In the Season 3 premiere of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, the USS Enterprise is partially saved from a Gorn attack thanks to an on-the-fly cloaking device created by a young engineer named Montgomery Scott. Played by Martin Quinn in Strange New Worlds — following his appearance in the Season 2 finale — the newest version of Scotty is also the youngest we’ve met so far. He’s not yet the Chief Engineer of the Enterprise, but his knack for giving it all he’s got and coming up with quick solutions with no prep time, is already apparent.
But, one of the most interesting things about this episode is that it basically both reboots and lays the foundation for a similar tech feat that Scotty will pull off about a decade later in the classic Original Series episode “The Enterprise Incident.” Here’s how Scotty’s faux-cloaking device echoes and predicts his improvised connection of a different cloaking device later in his life.
Spoilers ahead.
As the Enterprise heads into Gorn space to rescue captured colonists as well as members of the crew, Scotty is under pressure to replicate an ad-hoc cloaking device that he used on his shuttlecraft, after his previous ship, the Stardiver, was destroyed by the Gorn. Much of the tension in this episode comes from the fact that what Scotty did with his shuttle was on a smaller scale than the Enterprise, and that while under pressure in the moment, he made it work, but he’s struggling a bit with more time on his hands. In a hilarious scene, his mentor, Pelia (Carol Kane), provides the solution by lying to Scotty, and telling him the Gorn are already attacking, and thus, the cloaking device needs to be ready right away. Scotty falls for this ruse, and gets the gizmo working, foreshadowing his ability to do the impossible — and become a “miracle worker” — under pressure.
But, more specifically, when Pike (Anson Mount), Number One (Rebecca Romijn) and Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) are discussing Scotty’s gizmo, it’s revealed “it’s like a cloaking device” insofar as it doesn’t literally make the ship invisible, but rather, sends out a false transponder signal. Because the Gorn don’t really look out the windows of their ships, this allows the Enterprise to pass undetected.
This episode, “Hegemony Part II” takes place in roughly 2259, but about a decade later in 2268, Scotty will have to install a full-on, real-deal cloaking device into the Enterprise’s systems, after Captain Kirk steals said cloaking device from the Romulans. That episode is a massive spy story in which Kirk acts like a lunatic in order to fake his own demise and steal advanced cloaking tech from the Romulans. The retroactive canon here is that even though Klingons and Romulans have cloaking devices in the earlier Discovery and Strange New Worlds era, the cloaking tech gets better, which is why Starfleet wants an upgraded cloaking device in “The Enterprise Incident,” even though it looks way less advanced because the episode is from 1968.
In “The Enterprise Incident,” Scotty installs the Romulan cloaking device with moments to spare, and like his younger self in Strange New Worlds, isn’t entirely certain it’s going to work at all. But the secret weapon both then and now isn’t the technobabble or the device itself, but rather, Scotty’s ability to make it all happen.
With Strange New Worlds Season 3, Martin Quinn’s name is in the main credits of every episode. Because James Doohan was always credited at the end of various episodes, this is the first time in a Star Trek TV series, ever, that the actor playing Scotty is in the opening credits. So, Scotty has finally come home to Starfleet, in some ways, for the first time.
