"Enterprise" ends its second season on UPN Wednesday night, and it doesn't come without some ongoing debate on the viability of the Star Trek franchise. But there's a good chance that the events in the second season finale, "The Expanse," will find some new members of the audience willing to tune in instead of going to The WB to watch "Smallville" next season.

But now that "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" is gone, it seems up to "Enterprise" to help keep the network afloat. Series star Scott Bakula (Capt. Jonathan Archer), however, feels that's no different than what the series has been doing from the start.

"I think we have been (carrying the network) for the past two years," Bakula recently told TV Guide. "I'm just going by the (Nielsen) numbers. Because 'Buffy' started at The WB, there was a different energy about that show, with all the turmoil surrounding it. The Star Trek franchise has always been a big part of UPN. We've held our own on Wednesdays, though we've got work to do, obviously. There's even more pressure on us now."

Bakula said he recognized there was a slump going on in fandom for Star Trek, but it should be expected for something that has been ongoing for decades.

"The idea of Star Trek has been around for 37 years now," Bakula said. "It's always a challenge to keep pumping life into it. It's like, are people as excited to see 'Terminator 3' as the last 'Terminator'?

"I wasn't quite ready, this season, for us to be singled out the way we were in such a negative fashion. I was surprised by that. Any TV show has a second season slump where viewership is down from the initial tune-in. The reality is, we're one show on a network that's struggling and doesn't have 100 percent coverage (in television markets) across the country. All we can do is keep trying to make great episodes. The fans that are watching us really seem to enjoy it, and at the end of the day, that's who we work for."

If nothing else, Bakula said that with bigger weapons, there should be a lot more action in the show's third season, which begins in the fall.

"It's really more a function of costs than anything, how much action you can do in an hour show," Bakula said. "I think we get an awful lot of action in, to be honest, but we've refitted the ship with bigger weapons and cannons. It's awfully phallic. Isn't that what guns are all about?"

Executive producer Rick Berman told Sci-Fi Wire that there is a lot of death in the second season finale, and the parallels between this episode, where more than a million people die, and the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S., where nearly 4,000 people died, weren't realized until deep into the process.

"We were literally way into the scripting stages before we started to see the parallel," Berman said. "I think one of the things that motivated us is in analyzing the 10 existing Star Trek movies, we were looking for something that would help torque up our series and add a little dimension to get a little added excitement towards the end of the season. We did a little analysis of our own, and we saw that two of the most popular movies ... were 'Star Trek IV,' which was the one about whales, and 'Star Trek VIII,' which was 'First Contact.' These were both films that had to do with the future of Earth being at stake. And we decided that that would be a great place to start.

"It wasn't literally for a long time that we suddenly realized (the Sept. 11 parallel). But the idea of aliens coming to destroy Earth has been around a lot longer than 9/11."

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