With Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4, Episode 3, “Human Best Friend,” the series is back to the formula that makes the show what it is: Not just self-contained sci-fi episodic stories, but also different genres. Episode 2, “The Griffin Incident,” was a full-on horror story, with tributes to Event Horizon, and Episode 3 switches gears into comedy of errors, in the style of The Hangover, but also with nods to the classic 1966 Star Trek holiday-gone-wrong episode, “Shore Leave.”
“We like to alternate,” co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman told Inverse before the launch of Season 4. “TOS tended to alternate between mythology episodes and monster episodes. We alternate between classic Trek and more pushed-genre.” But Goldsman also noted that regardless of the genre-hopping between episodes, the show is “always in service of attempting to enhance the emotion of the emotional storytelling, obviously.” And on that front, within a zany romp episode, “Human Best Friend” does explore a huge emotional foundation of one all-important Star Trek relationship: Kirk and Spock.
