Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Boss on [Spoiler]’s Season 2 Finale Debut: ‘We’ve Been Talking About Him for a While’
Another Star Trek fan favorite has made their way to Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.
The Paramount+ show’s Season 2 finale, released on Thursday, saw the Gorn attack a colony modeled after the American Midwest. (The Enterprise crew last faced the lizard-like creatures in Season 1’s penultimate episode, during which Hemmer died after being infected with their venom. Read our full recap here.)
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Midway through the finale, Pike encountered a resourceful lieutenant, who was revealed to be Montgomery Scott, aka Scotty, played by Martin Quinn. The Enterprise’s future chief engineer landed on the colony planet after fleeing the Gorn and found a way for himself and survivors from the USS Cayuga to hide in plain sight until help arrived.
Given that Scotty’s voice (played by Matt Wolf) was previously heard in the Season 1 finale, the beloved character’s physical appearance in Season 2’s final episode wasn’t so much a surprise as it is a warm welcome.
“We’ve been talking about him for a while as a general idea,” co-showrunner and executive producer Henry Alonso Myers tells TVLine. “As we were going into the finale, it suddenly became a weird, rare opportunity to introduce him for a lot of different reasons. What we’d like to do with the characters [from the original Star Trek series]… We don’t meet our understanding of who they are in that series, we meet who they are before. They don’t know who they will be, and they aren’t that person yet. They have some stuff to go through.”
Quinn is the first actor of Scottish origin to take on the character in a live-action setting. Previously, Canadian actor James Doohan played Scotty in the original Star Trek series and movies, while English actor Simon Pegg portrayed the character in the 2009 Star Trek film reboot starring Chris Pine, as well as sequels Star Trek Into Darkness and Star Trek Beyond.
“We also had a great opportunity to cast someone who’s from Scotland,” Myers notes, “who can do that Scotty, but also who can go through all of the things that we want to see him go through before he becomes the person that we know.”
In case you’re wondering, the Strange New Worlds EP confirms that “we will see him more” of Scotty in the show, which snagged an early Season 3 renewal this past March.
Scotty’s arrival comes after James T. Kirk (Vampire Diaries alum Paul Wesley) appeared in the Season 1 finale and several Season 2 episodes. Co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman acknowledges that as Strange New Worlds gets closer to timeline of the original Star Trek series, “it starts to become inevitable that we start to pull in more folks that are sort of TOS-based.”
However, they also attempt these special cameos “because there’s a reason to do it, rather than just to kind of go, ‘Hey, let’s dust off Scotty because he’s cool.’ Although there’s always a little bit of that.”
How are you feeling about Scotty’s appearance in Strange New Worlds’ Season 2 finale? Grade the episode below, and then share your thoughts in the comments.
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