Indeed.
Observations on Janice Lester's isolation room
- Thread starter Just a Bill
- Start date
Indeed it's quite an odd piece of scene framing and a limitation of the set design.My favorite ladder conundrum is trying to reconcile the bottom and top halves of the EMM ladder in Mirror, Mirror:
Either McCoy walked unhindered right through main engineering to approach the guard he incapacitates, and the techs working therein witnessed the crime ... or for some reason the EMM access is a two-story climb from the deck below engineering.
Speaking of the EMM, at the other end of the room there is another potential access point that is not shown on screen. My belief is that Stage 9 had a staircase or lift platform available to use on that end for any non-ladder-climbers. We see Doohan and Kelley both using the ladder in MM, but Mira Romaine does no climbing in Zetar... so perhaps that's how Jan Shutan accessed this set. It also seems unlikely that Scotty would have carried Mira down the ladder after her debilitating episode there, so I might even speculate that there's another exit point in-universe as well. (Or, they just beamed her out. Intra-ship transport was rare in those days, but not impossible.)
Assuming that you take the visuals more or less literally, it could be a straight 2-storey climb (for some reason). However, if so that design choice is doubled down on and made weirder in By Any Other Name where Scotty & Spock climb down from the EMM and seem to immediately exit into a full corridor with a turbolift at the end of it - implying that there's no machinery of any sort under main engineering???
The best solution I've seen to this weirdness is in a thread from a few years ago, when @blssdwlf proposed a 2-ladder setup and service corridor which wrapped around the edge of the EMM.
Under this interpretation when in Mirror Mirror McCoy and Scotty knock out the guard and drag him offscreen, they are in fact moving him off to base of the second ladder instead, before ascending to the EMM themselves. This actually makes the kinapping more secure, since the sleeping guard won't be immediately visible to anyone who opens the corridor door and peeks inside.
In BAON we see Spock exiting the same door from MM and the ladder is visible, but that's not the one leading to EMM. Yes Scotty is seen climbing down off the ladder, but he was probably just putting his tools away
So just finished watching "By Any Other Name" and got some more views of the EMM.
There is a scene where we see Spock and Scotty climb down from the EMM and exit into a corridor which I'm going to guess is the one that runs perpendicular to the Engine Room entrance. However, the ladder I see in the EMM is on the right side which to me would eliminate it going to the corridor and instead go to perhaps the engine room itself. So, I added another ladder and a doorway to the corridor
Hopefully when I get down to the lower level there will be enough room for the deflector control station as seen in "The Enterprise Incident" and "Elaan of Troyius"
The EMM set was built about 6 feet off the ground, so it's entirely plausible that in-universe there were a few steps off to the side which lead up the next deck, perhaps an engineering maintainance room. On the MM Enterprise where security was tighter however, this might not have been an option.
On the filming set, short stairways where used to get actors onto raised areas of the stage. You can see them next to the Engine Room, on the top left of the JTB setplan. You will see that they are somewhat less steep than the ones in the Engine Room itself!
In 'Operation: Annihilate! there was the chamber that Spock was in for the extreme UV treatment. Then, there was this other chamber from 'The Lights of Zetar'.
Where were these chambers supposed to be located?
Where were these chambers supposed to be located?
The lab set in Operation Annihilate was a unique creation for that episode (although it reused the pressure chamber door from Space Seed) and doesn't seem to have been connected to the corridor. It might have been constructed in the same wild area as the Romulan Bridge, or maybe even on the adjacent soundstage entirely!In 'Operation: Annihilate! there was the chamber that Spock was in for the extreme UV treatment. Then, there was this other chamber from 'The Lights of Zetar'.
Where were these chambers supposed to be located?
Elements of the OA lab set were repurposed for the Sickbay Laboratory when it was contructed for Season Two.
As shown below, if the pressure chamber needed to be used for a story it would nesseciate the partial dismantling of the adjacent corridor - perhaps that's why it was not used until Lights Of Zetar?
I think your memory here is slightly fuzzy (as mine often is). As far as I recall, the only plot-relevant re-use of the Space Seed door was in Zetar. The one in OA looked more like the entrance to a meat freezer -- and even had thick 20th-century hinges!
Seeing new parts of the Enterprise was always a treat, but this was not their finest effort. I'm glad we only saw that chamber once. It's not too surprising that our memories would sometimes fill in this rough spot with an image of the thick, asymmetrical, glorious sliding door from SS/TLoZ.
As for location, I found a couple of background clues that they built this temporary chamber into McCoy's office: you can briefly see bits of the laboratory. It looks like they put up a temporary wall to Chapel's left in front of that little bench alcove, and the chamber itself is taking up the corner formed by the office door and the display shelf behind McCoy's desk. Now I understand why that chamber was the size of a toilet closet in an old camper.
Last edited:
The Making of Star Trek says that most of decks 2-3 were science labs, but all medical labs were adjacent to the sickbay complex on deck 7. This was not necessarily an exhaustive listing.
Similar threads
