Planet Earth

A PAX expedition to California runs into trouble, encountering a savage sect of mutant “Kreegs” who try to take the team’s technology for their own savage ends. Pater Kimbridge takes a shot from a 20th century rifle, and Dylan Hunt leads the team back to the safety of PAX’s central city. Kimbridge will require life-saving surgery, and PAX’s only two surgeons qualified to perform the procedure have both gone missing. Hunt decides to lead a team to a community where men are enslaved by women, hoping to follow up on a sighting of the missing Dr. Connor there. What Hunt doesn’t know is that it won’t be as easy as masquerading as a new male slave: the water and food given to men is laced with a drug that ensures their obedience to – and fear of – their mistresses. Hunt manages to avoid the drug for some time, but his insubordination to women gives him away and he is forcibly dosed. Now he has to fight off the effects of the drug as he tries to carry through his plan to find Dr. Connor and free the enslaved men; worse yet, the Kreegs are about to launch an attack on the female-dominated community, already aware that its men will not fight back.

teleplay by Gene Roddenberry and Juanita Bartlett
story by Gene Roddenberry
directed by Marc Daniels
music by Harry Sukman

Cast: John Saxon (Dylan Hunt), Janet Margolin (Harper-Smythe), Ted Cassidy (Isiah), Christopher Cary (Baylok), Diana Muldaur (Marg), Sally Kemp (Treece), Johana de Winter (Villar), Claire Brennen (Delba), Corrine Camacho (Bronta), Majel Barrett (Yuloff), Jim Antonio (Jonathan Connor), Aron Kincaid (Gorda), John Quade (Kreeg Commandant), Rai Tasco (Pater Kimbridge), Sara Chattin (Thetis), Lew Brown (Merlo), Raymond Sutton (Kreeg Captain), Joan Crosby (Kyla), James Bacon (Partha), Craig Hundley (Harpsichordist), Robert McAndrew (First Dink), Bob Golden (Second Dink), Susan Page (Little Girl)

Notes: Planet Earth is based on a story idea that Gene Roddenberry had mooted as a “possible future episode” of both the original Star Trek and, later, for a prospective Genesis II series. More familiar faces are found behind the scenes; Marc Daniels directed the first Star Trek episode broadcast, The Man Trap, as well as fan favorites The Naked Time, The Menagerie, Court-Martial, Space Seed, The Doomsday Machine, and Mirror, Mirror. At the time of this movie’s TV premiere, he had also turned his hand to writing, including the animated Star Trek episode One Of Our Planets Is Missing. And finally, Roddenberry’s right-hand man for almost all of the original Star Trek, producer Robert Justman, is credited as the producer of Planet Earth as well. Diana Muldaur had appeared in the original Star Trek episodes Return To Tomorrow and Is There In Truth No Beauty?, and Roddenberry would call upon her again to play Dr. Katherine Pulaski in the second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Craig Hundley, who appeared as Tommy Starnes in …And The Children Shall Lead, appears as a harpsichordist here – perhaps the midway point between his early acting ambitions and his later musical leanings, which would lead him to devise the Blaster Beam instrument that was heavily used by Jerry Goldsmith in the soundtrack of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.