Trek On: ASSIGNMENT: EARTH

Title: Assignment: Earth

Airdate: 3/29/1968

Plot Summary

Assignment: Earth starts with the Enterprise is on a research mission in 1968 to understand how Earth avoided the pitfalls of nuclear war because Wikipedia is down or something. They are interrupted by the arrival of Gary Seven, a human from another planet who claims he is on an assignment to stop nuclear war. Kirk doesn’t know if he can trust him and has to make a decision that will decide Earth’s and possibly his own future.

Risk Is Our Business

Kirk is given a difficult choice and has to do his best to decide whether to trust Seven or not.

Logical

Spock finds that even his neck pinch has no effect on Gary Seven. He’s able to redeem himself later by distracting a guard and pinching him later.

He’s Dead Jim

Bones can tell us that Seven is the perfect human but that he is indeed human.

Helm Sluggish Captain

Sulu appears to take the con and helps Chekov and Uhura in letting Scotty know what’s going on.

Nuclear Wessels

Chekov works with Sulu to let Scotty know the situation down on Earth with the nations.

Hailing Frequencies Open, Sugar

Uhura monitors old earth frequencies to let everyone know that everyone is going on high alert.

My Wee Bairns

Scotty can only pinpoint Gary Seven’s location within 1000 meters but then is able to lead Kirk and Spock right to him. Later on, he’s able to not only find Gary on the rocket gantry but zoom in on him with a camera with 4k resolution from an old satellite. Somehow.

Canon Maker

They use the warp speed breakaway, which later is known colloquially as the slingshot effect, to go back in time. It’s a nice call back to an established idea.

This also establishes an unnamed organization on an unnamed planet that grabbed people from Earth, and kept and trained them for generations to be used as agents to help Earth along as needed. This would be revisited in Picard Season 2.

Gary Seven and Roberta Lincoln’s adventures sadly never made it to the small screen, however John Byrne created a nice little comic series telling their stories.

Canon Breaker

The Enterprise is sent back to do historical research using this effect on purpose. This would contradict a lot of lore later on, to the point that they established Temporal Affairs to investigate any time travel violations. The Prime Directive informally applied to time travel as well so this whole thing doesn’t make sense. Yes, I know they hadn’t established that agency yet but really, earlier episodes showed just how dangerous it is to mess around in time. The whole setup is ridiculous.

Man It Feels Bad To Be A Red Shirt

No deaths!

Technobabble

Enterprise doors not only respond to cats but only open part-way since cats aren’t very big.

I Know That Guy:

Barbera Babcock lends her voice again for the Beta 5 computer.

Morgan Jones plays the Colonel.

For a long time, it was unknown who played Isis in human form. For a long time, people thought it was Victoria Veltri but she always denied it. Finally, the original call sheet was found in 2019 and it confirmed it was April Tatro.

Finally, we have Teri Garr in her first major role. Of course, she would go on to great fame with Close Encounters, Mister Mom, and Tootsie among others.

We have Robert Lansing back as Gary Seven. He is the only guest star to be noted in the opening credits. He had a very prolific career in film and television but is oddly enough probably best known for this episode.

What It Means To Be Human – Review

I always kinda liked Assignment: Earth but now that I’m having to look at it with a more critical eye, it’s not very good.

Of course, as everyone knows, Assignment: Earth was a backdoor pilot to a new series that would star Lansing and Garr as they worked to help Earth along on various missions that was never picked up. Lansing and Garr are great in this and have a lot of chemistry with his no-nonsense approach and her bubbly ditziness. But as a Star Trek episode it really kinda blows.

For one, the setup has the Enterprise just doing some time travel tourism which is all kinds of wrong and dangerous. The other episodes were accidents and it was understandable. Only one other time did they purposely go back in time, the Voyage Home, and you can kinda understand it since the Earth was about to be wiped out. But this? Ridiculous.

Then Kirk and Spock really don’t do anything. First, they spend much of the episode wandering around the city trying to get to where Seven is and can’t even get past tiny little Teri Garr before Seven has beamed out. Then they track him down to the launch site, only to get nabbed by the guard and spend the other half of the episode standing helplessly in launch control.

Really, the guard would take a couple of prowlers to the center of the action? No brig or holding room? Seriously?

Then there’s Scotty beaming Seven off the platform only for Roberta to randomly push buttons at the exact same time to yank Gary from where he was going. For the second time the Enterprise ran across him because they intercepted his transporter beam. How? Spock is randomly in the transporter room when it happens.

Assignment: Earth hinges on Kirk just not having enough data to make a decision on whether or not Seven is telling the truth. He just has no way to find out. Except at the end when Kirk tells Gary that the Enterprise library computers record that Roberta and Seven have a lot of adventures ahead of them. Maybe information that MIGHT HAVE BEEN USEFUL EARLIER!!!!

Assignment: Earth is all so contrived and is only held together by some great performances by Garr and Lansing. The more I break down the episode, the angrier it makes me. Eh, Teri Garr in her prime was damn cute.

Season Two Overview And Scoring

I’m really not sure which season I liked best, so I did a scoring method to try and sort it all out.

Season 2 started with some really strong episodes: The Doomsday Machine, Mirror Mirror, and Amok Time among others. However, the back half of the season had some real stinkers like The Omega Glory, Friday’s Child, and A Private Little War. Humorous episodes tended to be strong like I, Mudd, A Piece of the Action, and the sublime The Trouble With Tribbles. But for every Ultimate Computer, you get a Wolf In The Fold.

So there’s a lot of uneven quality across the season. I can’t say it’s stronger or weaker than season one, but I would say we have at least the same amount of quality in general.

So for scoring, I’m taking the number of 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5-star episodes, totaling them up, and multiplying by their score to give a weighted total. If they get a half score, I round down. So a 2.5 would be considered a 2-star episode for this.

Scoring is ridiculous bullshit anyway but you Outposters seem to demand it, so let’s do this. I can say that as of writing this paragraph I have no idea what the numbers will come out to.

I know the second season has two fewer episodes but still, it appears season 1 takes the crown so far with a score of 86 vs 76. Interestingly season 2 had more 5-star episodes but a whole lot more 2-star episodes.

Season 3 is coming, could it beat them both? Spoilers… No.

Hope you’ve enjoyed these recaps. I will take some time off to build up season 3 in the hopper and look to close out the original series sometime in March. See you then, Outposters!