Red Alert! Experience

by Uli

The Universal Studios Hollywood's Fan Fest Nights took place in April and May 2025. The central attraction was "Star Trek: Red Alert!" with a tour of the screen-used Enterprise-D bridge from Picard season 3 and partial reconstructions of other sets. Here is a report with impressions by Uli, who walked through the sets no less than 14 times, and with side-by side comparisons of the sets and screen caps.

Quark's sign

Arcanis Lager sign

Impressions

You walk through a shuttle to visit the Enterprise-D at the Athan Prime fleet museum from PIC, which has been turned into a museum ship with increased turbolift capacity and other modifications for museum tours (explaining why there are guardrails, emergency exits, and cordoned-off areas). The Enterprise-A is seen docked behind (they ask fans if they know what ship that is) and the Stargazer can later be seen docked in front.

An energy creature appears and enters the ship, messing with the systems. You're sent to sickbay, where a Playmates tricorder makes a nice Easter egg appearance. The anomaly spreads and the ship goes to yellow alert, comms are failing and they send you to engineering, where a tour shouldn't even be going. The pool table here is an absolute highlight as it looks very authentic. Then the much too small, but otherwise nice looking warp core destabilizes with spark and steam effects, and they go to red alert and rush you to the turbolifts for evacuation, but the transporter rooms are not reachable and the computer reroutes the turbolift to an unknown destination. Fans with commbadges are asked if theirs work. Then as the ensign guiding you in the turbolift starts to panic "Computer, where are you taking us?!", it says: "Bridge".

Shuttle

Sickbay

Sickbay tools

Sickbay cart (Boby Taboret)

Corridor to engineering

Pool table

The doors open, and you're on the screen-used bridge set from the end of PIC season 3. The energy creature pulls out from the ship and activates the universal translator to tell you that it didn't intend to alarm anyone and was just curious. As it disappears, the ensigns on the bridge ask the computer about the creature, and we're told there is no record of it in the Federation database. It turns out we just encountered a new lifeform and were witnesses to first contact! Most of the bridge seems to be the original set: The aft stations, central chairs and consoles, OPS and CONN, the viewscreen, and the lateral walls with the padded compartments, replicators, and ship diagram. The dedication plaque is a replica, which is probably a good thing since the one used in PIC was apparently the original one from TNG. Only the corners were changed to put bigger doors and emergency exits in, the carpet is new (also a good thing with masses of people walking across), and they had to flatten the ramps, which required a new tactical horseshoe as well.

Energy creature on screen

You're sent out through a transporter effect as you leave the ship. Seeing the screen-used consoles up close is a great experience, but unfortunately they don't give you much time to look at everything. I went 14 times to see all the details from all possible viewpoints. The actors also rotate and play their roles a bit differently, so you get a new experience with new aliens if you go several times.

TrekCore has posted a video of the walk-through.