Star Trek Strange New Worlds Season 4 Reaction: Episode 3

Star Trek Strange New Worlds
Season 4 Reaction: Episode 3

Human Best Friend

The episode starts with cutting between Ortegas and Scotty's personal logs, followed by Una and Pike discussing the upcoming mission and the stress the crew has been under (previously mentioned in "Valles Marineris").  The crew decides to stop at a shore leave planet where the atmosphere causes you to become drunk.  The crew's shore leave antics include Ortegas (not feeling the effects of the atmosphere) stuck with Scotty and trying to find Pike, Spock hallucinating Jim Kirk, Una singing "Total Eclipse of the Heart" in Klingon (likely selected because of Bonnie Tyler's recent passing), Dr. M'Benga playing bartender ("It's green" apparently a TOS reference" and Pike getting a tattoo.  Add the ticking clock of the alien delegation the crew was to meet in two weeks coming to meet the Enterprise in two hours and the missing shuttle and you've got a typical trek "shore leave plus a plot" story.  The "shore leave episode trope" has been done before, in TOS "Shore Leave", TNG "Captain's Holiday", DS9 "Let He Who is Without Sin" and ENT "Two Days and Two Nights" to name a few examples.  This begs the question: does every shore leave have to have a threat/quest/ticking clock?  Can't a crew just have a break?  We do get a little bit of Scotty backstory, something new for trek.  It is nice seeing Ortegas deal with her repressed anger.  The hung over crew at the end was a fun payoff to the overall plot.  Ortegas and Scotty come to terms with each other, albeit bonding over a bomb threat, a nice pay off to the "feud" between them since the season premiere.  I did think that the gag with Scotty's finger getting blown off as a meta fourth wall breaking reference to James Doohan losing a finger in WWII during the D-Day invasion was odd and not particularly tasteful.  We get to see engineering for the first time since season 2 and for the first time Scotty in Engineering.  Overall a fun episode.  Unremarkable, but fun.