Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Episode 3: Human Best Friend

This Human Best Friend review picks up right where the crew needed it most: a breather. After the heavier, more dramatic beats of “The Griffin Incident,” episode three swings hard in the other direction and delivers a full-on comedy outing, memory gaps and all.

The setup is pure farce. The Enterprise crew heads to a “tech-free” shore leave planet, only for things to go sideways almost immediately. The next thing anyone knows, the senior staff wake up scattered, hungover, and missing entire chunks of the previous night, with the shuttlecraft nowhere to be found and a peace negotiation suddenly moved up by weeks. If that premise sounds familiar, it should. Any Human Best Friend review has to start with the obvious comparison: the episode leans directly into the structure of The Hangover, with the crew piecing together a chaotic night backwards, clue by embarrassing clue, to figure out what actually happened and how to fix it before diplomacy falls apart.

A Hangover-Style Setup: Where This Human Best Friend Review Starts

The bones of “Human Best Friend” are borrowed, and the episode doesn’t hide it. Like the film it’s clearly channeling, most of the fun comes from the reveals: what got broken, who ended up in a ridiculous costume, and how a simple shore leave spiraled into a full-blown mess. It’s a broad, silly premise, and Strange New Worlds commits to it. The rest of the crew back on the planet get their own drunken subplots running in parallel, which keeps the chaos escalating even while the main investigation plays out.

It’s not subtle television, and it’s not trying to be. For an episode following something as tense as “The Griffin Incident,” that shift in tone reads less like a misstep and more like a deliberate palate cleanser, even if the comedy-episode format has a mixed track record across Star Trek as a franchise.

The Rest of the Crew Isn’t Doing Much Better

While Scotty and Ortegas handle the investigation, the episode keeps cutting back to the wreckage everyone else left behind, and it’s some of the funniest material in the hour. Pike is seriously considering getting a face tattoo. Chapel is aggressively winning at bingo and irritating everyone in the room while she does it. Uhura is fully in party mode. Una, of all people, is belting out a power ballad in Klingon. And Spock, still not entirely sober, has convinced himself he’s hallucinating an old friend standing right in front of him, which is a strange and slightly baffling beat but a fun swing for a character not usually given room to be this unguarded.

None of these threads get much depth, but that’s the point. They’re there for color, to sell just how thoroughly this crew let their hair down, and to make the ticking clock toward the peace talks feel genuinely dicey. Any honest Human Best Friend review has to admit not every joke sticks the landing, but the sheer commitment to the bit carries most of it.

Scotty and Ortegas Steal the Show

The real engine of the episode is the pairing of Scotty and Erica Ortegas. The two have been sniping at each other for most of the season, and “Human Best Friend” finally puts that friction to use. Forced to team up with no memory of the night before and a peace summit on the line, their bickering stops feeling like background noise and starts feeling like an actual relationship taking shape.

What makes it land is that the show doesn’t rush them into being best friends, and it doesn’t push them toward anything romantic either. Instead, their working relationship earns its progress the hard way, through shared frustration, a few honest admissions about what’s really been bothering each of them, and the kind of grudging respect that comes from surviving a genuinely bad day together. It’s a small arc, but it’s the most effective part of the episode, and it’s carried entirely by the chemistry between the two actors.

Final Thoughts on This Human Best Friend Review

“Human Best Friend” isn’t going to be remembered as one of Strange New Worlds’ strongest hours, but it’s not trying to be. As a comedic breather after a heavy episode, it does its job, and the Scotty-Ortegas throughline gives it more heart than the average bottle-episode gimmick. If you came in expecting another Hangover riff from this Human Best Friend review and left with a soft spot for this odd-couple friendship, that’s probably exactly what the episode was going for.