In 1974, 13 episodes of
The Six Million Dollar Man were transmitted into homes, along with a barrage of
commercials promoting the show. At the time, I was discovering the science fiction stories of
Isaac Asimov who had grown up reading science fiction stories about evil
robots and, through his own stories featuring the "
laws of robotics", he had explored the idea of robots who could not harm people. Evil robots were a popular topic in episodes of
The Six Million Dollar Man. For example, in
episode 4, "
Day of the Robot", an evil robot tried to kill the star of the show, Steve Austin.
The Questor Reality
In an alternative universe,
The Questor Tapes might have become a late 1970s science fiction television program about an ancient alien
intervention into Earth's history. The star of
The Questor Tapes (an android named Questor) was a "friendly robot" similar to the character
Data in the late 1980s
Star Trek: The Next Generation. I suppose that Questor ruined his own chances of staring in a 1970s television series by stating calmly and logically: "
I am not programmed to kill."
2014 is the 40th anniversary of
The Questor Tapes pilot movie. There were no fist fights, no car chases and only one person dies -in an act of self-sacrifice- at the very end. In the late 1960s,
Roddenberry had failed to interest Hollywood in a similarly cerebral science fiction show called
Assignment: Earth.
 |
| Hollywood go boom! |
I suppose the folks in Hollywood had little trouble opting for shows like
The Six Million Dollar Man and
The Bionic Woman over
The Questor Tapes and
Assignment: Earth. Mindless episodes about killer robots and
bigfoot with slow motion video of
Lee Majors and
Lindsay Wagner were safe bets in Hollywood.
Lost in Hollywood
To me, it seems miraculous that
Star Trek was on television in the 1960s. As it was, Roddenberry had to fight to defend core features of his futuristic vision against the mundane and conventional preferences of Hollywood executives. It is fun to fantasize about an alternate Reality, the Roddenberry Reality, where in 1970 there could have been a television show based on
Assignment: Earth, while in our world we got dystopian
drek. In 1975 we could have had a new television series called
Questor, but we got
The Lost Saucer. In 1978 we almost had
Star Trek: Phase II, but we got
Cylons.
 |
| Teri Garr (left) as Roberta Lincoln in Assignment: Earth |
Collaboration. The
original script by Roddenberry (1966) for what became
Assignment: Earth had a fairly conventional Evil Alien theme running through it. Adam Riggio
has commented that Roddenberry was "
utterly terrible at writing" for
Star Trek. In 1967
Art Wallace collaborated with Roddenberry to re-work the story as a
potential Star Trek spinoff. As a television SciFi show, why is
Assignment: Earth so much better than
The Questor Tapes? How might it have been made even better; good enough to out-shine
Star Trek?
Reggio
has had fun imagining an alternate Reality in which
Assignment: Earth became Roddenberry's best known creation while
Star Trek was quickly forgotten. Riggio
suggests that we, "
Just imagine Lindsay Wagner (The Bionic Woman) playing Roberta", and
Nimoy as Gary Seven.
Riggio has also suggested
Barbara Feldon as a possible Roberta, which I think is absurd.
Star Trek might have gotten its start by pretending to be a "
Western" set among the stars, and Roddenberry might have originally sought to launch
Assignment: Earth off of the popularity of "
spy shows", but it would have been a huge error to push potential fans of
Assignment: Earth towards associating a fledgling science fiction show with a comedy secret agent spoof like
Get Smart.
Time Travel
Does
Assignment: Earth work as a television show about time travel? I have my doubts. Would anyone like the idea that the history of Earth is being kept on track by Gary Seven, an agent in a time travel war, an endless struggle against evil aliens?
Art Wallace vs Gene Coon
Somehow Art Wallace was a good fit for
Assignment: Earth, able to produce a fun episode that held promise as a possible new series. In contrast, with a terminally ill
Gene Coon working on
The Questor Tapes, the result was rather cringe-worthy. For example, the middle part of the pilot movie with
Dana Wynter seems contrived to allow Questor to explain that he has a functioning penis. It is fun for me to image that in the Ekcolir Reality, the entire course of the history of science fiction television shows could have been different, allowing both
Assignment: Earth and
The Questor Tapes to be produced as long-running television shows.
The Thomas Effect
Thomas Iwedon is born into the
Ekcolir Reality and he quickly came to have some understanding of the fact that Earth has long been visited by aliens from a distant galaxy. Thomas became a writer of science fiction stories. I imagine that Thomas first wrote for a television show in 1959, writing for the
Foundation of Reality science fiction series.
Foundation of Reality was based on the revelations in the final book of Isaac Asimov's Foundation saga:
Foundation Law. In
Foundation Law, Asimov revealed how
Daneel had worked for 20,000 years to design a modified type of human being, genetically imprinted with the
Three Laws and capable of functioning to form the group mind,
Galaxia. Asimov's Foundation saga ended with Galaxia repulsing aliens from another galaxy (described by Asimov as "the
Huaoshy" along with their minions "the
pek"), preserving our galaxy as a domain of 25,000,000 Earth-like planets populated by a unified human species safely existing under the watchful eyes of positronic robots following the
Zeroth Law of Robotics.
Foundation of Reality continued Asimov's saga with the introduction of the
Kac'hin, a human variant that had been designed by the pek. The television series spanned most of the 1960s and covered the same ground as
The Foundations of Eternity.
In the Ekcolir Reality,
Star Trek began as a spinoff from
Foundation of Reality. The transgalactic mission in
Star Trek was an attempt to reach the
Galactic Core and find worlds such as
Hemmal and
Klyz where the pek had long worked to design new human and
Fruthwa variants. In this
Star Trek, there was no Vulcan, but there was a Fruthwa crew member (Sut'hiro).
Natalie Wood was second in command as the captain's "
Number One". In the Ekcolir Reality, television technology was about 20 years ahead of what we have here in the Buld Reality, so the original
Star Trek was in many ways similar to
Voyager.
Future Science
 |
Roberta Lincoln and Gary Seven
Staring Lindsay Wagner and Steve McQueen |
Future Science magazine first appeared in the
Foundation Reality where it was devoted to non-fiction and frequently served as a platform for Isaac Asimov's stories about recent developments in nuclear physics, military technology and computers. In the Ekcolir Reality,
Future Science published science fiction stories. Many of its stories were in the format of scripts, initially for radio and later (starting in the 1920s) for television. During the 1950s both Thomas and Gene Roddenberry had stories published in
Future Science.
Thomas, Jack Vance, Roddenberry, Art Wallace and Gene Coon all wrote episodes of the long-running 1950s television series
The Phaeton Effect, inspired by Robert Heinlein's 1949 story in
Future Science: "
Pathfinder".
 |
Questor the pek,
usually played by
Erin Gray |
In
The Phaeton Effect, an underground civilization existed below the surface of Mars. That hidden culture was home to a form of artificial life representing the remnants of a Fru'wu-like species that had originated on a planet,
Phaeton, a world with a dense carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere that had once existed where the asteroid belt is.
Thomas recruited Lindsay Wagner to play the role of Roberta Lincoln in the 1970 television series,
Assignment: Earth. Many of the episodes concerned environmental problems, particularly the chronic problem of
rising sea level that was a serious issue in the 1970s of the Ekcolir Reality. As a spinoff of
Star Trek, the star ship
Voyager, having reached the black hole at the center of the Galaxy, was propelled through a time warp back to 1970s Earth. Its crew played a role in
Assignment: Earth that was similar to the
Buld who reach Earth in
Exode.
In the Ekcolir Reality,
Questor was a spinoff series from
Assignment: Earth. In a bold move, the alien android Questor was played by
Erin Gray in the television series. Questor's human companion was Dr. Rachel Tajneb, played by
Gretchen Corbett.
In the television series, Questor was a pek, able to morph into any convenient form. Many other 70s actors and actresses appeared on the show to help depict Questor in disguise including memorable performances by Lola Falana, Angie Dickinson, Phyllis Davis, Cheryl Ladd, John Travolta, Clint Eastwood, George Takei and Dustin Hoffman.
Related reading. More
television from the Ekcolir Reality.
2019 UPDATE: the lost planet of
Ver'la.
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