Why did the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds higher ups debut *that* character?

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds debuted Montgomery “Scotty” Scotts for the second time.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds made a big swing with their season finale for season two; “Hegemony”. In the episode, a small and quaint alien planet modeled after the mid-1900s Mid West United States, Parnassus Beta, was receiving aid from Starfleet when the Gorn attacked. On their way to attack this planet, the Gorn ran into another Starfleet vessel, the USS Stardiver, and decided to destroy it.

Only one shuttle escaped, piloted by one of the most iconic characters in all of Star Trek; Montgomery “Scotty” Scott. Due to the damage he took, he had to go to the closest planet he could, the same one that the Gorn were already on their way to.

Due to this, Scotty got caught up in the mess that the USS Enterprise and USS Cayuga were already involved in. This is how Captain Christopher Pike would go on to meet Scotty and establish the first canonical appearance of the famed officer.

But how did it all come about?

How did Scotty end up in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds?

According to an interview Henry Alonso Myers gave to TVLine, it was a long time in the making, saying;

"We’ve been talking about him for a while as a general idea. As we were going into the finale, it suddenly became a weird, rare opportunity to introduce him for a lot of different reasons. What we’d like to do with the characters [from the original Star Trek series]… We don’t meet our understanding of who they are in that series, we meet who they are before. They don’t know who they will be, and they aren’t that person yet. They have some stuff to go through.We also had a great opportunity to cast someone who’s from Scotland, who can do that Scotty, but also who can go through all of the things that we want to see him go through before he becomes the person that we know."

Martin Quinn is the young man who played the iconic Star Trek character, and he is in fact the first man of Scottish descent to play the character.

The arrival of Scotty on Strange New Worlds brings the original crew count up to four now; with Spock, Nyota Uhura, James T. Kirk, and now Scotty having appeared on the show. Only Hikaru Sulu and Pavel Chekov remain to debut.