Thursday Throwback: Take a tour of Deep Space Nine’s U.S.S. Enterprise set

Take of tour of the Enterprise through the eyes of Deep Space Nine

You didn’t read the headline wrong. We’re going back to the mid-90s where we get to see exactly how the design team on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine re-created the set of the U.S.S. Enterprise for their iconic episode “Trials and Tribble-ations” crossover episode.

For those who don’t remember, this was the episode where Captain Benjamin Sisko, Jadzia Dax, Julian Bashir, and Miles O’Brien go back in time to the events of the Original Series episode “Trouble with Tribbles”.

What made the episode so brilliant was how seamlessly all four Deep Space Nine characters were blended into perfectly with the crew of the original Star Trek series. They even worked the characters into existing scenes that if held up to one another, would be hard to identify which scene was from the Original Series and which scene was from Deep Space Nine.

Because of how important both episodes were to their respective shows, apparently Deep Space Nine designer Doug Drexler took Mike Okuda on a taped tour of their re-created U.S.S. Enterprise.

The Deep Space Nine recreation was certainly done with a lot of love

It’s very obvious that the creators of this re-design did so with a lot of love and appreciation for the original show. Drexler is almost gushing about how creative and forward-thinking the creators of the original show were, using trash and specific types of plastic to help bring the Enterprise out of the 1960s and into the future.

Even 30 years later (as this was filmed in 1996), Drexler puts over how original and futuristic it all is, calling the design choices timeless. Which they absolutely are.

The video is definitely very interesting to check out, as it was one of the few times that a show invested so much time and money into re-creating a set with the purpose of one-time use. It’s also very interesting to see where the crew, for lack of a better phrase, cut corners when re-creating the set, knowing that they’d be overlaying the scenes on top of the reshot scenes at some point.

Maybe one day we’ll dig up a video on how they actually did all that visual effect work and see if we can’t find out how they made it look so perfect.