But before Pike took command of the Enterprise, the treatment Roddenberry shopped to networks was about Captain Robert April of the USS Yorktown. Aspects of this treatment did eventually make it into the show, as Admiral Robert April appears in both The Animated Series and Strange New Worlds. And the Yorktown did take flight, getting name dropped in Star Trek IV and Voyager.
Meanwhile, although Roddenberry later reworked it into the season one two-parter “The Menagerie,” “The Cage” is different enough from Star Trek proper that it feels like the pilot of a very different series. In addition to Pike, the Enterprise of “The Cage” was operated by first officer Number One (Majel Barrett, who would go on to play Laxwana Troi in The Next Generation and voice the ship’s computer), Pike got his physical not from Bones but from the even older and grouchier Doctor Boyce (John Hoyt), and trusts not in Sulu but in navigator Lt. José Taylor (Peter Duryea). Even Leonard Nimoy’s Spock, the one familiar face, feels very different, laughing in glee at the sight of alien flora.
Odd as “The Cage” was, its elements have been repurposed for books and comics, as well as plotlines in Strange New Worlds.
Assignment: Earth (TV)
With the help of none other than Lucille Ball, Star Trek made it to air and ran for two seasons. But Roddenberry could tell that NBC didn’t like the return they got on their effects budget. Sensing an imminent cancelation, Roddenberry developed a new series to pitch to studios. Assignment: Earth starred Robert Lansing as Gary Seven, a human descended from a line of people taken from prehistoric Earth and cultivated by well-meaning aliens.
The series would have followed Gary’s attempts to prevent changes in Earth’s history, ensuring that humanity reaches its full potential. But no network (by which I mean just CBS, NBC, and ABC) bit, so Roddenberry reworked his pilot into the final episode of season two, appropriately called “Assignment Earth.”
That episode failed to launch a new series, and while Gary Seven and his sidekick Roberta Lincoln (Terri Garr) do live on in comics and novels, Roddenberry had to save Assignment: Earth‘s benevolent alien ideas for a little-loved 1974 movie called The Questor Tapes.
