Interview: Owen Kingston and Tom Black on Bridge Command Season 2

Photo: Alex Brenner

Immersive Rumours: Hi Owen and Tom. Thanks for speaking to us today! Do you mind introducing yourselves and telling us what your roles are at Bridge Command? 

Owen Kingston: I'm Owen Kingston, I'm the Artistic Director of Parabolic Theatre and Bridge Command.

Tom Black: I'm Tom Black. I'm the Executive Director of Bridge Command, working closely with Owen and the whole team to operate this wonderful ongoing sequential story that we're able to tell.

IR: For those who have never been, what’s the Bridge Command experience like?

Owen: It's like being in your own sci-fi series. That's what we're going for. To come to Bridge Command and be a punter is to step into your own sci-fi world, and you be the hero of your own sci-fi story.

IR: The first time you both spoke to Immersive Rumours was ahead of the show opening back in March 2024. A lot of the site was still under construction, but we were able to get a hands-on demo of the experience ahead of the public opening. Looking back at that time, what are your overwhelming memories of building and opening the show?

Owen: I think launching a new show is always, to some extent, quite a chaotic process, because it doesn't matter how well you plan it; no plan survives contact with the enemy. Unexpected things happen. When you've got something with as many moving parts and as complex as Bridge Command, it's nearly impossible for it to all go completely smoothly.

This is by far and away the biggest thing we’ve ever done. Parabolic has always done quite small shows, and in the past, we've always been able to launch a new show softly and quietly to iron out the kinks without anybody really looking at it. We used to do a lot of stuff with the Croydonites Festival, and it was great because we had two or three weeks to perform to people who were either our hardcore fans, who were willing to come to Croydon to see us, or just the good people of Croydon who didn't really know who we were. You could try something new out of the public gaze and have a chance to fix it before that lens of publicity hit you. That's something that we didn't have with Bridge Command because it's that much more high-profile.

The other thing that was memorable from that time is that we were not prepared for how different it would be to run this show for fourteen people than it is to run it for nine people. When we did the first version of Bridge Command back in 2019 on a shoestring budget in the basement of COLAB Factory, it was for six people. We ran that for months and months and months, and it worked really well. When we started planning this new version in January 2020, we thought we could expand it to nine people quite comfortably, and it would work similarly well.

About six months before we were due to launch, we had a bit of a crisis with our investors when we were looking at the budgets and thinking, ‘Oh, crumbs, is this actually going to make enough money?’. The decision was taken, rather than to scrap the whole thing entirely, to up the audience capacity again. We did it to survive, really. If we didn’t find more capacity from somewhere, we weren’t going to be able to even open. We put work into that, but I think we didn’t have enough time left to put enough work into that.

I think it's fair to say that when we opened, really full shows did not work as well as the shows that had eight to ten people. When we had an absolute maximum capacity audience of fourteen, there were problems because there were people who didn't have enough to do. I think we’ve fixed that problem now, but it took us longer than I would have liked to fix it.

Making fixes just took longer than it has on any other show we've ever made in the past. I think it's the difference between - to use a naval analogy - trying to turn around a small boat as opposed to trying to turn around a supertanker. We really felt that with Bridge Command. It's so much more of a bigger proposition, so many more staff, so many more shows that we are running in a day, that to make a meaningful change just took way longer - four or five times longer.

Tom: With Bridge Command, we could meet the next morning and go through it, but then that night, whatever we did, we would be running not one version of the show, but four or five. We'd get loads more data, and of course, not every single one of them would have responded to the change we've just made in the same way. I’d underestimated the scale of being reactive; it became much harder, and it became more of a supertanker.

We also had a lot of focus on the onboarding process and the training process. There’s two distinctions there - welcoming people in, literally both off the street and then through the various stages to get into the show and into the world of the show and making clear what's going on, but also the process of training people how to use the ship, the software on the screens, the mechanical things on the ship, all those things. You need to be shown how to use those.

It's fair to say that it took us longer than I would have liked, but because of the problems we've mentioned, we didn’t 100% get it right when we opened. I'm really thrilled with how training now works for the show, and we've seen a huge change in feedback. It's been months and months and months, and pretty much no one has raised any issues with it, but it just took time to handle that.

Owen: Those first few months, I remember we used to try and teach people how to use the ships before we'd even put them on the ships. We used to have terminals in the bar and try to get people to play tutorials, but none of that stuck. It took us at least six to eight weeks to settle on what worked in terms of getting people to learn how to fly the ships quickly so that they could then do a meaningful mission afterwards.

Photo: Alex Brenner

IR: When you first conceived Bridge Command back in 2019, was it ever designed to be an experience that would appeal to absolutely everyone? You're trying to do one thing incredibly well, and that thing is obviously somewhat niche. Some people just don’t like sci-fi, right?

Owen: Exactly. I think immersive works best when the product that you've made appeals very strongly to a particular audience. If I'm looking at the advertising, either it makes me go, ‘Yes, I want to do that immediately’, or it makes me go, ‘No, I'll never do that in a million years’. I think one of the problems that immersive theatre has had historically is that it's been all about massive spectacle. It's been about appealing to a very large audience. The economics of the industry have all been built around that. You can look at Punchdrunk or Secret Cinema, who’ve done great shows in the past, and that's been their business model. They want something that's going to attract loads and loads of people every night and justifies a colossal spend and an enormous set. That's one way of doing it, but I think the economics in the last few years have shown that that's not actually the sustainable, brilliant model that maybe it's been made out to be, or maybe even has been in the past. What we're looking at is something different.

Parabolic's early work was all about taking much smaller-scale audiences, spending less on it, but making something that is really going to appeal to enough people to be able to see that. The beautiful thing about For King and Country was that you’d look at the advert for that, which said, ‘Can you win the war?’, and if you are in any way a World War II nerd, you're going to want to come and do that. If you're not, you're not.

I think Bridge Command does the same thing. If you want to fly a starship, if you want to be like Captain Picard, Captain Kirk or Captain Janeway, then yes, that is going to be for you. If that doesn't float your boat, then maybe not so much. Building shows that are sustainable for a niche but large enough audience to sustain it - I think there’s an interesting business model there which can work.

IR: Have audiences' reactions to the experience matched up with what you hoped it would be prior to opening?

Owen: Broadly speaking, I’d say yes. Wouldn’t you say so, Tom?

Tom: Yeah. I think so. I think in hindsight, we expected people to get really invested in their own naval careers, for want of a better term, and getting promotions. People earn medals and collect different patches. We've got a fan Discord now. It's run by us, but it is full of regular attendees, and we can see how much people are really interested in the ongoing stories of the main cast, so to speak. 

Everyone who works here, from front of house through to the people running your ship, they're all actors. Everyone has got a character with a named role and a backstory and everything like that. We sell bar tickets, and there are people who come a couple of times a week; they'll maybe do one mission, but they'll come two or three times to hang out in the bar and play a game, read a book, do some knitting, but also chat to people. They might say ‘I've got a theory as to what's going on in such and such part of space’. Then the character who's in the bar with them will maybe chat to them about that. People really care.

I would actually say that is a bit of a surprise. They care even more than I thought they would about hanging out with the characters on an ongoing basis. People always like the characters in Parabolic shows; it was always about the story and about the audience themselves becoming the main characters in a story, but the fact that there is this recurring cast, of us being the people who are on the ship with you when you're doing your adventures, and you can see them over a much longer scale than just the two and a half hours of Crisis, What Crisis?, or For King and Country, I think that's something we didn't…

Owen: We didn’t plan for that did we?

Tom: Maybe unconsciously. We created these characters with it in mind, I suppose, without realising, but it's gone down way better than we thought it would be.

Owen: It’s become a soap opera in space for the people that become really invested in it. That's been fuelled by some of the special events and other things that we've done. We've been able to expand that a bit for those who are keen on it.

Photo: Alex Brenner

IR: Previously, you’ve done one-off events like War Games, and you’ve had two Treaty events so far, right?

Owen: Yup. We've had a couple of others since then as well. You know when there's the novelty episodes of Star Trek where the holodeck breaks or things like that? We did one that felt a bit like that, where all of the crew played by actors succumbed to a weird disease, and they had to be fixed by the audience. We've played with several different things now. We’re about to do one about ██████████.  Although I don't think we're allowed to talk about that yet, so that's a big spoiler…

Tom: Please don’t print that. Our staff has been very good at not dropping any hints about it, so we’re pretty sure the audience are going to have no idea what’s going to happen in that. It’ll be a nice surprise. 

For a while now, the special events have been selling out before we really release any details at all. We've ended up in the situation where we haven't needed to reveal the really juicy element of it to sell it, because people are keen and they trust us, I suppose.

IR: Are all of these one-off events non-canon or do they feed back into the ongoing narrative?

Owen: Oh, they're very much part of the story. What's happened with those, and it's happened organically rather than us specifically planning it this way, but each of those events has become a milestone moment in the ongoing story of the Adamas Belt and has actually shifted that story along a little bit. 

When we ran the treaty, that then affected the missions that we were running. All of the different factions that people were encountering suddenly all of them had signed some form of treaty with each other, and that affected the interactions people had, and it became part of the ongoing narrative. Similarly, in some of the other events we've run, we've had a political election cycle running alongside as part of the story content, so that's fed into some of the things that have happened.

It's all part of creating that sense of a world that isn't just static, you know? It continues to build and change and thrive. We're currently shooting a whole load of new content to update the news channel that we run in the bar. When we opened, we had about an hour's worth of TV news that was all relevant to the world. Some of that is very out of date now, so we're in the process of updating it.

The plan for the events going forward is to try and do them every couple of months and have that be a way of moving the story along. When you watch Star Trek of old, you'd get lots of monster-of-the-week episodes, lots of things that are very inconsequential are all contained within one episode, and then every now and again, you'd have a big milestone story moment, like Captain Picard becoming a Borg or something like that. That's what we've tried to do with those special events.

IR: You’ve also introduced bespoke campaigns recently. Can you tell us a bit about that?

Owen: Honestly, they’re peak Bridge Command. It's the best version of the show you can possibly create, I think. The first one that we did was with people who had met through playing Bridge Command. None of them were friends beforehand, but they had met just doing random pickup shows, and then they decided they got on well. They approached us and said, ‘Would you be willing to do this?’. We thought, ‘Absolutely, that sounds amazing’.

So we crafted a story for them, which was over five shows. That story was a linked narrative, and their actions very much determined the outcome as well. We were able to be responsive to that specific group of people. It worked as a format, and it was terrific fun. It's like running a D&D campaign and has very much got that vibe to it. 

We assign a member of staff to be the campaign manager, and that member of staff coordinates what's going to happen for the campaign, makes sure they get the staff they need for it, and makes the necessary tweaks to the story. It's terrific fun. What’s nice about it is that it works for people who have never played Bridge Command before but love the concept in principle. If they're willing to trust us upfront with the big wodge of cash, then we can very much give them the time of their lives.

It’s one of those things that in your wildest dreams, you hope one day you might be able to make happen. It was one of the bucket list things to do with Bridge Command, and it's incredible to have had a chance to do it and to see it really work as well.

Tom: It was huge fun to make, and one of the players in the first outing described it as a ‘love letter to Season 1’, because the campaign itself pulled on various threads that regular participants were used to from all the missions in Season 1. Characters, factions, even a couple of ‘whatever happened to x’ kinds of things. 

Without giving anything more away I will say that this went down very well with that group, and we’ve now got half a dozen other groups playing through the same story - though it’s important to say that part of the luxury of a campaign is that the story and how it unfolds is tweaked to reflect your crew’s unique actions, even more so than a normal Bridge Command mission. 

And the original group have now booked again, so we need to do it all again! We’ll be continuing their adventure, but it’s a whole new story. So there’ll be a ‘second campaign’ set of 5 missions available to anyone in a few months’ time.

Photo: Alex Brenner

IR: There’s something really interesting about how more and more immersive shows are operating with ongoing, multi-year narratives nowadays. The Key of Dreams is moving into a new story chapter later this year, Phantom Peak is constantly evolving, and of course, you’ve recently debuted the new chapter of Bridge Command. I think that structure goes a long way to explaining how those kinds of shows have managed to build a loyal fanbase, who return often.

Owen: It's just really important to balance it against that first-time experience. If you focus too heavily on fan service and pleasing the returners, you get the same problem that TV series have, which is, if I see a TV series that's run for ten seasons, I'm going to think twice about starting at the first season. It’s a huge investment of time.

What we’re always trying to be careful to do with Bridge Command is not put off people who are coming for the first time. We're always trying to be aware of how we frame the experience to people who are encountering Bridge Command for the first time, and making sure that we don't put too high a barrier to entry.

Tom: Yes, the overwhelming majority of people experiencing Bridge Command are still brand new to it, though to get statistical for a second, we have seen the number of returning regulars go up, not down, while our overall number of sales increases – so that’s felt really good for our momentum, as it means we aren’t just maintaining the same number of people wanting to come back again and again. We’re winning over more and more new people all the time. Our regulars are very, very welcoming to newcomers, too. There are many happy stories of people coming on their own or in a small group and being nervous, and then being ‘adopted’ by experienced hands on their crew, who afterwards encourage them to join our Discord server and become part of the community.

IR: We're a couple of months into Season 2 of Bridge Command now. When you started to structure and work out the plans for these new missions, what were the big takeaways from the first year or so of running missions?

[Owen laughs]

Owen: I'm laughing because there was a massive one. When you look at any TV show, particularly sci-fi TV shows, you see the same plots recur over and over again, redressed. You see it a lot in sequels to movies, too, where essentially people are coming to see it because they loved the first movie, so you want to give them enough of the first movie that they liked, but you also need it to feel different so they don't feel like they're just watching the same thing again. Star Trek's a perfect example of something that does that all the time, and Stargate SG-1, which I love, does that really noticeably.

I was having a bit of a thought experiment in the lead-up to beginning to write for this new season, and I was thinking, ‘What are the basic plots of Bridge Command?’ The process of analysing that brought me to the conclusion that every single episode we had up to that point was basically the same plot redressed - ‘Save the Guy’. We would send the crew out to go and do something, and they would save a character and bring them back. Every mission did that in some way or another.

IR:  And how many mission stories did you have in Season 1?

Owen: I think 10 or 11 missions, and they all did that in some way. The thing was, we hadn't noticed! So we’d done a reasonably good job of making it different every time, but we said, ‘We have to do some different plots’. So we actively went into the new season saying ‘We're going to, at most, do one or two Save the Guy plots and everything else; we're going to really work hard to think of different things that the audience do’. 

IR: So what caused you to end up making so many ‘Save the Guy’ missions in Season 1?

Owen: It had arisen, I think, because of how we staff the shows. We put three performers on each show. One of them will be the flight controller, who is the games master. They’re a performer, but they’re also making things happen behind the scenes. We have somebody who goes on with the crew at the beginning to train them in how to use the ship, and then we have an actor whose job it is to play whatever the prominent character is. One of the best ways to get a character onto the ship is to have them pick up or rescue somebody. That was one of our big takeaways - just spotting what we'd done by mistake. 

As Tom was saying earlier, we also underestimated how invested returning audiences would get in not just the world of the show and the stories we're telling, but the characters on the Warspite that our actors played on the regular. We purposefully built in more plot points and story points that allowed for character developments and interesting things to happen to them. That was part of it as well.

Photo: Alex Brenner

IR: When we first spoke 18 months ago, you mentioned that you had ideas for the next four or five years’ worth of Bridge Command. Is that still the plan now that you’re some way down the road from opening?

Owen: Absolutely, yeah. What we found actually is that it's going to stretch further than we thought. We'd come up with quite a lot of ideas, and what we found, again, is part of that supertanker analogy of it taking a long time to steer Bridge Command in a particular direction.

It's taken us longer to get some of that content out there because, actually, if we make new content, it doesn't just sit there for a couple of weeks or even a month. In order to get it through our whole fan base, it takes several months for people to play through all of those things. I think that elongates that timeline a little bit.

We're anticipating at least being there until the end of next year. We'll see beyond that. I think how we're doing financially will dictate whether we extend. We have a 10-year lease on our site with a three- and five-year break. We'll make a decision at some point before the end of next year as to whether we want to go on past the end of that three-year break and into the five-year break.

That will be purely a financial decision at that point. Is it still making enough money to cover its cost and also making money for our investors? I think that's the critical thing. They won't want to take the risk of us being there another two years and then dipping down into being loss-making. That's for the future to see, but we're pretty committed to being there throughout most, if not all, of next year.

IR: Outside of Bridge Command, are there any new Parabolic shows on the way in the not-too-distant future?

Owen: There’s not much to say there, apart from there being some huge opportunities that have opened up, which we would love to take advantage of. Currently, we're not on any kind of ticking clock time scale to take advantage of those, which is great, so we can keep ploughing a lot of effort and attention into Bridge Command for as long as it needs it, but I think we're looking at least one more, really high-profile show in the next few years. I can't really say anything about what that will be.

There's also the back catalogue of things. It's now been maybe six years since we did the last performance of For King and Country. I think that is still probably my favourite Parabolic show. There's been some talk of late about trying to bring that back again. I know certainly all the original cast feel as fond about it as I do, and it's been absent from the world for a while. There's a whole generation of new immersive theatre fans who've never seen it. I think it would be worth doing that again for people at some point if we can.

IR: I think it’s fair to say you’ve got your hands full with Bridge Command at the moment.

Owen: Yeah. Any new Parabolic show will largely depend on Bridge Command. If we get to the end of next year and we're like ‘Okay, we've had a good time doing Bridge Command, but we think it's time to close’, then that would create space for us to work on something new. If Bridge Command goes on beyond the end of next year, then we may be looking at another couple of years before we make something new.

It's a win-win as far as I'm concerned, because Bridge Command is a wonderful privilege to work on. There's nothing else out there that's quite like it, and as long as it can go on, I'd be very happy to be working on it.

Photo: Alex Brenner

Read our ★★★★½ review of Bridge Command from October 2024 here

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Bridge Command is currently booking until 31st January 2026 in Vauxhall. For more information about the show, and to book tickets, visit bridgecommand.space