59 Years Later, Star Trek Just Redefined Its Most Resourceful Character

In Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Scotty (James Doohan) reveals to Admiral Kirk (William Shatner) that he always makes his repair time estimates a bit longer than he actually needs, all so he can maintain his reputation as a “miracle worker.” The idea that Scotty can patch together a starship’s systems at the last minute is not only an established bit of canon, it’s also a trope that transcends Star Trek. But have we gotten Scotty wrong over the years? While he’s certainly a major character in the Trek mythos, the idea of Scotty’s basic confidence isn’t something that has been explored on screen in depth. Until now.

With Strange New Worlds Season 3, specifically with Episode 6, “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail,” we’re getting more of Scotty’s scrappy origins, including the much more grounded notion that sometimes, when he tells you a ship won’t hold together, maybe it really won’t.

Mild spoilers ahead.

Early in “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail,” Scotty (Martin Quinn) and Kirk (Paul Wesley) have a pretty big disagreement about just how hard the broken-down USS Farragut can be pushed. Scotty makes it clear that the ship can’t take it, like at all. “If we push this ship too hard and it fails, that’s our fault.” Kirk, who is not yet technically Scotty’s captain, confidently suggests that the risk is worth it, which gives longtime fans that nice warm fuzzy feeling reminiscent of other times in older episodes — technically the future for SNW — in which Kirk pushed Scotty to do something nuts, and everything worked out.

But the best twist in this episode is that it doesn’t work out. Kirk was wrong, Scotty was right, and pushing the Farragut too hard, too fast, quickly proves disastrous. This is one of Strange New World’s best fake-outs so far, only because, up until this point, Scotty has been pretty much working miracles, provided he’s under a lot of pressure. In the Season 3 debut, “Hegemony Part II,” when his mentor Pelia (Carol Kane) tricks him into thinking the Gorn are attacking, Scotty is able to improvise a makeshift cloaking device on the fly. In “Hegemony Part II,” SNW was giving us the grace-under-pressure version of Scotty, albeit a less confident version of the man we know so well from The Original Series and the various films. But in “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail,” Scotty knows he’s right, Kirk doesn’t listen to him, and, briefly, everyone entertains the idea of removing Kirk from command entirely.

If TOS, we always got the sense that Scotty had Kirk’s back no matter what. Famously, Scotty calls Captain Kirk “Jim!” in “Mirror, Mirror,” when he tries to suggest that Scotty should operate the transporter and save the crew, rather than Kirk. The point is, outside of the reboot films, Scotty and Kirk have generally been very close, and if Scotty complains about Kirk, we’ve never taken it very seriously.

This fact is what makes Scotty and Kirk’s dynamic in “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” so great. At the beginning of the episode, Scotty doesn’t trust Kirk. In the middle of the episode, Scotty tells Kirk not to do something, Kirk does it, and things get even worse. By the end of the episode, when the crew works as a team, Scotty and Kirk are good, and, in theory, we’ve seen the birth of their relationship. The episode also does this between Kirk and Spock, of course, but, in a sense, there’s less tension between Kirk and Spock in general.

On paper, throughout The Original Series, Scotty should hate Kirk. And why wouldn’t he? Kirk is an unreasonable boss who frequently ignores words of warning in favor of a gut instinct. The entire Trek franchise has given us moments of Scotty’s incredulity, but it’s only now, with this Strange New Worlds episode, that Scotty’s utter frustration with Kirk’s command style feels realistic. As the years pass, Scotty clearly got used to Kirk’s nonsense. But, here, at the beginning, he understandably thinks Kirk is, understandably, a bit of a jerk.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds streams on Paramount+.