Assignment Earth Blunders

I think Gary 7 and Roberta would have done okay, as long as Kirk and Spock don't interfere with whatever is happening.

 

Well, it was breaking away from Psi 2000 in "The Naked Time" (TOS) that led them to the accidental discovery of the phenomenon, and an emergency breakaway from "a black star of high gravitational attraction" which they were passing on their way to Starbase 9 that initially flung them back in "Tomorrow Is Yesterday" (TOS). Still, I suppose one might assume that there are different and/or more specific requirements for performing the maneuver intentionally under control, although Spock does describe their calculated return slingshot around Sol as being "like the one that put us here" FWIW.

-MMoM

 

Gene should probably thank his lucky stars (trek) that things turned out the way they did.

If ST had been cancelled after season two, who knows if Star Trek would have become the scifi pop culture sensation that it eventually became. Granted season three wasn't spectacular.

And if that scenario had played out and Assignment: Earth, the series, took the place of ST, I doubt that A:E would have lasted long nor would have had the impact that Trek had on scifi or pop culture. We might have missed out on a lot of stuff. Among other things, maybe trekbbs would never have existed. And somehow I doubt that there would have been an A:Ebbs forum to replace it.

 

I could be misremembering, but I thought his stepping down as line producer was because he gave the studio/network an ultimatum that he would quit if they put the show in the "death slot" (forget what day and time, but basically when no one would be watching) and they called his bluff and said "ok, bye then!" Like I said, though, that could be a distortion of the true facts. I'll have to check up on it further, or maybe someone else here knows further? Wasn't he still around working on stories and scripts, just in a much less active role?

-MMoM

 

It was something like that, as I recall. The death time slot was Friday at 10:00 PM! Justman and Solow said that GR was basically missing in action during season 3, working on other potential projects.

 

Thanks. I think I remember them (or someone) saying he was physically there but just stayed holed up in his office all the time. Still have to look for sources to be sure of my recollection.

 

Or Assignment: Earth becomes the biggest hit, lasting over ten years with Mission: Impossible-level storylines. Then Roddenberry makes two semi-successful movies, and in his latter days, brings back the show following the writers' strike where it lasts five more seasons, followed by annual television movies for five more years, until Robert Lansing's death and then Teri Garr's retirement brings about a (temporary) end to the franchise. Then it's brought back for a sub-par theatrical reboot movie in 1999, and a one-season sequel TV series in 2003.

We're currently discussing CBS' tentative plans to bring forth an Assignment: Earth internet TV series (will it be another reboot? a sequel?), and arguing over whether the two-season Star Trek series constitutes the future of the Assignment: Earth universe, or should just be ignored.

 

According to Gary Seven the world that sent him to earth would be still unknown to the Federation even in Kirk's time, so it sure wasn't them that asked for The Enterprise to be sent back in time! In fact if they had of asked then why did Gary Seven object to their so called interference in the episode?
JB

 

Could have been two seasons of Trek and one of Assignment:Earth I guess! We might also have found out about the aliens behind Mr.Seven rather than all this fifty year old guesses! Glad they went with Trek's third season though as can you imagine Trek without The Enterprise Incident, Day of The dove, The Tholian Web and All Our yesterdays?
JB

 

...Except not - that was Scotty cold-starting the warp engines. Or at least Spock assigns all the glory on the time travel feat to the cold start formula and none to the planet. He even emphasizes the repeatability of the experiment even though Psi 2000 is now gone forever. (Or will be, in three days. But I sort of think Spock didn't count on that, and Kirk postponed the repeat attempt to "someday" without Spock opposing.)

...Or was that Sol again, at the other end? They must have been on a course to Earth, the destination already punched in by Sulu, or else they wouldn't have ended up there (Spock even mentions "the automated helm setting"). The escape from the black star just sent them careening through space, thinks Kirk....

...In a log that predates the crew awakening in the 20th century! Granted that Kirk apparently dictates all his logs well after the fact. But it's also possible that the trip from the black star to Sol took several minutes of Kirk dictating, Sulu trying to regain control, and Scotty trying to stop the ship, and it was only the time travel at the very end, next to Sol, that made the crew lose consciousness just as in ST4:TVH.

"Here" possibly being the 20th century, rather than at Sol. That is, the result of the slingshot around Sol, rather than the result of the careening from the black star.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Unknown to the Federation counsel maybe and mere starship captains definitely, but not necessarily to certain upper echelons of Starfleet...

 

What was happening there is that the planet was collapsing and pulling them in, and they needed the cold start to achieve enough speed to escape, i.e. "break away." At least, that was always my impression.

They were headed for Starbase 9, which was explicitly said to indeed be in the same direction as Earth from wherever it was they were to start with.

At least some of them unquestionably are written in hindsight, yes. "The Enemy Within" (TOS) is the example that comes to mind immediately, but I'm sure I recall there being multiple others well.

I would think "here" refers to both, and that "breakaway...like snapping a rubber band" and "slingshot effect like the one that put us here" are talking about one and the same phenomenon. "Breakaway" is the same terminology applied to their method of arrival in "Assignment: Earth" as well.

I guess I didn't quite clearly understand the alternate scenario/interpretation you were envisioning? Perhaps I'm just slow today.

-MMoM

 

I still think somebody should reboot "Assignment: Earth." You wouldn't even need to maintain a connection to STAR TREK. Just call it "Gene Roddenberry's ASSIGNMENT: EARTH."

 

Well Gary states they are unknown to the Federation even in their time and Scotty states there are no planets in the vicinity where the beam came from so the planet must be either shielded or cloaked!
JB

 

And of course absolutely everything that happened made it into the history books. Not one scrap was left out.

Nope, that's not how it works. There are lots of things you're not going to find on Wikipedia (or the Federation equivalent), because the hard records were lost or destroyed before they could be digitized, or even the digitized records were destroyed. There are some things that happen that never do get recorded. That's why archaeologists and historical researchers aren't out of work. There's still a hell of a lot to discover.

It's obvious that Gary Seven's presence in the late 1960s never made it into the history books, or Kirk and Spock would have already known about him.

It's not that hard to lose history. Not long before the 2015 federal election, the federal government here in Canada (when Stephen Harper was Prime MInister) decided to literally trash and burn entire environmental science libraries. They burned records going back decades, since that information would have helped the environmentalists fighting the oil and gas companies. They swore up, down, and sideways that they digitized the information before trashing the physical records... and if that's true, I've got ocean front property outside my front window for sale (I live in a landlocked province in Canada).

Star Trek's in-universe history includes more destructive wars than we've had so far (thank goodness nothing like the Eugenics wars or WWIII has happened... yet). So there are more opportunities and reasons for certain historical details to get lost or deliberately forgotten.

Or maybe it's just a coincidence that nobody's had a reason to do it except around the Sun. It's a difficult and dangerous procedure, and not something to be done casually.

I just mentioned an essay that speculated that the bum's death is why there's no TV show called "Star Trek" in TOS' in-universe history. The essay speculated that the bum's disappearance led to his eldest son (hypothetical that he had kids) turning to a life of crime to support the rest of the family, which in turn led to an encounter many years later with Roddenberry before he became a writer... an encounter Roddenberry didn't survive. So if Roddenberry died before creating Star Trek, that's why there's no "Star Trek" in Star Trek.

As I've said, sometimes records get lost. Sometimes they get deliberately destroyed. Did you record absolutely everything about your own life? Do you even remember absolutely everything about your own life? If you were to look up a history of your own city, would you find everything there that you remember personally? I doubt that.

Starfleet didn't know about Gary 7.

I guess you could extrapolate and stretch continuity a bit and say the Department of Temporal Investigations set it in motion, since they would known by their century.

I wonder if Teri Garr would have wanted to do a series. I read in an interview she gave that she hates being reminded of Star Trek, and her comments about it included, "Don't talk to me about Star Trek fans. Those are the kind of people you see at swap meets!" (paraphrased).

So her nose has definitely been in the air for a long time. Those comments have somewhat tainted my subsequent enjoyment of this episode and any novels that mention Roberta Lincoln.

Yes, it could make an interesting series, and go in a variety of directions.

 

Anyone coming back in time to our period might say, "Wow, the Earth is in a really big mess. Let's go back to our own time, pronto!"

 

Actually, Gary is rather vague in that regard, simply saying that his planet is "unknown" in Kirk's century; he doesn't specify Starfleet. However, just because the planet is hidden it doesn't mean that his organisation has not made discrete diplomatic overtures to specific members of Starfleet

Exactly my point. If the Federation populace in general don't know about this super secret organisation, why should a mere ship's Ensign? (it was Chekov who consulted the star maps, not Scotty). Again, it does not preclude the possibility that certain individuals in Starfleet had been made aware of the Aegis - which in fact is exactly what has happened by the end of the episode! So clearly what Gary tells them at the start of the episode is a generalisation at best.

The other thing in this episode which is often overlooked is that the events are are a clearly stated example of a causality loop - giving the Aegis even more reason to ensure that it occurs.

 

They've specifically said in Star Trek that records are fragmentary from the 1990s. So I assume the Enterprise, as well as perhaps other ships, was sent back in time to discreetly copy specific records to fill in the gaps. The 1960s seem an odd place to do it, as opposed to the 1990s or better yet, 2030s or something where they can download the internet, but it might be safer than that period (where sleeper ships ruled the skies) or it might be a dry run (that ran into issues) for a planned trip to another time. Or perhaps the Lexington travelled to 1998 and the Intrepid went to 1973 and the Farragut travelled to 2051 at the same time (or, more likely, they travelled to ancient Vulcan or Orion or Romulus to look into their pasts).

I assume then that "Assignment: Earth" was a failure, what with running across a local who was more powerful than they could imagine. Once they got the Guardian of Forever up and running on their side, they just used it to waltz into past civilizations and start "record-keeping" until they had the full genealogy of the Raymond family (and other details) completed.

 

Their mission isn't to make sure 'not one scrap' of history went unrecorded. It's literally to listen to communications to see how Earth survived desperate (and completely undefined) problems in 1968.

I feel like we're discussing it maybe too strenuously though. It's a great episode and no one is really taking it to task, but it doesn't mean we can't make fun of how quickly they tried to explain away the set-up so that they could move on to other things.

 

They were collecting information on the last part of history before the digital age when everything was recorded.