YMMV / Star Trek S2 E26 "Assignment: Earth"

• Fanfic Fuel: Gary Seven and his team, since their story was deliberately left open for further adventures. They've appeared in books and comics interacting with history both real and fictional (including encounters with Khan Noonien Singh during the Eugenics Wars).
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The Enterprise crew goes back in time and Spock mentions that an unnamed important person is supposed to be assassinated on that day. Since the episode was meant as a "backdoor pilot" for another show, this was not elaborated upon. However, six days after the episode aired, Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered.
  • This episode ended up being a lot more eerily prescient than just that. It's not that far ahead of Robert Kennedy's assassination either, and on top of that, Gary Seven was attempting to stop the launch of a nuclear weapons platform into orbit. On the same day as MLK's assassination, NASA also launched a Saturn V rocket (Not, however, carrying nuclear weapons) which suffered a malfunction and ended up going way off course, and was covered up in the Star Trek universe. Spock's prediction of an uprising in Asia is also sometimes tied to a coup in Iraq, but that was over three months later.
• Memetic Mutation: A very popular gif of Spock stroking a cat (Isis) came from this episode.
  Spock: Quite a lovely animal, Captain. I find myself strangely drawn to it.
• Newer Than They Think: Some fans have been known to point out similarities between Gary Seven and the Doctor (a mysterious Science Hero with a female companion and a Magic Tool). Except that the Doctor didn't actually have those characteristics at the time the episode was broadcast: the sonic screwdriver was introduced in the story "Fury From the Deep", broadcast in the same month as this episode, and the idea of the Doctor having a single female companion was not introduced until the early 1970s. (It's also worth mentioning that Doctor Who wasn't broadcast in the U.S. until 1972,^note Not counting the parts of northern border states that received CBC broadcasts so it's unlikely that the Star Trek writers would have been aware of it in 1968.). Also, the concept of the Doctor acting as an agent for some Time Police (in this case, the Time Lords) hadn't yet been conceived as that would be introduced with the Third Doctor in The '70s. Even the Time Lords hadn't been invented yet for the show and the Doctor was still an aimless wanderer, not yet temporarily assigned to Earth.
• Special Effect Failure: A rare instance of this trope applying far more to the remastered version of the episode than the original. In the original broadcast version, a stock shot of the Enterprise orbiting Earth was taken from the previous season's "Tomorrow is Yesterday," and a stock Saturn V photograph was used for the rocket which Gary messes with; both were fairly typical quality for the era. In the remastered version, however, they added a new orbital shot which shows the Earth rotating backwards and didn't bother cleaning up the Saturn V photo whatsoever, meaning that it goes from looking acceptable on a 1960s TV to looking absolutely awful on a modern HDTV.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: There's a reason why Gary Seven and his entourage have been such an incredibly popular subject for both fan fiction and officially-licensed Star Trek spin-off material. Unfortunately, the actual episode generally isn't seen as one of TOS's better ones, due to its Poorly Disguised Pilot nature being a little too obvious, and the series regulars getting almost nothing to do. It wouldn't be until Star Trek: Picard that this got picked up on in official canon, revealing that The Travelers from "Where No One Has Gone Before" were their progenitors, and specifically recruited them to help keep historical points from being altered.
• Values Resonance: "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 gonna be alive when we're thirty." Roberta is talking about the young Baby Boomers of the 1960s, but these lines could be delivered verbatim by a Millennial or Zoomer in the early 21st century.

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