What’s the most important set on a Star Trek show? Depending on the series, it might differ—for the most part, it’s going to be the bridge of a starship. But “the bridge of a starship” isn’t really the answer to that question: it’s the place that feels most like home. And while it’s definitely not a starship, Deep Space Nine’s promenade is exactly that, perhaps more than any other iconic locale in the franchise.
Today as part of a series of updates to its virtual tour offerings on the Apple Vision Pro, the Roddenberry Archive and OTOY announced a raft ofnew virtual reality set tours, taking fans inside the world of Star Trek. To celebrate this week’s return of Star Trek: Discovery, the bridge of the legendary vessel is now available for virtual visitation, as are the first virtual tours inside the fleets of the Klingon Empire—specifically the I.K.S. Amar, the K’t’inga battle cruiser from the opening of The Motion Picture. But perhaps the most fascinating addition is a further exploration of Deep Space Nine’s titular station, and the most important place of all among its rings and pylons: the thoroughfare of the Promenade.
The Promenade was already part of the archive, but now audiences can explore further aspects of the set—one of the biggest ever built for Star Trek, the biggest outright at the time of filming—but the real highlight is a new, accompanying documentary about the design history of the set and its legacy, narrated by the perfect tour guide for such a locale: Armin Shimmerman, the man behind the lobes of the Promenade’s premiere businessman, Quark.
It’s a great little piece, looking at the set’s design process, how its scale was captured on screen, as well as Shimmerman relishing in giving little in-universe guides to everything that the Promenade had to offer. It’s a reminder of not just what an impressive set it was, but how its design language informed the very heart of what Deep Space Nine was doing with Star Trek. In the Promenade, we have a primary set that is unlike anything we’ve ever seen on the show before: this is not Federation design, or Starfleet ship corridors, but the brutalist angles of Cardassian aesthetic clashing with the pops of color from the flags hung by the Bajorans and other alien cultures steadily in the process of reclaiming what was once a grim shadow over the oppressions of Bajor. Few Star Trek sets are exactly comforting, but this heady mix of sharp angles and cool metallics against the vibrancy of shop lights and flags brings the Promenade a sense of homeliness that few other regular Trek sets could match.
But one thing this tour can’t capture about the Promenade that made it so compelling in the first place is the people milling about the place: the life that made it feel like home more than anything else. Sure, every Trek set has had some flavor of walk and talk on it before, the bustle of crew milling about and looking at monitors, but the Promenade was life itself made manifest. The culture clash of the design language was echoed in the people—so many people, more people than we would often see in one place on Trek outside of big crowd sequences or social hubs like canteens and bars. You had Starfleet crew, sticking out in their black and division-colored uniforms, you had the browns and beiges of Odo and his local security officers, you had Bajoran priests, you had civilians of all species and stripes, from visitors passing through to vendors hocking food and trinkets—and, of course, the myriad patrons of myriad scruples flocking in and out of Quark’s bar. The Promenade was defined by background vibrancy, a social and communal space that was far more important to Deep Space Nine than the cramped battle bridge of the Defiant, or the command crew’s home in operations.
That life made the Promenade sing—sometimes literally, in the case of the Klingon restaurateur playing his accordion and roaring traditional Klingon ballads at diners—and it made it the heart of Deep Space Nine, a sacred space for the viewer that the show could then violate at a moment’s notice to amplify any given threat. The Promenade has been home to firefights, assassination attempts, it’s been besieged, it’s been captured by our heroes’ worst enemies, but it’s also a place of love, adventure, and fun, the sight of some of the best moments in the entirety of DS9. It is, after all, where the show’s heart is—and that is where home resides.
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