Voyager Season Seven Press Release Hints at a Prequel Series A "Surprising Conclusion" and a "Smashing Finale" Lie Ahead in Season Seven 

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"Star Trek" series faces final frontier next year LOS ANGELES, March 20 (Reuters) - Science fiction series ``Star Trek: Voyager'' will face its final season next year on the UPN television network, but talks have already begun for a new series based on the classic 1960s TV show ``Star Trek,'' network officials said on Monday.   ``Voyager'' helped launch the fledgling network in January 1995 and has remained a cornerstone of its programming ever since. It remains popular, but UPN and the show's producers figured that after next season, its seventh, ``Voyager'' will have ventured to all the strange and exotic places on fringes of space that it can.  

Tom Noonan, who heads UPN's programming division, promised advertisers ``a surprising conclusion'' and a ``smashing finale'' for the show at a special meeting on the Paramount Pictures movie studio lot to preview the network's 2000/2001 season.   Network chief Dean Valentine said UPN was already talking to the show's producers about a new ``Star Trek'' series to take its place, but he remained mum on any details.   ``Voyager'' is the fourth series in the long-running and wildly profitable franchise of programs and movies originating with the adventures of James T. Kirk and the crew of the spaceship Enterprise on the frontiers of space.   ``Star Trek'' first rocketed onto U.S. airwaves in 1966, but it was panned by critics and generally unwatched by audiences. After just three years, NBC yanked the show from its schedule.  

In reruns during the 1970s, the show found a core audience of mainly young men who came to be called ``trekkies'' and who held conventions to buy and sell ``Star Trek'' memorabilia. By 1979 Paramount, seeing a huge marketing opportunity, brought the series back as a special effects-filled movie that proved to be a blockbuster at box offices.   The first movie sparked a years-long run of sequels that lasted into the 1990s, and three more TV shows: ``The Next Generation,'' ``Deep Space Nine'' and finally ``Voyager,'' which starred Kate Mulgrew as Captain Kathryn Janeway at the helm of the 24th Century spaceship. The show also spawned an animated version that ran during the mid-1970s.