During the first season of Star Trek The Next Generation, there was never a full-time chief engineering officer for the Enterprise-D. Originally the producers thought that most of the action would take place on the bridge and would rarely go to other areas of the ship, including engineering. The bridge officers would call over the intercom to the other areas and have some voice actor say “Yes sir!” and so forth to save money on new sets. Gene Roddenberry disagreed with this idea and had a change made to the shooting script for the pilot episode “Encounter at Farpoint” to include a scene in engineering; otherwise no engineering set would have been built at all. That set the stage to bring in a new character to act as the chief engineer. Well, it didn’t quite work out as planned at first.