STAR TREK:
- The Original Series (TOS)
- The Animated Series
- The Movies
- The Next Generation (TNG)
- Deep Space Nine (DS9)
- Voyager
- Enterprise
THE ORIGINAL SERIES:
- Season One
- Season Two
- Season Three
- "Season Four"
Season Two:
-30: "Catspaw"
-32: "Friday's Child"
-33: "Who Mourns for Adonais?"
-38: "The Apple"
-39: "Mirror, Mirror"
-43: "Bread and Circuses"
-45: "A Private Little War"
-46: "The Gamesters of Triskelion"
-49: "A Piece of the Action"
-52: "Patterns of Force"
-54: "The Omega Glory"
-55: "Assignment: Earth"
-Season 2 Rankings
SCIENCE FICTION:
- Doctor Who
- Sliders
- The Matrix
- Main Index
- Site Map
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Assignment: Earth
(Star Trek story #55 in production order)
- story by Gene Roddenberry and Art Wallace
- teleplay by Art Wallace
- directed by Marc Daniels
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Assignment: Earth
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Star Trek saves its only second season foray into the
world of time travel proper for the very end of its run,
which turns out to be an exceedingly bland run-of-the-mill
exercise that re-hashes its usual petrified take on the subject.
The opening, and indeed many of the challenges of the story,
are extremely reminiscent of
"Tomorrow is Yesterday"
(Star Trek production #21), with talk of the
"lightspeed breakaway factor" bringing the Enterprise and crew
to then-present-day 1968 - although this time on purpose
and with intention to study the time without allowing themselves
to be detected. No sooner do they record this in the log than
an adventure slams into them. With their strict restrictive
fear of altering anything, you have to wonder why they bothered
to tempt fate in the first place.
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What is perhaps more interesting is revealed in Herb Solow and
Robert Justman's "Inside Star Trek" book and audio cassettes:
that this episode is a thinly disguised backdoor pilot for
a proposed TV series about Robert Lansing's Gary Seven
alien agent, saving humanity each week in James Bond style with the aid of
his Earthly assistant Roberta Lincoln (Teri Garr) and his
mysterious cat-woman companion Isis. That series might even have
gone somewhere, if only this "pilot" episode wasn't such a clunker.
The biggest flaw in the episode is the lack of a proper,
tangible, externalized antagonistic force to drive the conflict
in the plot. All of the major characters belong to either
Star Trek's cast of heroic regulars, or the proposed new cast
of Gary Seven's heroes. The writers attempt to generate most
of the story's conflict artificially between these two groups,
while any roles outside of these groups remain uninteresting
bit parts. There are major motivational problems as well,
because Gary Seven is the only character who knows what's
going on, and he keeps too much information to himself until the very end.
All the other characters are left in the dark, with our Star Trek
regulars forced to doubt their every possibility for a move,
spending all their time either second guessing themselves
cluelessly, or standing around in some form of captivity
waiting for something to happen. For a story that's meant
to double as the 55th of Star Trek, and as the 1st for
"The Adventures of Gary Seven", the story really doesn't do
justice to either series or either set of characters. The
audience is left with no-one to root for, and nothing to
get emotionally invested in.
There is some fun to be had with this episode. Teri Garr's
bubbly presence lifts the episode up a notch, and is one of the
story's highlights. Her costume seems to be more suited for a
quietly posing model though, and looks a bit out of place when she
starts jumping around the set like a monkey. The episode
also uses a lot of footage of a rocket ready for launch,
which is the kind of thing that can easily drone on too long and
be a bore. "Assignment: Earth" is at least successful in
combatting this by having Scotty encourage the audience to
try to spot Gary Seven somewhere in there with him, elevating
our interest in such footage enormously. Nice one.
When all is said and done, this Star Trek episode actually
does keep its nose clean in terms of what actually happens
with regard to time travel. Nothing "changes" magically,
history proceeds logically, no conundrums bugger up the writing.
The belief in such possibilities has merely rendered the
characters extremely impotent and boring today. Because any
time-travel no-no's are limited to beliefs inside the characters,
this is actually the best of the three full-length time travel
stories produced on Star Trek so far. Yet it still isn't a
winner by any stretch of the imagination.
It is interesting to ponder Gary Seven's actual take on
time travel though. He appears to have some knowledge
of future history, but he only verbalizes the threat
of changing history when he realizes who the Enterprise crew
are, as though he is tailoring his remarks to fit in with
what he knows their belief systems would be. What does he
himself really believe? Perhaps this is still officially up
in the air, although it's hard to think that the Star Trek writers
who penned this episode actually have anything more
metaphysically correct in mind. Had "The Adventures of Gary Seven"
become a series, it could have safely stayed away from any
time travel, as Gary only travels across space, and it would
probably have turned out to be much more dramatic, exciting,
and interesting than this poorly designed pilot could show.
Rankings:
Best Story:
- The Doomsday Machine
- The Trouble With Tribbles
- Journey to Babel
- Mirror, Mirror
- Who Mourns For Adonais?
- The Ultimate Computer (the most organic and potent of all the Kirk-vs-Computer conflicts on Trek)
- A Piece of the Action
- Obsession (solidly plotted, but a bit slow)
- Amok Time
- The Immunity Syndrome
- The Deadly Years (the real fun is watching Shatner and Kelley chew the scenery in this one)
- By Any Other Name
- The Changeling
- Friday's Child (although not a very effective ending)
- Metamorphosis
- Assignment: Earth
- I, Mudd (VERY goofy, and too loose a grasp of AI machine logic)
- Return to Tomorrow (some good bits for sure, but quite wet, slow,
and just not very exciting. How can the aliens do all that,
and not build more sensitive androids for themselves?
Why not build them millions of years ago?)
- Catspaw
- The Apple (characters not very interesting in this one)
- Wolf in the Fold (well made, but not my style of content)
- The Omega Glory
- Patterns of Force
- Bread and Circuses (overriding feeling of unpleasantness / uselessness)
- The Gamesters of Triskelion
- A Private Little War
Best Music:
- Fred Steiner: Who Mourns For Adonais?
- Gerald Fried: Friday's Child
- Sol Kaplan: The Doomsday Machine
- Gerald Fried: Amok Time
- Gerald Fried: Catspaw
- Jerry Fielding: The Trouble With Tribbles
- George Duning: Metamorphosis
- Fred Steiner: By Any Other Name
- Alexander Courage: New Compositions for Season Two Library
- George Duning: Return to Tomorrow
- Samuel Matlovsky: I, Mudd
- Fred Steiner: Mirror, Mirror (really, is anything new here?)
- George Duning: Patterns of Force marches
- Fred Steiner: The Omega Glory
Best Directing:
- Marc Daniels: The Doomsday Machine
- Marc Daniels: Mirror, Mirror
- Joseph Pevney: The Trouble With Tribbles
- Joseph Pevney: Amok Time
- Ralph Senensky: Obsession
- Joseph Pevney: Journey to Babel
- John Meredyth Lucas: The Ultimate Computer
- Vincent McEveety: The Omega Glory
- Marc Daniels: Who Mourns For Adonais?
- Marc Daniels: By Any Other Name
- Joseph Pevney: The Deadly Years
- Joseph Pevney: The Immunity Syndrome
- Joseph Pevney: The Wolf in the Fold
- James Komack: A Piece of the Action
- Marc Daniels: "Assignment: Earth"
- Marc Daniels: The Changeling
- Ralph Senensky: Metamorphosis
- Ralph Senensky: Return to Tomorrow
- Marc Daniels: I, Mudd
- Joseph Pevney: Friday's Child
- Vincent McEveety: Patterns of Force
- Ralph Senensky: Bread and Circuses
- Joseph Pevney: The Apple
- Gene Nelson: The Gamesters of Triskelion
- Marc Daniels: A Private Little War
- Joseph Pevney: Catspaw
Read the next Star Trek review:
"Spectre of the Gun"
This Season Two time travel story
is available on DVD and Blu-Ray.
Click on the Amazon symbol for the desired disc format
and location nearest you for pricing and availability:
Star Trek Season Two "Purist" Standard DVD Box Set:
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Watch the legend continue to develop through its prime.
Set contains all 26 episodes from the second season
in their original wacky broadcast order,
plus new bonus features.
As someone interested in researching how the episodes
actually looked and sounded originally, and when and
exactly how certain musical cues first debuted,
this was the DVD set for me, and it remains the most
untampered-with full-season collection of Star Trek
out there. Unique extras include pure text commentaries
on select episodes.
Sadly, these sets are starting to
become rare, and prices are now rising as these
become collectors' items....
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DVD U.S.
| DVD Canada
| DVD U.K.
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Standard DVD Extras include:
- To Boldly Go... Season Two featurette (20 min.)
- Designing the Final Frontier featurette (22 min.)
- Writer's Notebook: D.C. Fontana (8 min.)
- Kirk, Spock, & Bones: Star Trek's Great Trio (7 min.)
- Nichelle Nichols - Divine Diva (13 min.)
- Life Beyond Trek: Leonard Nimoy (12 min.)
- Text Commentaries on
"Amok Time" and
"The Trouble with Tribbles"
- "Red Shirt Logs" Easter Eggs (8 min. total)
- Production Art & Photo Log (still menus)
- Original Trailers for every episode (1 min. each)
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The Original Series Remastered Sets
The re-mastered Star Trek set for season two,
like that of season three, seems destined to be obsolete
in very short order. Its content is easily surpassed
by the more respectful presentation on Blu-ray, and unlike
the "purist" DVD release listed above, appears to have none
of its own exclusive content. Add to that the very gimmicky,
awkward packaging that is prone to damage both during shipping and
with light usage, and I'd have to recommend that all devoted Trekkers
should consider other options for their ideal TOS season two product.
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Season Two - Blu Ray
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26 episodes @ 51 minutes
Star Trek sets are now available on Blu Ray.
Picture and sound quality restoration has gone up yet
another notch since the remastered version, as have the
liberties taken with "upgrading" the episodes.
Once again, even newer CGI effects and optical shots have
replaced many space scenes, matte paintings, and phaser
effects.... but this time the upgrades have the same respect
and user-functionality applied to select
Doctor Who DVD releases since 2002,
as the CGI effects can now be turned off to see the original
effects. Good show. It seems that the music
has still been tampered with too much for my liking though.
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Blu-ray U.S.
| Blu-ray Canada
| Blu-ray U.K.
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Blu-ray features add:
- option to watch original or new CGI effects.
- Audio commentary on "The Trouble with Tribbles"
by writer David Gerrold.
- Starfleet Access - Okuda interactive trivia
plus picture-in-picture interviews
on 2 episodes:
- "Amok Time"
- "The Trouble With Tribbles".
- Behind-the-scenes 8mm home movies part 2 (HD, 12 min.) from
Billy Blackburn (Lt. Hadley / DeForest Kelley stand-in)
- Star Trek TOS on Blu-ray (HD, 10 min.) restoration and upgrade featurette.
- Star Trek's Favorite Moments (SD, 17 min.)
- Mobile-Blu Content-To-Go Exclusives:
"Creating Chekov",
"Listening to the Actors"
"Writing Spock"
"Spock's Mother"
- "More Tribbles, More Troubles" with commentary
from the animated "Season 4" DVD box set.
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"Trials and Tribble-ations" in HD this time,
with
two featurettes from the DS9 season 5 DVD box set.
- plus all documentaries, featurettes, and episode promos
from the "purist" standard DVD set listed far above.
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Review written by Martin Izsak.
Comments on this article are welcome. You may contact
the author from this page:
Contact page
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