"After 18 straight years on the air and 750-some episodes, the current run of Star Trek is over. Which is a good thing. It needs a rest," executive producer Brannon Braga told an audience at Claremont McKenna College last week.

A report at StarTrek.com contains Braga's reflections on the cancellation of the series he co-created with Rick Berman, with whom he also wrote the series finale, currently scheduled to air May 13th. "It could be a couple of years, it could be eight years," Braga said of the timetable for Star Trek's return. "I don't see it as a cancellation, I see it as more of a gestation."

The longtime franchise writer, who came aboard during The Next Generation and became an executive producer during the run of Star Trek: Voyager, admitted that he was depressed that his most common question had changed from "Why is Star Trek so popular?" to "Why is Star Trek coming to an end?" He said that even if Enterprise aired the best episode of Star Trek ever filmed, "people have seen enough and they've devoted enough of their time and lives...they don't watch television as much." He insisted that he did not believe that the quality of the show had declined, only that it had oversaturated its market.

Braga said that because people anticipated the cancellation, the reaction among his colleagues was disappointment rather than shock when it came. "It's a bittersweet time for me, because I basically spent nearly half my life on the Star Trek franchise," he said. In addition to the very successful Star Trek: First Contact, Braga has written or co-written more than 100 episodes of the various Star Trek series.

Of those, he admitted that the worst episode he ever wrote was Star Trek: Voyager's "Threshold", in which Janeway and Paris turned into giant salamanders. Ironically, Threshold is now the title of the pilot he is working on for CBS, though that will be a contemporary series about a woman investigating alien life. He joked that Next Gen characters seemed to be taking Adult Education courses to better themselves, confessing that he wasn't really sure how the economy worked in a future without money.

For more, see the original report at StarTrek.com.

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