Summary
- In "Relics," Scotty's lack of curiosity about his former crewmates from Star Trek: The Original Series is addressed by Star Trek: The Next Generation's writer, Ronald D. Moore.
- Originally, there was a cut line of dialogue where Troi would ask Scotty if he wanted to know what happened to his friends and family, but Scotty was not ready to hear it.
- The decision not to directly reference the fate of the other Original Series characters was made to avoid cluttering the episode and locking the show into specific storylines.
Scotty (James Doohan) guest starred in a classic Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, and the show's writer, Ronald D. Moore, explains why Mr. Scott didn't ask about his friends from Star Trek: The Original Series. The TNG season 6 episode "Relics" saw Scotty emerge in the 24th century after spending decades in a transporter pattern buffer. But the Chief Engineer known as the "miracle worker" didn't feel at home aboard the Galaxy Class USS Enterprise-D, and Scotty missed his own Constitution Class Enterprise, "no bloody A, B, C, or D." Yet Scotty curiously didn't ask what became of Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) and the rest of his crew.
In the Star Trek oral history "The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years" by Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross, Ronald D. Moore says that a cut line of dialogue addressed whether Scotty wanted to know what happened to the cast of Star Trek: The Original Series. Read Moore's explanation in his quote below:
I set out to do a show that was nostalgic and sentimental and that would resonate with what people cared about. Originally, Troi was going to ask Scotty if he wanted to know what happened to his colleagues aboard the Enterprise. There was a line in a scene that got cut out between Troi and Scotty where she said, “Would you like to know what happened to all your friends and family,” and he said, “No, I’m not ready to hear that.” That was the closest allusion we were going to make. My thought is it would clutter it up a little bit to make direct references, since once you bring up Bones and say that Mr. Spock is James Bond now and underground on Romulus, you have to talk about everybody else, and we didn’t want to say what happened to everybody else because we didn’t want to lock ourselves into it.
