Returning to Pages in a Dank Tunnel, Composing, 14/02/2018

Taking a break from philosophy today, because I came home last night after a long day at work. I want to make a legitimately short post today, to talk about some of my artistic work.

Some good news on the artistic front. I have an audio-play coming out in The Twelfth Doctor Adventures, an independently produced series in Britain. Quite a fun fan production that explores a trans companion character.

The series producer JR sent me her script for the first episode, which portrayed their companion, Toni Perkins.* It made a good guide for the character when I was writing my episode, “The Walls Are Alive.” At her best, Toni has a strength with two foundations – her empathy and knowledge of her own fragility.

Books are my home.

* JR tells me the name Antonia Perkins was not an intentional reference. I will never be capable of believing this.

As you can probably tell from the title, I took a crack at another Lovecraftian horror story of the underground spaces that defy human comprehension. I even had some input on the sound design, so JR knows how I want the creepiness of the story to flow from the setting.

Most importantly for the sound, we talked about different ways to make the normal spaces of human existence become disturbing, weird, shocking. The territory that you think is safe actually startles and destabilizes you as a listener. It’ll be a subtle aspect of the story that messes with listeners.

“The Walls Are Alive” is set in a country estate on a human colony world in the far future. Underneath the mansion is a network of tunnels curving through spaces that are typically impossible for humans to traverse.

It was a good use of the Digger aliens I developed for Under the Trees, Eaten a few years ago. I wasn't done exploring the potential of those creatures for fiction, so I was happy to get another opportunity to set a story with them.

The opportunity to contribute to the project came along at a time when I was feeling stressed in my life. My old teaching job was getting tough – I was beginning to suffer from what I realized was improper training and a workplace culture that encouraged instructors to let each other fail as small errors snowballed into serious problems.

Some of my favourite spaces in the Doctor Who fan community
are the queer ones. Not necessarily the gay ones, which have
their own unavoidable problems at the moment. But the queer.

So I was glad to get an offer – even if it was for free – to contribute to a project built in making explicit the values of liberation and queerness that so many fans saw in Capaldi-era Doctor Who.

I think it’s time I focussed more on smaller projects like this for my writing. The last couple of years, I’ve been trying to produce a film version of my play from four years ago, You Were My Friend. But I’ve frankly had a lot of trouble raising the money for it and getting a crew together before I had the money to make it.

Now that I’m working full-time as Anderson College’s Director of Education, I have more money and don’t have to hustle all the time. But I’m also no longer in a position to devote three or four weeks of my life to eight hours of shooting a film on no notice.

But I do have time to devote every week to writing another short-ish novel. Which the latest version of You Were My Friend can be. It’s the kind of work where my talents can work best. And developing connections in the Toronto art and publishing world over the next year can make for a respectable indie author career.

So I’ll be getting back to pages. It’s where I belong.

After the Flood, Doctor Who Fanfic, 13/10/2015

Today, I thought I’d describe what would have been a much better ending for Before the Flood. Because when my favourite TV show makes me mad, I at least want to flex my writing muscles pitching a different scenario.

• • •

I was pretty annoyed that the Fisher King only got a few lines of Generic Monster™ dialogue. It was a waste of Peter Serafinowicz, whose voice can work wonders. I see a very simple solution here. Cut the opening monologue about the Bootstrap Paradox and use that time for a four-minute long conversation between the Doctor and the Fisher King about the nature of the soul.

Fisher King

“I do nothing to their souls. I know nothing of the soul. My writing sets an energy pattern whirring around their brains. When they die, this energy reanimates them as holograms. They do my bidding. They call my people. They kill for me. I kill them to make them my machines.”

Another thing I think this story needed was more of the
angry Capaldi.

Doctor

“Do you really think that's all you're doing? Building a radio amplifier? You're killing people and literally ripping their minds out of them! Instead of leaving the dead in peace, you twist them into parts for your phone. These aren't holograms, they're ghosts! They're people! 

“And you’ve wiped away all the meaning they had in their lives. You're written it all over with your phone call! Did you see the fear on O’Donnell’s face as you shot her? Could you have seen everything in her life leading up to this one stupid moment when she took a wrong turn and ran into you?

“No. You just saw another signal amplifier. And now that's all she ever was.”

Imagine Peter Capaldi and Peter Serafinowicz saying this to each other. Then they return to the same dialogue that tricks the Fisher King into going outside and dying in the flood.

• • •

Yesterday’s post spent some time on the icky ending of the base-under-siege crew’s storyline. There was enough ambiguity in Bennett and O’Donnell’s behaviour toward each other than you could easily imagine that they were actually a couple. Maybe early in their relationship, but still involved.

Having watched the episode to completion, this is no
longer a cute moment. I'd prefer to recall it as tragic
instead of simply creepy, as in Whithouse's version.

Remember when she jumps up and down in front of Bennett with glee at being part of a real Doctor Who episode? “It's bigger on the inside!” Certainly the sort of thing a young woman could do now that he finally has a private moment with her awkward boyfriend in the middle of this crisis.

So it’s the last scene in the base, and the ghosts have been locked in the Faraday cage. The Doctor has just told us that UNIT will take the cage into deep space, and they’ll fade away as the Earth's electromagnetic field can no longer sustain them. There's nothing left to them but these echoes.

Clara and Bennett have their moment when they discuss how to move on from someone you loved. And as the crew drifts away from the cage, Bennett takes one last look back through the window. 

He steps closer until he sees O’Donnell's ghost moving closer to the door too. She puts her hand up to the window. He places his opposite. He looks into her empty eyes and sees her repetitive muttering shrink to a twitch. Her hand stays on the window, touching his through the glass.

• • •

Cut to the Doctor and Clara in the TARDIS. Instead of talking about the bootstrap paradox, they might say this.

Clara

“I hope Bennett does get over this, though.”

Doctor

“Is it about getting over it, Clara? Or learning to live with it.”

Clara

“What's the difference?”

Doctor

“Plenty. He's certainly not running away from it. He didn’t even ask if he could come.”

Clara

“Is that supposed to mean something?”

Doctor
“I don't think so. I’m not always talking about you, you know.”

Clara

“There is a difference, though. You do have to learn to live with it. Just fully understand that they’re gone. And there's nothing left of them.”

Doctor

“Can you be sure?”

Clara

“Can’t you?”

Doctor

“Well, I'll never stop looking forward to being surprised.”

• • •

Can this be my first audition sample?

Star Trek: To the Farthest Stars S1 E01 “The Starship Enterprise,” 14/03/2015

The first episode would start in an office at Starbase Rainbow, where Ensign Quentin Nichols, freshly graduated from Starfleet Academy, reports to receive his first starship duty assignment. He can barely contain his enthusiasm when he learns that he’s been assigned to the Enterprise under such an exemplary captain as Sidarth Bajwa. The Galaxy-class starship is currently docked at Rainbow, and its crew is on shore leave, except for a skeletal crew doing repairs and maintenance.

The Starship Enterprise

Nichols reports to Engineering on the Enterprise, finding the engine room empty. He wanders around the displays and the warp core, in awe of its size and beauty. But he’s getting just as confused as he is happy to be here, because no one is in engineering.

“Hey! You’re not supposed to be here,” Nichols hears from off screen, and he turns, embarrassed, to face Chief Engineer Katy Zhang. She was sitting quietly at a wall display in an isolated upper corner of Engineering, absorbed in her own work. He awkwardly manages to stammer out that he’s the new transporter technician, reporting for duty since his section superior is the Chief Engineer.

This is the exposition scene for Nichols’ character, as he talks with Zhang about hearing of the exploits of the Enterprise and Captain Bajwa, which had become legendary at Starfleet Academy. He names a bunch of ridiculous-sounding adventures: the Barzan wormhole gambit, the wreck of the Stargazer, the Yeti of Tau Ceti. Zhang also starts quizzing him about engineering problems as they walk around the warp core. She’s impressed with his answers, but not too impressed. Finally, Nichols asks what Zhang is doing working on the ship herself during a shore leave. 

“My shore leave is being able to relax on my ship and get my maintenance work done without being bothered by everyone else who works in Engineering. My shore leave is not having to give anybody orders for a week. Welcome to the crew, Ensign Nichols. I’m glad to have you here, especially someone dedicated enough to his job to report for duty in the middle of vacation. Now, consider yourself dismissed until shore leave is over at the end of the week. Go get drunk. That’s where the rest of the crew is anyway.”

After some research into Star Trek's aliens, I've
concluded that Rhaandarites are the embodiment
of pure Alpha Quadrant disco.

I’d never be able to resist making Starbase Rainbow’s bar a hipper version of the Mos Eisley cantina scene: blue and red neon lights criss-crossing the ceilings, a band of Rhaandarites playing electro-clash on touchpad synths and theremins. Nichols is wandering through a huge crowd of people in Starfleet uniforms and casual clothes, knowing that most of these people are his new shipmates on the Enterprise. Finally he finds the bar and orders a drink, when a sexy young player wanders into the shot wearing an ostentatious suit including a Han Solo vest.

“Well, hello there!” he says with a curl on his lip. “Paul Diamond, pilot of the Enterprise. And who might you be?” There follows the most awkward pick-up conversation anyone can have, to the point where Diamond is getting exasperated. Finally, Alex Solomon appears from the crowd and explains that his friend is just trying to get laid. Nichols is embarrassed again, even more so than last time. But Diamond laughs it off. He welcomes the young Ensign to the crew, then walks into the crowd to start dirty dancing with a very hairy Tellarite woman in a non-regulation TOS-style miniskirt. 

Solomon slaps Nichols on the back and congratulates him, ordering two greenish-blue shots. “Whenever a new crewman can keep Diamond’s hands off him, he deserves a drink.”

Cut to a closeup of Captain Bajwa’s hands as he pours three small glasses of red wine. He’s in his ready room with his first officer, Cmdr. Erib P’Trell, and Starfleet Admiral Cooper. Passing the drinks around, Bajwa jokes with the Admiral about consuming synthahol on duty, “If we pretend this is real liquor, we might all end up pretending to be drunk on the job.”

The recurring character of Admiral Cooper I imagine
as a smolderingly intense Jon Hamm.

Admiral Cooper smirks, but knows that this is just how Bajwa deals with stress. And things are getting stressful: Romulan ships have been observed in the Turkana sector for the first time in 15 years. They suspect the Romulan government is trying to access a mysterious superweapon in that star system. “Just like before,” says Bajwa.

The star system’s government is stable now, at last. But things are still fragile. Cooper is concerned that Romulan operatives have begun infiltrating positions of power on that planet. The Enterprise, however, is weeks away, and Cooper confirms that P’Trell is right when she says there are plenty of Federation ships closer to the system to investigate. 

Admiral Cooper instead wants the Enterprise to track down Lovanek, the Romulan covert operative who helped arrange the first uprising on Turkana IV, which began the civil war that brought the Federation back to the planet. Bajwa accepts the mission, but it cracks his confident, sarcastic attitude, and he asks for a moment alone with his First Officer.

Admiral Cooper leaves Bajwa and P’Trell to have an intense conversation. P’Trell knows how ruthless Lovanek was, and that even though he’s old, he’ll be difficult to find. And he would never cooperate with Federation representatives. Bajwa knows Lovanek is especially hostile to him, because he spent years trying to have the Romulan prosecuted for war crimes. 

Ming Na brings a sense of gravity and professionalism
that I think would suit Chief Engineer Zhang.

Sardonic laughter escapes him when he tries to remember which Turkana peace treaty contained the clause granting amnesty to that long list of belligerents. P’Trell notes that the Turkana civil war included nine peace treaties over ten years, and wonders why we still honour peace treaties that couldn’t stop a war for longer than six months.

“Because the Federation is a government of laws,” says Captain Bajwa. But he looks down through his window at the surface of the planet as he contemplates all the casualties of that war. He and P’Trell both know that when they eventually find Lovanek, the old Romulan secret agent will only be the second-most dangerous person around.

We cut to the planet’s surface, where Lt. Cmdr. Bondar is jogging on a bright afternoon through a forest path. As the trees grow more sparse, she runs up a rocky hill and finds Dr. T’Laina taking in the sunlight as it starts to set. 

“I thought I’d find you here,” says Bondar. “You told me before how much you loved this part of Sirtis Park.” Rocks rise out of the forest, describes the Enterprise’s Chief Medical Officer, like a piece of Vulcan rising out of a piece of Earth, yet it’s on a planet in the Dorn system. They discuss meditation, and the necessity of a path to inner peace. “I thought that path was logic for Vulcans.” 

“Everyone has their own paths, all of which have their own order and logic,” answers T’Laina. But to Bondar, the ship’s doctor either speaks barely comprehensible medical terminology or riddles. For T’Laina, nothing is a riddle if you understand it. 

“I’m sure as a Vulcan, you have such an advanced understanding.” Not as a Vulcan, she says, just herself. 

The actor playing Paul Diamond would
have to be just as sexy as Harrison
Ford in 1977. And he would leave the
Tellarite's quarters still wearing that
vest. He's back in uniform once he's
back on the bridge, though.

Their good-natured philosophical banter is interrupted by a call from the captain to return to the bridge as shore leave is officially ending. We cut to a montage sequence of the main cast getting ready to return to work. Zhang welcomes her crew back to engineering, Diamond kisses his new Tellarite friend goodbye at the door of her quarters on the station, Nichols replicates a large orange juice as he steps, bleary-eyed, from his shower, P’Trell fastens her sheathed ushaan-tor blade on her belt, and Solomon signs in to his station on the bridge as Captain Bajwa enters from his ready room and takes his seat in the big chair. 

A Steadicam shot tracks out from Bajwa to reveal the bridge crew at their stations: P’Trell in her chair next to the captain, Diamond at the helm, Solomon at the sensor station next to him, and Bondar at the ship’s internal logistics station behind the captain and commander. The music swells as the ship leaves the starbase. Bajwa smirks to the fourth wall as he gets to say, “To warp!” for the first time.

After a fade to show that time has progressed, the Enterprise gets a distress call from a small Federation freighter that’s experiencing engine trouble, and the resulting systems failure has knocked out quite a few things, including the transporters. They’ve parked in orbit of an uninhabited planet for maintenance, but they could use some help with repairs. The Enterprise can be there within a few hours, so Zhang assigns Solomon and the new recruit Nichols to prepare the repair team.

In engineering, the boys get their toolboxes ready and joke about the previous night. Nichols is still feeling tired, so Solomon offers an old Vulcan hangover cure that he knows. Nichols is puzzled, because he didn’t think Vulcans drank catastrophically. “I grew up in Khohav,” says Solomon. “The Vulcans there learned a few things from us.”

It takes a moment for Nichols to realize that Solomon was raised on a world-ship the size of a small moon. “I’ve never met anyone from there before.” And the science officer waves hello.

On the bridge, another call comes from Captain Stevens on the freighter: their engine troubles are getting worse, and their orbit may start to decay. Bajwa orders P’Trell to lead the away team, then calls Dr. T’Laina in sickbay to prepare for possible injured.

When they reach the freighter, little more than a grey box with some windows and a warp drive, there are sparks coming from its nacelles. The repair team beams down: P’Trell, Solomon, Nichols, and two other yellow-shirts. The four engineers get to work, and P’Trell gets a briefing from Captain Stevens, who is a little too adamant that no one from the Enterprise see their cargo. P’Trell keeps an eye on him.

We can tell, by the time this sequence starts, that
something is going to explode.

Naturally, the freighter’s engine goes haywire before the repair team can get much started. Solomon hauls an extra out of range of a small explosion and the ship’s orbit starts to decay. The repair team and the skeletal freighter crew run at the ship’s systems in a frenzy of technobabble making emergency repairs to stabilize it, but it looks as though the engine is screwed.

Captain Stevens has disappeared, however, and P’Trell suspects he’s disappeared to the cargo bay. She finds him there, planting some small charges strategically on the cargo boxes. When Stevens leaves the room, P’Trell sneaks in, deactivates one of the bombs, and pops open a box. We only see her enraged face as she sees what Stevens’ ship is carrying. As she reaches into the box, we cut away.

The freighter’s engine room is going critical. Solomon leads his team and the freighter’s engineering crew outside. The ship starts falling into the atmosphere. Bajwa, Bondar, and Diamond freak as they realize that interference from the heat of the atmosphere will prevent them from beaming away the freighter crew.

Nichols calls the bridge directly, saying that if the Enterprise can get close enough to get a tractor beam lock on the ship, he can use the freighter’s own transporters to beam everyone to sickbay. “That sounds absolutely insane and dangerous, Ensign!” says Captain Bajwa, “Mr. Diamond, take us in.” The captain and the helmsman are both much too enthusiastic about this.

Bondar reports that the stress of flying shield-less into the atmosphere after the freighter will strain the hull and cause dangerous breaches if they’re longer than three minutes. “I hope you heard that, Ensign,” says the Captain. He did, and is furiously plugging wires back into boxes with Solomon in the freighter’s transporter room. After a few more reports of danger from Engineering so Zhang can get some lines in the sequence, they get a tractor lock, beam the away team and the freighter’s crew into sickbay, and haul the Enterprise back into space with minimal damage and no one lost. Dr. T’Laina confirms that everyone is aboard. The freighter breaks into pieces in an awesome effects shot.

Captain Bajwa is the type of person who would want to
tell Stevens, "You play with fire, you get burned . . .
bitch!" but wouldn't because Starfleet decorum is
unfortunately important.

As the episode wraps up, Captain Stevens is stressed and frustrated in the observation lounge, ranting to Captain Bajwa that the Federation government owes him for his lost vessel and cargo. Bajwa tries to calm him down, telling him that they’re returning to Starbase Rainbow to see about all the legal matters regarding the incident. But the freighter captain will not listen.

The door beeps, interrupting them. “Ah,” smirks Captain Bajwa. “That would be my First Officer. You met her already. She has at least one piece of cargo that she managed to get from your ship. Perhaps something productive will come of it.”

P’Trell enters carrying a bulky metal object, and slams it on the conference table. It looks to us like a microwave, but as soon as Stevens sees it, his face blanches. 

“Your ship’s cargo manifest said nothing about replicators,” the Andorian says. “I’m sure you must know that they’re a controlled commodity.”

“An extremely controlled commodity,” says Captain Bajwa. “The authorities at the starbase will have a lot to say to you.”

The last major scene takes place in a transporter room, as Ensign Nichols is looking busy at the console. Captain Bajwa enters, and Nichols tenses up into an erect stance.

“At ease, Ensign. You know I’m not that formal. You did an excellent job on the mission today, and I wanted to let you know that I’ve mentioned it in my report to Starfleet Command.” Nichols thanks him, and is a little embarrassed. Bajwa continues. “Getting a commendation on your first day in service is quite something, you know. It’s almost like some awful story about adventures and derring-do on a starship. But I had a look at your Academy records, and it showed me that I shouldn’t expect much less from you.”

Donald Glover is a great casting idea for Quentin
Nichols. If I can drag him away from his rap career
for 13 episodes.

Lt. Cmdr. Zhang is on the bridge doing some systems work, and Captain Bajwa wants the young ensign to join her. “You’re a fine addition to my crew, Quentin. Follow me.”

So Captain Bajwa leads Nichols onto the bridge, where he takes a seat with the Chief Engineer at a rear station. The Captain is sitting in his chair, P’Trell the First Officer next to him, chatting with Chief Medical Officer T’Laina as she stands nearby. Solomon and Diamond sit at the front consoles, and Bondar is behind them at the weapons desk. 

“Mr. Diamond, to warp,” says Captain Bajwa. “We have a lot to do.”

• • •

The first episode of Star Trek: TFS is clearly a Mary Sue plot, the point of which is to demonstrate that there’s nothing wrong with Mary Sue plots. Quentin Nichols in this episode is an audience point of view character, which I think an audience would need to be introduced to a new crew of the Enterprise whose existence is a gleaming eyesore on the face of canon, and whose existence would appear (to the least charitable) to overwrite the beloved Enterprise crew of Captain Picard et al. 

But the stories of TNG didn’t go away. They’re still right there on Netflix, our DVD shelves, and syndicated cable TV reruns. TFS is simply a set of new, different Star Trek stories. There can always be new Star Trek stories, new paths to explore the ideas that 50 years of accumulated Star Trek has given us, new visions of what Star Trek can be. We all have this power.

If I Could Journey to the Farthest Stars, Jamming, 06/03/2015

You could do so much with a CGI Enterprise.

Regularly reading and engaging with the community of commenters around the Star Trek blog Vaka Rangi got me thinking about some alternative ideas about the show. One of the unfortunate constraints of Star Trek as an intellectual property is that it has a strictly defined canon. 

Unlike Doctor Who, for example, which has just plain given up on the idea of keeping every story internally consistent with continuity points introduced in previous works, Star Trek is governed by this impulse. Even J. J. Abrams’ new continuity of the TOS era in his films had to give an in-canon explanation for it, the alternate timeline that began with Spock’s time travel. 

But there’s no need to stick when canon when you reimagine something on a blog, a different vision of the Starship Enterprise that exists solely for the sake of imagining new journeys in your mind, and perhaps in the imaginations of your readers and friends. So here is my imagined crew of the Starship Enterprise, playing with established character ideas from existing Star Trek, or conceiving new directions altogether. 

Vincent Ebrahim is a veteran British
TV actor who can do drama and
comedy easily, just as the role of
Captain Bajwa would require.

Captain Sidarth Bajwa

The captain is a wiry Indian man in late middle age. Star Trek has never really set about making the captain a comedic figure by default, and I’d like to try that with Bajwa. His strength is as a diplomat, and his diplomacy lies in being able to defuse situations with self-deprecating humour. He’s the affable captain who approaches the daily business of running a starship casually. You know things are getting serious when even Captain Bajwa gets serious. 

His spiritual beliefs take centre stage in some stories, particularly his philosophical take on them. He has a strong element of Hindu and Buddhist attitude in his character, but is basically agnostic in his religious belief. There’s always a temptation to make Indian characters in Western-written stories extra spiritual, monk-like. I want to avoid that, but also subvert it, turn the expectation into a joke. For example, Bajwa is a vegetarian, even though replicators can create meat dishes without ever having killed an animal. But it’s because he grew up in a largely vegetarian household and just doesn’t like the taste of most meat. 

Commander Erib P’Trell, First Officer 

One virtue of the much-maligned Enterprise was developing more of the Andorian people, but this Star Trek would be the first with an Andorian major character as a Starfleet officer, and a female one too. Leader of most of the away missions, she’d be primarily a headstrong, emotionally intense officer, with quick reflexes in dangerous situations. She'd be our route to explore how Andorian culture changed after spending centuries as a central power of the Federation, how a proud cultural history of warriors adapted to a lifestyle of relative peace.

Tell me Star Trek fans wouldn't
enjoy a female Andorian First Officer
who had a biweekly jujitsu fight.

P’Trell would also do most of the fistfights on the show, and occasionally whip out her traditional uushan-tor blade at especially climactic moments of ass-kicking.

Lt. Cmdr. Natalie Bondar, Chief of Security. 

Ukrainian, perhaps with a slight accent, named after Roberta Bondar, Canada’s first female astronaut. Lt. Bondar would be my attempt to do the basic concept behind Tasha Yar right. She grew up on a human colony planet that had gone neglected by the Federation for a century. She lived a harsh childhood mostly on the streets where criminal gangs were the most powerful political force.

After some interplanetary incident (Romulan incursion, terrorist plots, piracy; I’m not sure yet) brings the Federation in to restore law and order, Bondar leaves her planet at the first opportunity. She works for a few years in the comparative paradise of Earth, and joins Starfleet as the path of greatest upward mobility in the Federation. 

Perhaps the first season would have a story arc that slowly revealed the truth about Bondar’s origins. Maybe a villain or two — a Romulan secret agent and his equally ruthless human counterpart — return as the Enterprise stumbles on a covert operation that had its beginnings in the gang violence of her homeworld. The storyline would be central to developing Bondar’s character, as well as the captain’s. 

The teenaged Bondar would have been quite bitter toward the Federation for their borderline imperialist behaviour in occupying her planet after ignoring it for generations. But an officer with one of the Federation starships befriended her, teaching her all the potential for progress and peace that a life journeying through the stars can hold. An affable young man in his 30s named Lt. Sidarth Bajwa.

If Star Trek: The Farthest Stars was greenlit for 13
episodes on Netflix in 2016, I'd do whatever I could to
get Tatiana Maslany to play Natalie Bondar.

Bondar also has the largest personal weapon collection on the Enterprise, proudly displaying it on her wall. I imagine it quite shocking Ensign Nichols the first time he sees it.

Lt. Cmdr. Katy Zhang, Chief Engineer

Zhang would carry on the Star Trek tradition of Chief Engineers who love the ship like a spouse, though she wouldn’t go quite as far as Geordi LaForge did in “Booby Trap,” and actually make out with the Enterprise. She’s the problem-solver, the most analytic member of the crew. Ironically, given the prominence of a Vulcan on the cast, but this is how I’d like to play with audience expectations on my Star Trek.

On an Enterprise where Captain Bajwa is an affable eccentric, Commander P’Trell is the action hero, Security Chief Bondar is the ex-gangster, and the one Vulcan in the regular cast is more mystical than straightforwardly logical, Chief Engineer Zhang is the most level-headed member of the crew. 

Given the people who surround her, I’d say she’d end up being the most sardonic and sarcastic member of the entire crew. This would be especially appropriate since she’s most often put in charge of the youngest, less mature, more impetuous, less experienced members of the main cast, Solomon, Diamond, and Nichols. This would also make her the one woman put in charge of wrangling a bunch of impulsive young men. No wonder she feels more comfortable puttering around the engine room.

An actress with the gravity and nuance
of Angela Bassett would be perfect
for a role like Dr. T'Laina, who would
restore some of the mysticism to
Star Trek's depiction of Vulcans.

Dr. T’Laina, Chief Medical Officer 

A Vulcan doctor whose family has produced Starfleet officers since the Federation first came into being. As a doctor on a starship travelling to dangerous situations, she combines the terse attitude and utilitarian ethics of a stereotypical Vulcan with the strength of duty that her family’s Starfleet history has planted in her. 

T’Laina also approaches her job on the Enterprise as a healer, and so combines her better-known Vulcan characteristics with the more mystical approach to the world that Spock’s journeys have always incorporated. She’s also the oldest cast member, played by an actress in her 50s, and the oldest character of the regular cast, approaching 200. Her experience and compassion combines with her sense of logic and philosophical education to make her the closest Star Trek has had to a genuine shaman since Guinan.

Lt. Alexander Solomon, Science Officer

He was born on Khohav ben Zion, a world-ship that’s home to 500,000 Jews, Yazidi, and a few Vulcans, which travels around central Federation space. His scientific studies and knowledge are the product of his religion, a development of Jewish mysticism which considers mathematics to be the fundamental language of nature and God. 

His home society has developed close links with the Vulcan Science Academy because of natural affinities between its philosophy of mathematics and their concept of Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations. It only makes sense, since IDIC was developed as a riff on ideas of Rambam anyway, and the “Live long and prosper” hand sign is a rabbinical gesture representing one of the Hebrew names of God.

I think it would be quite cool if Solomon sometimes wore
an IDIC medal, showing the philosophical connections of
Vulcan and Judaism.

Solomon himself is a young man, though. He is eager to learn, which is why he and T’Laina have such a close friendship, as she acts as his philosophical and scientific mentor. But Solomon is also eager to practice, which is why he’s frequently on away missions with P’Trell and Bondar facing various levels of exciting danger.

One episode would feature Solomon and Nichols stuck in some perilous situation, perhaps the wreck of a small starship on a planet where they’re surrounded by dangerous predator animals and threatened by the dangerous ion storm that brought the ship down. Solomon would end up in the senior role, a position he isn’t accustomed to or all that comfortable with.

A storyline about Solomon and T’Laina’s friendship would feature allusions to the philosophical ideas of Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas, a new twist on the better known utilitarian ideas of Vulcan ethics. 

His nickname for Nichols is “Q.” This will probably not be significant at all.

Paul Diamond would fulfill all the potential for smart
comedy that Captain Jack lost as Torchwood grew
increasingly angsty.

Lt. Paul Diamond, Helm

There’s always one character on most Star Trek shows who’s a bit of a ladies’ man. It started with Kirk’s green ladies of the week, continued through Riker’s submissive promiscuity, and Tom Paris’ immature charm. Well, Paul Diamond goes about as far into omnisexuality as we’ll probably be at our most progressive edge by the 2300s. 

I don’t yet have much of an idea of what Diamond would be as a character aside from everything Jack Harkness could have been if he’d stayed the loveable cad that Steven Moffat wrote. But that’s a good place to start at the first episode.

En. Quentin Nichols, Transporter Tech and New Guy. 

A recent graduate of Starfleet Academy, the show would begin with Quentin’s transfer to the Enterprise, the newest addition to an already-established crew. His early storylines would have him form friendships with the rest of the cast, starting with Zhang and Solomon, as he’d have the most professional contact with them. It wouldn’t take long for him to establish himself as a valued member of the crew, though his storylines would also demonstrate how green he is.

The Problem of Wesley hangs over a character like this, but the key to making him a character that viewers would actually like is making him humble. He’s no boy genius, instead an earnest young man happy to be serving on the Enterprise for his first major assignment. He knows his way around a transporter, is learning wider ship’s engineering, and finds himself at the centre of ship-side events when half the cast is on an away mission.

Assignment: Earth IX Story Generator, Jamming 16/11/2013

The fourth season finale of Assignment: Earth opens with an action sequence of course, as Gary Seven flees through the twisting corridors of the Untied Nations. This is a scene of pure chaos, the perfect hook for the beginning of an engrossing episode. We cut wildly back and forth to Gary trying to find Roberta and Isis in the massive building, then to Isis trying to track down Gary and Roberta, and Roberta generally just trying to get the hell out. This is all while surrounded by thousands of people running wildly through an enormous confusing building doing basically the same thing.

Of course it’s Roberta who finds in all that chaos, one actually calm person, the immaculately dressed Louis Ten. After an initial comic scream and a slapstick attempt to put him in a headlock (Did I mention that Roberta’s occasional tries at something approaching martial arts generally result in physical comedy? I didn’t cast Barbara Feldon for nothing.), she flees from him elsewhere in the building. She manages to run out of the building to find that most of Manhattan is under the shadow of the giant Aegis ship. But the first thing she sees is Gary’s old Foto Hut van from his own sabbatical after season three. She looks back to the UN and starts to put the pieces together.

Francis Eight meets with the other leaders of his conspiracy, all Aegis operatives and their familiars, some of the latter in human form and some animal. This is a parade of ethnicities, genders, and species (on the part of the familiars at least), so the extent of Francis’ cabal is clear. There are operatives from all over the Earth. But the limits of their reach is clear when one conspirator asks in a Nigerian accent, “But have any of them responded to our demands?”

“They’ll have to respond after what we’ve done today!” Francis barks. “They’ll realize that this is the only way to succeed in their plan of controlling humanity’s morals!” At this point, it’s clear to the audience that the Aegis have nothing to do with the plan to invade and conquer Earth militarily. “And we certainly won’t have to deal with interference from Gary Seven much longer.”* Morrigan, in a quick cut, transforms into a raven, flying through the corridors after him.**

* Pure cheese, I know.

** We would never actually have the money to show anything like a morphing sequence on the show, and with the technology of 1974, it would be absolutely dreadful to watch anyway. Whenever a familiar changes, we just cut across the 180º from one form to another.

Even when running a Foto Hut van, Louis Ten is
remarkably stylish.

Isis finds Louis when he’s in a service elevator on his way to the top floors to find Francis and his gang, dropping in on it as a cat through a vent in its ceiling. Despite his protests against being “constantly manhandled by Seven’s women!” Isis has no problem getting him in a chokehold against the elevator’s wall. She warns Louis that if he deviates from the plan, she’ll kill him extremely painfully.

In the Secretary-General’s office, Louis meets with Francis Eight. They talk about Gary Seven, who hasn’t been seen since the chaos at the start of the episode. They talk about why Gary didn’t kill him, and Louis evades the question, shifting the subject to talk about the Aegis, and what their reaction will be. Francis has sent them a detailed and comprehensive argument for the inadequacy of their own plans for moral influence of humanity, that they are only breeding competitors and rivals instead of people subject to their power. Louis and Francis spend several minutes in conversation about the morality of empire and the worth of peoples and planets. Francis speaks of these in entirely material terms. Louis is cagey. While they speak, all the other conspirators and familiars except Morrigan file into the room to intimidate him. Then Louis addresses them, “I’m so happy to see us all here together.” 

And as Francis fumes with anger, they’re transported to another Aegis ship overlooking the planet. We see Roberta and Gary in the Foto Hut van with a CB radio, having sent a signal to Aegis authority. The giant ship has disappeared from the skies of New York. “They have you now, Francis,” says Louis, laughing.

Isis the cat, meanwhile, has found Morrigan the raven on the roof of the United Nations, and they transform into humans. Isis confronts Morrigan with the evidence she’s been searching for all season, particularly in very tense scenes of confrontation between them, that Morrigan was the one who killed Louis’ familiar Osiris. Because Morrigan knew that Osiris would never go along with the plan. 

As they’re about to fight, we cut to Gary and Roberta in the van where Gary is explaining that Osiris had discovered Francis’ conspiracy to turn Aegis into a proper imperial power, and Morrigan had killed him to silence him. Louis was understandably freaked, and ran away, having been declared a fugitive and believing himself to be a suspect in Osiris’ death. 

“But how do you kill a familiar?” Roberta asks. Gary answers, “With great difficulty.” And another firestorm erupts from the roof of the UN. 

Patrick Troughton had a wonderful face for gurning and
screaming in terror.

And up on the ship, an Aegis finally appears to the viewers of Assignment: Earth, an enormous feathered quadruped with sharp mandibles ringing its mouth and antennae sprouting from all over its body. Francis sputters in front of his masters, who he has betrayed. He can tell that they didn’t accept his arguments, and he demands to know why. BECAUSE YOU ACT WITH GREED, WITH PERSONAL DESIRE, FROM THE INTERESTS OF YOUR OWN SELF. WE ARE NO SELF. WE DO NOT THINK WITH SUCH PETTINESS AS TO DESIRE POSSESSION. So the full gurning powers of Patrick Troughton are turned up to the highest intensity as a powerful bright light fills the screen, washing away the closeup on his face. The only sound we can hear is Louis Ten laughing.

We next see him later, knocking on the window of the Foto Hut van with Gary and Roberta still inside. He’s carrying a sleeping cat, and says she’ll need to rest for a few days, but will be fine soon. As for Morrigan, “I think our kitten had a lovely meal of squaw today.”

To Roberta’s question of what happened to him, Louis explains what happened when he fled Aegis. He started searching for other operatives, and found many of them involved in the conspiracy. When he eventually found Gary, he thought he was part of it too, but when Louis and Gary finally were able to talk in the industrial park’s field, Louis realized that Gary had absorbed some much more noble human values. Louis went undercover, Gary having helped fake his death. When Roberta asks him what he’ll do now, Louis says that he’d like to start his business with a photograph developing van again. But with almost all the Aegis operatives compromised by Francis’ imperialist conspiracy, there are only a few of them left on Earth. And none of them have much of a heart for conspiracies anymore. The Aegis plan may really have been destroyed, or at least set back considerably.

Assignment: Earth VIII Story Generator, Jamming 09/11/2013

If the four seasons so far of Assignment: Earth can be said to have an overall narrative, it’s Gary Seven’s growing skepticism that the plan that the aliens who raised and trained him, the Aegis, have for Earth is the best plan for its people. I’ve described the Aegis as operating something like a simplified Old Hegelian with regard to Earth’s history. They see the human race as an insignificant primitive people who nonetheless have potential, if they can be guided correctly to the right path of development. Their manipulation of human history has a moral justification over millennia, the Aegis are tweaking different events in human history to improve the likelihood that humanity will develop what they consider the highest morality. Precisely in what that consists, we’re never entirely sure.

Even Gary, who was raised among them, isn’t entirely sure what all the principles of the Aegis’ highest morality are. Isis always finds it difficult to explain, often referring to the value of harmony and reciprocation. Selena Three, Nichelle Nichols’ periodic guest character throughout season three, best articulates the moral perspective of the Aegis. 

The fourth season saw Gary Seven grow in his
skepticism, even as he resolutely failed to develop his
fashion sense.

She’s mostly appeared this season in plots not directly connected to the shenanigans of Francis Eight at the United Nations. She’s often involved in promoting or promulgating some new development in computer technology or a discovery in environmental science. Rather, she and Gary help protect them from threats and hostile actors, because this is an action-adventure show and we need guns and fistfights. As best as Selena can explain, Aegis morality revolves around a kind of total recycling, a society where every waste product is used for the construction of everything else. It’s a plural holism, valuing individual experimentations (which is why Gary hasn’t had his own work shut down over the last two seasons), but understanding that all parts of a smoothly running system are ultimately replaceable, providing their function to constitute the whole remains in place. The needs of the whole are of an entirely different category than the needs of individuals.

Of course, the Aegis’ progress hasn’t always been entirely successful. Many of the individualist values that developed in the West are entirely against Aegis moral principles. The same goes for the centralized dictatorships of the other major world powers over the years in Asia, which have holist elements, but are too draconian and easily corruptible. Aegis interference in human development is millennia old, and will continue for millennia more.

But the core idea is that the Aegis empire is a moral one; their desire is to build a network of intelligent races across the galaxy that share values and principles. Gary had come to dislike this idea because, however good he may think the moral principles are, he no longer thinks Aegis has the right to manipulate the history of worlds to encourage them developing those moral principles. He believes in autonomy of the development of worlds. The conflict with Francis Eight works along entirely different lines.

Because Francis is tired of the slow path to success in the Aegis plan, and he doesn’t think the idea of an empire of morality alone achieves all that can be achieved. Francis has seen how lofty and noble the moral goals of the Aegis are, and knows this is incompatible with the underhanded methods of secret agents and hidden cultural manipulation they use to achieve them. Francis can’t abide by the hypocrisy anymore, and he’s convinced his familiar Morrigan that their hypocrisy is likewise intolerable.

At least this is what he says to Gary Seven when they finally confront each other in his office at the United Nations. Francis and Morrigan have failed to manipulate Gary and Roberta into ending their friendship, and they’ve traced the interference to Francis. When Gary confronts him, Francis explains all this, and ends his speech with the rhetorical flourish that marks him clearly as the villain of the season. Imagine Patrick Troughton and Leonard Nimoy having this conversation:

Francis Eight would be every inch the upstanding imperial
gentleman of the modern era.

Francis Eight (Patrick Troughton): “I couldn’t abide the hypocrisy anymore, Gary. I simply could not! I have lived such a long life for the Aegis, and all this time I’ve been their slave. But I was happy in this slavery. My life was comfortable, my goals assured and guaranteed. You know how good it feels to devote yourself wholeheartedly to a cause that’s bigger than you are, almost infinitely bigger. It was like we were working for gods. According to most religions, I suppose we technically are working for gods. Your heart must be so empty living as an apostate.”

Gary Seven (Leonard Nimoy): “It was a happy life. But I still have a happy life. There are other ways to be happy.”

Francis: “Oh, I’m sure there are. And I’ll find my own way to be happy again soon. You see, I couldn’t stand the hypocrisy of the Aegis going to so much effort for such a modest goal as creating a shared morality, as if they wanted every intelligent life form in the universe to be their echo. As if that were enough.”

Gary: “Enough? What do you mean by enough?”

Francis: “Our masters want a moral empire. But we would have no place in that moral empire. We’re the soldiers, the ones to build the empire. But once the empire is established, our work would be done. We’d be superfluous. Useless. What I do, I do not for us, but for our descendants, those who our masters will discard when the work is done. When the Aegis learn the rules of my empire, we’ll never be rejected. Operatives will always be necessary.”

Gary: “An operative has his task, and his work is done when his task is done. That’s what we always learned.”

Francis: “True empire is a never-ending task, Gary. The Aegis will only truly profit and prosper when they control Earth. An Earth on the same moral level as the Aegis will be their equal. They’re building an empire just to give it away. The purpose of an empire is to keep it.”

As the full weight of what Francis has just said dawns on Gary, the sky darkens overhead and the penultimate episode of Assignment: Earth’s fourth season comes to an end. A massive Aegis ship, black, round, covered with angular protrusions and lights of a thousand colours, descends over New York City as Francis Eight laughs maniacally as his dream of a genuine interstellar empire comes to fruition.

The Ethics of It All, Assignment: Earth VII Story Generator, Jamming 02/11/2013

Leonard Nimoy’s Gary Seven is the star of the television show Assignment: Earth. His character supplies the central arc of the show, the man whose messy involvements with human relationships lead him to rebel against the easy answers and simple plans of his masters. Diana Muldaur’s Isis is his familiar, embodying the tension of the mission itself with the sympathetic protagonist Gary. But Barbara Feldon’s Roberta Lincoln is the heart of the show in a literal sense. 

Roberta is the conscience of Assignment: Earth. Gary Seven began to doubt the authority and knowledge of the Aegis when he befriended Roberta. Indeed, it begins when Gary first makes friends among humans, lets them into an intimate circle. Even in the backdoor pilot Gene Roddenberry first produced at the end of the second season of his predecessor program Star Trek, Gary only becomes sympathetic, or at least understandable, when he makes friends with Roberta and the crew of the Enterprise. Although the Enterprise would disappear into the depths of obscurity in television history, Roberta Lincoln would become the ethical centre of one of the most revolutionary television shows in American science-fiction. 

It's a principle inspired by an idea of David Hume.
Knowledge of justice, right, and other moral and
political concepts of their sort imply no motivation
to apply them to anyone but yourself. Reason can't
drive you to care for others. Only empathy can.

If I could return to the real world for a moment, this conception of the power of friendship is at the centre of my own moral philosophy. Justice, right, and good are abstract concepts. In the discipline of philosophy, we treat these as powerful concepts, and they underlie all political activity. Yet they don’t have worldly power; these concepts alone can’t motivate people to action. Hell, even among philosophers, we’re less often driven to action in the name of these concepts as we’re driven to arguments over their nature and content. What motivates people to political action is when they see and empathize with an injustice, a wrong, or a harm, that befalls some actual person. The motive of authentic politics (not just jockeying among state and corporate institutions for personal power) is this face-to-face connection.* That empathetic connection is the generation of friendship.

* Anyone with a little background can see the influence Emmanuel Levinas has had on me as a political, moral, and ethical thinker.

Roberta was Gary’s first friend, the first time in many, many years that an Aegis operative has truly made a friend on Earth. The empathy and sympathy for the people of Earth that uniquely characterizes Gary among all the operatives began with Roberta. That was the importance of the arc involving the Robinson family in season three. Roberta’s friendship had introduced Gary, for a start, to the injustices suffered by women in the middle class. His friendship with the Robinson family introduced Gary to the injustices and harm done by racism institutionalized in government, culture, and economics. The involvement of Isis in the lives of the Robinson family similarly started friendships that opened her to the everyday economic injustice of racism and gang crime. Some of the season three episodes focussed on the Robinson family would be action-comedies with Isis in the comedic role, stuck getting to know the Robinson family matriarch, Johnny’s mother Joelle, while Gary and Roberta did a lot of the action television work. It would be a change of pace, as the role of Roberta in seasons one and two would often be comic relief while Gary and Isis took care of the action work. Joelle would periodically appear around season four, usually approaching Isis first. 

Central to Assignment: Earth, and to my own conception of effective politics, is the power of friendship to enact social change. Simply getting to know and care for individuals who are different than you, who face different problems in their lives than you, opens you to political action. The abstract concepts of more usual moral and political philosophy are tools in our arsenals once our friendships have motivated us to political action. 

That’s why the fourth season finale of Assignment: Earth begins when Francis Eight and Morrigan confront Roberta Lincoln with what she did. They understand the power of what friendship can do, and contrary to suspicions sown throughout the season, they are still loyal to the Aegis, and will do whatever they think necessary to safeguard their plan for humanity’s development. In fact, they are a little too loyal, because their plan threatens to tear the television show Assignment: Earth apart. Their goal is to destroy the friendship between Roberta and Gary Seven, severing his sympathetic link with humanity, and allowing him to be the brutally impartial agent that is required. They risk going farther into immorality than any operative has before.

So We Finally Have a Villain, Assignment: Earth VI Story Generator, Jamming, 26/10/2013

I wanted Patrick Troughton to perfect a way to mug the
camera in a way that would unnerve an audience.

Only Patrick Troughton could play Francis Eight. 

Of course, Francis Eight wouldn’t be anything like the Doctor. Watching The Enemy of the World convinced me with certainty of Troughton’s incredible versatility. What Francis Eight as a character relies on is a lack of trustworthiness, a characterization that makes you suspicious of him all the time. I suppose the character has a smarm more appropriate to Salamander, the villainous dictator Troughton also plays in The Enemy of the World. 

But the character would work differently than Salamander as well. After all, I wouldn’t want to throw soft pitches to Patrick Troughton, especially after paying him enough money to get him filming in New York television studios for six episodes this season. Francis has to combine a sense of considerable wisdom and experience with that uncertainty of his moral character. He’s slyly charming, like a rogue from a spy show who’s retired to become a snide Control figure, but who occasionally lets slip a Machiavellian ruthlessness. There should also be a sense that he’s personally much older than his appearance. He was a warrior who’s become a sage, but who may be a closet gangster. 

Jacqueline Hill was capable of still, steely performances
that would perfectly suit Morrigan, another Aegis familiar
named after a god of death, this time Celtic.

Naturally, his familiar is a bird, a raven named Morrigan who appears with him at various surreptitious points in the city, delivering him strange signs or mysterious messages. When in human form, Miss Morrigan is a prim Englishwoman dressed entirely in black, and played by Jacqueline Hill, who has a similar sly characterization. She’s meant to echo an even more extremely secretive and haughty version of Isis as she was in the first season. This is where the progress of the main cast in growing more human and individual will become clear. Isis sees in Morrigan a direction she might have gone if Gary had been a different sort of person, less impulsive and moral on an individual level, which would have made him less likely to form emotional bonds like with the Robinson family in season three. Beyond that, it would be joyous to watch Jacqueline Hill slowly develop an appetite for scenery over her and Troughton’s six appearances in season four. 

One might wonder how much influence Doctor Who could have on American adventure television at this time. Until the late 1970s, after all, no episodes of Doctor Who were broadcast outside Britain beyond a few strange transmissions that would see film prints end up in Hong Kong and Nigeria. The show could never have found an audience in the United States. 

However, that didn’t stop me, the imaginary time-displaced Emmy-nominated (but never winning!) showrunner Adam Riggio from going on vacation to London in the summer between seasons two and three in summer 1972. While there, I caught a strange program Saturday evening that transfixed me with its weirdness. I asked around at the BBC, and while none of the current stars would be available anytime soon, I was given a brief history of the show. So I had them make some old prints and mail them for my review. I spotted Hill from a brilliant performance in a story they sent me called The Crusade, and from the moment I finished watching the print they made of The Power of the Daleks, I had to have Troughton. I left the film prints in a storage space in the studio, and they should still be kicking around somewhere. 

So what precisely is Francis Eight doing in New York? He and Morrigan are part of the new British delegation to the United Nations, giving Francis direct access to the goings-on of the Security Council and privy to much of the gossip floating around the General Assembly. He’s perfectly positioned to spy on and nudge the behaviour of various delegations and governments through a carefully placed word here, an overheard conversation there, and the occasional raven surreptitiously using the photocopier. Gary, Roberta, and Isis have been tasked by Aegis authority to see that Francis is using the right nudges, only those the bosses want him to use.

Assignment Earth V: Story Generator, Jamming, 19/10/2013

I’ve actually left my weekend readers hanging longer than the imagined audience for my impossible fourth season premiere of Assignment: Earth. You had to wait a week to find out how the confrontation of Gary Seven and Louis Ten was going to end. The imaginary people watching it on TV only had to wait until the end of the commercial break. 

So of course Gary shows up at the motel first. After Roberta Lincoln sends the distress signal, we see where Gary has been all this time, in a Foto Hut van in New Jersey.* He’s grown a beard, and looks more like a dropout hippie than ever before. But when he detects the signal, a kind of ESP, he reverts to his old, hyper-logical, determined self. There’s one more scene where Isis, believing she could die at any moment, is about to tell Roberta a horrible secret about her role in the Aegis when she loses consciousness. Gary appears and mystically heals her, but she won’t wake up until the end of the episode because that would ruin the climax.

Ideally, I would have disguised whether Nimoy would even
return to the series for the fourth season. His beard would
make people suspect that he had taken another role, because
it's a modification of his appearance. I would even have
made up a fake show, Torchwood-style, shot by the same
studio and production company, to explain why Nimoy
would be near the Assignment: Earth set so frequently.

*Yes, in case you’re wondering, I essentially turned Gary Seven during his wilderness year into Leo from That 70s Show. And be fair, as wonderful as Tommy Chong was in that part, wouldn’t it have been hilariously weird to have seen Leonard Nimoy in that role too? Basically, I think any role involving an eccentric weirdo on television from 1970 to 2005 would have been amazing if it had been played by Leonard Nimoy.

Walking around outside the motel, Roberta, in a motormouth style Barbara Feldon will have perfected over the last three years of playing her, rapidly infodumps as much as possible on Gary. After she runs out of breath, he tells her that everything was stated much more clearly in Isis’ psychic message, but he appreciates her concern. He also reveals that he’s known Louis Ten for a long time. When Louis arrives, the two men talk calmly, like old friends, then walk into the fields of the abandoned industrial district. 

Naturally, we don’t see the fight. Seeing the fight would ruin it. Instead, the camera follows Roberta in the motel room looking after a recovering Isis, then being interrupted by the thunder and lightning of a hurricane appearing outside the motel, which quickly changes to hideously unnatural colours. Green, red, blue, and purple lights. Thunder that incorporates horrifying howls that are beyond the capacity of any life form on Earth. When the scene calms down, Gary staggers into the motel room, picks up a still-unconscious Isis, and takes her back to New York.

Roll credits. Welcome back to Assignment: Earth.

One of the arcs of Assignment: Earth is that, from the first season onward, Gary Seven is going to learn powers that bring him closer to those of his alien masters, the Aegis. Isis assures him that his developing powers are a sign of his growth as an operative, as he progresses beyond the needs of physical technology and becomes able to control the energy weapons and quantum calculations that she and the Aegis central computers can. It’s an old theme in both science-fiction and philosophy that the human body as we understand it is limited, but that we have the potential to access higher planes of existence. I personally don’t think of these planes as higher, just a different set of abilities which open up different capacities for worldly action. Given some of the problems physical technology have caused humanity when combined with our natural sense of greed and hunger for power, I wouldn’t mind a few years of experimentation with psychic powers again. I’d probably regret it.

Season four of Assignment: Earth, after the premiere, would see the same adventure plots returning, but with the new twist that the Aegis didn’t entirely trust Gary Seven or Isis. Being their only operative on the scene, and the only operative capable of killing the rogue Louis Ten (or did he???), they don’t mind his more eccentric methods and his new taste for individuality and variation. They don’t mind it, but they don’t like it.

For an actress as talented and versatile as Nichelle
Nichols, it's remarkably difficult to find images of
her online that aren't in a Star Trek uniform.

I thought of a wonderful way for Aegis to reassure Gary that a return to something like the status quo is possible after the events that caused his own rogue status. When Gary Seven, Roberta Lincoln, and Isis return to the Prospect Heights brownstone that was their base through the third season, they aren’t sure what they’ll find, whether Louis Ten represented official Aegis, or was another rogue agent operating for a mysterious purpose. At the start of the episode, they learn the new status quo. On walking up the steps of the brownstone, a familiar face emerges. Gary immediately and happily welcomes his old friend, Selena Three, played by Nichelle Nichols. 

We learn from Selena, who will be a recurring character in season four, that Louis was a rogue agent who had murdered his minder Osiris and disappeared from his own assignment in the USSR to find Gary. He had sent a series of increasingly unhinged messages to their command, growing obsessed with Gary’s ability to disappear from the view of Aegis. Gary’s new mission, in addition to any historical-dialectic tweaks that become required, is to help Selena discover why Louis Ten went rogue, how he was able to kill Osiris, and what effects his treason might have had on other operatives on Earth. His mission for the first episode in the new status quo, after shaving his terrible beard, is to find out if the operative Francis Eight, currently attached to the British delegation to the United Nations, is likely to betray Aegis.

Selena Three claps her hands to call her black labrador dog, Loki, and leaves the brownstone, letting them know they’ll be seeing her again.