Strange New Worlds Just Gave Us Star Trek's Version Of The Hangover
Kirk lives rent-free in Spock’s head. Always has.
With Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4, Episode 3, “Human Best Friend,” the series is back to the formula that makes the show what it is: Not just self-contained sci-fi episodic stories, but also different genres. Episode 2, “The Griffin Incident,” was a full-on horror story, with tributes to Event Horizon, and Episode 3 switches gears into comedy of errors, in the style of The Hangover, but also with nods to the classic 1966 Star Trek holiday-gone-wrong episode, “Shore Leave.”
“We like to alternate,” co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman told Inverse before the launch of Season 4. “TOS tended to alternate between mythology episodes and monster episodes. We alternate between classic Trek and more pushed-genre.” But Goldsman also noted that regardless of the genre-hopping between episodes, the show is “always in service of attempting to enhance the emotion of the emotional storytelling, obviously.” And on that front, within a zany romp episode, “Human Best Friend” does explore a huge emotional foundation of one all-important Star Trek relationship: Kirk and Spock.
Warning: Spoilers ahead for Strange New Worlds Season 4, Episode 3, “Human Best Friend” below!
“Human Best Friend” ending explained
Kirk lives rent-free in Spock’s mind. Or does he?
While most of this episode deals with Scotty (Martin Quinn) and Ortegas (Melissa Navia) trying to determine what happened during a wild shore leave-gone-wrong, one side plot deals with Spock Ethan Peck), seemingly hallucinating the existence of James T. Kirk (Paul Wesley) hanging out in his room. The title of the episode refers to Spock thinking of Kirk as his “human best friend,” a fact which is integral to the relationship between these characters in The Original Series. “I told you everything,” Spock says at the end of the episode, when he realizes Kirk is not his Snuffleupagus, and was, in fact, flesh-and-blood the whole time. Kirk responds by saying: “And those many, many secrets are safe with me.”
Although it’s been a long and winding road from Discovery to Strange New Worlds, in a sense, Discovery Season 2 set up Spock’s need for Kirk in the 2019 episode “Such Sweet Sorrow Part 2.” In that episode, Spock lost his human half-sister Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) forever, and when she jumped into the future, she told Spock this: “Find that person who seems farthest from you, and reach for them.”
That moment foreshadowed the Kirk-Spock friendship in a big way, and now, with Strange New Worlds Season 4, “Human Best Friend” is providing another layer.
Strange New Worlds gestures at an old-school Roddenberry concept
Kirk and Spock in The Motion Picture.
Because Spock and Kirk have mind-melded in Strange New Worlds Season 3, by Season 4, their bond is deepening, mostly because the mind-meld jumpstarted things, but now things are getting more real. It may seem a little schmaltzy in Strange New Worlds, but the hugging and heart-to-heart in “Human Best Friend” is connected to something Gene Roddenberry floated in 1979.
The Kirk and Spock bond was very strong in the TOS era, so by the time The Motion Picture rolled around in 1979, Roddenberry decided to create an in-universe concept that helped explain Kirk and Spock’s very, very deep connection. In the footnotes of the novelization of The Motion Picture, we got this detail about Vulcan friendships. “The human concept of friend is most nearly duplicated in Vulcan thought by the term t’hy’la, which can mean brother and lover.”
While fandom has obviously had a field day since the 1960s with the idea of Kirk and Spock as more than platonic friends, Roddenberry had it both ways with the “t’hy’la” concept.
Is Spock saying “human best friend” in Strange New Worlds the new canon version of t’hy’la? Almost certainly. And, as Strange New Worlds continues into its final season next year, we’ll almost certainly see this immortal bromance continue to grow into one of the most important friendships in all of fiction.
