Is Scotty Star Trek's Most Normal Character?
Martin Quinn reflects on the Final Frontier's working-class hero.
Since 1965, when James Doohan stepped in front of the cameras for the second Star Trek pilot episode, “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” science fiction history was forever changed. But although he was the chief engineer of the Enterprise, Montgomery Scott wasn’t a major character at the beginning of Star Trek history. Yes, Scotty is famous in the culture because of the phrase “beam me up Scotty,” even though that phrase was never actually uttered in any Star Trek thing to date. He’s also famous as the guy you call to give you more power, who pushes back on all those power demands. In this way, Scotty is a paradox: He both pushes back on the strains that various characters put on the mechanisms he’s tasked to maintain, but he also produces miracles out of those machines.
“I like the idea of thinking of him as a car mechanic,” actor Martin Quinn tells Inverse. “But is Scotty working class? Is that even a thing in the Star Trek future?”
Since 2023, in the finale of Strange New Worlds Season 2, Martin Quinn has played the youngest version of Scotty in the Star Trek canon yet, joining the crew of the Enterprise after his previous ship, the Stardiver, was overrun by the Gorn. Quinn also, oddly, is the first Scottish actor to play this famously Scottish character; James Doohan was Canadian while Simon Pegg is English. Quinn is keenly aware of this, and in conversation with Inverse, he’s reflective about the depths of Scotty, and reveals that he’s thought quite a lot about this iconic character, a process that has included him writing his own ideas for Scotty’s background, as well as listening to fan feedback. In short, if you think Quinn’s Scotty is just presenting a character at one moment in time, the truth is, the man behind the character contains multitudes.
Scotty is Star Trek’s lovable “grump”
Quinn says “transporter accidents follow Scotty around his whole life.”
For Quinn, the interesting thing about playing Scotty in Strange New Worlds is giving us a version of the character who is fun, but also represents one essential quality of Scotty: he’s cranky.
“I think that he's sometimes the grump of the bunch.” Quinn says of Scotty’s disposition in Strange New Worlds, and throughout the Trek canon. “I watched loads of Scotty and decided that I would take a bit of a journey with him with formality. The old Scotty is a little bit more of the hardened soldier...but perhaps he’s at a stage at the moment, where he’s a bit more, don’t worry about the formalities, just crack on with it.”
In the third episode of Strange New Worlds, Season 4, “Human Best Friend,” Scotty has to reconcile his frustration with the character of Erica Ortegas (Melissa Navia), who, up until this point, has been a thorn in his side in terms of her lack of respect for the systems Scotty has tried to put in place. All of this is, of course, foreshadowing Scotty’s future-tense frustration with Captain Kirk and others pushing the Enterprise beyond the safety limits. Scotty’s grumpiness, both now and throughout Star Trek, represents a kind of practicality. He has normal concerns about logistical problems, which manifest in larger-than-life quirks. Despite all of this, Quinn thinks Scotty is perhaps one of the most normal, realistic characters in the Star Trek pantheon. He’s a guy we could have a drink with, and he’s also cuckoo bananas about people messing with his warp engines, transporter systems, and the like.
“We were quite interested in the kind of ADHD messiness of a younger, highly functioning intellectual Scotty,” Quinn explains of his approach to Scotty in SNW. “He’s a wee bit more three-dimensional now, I’d say, than ever before. But there’s always been a duality to his character.”
Martin Quinn thinks about Scotty’s past...and his future
Geordi (LeVar Burton), Riker (Jonathan Frakes), and Scotty (James Doohan) in 1992 The Next Generation episode “Relics.”
At the start of the season, Quinn told Inverse that one of his favorite Scotty episodes from all of Star Trek, actually isn’t from The Original Series, but instead, from The Next Generation, specifically the moment Scotty shows up in the 1992 episode “Relics.”
“I love that fact that I’m getting to play this character that was in The Original Series,” he says. “But he also touched base with The Next Generation, [which] is really quite special as well. It’s quite moving that I’m part of this franchise in more than one way.”
Quinn has also given a fair amount of thought to Scotty’s biography overall, and admits that he “was trying to do a bit of writing on my own origin story of Scotty.” If Strange New Worlds sometimes scans as a kind of fan fiction version of The Original Series, Quinn says that he has worked hard to make Scotty a version of the character that “doesn’t ruin it for anybody.”
Scotty isn’t always grumpy...sometimes he’s the life of the party. “Both things can be true,” Quinn says. “That’s what makes Scotty so well-rounded.”
Quinn also said that he read comments online, including criticisms about his Scotty, and tried to subtly change his performance to match what fans were hoping for. “A lot of people had their idea of who and what Scotty is,” Quinn says. “And those opinions are very well-informed. So people's concerns weren't something that I was ignoring; when I was playing my wee scenes, I was trying to answer some of the things that annoyed people.”
Specifically, Quinn wanted to give a sense that Scotty had served in a major military conflict in the past, and wanted to “tie in” that detail to the Scotty of Strange New Worlds. He also notes that at some point, we know that Scotty “lost a finger,” a moment that reflects the fact that in real life James Doohan lost a finger in WWII, and in The Original Series and the films, one can sometimes see that Scotty is missing a finger. In “Human Best Friend,” Quinn says the show wanted to gesture to this fact. “We know he lost a finger at some point,” Quinn explains. “I wanted to get that detail in there.”
Quinn also hopes that if a SNW spinoff ever materializes, he can further expand on Scotty, and truly give us more of his backstory. He also notes that even though this version of Scotty is sometimes full of doubt, the power of the character is his confidence in his own abilities.
“I hope, in life, I can get to the point where I'm as sure of myself as Scotty is,” Quinn says with a smile. “There’s something really reassuring and inspirational about Scotty.”
