Frankly I think we all owe Mr. Byrne a huge thank you. His well intentioned but ultimately horribly shallow Assignment Earth series serves as an excellent reminder of why nostalgia aside hyper compressed story telling is not really any better than hyper decrompressed story telling.
I had been looking forward to IDW's Second Stage initiative with regards to Star Trek books, and their first effort Peter David's New Frontier was quite to my liking. I've always enjoyed the attempted pilot/crossover that was the Classic Trek episode Assigment Earth and have enjoyed further expansion on the characters and ideas in the novels Assignment Eternity, and The Rise and Fall Of Khan Noonien Singh series all written by Greg Cox. So I thought that seeing Byrnes take on Gary Seven, Ms. Lincoln and Isis would be a treat.
Instead what it is, is plodding, hackneyed and kind of joyless. Not to mention horribly rushed. The story is basically a redress of a "classic" film noir detective story complete with double crosses and missed guesses as to the real bad guys identity. It's a simple tale and it's not exactly mishandled by Byrne but he never seems to rise about the bare bones of either the Assignment Earth concept nor the film noir trappings he invokes.
At the end I found that not only did I not really care about what had happened but I didn't really feel that the characters involved did either.
Add to this the fact that the story is really too stand alone for my tastes. I will confess to being a product of my times but the "stand alone" stories that I like best are in the style of Spider Girl where truly each issue has a definite beginning, middle, and end. But at the same time information is presented that rewards the constant reader.
Ultimately while I firmly believe that Byrne had the best of intentions and did not "phone" in a single thing, I still found it very wanting and cannot in good conscience continue with this series.
Good Luck and Good Reading
Toriach
