Star Trek’s Latest Mind Meld Was the Weirdest in 60 Years, & We Love It
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds just gave us the weirdest Vulcan mind meld we’ve ever seen, and it was an absolute delight. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4. This show has always pushed the boundaries; Season 2 gave us a stunning musical episode after all. But this season has had everything from Star Trek horror to dinosaurs, and we know there’s a puppet episode coming this season too.
Season 4’s episode titles are designed to obscure as much as they reveal. Nobody expected the latest episode, “Human Best Friend,” to see the Enterprise crew take shore leave on a planet where the atmosphere makes you drunk. The episode was written by Kathryn Lyn, who’s best known for her work on Star Trek: Lower Decks, and it even reuses ideas from one of Lyn’s best-loved episodes there; Vulcans look completely normal while insisting they are totally out of control. In this case, we have Spock hilariously navigating the impact of a past mind meld with Kirk, even as he hallucinates that people are plants.
The Mind Meld Got Funnier Than Ever
The plant hallucination occurs for a reason, though. The Enterprise’s shuttle has gone missing, and Ortegas and Scotty need Spock to hack into a security system to find it. To their surprise, they discover an office without a trace of technology; but Spock insists it’s there, with the security monitors interwoven into plants. It’s “photosynthetic technology,” which even the Vulcan Science Officer had previously believed was impossible. Delightfully, it seems the only way to hack into this tech is for Spock to perform a Vulcan mind meld with a plant.
Strange New Worlds doesn’t pull any punches, instead fully acknowledging the absurdity. “My mind to your leaf,” Spock says as he forges the mind meld. Ortegas and Scotty watch in utter bemusement, unable to fathom what’s going on here. But it turns out Spock’s “photosynthetic technology” isn’t illusory after all, because we see a projection of the security system as he traces the lost shuttle. Yes, Spock really did just commune with a plant (although doing so becomes the reason he starts seeing people as plants, including one hilarious moment when we see Ortegas as a cactus through his eyes).
“Human Best Friend” is a wonderfully whimsical episode, perfectly timed to let us recover after the high-tension horror of “The Griffin Incident.” Although it’s more focused on Ortegas and Scotty, the title actually refers to Spock, who is experiencing other hallucinations because of the planetary atmosphere; he keeps seeing James Kirk, who he concludes has become his “human best friend” after a previous mind meld. It’s a touching subplot in a surreal story, one that perfectly sets up the future partnership between Kirk and Spock in Star Trek: The Original Series.
