'Deep Space Nine' makes final trek

Farewell: Rene Auberjonois and Avery Brooks star in the series finale of 'Deep Space Nine,' two hours jam-packed with resolutions.

The series finale begins airing next week (check local listings), but there's no new Star Trek movie or TV series in sight, leaving just Voyager on UPN for Trekkers.

"The fact that Deep Space is going and Voyager will be the only Trek show on the air for a while will be very beneficial to the franchise," says Rick Berman, the Paramount producer who oversees Trek's galaxy of TV series, movies and theme-park attractions.

With three Trek series in production in the years since the original left the air, "we've produced 19 seasons of TV in the last 12 years, almost 500 episodes worth. It's important for us to keep Star Trek fresh and not overextend it."

DS9   premiered in syndication in 1993 near the end of the successful run of The Next Generation. Set at a space station that was home to alien visitors, Deep Space was never as popular as Next Generation but always did respectably. In the most recent syndication ratings available ( May 3-9), DS9  was the highest-rated first-run drama, at No. 16, compared with Xena:  Warrior Princess at No.23 and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys at No.29.

So why end now?

As with Next Generation, Berman says, DS9 was always scheduled to run seven seasons, long enough to amass episodes for repeats to run five days a week on local stations. (The original Star Trek lasted three years and 79 episodes.)

Berman isn't giving many specifics about the two-hour finale, but it is known that the two-year war between the Federation and Dominion comes to an end, and the DS9   company breaks up. Some stay on the station, others do not and many aliens stop by.

"Unlike a space ship, which goes to visit planets every week, we were land-based, and that created a huge amount of secondary characters who came to visit," Berman says. "Many will be stopping by, and closure will come to all of them."

Paramount has no plans to spin the DS9 characters off into a feature film. "Saturating the market with another franchise of movies might not be wise at the moment," says Berman, who says there won't be another Trek film before 2001.

Voyager is still thriving on UPN and remains the network's highest-rated show. Star Kate Mulgrew made noise last summer that she might leave the show, but Berman says she has a contract for the sixth season, which starts production this summer, "and she'll be back." And the year after? "That is a negotiation that always takes place with actors, and we'll see."

Jason Davidson, a 19-year-old Canadian student who runs a Star Trek fan site on the Internet (www.oocities.org/Hollywood/6952/), says DS9's legacy "will be that it took chances and dealt with characters, relationships and issues more than any other Trek series."

Going off the air now is a good thing, he says. "Letting DS9 have a rest might be a good way of starting to whet the appetites of (Trek) fans instead of instantly serving up something new."

But for all the talk of giving the franchise a rest, there won't be a long gap between the end of DS9 and a new Trek series. "I don't expect the hiatus to be more than a year," Berman says.