Star Trek: Back to the Final Frontier

My favorite Star Trek episode is called "Cause and Effect." Here's the setup: the crew members of the Enterprise (the Enterprise-D, since we're in Next Generation here) are trapped in a time loop. They repeat the same sequence of events over and over again. At the end of each loop, the Enterprise is destroyed in a catastrophic collision with another ship, and they go back to the beginning. But with a subtle difference: each time they go through the loop, it leaves behind dark trace memories, so the next time around, the crew is haunted by a sense that something terrible is happening, but they can't quite put their finger on what it is.

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There's a lot to love about "Cause and Effect." The fetching but elusive Ensign Ro Laren is in it. Generous amounts of drive plasma are vented from the starboard warp nacelle — always good. The writers actually give Dr. Crusher something useful to do for a change, and Kelsey Grammer makes an awesome, beyond-random cameo as the captain of the other ship. Plus, the whole conceit is brilliant. It's like one of Philip K. Dick's epistemological passion plays: we watch the same scenes four times, almost word for word, and they mean something slightly different each time. (Watch TIME's video, "How To Be a Star Trek Scribe.)

"Cause and Effect" could be a metaphor for the whole Star Trek franchise. Each new version — and to date we've had five Trek TV series and 10 Trek movies — repeats the same basic scenario, but each iteration is burdened more and more heavily by the past, and each one ends in collapse. Then the loop starts all over again, but with that sense of looming doom one notch darker. Even I, a fan, am surprised that Star Trek is still with us after 43 years.

I thought it wasn't. I thought it had died in 2004, after the double deathblows of Star Trek: Insurrection (the second-to-last movie; I considered Nemesis just posthumous galvanic twitching) and the uneven last series, Enterprise. Now an 11th Trek film is nearly upon us — it opens May 8 and is helmed by J.J. Abrams, the unstoppable force behind Alias and Lost — and I'm torn between horror, that someone is defibrillating the beloved corpse of Trek one more time, and, in spite of all my better instincts, hope.

I was too young to see the first series when it aired. Once I was old enough, I didn't want to — after Star Wars, which revealed the stunning truth that spaceships could actually get dirty, Trek looked a little out of date. Nothing gets old fast like the future. (See TIME's 1994 cover story on Star Trek.)

But then The Next Generation (hereafter TNG) arrived in 1987. It was still goofily Utopian — with its sliding doors and ambient lighting and free-flowing synthehol (booze that doesn't give you a hangover), the Enterprise-D looked like a Qantas Club airport lounge — but somehow I didn't care. TNG wasn't dirty and real like Star Wars or degraded and cyberorganic and cosmopolitan like Blade Runner. This was the other future, the one that wasn't ever actually going to happen, but you wished it would. And it was riveting. Unconstrained by plausibility or topicality, TNG was free to be playful and sexy and self-aware and melodramatic and often just plain dramatic. (See pictures of Star Wars on tour.)

But then Paramount, giddy from the fumes of a profitable franchise, marched fans through the noble (but sometimes frustratingly static) Deep Space Nine, then the noble (but ever-so-slightly-belated) Voyager and on down into the black night of Enterprise, a well-intentioned but not very noble re-reboot that featured a theme song by Diane Warren (borrowed from — wait for it — Patch Adams) in place of the traditional, lush instrumental opener and, in the holy captain's chair, Scott Bakula (borrowed from — wait for it — Quantum Leap). Not even Jolene Blalock with Vulcan ears could save it. Enterprise became the first Star Trek to be canceled for low ratings. Meanwhile, at the box office, Insurrection made back its $60 million budget, but not by much. Star Trek was always, at heart, a franchise owned by the fans, and it seemed as if the fans were returning it to sender.

But the aughts have been a boom decade for the revival of seemingly terminal franchises. Batman Begins redeemed the Caped Crusader from the hell of Batman & Robin. Casino Royale restored a vividness to James Bond that I wouldn't have believed possible after Die Another Day. The new Battlestar Galactica was a triumph. Superman Returns ... well, you can't blame them for trying.

If you believe him, Abrams barely saw Star Trek the first time around. He has genially but unapologetically stated that he is neither a Trekkie nor a Trekker — choose your suffix. "The whole point was to try to make this movie for fans of movies, not fans of Star Trek, necessarily," he has said. Star Trek — just Star Trek, straight, no chaser — is Abrams' attempt to reverse-engineer the early years of Kirk and Spock and the rest of the original-series crew. It's like a Stanislavskian exercise, retroactively endowing the characters with a set of childhood memories (rather like the replicants in Blade Runner) that explain how they became who they are. (Captain, it appears we are caught in a time loop!)

Like everything Abrams does, Star Trek will be a savvy, glossy, professional operation, tricked out with clever writing and grand set pieces and the kind of CGI that looks just like the real thing except that it smells like money. And I, for one, plan to enjoy it richly. I'm expecting the most exciting Trek in years.

But I won't enjoy it quite the way I used to. Star Trek will be a slightly melancholy pleasure, like spotting your high school sweetheart years later, all dolled up on the cover of a magazine. Cause and effect: with all this rebooting, I suspect something ineffable has finally been booted right out of Star Trek. There won't be that sense of intimacy, of something both brilliant and ridiculous, that told fans what they were watching was secretly theirs. That was all in the past. This is the future.

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