TrekUnited's campaign to save "Star Trek: Enterprise" was both brilliant and ridiculous. Its problem is it took on the right mission, but climbed aboard the wrong ship to accomplish that goal.

Or to put it in more cliché terms, the fans put together an amazing effort -- only to ultimately just bark up the wrong tree.

The fact that fans were willing to pony up more than $3 million of their own quatloos is amazing. But the question is: Why were they doing it? If it was merely to continue "Enterprise," then that's the most misguided reason of all.

Whatever you think of its merits, "Enterprise" itself was just that latest in a line of Trek series. Although the show will go down as one of the short-lived of the Trek incarnations, we fans have had to say farewell to its predecessors in years past. "Enterprise" itself offers nothing extraordinary to fight for beyond what its franchise brethren have already offered us. No, if it's just for the sake of "Enterprise," better to just say "good-bye."

Is the goal to save Star Trek itself? Certainly, a more laudable goal, but even it is also ill-considered.

You will find no bigger fan of Trek, writ large, than myself. It's the first sci-fi I discovered as a kid, and I grew up on it in the 1980s. But you have to ask yourself if there's anything today really there to be saved -- never mind the fact that I would argue Star Trek doesn't really want to be saved.

Sure, there are individuals within Paramount and elsewhere in the corporate machinery who love and support the franchise and would love to see it live on, but let's face it, throw $3 million at Viacom and you'd be lucky to illicit a sneeze.

As a huge capitalistic entity, $3 million is nothing to Viacom. Its decision to kill Star Trek was not over some handful of millions of dollars but rather over what it considers a "strategic direction" worth much more. So the fact that fans were willing to hand over $3 million is simply not meaningful in terms of Viacom's business plan.

Which is not to disparage the TrekUnited campaign, or to call the $3.14 million a paltry sum.

Not at all. It's just a matter of scale.

Instead of trying to give the $3.14 million to corporate executives who would use it as toilet paper, try giving it to someone to whom it would make all the difference. In the right hands, $3.14 million could pay for a season of one heckuva fine sci-fi series.

Of course, it's not going to be Star Trek. Star Trek itself, today, is dead and gone. But that doesn't mean the essence of Trek, the values and ideas that made it special, are gone. Quite the opposite, I'm certain they live on. They certainly do in former Trek scribe Ronald D. Moore, and within his series, "Battlestar Galactica."

So find another talented writer/producer, give him or her the money, and let them go at it. Distribute it online, or on DVD for a small fee, and I'd be more than happy to watch that series.

A former entertainment journalist, Scott Nance is a member of the USS Chesapeake, an independent science-fiction and Star Trek club in the Washington, D.C., area. He is a columnist for Airlock Alpha, and can be reached at scottnance@airlockalpha.com.