(courtesy Memory-Alpha fandom)
“Human Best Friend” (S4, E3)
After the good but not great first two episodes of Strange New Worlds‘ fourth season, it was fun to see them come back playfully roaring with “Human Best Friend”. It had all the quirk and bounce of the best of the series’ episodes with some added emotional weight thrown in for good measure. The episode see Alpha Shift, aka the main crew on the ship, getting much needed R & R on the planet Cesnar at a resort where the atmospheric gases render everyone high as a kite within a count of ten of arriving on-planet. Leaving aside the fact that this may not be the best planet to go to when you’re on your way to a major diplomatic mission with the diplomatically inflexible Rodaxians (who see fireworks as a major olive branch), it means that the shuttle doors are barely open before everyone is completely and utterly gaga. Cue the FUN!
The main character in play is the super intense Erica Ortegas (Melissa Navia) who wakes up an indeterminate amount of time later wearing an Andorian headband in a trashed hotel room with a costumed Montgomery Scott (Martin Quinn) lying alongside. While Ortegas is relatively sober(ish), Scott is mostly definitely not, with Captain Pike (Anson Mount), Nyota Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) who is the MVP Drunk Person of the show, La’An Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong), Joseph M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun), Christina Chapel (Jess Bush) and Una-China Riley (Rebecca Romijn), who knocks it out of the park singing “Total Eclipse of the Heart” in Klingon (they have a thing for power ballads, apparently), in varied states of inebriation. Spock, by wayof contrast, seems the most sober of the lot of them but rather hilariously keeps insisting he is drunk as the proverbial skunk and is hallucinating James Kirk (Paul Wesley) who may or may not actually be on Cesnar). This becomes a problem, and a hoot at that, when it emerges that the Rodaxians have been summoned to Cesnar by persons unknown, meaning there’s a super good chance the negotiations will have to happen when the Enterprise crew are absolutely blotto. Not optimal, but wait there’s more. It turns out there’s some foul play at work and only Erica, trying to corral her drunk crewmates, which, yes, is very much like herding cats, can get everyone back to the ship and maybe save the day.
What emerges in “Human Best Friend” is an episode that is a thrillingly funny treasure hunt-meets-wild goose chase with some fairly serious stakes at play. While the crew definitely get the letting-off-steam time they need, the episode also serves as a way of bonding Scott and Ortegas – though she’s not in The Original Series (TOS) so you can only assume she transfers off later or dies (sad face) – and Spock and Kirk (in a comedically rich and yet touching way) which will become important as Strange New Worlds continue to set up the events of TOS in which many of the crew are really tight. As episodes go, it was a brilliant mix of the hilarious and the serious and showed one of the best Star Trek series to emerge from Roddenberry’s vision has a lot of life left in it as it races to the end of its run in 2027 with a fifth and final season.
(courtesy Memory-Alpha fandom)
What a fine episode! While the first three episodes of this season felt a little (or a lot) underdone (thought still enjoyable), “A Case of Chiaroscuro” (the second part of the title refers to an Italian art form which uses light and dark to produce a three-dimensional look) felt like all the boxes were ticked, the heart and soul was firmly present and a real thoughtfulness of intent and action was woven into the narrative. Centering on Commander Una-Chin Riley (Rebecca Romijn), Doctor Joseph M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) and Ensign Nyota Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) who have to shelter on the Klingon Empire-occupied planet of Mat’aar XII after their mission to retrieve an errant Starfleet probe sees them cross over into Klingon space.
What should have been a relatively simple hide until you can escape scenario becomes infinitely more complicated when it turns out that the Commander is the spitting image of the woman who rules the capital on behalf of the occupying power, represented by Kor (Demore Barnes), and that she is a collaborator of legendary cruelty who is somehow also the head of the resistance. It’s unclear what has happened to Nevette for much of the episode (and why the native population look very, very human) but to survive Riley has to pretend to be her, a dangerous game since she is interacting with people who know her well (and who, it turns out, may have had a hand in what happened to her). M’Benga, of course, is best placed to survive this odd place in which they find themselves thanks to his traumatic experience fighting the Klingons as a special ops fighter; Uhura however has the mother of all very steep learning curves but excels, despite some quite awful torture being perpetrated on her.
“A Case of Chiaroscuro” brings up some salient issues, the most pressing being of course whether you should interfere in a society that’s not your own. Starfleet makes it clear you shouldn’t but the situation on Mat’aar XII reminds Riley of her childhood and how her family didn’t act to change a situation when they could have. This is her chance to rectify that historical mistake and you can bet she’s going to do it, regulations be damned. (It’s dilemma echoed in the rather slender-to-non-existent B-story with La’an, played by Christina Chong, on the trail of a strange signal buried in the retrieved probe’s comms.)
Drenched in lushly evocative black and white, and looking like a 1940s film noir cinematic masterpiece, completed with the fashions and a beautiful if menacing Casablanca vibe, “A Case of Chiaroscuro” is a perfect package, bringing together exemplary world-building, a vivid sense of time and place, a magnificently immersive moral dilemma and some beautiful character work, especially for Riley, whose actions show that while regulations matter and are in place for a reason, they cannot be allowed to stand in the way of common human decency and doing what’s right which has always stood at the heart of Star Trek and defined it as a franchise with deeply meaningful morality and heart.
Strange New Worlds streams on Paramount+