Strange New Worlds Plays La'an's Trauma for Laughs One Week After It Nearly Made Her a Killer

Seven days ago, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds put a knife in James T. Kirk's gut after something aboard the Griffin reached into La'an Noonien Singh and found the thing she is most afraid of, turning into her ancestor. Pike left it out of the official report to spare her, and the episode ended with a ghost telling her to keep it quiet. This week, that same inheritance is the punchline. La'an takes over a gang of goons on a pleasure planet, spends the back half of the episode threatening to kill everybody, and it is played for laughs.

I want to be clear up front that I am not calling this a bad episode, because it is not. I laughed out loud more than once. But somewhere between last Thursday and this Thursday, something came loose in this show, and it took me two passes and a whole page of notes to work out what it was, because it was not where I thought it was going to be.

My First Note Was Wrong: the Jokes Actually Land

My first note on Human Best Friend was that the comedy was not landing. That note was wrong. On a second pass, the jokes mostly land. Dave Foley is funny, the karaoke is funny, and I laughed in the same two places both times, which is usually how I know it is the writing and not my mood.

That left me somewhere worse, because something was still off and I did not have a name for it. The comedy was never the risk here. A comedy episode is exactly as legitimate a swing as the horror episode was last week, and I gave that horror episode a nine. So the question I ended up chasing was not whether this was funny enough. It is why an episode where the jokes work still feels like it is wrestling the show it lives in. Where I landed is that this plays like a Lower Decks episode made in live action.

No, This Episode Does Not Turn Into a Bomb Thriller

Before going further, one correction: you are going to hear that this episode does half a comedy and then bails into a bomb countdown thriller for the third act. That is not what happens. There is a bomb, technically, and there is even a countdown, technically, but at no point did I feel an ounce of thriller. It reads more like Adam West running down a pier with a big cartoon bomb looking for somewhere to put it. The comedy tone never breaks, not even for the ticking clock, and that is not a nitpick. It is the whole diagnosis.

Kathryn Lyn and Yana Gorskaya Look Like a Hiring Pattern, Not a Coincidence

Once I knew the jokes were not the problem, I looked at who made this. Kathryn Lyn wrote it. She wrote Lower Decks' "wej Duj," which was nominated for a Hugo Award, and she co-wrote "Those Old Scientists," the Lower Decks crossover I would put up as the best live-action comedy Star Trek has made this century. This is not a random staff assignment; this is not the person you hire when you merely want funny Star Trek.

Yana Gorskaya directed it, and she is an editor first, which matters more than anything else here. She cut Spellbound and Taika Waititi's What We Do in the Shadows and Hunt for the Wilderpeople. She then directed 22 episodes of the What We Do in the Shadows series across six seasons, including the finale, earning six Emmy nominations along the way.

Look at what is actually happening across these two weeks. Last week the show handed a horror episode to a working horror director and got out of her way, which I called the real story of that week. This week they handed the comedy episode to a Lower Decks writer and the person who built the visual grammar of What We Do in the Shadows in the edit bay. That is twice. That is a hiring strategy, and I do not think anyone else is tracking it as one. Nobody in either sentence did bad work; this is about what happens when you hire two brilliant people and do not give either of them an anchor.

This Episode Is Structurally a Cartoon

I could see this episode animated, hands down, and I do not mean that as an insult. If someone told me this script had been boarded for Lower Decks, I would believe it instantly. The rhythm is drawn rhythm, the physical business goes further than bodies go, and the reactions hold a half second longer than a live-action reaction holds. It is genuinely structurally vaudeville, and there is nothing wrong with vaudeville.

I felt it hardest in the La'an material. The sequence where she takes over the gang is a cartoon, and that is a diagnosis, not a slam. It works perfectly in animation. Put Mariner in it and it sings, because Mariner taking over a gang of idiots is Tuesday for Mariner. Put Tendi in it and it sings even harder, because her Orion pirate lineage is a thing the show lets her pick up and put down whenever the joke needs it. Both of those characters have an elastic relationship with a violent inheritance. That is design. La'an does not. Her inheritance is the least elastic thing in this entire franchise.

Gorskaya has said, talking about Shadows, that the documentary element is what grounds the broad stuff, that calling attention to the camera and the camera operators is what makes the format feel real and makes the jokes land harder. Her whole comic grammar is built on something underneath holding it down. Shadows had the mockumentary camera doing that job; Lower Decks had animation doing it, because animation gives you permission for free. This episode is neither. It is not a mockumentary and never pretends to be. There is no doc camera, but the beats are Shadows' beats, and the thing that grounds the rhythm stayed home.

Last Week Had a Counterweight. This Week Did Not.

To find out why nobody caught it, I pulled last week's credits. The Griffin incident was directed by Xel Carbonell, an outside genre specialist, and written by Robbie Thompson, who wrote 17 episodes of Supernatural, including one told entirely from the victim's point of view, a full musical episode, and one shot entirely from inside the Impala. That is a writer whose specialty is taking a wild formal swing and landing it without breaking the show it lives inside.

Last week, one specialist steered out while one writer held the house style down. This week, two specialists steered in the same direction away from the house, and nobody was holding anything. That explains everything, including the bomb: if there is no counterweight to the comedy, the comedy keeps going until it has touched everything in the episode, and a countdown soaked in that tone for forty minutes cannot generate a second of tension.

Steel-Manning the Defense: Pike's Cover-Up and the Shore Leave Trope

There are two good arguments against my point, and I would rather make them myself. The first is that Pike buried the incident, leaving it out of the report specifically so La'an would not carry that burden, which gives an in-story reason nobody is bringing up the stabbing. But that only explains why the crew does not mention it. It does not explain why the episode goes looking for a laugh in the exact place the wound is. One is a plot device; one is a choice, made by somebody in the room.

The second argument is better. Shore leave episodes exist so characters can act out of character, which is the entire function of the trope. Me complaining that La'an is acting out of character misunderstands the assignment, and if the episode had simply let her get drunk and be a mess, I would have zero notes. Pike getting a face tattoo is exactly that, and I will defend it. But this episode does not just let La'an cut loose. It reaches specifically for the augment thing and builds the gag out of her commanding and threatening violence, playing her genetic inheritance for comedy seven days after that same inheritance nearly made her a murderer.

The Show Proves It Can Track Continuity, Just Not Here

The tell that this is a choice, not just how episodic television works, sits in the same episode. Uhura and Scotty butt heads in the premiere, episode two does not touch it because it is busy being a haunted house, and this episode pays it off. Three episodes, one thread held. The machinery exists; it just was not pointed at La'an. That is also my Kirk problem: a woman put a knife in this man a week ago, and the episode does not carry any of it. He is simply around, and I found myself wondering whether he even has a ship of his own to go to.

The Intoxicating Air Solves Every Problem the Script Does Not Want to Face

Once I had that, I could not stop seeing it in the small stuff. The air on the planet is intoxicating, literally and mechanically written into the script, so nobody has to make a decision; the inhibitions question and the judgment question are both solved by the atmosphere, and every guardrail is handled by the environment instead of by a person. We skip the arrival and the descent and wake straight into the amnesia. The bomb is a big round prop with a fuse and zero threat, the vacation runs a terms-of-service joke that was already tired in 2014, and the gang hideout is crates on a backlot. None of it costs anybody anything, which is why the countdown could not land and why the comedy had nothing to push against.

I can see the effort that went into getting disciplined Starfleet officers to behave like this without breaking any of them, and the intoxicating atmosphere is a genuinely clean solution to that problem. My first pass was that the hangover premise is simply a dated reference, which is true, and I decided that is the least interesting thing wrong with it, since Star Trek has been borrowing other people's movies since 1968. What actually bothers me is that the whole frame can be lifted out and the episode underneath keeps running.

The Cut I Would Have Made

My alternate version drops the hangover structure entirely. Show them arrive, show the first drink, the first bad idea, the influence taking hold, all the way to the lights going out, then let them wake up with nothing. Since we would already know what happened and they would not, everything after becomes dramatic irony instead of a mystery box, so the comedy comes from watching them reconstruct a night we already got to enjoy. The characters stay legible the whole way through, and you would not spend a third of the runtime discovering information you could have shown in three minutes of people making bad choices. That, to me, is the actual answer for why the middle drags: reconstruction as plot burns screen time that a straight chronological structure hands you for free.

What Actually Works: Pike's Tattoo, Una's Karaoke, and Dave Foley's Two Registers

Most of the episode is genuinely good, and every character gets a moment that extends who they have already been. Pike, the most controlled and burdened man in Starfleet, cuts loose completely and comes back with a full face tattoo, which is the one man on the ship with the most reason to want a night off taking it. Una singing '80s power ballads in Klingon is a heritage joke going back to Star Trek VI in 1991, and it is never going to stop being funny to me. Spock spends the whole episode convinced he is hallucinating and stays the straight man throughout, and Uhura runs the party while turning away Ortega and Scotty for being fuddy-duddies, a fallen version of the woman who used to be the one told to relax. The recap for this episode goes and pulls specific early shots of young Uhura being the stiff one, twenty minutes before that joke lands, which is an authored recap someone chose deliberately in the edit bay.

Dave Foley is doing two things at once. He spent Kids in the Hall being the unhinged one, then five seasons on NewsRadio as the straight man in a building full of lunatics, a role Paul Simms wrote specifically for him, and here he is both at once: a lunatic running an intoxication resort who then sits down across from Ortega for a level conversation about how he used to be exactly like her.

Final Verdict

I want to be careful with this score, because there is a version of this review where I am a lot angrier than I actually am. I laughed, the performances are good, Foley is great, the Klingon karaoke is a gift, and Pike's tattoo made me genuinely happy. Nobody in the credits did bad work. But the frame around all of it was borrowed, and borrowed from something that was already dated five years ago, and it cost La'an something she could not afford to lose seven days after we watched her nearly kill a man. Human Best Friend gets a 7 out of 10. It is a good episode, not a great one, and most of what is missing is not on the screen, it is in the room. Last Thursday the name Noonien Singh was the worst thing that could happen to her. This Thursday, it was a bit.

Do you think the La'an material crossed a line, or is that carrying last week's episode too hard into this one?