The Las Vegas Hilton has a lot of cultural cachet. Think about it: This is the place where Elvis Presley had an exclusive eight-year engagement to perform and it's the home to "Star Trek: The Experience" and soon "Borg Invasion 4D"! You would be hard-pressed to find two more popular symbols of American culture than that.

But we digress. Over the weekend of August 1-3, the Hilton was the perfect host for several thousand Star Trek fans, many stars and untold amounts of related merchandise. Elvis may only be with us in spirit, movies and recordings, but Star Trek lives on to fight another day!

Here is the first in our reports covering the entire weekend.

Marina Sirtis

The first celebrity of the weekend to take the stage, Marina Sirtis ("Deanna Troi") didn't expect much of a crowd, but she was pleasantly surprised. "My goodness, this is big for Friday! This is fantastic!" To catch the fans up on her latest comings and goings, she just did two back-to-back movies called "Specters," a ghost story, and "Walking on Water," a teenage adventure movie, the latter which she helped get Star Trek: The Next Generation colleague Michael Dorn cast in as a villain. "So they give him this big part which is now bigger than my part, and he gets billing above me!" she exclaimed. "Tell him when you see him on Sunday that he owes me dinner."

She also expressed some exasperation toward the audience. "You know, I do have to chastise you a tad, 'cause you didn't go to see Nemesis enough. Would it've killed ya to go more than once? Who went more than once to see 'Nemesis'? All you people come right to the front of the autograph line!" She was joking around, of course, but the disappointment over the box office returns of "Star Trek Nemesis" was undeniable, despite brisk sales on DVD. "I told you last year if you don't come to see it, it will be the last movie. Guess what! You blew it! The Next Gen cast is now retired!" After a collective cry of "Awww," she retorted, "Yeah, now you're sorry!"

Answering questions from the fans, her recollections of seven years on TNG included the evolution of her wardrobe. She went through all sorts of costume changes over the years, and finally in the sixth season ended up in a regular uniform — and the producers realized she looked good in it. "What I liked about my uniform was that, I lost my cleavage — and all my brains came flooding back. Not only was I, like, allowed out on away teams, I was actually the leader of an away team once. I had phasers; I had medical tricorders ... and unlike Beverly [Crusher] I seemed to know what was wrong with people." In the episode "Timescape" in particular, she has a fond memory of a line she spoke, which was: "'That's impossible. The Romulans use an artificial quantum singularity as their power source.' And who did I say it to? Geordi [La Forge] and Data! Like, they didn't know this! You know, we were shooting that scene and we were standing in a line, and I was kinda looking surreptitiously from right to left to make sure they hadn't developed a cleavage while I wasn't looking!"

Despite her light-hearted chastisement earlier, she closed her session with some very earnest words. "I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart — and I honestly do mean this — I want to thank you for my car, for my house, the clothes that I'm wearing... Everything I have I owe to you. I used to wonder, what's going to happen when Next Gen is over? Well, we've been over now for nine years. We've made our final movie it looks like, and you guys are all still here. I just want to say, you are the best fans ever in the history of show business. I don't know what the future holds in store for us, but whatever it is, you guys are the best. You'll always have a special place in our hearts. God bless you all."

Robert Picardo, Tim Russ, Robert Duncan McNeill

Among the Voyager threesome appearing that afternoon, Robert Picardo ("The Doctor") took the stage first, solo — actually, he was joined by a Borg friend as he reiterated the announcement he made that morning to the press about the new "Borg Invasion 4D" attraction under construction at The Experience (related story). "Finally you get to see me on a 35-foot screen, which of course means that my nostrils will look like a two-car garage," Picardo told the fans, and proceeded to sing two Borg Queen-related parodies off his two CDs "basic bob" and "extreme bob" (see RobertPicardo.com for more) while dancing with the Borg character.

Picardo was then joined by Tim Russ ("Tuvok") and Robert Duncan McNeill ("Tom Paris"), who reminisced about their roles and the place their show played in the franchise's history. McNeill was particularly proud that Voyager broke ground with a female captain. "It really defined our show. Star Trek had not been known for the strongest female characters up until that point. I think what our show did was really reconceive how Star Trek looked at female characters, not just in Kate Mulgrew, but with B'Elanna and with Seven of Nine. I think it created a real, new perspective on female characters in the future, in science fiction."

Russ talked about the challenges of playing an emotionless Vulcan for seven years. "I think, having to do it over a period of time was a little bit troublesome, because as an actor you go through many years of learning how to perform your craft in exploring emotions and being able to portray emotions, and if you do a character without them for such a long time it can be stifling."

Picardo had the opportunity to talk about his latest TV project, Lyon's Den starring Rob Lowe, premiering this fall on NBC, Sundays at 10:00. "I play a human character, which was a stretch," he said. "I play a police detective who is investigating a very suspicious suicide, and I will be in, I think, six out of the first nine episodes." Then he oh-so-subtly hinted, "If every person in this room writes five letters each, I'll be on for the rest of the entire run. I wouldn't say that I'm 'begging,' but I'm certainly 'suggesting.'"

Nichelle Nichols

The first of three Original Series stars on stage Friday afternoon, Nichelle Nichols ("Uhura") tried to resist telling the same stories she's repeated numerous times at conventions, such as when Martin Luther King talked her into staying with the show, but fans were still interested and asked about them. One of those stories was about meeting Whoopi Goldberg. While shooting "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier" just across the way from Star Trek: The Next Generation, Nichols was hoping for an encounter with the Oscar-winning actress she admired so much. "So one day Richard Arnold [Gene Roddenberry's personal assistant] came to me and he said, 'Nichelle, um, I know you're really busy, but um, Whoopi Goldberg would like to meet you." She said anxiously, "I'm not that busy!" Arnold brought Goldberg to the movie set, and as Nichols relates it in a dead-on impression of the "Guinan" actress, she told her, "I'm a big fan of yours." Shocked, Nichols retorted, "I'm a big fan of yours!" Goldberg continued, as Nichols put it, "'Ever since I first saw you on television, I knew I was gonna be somebody 'cause you were there for me. I mean, you were there for me.' And I went, 'Wow.'"

Responding to a fan's question about her wardrobe in the Original Series, Nichols recounted, "They were the most comfortable costumes that I've been in at any time. They were utilitarian, comfortable, they were pretty. They also reflected the mini-skirts that we were wearing during that time. And it also reflected Gene Roddenberry's insistence that you don't have to lose the difference between the sexes to have parity and equality. Which I thought was incredible."