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.
Mayberry is a fictional town based on the Andy Griffith’s real home town of Mount Airy, North Carolina. The town has embraced the image and identifies itself with Mayberry.
Andy Griffith was born in Mount Airy in 1926 and arguably was the town’s most famous resident.
The reason it’s arguable was because Chang and Eng Bunker, the original “Siamese” twins, moved to Mount Airy in 1845 and lived there for over twenty years.
So I really feel The Andy Griffith Show should have featured a pair of retired conjoined twins living in Mayberry.
And Mission Impossible had an episode filmed in Stalag 13. And they used the studio office buildings as foreign country offices. You could even see the Desilu water tower in one episode. I think the natzee offices in Patterns Of Force were Desilu offices. Reuse, recycle.
I still laugh when Emergency!'s Station 51 had to go to a rescue at “Mammoth Studios” which looked an awful lot like Universal. “hey, we’re filming in the studio today!” Saves money and hassle of location shooting at least.
UFO went one further and had the entire series based in the film studios. The studio was supposed to be just a cover for the secret base beneath. But it also gave them a good excuse if anyone spotted any aliens or strange tech around.
In a third season episode, Star Trek had the Enterprise encounter two aliens - one in a stolen Federation shuttlecraft (aka - a model they already had) and the other in an invisible spaceship! The makeup was only half-expensive, too, and the episode was rounded out with recycled stock footage (no points for identifying the episode).
In an Auton episode of Doctor Who, the Autons are seen through a shop window (as manikins), the camera cuts to the street, where we hear breaking glass, and then cuts back to the Autons stepping out of the (now entirely glass-free) windows. Breaking glass is expensive!
Don’t forget the “off screen” guest stars including Avery Brooks, Terry Farrell, Colm Meaney, and Alexander Siddig . Although given that they re-used a lot of footage from The Trouble with Tribbles, I wonder if Trials and Tribble-ations counts as a bottle episode for DS9.
I would say “no.” Yes, they were able to re-use footage from the old episode, but there was also extensive set-building required to shoot the new episode: the DS9 construction team had to build faithful replicas of a number of TOS sets, both for the Enterprise, and Space Station K-7. Given that the idea behind a bottle show is that it doesn’t require much, if any, in the way of new sets or additional actors, I’d say that disqualifies it.
The episode’s entry on the Memory Alpha Wiki describes some of this. My favorite part of the story is that, after they had completed the sets, Robert H. Justman (who had been a producer on TOS) toured the sets, and while he was very impressed, he noted two materials which weren’t “right;” Michael Okuda acknowledged this, explaining that the company which had made those materials had gone out of business in the intervening 30 years, and they had to make do with substitutes.
Some discussion about what makes a bottle episode in this thread. I haven’t seen a mention of the BBC Series Inside No 9 which ran for some 55 episodes. They were written by League of Gentlemen writers Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, who did a bottle episode for a series they were working on to lower the average cost per episode and enjoyed the process so much that they wrote series of 6 half hour bottle episodes. These proved so popular they it ran for 9 series. Every one had at least one guest star.
The overall quality is IMO exceptional and a personal fave is episode 1.2 “A Quiet Night In” about 2 inept burgalrs trying to rob a house and is one of the funniest farces I have ever seen
I don’t see how any of those could be a bottle episode.
A bottle episode is an episode of an ongoing series where the action is confined to regular series sets, use regular series actors, and existing costumes and props. Nothing, or little, should have to be constructed specifically for that episode.
Inside No 9 was an anthology series. Every episode had a different setting, and a guest cast. New sets, props, costumes etc had to be built for every single episode.
I suppose an anthology episode with a very limited set and one or two actors might be cheap enough to be roughly equivalent to a bottle episode (Twilight Zone’s Last Night of a Jockey might be an example)
. Although given that they re-used a lot of footage from The Trouble with Tribbles, I wonder if Trials and Tribble-ations counts as a bottle episode for DS9.