Lines you find amusing

Well at least in the case of McGiver's she was a member of the crew and had a phaser. And McCoys snuck up behind Kyle.
The guy he replaced saw that Gary seven was a clearly a stranger and unauthorized and got duped pretty badly

 

Sure, but he was working on the transporter DURING AN ALERT SITUATION, had his back to the door, and failed to look up when it opened with the "whoosh" sound. Just silly. There had to be 1,000 ways they could have written that better and given how critical it was to the plot that McCoy get off the ship, it really, really bugs me about City (which is sad).

 

The best part of that whole scene is the fact that deranged McCoy knows how to use the transporter! A device he doesn't even trust when used by experts.

 

So maybe, having a transporter phobia, McCoy studied transporter operation so he could tell if the operator was doing something wrong and hop of the pad.

 

But the McCoy who escaped from the Enterprise was in a Cordrazine hallucination nightmare and was no longer the Georgian country Doctor...
JB

 

I always wondered about McCoy's Starfleet operations capabilities. He carries a phaser and seems to know how to use it. In TIS, when there's a debate about whether Spock or McCoy will fly the shuttlecraft into the amoeba, Kirk does say he's better qualified as a "command pilot" than McCoy, but clearly McCoy could fly the shuttlecraft or there would have been no debate. And then there's the cute/wistful moment when he operates the sensors in TSFS.

 

I mean, obviously he knows the basics on this stuff. I doubt that you'd qualify for Starship service unless you got a certain amount of training on the equipment. I'm sure that McCoy couldn't take apart and reassemble a warp drive the way Scotty could, but he knows more than the average layman would. I may not be able to replace the alternator in my car, but I can change my oil or change a tire if I need to.

 

Can you change a tire with heavy, wet snow falling down the back of your pants? Been there, done that.