Star Trek: The Lost Generation

    In the span of four decades, five television incarnations and countless motion pictures, the 23rd-century crew of the Starship Enterprise and the brave utopians of the United Federation of Planets have boldly gone where no one has gone before.

    But now, with the franchise seemingly gone and no new Star Trek film or show in sight, the world’s most infamously obsessive fans have been forced to go where no Trekkie has gone before: off Trek.

    “Trekdom has scaled back to its very core,” said Gabriel C. Koerner, an Emmy-nominated visual-effects artist and a man generally known as the Star Trek “superfan.”

    But the time without Trek may, ironically, be the best thing to happen to the franchise, according to some.

    “It may feel like a mourning period for a lot of people, but sometimes you don’t know until you look back and assess what happened,” Roger Nygard, director of the documentaries "Trekkies" and "Trekkies 2," said. “My guess is if history is an example, this will be a very fertile time for the fans.”

    The final Star Trek television series, "Enterprise," (2001-2005) suffered from the ridicule of diehard and notoriously nitpicking Trekkies — or Trekkers, as they preferred to be called.

    It couldn’t find a new audience, either, and by the time Paramount took it off the air in May 2005, its ratings were dismal.

    On the silver screen, things weren’t much better.

    The fan clubs are still out there, and the conventions are still being held, funny ears and all. But some Star Trek fan clubs have redirected some of their energies to other sci-fi shows, like the Sci-Fi Channel’s successful remake of “Battlestar Galactica,” which notably includes writers from “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.”

    “A lot of the fans have been tuning into shows like ‘Battlestar Galactica’ and ‘Stargate,’” said Denise Crosby, who was part of the original cast of and had an ongoing role on "Star Trek: The Next Generation" (which ran from 1987-1994).

    And, according to Koerner, attendance at Star Trek conventions has been noticeably down, with some organizers forced to merge purely Trekkian events with those dedicated to other sci-fi and fantasy themes.

    “[One convention organizer], primarily known for organizing Star Trek conventions, has indeed been refocusing its conventions into multi-genre-show events, because there has been a perceptible drop-off in Star Trek interest,” he said.