“Assignment: Earth”
Written by Gene Roddenberry & Art Wallace
Directed by Marc Daniels
Season 2, Episode 26
Production episode 60355
Original air date: March 29, 1968
Stardate: unknown
Captain’s log. The Enterprise has gone back in time to do historical research to see how humanity survived the year 1968. While orbiting and monitoring communications, the Enterprise intercepts an incredibly powerful transporter beam, one that comes from another solar system. In the beam is a human from this time period named Gary Seven, who has been trained on another world by aliens who want humanity to survive. (He’s holding a cat named Isis, with whom he can apparently communicate.) Seven insists that he must beam down to Earth or the entire human race will be in danger. But Kirk has no proof of that, and so has him confined to the brig. (Seven tries to break free of confinement and beam down, with help from Isis, but fails, getting shot and stunned by Kirk for his trouble.)
Seven wakes up in the brig and manages to break out of using an all-purpose weapon called a servo, which looks just like an ordinary pen. He stuns several security guards and beams down to Earth, overriding the override on the transporter. Seven and Isis materialize in an office in New York City. We find out that Seven’s mission, along with other agents—including two who have been missing for three days—is to guide humanity. The race of aliens who sent Seven took several humans from Earth six thousand years ago, and genetically developed their descendants into perfect specimens of humanity. Given that humanity’s technology has progressed faster than their social and political acumen, Seven and his cohorts are trying to keep humanity from destroying itself.
The missing agents were to sabotage an orbital platform launch at McKinley Rocket Base. But the mission has not been accomplished, and so Seven must complete it himself.
Roberta Lincoln shows up. She is a secretary hired by the missing agents to do research (she thinks it’s for an encyclopedia). Seven thinks she’s one of the missing agents, and then realizes that he’s screwed up. He tells her that he’s with the CIA (using one of many fake IDs he has) and that he’s on a mission to save the country. Playing on Lincoln’s patriotism works, and she agrees to stay and keep working.
Seven’s computer, the Beta 5, determines that the agents were killed in a car accident while en route to McKinley.
Kirk and Spock beam down and are able to track Seven’s transporter signal to the office. Lincoln delays them long enough for Seven to escape through a transporter of his own that takes him and Isis directly from the office to McKinley. Kirk and Spock find plans for McKinley—but then the cops show up. The captain and first officer beam up with the cops and then they’re sent back down, completely bumfuzzled—as is Lincoln when she sees the officers beam back.
Scotty is able to get images of McKinley, but they can’t find Seven visually—and he’s probably hiding if he plans to sabotage the launch. Kirk and Spock beam down to McKinley. (In a nice touch, they’re wearing lighter clothes this time, as it’s generally warmer in Florida than it is in New York.)
Seven is stopped by Sergeant Lipton, to whom he shows his NSA ID, then stuns him when he tries to call security to verify his totally bogus ID. Then he stows away in the car of Cromwell, the launch director, when he goes to do a final inspection of the gantry. After the inspection, the elevator is sent all the way up—with Seven and Isis in it.
Lipton wakes up just as Kirk and Spock materialize, and he captures them. They’re brought to Mission Control, but there’s no other issues, so they decide not to delay the countdown. Meanwhile, Seven is working hard to sabotage the launch.
Back in New York, Lincoln accidentally discovers the vault with Seven’s transporter in it. (It is as yet unclear how she got rid of the cops, though one suspects that they left quickly of their own volition and headed straight to the nearest bar.)
Scotty manages to find Seven in mid-sabotage and beam him to the Enterprise. However, Lincoln playing with Seven’s transporter enables him to reappear back in New York. Uncaring of the consequences, Seven activates the Beta 5, which freaks Lincoln out even further.
Seven and Lincoln in New York and Kirk and Spock in custody in Mission Control stand by helplessly and watch the launch. Seven tries to finish his sabotage with the Beta 5. A frazzled Lincoln tries to call the police again, but Seven uses his servo to break the phone. While he can’t destroy it, he does send the rocket off course. The warhead is now armed and going to crash in Asia somewhere and explode. Mission Control’s destruct signal isn’t working.
Worried about what he’s doing, Lincoln clubs Seven on the head before he can finish his work, as she’s sure he’s trying to start World War III—but Seven insists that he’s trying to stop it.
Kirk and Spock manage to overpower Lipton while everyone’s distracted by the launch going pear-shaped and have Scotty beam them to Seven’s office. Reluctantly, Kirk agrees to let Seven finish his work. The rocket detonates 104 miles over land, which is high enough so that no one is hurt.
Spock does a bit of research, and learns that the rocket exploding 104 miles over Earth is exactly what happened in history. While they talk, Lincoln sees Isis change into a woman in a funky black outfit, but changes back to a black cat before anyone notices.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Scotty expresses shock that there is a transporter that can transport people across solar systems. This is highly amusing, given that such a transporter is a major plot point of the 2009 Star Trek…
Also part of Seven’s “high tech” equipment is a typewriter that responds to voice. By typing. With a ribbon. On a piece of paper. Yeah.
Fascinating. Seven is immune to the Vulcan neck pinch, which really sucks for Spock.
I’m a doctor not an escalator. McCoy confirms that Seven is human. It’s a very exciting episode for him.
Ahead warp one, aye. Sulu confirms that the rocket will explode. It’s a very exciting episode for him.
It’s a Russian invention. Chekov confirms that the transporter came from far away from an area of space that’s empty. It’s a very exciting episode for him.
Hailing frequencies open. Uhura contacts the surface once. It’s a very exciting episode for her.
I cannot change the laws of physics! It really is a very exciting episode for Scotty, as he tracks down Seven twice, first in his office, then at McKinley. Because he’s just that awesome.
Go put on a red shirt. One of the security guards is taken down by a small black cat. And several are stunned by Seven’s servo. Poor bastards.
Channel open. “I know this world needs help. That’s why some of my generation are kind of crazy and rebels, you know? We wonder if we’re gonna be alive when we’re thirty.”
Lincoln’s supremely awkward explanation of the hippie movement.
Welcome aboard. Don Keefer plays Cromwell, Lincoln Demyan plays Lipton, Morgan Jones plays Nesvig, Bruce Mars (last seen as Finnegan in “Shore Leave“) and Ted Gehring play the two cops, and regular stunt person Paul Baxley plays the security chief. Plus Barbara Babcock (who also voiced Trelane’s mother in “The Squire of Gothos” and played Mea 3 in “A Taste of Armageddon“) does the voices of both Isis and the Beta 5 computer, while Isis’s feline form is played by Sambo the cat. The identity of the woman who plays Isis in human form remains a mystery. (Rumor had it that Playboy Playmate Victoria Vetri played her, but Vetri herself denies it. The role was uncredited, and has apparently been lost to history.) EDITED TO ADD THREE YEARS LATER: I don’t normally edit posts this far in the future, but this is worth it: Trek historian Larry Nemecek has identified April Tatro as the woman who played Isis in human form.
Plus we’ve got recurring regulars George Takei, Nichelle Nichols, Walter Koenig, and James Doohan (who also provides the voice of the Mission Control announcer).
But the big guests are the great Robert Lansing as Seven and Teri Garr (credited as Terri Garr) in one of her earliest roles as Lincoln.
Trivial matters: The episode was intended as a backdoor pilot to a series featuring Seven and Lincoln fighting against contemporary alien threats to Earth, but it wasn’t picked up. Having said that, Seven and Lincoln have appeared in enough pieces of tie-in fiction to fill out a TV series: Assignment: Eternity and the two-book The Eugenics Wars: The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh, all by Greg Cox; “The Aliens are Coming!” (in Strange New Worlds), From History’s Shadow, and Elusive Salvation, all by Dayton Ward; “Seven and Seven” by Kevin Hosey (in Strange New Worlds VI); “Assignment: One” by Kevin Lauderdale (in Strange New Worlds 8); “Rocket Man” by Kenneth E. Carper (in Strange New Worlds 9); issues #49-50 of DC’s second monthly Star Trek series by Howard Weinstein & Rod Whigham; DC’s “Convergence” crossover in Star Trek Annual #6 and Star Trek: The Next Generation Annual #6 by Weinstein, Michael Jan Friedman, & Ken Save; and IDW’s Assignment: Earth comic book series by John Byrne.
In issue #49 of the Trek comic, Weinstein coined the term “the Aegis” to refer to Seven’s mysterious masters, and that term was used in pretty much all the tie-in fiction going forward.
This episode was scarily predictive, as Spock mentions a major assassination and a rocket launch on the same day that they’re there. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and Apollo 6 had a messed-up launch on 4 April 1968, six days after the episode first aired. (Apollo 6’s mishap was nothing like what happened here, of course, but that could all be part of Seven’s coverup…) In his Department of Temporal Investigations novel Forgotten History, Christopher L. Bennett explicitly dated this episode as taking place on that fateful day.
Teri Garr has refused to discuss the role of Lincoln or her involvement with Star Trek in any interviews, nor has she participated in any way in any of the (many many many) retrospectives and documentaries about the franchise over the past five decades. Her experience was not a pleasant one, apparently, and rumor has it that she was displeased with Gene Roddenberry’s messing with her wardrobe, insisting that her hemline be higher (something that also put Roddenberry in conflict with costumer William Ware Theiss, according to Herbert F. Solow & Robert H. Justman’s Inside Star Trek: The Real Story).
This is the first time a Trek episode has taken place entirely in the 20th century. It will only happen one more time, on the Enterprise episode “Storm Front.”
The method used by the Enterprise to travel back in time is the same one used to get home from “Tomorrow is Yesterday.”
To boldly go. “Well, how do you expect me to type, with my nose?” As a pilot for the Assignment: Earth TV show that never happened, and as the episode that inspired several excellent novels and comic books, this is a fun little hour. Robert Lansing is a solid lead, projecting a solid professionalism that is truly a façade, as he screws up more than once (mostly by not looking before he leaps), but makes it there in the end. And Teri Garr is a delight, adding a humanistic counterpart to Lansing’s stolidness.
But as an episode of Star Trek it leaves a lot to be desired. The Enterprise‘s reasons for being in 1968 are specious to say the least. Why not just ask the Guardian of Forever to play Earth’s history and slow the recording down the way Spock did in “The City on the Edge of Forever“? Why take the enormous risk of sending an entire ship back in time to risk polluting the timelines? It just doesn’t make sense to take the risk, especially since things go into the toilet pretty much from jump.
Still, it’s fun to watch, and any episode that results in the brilliance of Assignment: Eternity and The Eugenics Wars duology is worth the price of admission…
Warp factor rating: 5
Next week: Season 2 overview
Keith R.A. DeCandido apologizes for this rewatch being late, but it was his birthday on Monday and also the funeral for his grandmother, which made for a most bizarre birthday, all things considered…
It’s dubious enough to send a starship back in time for research, but there’s something incredibly perverse about sending it back in time to try and figure out how humanity survived a brush with extinction. “That moment in time seems really dangerous. Let’s jab it with a stick!”
I also never really understood the knowledge Kirk/Spock suddenly have at the end of the episode. They spend the entire hour wondering if they can trust Seven… but then it turns out enough about him is in the computer that they know he and Lincoln are in for same crazy adventures. But, if they know that, then (i) they should be able to at least partially infer his intentions/affiliation from those other adventures and (ii) have at least some idea that he was involved with events the “first” time, so things are unfolding as they “should.” Yet this idea is absent from the episode itself; they know nothing about him, then suddenly in the last two minutes they know a ton. As a kid I imagined that timeline shenanigans meant that the information didn’t get added to the computer until after the climax of this episode for some reason, but that doesn’t really make any sense…
Gary Seven! With all due respect to Doctor Who fans, this is my doctor. Probably because he’s more James Bond than the Doctor in style and attitude. I would’ve watched the heck out of an Assignment: Earth TV series. (Earth to CBS, you could still make that series, you know.)
My condolences for your grandmother’s passing, Keith.
Keith, Victoria Vetri did not play Isis. This was suggested as a possibility by a now-defunct fan website (preserved on the Internet Archive), but it was overtly presented as a guess, not a fact, based solely a report that Isis had been played by a Playboy playmate and on the site author’s opinion that “Isis” resembled Vetri somewhat. He invited people to let him know if they had evidence that he was wrong. And he very clearly was wrong — the Isis actress has the wrong eye color (green instead of brown), and lacks the distinctive speck of pigment that Vetri has on the white of one of her eyes. However, some IMDb editor mistook this person’s admittedly unproven speculation for a fact and put “Assignment: Earth” on Vetri’s IMDb page, and since most people just blindly trust IMDb, that hasty assumption has been repeated by countless sites all over the Web, even though it’s certainly false. A poster on the TrekBBS recently asserted that he had finally managed to ask Ms. Vetri herself, and that she had answered through a representative that she did not play Isis. (This, of course, is in need of further verification, but it’s a start.) To this day, there is no actual documentation or reliable firsthand account identifying the actress who played Isis.
Also, it was DTI: Forgotten History that dated the events of “Assignment: Earth,” not Watching the Clock.
As for the episode, the underlying idea is interesting, but I’m afraid that by trying to be both a Star Trek episode and an Assignment: Earth backdoor pilot, it doesn’t do a very good job of being either. The Enterprise‘s presence is indeed poorly justified, Kirk and Spock are too passive in the climax, and Gary and Roberta are not as well-established as they could’ve been in a full pilot.
Still, it’s better than the original A:E pilot script. Roddenberry first developed and pitched A:E as a half-hour series in 1966 — his first-draft script is dated just two months after TOS premiered. It was a rather different premise with Gary as a time traveler from the distant future, sent back to fight time-traveling “Omegans” named Harth and Isis, alien shapeshifters whose science looked like sorcery and satanism and who were trying to change Earth’s history to prevent its bright future as a galactic power. And it read like a rather inept attempt at a “stranger in a strange land” sitcom like My Favorite Martian, complete with a suspicious detective that Gary stymied with his futuristic technology. A lot of its business ended up in the Trek episode pretty much unchanged (like the stuff with the typewriter and the servo and such), but there was a lot of other stuff that tried to be funny and failed miserably.
But when Roddenberry failed to convince any network to invest in shooting his pilot script, he reworked it into a Trek episode so that he could use Trek’s budget and resources to shoot it as a backdoor pilot. He and Art Wallace dropped the proto-Temporal Cold War aspects and made it more about an advanced alien subtly guiding humanity through its turbulent adolescence — an idea he’d give another try with The Questor Tapes a few years later.
By the way, the “futuristic” automatic typewriter was a real device at the time, a Royal Automated Typewriter, except that it worked using a punched paper tape instead of voice activation. It was essentially the ancestor of a copier or printer, a way to make multiple copies of a single document — you’d type the first one manually to create the punch tape, and then the device would automatically retype as many copies as you needed.
“Assignment: Earth” is often compared to Doctor Who, and many assume it was a ripoff of DW, but that’s impossible; the series hadn’t yet been seen in the US, and most of the elements that are similar to “Assignment: Earth” weren’t added to Doctor Who until later. The sonic screwdriver, often compared to Gary’s servo, debuted just weeks earlier — but at the time, it was literally just a screwdriver, and didn’t become a multifunction device like the servo until the early ’70s. And of course Roddenberry first conceived of the servo in his 1966 pilot script, at which point the Doctor was an elderly man traveling through history and outer space with a strapping action hero and a teenage girl, nothing like A:E. So even if Roddenberry had been aware of DW at the time — which is very unlikely — it wouldn’t have been much like the concept he developed. Its similarities came along later, and it’s probably a case of parallel evolution — both A:E and Jon Pertwee-era DW were influenced by the high-tech spy-fi genre that was popular at the time.
First, I’d also like to express my condolences to Mr. D. He’s created this space here on the Internet where we can talk about something that we all find important-Star Trek-and I really appreciate it.
Now, onto “Assignment: Earth.” Robert Lansing is effective as Gary Seven for reasons that are kind of unusual: you don’t ever really learn that much about the character and the viewer kind of has to piece together details about him to try to explain what he’s doing on Earth c.1968 and who sent him there. It almost sounds like lazy writing, but it seems more like a case of “show, don’t tell” thanks to the strength of Lansing’s performance. He’s more interesting the less we know about him.
Lord Kinbote mentioned above that Seven reminded him of the Doctor and, having rewatched the episode myself earlier today, the Whovian vibes are definitely there. He’s not like either of the two regenerations of the Doctor (William Hartnell and then Patrick Troughton) that had been seen by 1968 or really, any one doctor. If anything, I’d roughly compare him to the Third and Ninth Doctors if one were to throw them into a cosmic, interdimensional blender.
Teri Garr is also well-cast as Roberta Lincoln and her explanation, however awkward, of the hippie movement was very relatable to me as a twentysomething person in 2016. William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy (love that hat) both gave good performances as well. It’s a shame that most of the regular cast was given so little to do, though.
Where does this leave us? Honestly, I’m not sure. It’s difficult to assess this episode, because I don’t quite know how to situate it within the context of the rest of the series. No other episode served as a backdoor pilot, and this one seems to have more to do with the hypothetical “Assignment: Earth” series than it does Star Trek. The background reason for the Enterprise being in 1968 is a little sketch and again, this is not exactly an ensemble production. But, in the end, it’s fun. I’m curious to see others’ opinions on this one.
My main reaction when I first saw this episode as a tween or teen (don’t remember exactly when I saw it the first time) was “Holy crap is Roberta cute!” Thirty years later I still have a bit of a crush on Teri Garr! And Greg Cox, if you read this comment, your scene in Assignment: Eternity where Roberta plops down in Kirk’s chair and basically says “I’m running this (stuff) til someone tells me what’s going on” is probably my all-time favorite Trek moment!
Krad–as with the others who have already commented, I grieve with thee regarding the loss of your grandma! Thoughts, prayers and hugs to you and your family.
To KRAD, my condolences on your grandma’s death. May the peace of God be on you and your family during this time.
I’ve always enjoyed this episode, it’s always been fun. Seeing Kirk and Spock trying to get by in then-modern day Earth always had them looking like fish out of water, and I was always a fan of Gary Seven and wished we could have seen him in a series, bet it would have been interesting.
Now I do have a thought, in most of the books I’ve read in the last twenty, twenty-five years or so that mention it, after the events of “City on the Edge of Forever,” Kirk wanted nothing to do with the Guardian of Forever, as he never really got over what happened with Edith Keeler, and for the events of “Yesteryear,” DTI had to practically force Kirk to go back there. And also, the Guardian is probably so classified, using it for any reason is probably prohibited. I can’t tangent what book that was, where Kirk had to be pleaded with to go back there, but I’ve seen several novels that had the Guardian ultra classified, I imagine probably even more so than Talos IV.
Thanks, Christopher, I had no idea about Vetri (who’s listed as playing Isis in IMDB, Wikipedia, and Memory Alpha *sigh*). Mixing your DTI titles up was just a brain hiccup on my part…………………………….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
There are some interesting elements here, but the episode tried to be too many things.
On a modern Trek note: I caught a promo for Nickelodeon’s Henry Danger that showed “Captain Man” (the show’s hero; Henry, aka Kid Danger, is his sidekick) being a bad guy and sporting a goatee. Hm, I thought, this looks interesting, I wonder if they do more with it than, say, Futurama did.
I was more right than I thought. The episode is a complete retelling of Mirror, Mirror done in Nickelodeon’s sandbox. They put in way more elements from the original than I thought they could fit, and the show was more fun than I thought it would be.
Joe Bob says check it out.
An amusing little episode that doesn’t really do much more than that. As a pilot, I’m not sure that I’d tune in each week. The premise seems a bit thin to me, especially with a 1960’s budget. Lansing & Garr work well together but still, seems like something is missing.
It’s an interesting look at Earth history, with the nuclear platforms and all that. Sure seems like Trek Earth was a much more volatile place than ours is. We seemed to have dodged the Eugenics Wars too, regardless of how well Greg Cox tried to hide them in plain sight. Makes you wonder who else had nuclear platforms up in orbit at the time. Was the US first or was in response to the Soviets or even someone else? After all, this isn’t our Earth. Things are quite likely different.
Was the self destruct accomplished with conventional munitions or by the detonation of the warheads? The latter seems more likely with the comment “Destruct is fouled up somehow, flight control. She’s coming down fully armed. She’ll go off on impact. ” The bright light of the destruct seems to indicate that it was a nuclear explosion. After all, that would be a scarier scenario rather than simply an abort like we have today where there’s a (relatively) small explosion. A nuke going off 104 miles over your head would attract a lot more attention than a much more modest destruction of a booster.
I’ve always imagined that General Order 7 was repealed after the revelation of The Menagerie where the Talosians are able to extend their powers well beyond their planet. )Why prohibit people from visiting the planet then? If the Talosians don’t want visitors they’ll just show them something that convinces them to leave.) In that case, the death penalty is subsequently switched to General Order Four which I think goes something like “Thou shall not visit the Guardian of Forever for any unauthorized reason, under penalty of death. Solves the problem of why they didn’t use the Guardian and why Chekov seemed to get it wrong in Turnabout Intruder.
“‘I know this world needs help. That’s why some of my generation are kind of crazy and rebels, you know? We wonder if we’re gonna be alive when we’re thirty.’ Lincoln’s supremely awkward explanation of the hippie movement.”
It was a bad explanation for the hippie movement. The closest applicable thing might be “live for today” as tomorrow may mean thermonuclear war.
But this “We wonder if we’re gonna be alive when we’re thirty.” rings absolutely true. I remember thinking something very similar in 1968 right after the assassinations and riots. People were being killed, riots were happening, Vietnam was in full swing and we still were afraid of the USSR nuking us. It may seem silly now, but “will we live to grow up (or grow old)” was a very real thought back then.
I like this ep. It’s quirky and a bit flawed, but fun.
First of all, condolences from me too.
The episode is entertaining, but I don’t personally care for Gary Seven. He’s too cartoonish for my taste – fairytale James Bond and his magic cat. Also, I don’t like the idea that the UFOs are watching over us, I prefer it when humanity overcomes its problems by itself.
I like Roberta Lincoln, though. When I watched Star Trek at the age of eleven or twelve, every young woman was a welcome addition because I could easily identify with them. I loved her outfit when I was a kid (the colours, the diagonal stripes, and the sleeves – I wasn’t particularly interested in the hemline :-)). I also like it that she’s introduced as almost a funny character, but later gets the very serious line “We wonder if we’re going to be alive when we’re thirty”. With the rest of the cast consisting of fairytale James Bond and two guys from the future, she’s the one who represents contemporary Earth, and it’s nice that it’s a young female who gets this job.
The time travel aspect of the episode has always bothered me. After they went to great lengths to avoid changing the timeline in Tomorrow Is Yesterday and The City on the Edge of Forever, here they’re sent back on purpose to do historical research? Isn’t that reckless? And if the Federation was willing to do something like that in the first place, why research a minor incident like this one instead of, say, some ancient civilization we know almost nothing about? And shouldn’t they have a historian with them when they do stuff like this? I was delighted when Forgotten History turned the episode’s premise upside down by explaining that the reason for the trip was to test time travel itself, the historical research was an added bonus, and the point in history was chosen because it was approximately the same place and time where they had been before. That actually made sense, so my compliments to Christopher for coming up with it!
@10/kkozoriz: “After all, this isn’t our Earth.” That’s your view of things – I like to imagine that it is our Earth. I can do that because I ignore facts that don’t fit :-)
What else can I say? I like Spock’s assortment of silly hats.
12. JanaJansen – That’s a valid choice to make as well. Just like I can believe that Romulus still exists and the one we saw destroyer in the reboot was a Romulus that we’ve never seen before. Same with the old Spock. We already know that there are many, many (MANY) alternate realities that at first glace appear to be the same or very similar to the one we’re most familiar with. Whatever works for each viewer. There’s no such thing as the Trek police.
The Federation being reckless with time travel? Perish the thought! They take it very seriously. No really! Honest and for true!
Think of how much time travel we’ve seen with just the crews of 5 ships (The reboot hasn’t gotten around to travelling in time themselves yet although they are aware of it). Now, multiply that by all the other ships in the fleet. Even if the Ent. (A, D, E, etc) are the exceptions, there’s still a ton of time travel going on. After all, Quark, Odo and Rom managed to do it entirely by accident. Of course, it’s usually handwaved away by claiming it was only happening the way it was supposed to happen. Rrrriiiiggghhhttt….
It’s actually a good thing this wasn’t picked up as a series. Could you imagine the continuity problems that would arise from trying to keep it in sync with the various spin offs? They couldn’t even keep them straight and this one didn’t have Star Trek in the title.
The “will we live long enough to grow up” feeling was live in the early 80’s. At least in the DC area where the air raid sirens were tested monthly and my high school was within 5 miles of several primary targets.
The “platform” sounds like a FOBS, which was a scary idea, especially given EMP effects. An Earth with both the US and USSR launching those would’ve been even scarier than ours.
Re: Isis, I find it oddly charming that there’s actually something we don’t know about TOS, given how obsessively the fanbase has been chronicling it for decades.
Still, 4, I think it’s a little overstated to state that Victoria Vetri definitively didn’t play Isis based on the eye color. They could have easily had her wear green contact lenses so that her human eyes would match her cat eyes, right? If corroborated, I would give more credence to the denial, although it occurs to me that her role was so brief and unconnected to anything that she might literally not remember being on the show. I’m considering this mystery open and won’t stop researching back issues of Playboy until it’s solved!
My sympathies on your loss, as well, Keith.
Even though, as Christopher lays out, this episode can’t actually have been influenced by Doctor Who. I would love to see a Doctor Who/Gary Seven crossover from IDW (although I guess IDW no longer has the Who license, do they?) I am sure such fanfic has been written. I’d like to see Roberta go up against a Dalek (as she’s been developed in the tie-in fiction, I bet she could, too!)
I never knew we had no idea who played Isis. I get a real kick out of that. It seems extraordinarily fitting.
I hope someday Ms. Garr will see fit to comment on her Trek experience, even though it was by all accounts a bad one. I know Trek fans would welcome her with open arms and love at a con, not just for this episode but of course all her other work. And the 50th anniversary year would be a great time for it! Oh, well…
@14/wiredog – You’re darn right we felt that way. I remember worrying that both the Falkland Islands crisis and the shooting down of KAL 007 were gonna spark World War III. (Frankly, I still have some days where I wonder if we, as a species, are gonna make it long enough for me to grow up… but I digress…)
@10/kkozoriz – Interesting idea about General Order 7. “The Menagerie” is my favorite Trek episode ever (yes, really), and that thought had never hit me, that the Talosians’ influence is far wider than first realized. Now, that way lies madness if you start taking it too seriously – what’s to prevent everything from the original encounter on, anywhere in the Federation, being a shared illusion? Gets pretty freaky pretty fast…!
@10/kkozoriz: But they did go back to the Guardian in “Yesteryear.” In FH, I had Starfleet pursuing both methods of time travel and keeping them both classified; the reason the Enterprise was the ship assigned to both time-travel experiments was because they were already in the loop and it avoided expanding the circle of secrecy. (Although I also asserted that there was a unique property to the Enterprise‘s engines that let them survive time travel more easily than other ships could — since, as David McIntee pointed out in the TNG novel Indistinguishable from Magic, if slingshot time travel were easy, then history would be getting changed all the time.)
@15/dunsel: At the time, tinted contact lenses would’ve been a lot more cumbersome and uncomfortable to wear. Modern, soft tinted lenses didn’t become available until the 1980s. I really doubt they would’ve gone to the trouble of subjecting the actress to wearing uncomfortable lenses for such a brief shot.
Besides, even aside from the eyes, it’s clearly not Vetri. Vetri at the time had softer, more girlish and doe-eyed features. She looked a lot like Dawn Wells from Gilligan’s Island. “Isis” doesn’t resemble her much at all to my eye. Also, it’s hard to tell, but I’m pretty sure “Isis” has a smaller bust than Vetri.
@16/MikePoteet: You should check out Greg Cox’s Gary-Roberta novels Assignment: Eternity and The Eugenics Wars Books 1-2. A lot of the “offscreen” missions that Gary and Roberta allude to would be very familiar-sounding to fans of ’60s and ’70s SFTV. I don’t recall if Greg put in any Doctor Who nods, but there’s definitely an Avengers nod (Steed and Peel, not Marvel).
And yes, I too remember growing up with the fear that nuclear war could descend at any moment. When Carl Sagan wrote Cosmos around 1980 and discussed the Drake Equation as a way of estimating the number of alien civilizations that might exist, his most optimistic estimate of the odds that a species would survive its nuclear era was one percent. That’s how hopeless things seemed to us back then, which was why Star Trek‘s portrayal of a future where humanity overcame its conflicts and thrived was so powerful for so many of us.
These days, I think, our existential fears (for those of us who face reality) are more about the survival of our grandchildren and great-grandchildren than our own.
By the way, has anyone else had trouble posting comments to Tor.com lately? Last night I tried posting a reply here and it just wouldn’t go through no matter how many times I reloaded the page and tried to post it again. That’s the second time in as many weeks that that’s happened.
It’s somewhat entertaining and watchable, but not much more. The problem is I don’t really feel invested in Seven’s motives. And I don’t find Lincoln to be that much of a comic foil either. And, as everyone brought up, there is no reason for the Enterprise to be there. I mostly remember this one because of the rocket launch scene. Lansing is decent enough in the role, and Garr manages to make Lincoln three-dimensional, which helps, but not much more.
I, for one, am glad this didn’t become a series. It doesn’t remotely feel like Star Trek. Rather, it feels like your average 1960’s mystery show. Way too campy. I haven’t really seen Dr. Who, so I can’t really comment on any similarities.
Plus, I really don’t understand the behind-the-scenes turmoil over this one. After 55 episodes of female performers in really short skirts (and other objectifying costumes), this is the episode in which that becomes an issue to the point of Bill Theiss clashing with Roddenberry? It doesn’t add up. You’d think they’d bring up other issues such as how did the cast feel about being supporting players in an episode of their own show.
@17/Christopher: I agree. Servers seem to be on the slow side. It takes 10-15 seconds from hitting post comment for it to actually load up in the comments section. But for me, it does work. It just takes a little patience.
What, no shout out to the cat that practically stole the show?
@18/Eduardo: To be fair, it wasn’t supposed to feel like Star Trek. It was intended to have a more contemporary flavor. The series prospectus talked about the contrast of having sci-fi technologies being used in present-day, realistic settings rather than alien worlds and futuristic spaceships. If anything, the prospectus invoked Have Gun — Will Travel (for which Roddenberry wrote many episodes) more than it did ST, in that they both revolved around a cool, intellectual, ultracapable lone hero who went around helping people solve their problems. After all, Roddenberry originally conceived A:E as a standalone series and only reworked it into a Trek spinoff as a plan B when he couldn’t get anyone to pay for a pilot. If it had gone to series, he probably would’ve wanted it to maintain its own distinctive flavor as a present-day spy-fi sort of show. I doubt we would’ve gotten much in the way of crossovers between the two series.
@19: Comments always load slowly for me. That’s nothing new; the forum software has been frustratingly sluggish since the “upgrade” happened. But twice in as many weeks, I’ve been unable to get a comment to post at all, even when I tried multiple times over several minutes and reloaded the site multiple times. The first time, last week with the “Omega Glory” thread, other people were successfully posting comments the whole time that I was trying to get in; each time I reloaded, there were more comments showing. But mine didn’t go through, and it didn’t belatedly appear later like they sometimes do; it just wasn’t getting into the system at all. I wasn’t able to post there again until the next morning. Last night, when the problem recurred, I even tried using a different browser to post, and it still wouldn’t go through.
Sorry about your grandma, Keith.
——————————-
I <3 Spock’s hat.
@13 – kkozoriz: I’m pretty sure that had A:E been picked up as a show, they wouldn’t have written/produced it as a Star Trek universe show; even if it was technically a spin-off.
@22/lordm: In the sense that the show wouldn’t have dealt with established Trek aliens and concepts, you’re right. The intent, according to the series prospectus, was to focus on Earthbound problems — anything from “saving a highly necessary young scientist, who is about to wreck his life and career and deprive the world of something vital he must offer” to “a university bacteriological experiment about to go awry,” from the Mafia to agents in the Pentagon or Kremlin to “an honest mistake about to be made by a powerful Senate Committee.” I get the sense that it would’ve been the kind of show where the crises and enemies were mostly contemporary/naturalistic and only the hero’s abilities and resources were science-fictional. The prospectus specifically criticized The Invaders as a show that got it wrong by focusing on inhuman enemies instead of human-generated problems and foibles, so I doubt there would’ve been any alien invasions for Gary and Roberta to contend with… unless the ratings dropped.
I don’t think the series would’ve overtly contradicted the pilot’s inclusion in the Trek universe, but it would’ve covered sufficiently different ground from ST that there wouldn’t really have been any overlap.
@1 “I also never really understood the knowledge Kirk/Spock suddenly have at the end of the episode. They spend the entire hour wondering if they can trust Seven… but then it turns out enough about him is in the computer that they know he and Lincoln are in for same crazy adventures. But, if they know that, then (i) they should be able to at least partially infer his intentions/affiliation from those other adventures and (ii) have at least some idea that he was involved with events the “first” time, so things are unfolding as they “should.” “
I think Kirk and Spock were paying Gary Seven back for his mysterious statements earlier in the episode; he was incredibly frustrating to them, and now they could be frustrating to him, by implying knowledge about Gary’s future adventures (when all Kirk and Spock really knew was that the late 60s and early 70s were a crazy time, in which an alien-sponsored human agent trying to save the world would be kept very busy).
@24/AndyLove: All Spock says is that Gary and Roberta “have some interesting experiences in store.” That probably just means that history records a lot of crises and threats that they’ll probably have to face just as a result of living through that time period, not that it specifically records their own involvement in those events. It’s laying the foundation for the idea that this was a critical time in Earth’s history and that Gary had an urgent mission to turn humanity away from Armageddon by influencing events both large and small.
Although, of course, the line was mainly just a way of saying to audiences and network execs that this guy’s adventures would be worth watching.
17. ChristopherLBennett – Which is exactly the reason that I used the word “unauthorized” in my proposed wording for General Order 4. The Talosians can’t be stopped by preventing people from going to their planet but anyone can jump through a big, glowing doughnut. I’d imagine that the historians were the ones with the authorization and Kirk & Spock were mostly there to provide transportation. Of course, we’re not here to watch the story of how a historian mysteriously is removed from history so it becomes a Spock story.
The proposed A;E series wouldn’t have to use specific Trek aliens to cause continuity problems down the road. How many writers would keep track of when such and such an event happened on Earth or whatever the show would come up with. Trek has enough trouble keeping things (relatively) clear when the series does have Star Trek in the name.
I’d say it’s likely that Seven and Roberta do show up in the records.
SEVEN: What else do your record tapes show?
KIRK: I’m afraid we can’t reveal everything we know, Mister Seven.
SPOCK: Captain, we could say that Mister Seven and Miss Lincoln have some interesting experiences in store for them.
It seems pretty clear that knows something and Spock is just giving a tease without giving any details. Of course, it’s equally likely that Roberta was killed by a bus the next week and they simply didn’t want to give anything away.
#16: I’m not personally aware of any Doctor Who fanfic crossing over with “Assignment: Earth”, but I can tell you that there is, in fact, a Sherlock Holmes/”A:E” crossover — because I wrote it, several decades back, for a printzine called Holmesian Federation which specialized in Holmes/Star Trek crossovers. Strictly, it’s more Trek than “Assignment: Earth”, as Gary Seven doesn’t appear; the premise involved Isis being accidentally transported to Holmes-era London, whereupon Kirk and Spock were dispatched to find her. And because Holmes fandom indexes everything, “The Adventure of the Unearthly Cat” did indeed wind up with a listing and a catalog number in the Universal Sherlock Holmes online bibliography.
This was long enough ago that people were actually putting their real names on their fanfiction, and it’s mildly amusing now to look back through the run of Holmesian Federation in particular to note down names of folks who subsequently went pro.
@26/kkozoriz: “The proposed A;E series wouldn’t have to use specific Trek aliens to cause continuity problems down the road. How many writers would keep track of when such and such an event happened on Earth or whatever the show would come up with. Trek has enough trouble keeping things (relatively) clear when the series does have Star Trek in the name.”
Yet later Trek series paid little attention to what TOS did establish about 20th- and 21st-century history. TNG and VGR never mentioned the Eugenics Wars. VGR: “One Small Step” is pretty hard to reconcile with what “Space Seed” established about interplanetary sleeper ships being used until 2018 when they were replaced by faster drives. Heck, “Space Seed” explicitly said that the Eugenics Wars were the last “World War,” but “Encounter at Farpoint” and First Contact retconned WWIII into the mid-21st century. So those continuity issues existed anyway. I agree, an A:E series might well have created some continuity hiccups, but it wouldn’t have been unique in that respect. That’s just part and parcel of how loosely TV shows from the ’60s through the ’80s approached continuity anyway.
Still, as I said, the series prospectus suggests that most episodes would not have focused on events significant enough to come into play centuries later. It would’ve been mostly smaller-scale, ’60s-centric things like defusing Cold War tensions or preventing terrorist attacks or rescuing endangered scientists or whatever. Maybe there could’ve been the occasional plot about a scientist working on some revolutionary breakthrough whose timing could be hard to reconcile with Star Trek‘s version of history, but I don’t think that sort of thing would’ve been the main thrust of the series.
“I’d say it’s likely that Seven and Roberta do show up in the records.”
As I said, Spock’s line could simply mean that the records showed enough “interesting” historical events over the next few years to suggest that Seven and Roberta would have their work cut out for them. If you went back and interacted with people living in, say, London in early 1939, you could tell them that they’d have some interesting times in store even if you had no knowledge of their specific actions over the subsequent six years.
Or it could be that, once Spock knew of Gary and Roberta’s existence, he was able to review the history of the late ’60s and early ’70s and recognize the evidence of their clandestine involvement in key events — say, doing a facial-recognition search and finding images of their presence under assumed names, or finding a pattern of official and anecdotal reports attributing key actions to an unidentified tall man with a black cat and a young blonde woman. So it’s not that the history books explicitly say “A man named Gary Seven and his secretary Roberta Lincoln prevented this disaster and caught that rogue agent and rescued this scientist,” it’s just that their hidden presence could be deduced from the historical data once you knew what to look for.
Well, between “Catspaw” and this one, black cats did pretty well this season! Which is nothing to sniff at from my end, because both remind me of a beloved cat I had as a young kid.
As for the rest of the episode, however, it’s a bit like inserting a chapter out of a Hardy Boys mystery into the Narnia series.
And while I’m sure the studio appreciated the pennywisdom of another Earth-type episode, I have always agreed, on an aesthetic level, with a comment Bob Baker made about “Doctor Who:” “The pure space ones were always more satisfactory.”
I don’t know if the analogy works entirely, but you made me smile. As for the DW space vs. Earth episodes, one of the reason’s it was created was to “teach” history, so originally, at least, time travel to Earth’s past was one of the show’s raisons d’être. And Star Trek, while not created for that, did find a way to be cheaper by using “parallel evolution” as a way to explain Earth-like settings on other planets; and not as an occasional cost-saving measure. It was a plan.
@30/lordmagnusen: Yep, the parallel-Earths idea was woven into Trek from the get-go as a way to convince networks that the show could be made affordably by reusing extant props, costumes, scenery, backlots, etc. However, the historical focus of early Doctor Who was not about cost-saving per se. In fact, saving money was the reason for the later decision to shift away from time-travel stories toward more present-day alien invasion stories — culminating in the decision to strand the Doctor on near-future Earth permanently starting in the 1970 season.
@27/John – Capital, as Holmes might say! I love the idea of Kirk and Spock scouring Victorian London’s foggy, gaslit streets for Isis. I’d no idea there was a fanzine (or used to be?) devoted exclusively to Trekkish Sherlockian fiction (or would that be Sherlockian Trek fiction?) Thanks for sharing.
@16/Christopher – These days, I think, our existential fears (for those of us who face reality) are more about the survival of our grandchildren and great-grandchildren than our own. Yes, sadly, I agree.
I did read Greg Cox’s Eugenics Wars books and caught the Steed/Peel nod, but don’t recall any specific Who shout-outs, either. What I didn’t catch at the time (and really should have) was that Roberta’s cover names were Teri Garr’s characters in Close Encounters and (IIRC) Mr. Mom. So clever.
28. ChristopherLBennett – VGR Future’s End could even be taken as retconning out the Eugenics Wars. One more reason I prefer the “many worlds” way of looking at Trek instead of shoehorning everything into one “prime” timeline. Some parts simply don’t fit with each other no matter how much people try to force a round peg into a square hole. The various episodes probably happened in some way in the various episodes but there’s really no one, all encompassing timeline, Much like how mirror McCy could spill acid that makes the exact same stain as the “good” McCoy did yet the background of the two characters is quite different. Now multiply that by all the various episodes and series and you can accept everything occurring as presented without worrying about if it fits into the same continuity.
If there was no record of Seven and Roberta then Kirk could have simply said something to the effect of “We don’t show anything that mentions you but I’m sure you’ll have your hands full in this time.” Instead, he specifically says that he can’t revel what he did find out. Of course, the real world reason for handling it as they did was as a sales pitch for a spin off series.
@34/kkozoriz: “VGR Future’s End could even be taken as retconning out the Eugenics Wars.”
People keep jumping to that conclusion, but they’re forgetting that none of the wars of the 20th century was fought on United States soil (since Hawai’i wasn’t yet a state at the time of Pearl Harbor). The wars the US was involved in were all fought elsewhere, and there were plenty of wars that the US wasn’t an active combatant in. So there’s no reason to assume that the intactness of Los Angeles in the 1990s means that the Eugenics Wars weren’t raging elsewhere on the planet. After all, Khan’s rule stretched “from Asia through the Middle East,” according to Spock. It’s a fair assumption that the Eugenics Wars were centered largely in Eurasia.
@30: I’m not completely satisfied with the analogy either, but it was the best I could do at the moment–glad you enjoyed it anyway! : )
@30 and 31: With “Doctor Who,” my feelings actually are a bit different. I enjoy the old historical stories–whatever their technical strengths or shortcomings–and wish that there could have been more of them (and more had survived the mass tape wiping of the 70s). It’s with “Star Trek” that I prefer episodes where they spend their time, well, trekking through the stars!
@krad: BTW, you were talking last week about Roddenberry’s excessive hands-on writing. “Doctor Who” is an interesting contrast, because only serious fans (or audiences of “An Adventure in Space and Time”) have even heard of the creative team that actually =created= “Who.” As the docudrama a few years back showed, Sydney Newman initially objected to the Daleks (his initial “bible” forbade “bug-eyed monsters”)–but fortunately he was overruled. After that, he seemed pretty much to have stepped back and let the show develop as it would.
@36/Don S.: I agree — it’s a shame the early Doctor Who historicals were unpopular with audiences, because they’re some of the best serials of the Hartnell era. “Marco Polo,” “The Aztecs,” “The Romans,” and “The Crusade” are among the series’ finest installments — although, sadly, “Marco” and half of “The Crusade” survive only through audio and the odd set photo. (The last few minutes of “The Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Eve” are pretty amazing too, at least until Dodo randomly shows up and ruins it.)
After all, the BBC didn’t have much experience with sci-fi, but they were old hands at period drama, so the historicals were generally well-executed and well-researched. I particularly love how “The Crusade” feels like the Doctor and his friends stumbled into the middle of a lost Shakespeare play about Richard I. Although “The Aztecs” also works as science fiction, because it’s the first DW serial that really uses time travel as a story point, examining the philosophical and ethical questions of whether history can or should be changed.
35. ChristopherLBennett – Which is why I said could instead of did. It’s possible of course. It’s also possible that the wars were fought on US soil and that the Voyager writers either forgot, got it wrong or deliberately ignored it. It’s odd though that not one of the crew mentioned the Eugenics Wars seeing as everyone in Space Seed was aware of them.. You’d think Tom Paris would chime in with a “Hey, the Eugenics Wars are going on right now.” seeing as he’s the 20th century history buff. Also, there’s no reason to assume that Khan and his followers made up the bulk of the supermen or that the wars were restricted to one, specific area.
SPOCK: No such vessel listed. Records of that period are fragmentary, however. The mid=1990s was the era of your last so-called World War.
MCCOY: The Eugenics Wars.
SPOCK: Of course. Your attempt to improve the race through selective breeding.
It is referred to as a World War (which is retconned in TNG).
SPOCK: From 1992 through 1996, absolute ruler of more than a quarter of your world. From Asia through the Middle East.
MCCOY: The last of the tyrants to be overthrown.
Last of the tyrants, not the only one. So, there must have been some that wee overthrown outside of Asia and the Middle East if Khan was absolute ruler of those areas. Besides, would someone really try to take over the world and completely ignore the most powerful nation? You’d think if one man was in control of the Middle East, source of much of the oil un the mid 90’s, the US would be on a major war footing. Yet, not a peep about it. Not even a hint.
Also of note is Spock’s mention of “selective breeding” as opposed to Chekov’s “Genetic engineering”. The ret-on of the Eugenics Wars ignores the definition of eugenics, which is:
“the science of improving a human population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics”.
Well, “Future’s End” is set in 1996 and the Eugenic Wars ended in 1996, so the war may have already been over at that point. We definitely know the Khan already escaped by the time of “Future’s End”, because Rain Robinson has a photo of the Botany Bay launch.
By the way, the inclusion of the photo in that episode clearly shows that the writers knew their Trek Universe history.
@38/kkozoriz: “Also, there’s no reason to assume that Khan and his followers made up the bulk of the supermen or that the wars were restricted to one, specific area.”
I never said they were. My point is that the United States is one specific area, that something could easily take place across most of the world and affect most of its people but still not take place on US soil, just like WWI and WWII. America is not the center of all things. We’re 6 percent of the planet’s land area and 4.4 percent of its population.
“Besides, would someone really try to take over the world and completely ignore the most powerful nation?”
Tyrants aren’t team players. The episode implies that there were many tyrants ruling over their own regions separately — after all, it was the Eugenics Wars, plural. The attempt to conquer the US may have failed while conquests of other nations succeeded. And the US may have been a participant in wars that took place overseas and did not spread to US soil, just like literally every actual war America participated in throughout the entire 20th century.
40. ChristopherLBennett – the US may have been a participant in wars that took place overseas and did not spread to US soil, just like literally every actual war America participated in throughout the entire 20th century.
Considering how many wars the US started in the 20th century, it’s also possible that Khan and his followers were created by America in order to take out rival nations and it got away from them. That would go a long way to explaining how the US is overrepresented in Trek in terms of crew nationalities, ship names, etc. We already know that the US of the Trek universe is more militaristic than ours is with the orbital nuclear platforms that we never had. WW III could be phase two of the operation which, again, spiralled out of control.
However, we don’t know how it worked out. And even if that story is told at some point, there’ll be no way to fit it into the fictional history without overwriting some of what has already been told.
39. OmicronThetaDeltaPhi – Just because there’s a picture of a DY-100 launch doesn’t mean that it’s the Botany Bay. Since our intrepid crew were totally unfamiliar with it, it’s actually very unlikely that it is that particular launch. And the war may have ended in 1996 but that doesn’t mean the launch took place at that time. It could have been later.
Fair point.
But the war still ended in 1996, and the inclusion of that photo still proves that the writers were aware of the situation.
Anyway, for what it’s worth, Greg Cox’s “The Eugenic Wars” places the launch of the Botany Bay at January 1996.
Strictly speaking, OmicronThetaDeltaPhi, that photo shows that the set designers knew their Trek history, not the writers. *wry grin*
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@31 – Chris: Yes, I never said that DW was about time travel to the past because of cost-saving, I said that it was actually for another reason, to teach history.
@38 – kkozoriz: Tom Paris is not a 20th century history buff. He likes some pop culture from that century, and old cars and retro-looking ships. He’s never actually established, that I can recall, as a history buff.
44. lordmagnusen
Captain Janeway: As I recall, Tom, you’re something of an aficionado on 20th century America.
Lieutenant Tom Paris: That’s right.
Future”s End, Part 1
a·fi·ci·o·na·do
a person who is very knowledgeable and enthusiastic about an activity, subject, or pastime.
More than a buff, less than a historian. He’d certainly be more knowledgeable of the Eugenics Wars than your average crewman.
He’s a fan of 20th century America. That’s quite limited. Yes, he’d probably know more than your average crewman, but if the war was not being fought in the USA, he wouldn’t have much reason to bring it up.
Look, let’s face reality: “Future’s End” was set in 1996 because it was made in 1996, and it would’ve been too confusing to 1996 viewers to be told that they’d been fighting Augment dictators for the previous several years, particularly as a side issue in a story that wasn’t about that subject. So it makes perfect sense that it avoided a dated reference from a 30-year-old TV episode. What matters is whether those of us nitpicky enough to care about reconciling the discrepancy are able to reconcile the discrepancy without the need for convoluted theories about timeline alterations. And to that question, the answer is yes. We can fudge the inconsistency very easily, because there’s more than a century of historical precedent for wars not being fought on US soil. Sure, you can pick out one or two tiny details that don’t perfectly fit with that interpretation, but of course they aren’t going to perfectly fit, because this isn’t reality, it’s two separate works of fiction that we’re trying to pretend are compatible. It’s an exercise in make-believe, not a history dissertation, so we’re allowed to gloss over the odd detail.
So, was Kahn of Into Darkness from 1996 then or was it retconed to sometime in the future? If we don’t discover an Eathlike plant at Alpha Centauri, do we have to change the line about Zephram Cochrane being from there? How much of a sliding scale should Trek have with it’s own history?
One nit of tricvia from this episode that shows that it’s not our would (and shouldn’t be limited by our history), there is no 811 East 68th Street in New York City,. There is an 811 68th Street in Brooklyn, but not East 68th street and none of the buildings there have 12 stories. Dies it alter my enjoyment? Nope. Not our world. No biggie.
I prefer to see Trek as existing in it’s own little universe(s) instead of changing the history that it’s built up over the past 50 years. The reboot had the chance to wipe the slate clean but they chose to keep everything prior to the opening scene of the first movie intact. Of course, there’s time travel that opens a whole can of worms. (Do both Kirk’s travel back to New York in 1968 and why don’t they run into each other? Or the thousands of other alternate Kirks and Spocks that did the same thing?)
They’d never run into each other via time travel, because they exist on different timelines.
Nope. It’s different only AFTER the arrival of Nero. The past before that point is the same for both universes.
@48/kkozoriz: “So, was Kahn of Into Darkness from 1996 then or was it retconed to sometime in the future?”
STID explicitly stated that Khan was “300 years old” — even though that would literally correspond to 1959. Enterprise also implicitly kept the original “Space Seed” dating. But it was sufficiently in passing that it was something that could be easily overlooked.
I’m not saying “Future’s End” intended to retcon the Eugenics Wars away. I’m saying that, since that wasn’t what their story was about, they avoided the question and had good real-life reasons for doing so. And I’m saying that there is no reason to assume the Eugenics Wars didn’t happen just because Los Angeles is intact. It’s the worst kind of ugly-American ethnocentrism to assume that if something didn’t happen in the United States, it didn’t happen at all.
“If we don’t discover an Eathlike plant at Alpha Centauri, do we have to change the line about Zephram Cochrane being from there?”
The line was “Zefram Cochrane of Alpha Centauri,” not “from.” We covered this back in the “Metamorphosis” thread — Cochrane was clearly treated as an Earth native. Gene Coon’s original outline said that Cochrane was “one of the great space pioneers… in the first expedition to Alpha Centauri.” He was “of” Alpha Centauri in the sense that the Englishman T.E. Lawrence was “of” Arabia. He was an Earth human who colonized Alpha Centauri. Whether the planet he colonized was inhabitable or in need of terraforming has not been established. (In my novels, I assume the latter, in fact, because ENT: “Terra Nova” established that the first interstellar colony was on a significantly more distant planet. And because there’s real scientific reason to suspect that any planets of Alpha Centauri A or B might be subject to heavy bombardment by comets perturbed by Proxima Centauri’s gravity.)
No, both timelines have differences before Nero’s arrival on the new one, I believe.
@52/lordm: Any differences between the new movies and the old timeline are differences in interpretation by different creators, like the differences between TOS and the movies (a whole new design style, different-looking Klingons, etc.) or between TOS and TNG (different date for WWIII, different age/appearance for Zefram Cochrane, etc.), or between any two different incarnations from different writers, producers, and designers. The intent is that the Abramsverse timeline was created by Nero’s time travel, branching off in 2233. If that hadn’t been the intent, if it had been meant as a totally unconnected timeline from the start, there would’ve been no reason to include Spock Prime and the whole convoluted time-travel mess in the story. None of that serves a purpose except to establish the new timeline as an offshoot of the original.
53, but that change means that future time travel stories presumably don’t happen or at least don’t happen in the same way, right? E.g., the sequence of events that cause Data to travel back in time to 1893 and Mark Twain to travel to the 24th century won’t happen, Voyager’s crew won’t travel back to the 1990’s, the person playing the part of Gabriel Bell is actually Gabriel Bell instead of Benjamin Sisko, Kirk doesn’t purloin whales from the late 20th century, etc. That is a lot of changes that could have a lot of unanticipated effects. I suppose one could postulate that the timeline is somehow preserved because Benjamin Sisko was “already” Gabriel Bell and that continues to be true even if that version of Benjamin Sisko is never born, but I don’t think the movie establishes this conclusively.
EDIT: Come to think of it, in the Abramsverse, that Star Trek IV probe is on the way. I sure hope someone is in a position to travel back in time and get whales again. I’d hate for Spock to lose another homeworld…
The new reality branches out, it doesn’t overwrite the original one.
How can one timeline be an offshoot of another? If they branch, then both are equally valid and both could be considered “prime”. The idea that one Spock is more real, more valid or more important than another is ridiculous.
The branching is like a letter Y, when it splits, neither one is a direct continuation of the stem. Instead they each follow a new path that includes what’s come before it but neither is more correct than the other. The timeline has already split uncountable times and each of those have spit uncountable times as well. Saying that there’s one, true timeline is meaningless.
That’s why I prefer the name Old-Spock to Spock Prime. The latter means that the new Spock is a shadow of the one, “true” Spock. All Spocks are equally valid. Even the evil one with the goatee is as much the “true” Spock as any other.
@56/kkozoriz: Huh? Nobody’s making a value judgment or saying anything’s more “real” (hint: they’re all fictional). The point is simply that the Abramsverse and the Prime universe are intended to have diverged from one another in 2233, rather than having been separate all along as some people mistakenly assume.
And when we speak of “Prime” and “offshoots,” we’re speaking in real-world terms. The filmmakers chose to refer to Nimoy’s Spock as “Spock Prime” because “prime” means “first.” He was the first Spock, Quinto is the second. The continuity of the shows and films from 1966-2005 was the original, first Star Trek continuity, and thus it’s the Prime Universe. That’s not a term actually used within the fiction, it’s a term we use in real life to differentiate the continuities.
In-universe, though, the Abramsverse can be considered an offshoot because it wasn’t a spontaneous divergence; rather, it came into existence as the result of time travel undertaken by people from the Prime timeline.
Prime doesn’t just mean first.
adjective
1. of first importance; main.
2. of the best possible quality; excellent.
That’s why I don’t like using it. It can come across as a value judgement, making one more important than the other.
Similarly, that’s why I don’t necessarily believe that old-Spock is the same as the Spock we saw in TOS. He’s A Spock, probably from a universe similar to the one we saw in TOS, I’d prefer to think that the YOS Spock is still out there, working towards reunification with the Romulans. A universe lost it’s Romulus but it wasn’t the one we saw in TOS, TNG, etc.
Writer’s intent is interesting from an outside perspective but it really has no bearing on what makes it to the screen. I don’t think that Gene L. Coon intended for Spock’s Brain to suck.
@58/kkozoriz: Dude, I’m a writer. I know words and stuff. Yes, “prime” has multiple meanings, but it can mean “first,” and that was obviously the intention of Abrams, Kurtzman, and Orci when they coined the term “Spock Prime” for their movie. Why would the people who created the Abramsverse intend the term to be a negative value judgment of their own creation????
You’re a writer? Wow, I never wold have guessed <Snark> Seriously, you and I aren’t the only ones here. I posted that so everyone could see the definition, Dude.
Yes, that was their intention but if someone who’s not familiar with the background of the movie hears the term Spock Prime, they might think of it in terms of being better, i.e. a prime steak.
Besides, who knows exactly what they’re thinking? Orci has said that Delta Vega is supposed to be the same planet, just moved to a new location. He later backtracked but that doesn’t change the fact that his original intention was that they were one and the same, regardless of how that idea is totally incompatible withe either WNMHGB or the reboot. One or the other, but not both.
Old Spock and New (or Nu) Spock gets the same point across and doesn’t give the impression that one is more important than the other. If time travel worked like it did in City on the Edge of Forever, they’d literally be the same character. Old Spock would simply have travelled back in time and he can’t go back because it no longer exists since there was no Guardian keeping a pocket of the previous reality safe.
If the new series is based in the original timeline as has been reported and they do a story where Romulus is still around in the future, does that mean the reboot movies are wiped out? Nope, it just means that they’ve told a story that required future Romulus. It’s all made up. They can do whatever they like.
Maybe him being Spock Prime means he is the leader of a race of transforming robots from Cybertron?
@60/kkozoriz: I think it’s being kind of paranoid to worry about whether people will misread the term “Prime.” People who dislike the movies are going to dislike them regardless of what terminology is used, and ditto for people who like the movies. The label isn’t going to change anyone’s mind. And again, it was Abrams and his team themselves who coined the term “Prime” for the original history. They’re the ones who would be most negatively affected if people reacted the way you fear, and they clearly didn’t think it was a problem.
Indeed, I’m quite grateful to Abrams and his team for coining the term “Prime universe” for the original 1966-2005 continuity. It’s a nice, concise, handy label that we’ve never had before, and it’s useful for differentiating the main continuity from others — not just the Abramsverse, but the Mirror Universe and the other alternate timelines we’ve explored in the novels. I’ve found it very handy in numerous online conversations. Honestly, I wish there were a comparable label for the new movies’ universe. All the existing labels like “Abramsverse” and “JJ-Verse” and (ick) “NuTrek” are rather clumsy.
Just like “Shatnerverse,” for the books written by Shatner and the Reeves-Stevens, a clumsy title, but it works I guess. If I’m not mistaken, Memory Alpha refers to the “Abramsverse” as the “alternate reality.”
#62: I’d agree that there really ought to be a better coinage for the (nominally) current continuity, especially considering that we’ve now also got the forthcoming CBS series to plug into the meta-index. If there were compact, easily identifiable logos for “Prime” continuity, the new-movie-verse (Ante-Prime? no, probably not), and whatever continuity the new show represents, such could be placed on book spines and merchandise packaging to quickly and easily identify product (and story) lines for readers and consumers.
I would quibble just slightly, though, with the idea that Prime continuity should be dated 1996-2005, considering all of the prose fiction taking place in that continuity published over the last decade. I see where you’re coming from in assigning those dates, but it really isn’t accurate to characterize the Prime milieu as a closed setting (as that dating suggests) when so much new and officially sanctioned creative work is still appearing within the continuity.
@64/John C. Bunnell: Well, I’m one of the creators of that “officially sanctioned creative work,” but I’d never pretend it was on the same level as canon. What we tie-in authors do is essentially an imitation of the core work, a conjectural extrapolation beyond it. Official sanction doesn’t mean the stories are equally “real,” it just means that the publisher pays the studio for a license to create and sell them legally. After all, there are various different tie-in publishers with mutually incompatible continuities, including Pocket Books, IDW Comics, and Star Trek Online. There’s never been an attempt to maintain a single, consistent continuity across all Trek tie-ins as there has been with Star Wars or Babylon 5, say.
I like to say that if the canon is history, tie-ins are historical fiction. They’re speculations about what might conceivably have happened between and beyond the established facts, but they shouldn’t be mistaken for the real thing. As far as the canon itself goes, no new “history” has been revealed about the Prime universe since 2005, aside from the glimpse of Romulus’s destruction that we saw in the 2009 movie.
RE: The Eugenics Wars controversy,
I favor Greg Cox’s explanation for why no one seemed to be aware of them in “Future’s End.” They were clandestine, covert. Khan wasn’t openly ruling over a huge swathe of Asia and the Middle East. He was the man behind the curtain, the puppet-master pulling the strings of a multitude of lesser dictators and political strongmen, and the same holds true for his rivals.
@57 – Chris: “Prime” can still be applied in-universe if we think that the classic universe existed before 2233 while the new one only exists after a certain point in 2233.
@58 – kkozoriz: You can still apply “prime” to the original timeline as in “of first importance, main”, since without it, and the actions taken by Nero in it, the new one would have not existed.
@47
I agree. They couldn’t actually mention the Eugenics Wars in that episode.
But the writers did choose to use the DY-100 model and launch poster. They could have ignored the issue completely, but chose not to.do so.
So this isn’t just an issue of fictional history. It is also an issue of the actual intent of the writers. They wanted continuity fans to be able to reconcile Future’s End with the TOS depiction of the 1990’s.
@68/OmicronThetaDeltaPhi: As KRAD already pointed out, it was the set decorators who chose to use the model and poster. Why does everyone think the writers come up with the scenery? It’s not like every last detail of the sets is specified in the script. Writers don’t have to time to come up with that stuff if it isn’t specifically relevant to the story — that’s why shows have art departments, to fill in those background details. The art staff might’ve snuck those nods in there because they could get away with it, regardless of what the writers had in mind.
62. ChristopherLBennett – It’s not paranoia but clarity. I really couldn’t care what people call it. Personally, I’d go with TOS Spock and JJ Spock. Makes it clear which one we’re talking about.
And as to your comment “Look, let’s face reality: “Future’s End” was set in 1996 because it was made in 1996, and it would’ve been too confusing to 1996 viewers to be told that they’d been fighting Augment dictators for the previous several years,”
Apparently viewers of 24 believe that Jack Bauer has saved the world, that the president has been assassinated, etc, etc. Silly people don’t realize that TV is actually an accurate portrayal of reality.
Sad to think that you believe the average viewer, particularly of something with Star Trek in the title, are too stupid to deal with an idea such as this. Got to keep it nice and simple for the masses. Sounds like the “too cerebral” comment in regards the The Cage. if that really were the case, why bother doing anything that calls back to a previous episode, any previous episode? Just keep each one nice and compartmentalized so people don’t get confused.
67. lordmagnusen – The idea that it’s the same Spock from the TOS universe is one way of looking at it. That was the intention of the writers after all. However, as we know that there are alternate universes. (parallels told us that there were over 285,000 with more popping up every second), there’s no reason why it has to be the “original”. It could even be the same universe as JJ Trek, just with time travel back and an overwriting of that universes future. What actually made it into the movie leaves many possibilities open. Writer intent is many things but canon isn’t one of them.
@70/kkozoriz: Lay off the ad hominem, please. This isn’t about my beliefs, it’s about the decisions made by TV producers 20 years ago. There is no reason to make this personal.
@69/Christopher: I’d argue it depends on the writer. I’ve written some very detailed stage directions and scene descriptions. Then again, it was a script for a short film with zero dialogue. Supposedly, J. Michael Straczynski was very detailed in his B5 work.
Obviously, this isn’t the case with a more collaborative written product like Star Trek. Plus, their art department was leagues above and beyond most TV shows, especially in the TNG/DS9/Voyager/Enterprise era where they had people like Sternbach and the Okudas doing a lot of behind the scenes work to make this universe truly come alive in the tiniest details.
@72/Eduardo: Yes, it gets written into the script if it’s relevant to the story or the characters. This was just a background Easter egg.
http://www.startrek.com/article/the-classic-episodes-anthology-out-april-29
Hey guys — my writing schedule got seriously borked by the death in my family and my vacation to Key West (which was much needed after said death in said family), so in order to get back on track, the TOS Rewatch that will do the season 2 overview will go up Friday morning, with the next Bat-rewatch going up Friday afternoon as usual. We should be back on track with the start of the third season Tuesday.
Sorry for the delay, and thanks for understanding.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Always, krad.
71. ChristopherLBennett – Christopher, you’re the one that’s saying that the concept of a science fiction TV show is too complex if the people from the future travel back to our time and it doesn’t match our world as closely as possible. Seriously, if they had traveled back to 1996 and discovered a full on battle between augments was happening in LA, the audience would be totally confused, even if the characters filled us in with information about the Eugenics Wars? After all, it was a world war (according too Spock).
SPOCK: No such vessel listed. Records of that period are fragmentary, however. The mid-1990s was the era of your last so-called World War.
MCCOY: The Eugenics Wars.
There, in two lines Space Seed gave us more information about the era of Future’s End than the actual episodes that were happening in that time period did.
Somehow holographic doctors are OK but history the diverges from our own is just too confusing?
I just find the idea distasteful that people aren’t capable of understanding something like that, particularly in the context of a science fiction TV show. It’s not like people were tuning in and expecting The Waltons, which, by it’s nature, is grounded in a fair approximation of reality. Put a killer robot into that show and people would be understandably confused. People tune in to SciFi to see the weird, the unusual, the unexpected. Thinking that people would find it confusing is just disappointing.
If you’d travelled to Los Angeles in 1944, there would be no evidence, none, of the fact that there was a “world war” going on, except maybe some propaganda posters here and there. Just sayin’. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@77/kkozoriz: Do you remember the chat we had a couple of days ago? You reconcile inconsistencies by moving Star Trek into an alternate universe, I do it by ignoring facts that don’t fit (in case of the Eugenics Wars, I ignore the date). If the writers had shown a war-torn 1996, they would have canonised your approach and damaged mine. (Well, eventually I would have ignored that too… but I would have been annoyed.) By avoiding the issue, they kept both alternatives open.
If memory serves, 1968 was also the year of Apollo 8’s successful orbit of the moon, with the reading of Genesis 1 for “all of you on the good Earth.” How fitting that this episode of Trek would be set in a year that ended (so I’m told – a little before my time) on a note of peace and hope for the future.
@77/kkozoriz: “Christopher, you’re the one that’s saying that the concept of a science fiction TV show is too complex if the people from the future travel back to our time and it doesn’t match our world as closely as possible.”
No, I am not. What I’m saying is that it seems likely that the writers of the TV episode 20 years ago probably felt that it made more sense to reflect the world of the present rather than taking time out of their story to explain a bit of decades-old continuity that was irrelevant to the story they wanted to tell. I’m speculating about the thought processes that probably shaped other people’s decisions. What I personally believe has nothing to do with that, because I wasn’t there 20 years ago, I didn’t write the episodes, and I had no influence on the people involved. The conversation is about what their decision-making process probably was, and that is not about you or me. So please stop trying to make this into some kind of personal argument.
78. krad – No newspaper coverage? No greater numbers of people in military uniforms? No mention on the radio? Also, you might want to ask George Takei about that, seeing as he was one of 80,000 Japanese Americans forcibly relocated out of California to internment camps. None of that? Out of sight, out of mind?
81. ChristopherLBennett – But that’s not what you said. “Look, let’s face reality: “Future’s End” was set in 1996 because it was made in 1996, and it would’ve been too confusing to 1996 viewers to be told that they’d been fighting Augment dictators for the previous several years,”
You didn’t say that’s what the writers chose. You made a statement that it was a fact because of this line of reasoning. The truth is, we don’t know why they made the decision not to mention the Eugenics Wars. After all, one of the writers was Brannon Braga. Hardly one of the most respected of the writers, mainly due to his totally off the wall ideas. Warp 10 salamanders anyone? Bragga was more into the big, strange and usually non-nonsensical story ideas. He wasn’t exactly known for his knowledge of Trek history. I think it’s more likely to have been “Meh, who cares” (if he even thought of it at all) instead of “Well, this will confuse the poor folks at home. Let’s just give them a big, convoluted time travel story that ends up making no sense whatsoever instead. “
Sorry, I should’ve been clearer: if a time traveller from the 24th century arrived in 1944 Los Angeles, there would be no evidence of a world war. No, there wouldn’t have been that many people in uniform walking the streets (might be different in San Diego, where there’s a naval base), because most of the military were overseas. They weren’t exactly looking at a lot of newspapers in “Future’s End,” as I recall (though it’s been a while), and what the newspapers said would’ve depended upon the day. (As an example, the coverage would’ve been wall to wall in, say, early June around D-Day, but less so other times.) And unless one of those time travellers was a historian, they probably wouldn’t have known about the internment of Japanese Americans, and would not have noticed their absence.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@83/krad: Not sure I’d agree with you on that, since there would’ve been pervasive wartime propaganda everywhere you looked — posters for war bonds and scrap drives, gas rationing and other scarcity measures, rhetoric on the radio, newsreels, movies, etc. WWII was the war that perfected propaganda into a pervasive tool for mobilizing civilian populations into wartime resources, and I don’t think you could’ve gotten away from it.
But that doesn’t mean that the same would be true for other wars. You could easily have gone to Los Angeles during the Korean War or the Vietnam War or the first Gulf War and not seen any immediate evidence of the conflict. Not to mention foreign wars that the US was only peripherally involved in, like the Lebanese Civil War in the early ’80s or the UN intervention in the Somali Civil War from 1992-5 (although that war is still ongoing today). Heck, the US is currently at war in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Iraq, and elsewhere, but that doesn’t generally have that much impact on everyday life in US cities. And that’s not even counting all the wars that the US isn’t a part of.
84. ChristopherLBennett – Good points Christopher but, as posted above in #38, Spock specifically calls the Eugenincs a world war. Hardly something on the scale of Iraq or Afghanistan. Khan was running 1/4 of the world, Asia through the Middle East. And who knows how much the other supermen had? All we know for sure is that Khan was the last, not the only, one to fall. So there must have been large amounts of the world that were just emerging from that. The supposed immunity of America to something like this is quite amusing, seeing as someone like Trump is currently showing how people are willing to vote for someone they perceive as having the solution to their problems regardless of the actual policies he espouses.
Seeing as power was seized in over 40 nations, it makes sense that they’d target the biggest threats to their plan first. Khan’s group probably went for India, home to over 17% of the population. Others probably went for the other nuclear powers and the plan would be to have the other nation fall in line. It is also mentioned in the episode that they were brought down by infighting, not from an outside force.
Spock – In 1993, a group of these young supermen did seize power simultaneously in over forty nations.
KIRK: Well, they were hardly supermen. They were aggressive, arrogant. They began to battle among themselves.
Given the choice, would you rather go after America or Fiji if your plan was to rule the world?
Didn’t all of the action except the bookends of Future’s End explicitly take place in an altered timeline? Technically when Janeway and co put things right at the end, they restored the timeline from the peaceful one shown to the war torn and nuclear weapon ridden one of Star Trek with all the genetic tyrants therein. You know, maybe SFDebris is right about Janeway? Anyway, my point is that there being no evidence of the Eugenics war in FE is not a bug, it is evidence of the timeline change by Starling.
kkozoriz: What an appallingly America-centric attitude. Spock was completely non-specific with what forty nations we’re talking about, and a war could easily involve 1/4 of the Earth and a set of tyrants could easily take over 40 nations, and the U.S. would never have anything to do with it. As Christopher said upthread, with the exception of a single aerial attack on Hawai’i, precisely NONE of the last two “world wars” was fought on American soil.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@86/random22: You’re right that, logically, the whole story should be in an altered timeline, although it’s unclear whether that was actually the producers’ intent, since Braxton somehow remembered it all in “Relativity” after having forgotten it at the conclusion of “Future’s End.”
However, the point is that it’s a mistake to assume that the lack of overt evidence of war in LA requires it to be an alternate timeline. The fact is that no war in the 20th century was fought on American soil, so it’s not only America-centric but also grossly ignorant of history to believe that an intact Los Angeles is inconsistent with a world war going on.
@87/krad: Again, though, Hawai’i was not yet a state at the time of Pearl Harbor, just an incorporated territory essentially like Puerto Rico is today, so I’m not sure whether it can strictly be called American soil. The only WWII casualties in the United States proper as the result of an enemy weapon were in May 1945, when five schoolchildren and their Sunday school teacher discovered and accidentally triggered a Japanese fire balloon, one of thousands of incendiary devices the Japanese had sent via the jet stream across the Pacific in an unsuccessful attempt to burn down US forests.
To my mind, being a U.S. territory still counts as U.S. soil. I mean, the alternative is to say it’s foreign soil, which is ridiculous. Parts of the Civil War were fought in places that weren’t states yet — does that mean those bits weren’t fought on U.S. soil, either?
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@89/krad: Okay, then, let’s just say that no war in the 20th century involved any fighting in the contiguous 48 states, with the exception of that one fatal fire-balloon incident. There was also Operation Pastorius, a failed German attempt to land saboteurs on US soil (although we’d call them terrorists today) to blow up strategic targets. (Well, the landing part succeeded, but the bombing part failed.)
Of course, if you went by the fiction of the time, there were countless and constant enemy sabotage attempts on US soil that were foiled by various heroes. These days we think of Captain America and Bucky fighting the Nazis in Europe, but that’s a retcon from the ’60s. Originally, they were based in a US camp and fought to protect the nation from saboteurs and fifth columnists. There were similar missions for Superman in the radio series in the first few months of WWII (with Clark Kent recruited as a military intelligence operative, though this seems to have been dropped when the show switched networks and had a semi-reboot partway through 1942) and Batman in the ultra-racist ’43 movie serial. Not to mention Wonder Woman in the WWII-based first season of her ’70s TV series, which probably reflects the ’40s comics as well.
87. krad – So, since it hasn’t happened in the past it couldn’t possibly happen in the future (which 1996 was when SS aired.)? I guess the whole thing with Cochrane and his crew hanging out in a ramshackle camp in Montana was just because they were a bunch of old hippies? America is, somehow, immune to being attacked in any way, shape or form apparently.
As I said before, sure you could easily have 40 countries and not have any of them be America. I just don’t see it as a wise military strategy when 1/4 of your conquered territories are Vatican City, Monaco, Nauru, Tuvalu, San Marino, Liechtenstein, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Maldives, Malta & Grenada. You’d think that at some point the supermen would go after Russia, Canada, America, China, Brazil, Australia, India, Brazil and the other large countries but I suppose the Eugenics Wars were more of a regional skirmish, ignored by most of the planet as long as they only concentrated on the little guys with no real economic, political or military power. I guess it could be considered a world war if the tiny countries they took over were located around the world.
As for being America-centric, isn’t that what Star Trek pretty much always has been? Most of the captains and crews are American. Even Sulu who was supposed to represent pan-Asia turned out to be American. Starfleet is based in America. The lions share of starthship names come from American sources. The first official alien contact took place in America, as did unofficial earlier ones. The Vulcans, Klingons and Ferengi all had their first contact with Earth in America. But to suggest that there’s even the possibility that a world war would dare to touch these scared shores and suddenly it’s too America-centric?
@91/kkozoriz: “So, since it hasn’t happened in the past it couldn’t possibly happen in the future (which 1996 was when SS aired.)?”
No, obviously. You’re twisting it. First off, we’re talking about “Future’s End,” not “Space Seed.” At that point, 1996 was the present. And the point is not that the Eugenics Wars couldn’t have happened in the continental US, it’s that they didn’t have to happen there. That it’s entirely possible that the Wars could be raging elsewhere while Los Angeles was completely intact, because the exact same thing happened in every other 20th-century war. I don’t know why this is so hard for you to grasp. You’re basically trying to argue that a repeated fact of real-world history — Los Angeles being unaffected by a major war — is somehow impossible or ridiculous, and that makes no sense. All we’re saying is that it’s possible, not mandatory, and you can’t refute that it’s possible, because it’s actually happened multiple times.
“As for being America-centric, isn’t that what Star Trek pretty much always has been?”
Yes, but how is that a good thing? It’s one of the franchise’s biggest flaws, hardly a trait to embrace or emulate.
92. ChristopherLBennett – “First off, we’re talking about “Future’s End,” not “Space Seed.” At that point, 1996 was the present. And the point is not that the Eugenics Wars couldn’t have happened in the continental US, it’s that they didn’t have to happen there. That it’s entirely possible that the Wars could be raging elsewhere while Los Angeles was completely intact, because the exact same thing happened in every other 20th-century war”
I brought up Space Seed because that’s where the 1996 date came from. And krad’s claim that since the US mainland was basically untouched in the past two World Wars, that it’s somehow more plausible that there’d be no sign of the third is based upon the Eugenics Wars being fought in the same manner as the others. However, as Spock says in SS “1993, a group of these young supermen did seize power simultaneously in over forty nations.”. It’s not like they were going to invade militarily. It was most likely an inside job, since it was so closely co-ordinated as to occur simultaneously.
The US takes great pride in the fact that they haven’t been invaded, primarily due to sharing borders with on;y to other countries, both of which are on friendly (mostly) terms. The Eugenics wars were something totally new. They weren’t like the last ones because the Axis powers didn’t seize power simultaneously, the rolled across borders one by one. That’s what different.
As for Trek being America-centric, it can be argued that it is a failing but what can’t be argued is that it is a fact. That’s how the history of that world played out. That’s how the fleet was named and staffed. Claiming that the rest of the world was embroiled in a devastating war, 37 million dead compared to six million for WW1 and 11 Million for WW2 according to Bread and Circuses (Note that those numbers don’t correspond to our world wars), somehow makes it less America-centric just means that the US gets the good news, the rest of the world gets the bad new and that means it’s “fair and balanced”.
I’m not saying that it HAS to be that way but it would be nice if there was some sign, some indication that the first time a crew visited an actual time given in a previous episode that there was some acknowledgement of it. As for people being confused by the reference, you had to be aware of Sctty’s line “It;s green” in order to get the joke when Data said much the same thing 24 years earlier and yet people seemed to handle that just fine.Apparently people would have been watching Future’s End and thinking it was a history program.
First of all, I want to say that while, as an episode of Trek, this left something to be desired, the show that it was supposed to spin off might have been interesting to watch.
Secondly, while I don’t really want to get involved in the (World) War of Words between CLB and kkozoriz, I will note that the first time I saw “Relics,” I thought the “It is green” sequence was pretty amusing. At the time, I had never seen “By Any Other Name” to realize that they were paying direct homage to a Scotty moment from TOS. I could appreciate that Data was (unintentionally) making a joke, while still oblivious to the fact that there was a deeper inside joke being referenced. This to say, just because Trek history mentions something doesn’t mean that explicit knowledge of that history is necessary to appreciate what I’m watching now.
If you’re all so sure that Isis wasn’t played by Victoria Vetri why won’t IMDB remove that entry and why don’t they add the uncredited Sgt Lipton played by Lincoln Demyan?
@95/Douglas Blades: Because IMDb is not a very well-curated source. All it takes is one amateur editor who doesn’t understand the difference between Internet speculation and confirmed fact, and any attempt to remove the attribution will probably be undone before long. It’s hardly the only error IMDb contains — for instance, there’s a ’60s Doctor Who actor that it confuses with a Star Trek actor of the same name.
Part of the problem is the echo chamber of the Internet. One fan site offers a speculation, some idiot IMDb editor takes it as fact, and then a thousand other sources make the mistake of assuming IMDb is always right, and it ends up everywhere. So even if IMDb removes it, someone is going to come across the same mistaken credit on some other site and go “Oh, I should add this to IMDb.” And so it becomes a self-perpetuating loop.
Who played Isis? Someone Gene wanted to get into bed, that’s who.
The typewriter never bothered me: I always assumed it was a camouflaged computer.
As for the 25-35 year old Actress/Model who played the part of Humonoid ISIS, Instead of Green Eyes they are Blue, also she has a unique chin, small Nose & is approximately 5’5″ tall, also she is Familiar not on Star Trek but other 60s Series like westerns.
Remember Gene Roddenberry did Westerns before Trek.
So whom is an Actress/ MODEL in the Late 60’s, with Hazel / Blue Eyes, “hole” in her chin, Petite & Raven Black Hair??
REMEMBER her part she POSED!!!
NOT ACTED!!
WHAT A POSE!!
ALSO could the ST TOS Ep. AE, Mystery Woman ISIS ACTRESS / MODEL be a FAMILY MEMBER OF THE CAST OR CREW OR STUDIO!
COULD THE ACTRESS EMILY BANKS BE “””ISIS“”??????
She has the EYE Color & features, nose & even the chin?? Change her hair color & add Hair extensions & heavy EYE make up & wa la!!
Her body would be right also.
EMILY BANKS “IS” the Actress whom Played ISIS in Humonoid Form!
She played Yeoman Barrows in the Episode SHORE LEAVE AS WELL!
Shakespeare’s “The Comedy of Errors” had nothing on this one.
Trek historian Larry Nemecek has done the world a great service by finally tracking down who played Isis in human form: it’s April Tatro. Details at this article on TrekMovie:
https://trekmovie.com/2019/03/12/star-trek-mystery-solved-isis-actress-from-assignment-earth-identified/
I don’t normally edit posts three years later, but I made an exception here, as this was worth noting in the entry.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@103/krad: Your edit needs a bit more editing: it says “has identifies April Tatro.”
Still, it’s great that we finally have a definitive answer and can (hopefully) put the damn Victoria Vetri myth to rest.
Hmm… Going back over the thread, I’m reminded that the guy who originally proposed Vetri as a candidate was basing it on a report that Isis has been portrayed by a Playboy Playmate or model, with Vetri being the one Playboy veteran from the period who bore even a moderate resemblance to Isis (which he admitted was flimsy). But it doesn’t look as if April Tatro ever appeared in Playboy, at least as far as a cursory web search can reveal.
According to inflationcalculator.com, her payment of $84.51 in 1968 is the equivalent of $613.85 today. Not including costume and makeup time, her rate of $29.15 works out to $211.74.
This has been a public service announcement.
I had a thought today. April Tatro’s main claim to fame is as a contortionist, and I wonder if maybe when they cast her for this bit part in the backdoor pilot, they were thinking in terms of potentially bringing her back if Assignment: Earth got picked up as a series. After all, who better than a contortionist to play the human form of a cat?
What with all the new Star Trek series being greenlit, I hope they consider revising the Assignment: Earth concept. I mean, sure it would look like a Doctor Who ripoff in several ways, but I know I’d rather see Gary Seven working behind the scenes of history than Section 31. Yeesh.
@107/Olds88: I don’t know how a modern interpretation would do it, but the original proposal for the show, as I’ve discussed above, would’ve been less like Doctor Who and more like a more thoughtful version of The Six Million Dollar Man or the latter two seasons of Wonder Woman — the kind of show where the crises-of-the-week were mostly fairly down-to-Earth drama/intrigue stories and the only SF element was the futuristic means that the heroes used to deal with them. The series prospectus argued that it was better to focus on human folly as the source of the crises rather than alien invasions or the like.
in 1916, Poncho Villa and his Division of the North raided the town of Columbus, NM. In response, the U.S. Army was sent to NM, resulting in open warfare. So, yes, the contiguous U.S. has been invaded at least once within the 20th Century.
Pancho Villa.
@110/M: Thanks for setting me straight.
No worries.
Though it was a very muted performance by Robert Lansing (intentionally so), I really enjoyed the Gary Seven character. It’s hard to gauge an actor from a performance like that, but seeing Lansing in one of my favorite episodes of The Twilight Zone called “The Long Morrow”, I already knew how brilliant an actor he was.
@krad/Captain’s log:
Awesome move by Captain Kirk! So simple, so effective. Like what are those cops gonna say if they try to tell anyone what happened, haha!
@54/Dunsel:
Whatever the case, I wonder where this would have put the Prophets’ plans for ‘The Sisko’ considering they arranged his birth haha…
@82/kkozoriz:
Braga has certainly had some hit and miss episodes. When he hits, he’s brilliant, when he misses, oh boy! However, I don’t think it’s fair to say he’s not respected just because he has some ‘totally off the wall ideas’. He reaches, true, but that trait has produced some fine sci-fi. Ultimately, I think that should be the barometer upon which a writer should be judged; nobody’s perfect.
@97/gerald_fnord:
Haha, I like that one, that’s a pretty clever interpretation!
Lord Kinbote, what you just said could’ve come true, as this video shows.
Perhaps this is bad as a Star Trek episode but I don’t care; I absolutely love “Assignment: Earth,” perhaps because it doesn’t feel like Star Trek. It makes me wish there had been a full series and I’m delighted to hear there’s no shortage of tie-in material continuing the adventures of Seven. Much of this love comes from the coincidental resemblance to Doctor Who but there’s also how some of the touches about Seven are close to ones I have for a reoccurring heroine in my fiction. Make no mistake, I’m going to track down every single tie-in work featuring Seven now!
Teri Garr did speak about her time on Star Trek–sort of–in STARLOG #173. Which is to say, she talked about how she didn’t want to talk about it.
“I have nothing to say about it,” Garr declared of “Assignment: Earth”. “I did that years ago and I mostly deny I ever did it.” Turns out she was glad the show didn’t go to series. “Thank God,” Garr told the interviewer. “Otherwise, all I would get would be Star Trek questions for the rest of my natural life—and probably my unnatural life. You ever see those people who are Star Trek fans? The same people who go to swap meets.” She then proceeded to slag off science fiction in general when asked about her contributions to Young Frankenstein and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. “I don’t regard them as science fiction,” Garr said. “I just consider them good movies.”
So, not a fan, then….
It must really pain Garr to see how popular and mainstream the genre has become……..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Nice update re April Tatro!
This episode should never have been made and a spin-off series featuring Gary Seven and Roberta would’ve probably been a disaster. This episode just didn’t work for me. For one thing, (as I think some commenters above pointed out), why would they risk time travel just to gather “historical information”? Don’t they already have pretty detailed records of Earth history in their 23rd century computers? Aren’t they worried that their very presence in 1968 Earth could change history and perhaps prevent them from returning to their own time? Terri Garr was charming as the eccentric Roberta, but I think Robert Lansing was miscast as Gary 7. He was just too dour and grim for us to care about him all that much. Some of the pacing in the show was off – especially that long drawn-out scene where Kirk and Spock are trapped with those US space officials while Gary 7 is fiddling with the nuclear rocket.
I also understand that appearing on Star Trek was a bad experience for Terri Garr and she has never spoken to media about it. Does anyone know what happened to her on the show? Was she sexually harassed (or worse?) as Grace Lee Whitney was?
@119/Palash Ghosh: “For one thing, (as I think some commenters above pointed out), why would they risk time travel just to gather “historical information”? Don’t they already have pretty detailed records of Earth history in their 23rd century computers?”
Well, that was just a lame excuse to set up the backdoor pilot, and it wouldn’t have been an issue if A:E had actually gone to series, since the series would probably have focused on its own stories rather than making any references to Star Trek.
But for what it’s worth, “Space Seed” established that the Eugenics Wars in the 1990s destroyed a lot of historical records, so the Federation’s knowledge of the late 20th century on Earth was spotty.
“Aren’t they worried that their very presence in 1968 Earth could change history and perhaps prevent them from returning to their own time?”
They were only monitoring from orbit until Gary showed up.
“I think Robert Lansing was miscast as Gary 7. He was just too dour and grim for us to care about him all that much.”
That was the intent, though. According to the series pitch document, Roddenberry wanted the show’s hero to be the same kind of stoic superhuman figure as Spock, or as Paladin in Have Gun, Will Travel, a show that Roddenberry had written extensively for before becoming a producer. Since both those characters were quite popular, he wanted one in a similar vein.
Robert Lansing certainly wasn’t miscast. Beyond how the character was intended to be portrayed as CLB points out, Lansing, I have no doubt, could have portrayed it well no matter what kind of directing he had. I’ve only seen him in one other thing, The Twilight Zone, in the episode “The Long Morrow,” and his performance was almost opposite of what he did for Gary Seven, and he was absolutely terrific.