Review

Unlike the similarly punctuated season 1 finale entitled Operation: Annihilate!, the season 2 finale entitled Assignment: Earth sheds the exclamation point in an appropriately symbolic move. Because unlike its season 1 finale counterpart, this episode lacks any kind of excitement whatsoever and is in fact quite dull.

Even worse, this episode's premise even further aggravates the logical problems introduced by Spock's magical time travel formula, first featured in The Naked Time and further abused in Tomorrow is Yesterday. Unlike the previous episodes where Spock's magical time travel formula was used as an emergency tactic, albeit an overwrought one, this episode opens with the crew having casually engaged in time travel in a mission of historical research openly sanctioned by the Federation, as if traveling back in time has since become routine.

As if that weren't bad enough, pretty much the entire plot is a mixture of stiltedness and incoherence. The episode wastes no time making itself so awkwardly annoying, as the very first scene rattles off all that silly time travel exposition, then immediately proceeds to have Gary Seven simply appear in the transporter room. It's not explained how his long range transporter could make such a remarkable error as dropping him in the Enterprise's transporter room rather than his desired destination on Earth, but who needs coherent technical explanations? That's not what this episode is about.

No, what this episode was supposed to be about instead was the danger posed by time travel and interfering with historical events. But the story isn't very good at that part either, because Kirk pretty much does all the wrong things right from the beginning. Rather than merely assume that Gary's unlikely arrival on the Enterprise was the result of an unlikely accident, just as Gary claimed, Kirk assumes instead the even more unlikely idea that Gary could be an alien invader of Earth or some kind of hostile time traveler trying to screw up Earth's history.

Not a single thing warrants Kirk's rather remarkable paranoia, but Kirk acts on it anyway, profoundly interfering with Gary's historically undocumented, yet nevertheless historically canonical mission in the process, thereby directly violating the stated purpose of their mission into the past: to observe but not to interfere with history.

The episode tries to cover up this blatant mistake at the end with Spock rattling off some nonsense about how historical record implies that the Enterprise must have been predestined to interfere with these events, but the irony of that already bad rationalization is that had anyone on the Enterprise familiarized themselves with historical events in the first place, then they could have easily validated Gary Seven's place in history, despite its strangeness, and allowed him to complete his mission as planned.

Given all that, I think it's fair to say this episode is largely an exercise in incompetence for all parties involved. The Federation for authorizing this ill conceived mission in the first place, Kirk for choosing to consider Gary guilty until proven innocent, Kirk's crew for not fact checking Gary's story, and even Gary himself, who repeatedly showed his tendencies toward buffoonery throughout the episode, especially with regards to his mishandling of Roberta's less than elegant distractions.

The result is an incredibly boring episode filled with countless clips of stock Apollo footage dragging on at The Corbomite Maneuver's pace where none of the characters can quite figure out whose side they're on until it's nearly too late. All this peppered with endless humor scenes which nearly all fall flat, way too many monotone computer scenes, and a strikingly irrelevant female sidekick for Gary Seven who adds nothing to the plot and for some reason is disguised as a cat.

I've read that this episode was supposed to be a sort of backdoor pilot for a spinoff series entitled Assignment: Earth, which was to presumably feature Gary Seven, Roberta, the mysterious cat girl, and that terrifyingly obnoxious computer engaging in a litany of similar adventures. I don't know about you, but based on the material seen here, I think the world can do without a crappy James Bond inspired Star Trek spinoff taking place in a contemporary science fiction setting.