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SST426: Voyager isn’t the only one borrowing from the movies — this time Strange New Worlds lifts its structure straight from The Hangover. In “Human Best Friend,” Strange New Worlds Season 4, Episode 3, Ortegas and Scotty wake up on a shore-leave planet whose atmosphere gets every visitor drunk, with no memory of the night before and a bomb newly discovered on their shuttle.

Dom Bettinelli, Fr. Jason Tyler, and Jimmy Akin dig into this Strange New Worlds season 4 episode 3 comic outing, and the verdict lands squarely in the middle. Jimmy’s biggest objection isn’t the goofiness itself — he’s fine with lighter episodes — it’s the timing: the crew’s “we need a break” reprieve arrives before the audience has actually watched them suffer through six stressful weeks. Fr. Jason Tyler says the story feels more suited to Lower Decks, and wonders whether Strange New Worlds has used up its quota of season-three-style silly episodes.

The panel traces the episode’s Hangover-style structure: Ortegas and Scotty, drunk and directionless, retrace their steps through the resort — Uhura’s karaoke party (a Klingon cover of “Total Eclipse of the Heart”), Dr. M’Benga moonlighting as a bartender, and Pike getting tattooed — while a countdown ticks toward a diplomatic disaster with the prickly Rhodaxian delegation. Along the way, Spock’s drunken hallucinations steal the show: mind-melding with a houseplant, apologizing for an already-spotless mess, and mistaking Ortegas for a cactus. His conversation with a figure he believes is a hallucinated Jim Kirk — confessing his deepest secrets — turns out, in the episode’s best twist, to be real.

Dom, Fr. Jason Tyler, and Jimmy also flag shakier plot mechanics: a resort manager who hands an urgent message to two drunk guests instead of delivering it himself, a shuttle that’s implausibly hard to locate, and a reactive bomb casing that behaves less like physics and more like a Bond villain’s parting gift. When the bomb finally goes off — with Scotty’s thumb nearly paying the price — the explosion reads to the Rhodaxians as an honored peace gesture instead of an act of war.

The panel’s main critique of the character work: the Ortegas-Scotty rivalry set up over the last two episodes resolves with the kind of tidy mutual-admiration scene the group has seen too many times before. Along the way they spot the episode’s Easter eggs — a Star Trek: The Animated Series-inspired resort ad, a wandering tribble, and a crew member literally named “J. Kirk” — plus a rundown of new Scotty trivia: he hates being called “Monty,” he’s got six brothers, and he’s crashed more shuttles than he’d like to admit.

The feedback segment closes out the episode, revisiting the season premiere “Valles Marineris” and the discussion of Strange New Worlds’ race-swapped legacy characters.

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