In today’s episode, a Tal Shiar operative decides the ending of Star Trek VI needs a rewrite. But she paid so much attention to the movies that she doesn’t recognize an obscure episode of the TV show swooping in to thwart her plans. Should pets have human names? Which senior officer needs cyber-security training most badly? And what’s the best way for a hapless human to acclimate to time travel? All this and more in Assignment: Eternity, or, Call Me Ishmael Junior.

Assignment: Eternity
Author: Greg Cox
Pages: 278
Published: January 1998
Timeline: About a week after the events of “Turnabout Intruder”, effectively making this episode 4×01
Prerequisites: “Assignment: Earth” (2×26) is the episode from which Gary Seven and Roberta Lincoln originated. “Unification” (TNG 5×07+08) might also be good to have under your belt to gain a sense of the momentousness of that which the Romulans are trying to stop.
Borrowable on Archive.org? Yes, although it looks pretty washed-out
Not to be confused with: Assignment in Eternity, a collection of novellas by Robert Heinlein, first published in 1953

The final episode of the original Star Trek‘s second season is a little jaunt called “Assignment: Earth”. Having demonstrated that slingshotting across time is in fact survivable and repeatable, the Federation is now using it to do covert ops in the past. While they’re in 1968 doing historical research, they intercept a transport that turns out to be a 20th-century man in a suit and his cat. The man is Gary Seven, and he works for alien bosses he won’t give out any information about that he works for, and he’s kind of on assignment right now, he has a nuclear warhead platform launch he needs to avert so that history continues on track, so if they could kindly, yanno, let him get back to that. They detain him for a while, but he escapes and gets to his condo on Earth where all his awesome futuristic equipment is. Through some misunderstandings, a young woman named Roberta Lincoln gets dragged into it, and over the course of the episode makes her usefulness as a companion apparent to Seven. Kirk and Spock try to stop him, but spend most of their time held up by local authorities. In the end, with no facts to base a decision on, Kirk decides to trust Seven, the nuclear crisis is averted, and the stage is set for further Seven/Roberta time-romp shenanigans.

“Assignment: Earth” is what’s known in the television industry as a backdoor pilot—i.e., it introduces new characters to an audience in an existing series rather than give them their own dedicated introductory episode. I don’t care for it that much myself. I have no problem with getting away from the Enterprise to tell stories about other characters—after all, it’s part of what made so many of those wildly experimental early novels so bracing, even when they weren’t entirely successful—but not generally at the crew’s expense; it’s simply not much fun looking at Kirk and Spock helplessly detained for the majority of the runtime. I didn’t find Seven and Roberta especially gripping characters on my first watch, and a rewatch specifically for this book changed very little. The way the episode ends with Spock and Kirk discussing all the wacky adventures Seven and Roberta are sure to have is too much. And the whole thing smells a little too much like a dollar-store Doctor Who: a well-dressed man of mysterious origin, moving freely about time and space, getting out of jams with his magic multitool, assisted by a fetching young companion. If I’m being truly honest, I’d most likely put it in my bottom five.

As the song goes, however, it takes different strokes to move the world, and “Assignment: Earth” is one of Greg Cox’s favorite TOS episodes. It took on a few different forms before settling into a TOS/Seven story (more on that below), but although pitting Gary Seven against, say, Picard would have created some fun philosophical friction, it’s nice to see these characters reunite so they can build on what came before. If nothing else, it’s a testament to the beauty of IDIC: if I wrote Star Trek novels, I probably couldn’t stop tripping over my own feelings about “Assignment: Earth” to convince myself that it would be worth revisiting—but thank goodness we don’t all think the same and that there’s somebody out there that wanted to do that, because I got to experience the distinct pleasure of being wrong and have my expectations pleasantly upended.

Assignment: Eternity begins in 2293 at the Khitomer Peace Conference, where a Romulan named Dellas successfully assassinates Spock. Back in 1969, Beta-5 apprises Gary Seven of the future timeline catastrophe, so he and Roberta Lincoln walk through the blue fog straight to the bridge of the Enterprise to warn Kirk of it. Kirk doesn’t appreciate Seven’s reluctance to give out specific information, and has urgent business anyway (flood relief to a world called Duwamish), but he invites Seven and Roberta to stay as guests until he decides this future problem is as pressing as Seven claims it is. Seven doesn’t have time to gain Kirk’s trust, and so, as he did the previous time he was on the Enterprise, he overcomes confinement and uses the computers in engineering to open up a wormhole that drops them directly in Romulan space.

While outrunning their inevitable Romulan pursuers, Spock’s scans detect a place where a planet should be, but in which none appears. They hide in the cloak to elude the Romulans, at which point Seven beams down (without permission, of course), with Kirk, Sulu, and Chekov hot on his trail. Once on the surface, a force field goes up around them, cutting off contact with the ship. What is this planet they’re stuck on? Is it a secret Romulan military installation? Is it the key to Seven’s mysterious mission? Could it be both…?

The most fun part of Assignment: Eternity is that the script is flipped this time. When the Enterprise traveled back to Seven’s time, part of why there wasn’t much they could do was that they were on his home turf. But this time, Seven comes to Kirk, so Kirk has the temporal tactical advantage—and boy, does he use the heck out of it. It was a little weird when Kirk tried to hold him up back in the 60s, when Seven surely knew his way around the era a little better than the future captain man, but it plays a lot more believably for him to not trust Seven as far as he can throw his servo when Seven is doing things like pulling the Enterprise through treaty-breaking wormholes. Seven and Roberta hijack Starfleet uniforms to blend in while trying to escape to the planet, which later makes Seven appear subordinate to Kirk, a clever illustration of the new dynamic (and later, an accidental tactical advantage).

I have to say I found the prose fairly staid and utilitarian, which was rather surprising given both Cox’s reputation in general and the fact that nothing about his first solo effort struck me that way. However, there was one major exception: I think Spock’s mind meld with Roberta is perhaps the best-written mind meld I’ve seen a book. Cox did a good job at blending their experiences and at having each one experience the other’s memories. Roberta in general is, for my money, the best-written character in the book; Cox excels in capturing the sharp intelligence that lies beneath her ditzy facade. I do think ultimately the book adds up to more than the sum of its parts, but there was a clunkiness to the nuts and bolts that sometimes made it a little tough to muster motivation to pick it up in my spare time.

Overall, I think Assignment: Eternity does a pretty solid job of giving us a slightly more expansive peek into the shadowy world of whatever it is that Gary Seven does without stripping away any of the mystique. If I could control what the Star Trek novelverse dropped in my lap next, I probably wouldn’t pick Seven and Roberta—but that’s kind of the beauty of it, isn’t it? There are some really talented writers out there who can work wonders with material another person might dismiss outright, and if they do it right, you end up walking away with a greater appreciation for characters you might not have thought much of at first, as I did here. I think it’s safe to say that Seven and Roberta have some interesting experiences ahead of them—and if I’m given to understand correctly, we’ll get to read some of them in books to come.

MVP & LVP

• Hard to pick an MVP for this one; it’s actually a strong race. Is it Seven, for dumping the Enterprise where it needed to be regardless of Kirk’s protestations? Or is it Spock, for performing the mind meld with Roberta that convinced him why it was vital to stay and see the mission through to its end, and also for the awesome command decisions that got the Romulan pursuers off their backs? I think I narrowly have to give it to Seven, operating as he does on a level beyond Starfleet regulation and never deviating from it—but man, is it a close one.
• My LVP goes to Vithrok, a balding scientist who is also Dellas’s sort-of assistant. He’s more of a bumbler than you expect from Romulans, and it’s not really clear why Dellas tolerates him other than the obvious computer expertise. I genuinely thought Dellas would eventually fire a disruptor on the highest setting at him, and it somehow feels weird that that never happened.

Stray Bits

• From Voyages of Imagination: Before landing on the reunion of the TOS crew with Seven and Roberta, Cox attempted to pair Picard with Gary Seven and Kirk with Q. In an early draft, its villains were “well-meaning Romulan dissidents”, but Cox abandoned that idea when it failed to generate dramatic tension and went for the more straightforwardly evil Tal Shiar at his first-reader girlfriend’s recommendation. Honestly, I’m kind of glad it didn’t end up a Q thing; it’s always more exciting for obscure characters to get another day in the limelight, and anyway, we’ll be getting plenty of Q action from Cox later in 1998.
• There are tons of references to 50s and 60s pop culture, which reminds me a bit of Barbara Hambly’s Ishmael in a way, although less on the side of gratuitous cameos and more just vague mentions. Some I picked up on, some I didn’t (e.g., I misidentified a reference to The Avengers1Probably no single piece of pop culture will get wiped as hard from the public memory by something with an identical name as that show has been. (The 1998 film probably didn’t do it any favors either.) as being a Doctor Who thing). Lately, I feel increasingly lucky to get any reference from before I was born.
• Roberta thinking Chekov looks like a Beatle (“Paul maybe, or George”) is a cute joke, if carried off a little hamfistedly. Two pages later, she thinks maybe he looks more like a Monkee, in case you managed not to get it. (pp. 30, 32)
• A somewhat more successful rib-nudger: “Although their trip through the wormhole had been brief in duration, they could have ended up anywhere in the universe. What if they were lost countless light-years beyond known space? [Kirk] didn’t like the idea of spending, say, seventy-five years or so trying to get home. / On the other hand, he thought, that could be quite an adventure…” (p. 49)
• Nurse Chapel had a cat at the Academy named Zoe. L name, in my opinion. I am firmly on the side of distinctly nonhuman names for pets. Signed, a person with a cat named Rootbeer. (p. 113)
• The password McCoy put on Isis’s cage is CAT. A student of the President Skroob school of password creation, I see. (ibid.)
• It’s noted that Roberta has started reading more sci-fi since she started traveling with Seven, which I find an elegantly simple and remarkably grounded approach to acclimating to all the wild stuff you would see when beginning to travel across time and space with someone. I think she might be the character Cox does the best job with here, making her seem slightly bubbleheaded yet still convincingly intelligent. (p. 177)
• Kirk ponders the future, p. 249: “What would become of James T. Kirk in the decades to come. Another five-year mission? An admiralty? Marriage and a family? My son David will be a grown man. What will he think of his father then?” Did Kirk know about David at that time? I know he hadn’t met him, but was he aware of him? I thought Carol Marcus hid the knowledge of her pregnancy from Kirk. Am I misremembering? Or did I spot an actual oopsie? I kind of doubt it, as I usually miss something small or otherwise extenuating when I call out continuity goofs—but if I did, go me!

Final Assessment

Good. Cox’s Gary Seven sequel gives us more time with some under-visited characters in a way that gives us a greater view of the 20th-century space traveler’s line of work without sacrificing any of its mystery. It does read a little mechanically, but it’s more than the sum of its parts, and overall it presents a satisfying adventure starring characters I ordinarily wouldn’t go out of my way to see more of, but ultimately learned to appreciate a little more.

NEXT TIME: Voyager is hearing Echoes