All these years, and I keep finding things I never noticed before. As a kid watching Turnabout Intruder, I thought Kirk (in Janice Lester's body) was hospitalized in the sickbay Ward Room like everyone else over the three seasons, but today I finally noticed that in fact he was in his own single-bed, single-door isolation room (obviously needed by the plot, to make it hard for him to escape or even to easily access McCoy).
I'm certainly not the first to notice this; the late, great Greg Schnitzer mentioned it in 2011, and he also pointed out the on-screen signage identifying an "Astro-Medicine Isolation Ward" in that corridor.
One of my ongoing projects is a physical representation of the Desilu set, similar to the Matt Jefferies model, so I wanted to figure out where this room was located. I wondered if they redressed Sickbay with some false walls (the iso room is very cramped), or set it up somewhere else and built an additional biobed just for this. Then I remembered that the third biobed seen in Journey to Babel (needed for the final scene with Kirk, Spock, and Sarek all hospitalized) was "wild" (movable). Here it is shown in the Stage 9 studio set plan for Babel; all I've done is blank out some other plan details and colorize the wild bed module.
In Turnabout, we see that the yellow door of the isolation room is clearly the one immediately counter-clockwise of the teal doors into the officers' quarters set (colorized below). All the comings and goings of Kirk, Lester, and other characters are consistently to and from that door. What I wanted to know was whether the filming interior of that room was actually on the other side of that same door, or positioned somewhere else on one of the Desilu stages and spliced in with camera cuts. Building the isolation room in that area would seem to pose a conflict, as the Brig was also needed in that very same episode and it occupies most of the space behind that door:
However, I'm convinced this is exactly what they did. During interior scenes in that room, whenever someone goes in or out the door you can see across the hall to another yellow door, in the exact spot where the Laboratory's yellow door is; and you can tell that the corridor curvature matches as well.
At least three of the brig's rear walls are "wild" and thus easily removed, as indicated by the curved dash-dot lines on the set plan. It's hard to see here at this scale, but it's the last three wall segments in the roughly octagonal arrangement to the right of the BRIG callout. I believe that the next segment connected to these (the one by the desk and chair) was probably also wild, even though not marked as such, since this space was used as a multi-purpose area for plenty of episodes over the seasons. It's possible that the wall was originally built-in and was then made wild some time after Babel. Or, since Turnabout was the very last episode filmed (and the producers knew this during photography), perhaps they filmed the Brig scenes earlier in the filming week, and then tore down that "permanent" wall to quickly redress for the Isolation Room. In any case, the iso room is a very small and simple set, needing only the rolling bed/monitor/walls assembly, a few more plain wall segments, and a mirror on the wall; so it would not have been a difficult redress at all.
So... does it fit then? Yeah, if you knock down that fourth segment then the wild biobed module fits easily. Add a few blank walls, run a strip of foil tape to cover up the seam between that smallest dog-leg addition and the door frame panel, hang a mirror, and you're good to go. (Below I use red to show approximations of the added temporary walls.) Just make sure you've got all your Brig scenes in the can, so you don't have to re-re-dress that location back to normal for pickup shots in the brig. Then go home and have a good meltdown because today, January 9, 1969, even as you are still working with Bill Shatner and Sandra Smith to get those last scenes on Day 7 of filming, the Bridge and Transporter sets are already being struck forever.
I'm certainly not the first to notice this; the late, great Greg Schnitzer mentioned it in 2011, and he also pointed out the on-screen signage identifying an "Astro-Medicine Isolation Ward" in that corridor.
One of my ongoing projects is a physical representation of the Desilu set, similar to the Matt Jefferies model, so I wanted to figure out where this room was located. I wondered if they redressed Sickbay with some false walls (the iso room is very cramped), or set it up somewhere else and built an additional biobed just for this. Then I remembered that the third biobed seen in Journey to Babel (needed for the final scene with Kirk, Spock, and Sarek all hospitalized) was "wild" (movable). Here it is shown in the Stage 9 studio set plan for Babel; all I've done is blank out some other plan details and colorize the wild bed module.
In Turnabout, we see that the yellow door of the isolation room is clearly the one immediately counter-clockwise of the teal doors into the officers' quarters set (colorized below). All the comings and goings of Kirk, Lester, and other characters are consistently to and from that door. What I wanted to know was whether the filming interior of that room was actually on the other side of that same door, or positioned somewhere else on one of the Desilu stages and spliced in with camera cuts. Building the isolation room in that area would seem to pose a conflict, as the Brig was also needed in that very same episode and it occupies most of the space behind that door:
However, I'm convinced this is exactly what they did. During interior scenes in that room, whenever someone goes in or out the door you can see across the hall to another yellow door, in the exact spot where the Laboratory's yellow door is; and you can tell that the corridor curvature matches as well.
At least three of the brig's rear walls are "wild" and thus easily removed, as indicated by the curved dash-dot lines on the set plan. It's hard to see here at this scale, but it's the last three wall segments in the roughly octagonal arrangement to the right of the BRIG callout. I believe that the next segment connected to these (the one by the desk and chair) was probably also wild, even though not marked as such, since this space was used as a multi-purpose area for plenty of episodes over the seasons. It's possible that the wall was originally built-in and was then made wild some time after Babel. Or, since Turnabout was the very last episode filmed (and the producers knew this during photography), perhaps they filmed the Brig scenes earlier in the filming week, and then tore down that "permanent" wall to quickly redress for the Isolation Room. In any case, the iso room is a very small and simple set, needing only the rolling bed/monitor/walls assembly, a few more plain wall segments, and a mirror on the wall; so it would not have been a difficult redress at all.
So... does it fit then? Yeah, if you knock down that fourth segment then the wild biobed module fits easily. Add a few blank walls, run a strip of foil tape to cover up the seam between that smallest dog-leg addition and the door frame panel, hang a mirror, and you're good to go. (Below I use red to show approximations of the added temporary walls.) Just make sure you've got all your Brig scenes in the can, so you don't have to re-re-dress that location back to normal for pickup shots in the brig. Then go home and have a good meltdown because today, January 9, 1969, even as you are still working with Bill Shatner and Sandra Smith to get those last scenes on Day 7 of filming, the Bridge and Transporter sets are already being struck forever.
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