Scotty: Enterprise Chief Engineer and Cat Hoarder

Not a lot of people know, but Lt. Commander Montgomery “Scotty” Scott was actually a drunken cat hoarder. His condition went mostly unnoticed while he was aboard the Enterprise because, as Chief Engineer and Transporter Tech, he was able to keep all of his hoarded sick pets stowed neatly in the matter/energy buffers aboard the ship.

Though the series creator Gene Roddenberry never directly reveals this side of the character, the clues are all there- the puffy red allergy-stricken eyes, and not to mention, the chronic transporter malfunctions due to the memory buffers being chronically full of digitized kitties. Once the problem became so bad that Captain Kirk was even split into two!

Keeping the cats in a stored buffer space came in handy, when years later, Scotty would use a similar trick to store himself in the transporter buffers after crashing on a Dyson’s sphere. This was a very difficult decision for him to do, because, in order to store his own pattern for so long, he had to clean the transporter memory buffers of some 30-plus years of cats, tribbles, and old space magazines he had been collecting that he had always meant to read but never got around to it.