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.

Jonathan Frakes (Commander Riker) was reunited with Michael Dorn (Worf) and Suzie Plakson (K’Ehleyr) on stage on Saturday, but he immediately jumped into the audience to ask his former co-stars some joking questions, such as, “What is Patrick Stewart (Captain Picard) really like?” to which Dorn responded, “Patrick Stewart is really nice, but he’s not that talented. It’s just the accent.”

The three actors reminisced about the camaraderie between the TNG cast, to the point that their joking occasionally scared directors off. “[The cast was] funny enough that they didn’t have to do practical jokes,” Plakson said.

“We ran a couple directors out of the biz,” Dorn admitted, while Frakes confessed, “We were like bad children.”

Dorn defended the cast’s professional attitude once the cameras started rolling. “When they said action, we were on,” he said. But after the director yelled cut, it was a different story. “Jonathan would run around the set, singing until he [literally] fell through one of the walls!” Dorn recalled.

Frakes mentioned he’s going to be directing an episode of Chuck, and discussed his gig directing the TNT show Leverage. “Whenever possible I offer roles to them jobs,” he says of his former co-stars on TNG. “And they turn them down. I offered Brent Spiner (Data) a job on Leverage. Brent said, ‘I don’t know Johnny.’ I said, ‘You don’t have to read.’ Brent said, ‘Eh… call me when someone turns it down.” After that happened, Frakes called Spiner back and said, “‘Now you have to do it.’ And he showed up.”

Dorn penned a romantic comedy with his producing partner and revealed that former co-star Marina Sirtis (Counselor Troi) is set to star in it. He shared that his dream project would be making a pilot of a TV show he wrote entitled High Flight about a flight school.

On Sunday, Robert Duncan McNeill (Tom Paris) took the stage to discuss his role on Voyager as well as his long-running directing gig on the NBC show Chuck. “Star Trek was my last acting job,” McNeill said of Voyager, noting he’s been directing since playing Tom Paris. “They keep talking to me on Chuck, saying [I] should do a guest role as a bad guy or something, but I don’t know.”

Though he’s no longer acting, he’s still close with many of his Voyager co-stars. “On most shows, you do just move on [after they end],” McNeill said. “But Star Trek is different because it’s got [the fans], a built in family. The guys [from Voyager] have remained close. It started the first season of Voyager—we went out for a steak dinner. It was so fun we decided to make it a regular thing. We haven’t really moved on: we still hang out, the guys still get together [regularly].”

McNeill told the audience that former co-star Garrett Wang (Harry Kim) had come to Chuck to shadow him as a director. “[He's] been spending some time with me on the Chuck set,” McNeill said. “Tim Russ (Tuvok) was doing a day on The Whole Truth, which films right next door to us, so we had a mini-reunion.”

McNeill acknowledges that the closeness between the cast of Voyager is a special thing. “I [directed and produced] a show called What About Brian a few years ago, and I saw one of the actors a few weeks ago, and he said he doesn’t see anyone [from that show].”

Because Chuck, which was recently renewed for a full season, has struggled in the ratings during the course of its run, McNeill worried about the show’s survival in its early years. “I kept thinking the show would get cancelled after the first season and the writers’ strike,” he admitted. “[Now] I actually feel like we’re a hit for NBC. As Heroes was fading, as The Event is fading, we’re actually up eight to ten percent. The cast is awesome and the concept is incredible.”

McNeill enjoys being on Chuck, and finds the show’s tone is the right one for him. “I like being on a comedy,” he said. “It’s more fun. I couldn’t do a Law & Order show now. I wouldn’t want to spend my day talking about horrible crimes; I’d rather talk about fart jokes.”

When asked about his style of directing versus that of former co-star Roxann Dawson (B’Elanna Torres), McNeill shared they have very different sensibilities as directors. “She’s very serious, and I’m an idiot,” he joked, adding, “She’s incredibly well prepared. I go off instinct.” When asked further about his directing style, McNeill revealed, “I’m an actor’s director because I’m always looking for that emotional experience.”

McNeill cited “Someone to Look Over Me” and “Parturition” as favorite episodes of Voyager, along with “Caretaker,” the show’s very first episode. “I like the pilot; the first episode was so epic,” he said. “I think we shot for 28 days, which is like a feature.”

“The first season or two, there was a lot of confusion about who these characters were,” he went on. “The writers were throwing everything and the kitchen sink at us. We were confused, [wondering], ‘Do we like each other? Do we get along?’ The studio and the writers were at a loss for what the show was. Because of that, the actors had a hand in the direction [their characters took].”

McNeill had qualms with his character early on in the show’s run. “My character early on was not a nice guy,” he admitted. “He was a womanizer, he was rude to people. Everybody hated me! I hated me—I was a jerk. I told the writers, if you keep writing this guy this way, you might as well write him off because no one is going to like him.”

Despite Tom Paris’s initial introduction, McNeill doesn’t agree with comparisons that suggest Paris and the character McNeill played on TNG, Nick Locarno, are essentially the same character. “People say Tom Paris and Nick Locarno are the same, but I don’t think so at all,” McNeill said. “Nick Locarno pretended to be a good guy in the outside but was really a rotten guy on the inside, whereas Tom Paris pretended to be a rotten guy on the outside but was really a good guy on the inside.”

In addition to his job directing on Chuck, McNeill has a project at Warner Brothers entitled 30 Minutes. “[It's] about a pizza delivery place and [the] misfits [who work there],” he revealed, describing it as “My Name is Earl/Scrubs mixed with 24 and Chuck.” The director also has a project at ABC Studios about “an old Hollywood hotel where crazy things happen.”

Enterprise actor John Billingsley (Dr. Phlox) followed McNeill onto the stage for an irreverent session during which he joked with fans about everything from his co-stars to politics. “I’m left alone on stage because they’re all getting stoned!” he said of his former co-stars Connor Trinneer (Trip Tucker) and Dominick Keating (Malcolm Reed), who weren’t able to attend the convention.

Billingsley updated fans on his current projects: “I’m doing an episode of The Mentalist [right now]. Connor Trinneer is doing the same episode. I’m not the killer, and I’m not the victim. I’m [also] doing a couple of indie films.”

The actor also detailed two practical jokes he played on Enterprise lead Scott Bakula (Captain Archer). “For Scott Bakula’s birthday party—his 70th, I think—I dressed up as his first wife. I had large bosoms and a floozy blonde wig and came in with a vodka bottle, saying, ‘Scott, Scott, how could you leave me?’ I didn’t check if his children were there and they were, and they started crying. They thought I was going to their dad!”

Billingsley also pranked Bakula during the filming of “Dear Doctor” in the show’s first season. “There was a running voice over, and there was a scene in which I’m on the bridge and we stopped to pick up a disabled space ship. I recorded [a voice over] for the first rehearsal that said, ‘Look at the ass on that captain! I’d like to pull his pants down and give him a jolly rogering!’ Scott took it well.”

He also added that he wasn’t happy with the show’s oft criticized finale, “These Are The Voyages…,” joking that he would have liked to see a different ending for his character. “It would have been nice if I’d been an intergalactic god,” Billingsley said of how he would have liked the show to end for Dr. Phlox.

The audio drama of the Fall of the House of Usher, an adaptation that “stays true to Poe’s original vision with only minor changes in dialogue,” has four speaking roles: Roderick Usher, voiced by O’Rear; Madeline Usher voiced by Friedericy; The Doctor, voiced by Billingsley; and the narrator, voiced by Sorbo.

The Fall of the House of Usher is the first in a series of planned original recordings by Macabre Mansion, who hopes to “produce and preserve significant works of classic literature in an audio theater format.”

A portion of the proceeds from the sale of the audio CD will go to A World Fit For Kids, which “give kids the training, tools and support they need to achieve their goals and lead fit and fulfilling lives,” in hopes of mitigating the current childhood obesity epidemic.

The Fall of the House of Usher will be available on CD in October.

Many fans may not have been happy with the finale to Star Trek: Enterprise, and Billingsley himself had mixed feelings about it, but he urged fans to rethink their annoyance toward Rick Berman and Brannon Braga.

According to Billingsley, the finale didn’t quite fit in with the rest of the fourth season. “The last season had so much of [writer and executive producer] Manny Coto‘s fingerprints on it that I think one of the things fans felt was a tonal and almost spiritual disconnect between the nature of the scripts throughout the fourth season and the final script. It was as if suddenly somebody from another cosmos dropped in and wrote the script, above and beyond the fact that the Enterprise‘s story was swallowed up by the framing device. I think people had just gotten used to Manny’s voice. I missed it in the final episode. Frankly, it should have been a two-parter. Our storyline needed to wind up.”

But Billingsley felt that Berman and Braga were expressing their emotion over what they felt was the ending of Star Trek after years of hard work on the franchise. “There are obviously mixed feelings among the fans about the legacies of Rick Berman and Brannon Braga,” Billingsley said, “but they were largely responsible for shepherding the franchise through many, many years of shows that people loved and kept watching. So they deserve a lot of credit. I think for them, the idea that they were going to be saying goodbye to Star Trek had a tremendous emotional weight. So they felt, and I can understand this, that they wanted to write the last episode of Enterprise.”

The finale story seemed to trivialize the third and fourth seasons of Enterprise, according to Billingsley. “I’m all over the map on this one because I have a lot of different feelings about it,” he said. “My problem with the final episode, ultimately, was that by jumping ahead however many years we jumped ahead, it was as if anything we did in the third and fourth seasons had no real weight. It seemed like the third and fourth seasons were being dismissed, which I’m sure was not the intention, but that was one of the things that bothered me.”

The finale meant the last appearance of Dr. Phlox. Would Billingsley return as Phlox again if he could in a Star Trek project? “I’d be delighted,” he said. “But is there any chance that one could make a wager on the odds of it happening? I’d bet my house it won’t happen, but if it did, sure, I’d want to be involved. I enjoyed playing Phlox.”

Playing the cheerful and amiable Dr. Phlox was a nice change from the actor’s usual roles and reflected more of Billingsley himself. “Because I’d played so many psychopaths and sociopaths and serial killers and tormented souls and drug addicts and lunatics,” said Billingsley, “Dr. Phlox is perhaps my favorite part if only because it was a chance to be giddy and delightful for four years. I rarely have the opportunity to be that kind of guy.”

Billingsley had a favorite and a least favorite episode of Enterprise. His favorite episode was one that featured Trip, Similitude. “I thought that was the best episode for a lot of reasons,” he said. “Everyone in the cast was involved and everyone had an emotional through-line. Some episodes, of any show, actors are used to convey information or they’re shunted aside. That episode, I thought it was the best of our ensemble pieces and it did what Star Trek does best, which is to deal with a topical question that has some sociological significance in a way that brings humanist values into play. And I got to handle a baby.”

The worst episode, in his opinion, was Precious Cargo. “[Padma Lakshmi as an alien princess] and Trip were on the run from whoever was pursuing her,” Billingsley explained. “I don’t remember all the details. I thought that was an unfortunate episode all around. It just didn’t work. Again, no fault of the actors. It just didn’t come together. And it was at a touchy point in our second season. We were holding on to not-great, but adequate audience numbers and after that episode our numbers just plummeted and we never got the audience back again.”

Unlike Bob Picardo (EMH) on Star Trek: Voyager, Billingsley didn’t really get the chance to have his story ideas incorporated into Enterprise, but had he been able to do that, he had definite ideas on what he would have liked to have seen for his character. “Bob Picardo, I think, did a wonderful job on Voyager of asking them for stories and suggesting plot ideas,” said Billingsley. “I did a little of that in the first couple of years, but didn’t make any headway, so I let that go. But for me it would’ve had to do with the Denobulan culture. I would have been interested in finding out more about Phlox’s species and his people and what their belief systems were. Any time I got a little information about Denobula, that was wonderful. It helped me flesh the guy out. Any story that moved in that world would have been great.”

Sunday, August 8th opened with a reunion of actors Connor Trinneer (Trip Tucker), Dominick Keating (Malcolm Reed), John Billingsley (Dr. Phlox), Anthony Montgomery (Travis Mayweather), Stephen Culp (Hayes) and Matt Winston (Daniels) from Star Trek: Enterprise. Keating immediately cracked a joke when Enterprise‘s premature cancellation was referenced, quipping that, “John Billingsley wanted too much money.” Trinneer followed up, adding, “Of course, if your character gets killed, you don’t care [about the cancellation]!”

The panel was asked about leading man Scott Bakula (Captain Archer), prompting Winston to joke, “He’s so dreamy! It was always me and Scott Bakula in the future, sweaty, lost and alone.” On a more serious note, the frequent Enterprise guest star said of Bakula, “He made me feel so at home. Scott was wonderful.” When asked about his father, legendary character artist Stan Winston, Winston noted that his family had founded the Stan Winston School for those wishing to study character arts and effects.

Montgomery spoke to his character’s upbeat personality. “I tried to keep a youthful exuberance about everything,” the actor said. When the audience expressed enthusiasm for the idea of going up in space on a shuttle flight, Montgomery asked, “Would you actually want to go into space? Think about how many things went wrong on our ship!”

Trinneer fielded a question about the relationship between his character and the Vulcan T’Pol (Jolene Blalock), prompting him to say, “It seemed to me for a long time it was one-sided. I finally said, you guys took Trip’s spine and stomped on it. I said she has to kiss him and he has to walk away. And they did it.”

Culp had a difficult time at first determining how his character fit into the scope of the show. “It was sketchy at first,” he said. “The second episode I did, “The Shipment,” it was like, why am I here? [Hayes was] a man of few words, a man of action. When Malcolm and Hayes fight, it’s like, ‘Why don’t you let me do my job?’”

Keating spoke about his latest guest role, saying, “I’m shooting Sons of Anarchy at the moment. I’m wearing a lot of leather!” while Billingsley commented on his appearances on the HBO drama True Blood last season, saying, “I spent most of second season without clothes on! I shagged anything in sight, including a pine tree. I hope they bring me back!”

Recently knighted Sir Patrick Stewart took the stage in the afternoon, auctioning off a jacket he received during the filming of the third X-Men movie, X Men: The Last Stand, with the proceeds going to Huddersfield Town Football Club’s Academy, of which Stewart is the president. The jacket went for a whopping $10,000 after an enthusiastic fan called out a bid while Stewart was describing how he customized the blue jacket with white tape to make it the color of the Huddersfield Town “Terriers.”

Stewart, who stated he’s been “doing a lot of theater,” said his version of “Macbeth” will be airing in early October on PBS. Stewart said of the play, “It’s scary and unpleasant at times, but you’ve got to be brave. He went on to joke, adding “After all, you’ve seen Michael Dorn‘s work.” Stewart also shared that he plans to reprise his role in “A Christmas Carol” one more time, noting that, “My life ambition has been to do one performance of ‘A Christmas Carol’ in the East Room of The White House.”

Brent Spiner interrupted the proceedings, stepping up to the mike and referring to his former co-star as “Lord Stewart” before asking him about “funny dots” on his head in reference to a dermatological procedure Stewart recently underwent.

When Spiner took the stage, a fan asked him about the possibility of seeing Data in an upcoming Star Trek film. “It’s really not up to me,” Spiner replied. “I don’t think I’ll be playing Data again. I thought about it, and then I took a look at myself. Data with white hair?”

Spiner hinted at projects he has in development, including a novel, a pilot he recently shot, a feature film in the works and a nightclub act he recently completed. And, “I’m going to be knighted by the Queen and I’ll be in the next Star Trek movie!” he teased. He went on more seriously, “Star Trek was a great gift that was given to me that I was allowed to be a part of, and I’m just happy about that. I think Star Trek is the biggest thing that ever happened in entertainment in America. It goes on and on. One never imagines you’ll be a part of something that’s essentially American history.”

When Stewart joined Spiner on stage, the two took plenty of cracks at each other. “Isn’t it true that the other guys on Star Trek used to call you Spiner the Whiner?” Stewart asked, while Spiner queried whether Stewart’s knighthood for “Services to Drama” was not in fact for being a “Drama Queen”?

Michael Dorn (Worf) closed out the convention, telling fans he’s started a small production company in order to make small movies. He would like to direct former TNG co-star Marina Sirtis (Counselor Troi) as Maria Callas, but has concerns. “I’m not really sure about directing Marina because we’re best friends,” Dorn said. “We talked to each other like brother and sister. So I’m not sure how that will translate to director-actor.”

Dorn recently revisited his work on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which gave him an even greater appreciation for his character. “This is a guy who was on a mission to get information that was going to save millions of lives,” he said of Worf in the episode “Change of Heart.” “Jadzia [Dax, Terry Farrell] is hurt and he has to leave her. And he’s like, ‘Forget this, I’m going back to get my old lady.’ And that’s what I like about the guy: he’s unpredictable. I like the guy, I really like the guy.”

Dorn praised the development of Worf from his days on TNG to his stint on DS9. “I liked the evolution of the character,” he said. “I don’t necessarily think he’s a tragic character. I think he had a rough life. If anything, I wish that they hadn’t killed Jadzia. I don’t question much, but I do question that.” Dorn wasn’t pleased that he didn’t avenge his on-screen wife. “When this guy killed Jadzia, the Klingon thing is to hunt the guy down and kill him!” he noted. “In the last episode, [Worf] should have gone over and just slashed him up.”

And what would he have wanted next for his character, after eleven seasons on TNG and DS9? “I wanted him to take over the Klingon Empire,” Dorn said.

Armin Shimerman, Robert Picardo, Ethan Phillips and John Billingsley are forming the “Bald(ing) Eagles of Star Trek” team, and are looking for people to sign up to join them for an “afternoon of adventure.”

“The Los Angeles Audubon promotes the protection of birds and other wildlife through recreation, education,
conservation and restoration. They are celebrating their Centennial with a ‘Bird-a-thon’, a week-long ‘species trek’ across L.A. County.

“Between May 1-May 9, teams, accompanied by experienced birders, will select a Los Angeles County hot birding spot, and venture forth, in a competition to see which team can spot the most species! ”

Thirty people will be able to join the quartet which will meet, picnic on a catered lunch and then head out to “bird.”

The price is $150 per person. This also includes the L.A. Audubon’s Centennial Celebration, which will be held directly after the afternoon of picnicking and bird-watching.

For those who can’t attend the afternoon but are interested in the Centennial Celebration, the cost for that event is $50 per person. At the Celebration, “The winning team will be lauded, drinks and grub will be consumed, and L.A. Audubon’s remarkable contribution to the health and vitality of our community will be hallelujahed.”

The L.A. Audubon website can be found here

“This is going to freak me out,” said Billingsley, when the man assigned to translate began his task. “Start drinking,” he said to the translator, to whom he had given a bottle of booze.

“I cannot,” said the man.

“I need another translator!” said Billingsley, to laughter and applause from the audience. The next translator took a hearty drink from the bottle. “Now THAT’s a translator!” shouted Billingsley.

Not to be outdone, Billingsley’s wife Bonnie, when called out by Billingsley, ran out with a roll of toilet paper in one hand and a long strip of toilet paper in the other hand. “I’m sorry I was in the bathroom,” she explained.

When her husband gave away ham sandwiches provided for them to the audience, Bonnie said, “This is what John does with everything we own!”

“Who wants my pants?” said Billingsley.

“Nein. Nein on the pant-ze” joked Bonnie. “How do you say pants?”

Billingsley opened up the floor to questions from the audience. “What’s your favorite episode from Star Trek: Enterprise and why?” was the first question.

“Anything where he had a lot of lines, or was naked,” said Bonnie.

“I quite liked the episode Dear Doctor, which was on in the first season,” said Billingsley. “I thought that episode was the first episode that began to treat the doctor as if he were a three-dimensional person. I also liked the episode where my wife appeared, the fictional wife. And then she wanted to sleep with Trip. That seemed a little unfair to me, but I liked it anyway.”

Dragon*Con runs from Friday, September 4-Monday, September 7 and the TrekTrak programming includes three Star Trek Captains. In addition to Shatner, Patrick Stewart (Picard) and Kate Mulgrew (Janeway) are scheduled to appear.

The other Star Trek actors  are: Garrett Wang (Kim,) John Billingsley (Phlox,) Anthony Montgomery (Mayweather) and Leonard Nimoy (Spock.)

Shatner and Nimoy will host a one hour Q&A session at 10 A.M. on Friday, September 4. Nimoy will make two additional panel appearances; one on Saturday at 4 P.M. and Sunday at 10 A.M.

The TrekTrak show, a Tonight Show-type event, will return. Patrick Stewart and Kate Mulgrew will be interviewed by Mr. Watts and co-host James Cawley (Star Trek: Phase II.)

Other Star Trek guest stars due to appear on various discussion panels are: Louise Fletcher (Kai Winn,) Richard Herd (Admiral Paris,) Alan Ruck (Captain Harriman) and Dwight Schultz (Reginald Barclay.)

As reported by Airlock Alpha, Senter faces two counts of theft as well as four counts of unfair or deceptive business practices.
Last July, Senter canceled the Boston JumpCon. “Many factors that needed to come together to make it happen simply did not,” he explained at the time. “We tried everything humanly possible and were unable to overcome the insurmountable obstacles.”

JumpCon failed to remove Star Trek: Enterprise‘s John Billingsley (Phlox) from the JumpCon Boston convention, in spite of Billingsley’s request to do so. “If our names remain on their website after [July 11],” posted Billingsley on his website, “JumpCON is clearly engaging in a form of fraudulent advertising.”

Senter will be arraigned in Hillsborough County Superior Court in New Hampshire this Friday.

To read more, head to the article located here.