Star Trek: Strange New Worlds cleverly references a famous Scotty quote from Star Trek: The Original Series, but does it secretly explain the line's origin too? Set less than a decade before the era of Captain Kirk, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds skirts gleefully around familiar territory, featuring famous characters such as Christopher Pike, Nyota Uhura, Nurse Chapel, and Samuel Kirk in previously unseen adventures. Only two episodes deep, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is already redefining Star Trek: The Original Series, from the presence of a Noonien Singh on the Enterprise's bridge to Spock sort-of-grieving the loss of his sister.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episode 2 ("Children of the Comet") strands an Enterprise landing party on a comet destined to smash an inhabited planet to pieces. Redirecting a shielded celestial rock proves tricky enough, but Captain Pike's task becomes significantly harder when an advanced alien ship hellbent on protecting the comet (sorry, M'hanit) from interference appears. Desperate to warn his absent crew of the new danger, Pike boldly orders, "Find a way to get through to the landing party right now. Break the laws of physics if you have to." It's a line that sounds eerily familiar...
Back in Star Trek: The Original Series, one of Montgomery "Scotty" Scott's best quotes (indeed, one of the best quotes in TOS, period) came in "The Naked Time." The Enterprise's crew is behaving irrationally under the influence of an alien pathogen, causing Kevin Riley to shut down the ship's engines. Keen to avoid disaster, Kirk orders Scotty to restart the ship, but his chief engineer retorts, "I can't change the laws of physics." The line has since evolved into an immortal, oft-quoted Star Trek catchphrase - and Pike's Star Trek: Strange New Worlds line cleverly pays tribute to the original by flipping the words once spoken by James Doohan. Rather than a crew member imploring their Starfleet captain not to expect miracles, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds presents a captain imploring his crew to perform miracles.
Pike's line could represent nothing more than a nostalgic Easter egg nodding toward Star Trek: The Original Series (of which there is no shortage in Strange New Worlds). Nevertheless, an in-universe explanation as to why these two lines mirror each other so perfectly might exist. Did one quote perhaps inspire the other? Very little is known about Scotty's pre-Enterprise Starfleet career, other than he joined in 2241, served aboard several ships, and the Enterprise was his first posting as chief engineer. Indeed, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has already introduced Scotty's gruff predecessor, Hemmer.
Star Trek's Enterprise timeline is malleable enough for Pike and Scotty to potentially cross paths. Maybe Scotty serves aboard the pre-Kirk Enterprise at a lower rank, or replaces Hemmer toward the latter days of Pike's captaincy. "Break the laws of physics if you have to" might become a recurring demand from Anson Mount's Captain Pike (we've not seen nearly enough of him to know for sure), so if Scotty was around during this era, his "I can't change the laws of physics" might've been inspired or prompted by the unreasonable, science-breaking request made by the guy who called the shots before Kirk.
Like most TV and film catchphrases, Scotty's "laws of physics" quote wasn't uttered nearly as often as you'd assume given its immense popularity. Other catchphrases associated with Star Trek ("Beam me up, Scotty" the most obvious) weren't spoken verbatim whatsoever, proving the fragility of an audience's memory. However, it's Easter eggs like Pike's Star Trek: Strange New Worlds line that amplify the cultural influence classic snippets of dialogue like "I can't break the laws of physics" carry throughout the years.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds continues Thursday on Paramount+.