*Warning: Spoilers ahead for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 4 episode 6 ahead.*

The sixth episode of Strange New Worlds season 4 sees the USS Enterprise trapped by a slipstream wormhole. In the chaos that follows, Joseph M'Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) ends up sliced in half, held together just by the sheer weight of the table that severed his body in Med Bay.

Yet honestly, that's far from the most shocking thing about this episode.

With the Chief Medical Officer out of action, another practitioner named Dr Philip Boyce steps up to help in M'Benga's absence.

Sound familiar? Boyce was actually the first Chief Medical Officer to work aboard the USS Enterprise under Captain Christopher Pike. He was played by John Hoyt in the first pilot developed for the original Star Trek series in 1964.

That pilot was scrapped, however, and Hoyt was replaced by Paul Fix who played a new doctor character named Dr Mark Piper in a second pilot.

NBC picked Star Trek up after that, but Fix was then replaced by DeForest Kelley who played another new doctor, this time named Leonard McCoy, who would go on to star in the Original Series as we know it today.

So what happened to Boyce? Footage of Hoyt's role was later incorporated into a two-part episode titled The Menagerie, Part I and The Menagerie, Part II, as well as the Star Trek: Discovery second season episode, If Memory Serves.

As such, Boyce's existence in Star Trek has been confirmed as canon. But if that's the case, where has he been for the past six decades?

That's the question fans have long posed, suspecting that Boyce must have simply died or retired at some point.

The introduction of Strange New Worlds drew new attention to this mystery as Boyce should also exist within this specific era of the Star Trek timeline. And now, four seasons in, we finally have our answer.

This season of Strange New Worlds has introduced this idea of an Alpha shift and a Beta shift where the two crews of the Enterprise swap over when it's clocking off time for them. As such, the characters we spend time with each week are part of the Alpha crew while the Beta crew usually work off screen.

However, this episode begins just as the shifts are about to swap over, and when M'Benga is put out of action, the Chief Medical Officer of the Beta crew, Boyce, is the one who naturally steps up.

That means Boyce has actually been aboard the ship this whole time, but just not as a member of the primary Alpha crew.

Not only does this reveal add a new element to this long-standing mystery, one that no one seems to have predicted, it also works as a fitting tribute to the very first Doctor who ever appeared within the Star Trek universe.

Boyce has always been here, he's always been an important part of the franchise's legacy, and reminders like this ensure he always will be.

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