The fans blame Rick Berman. And Berman blames the network UPN. The back and forth finger-pointing misses a larger point, however.

In the big picture, the terrorists killed Star Trek on Sept. 11, 2001, as certainly as they killed each and every victim of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the flight that crashed into Pennsylvania. To be sure, Berman, the former Trek czar, and UPN actually share much blame for bringing Trek low. Under Berman, its quality suffered greatly. And Berman is right: The network showed little interest in helping "Star Trek: Enterprise" stay afloat.

But I would argue that even if Berman had created a brilliant series and UPN had treated "Enterprise" as a prized jewel, the series and the franchise would have, at best, limped along.

It's a cliche, albeit it a truthful one, that everything changed on 9/11 - including, most importantly, that ephemeral quality known as the zeitgeist, defined as the general trend of thought or feeling characteristic of a particular period of time. And Star Trek -- bright, shiny, optimistic Star Trek with its well-lit bridge and its going boldly and all - it no longer held the general trend or feeling characteristic of the time after the towers fell.

Just think about the environment 15 to 20 years ago in which Gene Roddenberry brought Star Trek back to television with "Star Trek: The Next Generation." The period from the late 1980s through at least the early to mid-1990s was an increasingly optimistic time. The Berlin Wall came down. Democracies began to flourish where once there were none. The Cold War and the Soviet Union both simply ceased to exist.

Those years were purely pregnant with new potential for our civilization. For the first time in decades, the world had fundamentally changed and doors were thrown open for humanity's future that we had only dreamt about for the far future.

Exactly the kind of fertile ground for a highly optimistic view of the far future like Star Trek, right? You bet.

The world was entirely ready and happy to embrace Jean-Luc Picard and Benjamin Sisko and their essentially bright and cheerful portrayals of how things will someday be. It's hard to imagine, just looking at the state of the franchise today, but back then Trek was a thriving entertainment juggernaut.

One shouldn't oversimplify the reasons for its success, but the general good feelings of the time kept a strong wind at Star Trek's back for years.

After 9/11, thoughts of boldly going to new civilizations were replaced with the simple survival of our own. That the premiere of "Enterprise" came directly in the wake of the attacks should have been an ominous sign in and of itself, I think.

No, the basically cheerful premise Star Trek was selling specifically during the years "Enterprise" was on the air would find far too few takers simply because those were the years most directly after the attacks. Which is not to say prevailing trends and feelings will remain. Sooner or later, the zeitgeist will become more Trek-friendly.

In the meantime, most successful scifi will be that science-fiction, like "Battlestar Galactica" and "Jericho," that in one way or another capitalizes on our current post-9/11 mindset. (The success of the new "Doctor Who," which is another series that is fairly relentlessly optimistic, is an interesting exception.)

It's for that reason, though, that for the time being, I hold more confidence in the proposed new Star Trek http://www.airlockalpha.com/news423073.html target="_blank">animated series for the near-term success and survival of the franchise than I am in J.J. Abrams' new Trek film.

I don't know if Abrams comprehends the zeitgeist into which he's bringing his project or not, but the developers of the new animated series, which has yet to get a green light, plan to cast their new Trek as "an allegory for the post-9/11 world we live in. A world of uncertainty and fear."

If the folks behind this animated project can hold the kernel of what makes Trek, Trek, and yet adapt it to be relevant for this post-9/11 world, right there you'll have a successful rebirth of the franchise for our time.

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