Scotty’s accent was legendarily bad, but Scottish Star Trek fans loved him anyway

polygon.com:

[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 2, episode 10, “Hegemony.”]

Great Scott! In this week’s season finale of Strange New Worlds, Star Trek’s most beloved miracle worker finally arrives aboard the USS Enterprise. During a rescue mission on the border of the Gorn Hegemony, Captain Pike and his crew encounter the lone survivor of another Starfleet vessel, the talented and loquacious Lt. Junior Grade Montgomery Scott, who joins the effort to save a group of human colonists from an ongoing massacre.

Scotty’s debut on the show (the earliest TV appearance in the character’s personal chronology) was an unadvertised surprise, but not a total shock, as Strange New Worlds used its previous season finale to unveil Paul Wesley as the new James Kirk. What makes young Scotty a particularly sweet treat, however, is that for the first time, he’s being performed by an actual Scot: Martin Quinn has finally endowed the engineer with a convincing Scottish accent.

But before we criticize him a bit, let’s pay proper respect to the late James Doohan, who originated the role on Star Trek: The Original Series back in 1966. Doohan essentially created Montgomery Scott himself, having been brought in to audition for a then-unnamed role as the Chief Engineer of the USS Enterprise by James Goldstone, director of the show’s second pilot episode.

According to Marc Cushman’s exhaustive multi-book reference guide These Are The Voyages, Doohan tried a variety of different accents for the character, and when series creator Gene Roddenberry asked which accent sounded best for an engineer, Doohan selected Scottish, citing Scotland’s history of naval innovation. Doohan was also permitted to name the character, and