10 Star Trek Characters With Wasted Potential

The season two finale Assignment: Earth of The Original Series is a heck of a romp of an episode. Camper than Christmas in the Cotswolds, it has it all: time travel, Cape Canaveral, impending apocalyptic doom, a shapeshifting black 'cat,' Spock in a hat, perilous pursuits, and, of course, the enigmatic Gary Seven himself.

As the episode begins, the Enterprise is in orbit of 20th century Earth (1968, to be specific) for "historical research" (someone prepare a tranquiliser for Temporal Investigations, Daniels, and the entire crew of the USS Relativity) when they latch on to a transporter beam from over 1,000 lightyears away. Gary Seven (plus cat) steps off the transporter pad.

Seven, we learn, is human but is the descendant of a group abducted from Earth thousands of years ago by a highly advanced alien civilisation. The aliens have trained these humans over generations as 'agents,' 'supervisors,' or 'watchers' to protect and preserve the timeline. Gary Seven was then sent to Earth to find out what happened to his colleagues and, ultimately, to take over their mission to stop the deployment of a suborbital nuclear platform by the United States which otherwise would have led to Armageddon.

In season two of Star Trek: Picard, we do encounter another watcher – Tallinn – sent to supervise Renée Picard, and Gary Seven even gets a passing nod. In the end, however, the character has so far been confined to a single episode, and as such his boundless potential feels a little wasted. His missions alone, not to mention the chance to learn more about his fellow agents and the mysterious advanced alien civilisation in charge, could easily make for its own exciting series. In fact, this was the plan when Assignment: Earth was being produced – the episode was meant as the pilot for a spin-off starring Robert Lansing as Seven and, we would hope, his cat!