The bottle show: How to make a cheap episode of Star Trek

!trekkies

Bottle Shows

Star Trek: (real Trek, pre-JJ Abrams) was never a high budget show. It was expected to make ~26 episodes/year. Coming up with that many scripts is hard enough, but coming up with that many that you can fit into the budget is even harder.

The first thing you cut is going out on location. Only a fraction of Star Trek episodes were actually filmed outdoors. It's a major pain in the butt bringing your whole crew out to some place like Vasquez Rocks and feeding and sheltering them. If it rains, you get no footage and you still have to pay everyone. Even excessive winds or clouds in the wrong place can ruin your day. And shooting on location too much is counterproductive as eventually the audience realizes every planet looks like Southern California.

Tillman Water Reclamation Works in Van Nuys. It was used numerous times on multiple shows because from the right angles it looks a little futuristic.

The logical solution is to go to the soundstage. Get some paper mache boulders, plastic plants, and sand and you've got yourself an alien planet. The atmosphere is whatever color of gel you put on the lights pointed up in the back. The weather is whatever you want it to be. And everything is right there on the Paramount set within easy walking distance. Heck, you can just step over to Cheers and grab a stool next to Fraiser if you feel like it. The sound stage gives you most of the feel of the starship going to an exotic location but without the risk of dealing with nature.

A shot from "Power Play" on Paramount Stage 16, known lovingly as Planet Heck by the crew. Wind and lightning effects were used to vivid effect but it was still quite an ordeal even on stage.

Even staying indoors can be expensive though. Every new set needs an enormous amount of labor. Beyond the carpenters and painters you need electricians to wire it. Lighting technicians go through the laborious process of getting all their lights in the right place, pointed the right way, with the right color and intensity. That has to be done custom for the stand ins who literally stand there on stage wearing the same costume and hair as the actors. Artificial weather effects can be almost as much of a pain in the butt as real weather. And you've got to get through this whole cycle and tear it down and be ready to start over in a week.

The bridge of the USS Enterprise-C in "Yesterday's Enterprise". This is originally the main bridge from the movies. It was redecorated as USS Reliant, the Enterprise-D battle bridge, and most Federation starships in TNG.

So an even cheaper, simpler, more reliable kind of episode is needed: The bottle show. It takes place within the "bottle" of the USS Enterprise itself. Instead of exploring strange new worlds, everything happens onboard the ship. You already have the Enterprise sets permanently set up. The crew has experience in every angle to shoot from. The extras in the background already have Starfleet uniform costumes made for them. If you want to really get cheap then skip bringing on an expensive guest star and have our cast deal with each other.

In "Disaster" it was enough to turn off a few lights and have our own characters talk to each other. DS9 could turn the entire station into Empok Nor just by turning down a dimmer switch.

You may think that a bottle show would hopelessly stifle the creativity of the writers, but they can turn out to be among the best. For example TNG's "The Defector", "Conundrum", and "Cause and Effect". Good writers can tell a fantastic story without even leaving the ship.

Star Trek TOS: "The Mark of Gideon"

TOS was in a precarious position by the third season. The actors could demand a bit more money as the audience grew to expect their characters but the network kept cutting the budget. The network had only agreed to a third season because of a massive letter writing campaign. This wasn't simply naive trekkies begging for more, they had a logical pitch: If there's just two seasons of Trek that's not enough to sell into syndication and it will be lost forever. If you make a third season you'll have 75 episodes, enough to show as reruns. So just make us one more season, even if it's not that good.

Roddenberry had burned out early on and mostly turned the show over to Gene Coon. But Coon's amphetamine-powered genius could only last so long and he had to step back too. Roddenberry had also managed to alienate half of the writers in Hollywood with his meddling rewrites. So the show was now run by people who were competent and well-meaning but didn't have.uch of a creative vision for the show and couldn't afford to. After an enormous amount was blown shooting on location for the forgettable "Paradise Syndrome" (Kirk bumps his heD and thinks he's Native American) there was a desperate need for bottle show scripts.

Sorry bros but our obelisk went overbudget.

"The Mark of Gideon" brings the bottle show concept to an audacious extreme. The bad guys trick Kirk into beaming down to... an empty exact replica of the USS Enterprise! In story there's a very shaky justification for why they would do this. Apparently they hope the comfortable surroundings will make him content in captivity. But the business reasons make perfect sense. They can reuse the Enterprise sets except without even paying for extras to walk the corridors. The only new set needed was a tiny alien conference room, which was probably just done by rolling a wall out in the existing Enterprise conference room and swapping out the chairs.

The story was pretty clumsy and most of the events just happen for no real reason. Like there's no reason for Kirk and the girl to meet unless the disease can only be sexually transmitted. And there's not really any indication that Kirk just jumped right in the sack with his uncooperative captor within a matter of a couple hours so that makes no sense either. So there's really no purpose for 80% of the scenes or the one relationship in the episode.

Kirk and the inevitable love interest sitting awkwardly on the steps on the bridge. They didn't even bother trying to get to his bedroom.

The high concept is a planet devastated by overpopulation that needs to infect itself with a plague taken from Kirk. From today's perspective as we face demographic collapse over most of the world, this may seem a bit silly, but midwits at the time were terrified of overpopulation. Earth had just experienced the most dramatic population explosion in its history and it seemed logical to assume that resources would run out at some point. By the late 1960s it was clear to experts that the birth rate in the third world had been dropping for years and agricultural productivity was exploding in the Green Revolution, but this hadn't filtered down to pop media yet. Paul Ehrlich published the popular doom prophecy The Population Bomb in 1968 claiming that hundreds of millions would die of starvation around the world in the 1970s. Of course there were no famines except for the man-made ones, so eventually the overpopulation lunacy morphed into veganism, "sustainability", /r/childfree, and general hippie shit.

Actual footage of Indians who have been waiting 50 years for genocidal maniac Ehrlich's predictions to occur.