Resistance Is Futile—Or, at the Very Least, Unnecessary

First published May 4, 2004

By C. W. Oberleitner

On his recent trip to Las Vegas, C. W. Oberleitner spent a few hours in the 24th Century at "Star Trek: the Experience" in the Las Vegas Hilton. Here's Chuck's interstellar report on Las Vegas' most futuristic attraction.

In the spirit of full disclosure I should tell you that we, my partner and I, own two vehicles, both registered in California. The license plate on the first is an abbreviation of Vulcan Science Academy and the second is the name of one of the planet Vulcan's most renowned ambassador and father of Mr. Spock, Star Fleet's most famous science officer.

Hi, my name is Chuck and I'm a Trekkie or Trekker. Take your pick. (Pause to wait for world-wide-web to respond, "Hi Chuck.")

Yes I admit it. I'm a pop culture, film and TV franchise junkie. As a wee lad I struggled to turn the channel knob on our giant B&W Westinghouse television to tune in the original Mickey Mouse Club. I would watch the show daily with my faithful puppy Honey asleep in my lap. Year's later as a teenager, on Thursday nights, I would beg my grandfather, who had purchased the family's first four hundred pound RCA COLOR TV—the kind with the round picture tube—to rotate the antenna toward Pittsburg and tune in the NBC station in time for the original Star Trek TV series.

The Final Frontier

If sometime in the near future you find yourself in Southern California and think it might be nice to bop on up to Las Vegas for a couple of days let me offer you one piece of advice. Don't give the slightest consideration to the idea of driving.

Yes, Interstate 15 connects Los Angeles and all of Southern California with Las Vegas. Yes, it's a relatively short trip well under three hundred miles depending on your starting point. And, yes, the freeway does take you through some breath taking desert scenery.

All of that having been said, Las Vegas has become such a popular get-away among So Cal's nearly twenty million residents that Caltrans—the California State Department of Transportation—can't widen the freeway fast enough to accommodate all the traffic to and from Nevada's world famous Sin City. With the possible exception of the hours between midnight and four AM, there just is no good time to make this drive.

I should know, on a recent three-day visit to Southern Nevada's world famous desert oasis I decided to save a few dollars on airfare by driving. It's a two hundred mile, four hour bumper to bumper commute. As one LA Public Radio commentator recently said, "It's like Las Vegas has become LA's newest suburb."

Once there, traffic-wise, Las Vegas, especially along The Strip home to most of the city's world famous casinos and resorts, is every bit as congested as Los Angeles. Unless you really know your way around, driving can rob you of your leisure time faster than a slot machine can suck up your last quarter.

Day one of our trip was spent battling both freeway and local traffic just to get to our destination and then head out for dinner. By the morning of day two I was ready for something more diverting. I decided that battling Klingons and The BORG was far more preferable than piloting my personal shuttle craft up and down Las Vegas Boulevard with a few thousand of my fellow carbon based units. We head out for Star Trek the Experience at the Las Vegas Hilton.

Live Long and Prosper

One of the last old school hotels and casinos, the Las Vegas Hilton started life as the International Hotel in 1969. At the far north end of, and a couple of blocks off, The Strip in an effort to attract guests the International signed an exclusive entertainment deal with Elvis Presley. The deal included Elvis' own permanent luxury suite.

In 1971, the hotel played the part of Billionaire recluse—think Howard Hughes—Willard White's flagship hotel The White House in the seventh outing of the James Bond franchise Diamonds Are Forever. This was also Sean Connery's last, and some say worst, performance, for MGM, as British super, secret agent 007.

Like most of the rest of Las Vegas, the Hilton, began responding to what it saw as a threat to Southern Nevada's near monopoly on casino style gambling when Atlantic City, New Jersey, legalized gambling in 1976. Hilton Hotels began acquiring a series of Las Vegas landmark hotels including the Flamingo and Bally's. Near the end of the 90s, Hilton spun off its gaming division to Park Place Entertainment Corporation. Park Place Entertainment continued the move toward mega resort consolidation. January of this year Park Place Entertainment changed its name to Caesars Entertainment and joined the Las Vegas Hilton with the Flamingo, Bally's Caesars Palace and the Paris Hotel Resort and Casino.

In 1996, the Las Vegas Hilton, along with many of the city's mega-resorts, participated in the then popular trend of adding non-gaming attractions. On January 24, of that year, ground was broken on Star Trek the Experience. A joint venture with Paramount Parks and Landmark Entertainment, Star Trek the Experience opened the doors on a futuristic journey through the mythology of Gene Roddenberry's famous creation two years later on January 4, 1998.

We beamed down to the entrance of Star Trek the Experience on star date 04:17:04:10:32:00. Which is my way of saying that despite the fact that I'm a confirmed Trekkie, who lives less than fuel pod's drive from the gates to the 24th Century, it has taken me more than six years to experience The Experience for myself. What can I say, ever since moving to Southern California in 1995 I've been making up for a lifetime of not having been able to visit Disneyland. Forgive me Gene.

To Boldly Go

Las Vegas is a city full of a wide variety of attractions designed to appeal to just about every demographic and budget. In other words, the quality of attractions throughout the city range from the sublimely detailed, like the exquisite Monet Gardens in the Bellagio, to the downright slapdash and schlocky. Thanks to Paramount Studios' and Landmark Entertainment's attention to detail and quality of workmanship Star Trek the Experience, even after six years of steady use, is truly a stellar attraction.

The operative word in the name of this attraction is experience. STE is far more than just its two interactive multimedia shows. The STE portion of the mammoth Las Vegas Hilton complex includes the two aforementioned theatres, a gift shop, restaurant, and bar all housed in an amazing recreation, lovingly crafted and themed down to the last detail, of the Promenade deck from the Deep Space Nine space station from the Star Trek series of the same name. But that's getting ahead of things.

As you approach the main entrance to STE the first thing you're greeted by is the soaring expanse of the entryway, canopied by a starfield, which is populated with giant replicas of some Trek's most famous starships. The expanse is filled with the sights and sounds from more than thirty-five years of Star Trek films and television series emanating from a series of view screens located around the elliptical entry hall.

Once you've booked passage for your journey you enter a queue brilliantly themed as The History of the Future Museum showcasing man's relentless desire to explore the unknown. As you ascend the walkway to the entrance for Kingon Encounter and BORG Invasion 4d you're accompanied along the way by an illuminated timeline of events in both human and Trek exploration. From the exact birth dates of major characters to the somewhat convoluted reconciliation of inconsistencies between the story lines of the various films and television series every major event in Trek lore can be found at its appropriate place in the future.

The Trek timeline occupies the low wall overlooking the expanse of the main entry hall. The opposite wall showcases over 200 props and costumes from four Star Trek television series, including the current Star Trek Enterprise, and nine Star Trek films. Here you can get a close up look at the various forms and configurations tricorders and phasers have taken during Star Trek's nearly three-century storyline.

Strolling through these exhibits was like taking a walk down memory lane with some very dear old friends. In The History of the Future Museum I was able to spend time with the photon torpedo shell that carried Spock's lifeless body to the surface of the Genesis planet in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn. I marveled over the ingenuity and primitive quality of the vacuum tubes and copper wires used to create the mid twentieth century version of a Mnemonic Memory Circuit used in The City on the Edge of Forever from the original Star Trek series. And, as a devout Mac-fanatic—as well as being a Disney Dweeb and Trekkie—I got a laugh when I ran across the Mac Plus used by Mr. Scott to "invent" transparent aluminum in 1986's Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.

Scotty to Mac Plus: Computer. Computer?
[Dr. McCoy hands him the mouse.]
Scotty to mouse: Hello, computer.
20th Century Dr. Nichols: Just use the keyboard.
Scotty: Keyboard. How quaint.

A few weeks back fellow JHM columnist Joseph L. Kleinman offered a review of Klingon Encounter and BORG Invasion 4D. While I don't entirely share his overall assessment of the two multimedia motion theatre rides his review will give you a good idea of what to expect during these portions of your visit to the experience.

Themed attraction exits located directly in the path of gift shops became standard operating procedure in the late twentieth century. Judging by STE they still appear to be thriving in the twenty-fourth century. The nice thing about this gift shop is its location at the start of a wonderfully crafted recreation of the Promenade deck of space station Deep Space Nine.

Following the curved outline of DS9 you move past the gift and collector's shops to an impressively faithful reproduction of Quark's bar from the DS9 television series. It's called, amazingly enough, Quark's Bar and Restaurant. In the Cardassian themed restaurant, located beneath the domed starfield, you can dine on such Trek delicacies as The Holy Rings of Betazed, Isolinear Chips and Dip and that Ferengi favorite OO-MOX.

Don't let the names fool you. The food here is very good, the service is excellent and the staff is knowledgeable enough about Trek lore to take on even the most die-hard Trekkie in a trivia challenge. I had the Cardassian Pockets, which were great, and a side of Star Trek Nemesis playing on the view screen opposite my table.

Captain's Log

There are a few things I agree with Joseph Kleinman on about the filmed attraction portions of STE. For one thing, the theatre used for BORG Invasion 4D is way too much like a theatre and far too little like what one imagines the interior of a shuttlecraft to be. And, I agree that even though they may not be necessary, seat belts would have gone along way in aiding the suspension of disbelief and in support of the storyline.

These are only minor tribbles, er, quibbles. STE does an amazing job of doing what themed entertainment does best. It completely removed me from my surroundings and isolated me in a universe of its own making. Gone were all the sights and sounds one associates with Las Vegas and cavernous casinos. I could have been anywhere on earth, or in this case, anywhere in the galaxy.

After reading this you may have the impression that STE is just for Trekkies and Trekkers. Not so. During my nearly four hour stay inside the world of Star Trek I was amazed at the number of people, who had little more than a casual knowledge of the whole Star Trek phenomenon, wandering the corridors of The History of the Future Museum asking questions and having their pictures taken with strolling BORG and Andorians.

I was impressed by a man in his mid twenties who spent a great deal of time taking in every detail of The History of the Future Timeline. He told me that he'd, "never gotten into Star Trek."

"My dad always loved it." He said. "We'd always talk about it but I just didn't know as much about it as he did." He went on to say. "Now I can talk to him about it and really know what I'm talkin about."

Upon returning to our world I began doing the background research for this story. I discovered that Caesars Entertainment has put the Las Vegas Hilton up for sale. The sale is expected to conclude by June 2004. To quote Dr. "Bones" McCoy, "There is nothing so constant, in the Universe, as change."

C'ya real soon!