The Enterprise moves in to intercept a distress signal it picked up from the USS Jenolan, a transport ship that had disappeared nearly 75 years ago. As the ship exits warp it is suddenly rocked by a massive gravity well which sensors determine to be a Dyson Sphere, a massive sphere with the diameter of Earth's orbit around the sun constructed around a star. The idea being that a civilization living on the surface of the sphere -equaling many millions of planets- would have access to an inexhaustible source of solar energy.
They locate the the Jenolan crashed on the surface of the sphere and send-in an away team to investigate the wreckage. Unsurprisingly, there's no evidence of survivors on the ship but Geordi discovers an unusual configuration on the ship's transporter and that there's still a viable pattern in its buffer. Believing that someone had somehow preserved themselves inside the transporter, Geordi beams in the pattern. It turns out to Captain Montgomery Scott, or "Scotty," from the TOS series and movies.
Scotty was a passenger on the transport ship enroute to a retirement colony when the ship detected the sphere and went into investigate. After an attempt to hail the sphere the ship was pulled down and crashed on the surface. Scotty and a single member of the crew were the only survivors and with limited supplies and little hope of a rescue Scotty decided to jury-rig the transporter to preserve him and the other officer until help arrived. That help, it would seem, came 75 years later and while Scotty's pattern survived in the modified transporter with minimal degradation, the other officer's pattern was irrecoverable.
Scotty seems to have trouble adapting to life on the new Enterprise as he's quickly brushed off by other members of the crew, all favoring their work and duties over befriending Scott. Scotty seeks refreshment in Ten-Forward only to be disappointed by the 24th century's version of scotch. Though, Data is helpful in providing Scotty with a drink that has real alcohol in it.
A drunken Scotty recreates the bridge of the original Enterprise on the holodeck and goes in to sulk and reminisce alone, but is soon joined by Captain Picard. The two men share a drink, memories and thoughts before Scotty decides he's being foolish and needs to act his age and not dwell on the past.
Picard, motivated to make Scotty feel useful, asks LaForge to accompany Scotty on an away mission to the Jenolan in order to recover data from its computers concerning the Dyson Sphere. Geordi reluctantly agrees as he recently had a blow-up at Scotty during a confrontation in Engineering.
Working together on the Jenolan the two engineers eventually find a balance to work with one another, Geordi realizing that just because something is old it doesn't need to be dismissed and Scotty realizes that he still has some use in this world after all. In need of another piece of equipment, Geordi tries to contact the Enterprise but discovers it missing.
While Geordi and Scotty worked on the Jenolan, the Enterprise investigated a communications array on the surface of the sphere, contacting it engages a hatch and a tractor beam that pulls the ship inside, resulting in some minor damage to ship's systems leaving them trapped inside the sphere and in danger of being destroyed by a star in a phase of active solar activity that had resulted in the abandonment of the sphere ages ago.
Geordi and Scotty work up and plan to find the Enterprise and manage to get the Jenolan operating again to go off to find the missing ship. They believe the ship was pulled inside the sphere and cannot get out. Scotty believes they can open the hatch, avoid the tractor beams, and use the Jenolan to hold the hatch open while the Enterprise escapes. Geordi thinks the plan is crazy but Scotty convinces Geordi that it can be done, the younger engineer agrees to go with the plan.
The plan goes off without much of a hitch, suffering only the loss of the Jenolan as it needed to be destroyed in order for the Enterprise to make it out the doors.
Geordi and Scotty share engineering stories as they walk for the shuttlebay where Picard offers to give Scotty one of the Enterprise's shuttles as compensation for the loss of the Jenolan. Scotty remarks that the original colony he was heading for is where people go to retire, maybe some day he will end up there.
This is the last episode of the series to feature a character from the original series and overall it works out pretty well for Scotty, leaving him alive and well in the 24th century with a sense of purpose that he has something to offer the people of this time.
It's too bad he had to be a bit of an ass to get to that point.
The overall message of the episode works well and is a good one, that just because someone is old they shouldn't me dismissed and treated as if they have nothing to offer. Which is a great message.
Only, well, er..... Scotty *didn't* have anything to offer during his one major encounter on the ship, namely the confrontation with LaForge in Engineering. And the episode makes no vagaries about it as pretty much everything he does in Engineering comes from a lack of misunderstanding how technology in this time works. Hell, one of the very first things he does on getting on the ship is nearly electrocuting himself by almost touching a power-tap.
Often this discussion will come up on the boards on whether Scotty or Geordi were in the wrong when it came to their confrontation in Engineering and I find myself time and time again saying Scotty was in the wrong and I justify it by this:
Say you're at you're job one day and in walks a man who's been in a coma for even a reasonable length of time, maybe 20 or 30 years. Think of where our world and technology was 30 years ago, in 1985. A time when computers were just starting to show up in homes and being used in more and more offices the Internet didn't really exist in any meaningful sense and to talk to someone even on the otherside of town you still had to hunt-down a phone that was connected to a wall-socket and hope someone was next to their phone when you called.
Is a person whose last memory is that kind of world going to have anything to offer someone in that same job working in *today's* world?
There's two things Scotty dicks with in Engineering while he's there and both times he not only is wrong in what he is assuming but he's sort-of implying Geordi is bad at his job. He even offers Geordi "advice" in how to do his job, advice that includes lying to his captain about estimated times to complete a task.
Through all of this Geordi tries to be polite and patient but eventually blows up.
Scotty feels he's "in the way" and being ignored but it's not really the case. Geordi showed in sickbay, and even in talking with Scotty on the way there, a willingness to go over new things with Scotty. He just can't right now, he's busy. (I dunno, I guess the ship just made a brand-new, huge, discovery.) Picard shows an interest in talking with Scotty but he's busy right now (I dunno, a ship to run or something.) Beverly even tells Scotty he should take it easy anyway (I dunno, he broke his arm and spent nearly 4-decades existing as only energy or something.) But none of this apparently works for Scotty and even though he's on this massive, luxury, ship on which there massive amounts of things to do and see he's put-off and bored. Hell, even the guy who showed him his room brushes him off! (I dunno, he's a junior officer with other work to do or something.)
Keep in mind, once Picard was off-duty he does make good on his promise and seeks Scotty out to talk with him and the two men bond very nicely.
But after the encounter in Engineering, Scotty plays out very nicely and the bonding scene between him and Picard on the partially re-created set of the original TOS Enterprise bridge is a good scene. And once Scotty and Geordi learn to respect one another and work together the way that plays off is very good too.
The remastered look of the episode is very, very nicely done. One thing of note is making the "horizon" of the Dyson Sphere really appear to be on the edge of forever. In the original episode we can see a clear "cut" between the sphere's horizon and space and even see some of the curvature of the sphere. All of this sort of diminishes how mind-boggling HUGE this thing is. The remastered effects hides the curvature of the horizon and makes the horizon fade into blackness better as if it really were stretching on forever.
It's really, really, tough to imagine how utterly, ridiculously, huge this thing would be.
You're telling me this civilization could built this colossal structure but they couldn't develop a shielding system for the "surface" that protected it from the star's solar radiation?
Maybe it's me, but it seems to me the Jenolan could have stayed wedged in the doors AND for the Enterprise to also be able to get out. The doors are pretty damn massive.
We'll just pretend the Enterprise knew the prefix codes or shield frequencies for the Jenolan and thus could beam through the shields of the smaller ship.
There's just something nifty about the way the actress punches in the commands at her console and the way the ship responds by turning 90-degrees on her side to make it through the closing hatch. Even though she's doing nothing it some how seems believable she's making this maneuver.
I have a power auto-up and auto-down driver's window on my car. When I tell it to "auto-up" if I stick my hand in there and the window bumps it, the window will stop going up and will actually retract down a little bit. Household automatic garage doors do the same thing, reverse or stop when they encounter an obstruction on their way down.
I guess the aliens who built the Dyson Sphere had no such safety measures installed for their entry system to the sphere.
Overall a good episode, though. And it's nice seeing the partial recreation of the TOS bridge.
She picked up just enough from the show to realize they broke their own rules.
