There was another way off the bridge, and two pieces of canon support for it. Khan says he "jammed up your exit routes," plural, and after his initial discussion with Deela, Kirk walks off the bridge without using the turbolift. We don't see how he does it, but we see that he is not using the lift (which is "frozen" in place), and we hear his boots retreating. Additionally, Deela got onto the bridge somehow.
That's right. "Wink of an Eye" strongly implies that Kirk went down a staircase or something. It was cheating, but the episode doesn't work without it, because the elevator would take ages.
A similar thing happened on
Lost in Space, but for different reasons. During the third season, the
Jupiter 2 upper deck interior had to be moved to a different sound stage, and the new arrangement did not permit them to dig up the floor. So the elevator could no longer dip down, and the ladder to the left of it no longer had an opening you could climb down into. Now, to show someone coming up from the lower deck, they implied a third way down, a supposed staircase that was just out view behind the wall with the ladder on it. It made no architectural sense, but they did what they had to do.
I recall in some of the pre-TMP novels there is mention of an emergency ladder to the left (from Kirk’s chair’s POV) Of The viewscreen that can be accessed via a hatch.
They must have taken that idea from the Franz Joseph
Blueprints (1975) and
Technical Manual. Another case of TOS fiction using the FJ
Blueprints was in a short story called "Surprise!", in
Star Trek: The New Voyages (not a bad book, btw).The story refers to a little nook in the corridor between Kirk and Spock's cabins. The nook gets closed off with a snap-in wall panel that turns it into a private space between their quarters, so they can keep a chess game going in there. And then Kirk is getting out the shower and Uhura walks in, but the point is, the writer was working directly from the published blueprints.
