Star Trek: The Original Series 2-26: Assignment: Earth - Part 2

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures I'm still watching the Original Series episode Assignment: Earth. Not to be confused with the DS9 episode The Assignment. This features an Assignment to Earth specifically.

If you're looking for PART ONE, click that text to jump straight over to it. You wouldn't think this of all episodes would have enough content for me to drag this out into a second article, but here we are. And now I'm having to write a second intro to go along with it, with even more trivia.

This is the season finale for season two, but Star Trek was made back in a time when seasons could have a ridiculous number of episodes, so it ended up being episode 55. That's the exact number of episodes that Star Trek: Discovery's current at after four seasons. Lower Decks and Prodigy have been around for a few years now as well, but even if you combine the two their episode count hasn't quite reached that high yet.

I'll be going through the remaining episode scene by scene but all my SPOILERS will be restricted to 1968 and earlier. That's season one and season two and that's it, there will be no Spock's Brain spoilers here.

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Previously, in the first half of this episode:

The Enterprise was hanging around doing historical research in the 20th century, don't question it, when they accidentally intercepted a transporter beam. They found a strange man called Gary Seven and his cat Isis on their transporter pad, who's either here to destroy their history or save it. While Kirk wrestled with this ambiguity Seven teleported away to his office in New York, where he met a clueless secretary called Roberta. He convinced her that he's CIA, then left her to keep Kirk and Spock busy while he teleported away again to sabotage a rocket. So Roberta called the cops on them.

And now, the conclusion:

ACT THREE

The police Roberta phoned for finally arrive and I was not prepared for how retro their uniforms are. That's what New York cops wore in the late 60s huh? The cop on the right, Charlie, doesn't say much, but he's played by someone who had already had a fairly memorable role on the series. That's Bruce Mars, who portrayed Kirk's academy bully Finnegan in Shore Leave.

Roberta's muffled screams are a bit of a giveaway that someone's in trouble, so Kirk and Spock make a run for the other room as Roberta opens the door for the police.

The cops just run right in with guns drawn and fingers on the triggers, so it's lucky Kirk already has his communicator out.

Unfortunately Kirk told Scotty they'd be moving and needed a wide scan on the transporter, so when he beams them up, he beams everyone in the room up... including two bewildered cops. This is the crew's third trip to the past in the series so far, the third time they've gotten in trouble with the law while they were there, and the third time they've beamed someone up like this. I'm starting to see why this was Starfleet's last historical research mission.

The cops are too stunned to do anything, so Scotty is able to just beam them right back down again. So there are two people who are going to be traumatised for the rest of their lives. Roberta gets to witness it from the other side and she looks plenty bewildered herself.

In one draft of the script it was Roberta that got beamed up with Kirk and Spock and they'd done it deliberately as she was their only lead to find Seven. They assumed she was an agent like him, seeing as she was working in his office.

In the final episode Kirk and Spock don't know where Seven teleported to, but they have found plans to McKinley Rocket Base so they've got somewhere to look. 

Meanwhile, at McKinley Rocket Base, we see stock footage of people in white shirts working in a white room full of grey computer terminals and black phones. The room's so drab and monochrome that it makes the black and white monitors look colourful by comparison. We also see stock footage of the outside of the building, stock footage of the rocket, and brand new footage of some people in a control room just getting on with their jobs.

When Seven arrived at the base there was 60 minutes to launch. Here we get an announcement saying that it's now 50 minutes to launch, and I can believe I've been waiting here for 10 minutes with how long these shots go on for. Yes, I get it, it's a rocket base!

Hey it's Gary Seven! I remember him. This security guard spots him lurking around the launch director's car and calls him over. Seven's ready with his fake ID that claims he's from the NSA, but the guard explains he has to do an identity check with the phone inside that 'security communications' box.

Fortunately there's a reason Seven carries a cat around, and Isis distracts the guard with a surprise attack happening off-screen. This gives Seven a chance to whip his sonic screwdriver out and hypnotise him. He gets on the phone to tell people that everything's been straightened out here, and the goes right back to lurking around the back of the director's car looking suspicious.

I was worried the episode was going to make me wait through another 30 seconds of padding here, but it doesn't take the launch director long to get down to his car and drive off.

Back on the Enterprise, Kirk and Spock have found a replacement hat and they're dressed for Florida, so they're ready to make another attempt to stop Seven.

Scotty's able to use a weather satellite to get a good look at the launch base from multiple helicopters orbit, and they can spot him they can just beam him up to the ship. The tricky part will be spotting him. Scanning for human life signs probably won't help much on this planet.

There's 40 minutes to launch so they don't have long.

Fortunately the episode's not running in real time, so I only had to wait one whole minute for the launch director to drive up to the rocket and give Seven an opportunity to sneak out of the boot. It's cool seeing all this old footage of the real space program, and viewers were meant to be impressed, but I feel like they could've tightened up the pacing a bit.

I have to give the production team credit though for finding the exact model and colour of car seen in the stock footage, so the footage they filmed with their own car would match.

That rear projected background doesn't look convincing in the slightest (partly because the sunlight's coming from the opposite direction), but it is a nice view.

Alright it's been about another minute and now Seven is in a lift, going up to the top of the rocket. Some viewers might question if it was really important to for them to include more stock footage of the folks back in monochrome mission control and then a shot of the launch director driving away again, but there's 20 minutes of episode left and they had to fill them with something!

They could've at least had Seven chat to his cat or something while they wait. If I'd known the episode would have no dialogue for 20-30 seconds at a time I would've put a podcast on!

Meanwhile, back at the control centre, a pair of idiots decide to beam down in the open just as the guard's waking up and immediately get captured. It's funny because they only came down here because they couldn't spot Seven and beam him away. So they are aware of the concept of staying out of sight to avoid transporter beam problems, they just didn't think it applied to them.

Alright that's Kirk and Spock out of the action for the next... holy crap, 12 minutes?

It's fine though, Scotty's still on the case, looking at his aerial footage trying to spot Seven. For about 30 seconds. No dialogue. Lots of bleeping though.

Hey it's Roberta! She's the ideal kind of character for this type of episode as when she's alone like this she talks to herself. It's maybe a bit strange that she's still in the office despite aliens breaking in and beaming the police away, but at this point she's ready to just walk away. Then she accidentally leans on the pen that reveals the hidden vault.

Roberta didn't see Seven using the vault to teleport out but it immediately catches her interest and she goes over to investigate. I guess she wants to steal his money? Maybe look at some secret CIA files?

It's now 20 minutes until launch and Seven's finally reached the rocket gantry. This is an interesting scene as it relies on the cat crawling over him to have a look and then staying there until Seven's delivered his lines, and the cat actually plays along.

Actually it was apparently all ad-libbed. (Well, except for the meows, which they dubbed in later.) One of the three cats they used in the episode just liked the actor and would go over to see what he was doing, and he'd talk to it.

Back at the mission control, Kirk and Spock have been brought inside and given a lesson in how to search your prisoners properly. If you take the gadgets from your mysterious visitors they can't use them to escape! Fortunately the guards don't know what their phasers and communicators do and they're a bit too busy to play around with them at the moment.

Then there's a few more shots of stock footage, a few shots of Seven doing some rewiring, some more stock footage, some more rewiring etc. until two minutes later Scotty finally spots the guy and beams him onto the ship. Yay Scotty!

Well he nearly beams him onto the ship.

Fortunately Roberta had managed to work out the combination to the hidden vault through trial and error (the vault that she'd found by pure chance). Once she got it open she decided to play with the dials on the other side of the door instead of investigating the room's contents. She then managed to accidentally stumble across the right setting at just the right time to intercept the Enterprise's transporter beam and redirect Seven here.

Honestly it would have been a thousand times more believable if Seven had left his cat behind and the cat had activated his transporter... and that's when you know that a script has problems. (In earlier draft of the script Scotty actually managed to catch the guy and confiscate his gadgets. In that version Seven takes the brig's intercom apart and uses that to escape the ship a second time.)

Anyway, there's one minute left to launch so he couldn't have stuck around there much longer either way. In fact he's shown no sign of being able to activate his transporter remotely, so Scotty and Roberta may have just saved his life.

Then we get one of those present tense captain's logs, where Kirk tells us what he's feeling as he stands there in silence, stuck in this control room, separated from the device he would need to record a captain's log. He doesn't know how to stop Seven, or even if he should, and he's never felt so helpless. Don't worry, he and Spock will find a way out of this situation and get back into the plot in just... six and a half minutes.

Sidelining the series' leads is not an intrinsically terrible idea, Next Gen's Lower Decks, Doctor Who's Blink, and Bad Batch's The Outpost jump to mind as episodes that pulled it off, and there are probably much better examples! But Assignment: Earth is a great example of how to do it wrong, as sets up Kirk and Spock as protagonists and then has them stand there doing nothing.

Everyone's watching the launch, with the folks in the control centre viewing it through their primitive 1968 black and whites screens, while Seven and Roberta get to watch on his incredibly advanced alien technology in full colour.

The engines start up, we get some beautiful stock footage of fire blasting out all around it, and... everything goes fine. They have successfully defeated gravity and got their nuke into the sky. But the camera zooms into Kirk and Spock to show their concern as dramatic music plays. I don't know who the soundtrack's trying to fool, we already know that Seven's doing the right thing. Well, we know he's well-intentioned anyway, which to be fair isn't always the same thing.

ACT FOUR

For example, Roberta is well-intentioned when she continually phones the police on all of our protagonists, but it doesn't mean it's the right move. Isis spots her though and Seven takes out the phone cable with his sonic screwdriver in the nick of time. Then he tells her that she shouldn't try to leave as all the doors are locked. Which is usually a red flag.

Seven alters the settings and then switches the TV back on.

Oh no he's watching Enterprise!

See, this is the shot where Dominic Keating's credit comes up.

We also get a dead ringer for the shot that Jolene Blalock's credit is over, but I suspect they're from different launches as they don't quite match. I could be wrong however.

Seven tells the computer to begin the malfunction and fortunately it knows he's talking about the rocket. It starts veering off course and the people back in the rocket base start to get concerned. Roberta as well. She gets even more concerned when Seven arms the warhead, and decides to pick up a solid looking box off the desk next to her.

Then we get to check in with the bridge crew for a bit.

Uhura's busy switching between broadcasts in different languages, apparently able to understand them all without the universal translator. Though she may just be skipping through trying to find one in English (or Swahili). We get Chekov and Sulu in this episode and they also get a moment of screen time. Which means this scene features a European and an Asian telling us that the missile is on a trajectory to hit the "Euro-Asian continent".

They call the transporter room to update Scotty on the situation, because I guess he's been banished there like Spock. On the plus side this meant that Leonard Nimoy and James Doohan didn't need to to work extra days filming bridge scenes this episode. The ship could swoop down to shoot the rocket with phasers, but Scotty wants to call down to Kirk first.

By pure coincidence Kirk chooses that moment to try calling Scotty, but the communicator chirp alerts one of the guards.

And then the episode cuts straight to Roberta smacking Seven over the back of the head with the box! You could blink and miss it, it happens so suddenly and so fast. It's like the editor realised that they spent four minutes on the rocket launch and needed to start wrapping things up. She apparently really walloped the actor as well, so it's lucky it was padded.

She grabs the sonic screwdriver from his pocket and tells him to stay away from the machine, as it's pretty obvious at this point that he's not a CIA agent and he's up to something a bit shady. He tells her that if he doesn't finish what he started it'll cause World War III!

Then it cuts back over to McKinley Rocket Base see if Kirk and Spock are still silently standing in the corner. They are, but suddenly Scotty's voice comes out of the opened communicator.

Hang on, Scotty's only just called down to ask Kirk what he should do? It's been two minutes since Uhura flipped the switches to open a channel! It's like time doesn't work properly in this episode. We do get a nice close up of the props though, which is cool. Even though some are looking a little beat up at this point and when the guard picks the communicator up to investigate we can see the Velcro on the back.

Spock offers to show him how it works and the guy lets him get close enough to take him down with a neck pinch. 

This is the second time that Sergeant Lipton has started napping on the job today.

They silently take all their stuff back (earning bonus points for not contaminating history with future technology) and beam away without anyone else in the room noticing. Even though the guy heard them beaming in earlier and that's how they got caught in the first place. To be fair people are currently a bit distracted by a rocket that won't destruct.

Kirk and Spock beam directly to Seven's office, in a rare example of site to site beaming in the Original Series, and man I hope this means we're done with the stock footage of that command centre.

I mean it's cool that all these NASA employees got to be in Star Trek, but there are only so many times that an episode can cut to obvious stock footage of people staring at monitors in a grey room before it comes across like padding or parody and 18 times is way over that line. I don't blame the people who did the remaster for not colour correcting all the shots so that they at least appeared take place on the same day, because it wouldn't have been worth the effort.

Anyway Kirk and Spock are finally free, which means the protagonists are back in the story!

Look at the two of them, having an actual influence on any kind of events! Well, almost. They've mostly just taken over Roberta's role of keeping Seven away from his computer. Though when Seven explains that he wants to detonate the rocket 100 miles above the ground to scare both sides out of this arms race, Roberta switches sides and turns her weapon against Kirk!

Now there's two groups here with weapons drawn at each other, seconds away from the beginning of Armageddon. But we don't get time to dwell on the parallels as Seven grabs the sonic screwdriver from her hand immediately, pointing out that it was set to kill. He also calls it a 'servo', so now we finally have a name for it! Then he hands it over to Kirk to hopefully defuse the situation and win some trust.

All Kirk needs is some evidence that Seven really is part of their history, but he's not going to get it, and Spock may not be able to figure out how to operate his equipment in time. Spock tells Kirk that he'll have to rely on his human intuition, which is good because it means Kirk gets to make the final decision in this story and contribute in some way to a happy outcome. Of course if they can't deactivate it, the Enterprise can just shoot it from orbit like they mentioned earlier... but with 30 seconds left Kirk takes a chance on Seven and it turns out that he really was trying to save the world. Like we already knew.

The episode ends with Seven in a third outfit, making his own log entry with the automatic typewriter.

He mentions that despite the Enterprise's accidental interference with history, things worked out fine in the end. But Kirk and Spock are there to correct him with some information they've dug up in the meantime. It turns out that everything played out exactly as it did in their records; there was no interference. So much for Seven's certainty about what 'history' should be! He shouldn't even be calling it history, as he claimed earlier that this is his own time.

Now that they've established that Seven doesn't know everything, they tell him something else he might not be aware of: his stunt will have the intended effect, governments will make a new international agreement against weapons like this.

They've also found plenty of information about his and Roberta's adventures, but they can't spoil their whole TV series so Spock just says that they'll have some "interesting experiences". He then turns directly to camera and gives NBC executives a list of reasons why Assignment: Earth will be a fantastic addition to their line up of shows for the 1968 fall season. Okay no he doesn't do that, and he also doesn't say a word about how handy this information would've been to them at any other point in the episode.

"Spock, what do we know about the mysterious Mr Seven who just materialised on our transporter pad?"
"Records say that he and his assistant Roberta Lincoln had many adventures saving humanity from itself in the late 60s and early 70s."
"Oh, okay then, that's all I needed to hear. Let him beam down to the planet and wish him luck".

It doesn't seem like there's any mention of Isis in their records though. All her contributions to the team will go unnoticed. They don't even notice when she transforms into a (clothed) woman right there in the same room as them! Well, except for Roberta.

It was probably less of a surprise for viewers at the time, as they've could've already seen this shocking twist in the episode's trailer. They could have also seen it in the episode Catspaw, as the show's done the 'woman turns into a cat' thing twice this season. The Original Series had a habit of using ideas two or three times.

Though to be fair the idea came from Assignment: Earth's original first draft, before Star Trek was involved. In fact that featured a second cat called Harth, who would've turned into a guy who resembled Count Dracula. Well, one of his actors anyway (the script's not specific about which). The cats were both evil Omegans, the main antagonists of the show, but they were written out when it became a Star Trek episode. Then Isis was written back in as an ally in a later draft.

And that's the end, of both this episode and season two. I just hope that Spock's allowed back on the bridge in season 3.


CONCLUSION

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The episode Assignment: Earth is probably the best crossover in live-action Star Trek history, mostly because it's the only one. Though the fact that it's crossing over with a series that never existed may disqualify it. This is basically all we have of it, aside from that original script that went in a different direction.

Before Star Trek got involved, the Assignment: Earth series' pilot was going to be about Seven and Roberta meeting for the first time while the two cats plotted their demise. Seven ended up getting arrested for using counterfeit money to pay for the lease on his building and was nearly executed by a possessed cop. Meanwhile Roberta went on the run through a series of portals, previewing locations for later episodes. And that's about it actually. Seven comes across like an inept secret agent that achieves nothing and only manages to survive because of his indestructible clothing. On three separate occasions. It's... different.

When this pilot was reworked into a Star Trek episode they had to take this original plot out of it. Unfortunately they forgot to put a new plot in its place. The episode doesn't have any villains in it, no evil plots to thwart... and that can work great. In fact some of the very best Star Trek time-travel stories have no antagonist. There was the potential for a good story here, with the heroes piecing together what Seven is up to from the clues along the way. Unfortunately what Seven's trying to achieve is so simple (rewire a missile) that there isn't any room for ongoing investigation and multiple narrow escapes. The episode starts off okay, with a bit of Star Trek drama on the ship and some Assignment: Earth fun in the office, but once Seven reaches McKinley Rocket Base it just runs out of everything. For a whole quarter of the episode all that happens is Seven makes his way up to a rocket and messes with the wires, while Kirk and Spock do and say nothing, and Scotty watches TV.

There's nothing wrong with taking the heroes out of the action and focusing on another character for a bit, the trouble is the episode doesn't do that. It keeps switching back over to them, reminding us that the characters are standing there in silence, helpless. When you think of great Kirk and Spock scenes, they usually involve the characters talking to each other, or doing something interesting, or having any influence on events whatsoever.

It's a good episode for fans of vintage NASA footage however, as it feels like there's hours of it here. You get to see mission control, a car driving up to the rocket, mission control, an aerial shot of the rocket, mission control, an aerial shot of the rocket, mission control... and so on. Funny thing is, the footage was intended to be a selling point at the time, and I did appreciate getting a glimpse at what NASA were up to in the 60s. Trouble is it just keeps going and going, which only makes the second half feel even more padded.

Here's another issue with the episode that has nothing to do with the story or editing: the entire premise goes against Star Trek's philosophy! Assignment: Earth is based on the premise that Earth needs aliens to interfere with their development or else they'll probably blow themselves up with their advanced technology. Meanwhile Star Trek preaches that it's wrong to interfere with the development of alien cultures (unless they've been enslaved by an evil computer or mind-control spores or whatever). So Earth relied on an advanced race to save them from disaster but they're not going to pay it forward to other worlds. And there isn't one moment of discussion about this.

The original premise was closer to Doctor Who, with Seven as a time traveller saving history from aliens with his contemporary female companion and his screwdriver, but if this backdoor pilot had been successful we would've gotten more a less fantastical action-adventure. Every week they'd be using their sci-fi gadgets to go up against enemy agents, politicians, criminals, scientists etc. in order to avert disaster. So it would've fit right in alongside the spy thrillers of the era... or gotten lost in the crowd.

Personally I found Seven and Roberta to be one of the highlights of this otherwise mediocre episode, so I would've checked out some of the other stories. We could've never gotten a true continuation for the two though, as Teri Garr hated working on it and wouldn't have come back. Maybe it's actually for the best the TV series never happened. For one thing, working with cats in every scene would've been a nightmare.

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NEXT TIME

I can't imagine that this is the last time I'll be writing about Star Trek: The Original Series, but next on Sci-Fi Adventures I'm covering the last three episodes of Star Trek: Picard season 2! Do I hate the series as much as the rest of the internet seems to, or did I actually enjoy it in the end? Come by next week to find out.

Comments are welcome!