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: Picard - Season 2 Review, Part 2

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm finally getting back to Star Trek: Picard's second season! I realise that people are more interested in the third season right now, which is about halfway through at the time I'm writing this, but I need to catch up first. Though to be honest I actually wrote the episode reviews themselves ages ago right after they came out. I just didn't want to publish this until after I was done publishing my reviews of Discovery's fourth season, and that dragged on a little longer than expected. 

Sadly we've lost a member of the cast in the meantime, as Annie Wersching died earlier this year. I'll tell you right now that her performance as the Borg Queen was a highlight of the season for me. She seemed to be having the most fun.

This week I'm covering the middle four episodes of season two, which are:

• 2-04 - Watcher
  
• 2-05 - Fly Me to the Moon
  
• 2-06 - Two of One
  
• 2-07 - Monsters

There'll be SPOILERS for these episodes (and earlier Trek series), but I won't be spoiling a thing about what happens next. Even though I totally could. I know all kinds of stuff about season 3 now.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home - Part 4

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I've finally finished watching Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. And it only took me three weeks. This is the fourth and final part of this review, but if you want to check out PART ONE, PART TWO or PART THREE, you can click one of those links.

I'm really running low on trivia to pad out this intro text now. Uh, the title font looks mostly the same as the one used in Star Trek 1 and Star Trek 3, so they'd pretty much settled on a style by this point.

It also got brought back for the Deep Space Nine and Voyager logos, but they got bored with it after that. Which is a shame I reckon as it looks great. It's not an obviously sci-fi looking typeface but not quite fantasy either. The current TV series have gone back to the equally iconic Original Series logo, so maybe there's hope that the movie logo will also make a comeback someday.

Okay, please be aware that there will be lots of pictures underneath this writing and underneath each of those pictures will be even more writing. And that writing will be 90% SPOILERS. I'll not be spoiling any Trek that comes afterwards however. Well, unless stuff like logo fonts counts as a spoiler for you, in which case I've already given away too much.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home - Part 3

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures I'm still writing about Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. 

I keep thinking that I should apologise for writing so much about this film and dragging this on for so long. It wasn't the original plan, I'm not working towards a word count goal, it's just how it worked out. On the plus side you're basically getting a free book out of me here. A free book without an editor!

This is the third part of four, so if you want to go back to PART ONE or PART TWO click the text.

SPOILER WARNING: I'll be spoiling everything that happens in the film and any Star Trek movie or episode that came before it is also fair game.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home - Part 2

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures I'm continuing through the fourth of the original Star Trek movies, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. I like roman numerals, they make titles seem classier.

The Star Trek: The Next Generation movies also made it to film #4, but only just, and they didn't put any kind of numerals in its title. It's just called Star Trek: Nemesis. The Kelvin Timeline films don't use numbers either (they don't even use colons) so there's no danger of another Star Trek IV coming out any time soon. I mean seriously, it's been seven years since Star Trek Beyond and they still haven't made a fourth movie yet.

This is the second part of four, so if you want to go back to PART ONE click the text.

I'll be writing about the whole movie scene by scene, so there will be SPOILERS. Though I won't spoil anything from later Star Trek stories, even when there's something really obvious I should mention.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home - Part 1

Writer:

Steve Meerson, Peter Krikes, Nicholas Meyer, Harve Bennett

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Director:

Leonard Nimoy

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Release Date:

1986

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm writing about the film I have to describe as 'The One With the Whales' for SEO purposes: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.  

It's weird to say that the fourth movie is the third in the trilogy, but that's how it kind of worked out, as this continues on from the events in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, two films I wrote about back in 2016. You might be wondering why I jumped ahead to Star Trek VI and never came back to this, especially considering it was the film's 30th anniversary at the time... well, it's never been a favourite of mine. It's all about whales instead of spaceships, and the music sounds like it's from a Christmas movie, and Spock's weird, and etc. Though to be fair I was really young when I formed my first impression.

Speaking of anniversaries, the film was released on Star Trek's 20th anniversary, though I don't think they made a big deal out of it. Not compared to when Star Trek 6 came out on its 25th anniversary. In fact in some countries the posters called it The Voyage Home: Star Trek IV, with the Star Trek part in tiny writing, to not put people off. (The franchise hadn't been doing so well outside of the US).

Alright, I'm going to split this review into four parts, because films are long, and I'm going to split the parts over three weeks, because they take ages to write about. Well they do when you write about every bloody scene at least. The way I see it, I'm only ever writing about this film once so I might as well say everything I want to say now. This means that there will be huge SPOILERS here, but only for Star Trek stories up to November 1986.