With this week's announced ending of Star Trek: Enterprise comes many other endings. For the cast and crew comes an end to one of the best gigs in Hollywood. Most will tell you that working on Star Trek is like working for an extended family, a very talented and creative family. Over the years, the consistent quality of production on Star Trek has seen many well-deserved Emmy nominations and awards and the show was always breaking new ground for science fiction television. All of these qualities are to be expected, given the level of talent on display in virtually every department of production. But for now some of the crew who have worked on one Trek show or another, some for nearly 18 years, may find themselves on a new, different type of hiatus, one imposed by dint of a network cancellation.

There is another important and long-serving aspect of Star Trek that is also about to go on indefinite hiatus — the nearly unbroken service of Stages 8 and 9 on the Paramount Pictures lot in Hollywood. Since 1978 when initial production for "Star Trek: Phase II" — the planned successor to TOS — began and later morphed into "Star Trek: The Motion Picture," sets bearing various bridges, sickbays, corridors and more have stood on Paramount's Stage 8 and Stage 9 almost continuously.

(Prior to Star Trek, these stages had a history of their own. The classic "Sunset Boulevard" featured several scenes filmed in and around these stages, and Gloria Swanson's famed line "All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up" was shot on Stage 18, directly across from Stages 8 and 9. Stage 18, by the way, is where the Bridge and Engineering currently reside for Enterprise. Prior to Enterprise, the last movie shot on Stage 18 was the Tom Cruise vehicle "Vanilla Sky." And while we're on the subject of stage trivia, we've also been told that the Hitchcock classic "Rear Window" was shot on Stage 8.)

The exact order of how these stages were utilized may be sketchy now, but we will try and summarize how Star Trek, post-Original Series, has used these legendary stages. (Note: The original Star Trek was filmed on the old Desilu Stages 9 and 10 for most of the run of the Original Series. Those stages were later renamed 31 and 32 following the Desilu merger with Paramount.)

Paramount's Stage 9 was officially assigned to "Phase II" in '78. Production made it to the building of sets, and screen tests were shot, but the "Phase II" sets were ultimately revamped when the show did not materialize. Within a few months everything was transitioned to "Star Trek: The Motion Picture," and this stage has been used for Star Trek ever since. Following the making of "ST:TMP," Stage 9 was used roughly once every two years throughout most of the '80s for Star Trek's II, III and IV and then the subsequent shows. Star Trek: The Next Generation set down its roots in 1987, until the show's end in1994. Star Trek: Voyager followed soon after, running from 1994-2001, with Enterprise occupying the stages from 2001-05. There was a short break in continuity here: When the sets for Voyager were struck in order to build new ones for Enterprise, it represented the first time they had simply not redressed and remodeled the previous sets. They built Enterprise from scratch, as it were. It's a pretty safe bet (with the possible exception of some daytime soap operas) that these stages may have been the longest continuously standing, working sets in Hollywood.