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Observations on Janice Lester's isolation room

in this case the "changing room" would also have to share floorspace with the side corridor which runs alongside Kirk;s cabin in this episode.
Yup: the corridor that houses the agony booth. That's quite a busy little nook of the ship in the mirror universe.
 
Fair point, but that vertical column is still WAY bigger than how it ended up in the episode! :hugegrin:

  • The curved wall (with the recesed bookcase) first appeared in Kirk's closet in a deleted scene in The Corbormite Maneuvre.
  • Then it was due to appear in Charlie's cabin but never made it onscreen.
  • However, the same cabin configuration was used for Kolos in Conscience Of The King and the bookcase shelf is plainly visible (alone with the fancy sofa from Talos V!)
  • The bookcase shelf also appeared as a wall section of the brig, in The Changeling and Mirror Mirror.
Is the "window" wall panel in Charlie's room a single use item? I'm trying to place it elsewhere and nothing is coming, but they HAD to re-use stuff as generic as this:


They used Marplon's Absorption Chamber console in five episodes. I can't believe that distinctive piece of wall was never seen again.

Also, look at the shelf in these three frames:



It wraps around (it's that big?), so you can see it in the first image, but then you can't see it in the third one. Might just be the angle. Or were they cheating?
 
And almost certainly out-of-sequence. Just about the only television that's shot in-sequence is multi-camera, usually with an audience. And even that is often out-of-sequence, especially if multiple sets are involved.
According to the production report, the normal transporter scenes were filmed on the first day of filming on Monday 7/24/67. The transporter room (Mirror version), was the last set to be filmed the next day which apparently gave them enough time to redress the set as needed. Filming continued in the Mirror version of the transporter room and wrapped up the next day, Wednesday, 7/26/25.
 
It was only in Franz Joseph's blueprints that the engine room was asserted to be in the primary hull. TOS was always consistent that Engineering was "the lower levels." The Making of Star Trek also makes it clear that there are no engineering facilities on decks 7-8, only in the secondary hull. Doug Drexler's Constitution-class cutaway graphic from ENT: "In a Mirror, Darkly" confirms the position of Engineering in the secondary hull, directly under the nacelle pylons, with the triangular pipes being the bases of the power conduits extending into the pylons, and with the dilithium chambers on the engine room floor connecting to a horizontal intermix shaft running directly underneath it. (In my novel Forgotten History, I chose to interpret the "nacelle interior" seen in "One of Our Planets is Missing" as actually being this intermix shaft.)

I've always hated that Franz Joseph completely missed the point of the forced-perspective tubes and depicted them on the blueprints as actually being short and tapering like the real structure on the set, rather than being the much longer, straight tunnel that the designers intended it to represent. It's weird that he replicated that so literally while also depicting the corridors outside the engine room in a configuration that contradicted the actual set.
I get your point. FJ obviously got things wrong, but I’m always so impressed at what he did accomplish in the era before vhs, dvd, blue Ray, screen caps etc. He was the first, and he created the whole genre of doing “blueprints”. And his blueprints and technical manual were such huge parts of my youth…so I guess I tend to cut him a bit more slack.
 
Good point!
Although in this case the "changing room" would also have to share floorspace with the side corridor which runs alongside Kirk;s cabin in this episode.
RW3DLuV.png

RKyW1Ol.png

Perhaps the little table is for a security guard to monitor the side entrance? ;)

Another possibility is that the side corridor is pretty shallow and what we see from the outside angle is it (like the little alcove with the red grille behind it). That angle in the side corridor that is visible might be a narrow passageway around the side room but I kinda doubt there is any room for one.
 
Is the "window" wall panel in Charlie's room a single use item? I'm trying to place it elsewhere and nothing is coming, but they HAD to re-use stuff as generic as this:


They used Marplon's Absorption Chamber console in five episodes. I can't believe that distinctive piece of wall was never seen again.

Also, look at the shelf in these three frames:



It wraps around (it's that big?), so you can see it in the first image, but then you can't see it in the third one. Might just be the angle. Or were they cheating?
My vote is cheating. The shelf alcove definitely wasn't anywhere near that big!


Was not that the same screen that ended up between McCoys Lab and Office in the second and third season?
Quite possibly some of the structure was reused, although the grill section is different. As first glance it looks like a horizontal strip was simply applied:
Although this convenient closeup reveals that it's actually 2 rectangular grill sections stacked on top of each other!

Another possibility is that the side corridor is pretty shallow and what we see from the outside angle is it (like the little alcove with the red grille behind it). That angle in the side corridor that is visible might be a narrow passageway around the side room but I kinda doubt there is any room for one.
I've wondered the same thing but I just don't think there's the space. The "closet" side door in Kirk's cabin is only a couple of feet away from the corridor boundary as it is. Realistically the table and chair ought to be visible in the corridor screencap too!
 
I've wondered the same thing but I just don't think there's the space. The "closet" side door in Kirk's cabin is only a couple of feet away from the corridor boundary as it is. Realistically the table and chair ought to be visible in the corridor screencap too!

Add it to the list, along with the shuttle ceiling being higher inside than out, the TMP rec deck not fitting in the saucer, the TMP forced-perspective engine room corridor that would stretch beyond the deflector dish, and the Delta Flyer being too big to fit through Voyager's shuttle bay doors. (And don't get me started on Discovery's turbolift hammerspace.)
 
Yup: the corridor that houses the agony booth. That's quite a busy little nook of the ship in the mirror universe.

Yeah, I always get lost during the Kirk/Marlena scenes because my head is spinning from the fantastic Tantalus Field dialogue and the incredible censor-evading "oiling my traps, darling," but if you say for simplicity that Kirk walks north into his cabin (with the orange floor stripe to his right, or east), he enters, then looks east to see her on the bed. The Field panel is on the west wall southwest of the table, and then after that lengthy sequence, she later goes past the bed and into her changing room (trap oil chamber?) to the east, so the quarters should be basically three modules long. The second door seen from the outside corridor where Kirk enters (facing north-south) shouldn't be far enough east to be part of the changing room, so it looks to me like Marlena went out into the agony booth corridor to do the outfit change and other activities. That must have been interesting for the crew still cleaning up after Chekov.
 
the incredible censor-evading "oiling my traps, darling,"

I never realized that was what she was saying, but looking into it, I don't think it's intended as anything particularly racy, but is probably a hunting metaphor, a reference to keeping one's animal traps lubricated so they snap shut smoothly. She does refer later in the scene to going to another ship to "hunt fresh game." So she probably just means that changing into a sexy outfit for Kirk is her way of making herself more effective "bait," and polishing her rusty seduction skills.
 
My vote is cheating. The shelf alcove definitely wasn't anywhere near that big!
Agreed. They must have just rolled the bookshelf wall around to get the coverage they wanted for the takes, since the Brig is generally just open space on the left and the back.

this convenient closeup reveals that it's actually 2 rectangular grill sections stacked on top of each other!
A week or two ago, I was looking at TrekCore screenshots from the end of The Lights of Zetar, and this one confused me for a while:

QyMzxmY.jpeg


I didn't immediately recognize the wall configurations, and the "window" looked so much like a normal Earth window, what with its familiar framing and (apparent) venetian blinds, that for a few minutes I wondered if I was looking at temporary wild walls built right up to the usable perimeter of Stage 9, and getting a peek at an actual window on one of the office/wardrobe areas around that stage! I had to go pull up the video on paramount-minus to see that they were in fact walking from the lab to the exam room, and this was the same lattice of circles I've been seeing-but-not-seeing here and in the officer's quarters for years. Derp.
 
it looks to me like Marlena went out into the agony booth corridor to do the outfit change and other activities.
Agreed. Unless the Enterprise has TARDIS technology, you just cannot have Kirk's closet, the swing corridor, and the full rec room in existence all at the same time. I think you can pick any two of the three, although if you want the closet and the corridor simultaneously then it has to be the much shallower version of the closet we see in the deleted scene of Rand attending to Kirk's clothing. As you pointed out, Marlena's walk-in is much too deep to fit.

QounMK6.png


Even with a deep intrusion into the rec room off that little angled wall, I cannot figure out how to fit all three spaces at once, especially since the multipurpose room's anticlockwise wall ("west" in your examples) generally needs room for either a film crew or the viewscreen we saw in Space Seed and The Menagerie. (I guess it's not too surprising that we hardly ever saw Kirk's closet door in an open state; that space was pure cheat.)

Fortunately, in-universe, we don't have to figure out how to co-locate any of these things next to each other, or even on the same deck. Most directors did a good job of never implying what was right next to what. You'd think it would make sense for McCoy's quarters to be right across the hall from sickbay, for example, but if memory serves, The Man Trap did not require this to be the case. And although the multipurpose room pretty much always backs up to a ladder alcove (with or without red mesh), I don't think we were ever definitively shown whose quarters are just down the hall, or even whether the Transporter really was just across the straight corridor. There's pretty much always a camera cut and the implied passage of a little time when characters walk from one known destination to another.
 
Agreed. Unless the Enterprise has TARDIS technology, you just cannot have Kirk's closet, the swing corridor, and the full rec room in existence all at the same time. I think you can pick any two of the three, although if you want the closet and the corridor simultaneously then it has to be the much shallower version of the closet we see in the deleted scene of Rand attending to Kirk's clothing. As you pointed out, Marlena's walk-in is much too deep to fit.
Thankfully the Rec Room wasn't in that scene! I think you might have been a bit generous in your corridor spacing though - it's a weird shape and was more like this, I think:

8QavNsg.jpg


I still think cramming the corridor and book-case room into the same would have been impossible though! :devil:
 
Thankfully the Rec Room wasn't in that scene! I think you might have been a bit generous in your corridor spacing though - it's a weird shape and was more like this, I think:

8QavNsg.jpg


I still think cramming the corridor and book-case room into the same would have been impossible though! :devil:

There seems to be a bit of a curve on that wall behind Marlena. Maybe it fits like this? The gray line is the line of sight from the camera of what we cannot see. I left the same amount of room for a narrow passageway that is the same width as the ladder area behind the red grill.

qarCTgs.jpeg
 
There seems to be a bit of a curve on that wall behind Marlena. Maybe it fits like this? The gray line is the line of sight from the camera of what we cannot see. I left the same amount of room for a narrow passageway that is the same width as the ladder area behind the red grill.

qarCTgs.jpeg

Out-of-universe, yeah—I'm sure they just dressed up the Agony Booth Corridor to look like there was a wall there. Considering the other gymnastics that they did all the time, that would be child's play (like finding a needle in a haystack versus an out-of-control 24-foot shuttlecraft). And in fact Kirk and Spock do their terrific "Is that a threat?" walk-and-talk down some of the exact same real estate in what I think is Kirk's immediately preceding scene, but they made it look quite different.

In-universe, I like my explanation. It seems reasonable that Marlena was quite popular with the crew. Just kidding; obviously there's a closet there on Deck Five. Noooooo agony booth or Empire doodz observing Marlena and her traps.
 
There seems to be a bit of a curve on that wall behind Marlena. Maybe it fits like this?
Definitely; it's the curved "bookcase" wall from Pike's quarters in The Cage and the Brig in this same episode (MM). You seem to have it in just about the right spot. (I didn't mess with any of that in my diagram because I was depicting the Rand closet config rather than the Moreau one. But I should have explained myself better, and I'm glad you filled in the gap here.)
 
I don't think we were ever meant to take the corridor configurations as anything more than approximate representations of the underlying "reality," since they had to use a single corridor set to represent different corridors throughout the ship, including ones with different radii in the saucer that would have curved more or less sharply (which has bugged me my entire life, or at least ever since I gained a basic understanding of geometry), and ones in the engineering hull that wouldn't have curved at all. Even Franz Joseph acknowledged this when he departed from the sets' corridor layout outside the engine room (despite being strangely literal about the shape of the forced-perspective pipe "cathedral").

Still, in that case, it's odd that they opened up that temporary corridor next to the captain's cabin in the same episode that showed a side room extending into the corresponding space. It wouldn't have been hard to erect a wall panel there, as we've been discussing with the transporter alcove extension. Looking at the above photo, maybe they did it so that the Imperial emblem on the wall would be facing the camera more directly.
 
There seems to be a bit of a curve on that wall behind Marlena. Maybe it fits like this? The gray line is the line of sight from the camera of what we cannot see. I left the same amount of room for a narrow passageway that is the same width as the ladder area behind the red grill.

qarCTgs.jpeg
I do like that, but unfortunately MM also went out of its way to make the Marlena room even larger by including a table and chair, right where your wall goes! :mad:
wz4OEIk.png



I don't think we were ever meant to take the corridor configurations as anything more than approximate representations of the underlying "reality," since they had to use a single corridor set to represent different corridors throughout the ship, including ones with different radii in the saucer that would have curved more or less sharply (which has bugged me my entire life, or at least ever since I gained a basic understanding of geometry), and ones in the engineering hull that wouldn't have curved at all. Even Franz Joseph acknowledged this when he departed from the sets' corridor layout outside the engine room (despite being strangely literal about the shape of the forced-perspective pipe "cathedral").

Still, in that case, it's odd that they opened up that temporary corridor next to the captain's cabin in the same episode that showed a side room extending into the corresponding space. It wouldn't have been hard to erect a wall panel there, as we've been discussing with the transporter alcove extension. Looking at the above photo, maybe they did it so that the Imperial emblem on the wall would be facing the camera more directly.
The second season especially seemed especially obsessed with that new side corridor as it turned up a lot! Were the existing side corridors really not enough?
Still, it mostly worked and added more visual interest to certain scenes.
Less so for its appearances in Season Three because the Briefing Room carpet now extended further and every time that little side corridor turned up it now had a BLUE floor!!!
 
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