Story: Gene Roddenberry & Art Wallace
Script: Art Wallace
Director: Marc Daniels
Producer: Gene Roddenberry
When is a Star Trek episode not a Star Trek episode?
When it's a backdoor pilot for a new television series idea Gene Roddenberry has because it's clear the network hates your show and it's time to have an exit strategy.
Near the end of the production of the second season, NBC was moving to cancel Star Trek. It wasn't on the schedule for the next year. The network had budgetary concerns with the show from the beginning, and now without Herb Solow and Desilu to speak for the show (the studio having been bought by Paramount towards the end of the year), it was just NBC and Roddenberry. Ever since the rejection of the first pilot Roddenberry had taken on an "us vs. them" mentality that had not ingratiated him with the network execs, and now they were looking to cut their losses and cancel.
So Roddenberry created "Assignment: Earth" a series about an Earthman raised in secret by ultra advanced aliens and sent back to Earth to try and prevent the Cold War from going hot. Aided by his (predictably young and sexy) human secretary and his mysterious shapeshifting cat, they'd go around meddling in all kinds of things, presumably fighting off an opposing alien force favouring Earth's nuclear annihilation. In the Trek episode, our characters back in time, studying 1960s Earth for historical research when they become observers to the Assignment: Earth characters.
Funny how things turned out. Star Trek got renewed, and Assignment: Earth was never picked up - and for basically the same reason. Roddenberry had gotten in touch with Bjo Trimble, who was responsible for one of the top fanzines and fan mailing networks of the time and leaked that the show was going to be cancelled and encouraged a letter writing campaign to save it. While the amount of mail NBC got has been exaggerated into myth over the years, it was significant -- and inconvenient -- enough for the network to renew, since network policy at the time was that every letter received had to be responded to.
But while NBC decided to save the show, they also knew who the pain in the ass was who had caused the trouble -- they weren't going to give Gene Roddenberry another show, and without Herb Solow to back for him, neither was anybody else.
But what about the episode? Is it any good? Well, I mean, Assignment: Earth might have been a good late sixties adventure show, maybe not as good as Mission: Impossible but in the same ballpark, and perhaps cheaper with its smaller cast. But I doubt it would have become the cultural juggernaut Star Trek did. Indeed, even Mission, which at the time had much higher ratings, largely faded into obscurity until Tom Cruise turned it into a vanity movie series. This episode introduces us to the Assignment: Earth characters and set up just fine.
But it's a bad episode of Star Trek, as Kirk and Spock do a lot of standing around, talking, observing other characters being interesting and remarking on how interesting it would be to see what they get up to every week. Eye roll.
Rating: 2 out of 4
Next Voyage:
No comments:
Post a Comment