The Final Frontier?

As anyone knows who watched Leonard Nimoy's improbable resurrection in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, death in the Star Trek franchise isn't necessarily permanent. Which explains why a group of Trek fans believes it can keep the franchise alive if it just claps hard enough — and raises enough money. The imminent demise of UPN's Star Trek: Enterprise, whose last episode is scheduled for May, will mark the first time in 18 years that there hasn't been a current Trek series on the air, but there are are still two dim hopes of rescue from a Trek-free future. One is the federation of fans who have gathered at TrekUnited.com to cough up the costs of producing another season of Enterprise. The other is Spike TV, already home to Trek reruns, where a future season of Enterprise could still find a first-run home.

Like UPN and Paramount Television (which produces the show), cable's Spike is part of the Viacom media borg. And while a UPN spokesperson told the Boston Herald that the decision to cancel Enterprise is final, a Spike spokesperson said her channel wouldn't rule out adding new Enterprise episodes to the channel's lineup of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine reruns. ''It would definitely be something we would look at, and we know how devoted the show's fans are,'' Spike's Debra Fazio told the Herald.

Meanwhile, TrekUnited has raised $3.1 million toward the projected $30 million cost of producing another season of Enterprise. The group's co-founder, entrepreneur Tom Moore, told the Herald that some Fortune 500 companies are so impressed by the sum raised over the past few weeks that they'll kick in funds as well. ''I don't know how a company can ignore over $3 million in pledges to bring back a show,'' he said. ''No one has ever done that before. The only one like it I know of was a drive to bring back Farscape, and that raised $375,000, I believe. We've raised almost 10 times that amount already. All we want is for Paramount to find a way to bring the show back.''

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