Reminds us a lot of "Riley" from 'the naked conscience of the king', so it was very apropos for him to be the Ensign to show Scotty his huge enterprise D guest room. I thought maybe the kid might have been related to the original TOS actor who played Riley... there is an uncanny resemblance.
They should have made this into a two-part episode to expand Scotty's role and to give us more information about this Dyson sphere.
It was as if there was not enough time during the episode to really get in to the Dyson sphere subject, like who made it? Pak Protectors? Why was it abandoned, it's just this thing that they come across to give us an excuse as to why they could bring Scotty back into the Star Trek universe.
They had an excellent technical reason why Scotty would still be alive but at the time, Scotty did not know that James Kirk had passed away.
Scotty should have had some interaction with Worf as well- The last time we really saw Scotty, he had killed General West (Rene Aberjonois) who was pretending to be a Klingon, so he had a little bit of recovering to do as far as Klingons were concerned.
I did not like the way that they turned Scotty into a nosy, whining complainer, but, it was true to the character.
And, of course: "it is green".
There were a lot of missed opportunities here. But, he got to solve an engineering conundrum with Geordie so I was very pleased with that. My main disappointment was we did not get to see that much of the Dyson sphere and there could have been a lot of things they could have showed us.
Especially since Rick Sternbach, who was one of the main artists for next generation, made the cover art for the "ringworld" book by Larry Niven- so he had first-hand experience in designing what we saw of the sphere.
But they really did not depict the sphere as huge as it would have appeared, when the enterprise is in orbit around the sphere, you would not have been able to see the curvature of the sphere because we are talking about something that is as large as the earths orbit around the sun, twice 93,000,000 miles, right? The surface of the sphere would have been one endless horizon...
