Summary: <br> A Star Trek spin-off that never was becomes a comic book, featuring twin Richard Nixons.<br> Affiliate link included.<br> Transcript:<br> Graham: The Star Trek T.V. spinoff that never happened gets its own comic book. Is it any good? Find out as we take a look at Star Trek Assignment: Earth, straight ahead.<br> <br> [Intro Music]<br> Announcer: Welcome to the Classy Comics podcast where we search for the best comics in the universe. From Boise Idaho, here is your host Adam Graham <br> Graham: Fifty years ago, at the end of season two Gene Roddenberry left Star Trek the original series. The Season two finale was a backdoor pilot for another T.V. series. This was a common practice at the time, although it’s really somewhat annoying in retrospect, where you watch one T.V. series but you get a pilot for another potential series. Sometimes this can work well, if they mesh together for example, the Andy Griffith Show really had a back-door pilot as part of the T.V. series, Make Room for Daddy. However, the match of Star Trak and Assignment Earth wasn’t really good match. It had to have the Enterprise travelling back in time to 1968 for the flimsiest of reasons and then the crew of the enterprise really didn’t impact the outcome of the story.<br> The characters for Assignment Earth did that. The characters were Gary Seven, a human who was actually taken by aliens and trying to be part of their long, ongoing organization which tries to save humanity from itself. He has an I.Q. of 200 and is in peak physical condition, able to resist a Vulcan Nerve Pench. His secretary, Roberta Lincoln, is somebody who came in just looking for job and only in the episode Assignment Earth does she really learn what’s going on. She can be flighty and erratic but she is actually really intelligent, which makes her an asset. And then there is Isis, a shape shifter who, most of the time looks like a cat. However, is able to change into a beautiful black-haired woman and they are assisted by a computer that’s known as the Beta 5, which can allow them to teleport and do a lot of other neat tricks.<br> The series wasn’t picked up but John Byrne gave them a comic mini-series with stories set between 1968 to 1972. So, let’s take a look at this series and see how it worked.<br> The book starts out with “Brighter Than a Thousand Sons.” It begins with a duplication of the final scene of the Assignment Earth T.V. show and then it picks up three months after the Enterprise left where they are in Albuquerque, New Mexico and they’re clued in to a Soviet agent plot to hijack a rocket test and so they go undercover at the nucular laboratory at San Lobos because apparently, they don’t want to be sued by the government for using San Alamos.<br> But at any rate they discover a scientist is doing a test on advanced nucular fusion. This alarms Gary Seven because this technology destroyed Delphi Centaurius Six. Gary Seven begins to fall for the female lead scientist on the project and at the same time, they try to track down who the spy is. There is actually a page plus with John Byrne drawing panels about each particular scientist and potential for them to actually be the criminal behind the action and so it’s a mystery story but without really enough time to develop.<br> Now, we have the next story which is Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, and in this story the enterprise arrives in 1969. However Gary Seven is able to figure out without contacting them that this is actually an earlier version of the Enterprise arriving because this story is taken from season one of Star Trek. “Tomorrow is Yesterday,” which has the Enterprise ending up in 1969 and trying to find a way to remove evidence of their arrival from local databases so as to not interfere with history and what we see in this story is that Gary Seven and Miss Lincoln are kind of on the periphery of the story trying to make sure...
