COVER STORY : What a Long, Strange ‘Trek’ It’s been . .

This may be the 30th anniversary of Starfleet Command, but that doesn’t mean its enemies are cutting it any slack. The Borg, the Stepford Villains of outer space (they exist mainly to turn everyone else into beings exactly like them--wan, glassy-eyed and personality-free--through “assimilation”), have gone back in time to the 21st century to prevent a besotted scientist from creating Warp Drive, which in turn is responsible for creating the whole “Star Trek” universe. At least as responsible, that is, as Gene Roddenberry.

As part of their insidious plot, the Borg have commandeered half the Starship Enterprise. Patrick Stewart, as the heroic Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, strides boldly into the center of the ship’s bridge and sternly delivers evacuation orders: “Women, children and captains first!”

Rehearsal for that scene from the upcoming film “Star Trek: First Contact,” sans Stewart’s ad-lib, progresses, with the actor expressing concern that he has way too much exposition to burble under such dire circumstances. A quick rewrite brings shooting to an abrupt halt.

Stewart turns to Jonathan Frakes, who plays First Officer Riker and is moonlighting as a first-time feature director. “Are you still glad you’re directing?” Stewart asks mischievously.

“It’s the vision of hope for the future that keeps me going,” Frakes replies, poking fun at the oft-repeated mantra describing “Star Trek’s” enduring appeal.

Once the scene has been tinkered with, Stewart lauds Frakes: “You solved it! It must be great to be you!” He then turns to Michael Dorn, playing the Klingon Worf, to deliver his line: “The Borg have taken over half the ship--your half. With the showers.”

On its 30th anniversary, there’s plenty of reverence for “Star Trek” in the world, though it’s harder to find at Ground Zero, the Paramount lot, where, in addition to work on the film “First Contact,” casts and crews are going about it on the two continuing television series, “Deep Space Nine” (now entering its fifth year in syndication) and “Voyager” (now in its third season on UPN). An entire army of employees oversees the massive “Trek” licensing department, which oversees about 1,000 “Trek” items a year, ranging in price from a buck to two grand.

Ask the set decorators about their reverence--they’ve affixed technical-looking copper plates to every console throughout the sundry space vessels. One reads: “A-Team members operating black Chevrolet vans with red stripes. Consult network officials regarding use of gold jewelry, old cigars and outlandishly ridiculous personalities. Tuesdays after ‘The Fall Guy.’ ” Ask Jeri Taylor, executive producer of “Star Trek: Voyager,” who has in her office a cardboard standee of Picard--wearing Mickey Mouse ears.

Like many in the “Trek” trenches, Ira Steven Behr, “Deep Space Nine” executive producer, eschews the pretensions that come with such a monumental anniversary. “We’ll be hearing all about the secret encoded messages ‘Star Trek’ sends out and all the deep talks about the media phenomenon,” he says, adding, “I’d just say, ‘Guess what? Thirty [expletive] years. It was fun back then, and it’s still fun.’ ”

Director-actor Frakes, who stepped unsuspecting and unaware into “Trek” lore a decade back on “The Next Generation,” says simply: “It’s a privilege. It’s good fortune--we all, as actors, go up for pilots in pilot season. This just happened to be the pilot I got that year. I’ve been blessed.”

William Shatner, who through the years has regarded his participation in the ‘Trek’ universe with mild disdain, has come to peace with his--and Capt. James T. Kirk’s--enduring legacy. He now says: “ ‘Star Trek’ has been instrumental in giving me the opportunity to write books, direct movies and push the edge of technology in many areas, including World Wide Web sites, CD-ROMs and computer graphics. It’s quite a variety of opportunities beyond playing a role in a film. All because of the expectation that because I was Capt. Kirk, I know something about science fiction.”

Says Stewart, yet another actor who had no idea what he was getting himself into: “Everything in my life changed. Although if I had known then that I would do it for seven years and 178 episodes, I would not have accepted the role, I now know in hindsight that I would have been wrong to have not accepted the role.”

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“Star Trek” was conceived 32 years ago by Gene Roddenberry, an ex-L.A. cop who envisioned a “Wagon Train” to the stars about the crew of the starship Enterprise who routinely encountered alien planets invariably in need of a good Starfleet-issue butt-kicking.

NBC rejected the first pilot as too cerebral but ponied up money for a more action-packed second pilot, jettisoning every character from the first except Leonard Nimoy’s Mr. Spock. The series debuted on Sept. 8, 1966, and after struggling in the ratings for the duration of its network run (although it was No. 1 among viewers who owned color televisions its first season), it was canceled in 1969, the ratings for its last episode half of what they were for the first.

Through the years, Roddenberry, who died in 1991, has been portrayed by Trekkers as an Ubervisionary and by the non-faithful as a womanizing epicurean and a megalomaniac with an ego that spanned the cosmos. “The Great Bird of the Galaxy,” as he is known, is assailed for refusing to acknowledge that anyone else associated with the series contributed in any real way and for asserting that it was he and he alone who fought the good fight against network mediocrity, even though his actual involvement in the series dissipated severely to the point of nonexistence during its three-year run.

“My take is that Gene promoted himself so well, and promoted his idea so well, that he caused it to continue; that if he hadn’t done that, if he hadn’t had that kind of ego, ‘Star Trek’ would have died,” says Herb Solow, the Desilu executive who sold Roddenberry’s idea to NBC and oversaw its production. Solow has written with “Trek” co-producer Bob Justman “Inside Star Trek,” a dishy, behind-the-scenes look that attempts to demythologize Roddenberry and the series.

“When it failed, even though he did his best to pump it up, he could not let it die. It was his only way to make money. And he went out to lecture to make money, and the old programs kept running, and he kept self-promoting himself into a godlike stance, and with it ‘Star Trek,’ so ‘Star Trek’ did not die. He’s more responsible for keeping ‘Star Trek’ alive than for creating it. The creation of ‘Star Trek’ was a group of people; keeping it alive was him alone.”

For example, Solow disputes Roddenberry taking full credit for the creation of the ultra-logical Vulcan Mr. Spock. “If you read the first description, it said he was red and looked like the devil,” Solow says. A number of writers fleshed out the character, Solow says, adding that “the biggest thing that made that character other than Leonard [Nimoy] was Joe Sargent, [who directed an early episode and] suggested, ‘Play against emotion.’ Leonard did everything else himself, and that made the character.”

(Roddenberry’s widow, Majel Barrett--who played Nurse Chapel in the original series and the eccentric Lwaxana Troi in “Next Generation”--declined to be interviewed for this story.)

The true unsung hero, according to just about everyone who was there, was Gene Coon, who penned many episodes and was the lead rewrite man when Roddenberry’s interest and stamina flagged. Coon, in fact, created the most venerable “Star Trek” villains, the Klingons. (Coon left the show after the second season and died five years after the show left the air, putting him in no position to claim his rightful credit.)

“Gene Coon was my image of what used to be seen in movies in the ‘30s and ‘40s as the hard-bitten newspaper editor, who sat there pounding out rewrites on your story on a clackety-clack typewriter with an eyeshade visor and a bottle of Scotch sitting on the desk,” Nimoy says with a laugh. “He’d be sitting there pounding away in the dim light, in a world of his own. He was very good, and at times he was brilliant.”

Many also credit Nimoy with helping preserve the series’ quality, as well as being the spiritual head of the production.

“Leonard fought for his character,” says Justman, co-author of “Inside Star Trek.” “Yes, it was a problem, because actors get scripts not too long before they have to start saying the words. He would get a script on which we had labored very, very hard just to get it shootable, and then he would take umbrage with the way the character was written. I knew Leonard well enough to know that if he had a problem with the way his character was being handled, he was almost invariably right. Even though it meant more work and more pain, if it was good for the character of Spock, it was good for the show, and if it was good for the show, it was good for all of us.”

DeForest Kelley rounded out “Star Trek’s” holy trinity as Dr. “Bones” McCoy, the voice of humane reason opposite Spock’s coldly logical and scientific outlook and Kirk’s gung-ho approach to fisticuffs and impressing the ladies. He also was the peace lover in times of dissent on the set, which seemed to be often.

“De is a sweet, decent man, the most professional actor we had in terms of experience,” Solow gushes even today. “De knows, as a professional actor, you get the job, you’re glad to have the job, you learn your lines, you come in, you smile. He never got involved in any politics, he never bitched about the script. In a TV series, that’s spectacular, that’s a producer’s dream. Because De created no problems on the set, there are no stories about him. There are Shatner stories, Nimoy stories, stories about Walter [Koenig, who played Chekov] and Nichelle [Nichols, who played Uhura]. But lovable, hard-working, on-time De is just De.”

There’s a good reason for that, Kelley says: “I divorced myself from the problems because I’d been in the business long enough to know not to upset my stomach over a TV show. I’m a much happier person for having walked away. Fame, I got enough of that, not as much as Bill or Leonard, but enough. It’s funny with actors--you work your ass off to get people to pay attention to you, and when they do, you go nuts. I always had the attitude, ‘This thing’s gonna fold, and then I’ll go back to working in movies.’ ”

Though Kelley and Shatner were instrumental to the show’s chemistry, Solow says, “ ‘Star Trek’ was so tied to Leonard. If you took all the regulars from ‘Star Trek’ except Leonard, you could put them in a hospital, you could put them on a Navy ship, you could have them running a newspaper. They’re the same people--Scotty’s down in the press room calling out, ‘I’ll get the next edition out!’ They’re stock characters who you could inject into any stock movie. Except Leonard. Leonard is the key.”

Yet there were deep rifts between Nimoy and Roddenberry, and when Nimoy asked for a raise the second season, Roddenberry was shockingly willing to cut him loose.

In the end, an ego free-for-all ensued and both Shatner and Nimoy were estranged from Roddenberry. Yvonne Fern, who spent months with Roddenberry near the end of his life to write “Gene Roddenberry: The Last Conversation” and later became Solow’s wife, observes: “Gene said that he thought Shatner had delusions of grandeur, which just means it takes away some of his glory, I think. But Leonard, he was truly concerned about, I could see that. He was disturbed about Leonard, he wanted it to have been better--he said so many, many times, ‘I wish I could talk to him’--but he just died.”

“He was a very, very bright guy, a very complex man,” Nimoy says of Roddenberry today. “In some areas, we got along extremely well; in some areas, we just couldn’t find a meeting ground. The last conversation I remember having with him was at his home. The subject was the script for ‘Star Trek VI.’ The script had the Star Trek form, but it didn’t have the special alchemy that I was looking for. I wanted it to be a surprising story about the Klingons, a story in which we discovered something about the Klingons that we had never known before. I went to Roddenberry when he had read the script, and he said, ‘Wouldn’t it be interesting if we could discover what it is that had made the Klingons so angry all these years?’ ”

Nimoy laughs warmly at the memory. “I laughed like I’m laughing now, at the recognition of the thing. That was the touch he could bring to a piece--Jesus, something that’d make you sit up in your chair, that takes it out of the realm of a constructed, plotty melodrama and elevates it into something else. On those grounds, I loved listening to the guy, because he had those wonderful, penetrating, incisive ideas about how to get past the typical, and to get to something special about this situation. I enjoyed that, and I admired that in him.”

During the ‘70s, the series, which produced only 79 episodes, nonetheless became a hit in syndication, and an animated spinoff ran briefly, while rumors flew of a reunion either as a TV series titled “Star Trek: Phase II” or as a feature film. The Great Bird of the Galaxy tried to create other TV series, but none got past the pilot stage.

Ultimately, with Roddenberry producing, “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” (1979) went three times over budget and emerged as a bloated disappointment. Paramount executives were loathe to entrust another film to Roddenberry, so they brought in Harve Bennett, whose only prior relationship to the series was producing “Room 222,” which squashed the final episode of “Trek” in the ratings. But Roddenberry would not go quietly into that good universe.

“Paramount told me, ‘Don’t worry, we paid him off, we’ll protect you,’ ” Bennett recalls. “But then he would write me all these memos and he’d call me. He’d find me in the street, and when he found me in the street, management’s protection would disappear.

“Nothing was right but his own work,” Bennett continues. “I knew I couldn’t offend the man. I spent an awful lot of time placating Gene, bringing him around to my point of view. As leader of the cult, Gene would exercise what is known as the art of the leak--there was only one possible way the death of Spock [in “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan”] became national news before we even began shooting. At the time, I was livid, I felt betrayed, but he did it again when we blew up the Enterprise in the third movie. I later came to justify it to myself, saying the controversy he created rebounded to make them must-see pictures for ‘Star Trek’ lovers.”

“Trek II” (1982) hit big and single-handedly resurrected the film series, and Bennett became another underappreciated hero caught in Roddenberry’s orbit--Roddenberry said the film “was a good movie, but it wasn’t ‘Star Trek.’ ”

“You can substitute ‘It wasn’t mine’ in that,” Bennett says with a laugh, adding that the New York Times review of the film began, “ ‘Now that’s more like it.’ I’ll never forget that. I’d like that on my tombstone.”

With Bennett at the reins of the film series, Roddenberry turned his attentions back to television, contacting some old “Trek” buddies, including Justman, to watch some science-fiction movies to get in the mood for a new series. (Alas, Roddenberry hadn’t kept up with advancements in sci-fi. Justman recalls: “I suggested we see ‘Blade Runner,’ and Gene said, ‘What’s “Blade Runner”?’ ”)

From those screenings, “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” the first true smash hit, network-quality, first-run syndicated series, soon evolved.

“I perceived a chance to prove to the world and to myself that we could make a successful ‘Star Trek’ series from the get-go, that we didn’t have to get saved by fans wanting to keep the myth alive,” Justman says. “ ‘Star Trek’ was an important part of my life.”

Justman suggested that this new Enterprise be populated with families, as well as a Klingon (Michael Dorn’s Worf, now on “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”) and suggested Patrick Stewart to play the Captain. After Roddenberry met Stewart, Justman says: “His exact words were ‘I won’t have him.’ He was unshakable. But I was so sure--I was never more sure of anything in my life.”

Roddenberry did hire Rick Berman, the man who runs the “Trek” empire today. Like Harve Bennett, he knew not a whit about the show or the phenomenon.

“Not having a rich experience with ‘Star Trek’ was one of the things that attracted Roddenberry to me,” Berman says. “But it was like somebody dropping you in the middle of Madrid--sooner or later you’re going to have to start speaking Spanish. I was dropped in the middle of ‘Star Trek’ and had to learn it as a second language.”

Even though “Next Generation” offered an even more civilized version of the future than the original “Trek,” the characters themselves won over skeptical fans as well as a new generation of viewers who couldn’t tell Spock from spackle. In fact, for many, “Next Generation” surpassed the original series in terms of the quality of its stories and characterizations--and, certainly, its production values.

The show was such a smashing success that fans--and some cast members--feel a little burned when it ceased production in 1994 after its seventh season, believing that the move was merely a gambit to cash in with a new series of movies and make way for other TV possibilities.

Dorn declares: “I don’t know whose decision that was, but this show could have easily gone eight seasons, then made a nice transition to movies. Our seventh season, we were hitting our stride, and I think they pulled it maybe two years too soon.”

Berman responds: “Starting the film series was one of many reasons that Paramount decided to end the series after seven years. There were a lot of very complex financial reasons. [Specifically, stations that bought the series believed they had enough first-run episodes and were reticent to pay for more.] It was known years before that we were only going to do seven years. So the criticism and the letters about how the show was stopped to make movies have never been true.”

At this point, “Deep Space Nine” was already on the air, and Berman welcomed the chance to create another series, initially touted as passing through the “Trek” darkly. Instead of boldly going, this one was about boldly staying, on a rundown space station near a wormhole, run by an embittered Commander Sisko (played by Avery Brooks, who so loathes discussing “Trek” that he makes Shatner look like a gape-mouthed fan at a convention clutching an autograph book and an action figure).

“There were some problems in ‘Next Generation’ as Gene created it--it took place in a world with little conflict, which is very difficult to write to,” Berman says. “For ‘Deep Space Nine,’ we came up with a group of characters who fit within rules we could bend. The environment became part of the conflict--the space station was not user-friendly. We could have more fun with the characters.”

Armin Shimerman, who plays the cravenly materialistic Ferengi Quark, approved of this take on the “Trek” universe, particularly his character, which defies everything Roddenberry’s perfect future espouses.

“I personally think a lot of the Starfleet characters are boring,” he says. “They’re too goody-goody for me. Humanity is full of values as well as vices, and Quark gets to play those vices in a mix that is closer to humanity than many of the characters in Starfleet.”

Ira Steven Behr, executive producer on “Deep Space Nine,” says Roddenberry’s utopian vision was so much hooey in the first place: “No one likes to say this, but ‘Star Trek’ talks about a military organization. I know Gene would hate that, but we’re on starships, it’s Starfleet, it’s the military. They took phasers, not flowers, to the planets.”

Still, this wasn’t the “darker ‘Trek’ ” that fans expected.

“That notion got oversold,” says Ronald Moore, “Deep Space Nine” executive producer and co-screenwriter on “First Contact.” “It is darker, it is grittier, but that’s relative. It’s darker for ‘Star Trek,’ but it’s nowhere near ‘Blade Runner.’ But that was the perception that went out.”

“Deep Space Nine” has suffered from flagging ratings, a concern from the series’ conception, Shimerman says.

“We were worried that Paramount had gone to the well a little too often,” he acknowledges. “Would the audience accept it? Would our characters be as beloved as those on ‘Next Generation’ and the original series? Those questions still haven’t been answered, actually, after four years. I’m not sure that they haven’t gone to the well too often. I’m not sure that our characters are being accepted.”

Moore agrees: “It’s kind of the middle child. It can get lost in the shuffle sometimes.”

‘Star Trek: Voyager” is the infant, introduced two years ago as the flagship starship for Paramount’s fledgling UPN network, which garnered it plenty of corporate hoopla as it entered a crowded “Trek” galaxy. The show’s creators hurled the cast and its starship into far-flung, heretofore-unknown reaches of the universe, where they would not encounter any life forms familiar to “Trek” audiences (except in its anniversary show, airing this week, in which “Voyager” characters find themselves on a starship captained by Sulu (George Takei), the original series’ helmsman). “Voyager’s” goal: to get back home.

“Creating characters and casting was the hardest thing to do,” recalls executive producer Jeri Taylor, who previously worked on “Next Generation.” “We had to put together a group that wasn’t going to remind the audience of anyone else. This took weeks and weeks and weeks. It seemed like all the good aliens were taken.”

For a series inspired by a show that, in the ‘60s, clad its female characters in as little as possible, “Voyager” took a progressive stance by introducing a female starship captain--Kathryn Janeway, played by Kate Mulgrew after Genevieve Bujold bailed a couple of days into shooting the pilot.

“The first season, there was some reaction among the fans: ‘I don’t know about a woman captain,’ ” Taylor says. “It was not a lot of people, but there was a wait-and-see attitude. She certainly had to win over a certain portion of the audience.”

Mulgrew says: “It’s historic, and I wanted to be a pioneer in Trekdom. The scrutiny was great, but it was understandable and therefore acceptable to me. I realized that it would be difficult, but there’s nothing as exciting as a challenge of these proportions. I’m sure there are some who still don’t accept me. This is a slow process. Most of my fan mail comes from adult men and women and young girls. Girls see me and say, ‘Wow. I can do that.’ ”

But “Voyager,” too, has had a bumpy ride--it’s no longer UPN’s highest-rated series, and UPN isn’t exactly a ratings juggernaut to begin with.

“There are things that this year I would like to address,” Taylor says. “I think we have heard quite enough whining and complaining about getting home. It creates the impression that Voyager is a ship where the people on it don’t want to be--consequently, why would the audience want to be there? I would like to reintroduce the joy and sense of embracing the adventure. This is why they joined Starfleet--they are seeing things no one has seen before.”

In the meantime, the original “Trek” cast bade fans goodbye in “Star Trek VI,” and the film series was passed along to the “Next Generation” crew in the 1994 release “Star Trek Generations,” which met with mixed reviews, even within the family of “Trek.”

Including Nimoy, who passed on one last chance to play Spock.

“In my opinion, a great opportunity was missed on a crossover movie like that, a movie that hands over the baton,” he says. “The crossover aspect was submerged in this whole other complicated and intricate plot that I didn’t care much about. It became about this crazed Malcolm McDowell character--who cares about him? It was the ‘Generations’ aspect that I was interested in, and Kirk [who was killed by McDowell’s character] became a kind of subplot. I thought we could’ve had a much more exciting, powerful movie about this generational transfer, but we didn’t get that.”

As “Last Conversation” author Fern, who was a guest at a “Generations” premiere, observes: “Everyone knew that the Enterprise would be destroyed, just as it had been in ‘The Search for Spock.’ In ‘Star Trek III,’ when the original Enterprise blew up, people were crying and were shocked and upset and horrified and angry--they had an emotional attachment to the original Enterprise and were really affected by it blowing up. This second audience is just saying, ‘Whoa! Cool! Great special effects.’ I saw a definite lack of personal involvement in that movie.”

So with flagging TV ratings and fans who don’t shed a tear when a starship bites the dust, what does that portend for a franchise that has always painted a rosy picture of the future? Though Dorn says, “We will all be dead and it still will be going,” others now understand that there can indeed be too much of a good thing.

“I don’t think we should be overextending the ‘Star Trek’ universe,” Berman says. “I think we can absolutely take too many trips to the well. So I have to be vigilant about not letting the franchise get overexposed.”

But “Deep Space Nine’s” Behr offers another perspective: “What made the original series great was Kirk, Spock and Bones. Beyond anything else, that relationship was the thing that made that show fun to tune in to every week. Yes, everything else was cool and I loved the ship and the communicators and the tricorders, but it was that relationship.

“Even this megabillion-dollar franchise is ultimately no different than any other bit of storytelling. We still have to be true to that. You can always come up with the next technical problem and the next race of aliens, but it’s the characters who have to fly, not the ship.”