STAR TREK (TOS): ASSIGNMENT: EARTH: I Know this World Needs Help

***
“ASSIGNMENT: EARTH”
Season 2, Episode 26 (Production 56), Story 55
Written by Gene Roddenberry and Art Wallace
PLOT: The Enterprise goes back to 1968 to help Gene Roddenberry pitch a new series.
SUB-PLOT: Will Teri Garr call the cops?
KIRKISM: “Humans of the twentieth century do not go beaming around the galaxy, Mister Seven.”
HEADER QUOTE SPOKEN BY: Roberta Lincoln

For kicks and smirks, the Federation sends the Enterprise back to 1968 to do some historical research on how in the heck the world survived with all that chaos going on. There’s a transporter mishap and suddenly a suave older dude is aboard the Enterprise. Kirk wants to know who he is and why he’s holding a cat, and the stranger is like, “I’m here to guarantee Gene Roddenberry keeps getting paid when you get cancelled.”

His name is Gary Seven and he quickly figures out that the Enterprise is here from the future. Seven is mysterious and suave and a better character than the clunky script deserves. Look, I like this episode, and the chemistry between Seven and Roberta Lincoln (played by the plucky and beautiful Terri Garr) could make a great basis for an ongoing television show, which is what Roddenberry was using this episode to pitch to the network, but most of the fundamental issues with Roddenberry’s style of storytelling are in evidence here, too. Put in the simplest language, Roddenberry makes really boring television. However good or inspiring his ideas, he crams them into formulaic plots that make his characters adhere to the story rather than allowing his characters to act organically. When I sit down to watch an episode of STAR TREK, I know generally what Kirk and Spock and McCoy are going to do, but I also know that first and foremost they’re going to act in a way that adheres to this episode’s needs, even if that means acting dumber than last week.

Because ASSIGNMENT: EARTH is a tryout for Gary Seven and Roberta Lincoln, the Enterprise crew has to act in ways that serve them. So when Seven tells them he’s a human that’s been on a distant planet so advanced and awesome that it won’t even be known in Kirk’s time. Seven tells them if they don’t beam him down to the planet, Kirk will be responsible for changing history. So Kirk puts him in jail to think about it.

Luckily, Gary Seven has seen this episode so he knows how to escape. He can disable guards. He can survive Spock’s Vulcan Nerve Pinch.

But he can’t defeat a phaser, leading to Kirk saying incredibly insightful things like this:

“Captain’s log, supplemental. A man in a 20th century business suit – what is he? Not even Spock’s Vulcan neck pinch could stop him. Without our phasers, he would have overpowered all five of us. I find it difficult to believe the mysterious Mr. Seven can be Human. And yet, suppose he is?”

Yes, Kirk, suppose he is. That could mean … something.

Luckily, Seven is as bored with this as I was, so he and Isis escape. Although maybe Isis just wanted out because Spock was creeping her out.

They go to Earth, where Seven has a secret office that comes complete with a secretary who doesn’t know who he is, but is still willing to say things like, “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 going to be alive when we’re thirty.”

Gary Seven and his cat go interfere with a rocket launch and Roberta starts to think something’s wrong and Kirk and Spock get arrested and have to watch other people star in their show.

All in all, ASSIGNMENT: EARTH isn’t a bad episode but it’s not a great one, either. I can see why no one wanted The Adventures of Gary Seven and His Secretary Show, and if Roddenberry wanted the show to get picked up, he probably shouldn’t have spent all this time with silly bits like Seven proving his identity to his computer, which just feel like a D&D instruction manual.

That said, Season 2 of STAR TREK has a lot of good but even more bad. ASSIGNMENT: EARTH is kinda emblematic of the entire season in that regard – there’s some good ideas here but mostly it just feels completely forgettable, and forced to adhere to a formula that’s not very interesting.

STAR TREK (TOS): BREAD AND CIRCUSES: You’re More Afraid of Living

**
“BREAD AND CIRCUSES”
Season 2, Episode 25 (Production 44), Story 54
Written by Gene Roddenberry and Gene L. Coon; Directed by Ralph Senensky
PLOT: Blah blah blah Romans with a broadcast network blah blah blah
SUB-PLOT: Blah blah blah
KIRKISM: “My world, Proconsul, is my vessel, my oath, my crew.”
HEADER QUOTE SPOKEN BY: McCoy

If you stumble upon this reaction to BREAD AND CIRCUSES at random, it’s just another webpage. If you’re a regular reader of the Anxiety, however, you’ll notice it’s been a couple week since I reviewed a TOS episode. And before that it was a couple weeks, too. I’ve written quite a few reviews in the meantime, and I finished watching Season 2 a month ago.

So why no reviews?

Because this last batch of episodes of Season 2 are mediocre nonsense.

BREAD AND CIRCUSES is yet another limp, boring bit of melodrama, and yet another one of these “Earth Era” themed episodes. This time, we get a Roman civilization mixed with 20th century Earth tech. Kirk goes looking for a friend named Captain Merrick and they find him as the right hand man of the Proconsul of a Roman society that holds gladiator games and puts them on TV. There’s some rebels called the Children of the Sun who the crew falls in with, but before you know it, everyone has to fight in gladiatorial combat.

On the TV.

McCoy, Spock, their Child of the Sun pal Flavius Maximus, and another gladiator have to fight. Spock can take care of himself but McCoy can’t because he’s a nerdy doctor. The fight between the four goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on until they have wrung every bit of possible melodrama out of this fight seven or eight times.

The Romans want the Enterprise crew to come down, which is why Kirk gets to sit this fight out; they want him to call the crew down or they’ll kill Spock and McCoy and yadda yadda yadda. There’s a semi-interesting bit with Kirk being sent a slave woman for the night and a decent twist with the “Children of the Sun” being revealed as worshipers of Jesus Christ and not the big, hot, glowing circle in the sky, but that’s not enough to save this clunker.

Very little in this episode is very good or convincing or interesting. This whole alternate “Earth Era” concept is getting tired. Heck, this show is getting tired. STAR TREK can still deliver an occasionally good episode but these run of the mill episodes are sinking the series like a bunch of big, fat, heavy rocks. I’m tired of watching and writing about this show.

STAR TREK (TOS): THE ULTIMATE COMPUTER: Only a Fool Would Stand in the Way of Progress

**
“THE ULTIMATE COMPUTER”
Season 2, Episode 24 (Production 54), Story 53
Written by D.C. Fontana (Teleplay) and Laurence N. Wolffe (Story); Directed by John Meredyth Lucas
PLOT: Computers want to take yer jobs
SUB-PLOT: Computers want to take everyone’s jobs
KIRKISM: “You can’t simply say, today I will be brilliant.”
HEADER QUOTE SPOKEN BY: Kirk

Season 2 is not really ending well. In THE ULTIMATE COMPUTER we’ve got another dreary, limp episode that sees Kirk fretting like a ninny over a computer who wants to take his job.

Kirk is in a bad mood right from the start because the Federation is jerking the Enterprise around and he doesn’t like it. Commodore Wesley is beamed aboard to tell Kirk that the Enterprise is gonna be the fox in the fox hunt. Dr. Richard Daystrom is going to come aboard and fit his fancy new M-5 computer into the Enterprise, which will give control of “Kirk’s” ship over to M-5.

Have you figured out how all of this plays out? Kirk frets endlessly about possibly being replaced by a machine, McCoy yammers on about them doggone dirty machines and Spock pontificates about how super-smart Daystrom and M-5 are, and then tells Kirk that it would not be preferable to have a computer captain a ship because humans are loyal to one man.

Kirk’s all like, “Aw, thanks, big guy,” never realizing that if the entire ships gets automated, loyalty doesn’t really mean squat.

But logic doesn’t really have anything to do with THE ULTIMATE COMPUTER. What this episode is about is putting the fears of automation on the screen, and COMPUTER does this in such a ham-fisted, silly way that it just ends up making Kirk look like an insecure desk jockey. Or one of those nerdy lieutenant types that military movies are always making fun of while the real men do the actual work.

Of course, the M-5 machine goes wrong and starts taking the war games seriously, and Kirk and the rest of his officers have to run around trying to take command of the ship back. Kirk pulls another one of his “I’m gonna out-logic the computer” moves, convincing M-5 that it’s responsible for the deaths of human lives, which causes the computer to shut down.

It’s all incredibly tired and boring, which makes the episode a perfect match for this stretch of shows. This is five sub-par episodes in a row, where whatever joy I’m getting out of watching these characters interact is nearly completely sabotaged by silly stories. At this point, the only things that are keeping me going to the end of this season is that there are only two episodes left, and the final episode has the promise of a Teri Garr guest-shot.

But, man, this is some tedious television.