For Drexler, the thing that stands out most was the friends that he made over the years. “These people are still my friends, and I still work with many of them, too,” he said. Those friends included Mike and Denise Okuda. “I owe [Mike] much for [taking a chance on me], but the friendship that we have, it’s something you can’t put any price on.”

Star Trek: The Next Generation was the most fun time for Drexler. “I’ve been in this business for thirty-two years, and I’ve never seen anything like the cast on TNG,” he said. “You read about shows where they say it’s a big family and then you find out they really hated each other. Not on TNG. It was a genuine family and everyone had a ball. It was sheer fun, no matter how late you worked. Brent Spiner and Jonathan Frakes, the guys were wacky and totally loony. They didn’t take anything seriously until the camera was rolling. Honestly, I don’t think I ever saw a normal rehearsal. Every rehearsal had somebody trying to crack somebody else up. But once they called action, they were right on the money. If I could go back to a time, it would probably be to that show.”

After Star Trek: Enterprise wrapped, Drexler worried about future employment. “When Enterprise ended, I was thinking, ‘Man, I was on Star Trek shows for seventeen years! This could be the end of it! I’ll never work again! Who gets a streak of luck like that?’ But when I get home, there’s a message from Gary [Hutzel] on the answering machine. Lightning! Right away I knew he was going to ask me to come to Battlestar Galactica. I called him and he said, ‘I heard about Enterprise.’ I said, ‘Yeah…’ He said, ‘You know, Doug, every cloud has a silver lining.’ And that was it, I was on the show.

Drexler is currently working on Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome, and waiting to see if it is picked up as a series.

According to Billingsley, the future that Star Trek portrayed was a hopeful one. “For me, its success originally came from the idea that it was positing the hope and future for mankind, and (creator Gene) Roddenberry certainly was of a mind that Star Trek was designed to say first and foremost, ‘Yes we can.’ There is a time when different cultures and different races can bury the hatchet and we can find a way through our problems and thrive and grow.”

“When the show premiered in the 1960s we were going through a period in our history not unlike the period we’re going through now,” said Billingsley. “There was a tremendous amount of divide in our country…race riots, divisions over the Vietnam War, we’d lost a president, we were in a tremendous amount of social turmoil. And I think Star Trek suggested it was possible to get through that.”

Billingsley himself is not as optimistic about mankind as Roddenberry was. “While I admire the conceit of Star Trek, and the optimism of it, I don’t necessarily share that opinion,” he said. “I’m considerably more cynical about mankind.”

Star Trek: Enterprise ended after only four seasons, and Billingsley blames that on the studio and its greed. “But what happened with Voyager and our show Enterprise, and I don’t mean this in any way as a knock on our executive producers, …but Paramount was saying more, more, more, more, more, because they viewed this as a commercial product. Nothing (in television) works when it is brought into being by the marketing department. Paramount kind of sabotaged itself. I think they got greedy, and that’s what studios do, unfortunately, because they are run largely by bean counters.

“I say this, sounding harsh to my own ear: Everybody is in business to make a buck. But the idea that you have to have a product that has some artistic viability, that it just isn’t cash in, sometimes eludes the folks who are looking at the bottom line.”

Low ratings didn’t help the show either. “It’s a miracle we got four seasons,” said Billingsley. “Any other TV show would have been yanked after one season. Our ratings were abysmal. We opened well, we had a great audience for the first episode, and they watched it and they said, ‘This is nothing new. It’s the same Star Trek I’ve been watching for years and years. It’s a retread.’ And they ran away.”

Billingsley will be attending Starbase Indy, which begins today and runs through Sunday at the Indianapolis Marriott East in Indianapolis, Indiana.

The role is said to be a “principal role,” according to Deadline, but as to be expected, no details have been given.

Weller has been seen in Star Trek before. He played John Frederick Paxton in Star Trek: Enterprise (Terra Prime, Demons), where he was the xenophobic chief administrator of Luna’s Orpheus Mining Colony. Paxton created a half-Vulcan, half-Human baby using DNA from Trip Tucker and T’Pol. Paxton was revealed to be a follower of Colonel Green (reference from the original series’ episode The Savage Curtain).

November begins with René Auberjonois taking part in A Smut Sampler, at the Harry Ransom Center (Jessen Auditorium) at the University of Texas at Austin on Thursday, November 3 at 7 PM. The program, A Smut Sampler: A Light-Hearted Reading of Selections from Some Notorious Banned Books, is hosted by Isaiah Sheffler and will feature readings from books that were “banned, burned, seized and censored” in the past.

Next up is the Comikaze Expo which will be held on November 5-6 at the LA Convention Center. In attendance will be: Robert Beltran, Jennifer Lien, Tim Russ, Gary Graham, Robert Picardo, Garrett Wang, Marina Sirtis, Catherine Hicks, Richard Herd, Tony Todd, Celeste Yarnell, Bobby Clark and Chase Masterson.

Rounding out November is The Great Allentown Comic Con, which will be held from November 19-20 at the Merchants Square Mall in Allentown Pennsylvania. In attendance at The Great Allentown Comic Con will be Star Trek Voyager‘s Robert Picardo, and Star Trek author Peter David.

In December, Starbase Indy will take place from December 9-11 at the Indianapolis Marriott East. In attendance at StarBase Indy will be: John Billingsley, Tony Todd, Bonita Friedericy, Deborah Downey (Hippie in The Way to Eden) and cartoonist David Reddick (The Trek Life).

Although fans can’t yet rent The Captains on DVD through Netflix, they can stream it if they subscribe to that service.

In The Captains, William Shatner interviewed the other actors who have played Star Trek captains on various Star Trek televised shows.

For those wanting their own copy of The Captains, the DVD was released on October 18th and is available through Amazon and other retailers.

The unnamed project is based on an article written by Laura Blumenfeld for ELLE magazine, which was about the female agents on the Secretary of State’s security detail.

The new drama will “revolve around Diplomatic Security special agents who travel the world protecting American officials on diplomatic missions and will explore the personal and professional challenges these young women and men face while taking on one of the most dangerous jobs in the country.”

Sussman will executive produce as well as write for the project.

In To Brave the Storm, “Things are looking pretty grim,” said Martin. “Earth is in the worst shape it’s been in since the war began.”

“Because of T’Pau’s commitment to Syrrannite pacifism, Vulcan is still sitting out the conflict,” said Martin. “The rest of the Coalition has essentially crumbled because Vulcan’s pullout has spooked Andoria and Tellar. Starfleet has fallen back, making the Sol system’s defense its number-one priority. Jonathan Archer is forced to seek help elsewhere, hat in hand, and isn’t having much luck despite his concerted effort to rehabilitate Enterprise’s reputation, which the Kobayashi Maru disaster has tarnished pretty badly. Meanwhile, the Romulans are wrapping up a distracting conflict out on the Empire’s far Beta-quadrant frontier, and this allows them to mobilize more ships than ever before against a resource-starved Earth and her ever-dwindling list of friends, allies, and colonies. Did I mention that things are looking pretty grim?”

In To Brave the Storm, Martin has put his characters through the wringer. “I like putting characters into situations that test them severely,” he said. “It’s the only way to show what they’re really made of. Since Archer was the inadvertent author of what would one day become Starfleet’s Kobayashi Maru test, I wanted him to start thinking that the war might be turning into a no-win scenario for Earth. And I hoped he would find the inner strength to face death with some dignity and grace, ready to die with his boots on, as it were.

Archer wasn’t the only character undergoing trials and tribulations. “It was also important to me to give Hoshi Sato some stage time, showing how the war had matured her,” said Martin. “I needed to provide some closure to Travis Mayweather’s relationship with Archer, showing him coming full circle in working out the resentment he has felt toward the captain ever since the Kobayashi Maru incident. And most importantly, I wanted to bring a resolution to Trip’s fate, as well as to his relationship with T’Pol. Enough said on that for now, I think.”

Star Trek Enterprise: The Romulan War: To Brave the Storm was released today.

After Show with David Bedella is a show that consists of “informal live interviews with television, film and stage personalities, as well as music performed by Bedella and his jazz trio. The evenings will be rounded off with an open mic session.”

Bakula will appear in the first show, which will take place at London’s Alley Cat Bar in Soho, on Thursday, October 13. The show runs from 10 PM to 3:30 AM.

For ticket information, head to the link located here.

Star Trek was at its best when exploring current day issues in the futurist setting and Star Trek: Enterprise was no exception. “…the AIDS-metaphor episode with T’Pol was very strong,” said Braga. “It had to do with Vulcan mind melds, at that point in Vulcan history, being something that was considered taboo. To me, that’s an interesting exploration of Star Trek and also tells us something about people who are ostracized.”

Another favorite Enterprise episode of Braga’s was Dear Doctor. “…Another early one that I really loved, that I thought was a classic was called Dear Doctor, where the framing device was Dr. Phlox writing to a human counterpart on his alien world,” said Braga. “It had to do with the co-evolution of two humanoid species on a planet and which would survive. It was just a great episode of Star Trek. That’s one I look at fondly.”

But an early episode of Enterprise wasn’t as fondly remembered. “Ironically enough, my least favorite episode was a very, very early one called Terra Nova,” said Braga. “There happens to be an irony there. It was about finding a lost colony of humans, but it was boring and it was unfortunate that it was such an early episode.”

Enterprise ended after only four seasons and while Braga is willing to take the blame for various bad episodes, he does not believe that either Rick Berman or himself are to blame for the early demise of the series. “I will take full responsibility for any flawed or downright bad storytelling or creative decisions that hurt the franchise,” he said. “I don’t think, looking back, that that’s the main reason it went away. So I don’t think Rick and I killed the franchise. That’s absurd. Did I stay on the franchise too long? Was the storytelling feeling feeble and familiar? I’m going to say no.

“I look at season three of Enterprise and say the whole Xindi species concept was really cool. That’s a science fiction concept I’d never seen before. You had insects and aquatics with intelligence and culture. I thought that was a fascinating idea and we turned it into a season-long arc that I thought was super-fresh. I thought Manny Coto came in and breathed fresh air into season four. So I thought, creatively, the show was not on life support in season four, very far from it.”

Given time, any show will wind down, according to Braga. “But I do think there comes a point, whether it’s Star Trek, Gunsmoke, I Love Lucy, when a show has run its course,” he said. “One day, even Law & Order will be off the air. Whether you want to call it franchise fatigue or whatever, it’s not always just about the show.”

Braga spent fifteen years working on various Trek shows, caring deeply about his work. “Do you think I would have spent fifteen years on something if it wasn’t in my blood and wasn’t the most passionate thing in my life?” he said in response to fans who have been critical of his efforts.

While fan criticism is an inevitable part of the job, Braga remains grateful to those fans who backed him over the years. “There are also fans who are really kind and supportive, and I can’t tell you how much I appreciate those people. Those are the fans that kept me going for fifteen years.”

Braga is currently working on Terra Nova, which debuts Monday, September 26 at 8:00 PM on Fox with a two-hour premiere.

Star Trek: Enterprise was not only regular work for Montgomery, but it made him more visible in Hollywood. “It was a great time! That was obviously my real big break,” he said. “Because of the legacy that the Star Trek franchise has, it changed everything for me; it completely changed the game for me.”

Montgomery also took away valuable lessons from his time on Enterprise. “I learned a lot about being in front of the camera,” he said. “I learned a massive level of professionalism, so it helped to keep myself grounded amidst all of the chaos that my life had been turned into. But overall, it was a pretty amazing experience quite honestly. To be able to go to work and do what you love on a daily basis and actually get paid well!”

The grandson of jazz musician Wes Montgomery, Anthony Montgomery is a singer in addition to being an actor. His latest single, Stimulation, is available on iTunes. “When I was on Enterprise, I completed an album with my own money and got a German record label that distributed me,” he said. “I didn’t have an actual music team behind me because I was still focusing on acting. First and foremost, acting is what I do and love. I love the craft of acting and everything about it. This was just another extension of me creating myself and expressing myself in a creative fashion.’

Montgomery also writes, and has completed a graphic novel, Miles Away. “My graphic novel, Miles Away, is about a sixteen-year-old African American boy who has super powers and goes on a mission to find his parents and gets recruited by a secret organization on Earth by a couple of extra-terrestrials to come and liberate their own world,” he explained. “I just received the first thirteen pages back in color. It’s going to be ninety-six pages, full color and I’m looking at a November/December launch of it.

“I’m looking at having an independent launch and doing everything myself. I’ve gone to various media outlets and Star Trek graphic novel publishers, but that would take six months to a year to have it ready. I don’t want to wait until December 2012; I want to go ahead and get it out to the fans. So I’m doing everything I can to get it out by the end of this year. I’m really excited about it and I will say again, it’s just one of those avenues of me creating myself and an extension of my entertainment side, just in the form of a book.”

Montgomery expressed his appreciation of his fans. “The biggest thing that I want my fans to know is that I truly, truly appreciate them,” he said. “I know Darryl [Single Ladies] isn’t the most loved by the fans, and to me that means that I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing. If I can evoke that kind of emotion out of you, that’s what my job is. That’s why I got into acting in the first place. I thank them for being supportive. Thank all you wonderful fans for giving Single Ladies a second season. Please continue to support your boy! Follow me on Twitter, @Amontgomery5. Check out my new website, AnthonyMontgomery.com. There is a contact link on there if anyone wants to get something to me. I want them to join me on Facebook as well, Anthony Montgomery Fan Page.”