Give Me the Deep Space 9 Hotel You Absolute Hacks
A post on why now is the right time for a DS9-themed hotel experience.
I’m half way through the four hour Star Wars hotel video made by Jenny Nicholson, and good god is it a rollercoaster ride. As a man who physically struggles with cringeworthy moments, I am frequently writhing in pain from the content. Additionally, as a man with a healthy dislike of Star Wars products, I would sooner spend a week in a faithful recreation of the fucking Cube than pretend that I was a Star Wars character aboard HMS Baby Yoda for two days.
I can only imagine that my cynicism pales in comparison to that of the actors in the hotel, who are forced to watch as your average Star Wars fan repeatedly fails to solve a puzzle that wouldn’t challenge a juvenile fruit bat.
I’m glad it failed. I’m glad that the world’s tolerance for Star Wars slop isn’t so far gone that spending a month’s rent on a single day at an extremely mid hotel feels like a good idea to the majority of people. I’m glad that there is a depth that we won’t collectively plumb.
Perhaps I’m just the wrong audience.
At that ludicrous price point, my entire time would be spent mentally calculating what I could have bought had I not gone. The idea of spending that amount on-
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It wouldn’t happen. There’s not the public interest, Paramount doesn’t have the firepower of Disney, it just… couldn’t… you know…
Why the DS9 Hotel Makes Sense
Any “immersive experience” involving Star Wars is always going to have the same problem: Star Wars is an action-based universe with mythical heroes and villains, but your average Star Wars fan is as far away from being a heroic figure as they are from having decent taste in TV and film.
The first thing that they’d do if they actually had a lightsaber, would be to accidentally cut all their fingers off, then kill their dog.
The universe of Star Trek is, by comparison, significantly more grounded when it comes to individuals. Picard isn’t a significant character because he can lift rocks with his mind, but because he’s an excellent diplomat and sound negotiator. Starfleet isn’t a superhuman organisation made up of robed child-kidnappers, but a military-esque institution of normal-but-professional people.
Similarly, because Star Trek is principally a non-serialised TV series on a shoestring budget, all the alien races are just normal people with mostly minor cosmetic alterations. Rather than requiring seventeen hours of makeup time and world-renowned animatronics, you could have actors fall face-first onto a step and accidentally become Bajoran.
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The Star Wars hotel had attendees helping ICONIC characters like Choo Baka, or doing lightsaber training, or SMUGGLING. This is because the things happening on screen are only ever exceptional or in the vague ballpark of “cool”.
If you had them doing extremely mundane activities like cleaning the droids, they’d be furious when they finished without receiving a hidden message telling them they’re a very special boy and the galaxy needs their help. They might even think it “wasn’t Star Wars”, as though that was a bad thing.
By comparison, stuff a Trek fan in a Jefferies tube with a bleep-bloop tricorder and an O’Brian facsimile yelling at them for being off schedule, and they’d be booking another visit as soon as they got home. Hell, have them do actual hotel maintenance with the occasional inspirational message from Gul Dukat, and they’d never leave. The bar for what makes a “Star Trek activity” is so unbelievably low by comparison to Star Wars, that most hotel-goers would be thrilled if their role was just to get shot and fucking killed by a Klingon on the promenade.
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Your room for the night seem cramped and uncomfortable? That’s just the Cardassian style I’m afraid, not ones for luxury, ho ho. Oh, the food’s bad? Replicators must be on the fritz again, just be happy they’re not synthesising a virus that makes everyone forget English. Feeling ripped off by the prices at Quark’s? Buddy, we told you this was the authentic DS9 experience, and you’re getting it.
The Star Wars hotel had to contrive a reason for a room to have any natural light at all: “oh this room is to simulate the atmosphere of the planet we’re going to”. Nonsense.
My solution? The holodeck/holosuites, baby. A door that just leads straight back out onto the street: “The holosuites are currently running an accurate simulation of 21st century Swansea. Beware, the safeties are currently broken, and the natives are restless”.
In the instance that a drunken, confused Welshman comes through from the other side, it gets treated like a holodeck malfunction episode by the actors, and the attendees have to coax him into a metal box to be sealed away forever. Alternatively, you treat them as “journeys to the surface” — away missions — and the news articles of uniform-clad Star Trek nerds getting savagely assaulted by your average British person as organic marketing.
The best part is when you actually need an action set-piece, the expectations around what that action looks like are already Kirk-throwing-a-rock bottom. It is likely that, with the play-fighting skills of the average attendee, you’ll actually end up with something that appears authentic to the show.
Look, nobody can make fighting with a Bat’Leth look dramatic or realistic, and if attendees are actually making good use of cover in a firefight, rather than standing bolt-upright and holding a phaser like a TV remote, then they’re just not playing true Trek security.
Am I saying that I would go to this hotel if it was situated in Florida and cost six thousand dollars for two nights? No, but there’s some combination of number and location which would immediately have me don a yellow engineering uniform and eat an isolinear rod. Periodic hotel-wide alarms, with an accompanying tired voiceover from an increasingly aged Avery Brooks saying “All hands to battlestations”, where we have to run out and do mock battle with Cardassians/Klingons?
Get me a phaser, I’ll get rid of Kira.
Listen, Star Wars is damaged goods. Everything that involves the sequel trilogy is done through gritted teeth and a vague sense of shame. They can’t just pretend it doesn’t exist, as much as Disney wants to, so everything made has this odd sense of unease about it.
Meanwhile, Star Trek is stainless, and given that absolutely no additional Star Trek content has been made since Season 6 of DS9, I think it’s time for a triumphant return. Give me the DS9 hotel, and maybe, just maybe, I’ll forget about all the Ferengi episodes where the women couldn’t wear clothes.