By Rob Thomas
May 3, 2005
Almost 40 years after it began, the five-year mission that the USS Enterprise embarked on is coming to an end, or at least taking a very long break.

On Friday, May 13, UPN will broadcast the last episode of the fifth “Star Trek” series, “Enterprise.” Fans desperately lobbied UPN to renew the series for a fifth season, and some even raised $3.1 million in a last-ditch bid to finance the show themselves.

But the writing was on the wall, and in the last few months cast members were talking openly and bluntly about the show not coming back. Jolene Blalock called the final episode “appalling.” Producer Brannon Braga has said that the franchise needs a “rest” after some 19 years of various “Star Trek” shows on the air. And although there’s been talk about making an 11th “Star Trek” feature film, the last one (“Nemesis”) didn’t do so hot, so right now it’s all just talk.

It probably just adds insult to injury to note that the new “Battlestar Galactica,” the original version of which was the silliest “Star Trek” ripoff imaginable, has become a much sharper and more relevant show than “Enterprise,” even though “Enterprise” got better in its last two seasons.

So these are dark times for today’s “Star Trek” fans, the youngest of whom have never had to live in a universe where new episodes of “Star Trek” weren’t on TV every week.

To them, I say: Welcome to my pre-adolescent world.

What they’re about to go through is nothing compared to what “Star Trek” fans in the 1970s had to take. First of all, we were fans of a show that ended, at least in my case, before I was even born. So the idea of a new “Star Trek” episode was just beyond my understanding. Plus, we had to live with the ignominy of loving a show that wasn’t particularly well-liked during its original run. I distinctly remember the sense of injustice I felt at comparing the original show’s 79-episode run to, say, the 253-episode run of “The Jeffersons.”

(By the way, is this the geekiest column you’ve read in some time? Yes, it is.)

Anyway, we “Star Trek” fans clung to whatever flotsam we could. There was the 1970s Saturday morning cartoon version of “Star Trek,” which was decently written and featured the original cast, but was so badly animated it made “Superfriends” look like “Miyazaki’s Spirited Away.”

Then there were the books. Sweet mercy, they were awful. You got the feeling that some of the authors had never even seen the show, but just grafted Spock and Kirk into the science-fiction novels they already had sitting in their desk drawers, whether it made sense or not.

I distinctly remember reading a short story featuring Nurse Christine Chapel running around stark naked on some alien planet, doing some kind of rite-of-passage ritual. Hey, I was 10, and it made an impression. There are now some 650 “Star Trek” books out there, and some of them have got to be decent.

Things got so dire back then that I remember putting my crummy little cassette recorder on our TV set and audio-taping “Star Trek” episodes. Think about that when your copy of the “Star Trek Deep Space Nine: The Complete Fifth Season” DVD set arrives in the mail from Amazon.

I bring up all this not to strike some cranky “you think you Trekkies got it bad” pose. Not entirely for that, anyway. But the thing is, a decade in the cultural wilderness was good for the show. For the fans, our love for the show was honed, sharpened and tested by its scarcity, so when the movies finally started in 1979, and the TV show “Star Trek: The Next Generation” began eight years later, we were ready to appreciate them properly again.

More important, I think the break helped the people who made “Star Trek” figure out exactly what made it click. There was a lot of creative and commercial steam behind “The Next Generation” when it began, and in the movies, the original cast got to enjoy being part of “Star Trek” again, instead of worrying about being typecast. (Ten years of being relegated to “Fantasy Island” guest spots will do that to you.) In other words, taking a decade off was good for the long-term health of the franchise.

So to the fans, I say go re-watch the old episodes, go read the books, go talk about the show online, and don’t worry so much. You’re out there with money in your pockets, Hollywood knows it, and pretty soon somebody will have a really good idea about how to once again revive “Star Trek.” And the time off will turn out to be time well spent.

But I wouldn’t go so far as to audio-tape the episodes. Come on, that’s just sad.