Looking Back at When Star Trek Made Its Own Galaxy’s Edge

Star Trek: The Experience: Klingon Encounter (Best Version)

That adventure was “Klingon Encounter”—instead of being immediately put onto a simulator ride, guests would be “beamed” up through an incredible light and motion trick, with moving wall panels and gushes of air, and brought onto a full replica of the bridge of The Next Generation’s Enterprise-D. Not unlike how, say, Galaxy’s Edge’s second main ride, Rise of the Resistance, tricks people into thinking they’ve gotten onto a transport ship and physically moved to the confines of a Star Destroyer from their earthly travels, it would be in this setting that pre-recorded messages from Jonathan Frakes’ Will Riker would tell visitors that one of their number was in fact a direct descendant of Jean-Luc Picard—and that the Klingons were trying to manipulate time and erase the Enterprise captain from existence by eliminating his family line.

From there, visitors would move through the Enterprise’s hallways, into a turbolift attacked by Klingon saboteurs, and only then actually onto the ride itself—a simulator “shuttlecraft” with Geordi LaForge, taking them back to their home time and actually back over and into Las Vegas itself, selling the feeling of actually having travelled through time and space. After a farewell message from Picard “Klingon Encounter” dumped you back on Earth… of a sorts.

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