Is the "Trek" Over?

By Joal Ryan, E Online Fri. May 13, 9:26 PM ET

Something approaching good, cold Vulcan logic tells the son of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry that there's nothing to worry about with Friday's final voyage of Enterprise.

"Star Trek will never die," Eugene W. Roddenberry says. "It's a cash cow for Paramount."

At present, though, the cow is tapped out.

Star Trek: Enterprise signs off after posting record-low ratings for the series and the franchise. Heading into the finale, the four-year-old UPN series has averaged 2.7 million viewers, paltry even by the netlet's standards.

Elsewhere, the Trek universe doesn't look any brighter. There's no new series in the offing. There's no new movie in the can.

For the first time since the late-1970s, when Paramount Pictures turned a failed NBC series into the then-most expensive movie ever made, 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the wheels have fallen off Gene Roddenberry's "Wagon Train to the stars."

But even as obituaries are written, it's hard to find a Trekker, insider or outsider, who really, truly believes the journey is over.

"The fact that we're going two or three or four years without a television series, and the fact that the specifics of the next movie are not locked down, in no way means that Star Trek as a franchise is over," Rick Berman said in a telephone press conference last month.

Berman is executive producer of Enterprise, a credit he's had on every Trek series since The Next Generation.

To the current keeper of the franchise flame, Star Trek isn't dead or dying--it's tired.

For 18 years, Paramount cranked out new Trek adventures, from Next Generation to Enterprise, with two other shows (Deep Space Nine and Voyager) and six big-screen movies in between. In some TV markets, Berman said, Enterprise competed against the reruns of sister series past.

"The audience began to have a little bit of overkill with Star Trek," Berman said.

Fans like Candice McCallie, a 25-year-old Texan who worked on a grassroots campaign to spare Enterprise, says it's the studio powers that be who are tired of Trek, and not the audience.

"I think Paramount has grossly mistreated the franchise," says McCallie, spokeswoman of the SaveEnterprise effort.

The videogame maker Activision made a similar claim in a 2003 lawsuit. It charged that Viacom, Paramount's corporate parent, had allowed the Trek franchise to "decay." The dispute, which resulted in a countersuit and focused on licensing, not artistic, issues, was settled in March. The terms were undisclosed

Activision might have let up, but the SaveEnterprise faithful haven't.

"Star Trek is going to live on," McCallie says. "There's no doubt about that."

This past spring, SaveEnterprise raised a remarkable $3 million and secured a Canadian production company in the hopes of convincing Paramount to keep Enterprise alive.

The $3 million was returned to donors in April when Paramount said it wasn't interesting in the group's creative financing plans. But the group, reformed as TrekUnited (www.trekunited.com), remains committed to bringing the show back to life--somehow, some way.

Says McCallie: "Things in Hollywood can change in a minute."

On Friday night, McCallie plans to be in Los Angeles at an Enterprise viewing party hosted in part by Trek United and the Roddenberry family.

If there's anything McCallie's not optimistic about, it's the final episode. She's heard Enterprise star Jolene Blalock's comment to the Toronto Star about the finale being "appalling."

Not a fan of the writing of Berman and Brannon Braga, who penned the last episode, McCallie says she tends to believe Blalock.

"Maybe I'll be surprised," McCallie says.

Braga, fellow Enterprise executive producer and longtime Trek scribe, acknowledged that the final episode, "These Are the Voyages...," made some crew members "slightly uncomfortable." In the same telephone press conference as Berman, Braga explained that there was grumbling because it's a "different kind of episode"--set six years in the series' future and featuring appearances by Next Generation stars Jonathan Frakes, as Commander Riker, and Marina Sirtis, as Counselor Troi.

"Under normal circumstances, most people probably would have thought this was a very cool episode because it has a great concept driving it," Braga said. "But when it's the final episode of a series, emotions are running very high."

Rumors that the final episode had Riker revealing that Enterprise's run was nothing more than a vision of the holodeck were unfounded. The spoiler warning here is that there is no spoiler warning--no Pam-finds-Bobby-in-the-shower moment.

And so Enterprise dies with arguable dignity.

Eugene W. Roddenberry, who had no involvement with the series, either as a regular viewer or creative force, says he'll see out the show at Friday night's party to support fans and crew.

Now at work on a documentary about his father, Trek Nation (www.treknationdoc.com), the younger Roddenberry is unfazed about an ending he doesn't view as the end.

Says Roddenberry of Enterprise: "Perhaps one day, I'll get the box sets."