James Doohan, R.I.P.
I plan to write the only obituary of James Doohan not to use a trite cliche about “Scotty” being “beamed up” for the last time. Ugh. I’ve read too many of them over the last couple of days, and they haven’t gotten any funnier or more poignant.

Doohan, famous around the world for playing Montgomery Scott, the ass-busting, hardware-loving Chief Engineer of the U.S.S. Enterprise on the original (and only, I maintain) STAR TREK from 1966-1969, passed away this week at age 85. Cause of death was pneumonia, but it’s no secret that Doohan, the father of nine children, including a five-year-old (!) daughter, was suffering serious health problems for a couple of years now, including Alzheimer’s.

He was a heck of a good character actor, not that you’ve probably had much of a chance to find out. He claimed to have been severely typecast as a Scotsman after TREK’s cancellation, and appeared infrequently in non-Scotty roles in television and features in the years since. In a way, it was a great compliment; his Scottish accent was impeccable, making him instantly believable as the Enterprise’s jack-of-all-trades, who could often be found in the bowels of the starship, trying to divert dilithium power to the photon torpedoes or bypass the impulse drive or some such technobabble, usually while his boss, Captain Kirk (William Shatner), was screaming at him to hurry up before they all got killed.

Doohan began acting in his native Canada after fighting in World War II as a lieutenant in the artillery; he was machine-gunned on D-Day, and lost the middle finger of his right hand. His mastery of dialects made him a very popular radio actor, since he could easily tackle a wide variety of ethnic roles. He also met a Montreal actor, eleven years his junior, named William Shatner, who would much later become an important figure in Doohan’s professional life.

After many years of stage work, supporting parts in episodic television—in Canada and in the U.S.—and a few motion pictures, Doohan landed the role of Scotty in “Where No Man Has Gone Before”, the second STAR TREK pilot commissioned by NBC after the first was deemed “too cerebral” for TV audiences. “Where No Man…” was filmed in 1965, and although Doohan’s role in it is quite small, STAR TREK was picked up for the 1966 fall season by NBC, where it played to a small but loyal (and intelligent) audience for three years. The series mainly spotlighted its three leading characters—Kirk, Spock (Leonard Nimoy) and Dr. McCoy (the late DeForest Kelley)—but Doohan got a few chances to shine. In the second-season “Wolf in the Fold”, he was accused of mass-murdering women, but it turned out he was actually possessed by the spirit of Jack the Ripper (!), which was forcing Scotty to slash his victims. Scott managed to score with one of the few women that Captain Kirk didn’t in “The Lights of Zetar”, which was written by famed ventriloquist Shari Lewis (!) and guest-starred Jan Shutan as Lt. Mira Romaine, who also found herself possessed by an unearthly force.

My favorite Doohan moment is in the famous “The Trouble With Tribbles” episode, in which he, along with Ensign Chekov (Walter Koenig) and other crewmen, engage in a wild, lighthearted barroom brawl with a bunch of Klingons. Back aboard the Enterprise, the men are chewed out by a furious Captain Kirk, who keeps Scotty behind after dismissing the rest. Speaking in a friendly tone this time—Kirk and Scott were good friends, as well as colleagues—Kirk genuinely wants to know what could have made his loyal pal disobey a direct order to avoid conflict with the Klingons.

Scotty: Well, sir. They called you a tin-plated, overbearing, swaggering dictator with delusions of God-hood.

Kirk: Was that all?

Scotty: No, sir! They also compared you to a Denebian slime devil!

Kirk: I see...

Scotty: And then they said---

Kirk: I get the picture, Scotty.

Scotty: Aye...

Kirk: And that's when you hit the Klingons.

Scotty: No, sir.

Kirk: No?

Scotty: No, uh, well, you told us to stay out of trouble, and after all, we are big enough to take a few insults, aren't we?

Kirk: What was it that started the fight?

Scotty: They called the Enterprise a garbage scow!

Kirk: And that's when you hit the Klingons.

Scotty: Yes, sir!

Kirk: You hit the Klingons because they insulted the Enterprise. Not because they insulted---

Scotty: Well, sir! This was a matter of pride!

Shatner’s performance is great, registering a swell of pride when he starts to think that Scotty instigated the brawl to defend the defamation of Kirk’s character, and then deflation when he finally learns that, no, it was the Enterprise’s reputation Scotty was defending, not Kirk’s. It’s played for comedy, and Doohan is great in it, since it not only plays as a funny little scene, but also a further definition of the characters and who they are.

Doohan’s gift for voicework landed him several roles on the very good STAR TREK animated series, and he was also a regular on another of my favorite shows growing up, the live-action Saturday-morning kids show JASON OF STAR COMMAND. Whether it was typecasting or something else, Doohan’s roles were few and far between, but it was evident he still had the chops. Just check him out in 1982’s STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN, when Scotty proudly introduces his nephew to James Kirk, and again later when his nephew is killed in an attack upon the Enterprise. He also managed to pull off a great performance in STAR TREK: GENERATIONS, where he convinced us that he did not, in fact, despise William Shatner.

His feud with Shatner, exposed in Shatner’s autobiographical STAR TREK MEMORIES, was prime fodder for a lot of gossip in recent years. Shatner apparently never even realized Doohan had a problem with him, one that dates back to the original show’s run during the late ‘60s, when Doohan felt Shatner was a scene-stealer and an egotist. Maybe he was and maybe he wasn’t—Doohan wasn’t the only TREK cast member to feel this way—but the ill feelings certainly cast a bit of a pall over TREK fandom—after all, we like to think the Enterprise crew was one big happy family. Happily, Doohan and Shatner reportedly managed to talk things out in recent years, ending their feud and telling each other how much they loved each other.

Doohan follows the beloved DeForest Kelley, who succumbed to stomach cancer in 1999 at the age of 79, as only the second STAR TREK actor to pass away.