I just heard that Enterprise, the fifth incarnation of the best-known science-fiction series in television history, Star Trek, has been cancelled. I’m not surprised — rumors have been circulating for months that UPN was only stringing the low-rated show along until it hit 100 episodes, which is considered the sweet-spot for syndicated re-run packages. (One hundred eps are optimal for syndication because you can run the show five nights a week without viewers seeing the same ones too frequently. As it is, Enterprise will warp off into the sunset with only 98 episodes, but that’s apparently good enough.)
I’m also not what you would call heartbroken about losing this show. I think I’ve only seen three or four complete episodes and they didn’t move me one way or the other. The sad truth is that I was profoundly indifferent to this version of the Trek concept; I haven’t really considered myself an active Trek fan in years, not since Deep Space Nine wrapped production. But there is one aspect of this story that causes a twinge: after the final episode of Enterprise airs in May, it will be the first time since 1987 that there is no new Star Trek in the offing. No new spin-off series, no big-screen movies. As an idea and a brand name, Star Trek will have finally run its course. The tie-in books and computer games will probably continue for a while, but they’ll eventually peter out as well, and Star Trek will fade into history.

Naturally, the hardcore fanboys are having a hard time accepting the inevitable; there is much speculation on the message boards about a sixth Trek series that will debut after a suitable resting period, five years or maybe even a decade from now. Sorry, guys, but I believe that’s just wishful thinking. It’s over. And you know what? It should be over. It should’ve been over years ago, in my opinion.

That probably sounds strange to the people who know me well. After all, I’ve been a Trekkie for quite literally my entire life, or at least as far back as I can remember. When I was a very small boy in the early ’70s, I watched syndicated re-runs with my mom every afternoon. I used to race home from school as fast as my little legs would carry me because I didn’t want to miss the awe-inspiring prologue (“Space: the final frontier…”), and my thoughts of childhood play are larded with Trek-related memories.

For example, our kitchen floor was covered in ancient linoleum that sported an art deco pattern of colored circles against a faded white background. In my imagination these circles became transporter pads that could beam me to other parts of the house or out to the back yard, just as Captain Kirk could flash between his beloved ship and the planet below. I even supplied my own sound effects for the “beaming,” just like the ones heard on the show, or so I believed. I’m sure it must’ve worried my stolid, unimaginative father when his boy ran past him, humming and buzzing to myself before planting my feet on a circle on the floor and standing as still as a statue until my “materialization” was complete.

(Dad may not have understood my budding nerdiness, but he knew it made me happy, and he contributed to it by making me a phaser out of wood. Also, after he saw me playing with the flip-open metal case that housed tip-cleaners for his acetylene torch, he removed the cleaners and let me have the case to use as my “communicator.” In time I acquired professionally made toy replicas of these props, but they were never as good as the ones my dad gave me.)

On Saturday mornings I watched the Star Trek cartoon and operated Lego control panels built on TV-tray consoles. Some of my earliest books were James Blish’s Star Trek novelizations, and I also…

Well, you get the idea. I was a fanboy in love with the TV series most responsible for generating our modern fan culture.
My love affair with Trek waxed and waned over the years, overshadowed for a time by the juggernaut that was Star Wars, rekindled when the series made its unprecedented jump to the big screen with Star Trek: The Motion Picture and then the much better Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. I can still tell you the circumstances and location in which I saw each of the Trek movies for the first time, right up through the last one that featured any of the original cast members, Star Trek: Generations.

When the word went out in ’87 that there would be a new Star Trek series with an all-new cast, I was one of the old-school naysayers who said it would never work without Kirk, Spock, and Bones. I remained stubbornly unimpressed by the first two seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but when it came back for a third year I thought maybe I ought to give it another chance. To my surprise, TNG had managed to find its own identity and even though it didn’t have the same heart or chemistry as the original, I enjoyed it for what it was. In TNG, I found something unprecedented: an extension of an existing fictional universe that felt like an independent entity but still had ties and connections to its predecesor. It was like a new addition to a beloved family. I was there every week until it wrapped production at the end of its seventh season, and I was surprised to find that I missed it after it was finished.

The same thing happened with the second spin-off series, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: I didn’t like it at first, in part because I thought it compared badly to ST:TNG, but then I grew to love it on its own terms and I hung in there throughout the end of its run.

By this point I’d been feeding on a constant diet of newly produced Trek for a good ten years. The original series and its spin-offs had attained a level of popularity and critical respect that I never would’ve imagined possible when I was in high school and it seemed that only nerds liked this stuff. The late ’80s through the mid-90s were a kind of Nirvana for a fan like myself, and it seemed as if it was going to last forever. But everything would change with the launch of yet another spin-off series.

Star Trek: Voyager was a trainwreck (or should that be a starship wreck?), a shrill, poorly written string of pedestrian stories that failed to live up to its own premise, let alone the high standards of its predecessors. Where earlier Treks had been about the big issues of what it means to be human, Voyager was about… well, I’m still not sure what Voyager was about, aside from special effects and Jeri Ryan’s breasts.

Voyager caused me to start thinking that maybe enough was enough. Maybe Trek had been a wonderful playground when I was younger but now the swings were starting to sag and the slide was rusting. I started telling people that Trek deserved an honorable death before the producers could drive it into the ground.

It was far too late, though. At some point in the mid-’90s, Star Trek had become much more than a TV or movie series. It had morphed into “The Franchise,” as horrible and twisted a monster as anything ever generated by a transporter accident. The Franchise was the biggest money-maker in the history of Paramount Studios, the company that owned the brand, and they were going to milk it for every last drop they could. And so they have… and in the process, Star Trek has been diminished.

Where once it was a positive dream about human potential, a communal experience shared by its fans who in turn became a real community of friends, it has more recently become just another commodity. It’s been packaged, focus-grouped, diversified, and, ultimately, cheapened by bean-counters and speculators who wanted to fatten their own wallets more than they wanted to produce art, or even good entertainment, if you can’t bring yourself to call Star Trek “art.” The original series and all its various spin-offs have been marketed until even the hardest core of fans started to feel like they were being ripped off. When “limited edition” toys turned out to have no resale value and massive (and expensive) DVD sets were obsoleted by a new version that everyone suspected was coming, but which the studio always denied was in the works until just before it was released… well, let’s just say that the whole “enterprise” stopped being all that much fun. And I haven’t even mentioned the inter-fan conflicts that have sprung up over which series is better, whose fault it is that it’s all gone to hell, etc.

The really sad thing is that the Trek model of overkill has become the standard that all other science-fiction entertainments now aspire to match. Everything is viewed as franchise material, from Highlander — which really had very limited franchise potential, but that didn’t stop its producers from trying — to Buffy to Stargate and Farscape. Even Star Wars, the most significant and magical pop-cultural event of my generation, has become commoditized and cheapened by the salability of its name brand (although you can make a pretty good argument that SW would’ve gone that way regardless of what happened with any other property). And that is bad news for us, the fans, who don’t want “product” so much as something we can discuss and debate and love.

But it’s all over for Star Trek, at least. And I’m pleased about that, for the most part. It’s a relief, actually, as if a long-suffering relative has finally, peacefully passed on. If I had my way, the movies would’ve stopped after Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and the spin-offs would’ve been limited to Next Gen and DS9. And maybe not even those, as much as I enjoyed them. Because when it comes right down to it, the only Star Trek that really mattered all that much, culturally speaking, is the original one. Today it gets mocked because of the broad acting style, the primitive special effects, the velour shirts and miniskirts… but like it or not, that was the essence of Star Trek. That relic of the 1960s was the show that first advanced the ideas we Trekkies hold dear, of valuing diversity and finding fulfillment through exploration. At its best, the original Star Trek ranks with the finest drama ever put on television. And at its worst, it was still a lot more fun than anything I personally saw of its just-cancelled descendent, Enterprise.

An era is over. That’s okay, proper even, but I will admit that it’s going to feel strange to not have a starship probing the final frontier somewhere on the airwaves. Thank God I’ve still got my DVDs, and my memories…