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This article contains spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 4 episode 3
“The Alpha shift is going on shore leave.” When Captain Pike makes this declaration in the cold open to “Human Best Friend,” the latest episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, the ears of the bridge crew perk up. So do those of the viewers, especially long-time Trekkies who know “Shore Leave” as a legendarily silly episode from season one of The Original Series, one that features McCoy chasing the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland and hanging out with a pair of showgirls. Strange New Worlds invokes the spirit of “Shore Leave” but turns it into a character-building moment, one that exceeds mere callback.
But it wasn’t just fun and games for the people who made the episode, even when it came to choosing the song that Number One performs in Klingon for a karaoke session. “I didn’t get to pick the song,” admits Number One’s actor Rebecca Romijn admits to attendees of a cast roundtable. “The episode was originally scripted with a different song, but they couldn’t get the rights to do it. But I was thrilled with ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart,’” she concludes, underscoring the tension that makes both “Human Best Friend” and “Shore Leave” such special episodes.
In addition to invoking “Shore Leave,” “Human Best Friend” plays as an inverted sequel to both last week’s episode “The Griffin Incident” and the season 3 Ortegas-based bottle episode, “Terrarium.” As with “The Griffin Incident,” the crew experiences hallucinations unique to their own personal psychology. But instead of playing on each member’s deepest fears, the planet’s psychedelic atmosphere brings their pleasures to life. Thus, M’Benga gets to be an affable bartender, Spock imagines getting a hug from Kirk, and Uhura takes a journey through a smokey party. And like “Terrarium,” “Human Best Friend” lets Ortegas do something more than fly the ship by pairing her with a TOS character, this time Mr. Scott instead of a Gorn.
And that’s where the “Shore Leave” connections come in. Directed by Robert Sparr and written by Theodore Sturgeon, “Shore Leave” sees Kirk searching for a suitable place for his crew to rest after three grueling months. As he and an away team scout the planet, they encounter surprising visions: McCoy goes chasing after the White Rabbit, Sulu battles a samurai, and Kirk punches out Finnegan, the bully from his days in Starfleet Academy. Eventually, Kirk and co. learn that they’re on a planet operated by a kindly caretaker (not the one from Voyager), who runs the planet like an amusement park.
The Caretaker is just one of many extremely powerful beings that the Enterprise encounters throughout its journey, not unlike the Metron of “Arena” or Trelane of the Q. Even though he creates trouble for Kirk and co., his actions are not malevolent, even accidentally. He’s actively trying to give the explorers what they want and need, even if they don’t realize it.
The same could be said of both episodes’ relationship to Trekkies. “Human Best Friend,” written by Kathryn Lyn and directed by Yana Gorskaya, indulges in lots of goofiness, something that was a lot of fun for the cast. “I tried to get them to give me the Mike Tyson tattoo for real, but they wouldn’t go for that,” Anson Mount jokes about the facial ink that Pike gets in the episode.
Even though production passed on that suggestion, Mount found that “Human Best Friend” gave him lots of room to work. “Really, a lot of what our characters did was left to our interpretation,” he explains. “So I just got to go in there and play whatever type of inebriated Pike I wanted to be, so I made the decision to be the guy at the rave who wants to go to the chill tent and hold your hand and talk.”
Romijn had a more difficult task, given that Una had to sing a song that everybody knows, but she had to say the words in Klingon. “It felt a little overwhelming because I know that there are at least 20 people in the world who speak Klingon fluently. I worked with the dialect coach to make sure I got all the pronunciation correct and the translation correct. I recorded the song first and then sang to playback. It was a massive challenge to me that I never knew I wanted, but I was really proud of myself and I loved everything about it,” she enthuses.
In that combination of hard work and fun that she describes, Romijn captures the ethos at the center of both “Shore Leave” and “Human Best Friend.” Both episodes begin with the crew exhausted, and both episodes emphasize the importance of the crew being at their best. In the case of “Shore Leave,” Spock reminds Kirk that he hasn’t been operating at optimal levels. In “Human Best Friend,” the crew has to be ready for a difficult diplomatic meeting.
And yet, both episodes acknowledge that people can only be their best when they’ve had sufficient rest—and sometimes, that rest takes one to the silliest places. But on Star Trek, silliness cannot be separated from proficiency, making shore leave an important part of any mission.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds streams new episodes every Thursday on Paramount+.
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