[3.4/10] Star Trek, as a franchise, is awfully fond of alternative timelines and parallel Earths and other What If-style imaginations. Well, maybe there’s some alternate universe where The Adventures of Gary Seven became a major hit for CBS, and we all look back on the fact that Gary met Kirk and Spock with the same fondness that people think of the Adam West Batman meeting the Green Hornet flanked by Bruce Lee’s Kato.
But this is not that universe. Instead, it’s one where a viewer like me is left wondering why The Original Series finished its second season by turning over the proceedings to a reasonably dull character the audience has never met before, while sidelining its two main characters from most of the action. A backdoor pilot is nothing new, but it’s odd, to say the least, as a modern viewer watching a show turn its season finale into one big advertisement for another series.
(Don’t get me started on the cheese of Kirk telling Gary and Roberta that they’ll have lots of adventures together in a line that feels proto-ripped off from The Simpsons.)
But hey, it’s not the first time Star Trek has turned significant portions of an episode over to a new character. The problem was that “Assignment: Earth” didn’t feel like an episode of Star Trek. That could just be the result of Kirk and Spock and the rest of the Enterprise crew being put on the bench for most of the episode, but I think there’s more to it. The tone is a bit different, slightly more I Dream of Jeannie than TOS.
It’s also an exceedingly dull episode of the show. Star Trek is not above having uneventful, seemingly interminable middle sections that just sag and sag. But “Assignment: Earth” spends so much time at the McKinley Base where a nuclear bomb orbiter is being launched where next to nothing happens, and it happens slowly. There were times when I seriously wondered if the episode had been running short and so the powers that be just threw in random scenes of characters restating the problem or added in more establishing shots or other wheel-spinning to pad out the time.
That’s really the biggest problem with “Assignment: Earth.” No doubt, the audience would inevitably bristle at seeing their usual heroes put on the backburner in favor of some random half-serious Get Smart ripoff. But even taking the episode as we find it, and accepting that it’s an episode-length pitch for another show, “Assignment” does nothing to make me want to watch that show.
Gary Seven is a pretty uninspired presence. While there’s some intrigue to the character when he uses his little servo pen to best Kirk and company (something done, no doubt, to sell a Trek-loving audience that this guy is awesome don’t you know) and manages to beam down and pursue his mission anyway, Robert Lansing doesn’t offer much of a presence beyond that opening act. There’s a few semi-amusing moments when he banters with his cat (though TOS had already played the “cat that turns into scantily-clad lady” card by this point) but for the most part, he’s a big block of wood proceeding through a pretty perfunctory plot without many good story beats.
The same goes for the annoying Roberta, his young would-be sidekick. I couldn’t believe it was the great Terri Garr playing the role, because Roberta is the cheesiest sort of ditzy sixties foil. The fact that she’s so flighty and throws in weird, character-establishing lines like “that’s why my generation are rebels” kind of stuff just makes her an unpleasant presence in the episode. And there’s little comic or dramatic chemistry with her erstwhile future co-star.
That’s not helped by the fact that the episode repeats a number of things Star Trek has already done. It’s contrived and laughable how blase Kirk is about going back in time to 1968. If time travel were such a casual thing, it would have solved a lot of the crew’s problems from earlier episodes and probably brought a few people back from the dead. Nevermind the fact that it’s silly as hell that they just so happened to go back in time to the year when the episode aired. That alone could be forgivable, but combined with the episode’s other problems it’s just another dent in the fender.
It’s also a pretty ham-fisted anti-nuclear weapons story. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one to look askance on a show at the dawn of the nuclear age expressing its anxieties about the threat of global annihilation from fifty years later, but the show lays the whole “terrible risk” thing on pretty thick. To add insult to injury, the mission to mess with the telemetry of the orbiter rocket is a perfectly fine goal in the episode, but there’s not enough around it, with everything basically being reduced to the usual “oh no, we got captured!” stalling for time.
The best the episode can do for Kirk and Spock (beyond having them held at gunpoint by a random security guard) is try to give Kirk some grand dilemma about whether or not to trust Gary Seven and believe him when he says what he’s doing is for the greater good. But the episode drops that for most of its run time, only picking it up at the very end after the duo have basically been background characters for 90% of the episode.
In brief, “Assignment: Episode” fails as an episode of Star Trek, which is understandable, if not exactly desirable, for what is essentially an undercover pilot for another series. But what’s not okay is that it also fails as an episode of The Adventures of Gary Seven, or at least, as any kind of enticement for people to watch this shoehorned-in spinoff. While the premise of a man raised on another planet sent to Earth to help mankind survive the nuclear age has potential, the stone-faced hero with the space-case (no pun intended) sidekick and his feline assistant make for a weak mix when stretched across forty-five uneventful minutes.
The fact that we’re not talking about this as the start of a Gary Seven series suggests that the Paramount executives were not convinced of the potential for a show based around this idea, and after watching this disappointing season finale, I don’t blame them.
