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.

Star Trek: The Original Series 2-26: Assignment: Earth - Part 1

Episode:

55

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Writer:

Art Wallace

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Director:

Marc Daniels

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Air Date:

29-Mar-1968

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures I'm watching the infamous Assignment: Earth, the Star Trek episode that was blatantly a backdoor pilot for a spin-off series. A series that ultimately never got made.

Assignment: Earth the TV show was Gene Roddenberry's project, and the idea had apparently been around for a while. In fact he'd come up with initial story outline in 1965, shortly after the first Star Trek pilot got rejected. Star Trek's second pilot had a lot more luck, but Roddenberry continued working on Assignment: Earth's pilot as well, coming up with a first draft in 1966. By 1967 Trek's chances weren't looking good; even if it got a third season it likely wasn't getting a fourth, so Roddenberry decided to rework his script into a Star Trek episode. This would allow him to use Star Trek's resources to make his pitch in the form of a backdoor pilot.

(Though writer Art Wallace presumably did a lot of the rewrite work on it as well, seeing as it's his name on the teleplay. Wallace joined forces with Roddenberry after he pitched a similar series and got told that someone else had beaten him to it.)

Personally I'd say that the season finale is usually (but not always) the wrong time to give half the episode away to the guest stars. Though if things had worked out differently this could've been the last episode of Star Trek and the launch pad for the wildly successful Assignment: Earth! Decades later people could've been amazed to hear that the the series had been a spin-off of some long forgotten cult sci-fi show, and they'd be arguing over whether the Tom Cruise movies are better than the original series.

Alright I'll be going though the whole episode scene by scene, attempting to summarise what happens and what I think about it, while also finding room to sprinkle in a bit of trivia. This means that there's going to be SPOILERS, but only for the first two seasons of TOS.

Star Trek: The Original Series 1-01: The Man Trap

Episode:

1

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Writer:

George Clayton Johnson

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Director:

Marc Daniels

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Air Date:

08-Sep-1966

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It's Star Trek Day today, September 8th, so to celebrate I've decided to rewatch The Man Trap, the very first ever episode of Star Trek! Well... maybe. It's arguably not even the first with 'Man' in the title.

The Man Trap was the sixth episode of The Original Series to be filmed and it's at least the fourth chronologically (after The Cage, Where No Man Has Gone Before and The Corbomite Maneuver). But it's undisputedly the first Trek story to air on televisions and it aired exactly 55 years ago today, so that's why I'm writing about it. Well okay it aired two days earlier in Canada, but no one counts that for some reason.

There were a few reasons why this episode was chosen to get moved to the front of the line, such as: it has the characters down on a strange new world instead of being bottled up on the ship, it doesn't include any "space hookers", it's got a straightforward story, the visual effects could be completed on time, and it has a scary space monster. Uh, spoilers, sorry. Basically they wanted to put their best foot forward to maximise their chances that viewers would come back for a second story.

It was directed by Marc Daniels, who was credited on 14 episodes over three seasons, leaving him tied with Joseph Pevney as the series' most prolific director. On the other hand this was writer George Clayton Johnson's only Trek story. He wrote a bunch of Twilight Zone though and co-wrote the novel Logan's Run, so he wasn't the worst choice for the job! In fact the Star Trek producers made a habit of trying to get acclaimed science fiction authors to write for the series... and then heavily rewriting them afterwards to make their stories feel like Trek. The writers weren't always impressed.

Okay, I'm going to go through the whole episode one scene at a time, writing a recap under my screencaps and sharing my thoughts along the way. This means that there'll be SPOILERS for this episode and every single other Trek episode that aired before it. All zero of them.