The episode involves a space disease. I find the following item hard to believe, but it’s from Mem Alpha:

An early press release misspelled the disease as “xenopallasathemia”. Fan writer Ruth Berman picked up on the gaffe and reported it to Devra Langsam’s zine Spockanalia, adding “Talk about too much of a god thing.”

Because of “pallas” being in the middle of the space disease’s name. I don’t normally go for nerdy bad puns, but this case is so extreme that it commands respect. (Side note: Kind of odd that the script would impose such a tongue twister on the cast.) 

By now Star Trek had sets, props and footage it could cannibalize. MemAlpha notes:

 The Book of the People is the same as Chicago Mobs of the Twenties in “A Piece of the Action“.

The metal helical staircase is recycled from “The Empath“.

The scenes showing Yonada are reused footage of the asteroid from “The Paradise Syndrome“, and the curved staircase in the control room at the end of this episode seems to be the same one used inside the Obelisk in that same episode.

Lousy script.  “Hollow” is another lousy show, again because of script. Space disease hits reg from nowhere; there’s a space tribe bossed by a computer; the head gal falls in love w/ regular for no apparent reason; Kirk and Spock are captured, then let go, so what; the regular decides he’ll stay w/ gal and die from his disease, but then he doesn’t have to because the tribe’s memory banks have advanced alien knowledge; regular winds up back on bridge w/ rest, gal stays w/ tribe, but I forget how we reach this point.

Just a fucking stinker of a turd of a dead plot, and the regular who gets the terminal disease/alien gal is McCoy. Of all old Star Trek’s first-line cast, DeForest Kelley had the least to keep him afloat. He was likable, which counts, but there wasn’t much he could pull off as an actor. I think James Doohan was a good deal better. In season three he was getting enough business to count as number 3½ of the big three, but too bad he wasn’t higher up. Would have helped if he’d been the lead for this ep, which Mem Alpha says was the case in the story’s early stages.

McCoy’s eyebrow.  McCoy and the alien priestess have their first clinch. The camera tracks in slightly on McCoy – and DeForest Kelley raises one eyebrow. It’s like Dave Thomas doing an impression of McCoy registering consternation.

Also, when the show wants to remind us of McCoy’s fatal illness, he coughs. It’s like Chopin in a biopic. And there’s a lot of standing around and talking, though that’s the case even with decent old Trek. Couldn’t the writers/directors use the hack’s trick of giving the actors something to do with their hands? Even that would have helped.

The episode is a planet show, big on sets and costumes, about a dozen extras running about in various configurations. Theiss went crazy with the costumes, as he tended to when a whole bunch of aliens had to be got up. Wish I could show some, but Mem Alpha and Google aren’t helping me on this one.

Alien priestess.  The love interest, b. 1938, London. Didn’t really hear an accent. She was Patrick Macnee’s wife when the episode was shot. Wiki says she had parts in “Z-Cars, The Avengers, Danger Man, Mission: Impossible, Mannix, Days of our Lives, and Eight is Enough. She retired from acting in the late 1970s.” Married Eddie Albert’s son in 1978, when she was 40 or so and he was 28. IMDB lists 53 screen acting jobs, first was in 1960 (ep titled “A Girl for George” on Inside Story), last was in 1979 (two eps of Eight Is Enough as “Ms. Chovick”). Around time of “Hollow” she had eps of The Spies, Mission: Impossible, and The Outsider, and a role in something called The Greatest Mother of Them All. 

The cruelty of the system, or what?.  My theory is that tv science fiction was a tough thing for old character actors back in the 1960s. They wanted to keep working, but they had no idea how strange tv sf’s demands might be, or how awful the results were when the production crew didn’t hit the mark.

Below, I think this is a bad way for someone to wind up — at least per my theory. Maybe the actor (b. 1906 in Canton, Ohio; orig name Jon Lormier, stage name Jon Lormer) himself didn’t care. But the progression looks sad. Star Trek upped its demands on him until there he was, 62 years old and … Christ.

That runs from “The Cage” (first pilot) to a stand-by alien in “Return of the Archons” to the wig shot, which is from the actor’s brief but big scene in “Hollow.” He staggers up to the Trek men like an apparition and gives them a quavering, old-soothsayer speech that includes the episode’s title phrase; then he falls over and dies. This is by far the most that Trek ever gave the actor to do, but he had to put on that robe and that wig.

On the other hand, check out these credits:

 “Judge Chester on the prime time soap opera Peyton Place (1964-69 …), and guest appearances on Thriller (1960, hosted by Boris Karloff), The Untouchables (1962 …), Family Affair (1970 …), Barney Miller (1976 …), Mission: Impossible … and The Twilight Zone (1960-1963 …). He also made repeated appearances on Perry Mason (often as a coroner) from 1959 through 1963 …

He also had roles in the 1978 TV miniseries Arthur Hailey’s the Moneychangers …  and Loose Change …

His many feature film credits include The Comancheros (1961 …), The Singing Nun (1966 …), Dimension 5 (1966 …), Doctors’ Wives (1971 …), Rooster Cogburn (1975 …), and George A. Romero’s Creepshow (1982 …).

IMDB lists 147 screen acting jobs, starting with an ep of Nash Airflyte Theater in 1950 (great series title, of course), ending with a movie called Beyond the Next Mountain in 1987. Around the time of “Hollow,” he was doing eps of Batman, Lancer, Run for Your Life, The Big Valley, The Outcasts, The Guns of Will Sonnett, Mission: Impossible, and The Wild Wild West, not to mention the role of “Chaplain” in a movie called If He Hollers, Let Him Go. So I doubt that he was desperate to get a part. Maybe being a working-pro actor just requires a certain degree of not getting too fussed about a wig for one role.

… Gunsmoke had an episode called “Jailbait Janet” in 1960.

First admiral. Wiki says this man (b. 1911, Chicago) played the first admiral to show up in a Star Trek episode, namely “Amok Time.” Here he is again, in “Hollow.”

Played Nimitz in Baa Baa Black Sheep and admirals in the 2 Herman Wouk miniseries about World War II, Winds of War and Winds of Remembrance.

Did theater during his own WWII service, started in tv/movies in late 1950s, finally retired in 1991, had “amassed some 200 appearances in a career spanning … 35 years.” Seven times as a judge on Perry Mason, 1960-66. Tons of ’60s/’70s tv work, even ’80s: Untouchables, Twilight Zone, Rawhide, The Invaders, Get Smart, I Dream of Jeannie, Wild Wild West, Waltons, Kolchak,  Rockford Files, Fantasy Island, Quincy, on and on. Mem Alpha says:

On film, Morrow made appearances in the English version of 1962’s King Kong vs. Godzilla, the 1963 dramedy Captain Newman, M.D. …, Gore Vidal’s The Best Man (1964), Disney’s The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (1969 …), the war drama Johnny Got His Gun (1971 …), and Elia Kazan’s 1976 drama The Last Tycoon …), among others. Morrow went uncredited in nearly all of these films; however, one film he did receive credit for was the 1970 science fiction classic Colossus: The Forbin Project, directed by Joseph Sargent.

Not a really bad show, I think, though it’s one of my missing four and I can’t watch it again to make sure. As I remember, the episode’s effects were pretty good and I liked the space suits the guys wore early on. I think Kirk has his suit all thru the scene he does as a phantom. (And I see from Mem Alpha that the episode got an Emmy for its special effects, so there you go.)

The episode’s gimmick is dimensions and passing between them; the script introduces a special term, “interspace.” The idea is fairly advanced s.f., like the ideas in “Empath” and “Is There in Truth No Beauty?” None of the ideas involved were breakthrus for the field, but they took some thought and explaining; they weren’t the sort of thing normally lobbed in front of tv audiences as s.f. at the time.

Yet the episodes aren’t good. “Tholian Web” may not suck as much as “Truth No Beauty,” but the show is still faulty work. There’s a lot of standing around for the characters, the dialogue spins its wheels, or so I remember.

“Pointy-eared Vulcan.”  The worst of it is Spock and McCoy. Because Kirk is in limbo, the two of them are thrown on each other. This brings out a serious recurring weakness in old Trek, because the Spock-McCoy relation never worked too well. It needed a light touch, and maybe not enough writing/acting skill was around to do the job. The two characters sound carping and snide; they seem to dislike each other and they’re petty about it. This is also the case during the first and second season—yes, there’s the occasional McCoy-Spock moment that works, but not a lot of them.

The faultiness of the relationship really comes thru when something big is at stake, as in this episode. (Another example: “Paradise Syndrome.”) The ship is in a crisis, the burden is on Spock, so what does McCoy do? He says nasty personal things about Spock’s judgment and motives. He kicks the guy when he’s down and he does it viciously. Then a little time goes by and he comes back and says how maybe Spock isn’t a monster after all. Well, damn.

Moment of truth.  If McCoy could say such nasty things to Spock, and believe such nasty things about him, how can we pretend we’re watching a warm, barbed, bantering relationship between two professionals who have their differences but still like and respect each other? That’s what we’re supposed to be looking at; the pretence runs all thru the old series. But the relationship is not there. Odd, because 1) writing such a relationship doesn’t seem like it would be so tough for tv pros, 2) character banter/schtick has been such a mainstay of the franchise from one incarnation to another, and 3) why would viewers sign on to such an emperor’s-new-clothes sort of situation?

Side-note: during his Spock-confrontation scenes, McCoy always seems ready to stroke out. DeForest Kelley was a likable actor, but he didn’t really do a high-performance job as McCoy. When he put his character into gear, made him active in a scene and not just a sounding board, he did it by acting like an overcafeeinated man who’s confronting the fellow in the next cubicle about clicking his pen. Reasoning with Kirk, defying a space computer, bantering with Spock—he always gets ferocious real fast. (Did he ever do that shit back during his Westerns? In those days he had mainly villain parts, and I thought those guys played it cool in Western films.) 

Space helmets.  McCoy makes himself useful here by showing one of the “environmental suits” worn in the episode. I like these. They’re more like what you’d see in 2001, and as a kid that gave me the sense of a crossover. Mem Alpha says: “These suits were designed by William Ware Theiss and consisted of silver lamé with a fabric helmet with screen mesh visor. This allowed the actors to breathe easier while wearing the suit.”

 Also Mem Alpha:

This is one of the few episodes in which all of the regular second and third-season characters—Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scott, Sulu, Uhura, Chekov, and Chapel—appear.

In the scenes in which Captain Kirk’s head is partially obscured by his spacesuit, William Shatner does not wear his frontal hairpiece.

The ship’s chapel, which had previously appeared in “Balance of Terror“, was a redress of the transporter room.

The Exo III graphic from “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” reappears in the sickbay of the Defiant.

Utility man. Paul Baxley, b. 1923, Wyoming. He had six Trek appearance, including as a native in “Private Little War” (wig) and the captain of the ghost ship Defiant:

Mainly he was a stunt man. IMDB gives him 85 stunt credits, 41 acting credits, plus he directed a half dozen tv eps and worked as 2^nd unit director or assistant director a dozen times. Stunt credits start in 1947 (Deep Valley), end in 2000 (Dukes of Hazzard: Hazzard in Hollywood, a tv movie). Acting credits start in 1948 (Whiplash), end in 1980 (In God We Tru$t).

Crazy redshirt.  Got up to director, had about a dozen credits as such from mid-80s thru early 90s.

Stunt work: 48 credits. Acting: 20. Both start in the mid-60s (with I, Spy), and the stunt work is going strong in the late 90s, after his directing career. His Trek credit came after stunt/acting credits for eps of I, Spy, Man from U.N.C.L.E., Girl from U.N.C.L.E., and after Trek his next stunt/acting jobs were both for Mission: Impossible.

During the 70s he also worked as a gym teacher at Sutter Junior High in Canoga Park, Calif., though he was doing tv work too.

A clunker. The writing sucks. Everything is pinned to nothing—the story is all gimme. The idea is that every human everywhere is bound to go mad at the sight of the alien because that’s how ugly the alien is, and the dope who comes along with Diana Muldaur is bound to flip out and go homicidal with jealousy because that’s how much he loves her. And then he sees the alien and flips out extra and sends the Enterprise into someplace beyond the universe (what?) because he designed the Enterprise so this means he knows how to find the coordinates for, uh, for that place there

“He’s dead, Jim.” So far this is the only episode where I’m sure I heard the line spoken as precisely those three words, the classic formulation. McCoy says them right after the dope falls frothing to the ground. Maybe there’s a correlation between moments of extreme stupidity and the appearance of belovedly dopey lines of dialogue in their best-known forms. Maybe not.

Nimoy gets written up in a big way. He has a scene where he gets to grin and act hail-fellow-well-met, to laugh with a rich appreciation of life’s variety, because Spock has mindmelded with the alien (the alien has a great personality). Then Nimoy gets a mad scene because Spock de-mindmelds with the alien and forgets to bring along his protective visors that hold back the alien’s full ugliness. He left them on Sulu’s desk, the helm. Sulu sees them, gasps, snatches them up—“Mr. Spock …!” Too late. 

Dumb lights. The alien’s ugliness is represented by a light show: light pours out of the metal box where the alien is held, and then the screen gets trippy with the strobodelic light sequences old Trek falls into. Well, of course you’re not going to see the alien itself. But why a light show?

My theory: The light shows is like the big sparks that superhero artists draw around a guy’s fist when he’s knocking down a wall or punching the Hulk—impact balloons, or whatever they’re called. The strobodelics and the light pouring from the box aren’t themselves ugly, but they represent the impact of the alien’s ugliness. Which is a hamhanded device, sort of like going for all caps and rows of asterisks to indicate how awful the monster is. Then the show takes the mistake further, starts to live inside the mistake. The show treats the ugliness as if it were composed of light, so that putting on visors can protect against the ugliness. The visors reduce the amount of ugliness that gets thru, the way sunglasses hold back a percentage of UV rays. I guess if an alien was overwhelmingly generous or winsome, that would be a light show too and people would be wearing visors so they didn’t get dazzled.

The trippy light shows of old Star Trek … do those ever show up in the movies or Next Gen or the other successor series? Fan love has preserved so much from old Trek, but I get the feeling the strobodelics have been left buried back in the ’60s.

Plug for IDIC.  Roddenberry insisted on writing in the IDIC, an alien Vulcan brooch, because he was selling them thru his mail-order company. In order to justify the fuss made over the IDIC the script has to give Diana Muldaur an especially acute attack of nervous bitchiness.

About the mindmeld … Spock has to tell Kirk what it is. “Explain,” Kirk says, like it was a new idea.

Diana Muldaur. I like her, I think she does a better job than most of the show’s guest actresses. Her other episode was “Return to Tomorrow,” and she was a reg for Next Gen’s second season.

She was b. 1938, NYC, started her career in 1964 with an ep of Du Pont Show of Week, in 1965 became a reg on The Secret Storm, a soap opera, then five eps of Dr. Kildare, which was primetime and big. A reg on a new series in 1969, but it got canceled after 15 episodes. After that she was a reg on McCloud, the Dennis Weaver vehicle where he was a big-city cowboy who solved crimes. A lot of other roles, including ’70s movies and tv guest shots. In her fifties she really hit it big on L.A. Law, and after that she said the hell with it.

A neat quote: “I find so much tv depressing, even the sitcoms.” But I think she meant acting on the shows, not watching them, and had in mind co-worker relations on set.

Brown sash.  Okay, here’s the dope, b. 1926 in Kent, England. I like the costume Theiss did for him, the way it fronts a jumpsuit with a stylized sash and pocket, and the way light brown predominates, so the thing is businesslike but somehow festive.

Wiki says, “He appeared in guest roles on American television from the late 1950s through the 1970s. His career peaked in the 1960s with frequent roles on such popular series as The F.B.I., Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C., Star Trek and The Outer Limits. He played Sergent Tibbs the cat in One Hundred and One Dalmatians.” He was not good in his Trek episode. In fact he shows that Shatner’s hamminess was not so unusual by tv standards of the day, except for the energy and commitment that Shatner gave his hamminess. IMDB lists 45 screen acting jobs, first is “Leftenant” in show Navy Log (1957), last is “Man” in film Ant (2002). Around time of “No Beauty” he was doing eps of Beverly Hilbillies, 12 O’Clock High (3 eps, different roles), The F.B.I. (eventually 5 eps, different characters).

Paskey’s last show.  Eddie Paskey’s last appearance (56 eps as redshirt Mr. Leslie). His back got injured in the fight with Spock, which is hard to believe. As shot, the fight involved a minimum of physical contact, just a lot of camera spinning and fisheye lens. The immediate prelude to the fight is a fisheye-lensed Shatner with hands held out, telling the crazy Spock that he’s safe—it’s quite a vision. Anyway, Paskey said the hell with it and found better things to do.

Talked about him here, and his IMDB list is here. He did some Mission: Impossible in 1966. Wiki says he was born in a Delaware farm town in 1939, moved to Santa Monica at age 12 or 13, worked in his dad’s garage.