What would a TOS spin off look like

And yet, they just happen to have a transporter that is zillions of times more powerful than Enterprise technology, and they can hide planets from the Federation in the 23rd century. Maybe they're just borrowing all that from the aliens next door, too.

 

^The tie-ins, beginning with a Howard Weinstein comics story for DC that was built upon in later novels by Greg Cox and myself, have established Gary Seven's employers as a group called the Aegis. Howie's comics story evidently drew on elements of the original '66 pilot version of A:E and explained the Aegis as a group that worked to preserve the integrity of the timeline, working against other factions trying to alter history -- thereby anticipating Enterprise's Temporal Cold War by a full decade. (Which enabled me to include the Aegis as one of the TCW factions in my own DTI: Watching the Clock.)

And Howie's interpretation makes sense. How else would the Aegis have known that the late 1960s were a crucial period for Earth's survival unless they had the ability to project possible futures? Plus it was necessary to return to the time-travel well in order to cross over Gary with the Enterprise crew again in Howie's comics and Greg's Assignment: Eternity.

But I remain convinced that time travel would've been only an occasional element of the A:E spinoff if it had been made, and it would've been interesting to see more stories about Gary and Roberta dealing with contemporary threats in the '60s and maybe the '70s -- as we've seen them do in other tie-ins like Greg's The Eugenics Wars duology and John Byrne's A:E comics miniseries.

 

Yea, but it didn't not suggest it. He could have been lying at the time just like Spock did from time to time. Changing the past could also have disastrous effects much worse than the benefits of the time changes even like we saw in that Voyager episode with Braxton where he and Janeway wound up on Earth in the 20th century and the galaxy was destroyed in the future because of Braxton or Janeway. That was the one with the Bill Gates type - Starling. So there is always three sides to every equation and story at least but it could still all have taken place in one single contemporary setting of the future or the past for that matter because it wasn't about time travel like 'Voyagers' was but about time travelers in the present, the future or the past depending on what they decide, to save money on cost.

 

I saw Assignment Earth long before I saw Dr. Who. I never really made the connection between the two until now. Further, just based on the episode, I always thought Gary 7 had traveled in time. As a kid I assumed Gary was from the 20th Century, recruited and educated by an advanced society in the future, then sent back in time to his 20th Century to carry out his assignment. As stated, the lines of dialogue always made me believe this. I mean, how else would he know that the planet he was on would be unknown to 23rd Century Starfleet? Either future time travelers came back with such information, oor else he had spent time in the future.

 

Quite simply, I would rather have seen Star Trek remade with new actors in the roles of our friends from TOS, charting adventures from beyond the original 5 year mission, but before the advent of the movies, the benefits of new CGI and technology to this premise would be breathtaking.
I loved Enterprise because it looked so good on screen in a way that TNG, Deep Space or Voyager never looked IMO, because of technological advances, however it made TOS look way too old and dated, so the oppurtunity was missed to reboot Kirk and Co, and missed in the sense that we could have seen the crew revisit and enhance some rivalries with the Andorrians or Tholians for example.
Would it not have been better that Kirks crew fought for superiority with these species rather than Jonathon Archers crew, and thus timelines and canon would not have been fucked with.
I know someone will come back with JJ Abrams version of Trek doing a similar thing to what I`m trying to outline, but I never rated his version of Star Trek nor his choice of cast, except for the new Spock, and I feel he has went against the grain with some of the story in the first film.
I hope you can make sense of what I`m trying to say.

 

Here are the lines of dialogue:

And later:

So yes, clearly his organization has knowledge of the future, but he himself is explicitly a native of the 20th century, although he never actually lived on Earth prior to the events of the episode. He and hundreds of generations of his ancestors were raised on another planet, beginning c. 4000 BCE, and selectively bred into physically and intellectually superior beings. Which is more evidence that the Aegis has future knowledge, since they knew they'd need to abduct humans and breed a race of super-agents by the 20th century. But the episode stressed that Gary himself was born and raised in the 20th century, just not on Earth.

 

I assumed Gary Seven was one of the descendants of the human stock taken by the aliens six thousand years before. I also assumed—without foundation—that he was the seventh man named Gary in their program, and so Gary VII, actually.

 

That's exactly what was intended, as the dialogue itself indicates. Actually it's a little ambiguous; Gary only says that "agents" are descended from those abducted humans, and he's a supervisor, not an agent. But the pitch document that was written a couple of weeks ahead of the episode script clearly states that he is one of those descendants.

"Gary Seven" is his code name, according to dialogue. Presumably it's not his real name. After all, would the name "Gary" have existed 6,000 years ago when his ancestors were taken from Earth? (Its ancestor, the Gaelic name Garaidh, has only been traced back as far as the Middle Ages, sez Wikipedia.) I always figured that, since the people who gave him the code name were aliens, they were a little bit off the mark in their attempt to coin a plausible human/Western name. Although in Watching the Clock I referred to other Aegis agents as Cyral Nine and Rodal Eight; I decided at the time to treat them as ranks or tiers, with lower numbers being higher echelons. I've sometimes wondered if that was really a good idea.

 

True. But I always interpreted that in the context of the fact that he was part of a multi-generational covert operation. I accepted the idea that he was assigned his code name at birth. And to find out why I made that leap, you'll have to ask preteen CorporalCaptain; it just seemed right to me.

No, but Gary's aliens obviously kept up with the times, and could have named the subjects. I don't see why Gary, at least, can't be his given name. It's not like he actually needs an alias for the sort of reason that, say, the spies on The Americans do.

Perhaps Gary 7 is the prefix to a much longer alphanumeric identifier.

 

"Code," by definition, means the conversion of information into a different form. So something can only be a code name if it's different from your real name.

But consider it. We're talking about a population of humans who've grown up together on an alien planet for 6000 years. Do you really want to believe they're mere puppets of the aliens who have all their decisions made for them right down to what they're named? I find that a rather hideous prospect. To all indications, the Aegis are good guys, and they care about human rights and individuality and freedom and all that. That's what Gary was sent to Earth to protect. So presumably they'd grant freedom to their own agents as well, and allow them to develop their own culture, name and raise their own children, and lead lives that weren't exclusively about training for secret missions.

Again, consider his origins. Whatever language is spoken in the community he was born to -- a community whose forebears were abducted 6000 years ago -- would be a descendant of a tongue or mix of tongues older than any recorded language in human history, with six millennia of isolation and alien influence acting on it. Logically, its language, and the names its people used, would be unlike anything known on Earth. So yes, he would need an alias if he wanted to pass for a 20th-century Earth human.

 

Christopher, in the past I've described Gary Seven and his people on the Alien's planet(s) as being just short of "slaves." Would you agree that that is accurate?

Seven himself did say that the human ancestors were taken from Earth, a pretty specific term. Is Gary Seven, strictly speaking, a free man?

 

I don't agree with that assessment at all. Slavery is not a hereditary condition. If it were, then just about every African-American would still be considered a slave, and of course they aren't. Heck, slavery was a common practice the world over up until the 19th century, so probably virtually everyone has some slaves in their ancestry (though virtually everyone has kings in their ancestry as well). So it does not make any sense to say that someone whose remote ancestors were slaves is himself a slave.

Besides, we don't know that his ancestors were taken by force. I mean, given Gary's appearance, we're probably talking about people from central or northern European stock, and 6000 years ago that would've meant they may have been hunter-gatherers, or at best subsistence farmers. They might've been offered the chance to go someplace where their standard of living would be vastly improved, and gone willingly. Sure, Gary said they were "taken," but that's an ambiguous word -- you can take someone to the movies or take someone shopping without being arrested for kidnapping.

 

Why not? The ability to do one thing has no technological bearing on the feasibility to do another. That's like saying just because the horse-drawn buggy was developed, we should have expected the the airplane to be developed at the same time.

 

Christopher, I think you and I have either slightly or somewhat different assumptions, here.

First of all, if Gary Seven were operating in the context of real life secret agents, "Gary Seven" would not be his code name, because that name occurs on all of Gary's forged credentials, e.g. http://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/2x26hd/assignmentearthhd0462.jpg and http://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/2x26hd/assignmentearthhd0463.jpg. As a fake name on ID cards, the proper term would be alias. The purpose of a secret agent's code name is multifaceted, but one of those purposes is to protect the identity of the agent. The name "Gary Seven" clearly does not serve that function, since he's openly telling it to everyone in the clear. That right there would be evidence that secret agent tropes are being used in the teleplay both imprecisely and therefore erroneously, if this is how we are to interpret the meaning of "code name". It's worth noting that that would be the natural interpretation in the context of the episode.

It's also worth noting that the names "agent 201" and "agent 347" do qualify as properly used code names in the teleplay, by the real world standards of secret agents.

In any case, the purpose of the code name "Gary Seven" is certainly not obfuscation. If we are to accept that the term code name is in fact applied accurately, then we must resort to a context besides secret agents.

Code names are applied in many different ways by a variety of organizations. One application of code names is for an organization to assign unique identifiers to its items, when those items are created or acquired by the organization. The Manhattan Project is perhaps the preeminent example in the real world of something that is known only by its code name, which was assigned to it when it was created. Yes, a major purpose of that code name was to disguise what the goal of that project was, but the project simply had no other name at all, ever, at least as far as I know. But another purpose of that code name was to make sure that the referenced project had a unique designation. The fact that there is only one correct way to decode the code name is one of the most important properties of codes that is being exploited here.

An example in science fiction would be The Andromeda Strain. That is the organism's code name, and it is not known by any other name. The coding mechanism is what assigns the unique identifier, and that mechanism ensures that the code has any other properties besides uniqueness also demanded of it. In the case of Macintosh operating systems, such an additional property would be that it be a big cat name.

So, to get back to what I was assuming about Gary Seven, I was assuming that the code name Gary Seven was assigned to him at birth, to ensure that he has a unique name for all time in the organization. Heck, maybe he didn't even know or use that code name growing up. Maybe only once he graduated into training to become an agent was his code name revealed to him. He could have been given a name by his parents that was entirely different, I'll acknowledge that. But the aliens would want to give him a unique designation so they could classify him for all the various attentions that he required, whatever his ultimate role was or wasn't, since in any case his whole life existed within the context of their operation.

I agree that it's not necessarily true that the aliens abducted the ancestors by force. The humans could have gone willingly to serve their gods, for example.

I also always assumed that the aliens would be able to convince the human subjects, by laying it all out, that they were doing the right thing. Gary Seven is a true believer, and I don't think for one second that he was brainwashed or coerced in any way. To me, this is how I imagined that the aliens demonstrated their benevolence. If we are going to be idealistic, then the aliens would never have to worry about whether their project would collapse, for example due to the people refusing to cooperate, because they would be able to persuade them logically. Perhaps also they take good care of the people who don't go on to become field agents.

That said, Gary is arguably better trained than Kirk is. I'm not talking Salusa Secundus here, but Gary must have been to one helluva Kung Fu school.

 

It's not my assumption, it's Seven's own words:

You can take up the definition of "code name" with him if you like, but he called it a code name, and that means it's not his real name -- which is the point.

Then why are you arguing with me at such length???? If we're agreed that it wasn't his real given name, that's the end of it.

 

TAS.

 

Gary Seven of Nine, Tertiary Adjunct of Unimatrix 01)

 

Assignment: Earth aside, perhaps a TOS spinoff could just be one aboard a different kind of Starfleet vessel--a old transport ship that's smaller, slower, and less armed than the Enterprise, but tends to end up in similar predicaments from time to time. Maybe the real twist from TOS is that the ship has a female captain and first officer perhaps, I dunno...

 

[yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9SQ4H2FgV0[/yt]

 

The Starfleet freighter U.S.S. Huron from TAS' "The Pirates of Orion" sort of fit your description, as it was certainly not as large, fast or battle-capable as the Enterprise, had a smaller crew (only three were seen). A ship of its class would make the crew feel more isolated in the far reaches of space than the large, well-supplied Constitution class ship.

Perhaps you would see a focus on personal stories more than the interests of Starfleet.