The End of A Space Odyssey

"Deep Space Nine" was a grittier, darker place, with a flawed Federation. It is noteworthy that "Deep Space Nine," the first series after Roddenberry's death, is the most spiritual of the canon. Berman deserves credit for this; Roddenberry, by comparison, used God as a foil, defrocking Him as false, or manipulating Him to expose what he saw as the superior nature of the human spirit.

"Deep Space Nine's" tolerance-to-all ethos wasn't selling. By the second season, ratings began to sag. After "The Next Generation" ended its run in 1994, Paramount imported that show's popular Klingon, Lt. Worf (Michael Dorn), to "Deep Space Nine."

The ratings slide did not dissuade Paramount, whose parent company, Viacom, launched its own network -- UPN -- in 1995 with "Star Trek: Voyager" ("VOY"), featuring the first female starship captain, Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew, so like Katharine Hepburn that in 2003 she would play Hepburn off-Broadway). "I was very verbal in saying we were taking too many trips to the well," Berman said.

The 10 movies, beginning with "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" in 1979, performed consistently well, averaging nearly $80 million each in domestic revenue through the first nine, until the most recent -- and perhaps last -- effort, 2002's "Star Trek: Nemesis," fell off the table at $43 million, after costing nearly $100 million to make and market.

And yet Paramount went back to the well one more time, believing the canon (and cash flow) could not be interrupted.

"Enterprise" ("ENT") was a prequel to everything, set 150 years in our future and about 100 years before Capt. Kirk. Berman said he tried to create a "Right Stuff" of space, where exploration was risky and uncertain, where all the technological kinks had not yet been ironed out and moxie took one as far as expertise.

Fans clung to "Enterprise" the way a drunk who can't find his fix will chug cough syrup. The role of the captain, Jonathan Archer, was written for reliable sci-fi veteran Scott Bakula as a space cowboy but, as the series wore on, he seemed to lose any joy he may have had in the character. He was a bummer. Archer was frequently outshined by his drawling chief engineer, Trip (Connor Trineer), whose laid-back charisma was actually closer to what Berman was shooting for.

The series, however, created an appealingly slapdash future, as coltish humans headed into the cosmos on wobbly legs, a nice contrast to the cocksure Federation of later series. John Billingsley, as the ship's alien doctor, Phlox, was a delight and an occasional revelation. And the series helpfully answered the 28-year Klingon forehead problem. To wit: Why, in every "Trek" but the original, are Klingons huge, armor-clad creatures, so animalian and exoskeletal they appear to have a horseshoe crab stuck to their foreheads, while in Capt. Kirk's time, they look like swarthy guys with glue-on eyebrows?

The answer, of course, was budget: Roddenberry didn't have any.

But this season, "Enterprise" crafted a multi-episode story arc in which some Klingons are injected with genetically enhanced human DNA, creating a sub-race of Klingons who look more like humans and who apparently thrive through Kirk's time, 100 years later.

Which brings us to . . .

Timeline Tampering And Other Complaints

Nothing makes the hardest of hard-core "Trek" fans more upset than discovering what they consider breaches of canon orthodoxy -- characters speaking of events they could not have known about, events happening before they should, inconsistencies of starship design.