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Character Spotlight: Montgomery Scott

By Ames

Bust out the green booze! We’re spotlighting The Original Series’s resident miracle worker this week on A Star to Steer Her By, where we’re giving you the best and worst moments of each character in the whole dang show. We’re donning our worst Scottish accents to give you a whole bunch of moments from Scotty, whose engineering prowess is only matched by his love of scotch. If you’re going to wear a red shirt on this ship, make sure you’re the chief engineer evidently.

Since we’ve already covered the main three characters (Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are all here), finding moments to highlight from the rest of the crew of the original Enterprise is going to be more and more of a stretch. Cut us a little slack here – the writers didn’t consider the secondary characters most of the time either. See what all we came up with below, listen to this week’s discussion on the podcast (jump to 46:48), and maybe you’ll break the laws of physics too!

[Images © CBS/Paramount]

Best Moments

The best diplomat I know is a fully activated phaser bank We see Scott in command of the Enterprise a bunch of times because Kirk and Spock are on away missions, and his emphatically no-nonsense attitude is honestly refreshing, especially compared with all the times Spock utterly fails at leading. And in “A Taste of Armageddon,” Scott figures out Anan 7 was imitating Kirk and stands up to ambassador Fox about it like a boss!

Deus ex machina, literally Despite it being utterly futile, Scotty stands up to the literal god Apollo several times in “Who Mourns for Adonais?” and it’s a little bit commendable. Sure, he gets his ass handed to him. Multiple times. But we’ve gotta give the guy credit for trying! However, as you’ll see in a minute, his motivation may not have entirely been in the right place.

I meant to say that it should be hauled away as garbage Scotty is a genuine delight throughout all of “The Trouble with Tribbles” and he really gets to shine. We learn his idea of shore leave is curling up with a good technical journal, which seems right to us. But his big scene in the commissary in which he starts a massive brawl with Klingons in defense of the name of the Enterprise is just too good not to highlight.

We did it, you and me… put him right under the table Let’s also give Scotty a lot of credit for drinking that Kelvan under the table in “By Any Other Name”! He sacrifices a bottle of very old whiskey for the cause of distracting their captors, and he came out (or really staggered out) the other side a victor. They don’t call it Constitution class for nothing!

No order can stop me from frightening them Again, Scott is left in charge of the Enterprise while the three lead characters get to have an adventure in “Bread and Circuses.” Although under orders not to interfere while orbiting Rome planet over and over, Scott agilely side steps that order by turning off the power on the surface. There was NO reason to think that nonsensical idea would help in any way, but the gamble paid off!

It's the biggest guess I've ever made! Somehow, this is the first moment of actually engineering genius that we’ve included on the list (I suppose we just consider it Scott doing his job at this point), but installing a Romulan cloaking device on the Enterprise in “The Enterprise Incident” is a step above the usual excellent job he does down in the bowels of the ship. Now you see him, now you don’t!

Oh what adventures they’d have! I’m almost saddened we never got a spin-off series that was just the adventures of Montgomery Scott and the slug baby from “The Eye of the Beholder” because that would be a lot of fun. When Scott meets this hyper-genius child, he somehow works out a compromise with its people even though none of the other crewmen could so much as communicate with them! Even Spock!

My sister’s youngest Uncle Scott’s relationship with his nephew Preston in The Wrath of Khan is really quite lovely. We don’t get to see much of it (families in Star Trek are famously fraught), which means the moments we do get of them together are touching and sweet. And then James Doohan’s acting in Preston’s death scene is sure to pull on your heartstrings, something this movie does in spades.

Amazing grace Speaking of touching scenes from The Wrath of Khan, the film culminates in not only the perfectly delivered eulogy from Kirk (which has a special place on our Kirk spotlight post), but in Scotty’s playing “Amazing Grace” on the bagpipes while Spock’s torpedo is spat into space. The fact that this was added at Doohan’s suggestion makes it all the more beautiful.

From one surgeon to another Let’s get further into the movies, where Scott (and the other minor crewmembers) seems to have the most to actually do. All the main TOS characters commit one hell of a treason to go search for Spock in The Search for Spock, and Scott is right there with them, sabotaging the Excelsior by pulling out some of the parts of its notorious transwarp drive.

Hello, computer! The Voyage Home shows us what a crime it was throughout The Original Series that they didn’t pair McCoy and Scott together more often. They play so well off each other as they go off to find material for the trip back to the future with some whales in tow. The comedy is spot on, their timing is down to the millisecond, and their shattering the Temporal Prime Directive is… well, you’ll see.

No bloody A, B, C, or D The Next Generation found a clever way to bring Montgomery Scott into the 24th century in “Relics” and it’s a generally good time! Sure, I have a better punchline for the “it’s green” callback somewhere in our episode coverage, but Scott wrestling with being behind the times, seeking out the familiar bridge of the Enterprise, and having a heart-to-heart with Picard are all lovely moments.

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Worst Moments

I’d like to get into her toga Despite finding Scott standing up to Apollo in “Who Mourns for Adonais?” sort of endearing because he is so outmatched, his motivation the whole episode long is that he wants to get in Palamas’s pants, even though it’s pretty clear she’s not interested in that way, and he spends the rest of the episode speaking for her and telling Apollo what she wants when she’s right there.

This unit is not perfect Not so much a bad moment for Scott through any fault of his own, but a bad moment in that it makes him look as much like a chump as he did in literally the previous episode, Scott gets freaking killed in “The Changeling” only for it to get undone when Kirk asks really nicely. It was also in defense of Uhura, whose mind had just gotten erased, but there just aren’t enough bad Scott moments, okay?

Alright then, we can do it the hard way We mentioned a handful of times in which Scott did a good job in command of the Enterprise, but sometimes he’s almost as bad as that pointy-eared hobgoblin. In “Metamorphosis,” he decides to search for the missing crew by scanning every single possible one in the 7000 bodies in an asteroid belt, which is just not how engineers solve problems! An engineer would write an algorithm or something. Yeesh.

Is your refrigerator running? Here’s another moment while Scott was in control that he just acted stupidly. In “Friday’s Child,” the Klingons set up the ruse of a false distress signal to keep the Enterprise busy while the away team is on planet, and Scott loses like a whole day to it before figuring out he’s been duped. And then we never even get to see the confrontation with Klingons on his return! What a waste!

I just need a wee bit of rest, that's all We’re scraping for crumbs to find more moments from Scott doing anything noteworthy, and I can’t help myself from bringing up the look on his face when his advanced aging is revealed in “The Deadly Years.” There's nothing wrong with the character, but “walk in and look sad” seemed like a boring sight gag to me. Then Scott barely has any lines despite being one of the affected crewmembers!

A walk in the fog with a bonny lass We’ve harped on “Wolf in the Fold” in both our Kirk and McCoy spotlights, and we’re just not done giving grief to an absolutely absurd inciting moment for an episode. Scotty is literally diagnosed with a medical case of misogyny by Doc, setting up a string of events that gets a bunch of women killed. And this show was supposed to be progressive at the time.

Where they’ll be no tribble at all… in death “The Trouble with Tribbles” is a genuinely funny episode, and the punchline at the end is meant to be a good button. But then you start thinking about it. And you realize that if Scott beamed hundreds (if not thousands) of tribbles into the engine room of a Klingon ship, they were either fried when they went to warp or brutally murdered by Klingons. And that’s less funny.

Look over there, a distraction! Here’s another one to pad out the list that I find kind of dumb. To distract Kara long enough to get a phaser from her in “Spock’s Brain,” Scott pretends to faint and it simply looks ridiculous. As if this episode isn’t bad enough, it’s also so uncreative that it uses a really half-assed plan to get out of this situation. Where’s something as creative as fizzbin when you need it?

Could it be the half a gallon of scotch? Even more half-assed is everything about “Spectre of the Gun,” which sees Scott volunteering to test a kludged tranquilizer on himself only for it not to work because his mind is too weak. Yeah, I don’t follow this train of thought either. How do they know Scott would have woken up in time? What exactly were they going to do if it did work? Force it under the Earps’ noses? Yeehaw!

I’m an engineer not a doctor We’ve already stated how sweet the relationship between Scott and Preston is in The Wrath of Khan, but I still cannot fathom why Scott brings his dying nephew to the bridge instead of sickbay after the attack. It’s only in the movie to get a reaction out of Kirk and not for any rational purpose because Scott is a professional who should know not to go many decks out of his way during a crisis.

How do we know he didn't invent the thing? I’m gonna call Jake out as a hypocrite for putting McCoy regrowing a woman’s kidney in The Voyage Home on his best moments list, but putting Scott giving Nicols the formula for transparent aluminum on his worst list, but here we are. It does break the hell out of the Temporal Prime Directive by a few more factors, so maybe it’s the negligence that makes the cut!

I know this ship like I know the back of my hand And to round things out, we finally reach The Final Frontier, which includes a joke that couldn’t even land if it had a barricade in the shuttle bay. How incompetent does Shatner think Scott is to have him literally concuss himself on a weirdly placed crossbeam (what were those crossbeams doing there anyway?)? It’s a bad punchline to a joke no one asked for and does Scotty dirty.

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Well, we gave her all she’s got, captain. If you think some of these moments are already scraping the bottom of the barrel, imagine how creative we’re going to have to get for our Sulu spotlight. In fact, don’t imagine it; come back next week and find out! Also keep listening along to our podcast coverage of Enterprise over on SoundCloud or wherever you podcast, hail us on Facebook and Twitter, and keep your haggis out of the fire.

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