Star Trek: Trekking Onward

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Bruised egos also resulted, not surprisingly, from the effort to combine the two TV casts for a passing of the torch in the new movie. Nimoy declined a role after he saw how small his part would be. "I told them," he says, "'The lines that you've written to be spoken by somebody named Spock can be easily distributed to any of the other characters on the screen."' Which is what happened: Captain Kirk appears with two lesser members of the old crew: chief engineer "Scotty" (James Doohan) and Ensign Chekov (Walter Koenig). Several members of the Next Generation cast, meanwhile, were less than thrilled with their relatively small amount of screen time. Says LeVar Burton, who plays Geordi: "Hopefully, if we do another one of these, we will have an opportunity to spread the wealth more."

Then there was the film's controversial ending. As originally shot, Captain Kirk was killed by a phaser in the back. But test audiences were reportedly dissatisfied, and the scene was reshot just weeks before the film opened. Kirk now has a more action-packed, though considerably lower-tech demise; Trek fans are already grumbling.

None of which will matter much if the film is, as expected, a big hit. Then all that Paramount will have to worry about is trying not to squeeze too much out of its cash cow. The studio plans to produce a new feature film every two years, while keeping two TV shows running simultaneously. "Star Trek will do fine if they don't kill the goose," says Barrett Roddenberry. Berman acknowledges the danger: "There's always the question about taking too many trips to the well, and one of the tasks Roddenberry left me with was at least to try to prevent that from happening."

Yet Roddenberry's old optimism seems to be prevailing. "Gene Roddenberry had a point of view that space is infinite as far as we know, and therefore the possibilities for stories are infinite," says Brent Spiner, with Data- like precision. "In the original series, I think they had explored some 18% of the universe. We (The Next Generation) went into another 15%. So that leaves 67% of the universe left to explore." Which, by our calculations, should carry the show well into the 21st century, and that's not even traveling at warp speed.