Does anyone notice that the office is ALWAYS empty. I mean every office scene has the same three people in it.....Mary, Marshall and Stan.....besides the obvious witness they're processing. Are there not any admin people, other Marshalls? Its a HUGE office too. Kind of annoying to me.

It's a continual conceit eh? The whole: no one works here but us! phenomenum (Grey's Anatomy drives me bonkers over this.) Really though, are they the only three working there? I don't know enough about the Marshal service to even guess. Though it sounds like Albequerque (sp?) is a witsec hot spot, so given their reputed case loads there's probably a few other emplolyees. Who just stagger their case loads so's there never in at the same time. Maybe even it's a security thing. They're never around for the same briefings, so they don't know nothing about other witnesses, you know?

Y'know, I was wondering that too.

My first thought is "new show, probably can't afford all the extras."

My fannish explanation is that lots of space and few employees preserves secrecy. But really, it makes sense there'd be a perpetually annoyed government admin in there somewhere, too - some sort of nemesis to Mary, or BFF, depending on how it's done.

Aha! A clue was forthcoming! When Stan was talking about their ongoing complaints about being understaffed. I think they're it. With the further knowledge that they really only babysit new witnesses for a few months/couple of years, the case load of a couple of dozen each makes probable sense.

As for the huge office, I'm going with one of two explanations right now: firstly, space isn't exactly at a premium in the desert, and that's just the office they wound up with. Secondly, it's just technically easier to film in larger spaces. There are more places you can move your actors and place your cameras, and people don't end up standing on top of each other in the corner. If I wasn't fairly sure that they were shooting everything on location, I'd be wondering if it was a soundstage.

They're definitely filming on location - the actress that plays Squish complained about Albaquerce (can't spell it yet, will!) in her interview. Which I hope a lot of 'querce natives don't take umbrage too. I still remember how made Canadians were when the X Files left Vancouver!

I certainly noticed the big, empty office and wondered about the lack of staff.

Could it be that since Mary/Marshall/Stan's office is the final destination on a Wit's relocation journey, a larger staff just isn't needed? That, by the time a Wit gets to them all the processing/coordinating staff-type work most likely would be already done?

Settling witnesses in, troubleshooting, and putting out fires caused by witnesses already in the program, (more so than actually doing the bread and butter/staff-intensive work of placing them in the program) seems to be what their office is all about.

After all, it is not a police precinct where you process folks by the busload 24/7.

As for the size of the space (if you are staying in character) the poster who stated that it is probably just the space (this being government) the Marshals ended up with, is odds-on, right on the money.

But, from a real-world view, I think the poster who said that it's perhaps easier to shoot in a larger space" got it right.

I was rewatching my favorite episode "Trojan Horst" and actually you can see a shadow of someone working in the office. That's when Stan, Marshall and Mary are in the conference room discussing the case and when the camera zoom in on Marshall you can see past his shoulders a shadow of someone in the office. That's the only and first time I can see someone else working in the office.

I'd noticed this too. To me it was especially noticeable in the Marshall mambo dancing scene. That scene you could actually see more of the office around them and there was nobody at all.

Other times I could think that they were just in tight on the characters at the heart of the scene and we just couldn't see what was going on around them. Sometimes too they've been in there in the middle of the night, but really I'd think we'd be able to see someone sometimes.

My guess was just that they couldn't afford to hire extras, or couldn't find ones in the area that suited their needs???

I also wondered why such a huge office if there really are only the 3 of them. To make the witnesses think there was a much larger operation going on in Albuquerque?

So.......Area 51 is actually located in Vancouver and not in the Nevada desert?

Most assuradly! This comes as news? Pretty much all extra-terrestrial activity has moved north of the border - stuff to the south is just to expensive to shoot. So they just load up the ol' sand buckets and hit the road

It doesn't seem that large to me. It is large enough for 2 desks (for Mary and Marshall), one executive office for Stan (which contains some file cabinets, presumably for items that need to be behind an additional locked door), a large conference room (which I'm guessing could be quite full from time to time), and a small blind observation room on the other side of the conference room. The door out of which Stan locked the FBI agent in "Stan by Me" appears to lead onto a small outdoor patio, which appears to share some lawn furniture with the building's exhaust fan (which can be seen outside the window by Mary's desk).

Given the valve behind Marshall's desk and the exhaust fan, I'm guessing this was at one time a storage and maintenance area which has since been converted to a secured location. It does not look like a particularly desirable location. Other than Stan's office being large (which is not all that unusual for executives who have an image to uphold), the space doesn't look all that large to me.

The one thing that confuses me is that sometimes the glass doors between the elevators and the office are closed and require a card key for entrance but most of the time they're standing wide open. I also notice that the glass to either side of the doors has wire embedded, presumably as a deterrent to entrance and possibly to communication snooping, but the doors themselves appear to be just normal glass. So is it a secured location or not?

Office looks more like some type of Industrial storage facility. In the Stan-by-me episode there is some type of compressed gas cylinder (like Helium) visable in the background. Why would that be in a US Marsal office? Does Stan do party ballons in his spare time????

Actually there are others that work there. Stan just keeps them all locked in a room, like the FBI agent he didn’t like.

Are you suggesting that Stan has a Kinky side and that he like to lock people up? I wish he could lock Brandi & Jinx up somewhere. Poor Mary needs a break from those two nut-jobbers!

Kinky? Not really what I was thinking of. Perhaps ornery? It cracked me up when he locked up that agent.

YES!!!

Talk about low budget. Hire a few people to walk around and make some nosie. I said the same thing the first time I saw the show.