The 1000

Remember these guys? In the past I've commented about how the ENT-D never felt any bigger than the Constitution, because despite it's size, all the scenes were conducted in small room sets, with no creativity in painted backdrops that could give the illusion of bigger areas. It seemed that the biggest room they ever had was the shuttle/cargo bay

Well I also wonder why some of the extras they employed from time to time, couldn't have been used to reflect that 1000+ crew they have. The street full of natives in Journey's End, the court crowd in Farpoint. If they could afford a group of maybe 30/40 extras from time to time, why did we never get to see them used to supplement the crew?

I was just in the Darmok thread & it occurred to me that instead of having only Data & Troi working the linguistic problem, they should have a room full of people going over it. Just a shot or two, here & there, during a season, of a task force at work in uniforms, with maybe a select few in some alien costumes, Orion, Andorian, Vulcan, whatever was around

Do you know how much that would have heightened the feeling of magnitude? Now I realize they didn't have the budget of a modern show, but they could have at least tried once in a while

Some days it just felt like Picard was captain of a dozen people

 

At least once or twice Kirk got this

 

^ Heck, even in TOS (with its more limited budget) we'd occasionally get scenes, like the wedding in "Balance of Terror", or the corridor scenes in "The Man Trap", where they'd throw a whole bunch of guys in there and the ship really felt alive with people.

That's something that got more and more obvious in season three as they had less and less money: there were more scenes of almost completely empty corridor sets. The Enterprise felt barren.

As regards the court room crowd in "Farpoint", it's often struck me how much... thinner the same crowd scene is in the "All Good Things" version. It's like there's only one-third as many people in the room in the finale as in the pilot. Even the Q Continuum have to deal with budget cutbacks.

 

HA! I never bothered to notice that

 

The whole 1000 thing was something that the original writers said that the good writers were just kinda stuck with later.

That's why Voyager had 150 crew. It's a reasonable manageable number. If the season 3-7 team were there in season 1 the Ent-D would have had 150 people. But, besides the desire to one-up the crew compliment of Kirk's Enterprise, they envisioned the Ent-D as a mobile community deployed in deep space. They just never felt like expressing that, even the orientation in the past in AGT didn't have that many crew. You'd think the whole crew would be there to welcome the Captain. The writers never found a use for the number 1000 and we we just expected to think that they were all wandering around somewhere in the unseen parts of the ship running science experiments.

 

It's a big ship, with lots more room for people to be than the constitution. TONS of volume in there.

Regarding your other point, it's one reason I enjoy watching Hollow Pursuits so much. Geordi actually used a team of specialists and it showed him having a morning meeting with them and everything a department head would be seen doing.

 

But I like the idea of that many people on board. It's grand to think deep space exploration would be undertaken at that level. Multitudes of science departments, security details, operational & maintenance crews, medical teams capable of rendering planetary level aid, & community civilians like waiters, & bartenders, & barbers & masseurs & whatnot, for diplomatic missions.

One of the things that I love about the TOS movies is that it had that kind of grandeur. The whole reason that anybody ever really began even taking Star Trek seriously as a tv show again, was because by 1988 the computer graphics tech had improved so much that it was now possible on a tv budget to produce FX comparable to the TOS movies. We'll just bring our makeup & costume departments over & blammo. Movie quality tv show, but they failed to meet the standard of grandness where it came to crew, & it's always been noticeable to me. It wouldn't have taken much to counter that, in my generally uninformed opinion. lol

 

Just more money. Big cast of extras, you're going to have fewer new effects. Big effects show, smaller cast. A lot of times those big effects shows were 2-parters, to spread the cost.

 

I think the "1000" originated from the assumption that starships, and the crew complement, were inevitably just going to get bigger and bigger.


Frankly, nothing I saw during the show's run really warranted such a number.

 

According to Ed Whitefire who was on the team helping create the new Enterprise D, a crew of 1000 was way too small. It would result in one person in an area a bit larger than a football field- you could walk around for most of the day and not meet anybody.

 

Exactly. I'd gather there are more densely packed areas on the "civilian decks" where people huddle together for social comfort, complete with malls and spas and marinas for all we know. There would be room for another ten thousand there if need be, but where to find the need? It probably only takes a handful of people to run the highly automated ship (including its research facilities), so even if every one of them has big families, that's only the quoted 1,000 people. The rest would be passengers, and the storyline would have to be invented for taking the passengers aboard.

Also, the officer accommodation decks simply aren't going to get crowded even on the worst of days, and apparently there are too few top officers with families let alone children to bring the buzz of "normal life" to those decks.

It would have been interesting for Picard to visit the putative "civilian sectors" sometimes, but perhaps out of character for him. And evil invaders would have much more interesting targets available than the local shopping center. I guess the logical choice would have been to immerse the O'Briens in the busier parts of the ship - that is, assuming the resources could be found to show crowds.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Good point. Given the alleged size and volume of the D, 1000 seems like too small a number.

 

That's kind of a cop out of them to claim though, because they really do have a knack for drudging it up anytime they wanted to have Picard grandstand about his responsibility to whatever sentient hologram, half baked admiral, or nutty scientist that he was trying to plead with any given week

I'm responsible for over 1000 lives! or 12 depending on the FX budget of the week

I honestly think just a little attention in that direction would go a looong way. A couple shots in a couple episodes per season, of a room with 30 people working in uniform on something, or a corridor lined with people for evacuation, like they did in Generations, which I took as them finally admitting what it would actually look like

 

To be fair, we also got episodes like I, Mudd where the entire crew beamed down to the planet...and we see a total of 7.

 

That's one reason I consider I, Mudd to be the worst episode of the original series. I've owned the DVD's for, what, five years now, and I haven't watched it once.

 

I honestly think the 1000 thing came solely from a desire to go up from the 400 of the original Enterprise.

 

I could buy the I, Mudd thing if we were to believe the 'senior staff' were being isolated from the rest of the crew on the planet. But it's one of those one's Takei isn't in, and Chekov is there, so.....

They did seem to have some idea like this in early TNG, as they shot multiple "stock shots" of large numbers of crew members stopping in corridors to listen to the Captain's message over the intercom that got used in a few episodes in the first season, but like many things it quickly got abandoned.

 

Well the episode "The Ensigns of Command" infers that the Enterprise could easily evacuate the entire colony of 15 000 if need be.

 

You sure that was TNG? They certainly did it for TOS (which helped to sell the "full crew" visuals early on, even if it faded out over time) but I've been rewatching TNG-1 recently and I don't remember anything similar, except in EAF maybe