Star Trek warps to an end.(the Tube)(Television Program Review)

Forty-one years after they filmed the pilot, "Star Trek" went off the air for good this spring. Five series. Hundreds of episodes. Ten movies. Pulpy novels, video games, fan fiction that had Spock falling madly in love with Kirk. Model kits, barware, conventions packed with eager geeks. Done. Over. I have a friend who has the insignia of the Klingon Empire tattooed on his substantial bicep. How will these people deal with the end of sci-fi's most successful franchise?

Reruns, of course. But they've already adjusted. True fans already know the last shot of the last episode: The ship slowly sails into the inky beyond, engines thrumming, ending the show as it began: by violating the laws of science. Spacecraft don't make noise in a vacuum.

But we've granted that point since the show was born in the LBJ years. Fans have cut "Trek" so much slack the shears are dull. They accept that the communicators of the future are larger than modern cell phones. They accept that most species in the galaxy speak English and look like us, aside from odd nasal prostheses. They accept almost anything--even the decision to let William Shatner direct the fifth movie.

And most accept the end. Perhaps it's time to set it aside for a while. "Star Trek" has always mirrored the era in which it was made, and perhaps we live in times whose stark fears don't really translate well to metaphor. But before the Enterprise charges up its dilithium crystals and warps off for good, let's recap tour decades of space-opera TV, and see what each series says about the zeitgeist that produced it.

The Original Series. The gold standard. It was a perfect sixties show--New Frontier optimism, Klingons as Commie analogues, go-go boots, undiluted Shatner in his prime, pointy-sideburn manliness. Zeitgeist giveaway: the first interracial kiss, the TV equivalent of a lunch counter sit-in, even though people forget it was performed under duress. (Super-fabulous, powerful aliens forced Captain Kirk and Uhura to mash faces for their own amusement.) But it was the first nevertheless, and that counts for something. Overall grade: A. To say otherwise would be like critiquing the Old Testament for narrative flow.

"The Next Generation." The post-Reagan years. The Enterprise was no longer a lone vanguard making its way through realms unknown; now it was like a grand Hilton in space, complete with spa, psychiatric counselor, accommodations for kids, and a French captain who could sometimes be mistaken for a cranky sommelier. Whoopi Goldberg was the ship's bartender, which, in retrospect, really tells you all you need to know. Patrick Stewart's Captain Jean-Luc Picard was much-beloved, and for good reason: His stentorian acting style gave the show a dramatic heft it otherwise didn't always deserve.

The Federation, in this iteration, was like a liberal dream of the U.N.: diplomacy first, multicultural understanding above all, but if need be, a gigantic armada could be summoned to fight off whatever evil leather-clad empire had decided to mess with the goodfolk of Earth. Zeitgeist giveaway: The Klingons became allies, sort of, after the Berlin Wall fell. Grade: B+, not so much for overall quality, but because it relaunched the franchise with a broad-based appeal no subsequent version would match.