I just read in the late '70s version of the concordance that the the spin off show Assignment Earth was never supposed to be involved in/part of the Star Trek timeline.
The idea never sold so Roddenberry and Wallace decided to wrap it up in a Star Trek episode and see if it could then be sold. Still no takers.
That's right. The original plan was for a half-hour series in which Gary Seven was a time traveler from 2319, battling time-travelling Omegans. Here's an overview:
http://www.orionpressfanzines.com/articles/assignment.htm
I've read the pilot script, and it felt almost like a sitcom in the vein of
My Favorite Martian, only much less funny. A lot of the running time is about Roberta's wacky reactions to Gary's magic tech (some of which survived in the aired episode) or Gary's suspicious landlord trying to prove he's up to something but being stymied by Gary's magic tech. Or Roberta being the butt of sexual innuendoes as she misunderstands Gary's actions, or using Gary's tech to discover her best friend is being two-timed and save her from making a terrible mistake. And the supposedly alien Omegans come off more as demonic sorcerors, prefiguring "Catspaw" a bit. It feels entirely different from Trek and from the episode we got.
We are told Gary Seven is human, but this is never really proved. McCoy's examination could have been interfered with.
Except that Gary confirmed that he was the descendant of human abductees when he was confirming his identity to the Beta-5 computer, at which point he would've had no reason to lie, no listeners to deceive. So at the very least, Gary believed he was human and the Beta-5 saw no reason to correct him.
I seem to remember that an early version of the episode had the Enterprise going back in time to fight a race of time traveling aliens called Omegans bent on destroying Earth in the past.
No, as stated, that's from the non-Trek pilot version. I've read the pitch document written for the later, Trek-spinoff version, which slightly predated the episode script (Gary was temporarily renamed "Anthony Seven" in it), and there's no mention in it of time travel or Omegans. On the contrary, the revised idea was that Gary and Roberta would be tackling relatable modern issues and threats arising from within human society. It even makes a point of arguing that focusing on alien enemies, like rival show
The Invaders, is a mistake, because the only worthy villain "is man himself."
By the way, what I said earlier about how the episode seemed structured in a way to allow the Trek characters/scenes to be removed and leave a coherent story about Gary and Roberta? That actually was the plan, but not for a half-hour episode as I suggested. The pitch document mentions creating a 20-minute presentation film for NBC which would be cut from the non-Trek portions of the episode. (These days a 20-minute film
would be a half-hour episode once commercials were added, but back then there were fewer commercials so it would've been more like 25 minutes.) It would be interesting to find out if this presentation film was ever created -- it would be a neat historical artifact if it could be found. But it probably would've been found already if it had existed.
