From Out of a Time Warp, a New Roddenberry Series

Don’t expect any star cruisers and battleships whizzing through space or any pesky Klingons and Borgs in the new syndicated sci-fi series that bears Gene Roddenberry’s name.

This time around, the creator of the classic “Star Trek” series has brought the aliens to Earth.

“It’s kind of turning the tables [on “Star Trek”],” says his widow, Majel Barrett Roddenberry, an executive producer of “Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict,” which airs Saturdays on KTLA-TV Channel 5. The series is produced in Toronto by Atlantis Films in association with Tribune Entertainment Co. and Roddenberry Kirschner Productions.

“Consequently, we will be looking at humanity and what mankind is and how it feels through the eyes of the aliens,” Majel Roddenberry says. “It will be like holding the mirror up to nature.”

“Final Conflict” is set in a Midwestern metropolis early in the next millennium after the arrival on Earth of 71 advanced aliens called Taelons or “Companions.” When the series opened Oct. 11, they had already used their superior technology to wipe out such Earth problems as famine, disease and war. But there are many who believe the aliens have a sinister, darker side.

Kevin Kilner (“Almost Perfect”) plays William Boone, an honest, stalwart police captain who is recruited by the Taelons after the death of his wife to become the Commander of Security. Unbeknown to the Taelons, Boone also works for an underground resistance group along with U.S. Marine Capt. Lili Marquette (Lisa Howard), a fighter pilot who becomes Boone’s right-hand operative.

Leni Parker also stars as Da’an, the asexual Companion leader who becomes increasingly mesmerized by humans.

Roddenberry, who died in 1991, conceived the series in 1976 for CBS. It got pushed to the back burner when he began working on the first “Star Trek” movie for Paramount.

“I guess out-of-sight, out-of-mind,” says Majel Roddenberry, who also has a recurring role in “Final Conflict” as a doctor who works for the resistance.

“Going through all of his stuff after he died, I came across this. I said [to myself], ‘This is just as good now as it was then.’ The first segment [was] the actual pilot [he wrote], with some changes to make it a little more updated.”

Roddenberry’s pilot script, says executive producer and “Star Trek” buff David Kirschner (“An American Tale”), was a “very strong blueprint for everything that we’ve done. He created pages and pages of notes about where the show should go. It’s really from all of that we’ve worked from. It’s really his creation.”

Kilner, who loved “Star Trek” as a kid, responded immediately to Roddenberry’s script and the role of Boone. “I flashed on ‘Blade Runner,’ ” he says. “I thought maybe this could be like the [Harrison] Ford role in ‘Blade Runner.’ This is much more interesting to me than going into space.”

According to Kilner, the first two episodes, which were in the detective thriller genre, were not really indicative of the entire series. “In all the November episodes,” he says, “there will be a lot more science-fiction elements--strange problems that Boone and his team around him are trying to figure out and solve.”

Majel Roddenberry insisted that the series be produced for syndication and not network TV. “Gene never had a whole lot of luck with networks and the minds who ran them in those days [of the original “Star Trek”]. It was the censorship.”

With syndication, she says, “you don’t have people standing over you with memos all the time. Gene couldn’t stand that. He hated the idea of memos. Basically he did ‘Star Trek’ mostly for himself. He had so many things he wanted to talk about, and with censorship they wouldn’t allow him to do it. So he figured if he painted people funny colors and put them in a spaceship, maybe it will get by the network executives, and sure enough, it did.”

* “Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict” airs Saturdays at 6 p.m. on KTLA-TV Channel 5.