The cancellation of Enterprise after its fourth season may signal the end of Star Trek for now, but the franchise is not down and out for good, and a break may be the best thing for it. That's the sentiment expressed by Enterprise co-creator and executive producer Brannon Braga last week during a talk to students and faculty at a college east of Los Angeles.

"After 18 straight years on the air and 750-some episodes [Actually, more like 705 TV episodes. The point being, it is an extraordinary amount of television! – Ed.] the current run of Star Trek is over. Which is a good thing. It needs a rest," Braga told the audience of about 200, mostly undergraduate students. "I don't know for how long. It's not up to me, it's up to Paramount Pictures. It could be a couple of years, it could be eight years, I don't know. But it is over for now."

Without elaborating, he also commented, "I don't see it as a cancellation, I see it as more of a gestation."

Braga's talk, part of a regular speaker series at Claremont McKenna College, was booked well in advance under the titles "The Philosophy of Star Trek" and "Confessions of a Star Trek Writer." But given that the appearance came on the heels of the show's cancellation, he was forced to reflect on the implications of that development.

"The most common question I would always get over the past 15 years was, 'Why is Star Trek so popular?' Now I'm having to answer, 'Why is Star Trek coming to an end?' It's kinda depressing," Braga admitted. "Why was it so popular? I could go on and on with all the reasons. But why did it end? ... I think literally people had just seen enough Star Trek. You know, 750 episodes. Even if this final episode of Enterprise is the best episode of Star Trek ever made, it's still the 751st. There just comes a point when you need a break, and people have seen enough and they've devoted enough of their time and lives. Those people who watched Next Generation, we have found, were largely people in college who have families now, who are in their 40s or late 30s — they don't watch television as much. They had their Star Trek."

"I'm not going to stand here and say the quality of the show declined — I don't happen to think it did — I just think there was too much."

Braga has been an integral part of the Star Trek creative team since 1990 when he joined the staff of The Next Generation as a writing intern — about the time "The Best of Both Worlds" aired. He co-wrote the award-winning finale of that series, "All Good Things..." and then moved over to Star Trek: Voyager to eventually become executive producer, and then worked with Rick Berman to create Enterprise. All in all Braga has written or co-written more than 100 episodes of Star Trek, including the Enterprise series finale (with Berman) which is in production now.

He described the mood among the staff and production team since news of the cancellation as "bittersweet," given that all together, the franchise has had an uncommonly long, solid run. "A lot of people have worked on the show for the full 18 years, and it is a real family — I think it accounts for the consistency of the quality of the show, the way it looks, the way it's written," he said. "People knew it was coming; we didn't hide that fact. It was very probable that it was going to be ending. So the reaction was not shock, but disappointment, that it was not going to go another year or two."

He added on a personal note, "It's a bittersweet time for me, because I basically spent nearly half my life on the Star Trek franchise, and put a tremendous amount into it, and it's been a really, really interesting ride."

Are there any specific plans for Star Trek's future? "As far as I know, nothing — in terms of television. I know there's a feature film in development. I don't know anything about it, I am not involved with it, I don't know when it might see the light of day. But in terms of television, I wouldn't expect to hear much about Star Trek for awhile."

But Braga himself has already begun a new television project, a science-fiction pilot for CBS called "Threshold." He described it thusly: "It's a contemporary show, set today, that involves a woman who is a contingency analyst at a think tank, who is enlisted to investigate the possible arrival of alien life." He acknowledged that "Threshold" is also the title of a Voyager episode — "the worst episode I ever wrote in Star Trek," he laughed. "It's a coincidence!"

Since the subject of the lecture was ostensibly "The Philosophy of Star Trek," Braga did take opportunities to speak on that. "Gene Roddenberry's invention was a future where everybody, God forbid, gets along. It depicts a future where humanity has gotten its stuff together, Earth is a paradise, there's no conflict anymore — poverty, war, it's gone. And as boring as that might sound as a television show, it's really, really appealing to tune into. It's a place that we'd like to be, it's a place where we'd like our grandchildren to be — you like to be around these people."

"One of the most important facets of the show that Gene Roddenberry laid down was this 'Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations' concept, which is to say, no matter who you are, what color you might be, or even what your disabilities might be, you have a place in the world."

Taking questions from the students, he was asked to comment on the dialog in "Star Trek: First Contact" — which he co-wrote — that indicated there is no money in the future. "In Picard's time, and in basic Star Trek's time, the economy is not driven by money. I'm really not sure what goes on," he confessed.

"It was our personal pet theory that once this invention called the Replicator came about, which can make food, for the world, that there would be no need for a traditional economy, because everybody's fundamental needs would be met," he explained. "It was a future where people didn't have to worry about holding jobs and making money."

Then he joked, "If you watch Next Generation regularly, it seems like all people do is take Adult Education Courses — you know, they play instruments..." Referring to the dialog in "First Contact" about the futuristic economy, he added, "The Alfre Woodard character says something like, 'Well, what do you guys do?' And Picard says, 'We endeavor to better ourselves.' Adult Education Courses."