From News Telegraph:
Star Trek reaches its very final frontier
By Hugh Davies
Monday 2 May 2005
The final frontier may have come for Star Trek with the last television episode to be broadcast this month nearly 40 years after Capt Kirk, Mr Spock and Dr "Bones" McCoy made their debut.
The show's latest incarnation, Enterprise, has been cancelled by the US network United Paramount because ratings had slumped to 2.9 million viewers.
With so many repeats of the original series, and its follow-up The Next Generation, the new series had difficulty breaking through.
Rick Berman, the executive producer, who took over the TV and film properties after the death of Gene Roddenberry, the series creator, said: "I think we found ourselves in competition with ourselves."
He said the plan was "to give it a rest for a few years".
Five different crews have been featured in the series which, after a break in the 1970s and early 1980s, has been going non-stop for 18 years, with 624 hours of film.
Set a century before the first series, aboard an early version of the spaceship, Enterprise began in Sept 2001, with an audience of more than 12.5 million. Within a year that figure had halved.
Ronald Moore, who wrote Star Trek scripts before moving to Battlestar Galactica, said: "It never quite grabbed people viscerally and hung on like the other shows did."
Mr Berman said: "For us, it's a very bittersweet time. We have dozens of people who we have worked with us for 10, 15, some 18 years, and it's become something like a family."
As one of the most successful series ever, Star Trek is estimated to have made £53 billion through the shows, films, books, merchandise and theme park rides.
Actors still circle the world, appearing at conventions. Last year, the surviving members of the original cast -
William Shatner (Kirk), Leonard Nimoy (Spock), James Doohan (Scotty), Nichelle Nichols (Lt Uhura), Walter Koenig (Ensign Chekov) and George Takei (Lt Sulu) - gathered together for the first time in over a decade to meet their fans in Los Angeles.
