Is it just me, or was Scotty unnecessary as a recurring role?

[Wingsley]

Let's apply this practically, to known TOS episodes...

Consider those outings where Scotty is left in command of the Enterprise while Kirk, Spock and McCoy are away: "A Taste of Armageddon", "Friday's Child", "The Apple", "Metamorphosis", "Bread and Circuses" "The Enterprise Incident" and "The Empath" come to mind. Doohan/Scotty left some very good impressions in those stories, so much so that I don't think they would be as good without him. It isn't just the notion of having an engineer with a mathematical mind to run the ship while the captain and XO are away. It's Doohan's portrayal of Scott that left an impression there. The "personality" of the character made a material difference to the stories.

 

[Silvercrest]

Maybe Italy was nuked out of existance in WW3 .. just saying.

That suggestion will not score any points with the iguana.

 

[BDJ]

I don't think that complaining about how ethnicity was handled on TOS is a valid arguement. Folks tend to forget that ethnicity was handled very roughly on most all 1960's era tv shows. Trek was the first to show people of other cultures, races and genders working together in harmony as respected professionals and getting the job done!

For all you "modern thinking" folks and your PC attitudes, looking back from today you must take into consideration Roddenberry's forward thinking during the time. Here is a multi-racial, multi-ethnic cast of characters of both genders being portrayed in a way that was considered outrageous at that time in history!

By today's way of thinking it is ludicrous to believe that society would have a problem with a woman on the bridge or even a woman with a military rank or a woman of color with a military rank. But that was a problem for many back then. Getting away from racial stereotypes was difficult. Roddenberry used peoples perception of those stereotypes to teach a lesson, to break down barriers. To show everyone as human.

(It also reminds me about a young friend who once chided TOS for it's effects that "weren't that special". He didn't understand that at the time those were pretty darned good "special effects"!)

These actors took their roles just as serious and gave these characters a soul. That's one of the reasons why bit characters like Scotty, Uhura, Sulu, Chekov and others are so memorable to us. They took small parts, they took single lines of dialogue and made us remember them! Isn't that the mark of great character actors?

The way Doohan delivered his lines made him just as big as the big three. He had way less appearances, he had way fewer lines and yet even the lay person who isn't a huge Trek fan knows who the hell Scotty is!! Doohan took a tiny part and made it memorable. I think Uhura and even Sulu are remembered as well because the actors made the characters memorable (with even less than Doohan had to work with).

Chekov doesn't seem to enjoy the universal recognition that the others get and I'm not sure why as Koenig seemed to have a good handle on his character. Maybe it's because Chekov kinda became a bit of a sidekick character used as a punchline. (Not until Trek II did Chekov get a juicy hero part)

Anywho, I said all that to say this..IMHO Trek wouldn't be Trek without Scotty. (Or Uhura or Sulu or even Chekov.) Doohan and his work with the character are indelible.

 

[Sir Rhosis]

I remember seeing something in a documentary (I think it is during one of the interviews that accompanied the DVD set that came out in 2003 or 2005) where someone said that originally Scotty and Kirk were going to be the main characters who interacted with each other (i.e., Kirk as the brash young Captain and Scotty as the seasoned veteran who would be at odds with Kirk over what the ship could and could not handle). Then, as the producers discovered the winning Shatner-Nimoy-Kelley chemistry, the importance of Scotty's role got bumped.

I've never heard that claimed before, and it doesn't fit the facts. Nimoy was billed as a regular from the second pilot onward, and Kelley was always the top-billed recurring player in the first season. Doohan was usually the second-last billed of the recurring cast through most of season 1, below everyone except Nichelle Nichols, with only a few exceptions (he was higher than Takei in a few episodes and lower than Nichols in "The Squire of Gothos"). It wasn't until "City on the Edge" that he began being consistently billed above Takei and Nichols (and eventually Koenig). And of course he was only in 18 of the first season's 29 episodes.

So far from being conceived as a major player who then got bumped, Doohan was initially a low-ranking member of the supporting ensemble whose role grew over time.

So maybe what you heard on that DVD was just someone's speculation about what they would've liked to see, rather than something that was actually planned.

I think it was John D.F. Black who made that statement.

My memory (faulty at times, I admit) tells me it was George Clayton Johnson who said something of that nature in an interview. Seems he got that impression when first pitching, but soon realized it was not so.

I think...

Sir Rhosis

 

[Nerys Myk]

I don't think that complaining about how ethnicity was handled on TOS is a valid arguement. Folks tend to forget that ethnicity was handled very roughly on most all 1960's era tv shows. Trek was the first to show people of other cultures, races and genders working together in harmony as respected professionals and getting the job done!

Excluding all the other shows on before or at the same time as Star Trek that is: I Spy, Mission Impossible, Hogan's Heroes...

 

[jespah]

I generally come down on the side of there not being enough Scotty. But that may have to do with having plenty of engineers in my family.

Be that as it may, Scotty does embody the idea that the ship is imperfect. It's the imperfections that make the drama - the - it can't go any faster, we're out of torpedoes, you can't beam and go to warp (or fire phasers) at the same time, etc. Take those out of the equation and you have a sterile environment where battles can be won or lost predictably, based upon a bunch of calculations of ship size, speed and firepower.

Scotty is also useful as he's often (it seems) the only one reacting to what's going on. He actually panics! I don't think it's until Generations that we actually see anyone in the films who is scared - and that person is Data! Scotty gives a humanity and a face to what the viewer may be feeling, that the big three are heroic and all, but someone should be a bit worried that they might not be able to save everyone's collective bacon in time. Otherwise, if you as the viewer yawn and figure that, hey, they've got 6 minutes left in the hour so everything is going to be wonderful, well, suspension of disbelief is shot.

 

[Christopher]

I don't think that complaining about how ethnicity was handled on TOS is a valid arguement. Folks tend to forget that ethnicity was handled very roughly on most all 1960's era tv shows. Trek was the first to show people of other cultures, races and genders working together in harmony as respected professionals and getting the job done!

Excluding all the other shows on before or at the same time as Star Trek that is: I Spy, Mission Impossible, Hogan's Heroes...

Yes. ST's pioneering role on this count has been exaggerated. Network TV shows at the time were actually being encouraged to employ ethnically diverse casts, because studies had shown that minorities bought the products that the advertisers sold, so it was in their economic interest to attract minority viewers. In fact, one of the reasons NBC rejected the first Star Trek pilot was that the cast wasn't diverse enough; Roddenberry had promised them a diverse cast, but he gave them an all-white cast whose only nod to diversity was that the blond navigator was supposedly half-Latino. It was pressure from the network that got Roddenberry to add characters like Sulu and Alden and later Uhura.

Much the same goes for TOS's alleged pioneering gender equality. It was matched or surpassed in showing strong career women by other contemporary or earlier shows including The Avengers, Honey West, Get Smart, and Batman. (Yes, Batman, at least in its third season. Batgirl was a fantastic female role model -- brilliant, independent, and fearless, a match for Batman and Robin's crimesolving abilities with only a fraction of their resources, a genuine equal.) And again, the network was fine with gender equality. Roddenberry claimed that NBC resisted the idea of a female first officer, but they actually loved the idea; they just didn't like GR casting his mistress in the role. They would've been happy to keep Number One with a more experienced (and less potentially scandalous) actress in the role.

True, TOS does deserve credit for participating in the drive for greater representation of women and minorities in television. But it's certainly wrong to call it the first or only show of its time to do so, or the one that went the furthest.

 

[A.V.I.A.F.]

I remember seeing something in a documentary (I think it is during one of the interviews that accompanied the DVD set that came out in 2003 or 2005) where someone said that originally Scotty and Kirk were going to be the main characters who interacted with each other (i.e., Kirk as the brash young Captain and Scotty as the seasoned veteran who would be at odds with Kirk over what the ship could and could not handle). Then, as the producers discovered the winning Shatner-Nimoy-Kelley chemistry, the importance of Scotty's role got bumped.

I've never heard that claimed before, and it doesn't fit the facts. Nimoy was billed as a regular from the second pilot onward, and Kelley was always the top-billed recurring player in the first season. Doohan was usually the second-last billed of the recurring cast through most of season 1, below everyone except Nichelle Nichols, with only a few exceptions (he was higher than Takei in a few episodes and lower than Nichols in "The Squire of Gothos"). It wasn't until "City on the Edge" that he began being consistently billed above Takei and Nichols (and eventually Koenig). And of course he was only in 18 of the first season's 29 episodes.

So far from being conceived as a major player who then got bumped, Doohan was initially a low-ranking member of the supporting ensemble whose role grew over time.

So maybe what you heard on that DVD was just someone's speculation about what they would've liked to see, rather than something that was actually planned.

I think it was John D.F. Black who made that statement.

I think you're right. I'll review the bonus interviews on the DVD set and see if I can find the exact citation.

 

[A.V.I.A.F.]

Saying that Scotty was important to the development of Geordi and Trip creates a chicken-egg argument. If Scotty can be argued to have been superfluous, so would his predecessors.

You mean his successors, surely. Trip is technically a predecessor in-universe, but Geordi certainly isn't.
.

D-oh, yes. I was typing too fast again.

 

[CaptainMatt]

Might I add my view that without Scotty in TOS, things could have been quite dull in the long run. The man proved to be valuable in TOS and the OS feature films. Nuff said. But I am sure some will try.

 

[KeepOnTrekking]

I've never heard that claimed before, and it doesn't fit the facts. Nimoy was billed as a regular from the second pilot onward, and Kelley was always the top-billed recurring player in the first season. Doohan was usually the second-last billed of the recurring cast through most of season 1, below everyone except Nichelle Nichols, with only a few exceptions (he was higher than Takei in a few episodes and lower than Nichols in "The Squire of Gothos"). It wasn't until "City on the Edge" that he began being consistently billed above Takei and Nichols (and eventually Koenig). And of course he was only in 18 of the first season's 29 episodes.

So far from being conceived as a major player who then got bumped, Doohan was initially a low-ranking member of the supporting ensemble whose role grew over time.

So maybe what you heard on that DVD was just someone's speculation about what they would've liked to see, rather than something that was actually planned.

I think it was John D.F. Black who made that statement.

My memory (faulty at times, I admit) tells me it was George Clayton Johnson who said something of that nature in an interview. Seems he got that impression when first pitching, but soon realized it was not so.

I think...

Sir Rhosis

I was thinking the same thing. My memory was of a George Clayton Johnson interview where an initial pitch was of exploring the dynamic between Kirk and Scotty's love of the Enterprise. The Enterprise being Kirk's "lover" and Scotty's "baby." It might have been "The Star Trek Interview Book" or some other publication around that time.

 

[TerragonSix]

Scotty was an important add-on to Trek. A chief engineer, on any ship, is the guy that makes things work. If you need more power than you usually are able to have, you talk to that guy. Doohan had his moments in the show, such as 'Friday's Child' and 'A Taste Of Armageddon' - particularly where he refused to obey the Diplomat's orders to lower the screens.

If you can't accept Scotty as an important part of Trek, think of the actor; the guy that singe handedly, came up with the Klingon language.

 

[Christopher]

If you can't accept Scotty as an important part of Trek, think of the actor; the guy that singe handedly, came up with the Klingon language.

Well, not single-handedly. Doohan came up with the phonetics and a few bits of vocabulary for TMP (and I think he did the Vulcan in that film as well as the Klingon), and then linguist Marc Okrand used that preliminary work as the basis for his creation of a fuller, consistent Klingon language for The Search for Spock and later productions.

 

[MattWallace]

You might say he created "syllabic nucleus of the Vulcan (and Klingon) language."

 

[TerragonSix]

You might say he created "syllabic nucleus of the Vulcan (and Klingon) language."

I'd prefer to think of it as the Klingon and Vulcan version of "Hooked On Phonics"

 

[FordSVT]

The original Enterprise without Scotty?????? That would be like a turkey dinner without the gravy!

LOTS of gravy.

 

[Timewalker]

Even as a child I thought he was dreadful. If you're going to have a Scot at least hire a fucking Scotsman. There's no reason why he couldn't have been a Canadian engineer if they want to to keep the actor.

What kind of Canadian? We're not all homogenous, ethnically or linguistically. For instance, you take somebody from the Prairies and somebody who's a multi-generations native of Newfoundland. The Prairies person will find it quite challenging to understand the Newfoundland person unless he's been around a lot of Maritimers.

And would you have this hypothetical "Canadian" be anglophone or francophone? I would sincerely hope such divisions would cease to exist in another 300 years, but you'd be hard-pressed to sell that to a Canadian audience in the 1960s.

Besides, to the average American, a Canadian is exactly like an American, just with a few funny quirks. Roddenberry would not have felt any particular need to include somebody specifically Canadian - and in any case, why not simply have KIRK be the Canadian?

Scotty gave us a line that I have always thought of when under stress and nothing seems to be going right. The ship is traveling in a big circle, "and at Warp 10, we're going nowhere, mighty fast!"

Can't remember which episode that was from, darnit!

 

[A.V.I.A.F.]

Even as a child I thought he was dreadful. If you're going to have a Scot at least hire a fucking Scotsman. There's no reason why he couldn't have been a Canadian engineer if they want to to keep the actor.

What kind of Canadian? We're not all homogenous, ethnically or linguistically. For instance, you take somebody from the Prairies and somebody who's a multi-generations native of Newfoundland. The Prairies person will find it quite challenging to understand the Newfoundland person unless he's been around a lot of Maritimers.

And would you have this hypothetical "Canadian" be anglophone or francophone? I would sincerely hope such divisions would cease to exist in another 300 years, but you'd be hard-pressed to sell that to a Canadian audience in the 1960s.

Besides, to the average American, a Canadian is exactly like an American, just with a few funny quirks. Roddenberry would not have felt any particular need to include somebody specifically Canadian - and in any case, why not simply have KIRK be the Canadian?

Scotty gave us a line that I have always thought of when under stress and nothing seems to be going right. The ship is traveling in a big circle, "and at Warp 10, we're going nowhere, mighty fast!"

Can't remember which episode that was from, darnit!

It's from Let That Be Your Last Battlefield. Having a Canadian character would have been a bad move precisely because of American ignorance as to the diversity among Canadians. At best, we would have had a Dudley Do-Right type character. At worst, a French-Canadian character who would have spoken either with a Cajun accent or a Parisian one (both wrong by the way) and probably would have been played by Doohan, the so-called "master" of accents.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Being from Canada, Doohan could just use his regular voice.

 

[A.V.I.A.F.]

Being from Canada, Doohan could just use his regular voice.

True, but there is nothing especially Canadian about his voice, unless if he were to end every sentence with "eh."