On the fourth and final day of an event that saw more than 70 stars and 8,000 fans in attendance and thousands of dollars raised for charity, Slanted Fedora's 35th Anniversary Star Trek Convention at the Alexis Park Hotel in Las Vegas celebrated the most recently completed chapter of the Star Trek saga and built anticipation for the next one.

DAY FOUR — SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 9

Roxann Dawson ("B'Elanna Torres"), who directed a couple of episodes of Star Trek: Voyager, told the crowd that she had just finished directing the seventh episode of Enterprise. "It'll be an enormous hit," Dawson promised regarding the UPN series premiering on September 26. "You are gonna love this show."

Throughout the day almost all of the Voyager cast members were asked if they took anything home from the set when the show completed production in May. Dawson said she took a piece of engineering; Tim Russ got a piece of the console he spent seven years working behind. Jeri Ryan admitted, "I have a Borg alcove in my house." Robert Beltran didn't take anything but he wished he could have kept his bridge chair — "It was finely molded after seven years."

In a rare convention appearance, Jeri Ryan admitted that her final day of shooting on Voyager was not her most emotional day. "The sad day for me was the last day we were all together as a cast, which was [during "Homestead"] when Neelix decided he was going to stay behind," Ryan said. "And the last scene that we shot with Johnny [Ethan Phillips] where all of us were together, was him walking down the corridor and we're all lined to say goodbye to Neelix. And I was just blubbering! ... That was a tough day."

What does she look back on and laugh at? "My personal favorite: Forcefield Acting. Where you have to — run into a forcefield! That was really embarrassing. There were lots of very funny, we-can't-believe-we're-doing-this kind of moments."

Ryan said she just completed production of her fifth episode of Boston Public, the Fox drama she will star in this fall. She admitted that her first day of shooting was "terrifying" because for four years she had been playing the same character. "I didn't know if I remembered how to act like a human. It was very scary! But after the first scene, it was great, it was so refreshing, it was so freeing... It was a good first day."

When her time ended, she got to introduce her "man" — boyfriend and executive producer Brannon Braga. She purposely embarrassed him by yelling, "Oh honey!"

As something of an apology for being evasive in previous convention appearances, Braga started off by saying, "I hope you have questions about Enterprise. This is the first time I can actually talk about it." He pointed out that the new Star Trek series will kick off the fall season with a two-hour pilot in which a Klingon crash-lands in Oklahoma, which is the first time humans see a Klingon.

The show will star Scott Bakula as Jonathan Archer, the 22nd-century captain of the first Earth ship capable of traveling into deep space. "What's great about having Scott Bakula in the role is that, you kind of feel like you already know him... He's got a friendly presence, he's down-to-earth, and that's really how we see Captain Archer. He's a more accessible captain — he's one of the guys." He also described the character as "a cross between Chuck Yeager and Indiana Jones." He added Scott Bakula was the producers' first and only choice for the part.

Braga also let the audience in on some of what they'll be seeing after the pilot: "Jeffery Combs will be playing an Andorian in an episode that will air sometime in November," he revealed. "They're those blue guys with the antennae — probably the silliest looking aliens in all of Star Trek. But we thought it would be fun to take the silliest alien but make it cool, and redesign it. Still a blue guy with antennae, but now the antennae move depending on the Andorian's emotional state."

But the question on everyone's minds is, will the Klingons seen in Enterprise have forehead ridges or will they look like the Original Series Klingons? "They have ridges," Braga said, like those introduced in "Star Trek: The Motion Picture." But he did say that the writing staff may at some point put forth a reason for the differing looks between generations of Klingons. "Maybe there's a subspecies from a different continent on the Klingon homeworld... We'll see. We may begin to explore that dichotomy."

Throughout the weekend a number of ancillary events and presentations took place by the hotel's pool and in the ballrooms between actor appearances. One such event was a stunt show featuring veteran stunt people from the various Star Trek shows: Leslie Hoffman, who among other roles has often doubled as B'Elanna Torres; Brian Williams, who doubled as Data during Star Trek: The Next Generation and subsequent movies; and Tom Morga, who doubled as Spock in "ST:TMP" and Riker during TNG; and also played the giant creature who walked Kirk and McCoy across the glacier in "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country." Hoffman, Williams and Morga gave a demonstration of fight routines, punches, falls and flips, and generally spoke about what it was like to work as stunt people on Star Trek.

The day — and the convention — climaxed with craziness Sunday afternoon as the majority of the Voyager cast appeared on stage both separately and together, and had the audience in stitches most of the time. Garrett Wang, famous for his impersonations of fellow cast members, compared how the different characters on the bridge pushed buttons on their consoles: Tuvok was very "athletic"; Paris seemed like he was about to say, "Would you like fries with that?"; Seven of Nine pushed buttons like she was getting a manicure; Janeway was always "perplexed"; and Chakotay had a very staccato motion, "like a bully giving you noogies."

One tender moment came when Jennifer Lien, now a college student, joined Ethan Phillips on stage. Phillips said that when Kes left Voyager, she and Neelix "never had proper closure. So we'll do it now. Bye..." He then gave her an affectionate hug, drawing "awwws" from the audience.

While on stage together, Robert Duncan McNeill, Wang, Russ, Beltran, Robert Picardo, Lien, Dawson and Phillips spent a couple of hours making fun of each other, both as actors and as characters. Russ said, "I like Ethan Phillips. I like him a lot. But I also like falling out of a tree." When it was noted that Tom Paris, in the course of the series, had children with Kes, with Janeway (when they were transformed into lizard-like creatures) and with Torres, Dawson turned to McNeill and said, "Robbie, who didn't you do in the show?"

The weekend concluded with a party at Quark's Bar within the Star Trek: The Experience attraction at the Las Vegas Hilton. George Takei was on hand to take pictures with attendees in front of an ice sculpture celebrating the anniversary of the first airing of Star Trek on September 8, 1966.

Convention organizers Dave and Jackie Scott said, "It was a fabulous event. It was a celebration befitting the stars and the date, and we were proud to be part of it."