I don’t remember the Empath from watching it during Saturday afternoons on repeat in the 70s – I wonder if they didn’t re-air it because either it was so terrible or because of the torture.
I eventually got all the DVDs and watched it and thought, what the heck is this? It’s certainly my least favorite episode.
The other one that I don’t remember seeing as a youth is Turnabout Intruder (where that woman somehow takes over Kirk’s body). Other than those two, all of the DVD episodes were very familiar.
Episodes like that were the reason they didn’t get a lot of people writing in to try to get another season, the way we did during the second season. 20 minutes of plot in an hour episode (if that) and a set that must of cost the best part of $10 to construct.
I know all the episodes because I used to summarize them on my Star Trek Preview column in the world’s first online newspaper, on PLATO, 1975-1977.
So, what happens to TV show sets? I imagine that the main sets for a series (like the bridge of the Enterprise) stay set up for the whole run. But when they do have scenes in some other location, do they keep it in case they someday want to do another episode in a similar location? And how “kept” do they keep it? Keep it up? Break it down enough that it fits in a storage facility, but can be easily re-assembled? Keep the knickknacks that individualize a set, but break down the big plain walls into boards and canvas?
I imagine that the answer is “it depends”. Like, they probably have one set for “crewmember’s quarters”, that they keep up, but change the details like a picture hanging on the wall or what’s on the shelves, to change which crewmember it is. And for contemporary real-world shows, they probably have sets for generic locations like “an office” that get shared between multiple shows.
Who could have guessed that a show without the ratings to survive more than three seasons would become a cultural icon? Or that a silly UK children’s show about an itinerant time-traveler would endure for generations? What someone with prescience could have done back then…
I actually know a little bit about this, as I used to know the construction coordinator on TNG and Voyager, and he took me on a tour of the Voyager sets in the summer of 1996.
The main ship sets (the bridge, engineering, transporter room, captain’s office/ready room, sickbay, etc.) are pretty much evergreen; on Voyager, they had a set for the mess hall/Neelix’s kitchen, as they used that set frequently. They would have several sets dressed out as ship rooms which could be redressed for individual quarters, smaller offices and labs, etc.
My understanding is that they had a ton of set pieces and furniture in storage (as well as props and costumes), and could easily put back together a Klingon bridge set, for example, if needed (which would then get disassembled again). What was kept was probably chairs, desks, consoles, screens, etc.; AIUI, walls and floors were constantly rebuilt and repainted in the area of the soundstage which wasn’t dedicated to the more permanent sets.
They had a “Planet Hell” set, which was regularly redone for various “outdoor”/“on-planet” scenes. On Voyager, they had a small set for the Holodeck, which they rebuilt each season for whatever the theme was going to be for Tom Paris’s ongoing holodeck programs. When I visited the set, that “holodeck set” was decorated as a French bar and pool hall.
Also worth noting: the same soundstage at Paramount was used for the the Enterprise in the first six Trek movies, as well as the Enterprise-D in TNG, and the Voyager. When they were constructing the sets for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the setbuilding crew dug a hole in the floor of the soundstage, for placement of the “warp core” in the Engineering set, so that it would look like the core went both up and down from the main Engineering deck. The Enterprise-D and Voyager sets both had their Engineering sets built in the same place, to use that same hole in the floor for their warp cores.