It helps a lot that your self-worth doesn’t hinge on whether other people share your taste in entertainment. Shame others don’t choose to profit by your example…
Yeah, every commander needs
some kind of office, and when I walked into the TNG ready room, I have to admit I felt a thrill, as even by then a lot of great scenes had happened there. Not as big a thrill as when I stepped through the next door onto the bridge, though…
As for TOS, I’ve come to believe lately that if I had my druthers, I’d completely scrap
the exposition room the briefing room on TOS. There’s gotta be a better way to weave that stuff into a story than having everybody sit around a table and yak about it.
Jimmy Smits once gave me a tour of the LA Law sets on the Fox lot, and when we got to the conference room, he was very clear that everybody hated shooting those scenes, because they took forever to cover. All those characters around a table, and you have to shoot coverage of everybody, and every time the camera turns around to cover someone else it’s a re-light. I feel like it’s a metaphor for what those scenes do to the story—let’s all stop moving forward and just make long speeches
while sitting still.
It gets so tedious, desperate hack writers do all sorts of cornball crap to try to liven it up, like have Pike cook an omelette and have Spock wash dishes in a desperate attempt to distract from the fact that we’re basically reading a grocery list on camera.