Martin Quinn and Melissa Navia, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
Jan Thijs/Paramount+The latest episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, “Human Best Friend,” was a full-on romp in the great tradition of the franchise’s shore leave episodes (The Original Series’ “Shore Leave” and The Next Generation’s “Captain’s Holiday” are fine examples of the subgenre). And as much as the new episode offered a novel getaway for the crew of the Enterprise, it also provided showcases for two actors following very different paths in their Star Trek journeys: series regular Martin Quinn, the 32-year-old actor who’s studiously learned Trek canon to convincingly connect the dots between his green, less confident Scotty and the seasoned “miracle worker” version originated by actor James Doohan on TOS; and guest star Dave Foley, a longtime fan of the franchise who’s long embraced its messages and philosophies.
Beaming Scotty Up From Nervous Rookie to Confident Officer
For Martin Quinn, the bickering-buddy-duo aspect of “Human Best Friend” provided him a welcome opportunity to showcase a fresh side of his youthful take on Star Trek stalwart Montgomery Scott, who’s only just beginning to grow into the Doohan incarnation of Scotty that fans have delighted in for six decades.
Forced to untangle a knotty dilemma alongside his navigator nemesis Erica Ortegas (Melissa Navia) while the crew indulges in the psychotropic effects of an alien atmosphere, Scotty has an opportunity to sink into a more relaxed mode, even amid a ticking clock of impending disaster. “I feel like because Scotty’s still a little bit high, he’s a little bit more loose in that episode and able to explore it,” Quinn told TV Guide. “He’s able to let go a bit quicker than Ortegas, so that was fun.”
“That meant that things were a little bit less heavy duty for Scotty in that episode,” Quinn explained. “I didn’t have the same weight behind letting go my frustration as Ortegas was really going through, so it meant that I could have a lighter touch with the whole episode, and it just made it so fun.”
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Quinn said the friction, and ultimate bonding, between Scotty and Ortegas was a delight, linking an enduring Trek icon with one of Strange New Worlds’ original characters in a delightfully playful way. “I think what was really important about Strange New Worlds is finding that bridge between the SNW characters and the TOS characters,” he said. “There was a whole life before TOS begins; they had relationships and friendships with people that we don’t necessarily see. And we’re not at TOS yet — this is about them now. And it was great to build such a bond with someone that isn’t in TOS and really bring that life before TOS alive for Scotty.”
“I couldn’t have picked a better person to be paired up with,” he said of his primary scene partner in the episode, Navia. “She’s just such a great actress and so fun to play with. There’s something funny about how stubborn we maybe both are in different ways, and I think that’s why it worked so well. There’s egos to both of us, and it’s something that is brilliant about bringing those two egos together and seeing how they clash. But also because of the atmospheric effects of that planet I’m a little bit more playful with that and, because the effects have disappeared and she’s just got a hangover, she’s not able to enjoy it. And so that dynamic was brilliant.”
Quinn said playing an intoxicated Scotty was the latest step in the evolution of his portrayal of the engineer, who in the future seems to know his way around the bar but in Quinn’s hands begins as a more inexperienced imbiber.
“Everybody’s got their own view on how he handles his drink, but I did want there to be a little bit of a journey with that as well,” he noted. “In Season 3, Episode 2, Scotty kind of covers his drink at one point and goes, ‘OK, I hardly touch the stuff.’ So I like the idea then of him being a bit more of a happy, sleepy drunk in this episode, a kind of passive drunk, rather than we see him drinking people under the table in TOS. He can really handle his drink. He’s a seasoned drinker. I think this is Scotty at the start of his drinking. I like to think that perhaps the pressure of the job meant that he drank more and more as the years go on whenever he becomes chief officer, whenever he takes over from Pelia. Perhaps the drinking then really solidifies.”
Quinn has enjoyed keying in on aspects of Doohan’s original portrayal and reverse engineering them to come up with a Scotty that is gradually gaining experience, confidence, ingenuity, and respect for the structure of Starfleet command.
“[Doohan’s Scotty] is a little bit more formal at points; he’s got the kind of soldier in him,” he revealed. “I started trying to play with maybe a looser Scotty to begin with who slowly during his time in the Enterprise, perhaps due to the pressure of the job, starts to lean more into the formality, the uniformity of it. He becomes closer to the soldier that we see in TOS, the hands behind the back and, ‘Yes, Captain. No, Captain.’ And I justified that with the pressure of the job starts to make him realize the importance of that kind of formality…My Scotty does push back a little bit more, but I think slowly but surely I think he’s getting closer to James’ version.”
Since taking on the role, Quinn’s become a true student of Trek canon, but while he recognized many of the show’s playful Easter eggs — “so many wee tiny references,” like waking up in a full Mugato suit, a nod to the white ape-like creature featured in the TOS episode “A Private Little War” — others slip by him. “I’m the worst Trekkie because I’ve watched a lot of it, but also I need someone to be like, ‘Remember?’ And I go, ‘Oh, yeah!'” he laughed.
For instance: “When M’Benga says something like, ‘It’s green.’ That’s meant to be a reference — but what’s that a reference to? I saw a lot of people online were like, ‘Oh!'” Die-hard Trek fans will know the quote comes from the TOS episode “By Any Other Name,” in which Scotty drinks a Kelvin invader under the table with a green liquor he can only identify by its color; the line is called back in the TNG episode “Relics,” in which a miraculously recovered Scotty shares a similarly hued aperitif with Data, who also notes “It is green.”
Informed of this background, Quinn beamed broadly. “It’s things like that. I need people to jog me! Things go over the top of my head!” he said. “That’s why I love going to these conventions and you get speaking to the fans and they always go, ‘See, that was important because of X, Y, and Z.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, right — cool!’ I just try and play the scene truthfully. A lot of the nuance and the writing and the callbacks I’m not always clued up on. Sorry, I shouldn’t admit that, should I?”
Indeed, Quinn is embracing his role upholding the legacy of Scotty by connecting with both Simon Pegg, who took on the role in producer-director J.J. Abrams’ Kelvin timeline continuity on the big screen, and Doohan’s son Chris, who’s regularly represented his father in the Star Trek community since the actor’s death in 2005. “I’m going to meet Chris this Sunday at Star Trek Las Vegas [the large annual convention], actually,” he revealed. “And I met Simon at Star Trek Las Vegas last year. So when would I ever get to meet these guys? It’s brilliant that this is even possible.”
“Simon was so kind and lovely and supportive, and he was like, ‘Mate, I’m so excited for you,'” Quinn said. “We were getting photo opportunities with some fans together, but I was just like a fan to him. I was trying to chat to him as much as I could in between each photograph. So I kind of embarrassed myself, if I’m honest. But yeah, it’s cool to be a part of that. It’s just such a shame that I was born when I was, so I didn’t get to meet James Doohan, the legend himself.”
David Foley, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
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Sometimes a longtime celebrity Star Trek fan asks their agent or management team to make a call to the production office to suggest they’d be interested, pretty please, in making an appearance in the latest iteration of the franchise. But in Dave Foley’s case hailing frequencies came directly from Trek’s Hollywood HQ — first for a voice role as the Ferengi Parth on a 2023 episode of Lower Decks, followed by a wholly unexpected summons to join the Strange New Worlds team in person as Dendru, the crew’s dedicated shore leave director in Season 4’s “Human Best Friend.”
“I had met some [Star Trek] folks at a function in L.A. a while earlier and told them what a huge fan I was,” the Kids in the Hall and NewsRadio alum revealed to TV Guide. “And so that first turned into Lower Decks, and then they called me up and asked me if I would play Dendru.” It was a career dream come true for Foley, who self-describes as “a kid who grew up just loving Star Trek, and my politics, my philosophy of life was very much shaped early on by the series Star Trek. I learned about social conscious fiction from that show. I have a lot of deep feelings about Star Trek, so it was great to be able to do it.”
The role itself came with an added element of appeal for Foley. “I love that it’s a very silly character and it’s a very joyful, he’s a joyful person — or whatever he is — and that his whole reason to be is to make people happy, to help them,” he explained. “And it seems like this planet, the idea of a psychedelic planet, is not just to make you feel better while you’re there, but that this psychedelic experience will affect a better life going forward, which is another thing I really love: psychedelics and psychedelic therapy I think are amazing, and they are things that can change you pretty profoundly.”
Even as Foley has made excursions into more serious roles of late, including his turn on Fargo‘s fifth season, he was pleased to play in a more comedic installment of SNW that harkened back to some of TOS’s lighthearted missions.
“That’s always the thing with the original show: that they would cover so many heavy topics and there would be some really deeply philosophical episodes wrestling with morality,” he said. “And then they would just give you one that was just silly and fun and just to give you a release — and I think probably to give the actors a release too, so they could actually smile a little bit. And I always loved when they would do those episodes, so yeah, it’s definitely in the [tradition] — it reminds me of ‘Trouble with Tribbles,’ those kind of episodes.”
Foley admitted he was floating on air while on set. “Oh my God, I was giddy!” he chuckled. “I was wandering around getting a tour of the sets, wandering through the Enterprise, the bridge of the Enterprise, and I was FaceTiming with my daughter, who was at college in New York, and my daughter said, ‘Dad, I don’t think I have ever seen you this happy.’ And she’s quite right. I was just beaming. I couldn’t believe I was standing on the Enterprise bridge and standing in the transporter room. Yeah, it was amazing.”
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Slipping into Dendru’s alien makeup was a snap — which came as no surprise to him. “I’ve had heavier makeup days on Kids in the Hall especially, and more uncomfortable days,” he admitted. “I loved it. I showed up, I saw the sketches that the makeup artist had done, and I saw the rough drawings of what the wardrobe was going to be. They were still building it once I got there because they were fitting me for it, and so I loved getting into that look. And I’m so glad the show is finally airing so I can actually send pictures of that to people — finally!”
He also came away impressed by the camaraderie of SNW‘s cast. “I’m coming in there in the beginning of their fourth season and they were tight,” he recalled. “They were a tight group and they were friends. And it feels right that in this iteration of the whole Gene Roddenberry experiment, these people seem to really all have a shared purpose and mission sort of sense to it but they also seem to genuinely really like each other. And they would hang out and watch each other act, which I think years into a show is pretty amazing.”
Foley concedes that his SNW guest stint was the more enjoyable, hands down, over his visit to Lower Decks, which “was more fun to watch than to do, because you’re just standing in a room and talking to the director over the internet. But it was fun to take a crack at a Ferengi voice. I think I got the lisp right.”
He also confided that he found loose inspiration for his characterization of Dendru in an unexpected — but very Star Trek-adjacent — source: Galaxy Quest‘s Mathesar.
“Thinking back on it now, I have to admit that maybe I was ripping off Enrico Colantoni a little bit,” he confided. “I think I might’ve stolen a little bit of Enrico’s stuff.”
New episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds drop Thursdays on Paramount+.