The embarrassment didn’t mean that Alley hated being there. Far from it. She enjoyed meeting her co-stars and acting across such an outsize personality as William Shatner. But acting with such pros highlighted how ill-prepared Alley was for performing professionally. In her own words:

“Well, I loved it. Bill is a mixed bag of tricks, which is funny. I think he thought at one point, ‘Why the hell did they hire this girl, who’s never done anything?’ I wasn’t so good at my lines, I will tell you. The repercussion for me never having acted before was that I wasn’t the world’s best at learning lines. And I was sort of irresponsible. I mean, if you want to know the honest truth, I would go out every night and celebrate that I got a job in a movie. So I would stay out too late, and then I would come in, let’s call it ‘unprepared.’ That might be a polite way to say it.”

While one can relate to Alley’s impulse to have a celebratory cocktail every night (she landed a gig on “Star Trek” after all), it certainly wasn’t a wise course of action for an actor who is playing a pretty large role in a major Hollywood production. Saavik was more than a mere supporting player, and Alley had many, many scenes. She learned the hard way that a time had to come to put down the cocktail shaker and actually delve into the script.