Landru has a cameo in the Lower Decks episode No Small Parts.🤭

Still a better instalment of 'The Purge' than any of the actual instalments of 'The Purge'.:p

Oddly, I enjoyed this episode. It's the Twilight Zone Lite with a very Gothic Horror angle. I think this is the FIRST proper episode where we have the Prime Directive where they said "Prime directive be damned, we're doing what's right!". And I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought this episode HAS to be one of the influences for the Purge. This episode FEELS like a nightmare. There's a lot of dangling threads, we don't know what's happening and it's more focused on being a horror story than it is trying to be a logical Science Fiction story. Dooooesn't make sense, but it's more interested in freaking you out. Also, Sid Haigs in this thing. He's the one who shoots Sulu with the stick.

“We are the government - we’re here to help” hahahaha

I got a very strong vibe of "this is the first time we see the borg" with some aspects of a hive mind hinted at in the episode. While it was a more strict version of control in this episode, the self was lost in the great unified body of society. All at the control of an artificial organism.

One inconsistency I noticed, at the beginning they turn Sulu into a smiley zombie on the street, but later people need to be brought to a special chamber. Also, I’ve been doing a rewatch of Voyager (alongside your ruminations) and I just happened to watch Dreadnought the same week as this episode. All I could think watching Dreadnought was that Kirk would sweet talk this computer into submission in 30 seconds.

I always liked the interpretation that the Prime Directive is a "speed bump" meant to make a captain stop and consider if they really do actually need to get involved rather than a hard rule to never get involved at all. So, you have situations like this, where getting involved is clearly necessary. Or you have situations like in the TNG episode "Thine Own Self" where interference isn't warranted at all and so is avoided.

No don’t worry I like your discussion of the prime directive since you’re someone it doesn’t treat it with kid gloves. There are plenty of fans out there who are unwavering in their absolute defence in the prime directive and even in the absolute despicable way it’s applied later in the TNG era.

I figure the Festival is the 'pressure release' that the computer allows the mind to have once in a while so revolt doesn't occur from the psychological strain of being controlled by a computer

Sulu being turned made no sense whatsoever. They needed that weird room with the machine to turn people, Sulu was turned by an empty stick.

Summary: Enterprise is investigating what happened to the starship Archon that dissapeared on the planet Beta III a hundred years ago. A landing party finds out that every day at 6 o'clock the people on the planet start to behave erratic, hooded men with a hollow pipe are in charge and everybody is worshipping a leader named Landru. Who is this Landru and how can it control everybody? (Slow but not terrible episode, with interesting ideas about the lack of creativity in controlled societies.)

This si a time when the US society was having to encounter "primative" native peoples, particularly in the Pacific ocean, relocating people from the atomic Bomb tests. So there was a lot of activity including in National Geographic who went around "discovering" native people that everyone else knew were there and they just left them alone because they were cool with them being themselves. So you get a lot of this showing up in Star Trek. Military officials making decisions that affect whole cultures. It was the 60s.

I think I remember seeing this on a list of Rosebery's favourite episodes.

I loved your Prime Directive analysis!

The Prime Directive is just whatever we want it to be this week.

One of at least 3 times that Kirk uses logic to get a computer to destroy itself.

To answer Lore's question as to "why the festival" you'll see this come up repeatedly in Roddenberry's work. Suppression of emotions eventually requires an explosive release. This is part of Roddenberry's justification for all of his BS behavior including infidelity, "everything I feel (greed/lust/rage) requires me to express it immediately and without constraint." If he exercised self control he would be suppressing natural drives that would build up destructively so he had to seduce and have sex with women outside of his committed relationship and it's not because he's a horrible person - it's everyone else who's wrong.

Maybe it's a Roddenberry thing, the idea that the Enterprise crew encounters a "perfect society", happens more then once. As Landru dies, his idea of a perfect society, aka Paradise, is uploaded into a computer. One man's paradise is another man's hell. Kirk & company find a hell and end program by word fighting Landru's old computer - which happens to have a corrupted memory chip. Paradise itself, is a bad idea. Typical Roddenberry.

I thought the festival came from an obvious influence (in fact, the same source that seems to have influenced much of the plot) 'The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp'

I want to love this episode really because of how goofy is that everyone’s going on about Landru this Landru that. I really get a kick out of.

The 40 Acres lot was also used I believe for a Piece of the Action.

Carnivalistic Rituals are a real Thing, since (at least) the roman Saturnalia.

All praise to Landru...also FESTIVAL! FESTIVAL! Better get ready for Red Hour.

Thanks for your hard work.

Friend, you are not of the Body ! Repent friend, and Landru will forgive your sins ! Jokes aside, Landru is what I call a Thinking August like Spock, Data, Odo, 7 of 9, and T, Pol, but without any kind of ethics and morality . I rather liked this wonderfully absurd episode . Landru is the Life ! Landru is the Love ! Landru is of the Body !

The Festival is the purge. Landru's machine had to take the human need to blow off steam into account I guess.

The festival plot point was just dropped.... seems like the writers forgot about it.

The Prime Directive of noninterference - that phrasing is totally consistent with TNG's Prime Directive; I'm not really sure I buy into the wordplay of this rumination. The "of noninterference" is simply describing, succinctly, it's purpose or content (especially since we're still in TOS and getting that all across to the viewers for the first time). At best his statement is vague, as was Kirk's reply about it only applying to certain societies. Ultimately TNG canonized/clarified things, and for the better IMO, since Kirk playing fast and loose (Neutral Good ish) with the PD is more consistently Kirk, or what would become how we would think of Kirk, than the alternative posited here. As always, love the rumination and I love your PD rants even if I'm always on the other side lol. Strangely this is one of my more favorite TOS episodes, very memorable, and (particularly with the "modern" PD understanding looking back) really defining for Kirk on a philosophical level as opposed to how we would imagine Picard handling the situation.

When they did the digital remastering of the special effects it's too bad they couldn't have added a heat ray effect during the appropriate scenes to the ship in orbit.

My head canon is that this is one of these episode where the Director and Actors took a look at the script and were: "Suure, one of those, eh, let's just get this over with".

"The Body" aspect of this, and the way the actors portray being "one with The Body" comes across as a piss take of fundamentalist Christians. So I guess this is another first in Trek: that of being anti-religion, specifically Christianity.

I sort of considered this episode a comment on organized religion with maybe it's the Cold War thrown in for good measure. Some aspects of the "Earth Parallels" are a little too blatant for my taste, but the one thing that was interesting was the overt primitive Society above ground while there was a more advanced Society underground. The concept was also used in Spock's Brain which was often considered the least desirable episode in the whole serious. Going back to the religion metaphor, "Festival" might have had something to do with procreation as well as calling the population because they needed to do any sexual activity in the "Release" mode rather than in the "Control" mode. Also suspicious is that the Law Givers were able to zap sulu with their probes and he instantly got Absorbed while the others were sent to the Absorption Chambers. One might speculate maybe the lawyers probe zappers more temporary and people that were absorbing that way were later taken to the underground complex to be more permanently Absorbed. One thing I always had a little trouble with (mostly this was due to having a television budget as opposed to a cinema budget), were the too blatant "Earth Parallels" During the final three episodes of the Second Season, it's too bad they couldn't couldn't have turned Assignment Earth, The Omega Glory and Bread And Circuses into a three-part episode dealing with restoring Earth's timeline. Much of the content could have been maintained but it would have been a bit more believable.

Ok Lorerunner you made some interesting points like the lock-step march of the townspeople but you keep saying this is one of Roddenberry's three pilot scripts... Wrong! The three were Mudd's Women, Where No Man Has Gone Before and Omega Glory (Yeech!). Return of the Archons was written by Boris Sobelman based on an idea by Roddenberry... Ok a weak idea. You never seen to get the fact that TOS was DESPERATE for scripts... any shootable script. And during production they were not given time to scrutinize detailed story logic. As to the heat beams. Perhaps the heat was so intense that it took all available power to reinforce the shields. Divert power to engines and the shields weaken to the point the ship would burn up... an imaginative threat but an odd power for the Landru computer to have. Pull enough starships down and you guarantee Starfleet will send more to investigate. Landru didn't think that one out. Another point, peacing out will result in a very short episode. Kirk is in this case forced to intervene to save his ship which is contrary to pure interpretation of the prime directive since the ship is supposed to be extendable. This episode is relevant today. Look down any street and while you will not see everyone asking if you are of the body but you will see most people walking with heads bent staring into a smart phone. All praise to Apple Computers and Steve Jobs whose influence like Landru is still felt long after his death.

ok that being one Pilot-Episode originally explains why Bones is called Doc the whole time

The Many.....the Body. LOL

The Red Hour aka Black Friday

Peace and tranquility, friend.... and though you are not Of the Body, I find your Prime Directive interpretation refreshing.... I hated the way the PD was made into a fetish in later Trek where it was better to let a pre-warp planet be destroyed than get involved!! It shows how when you take a principle to extremes it becomes its opposite.... PD clearly has a focus on allowing civilizations to develop independently, avoiding a galactic Federation monoculture (which logically should allow saving a planet from getting wiped out, since you can't be independent and contribute to a diverse galaxy if you don't exist) ... Yet if a planet is not evolving, like this one, its debatable... who's to say static civilizations controlled by robots shouldn't be part of the great IDIC rainbow -- To ensure that all planets are evolving and dynamic may violate the PD. ... Your other point about how the PD should allow room for aiding a pre-warp civilization -- say reducing some level of terrible suffering...agreed!... even though it might be a comprise to the PD. In this case though, its hard to say if destroying the static system of this world is reducing suffering compared to what might develop. If Kirk had peaced out... it would be reasonable as well.

Landru, Landru, Landru

Landru is responsible for the US Black Friday,

'Heat rays' should be no different from the radiation a starship would encounter out in the universe, because it's a dangerous place for radiation (Why satellites don't last long around Jupiter) so Landu attacking with Heat Rays should be Picard's line in the future "Those won't even get past our navigational deflector"

First! What do I win?

Even when I first saw this as a kid, they lost me in the first minute when they showed a clock with Arabic numerals on a supposedly alien planet. Pathetic. They could have told the same 'story' with just a chime and no clock face. I always figured the festival was Landru's recognition that the violent instincts in his society could not be completely suppressed by his mechanical solution. It still needed an occasional release to keep people from going insane. OR maybe it was designed to reinforce the necessity in the popular mind for a communal Body to prevent total self-destruction Either of those approaches would have made for a better focus than what they went for.

How many computers have talked into destroying them selves 3?

7:25/24:53 "Why The FESTIVAL? Never ANSWERED!" Years ago, I was perusing some magazine or periodical or book on STAR TREK and read in this obscure Passage That there was this Religious HINDU CULT in INDIA of "THE FESTIVAL"! While the details of What was "specifically" being DONE at this "Pagan" HINDU Cult of KRISHNA? or/and SHIVA? or BOTH, it was EERILY Similar to this very Star Trek Episode "The Return of The Archons! Was GENE RODDENBERRY actually AWARE of this hoary? Cult from India's Past? Or was this another instance of a creative Storyteller unconsciously tapping in the reservoirs of Past Human Awareness on this Earth? There was another similarity in the early opening 2oth Century on a different, yet similar Topic! A novel was published about a certain fictitious Ship: The TITAN: in the story It SANK after striking this ICEBURG! Years later a real ship The TITANTIC did just that! Struck by this ICEBURG in the north Atlantic! In metaphoric terms, simile, or metonymy? a SHIP symbolically is rendered The SHIP of STATE, steered by One in POWER at the Helm of It (in the 20th Century F.D.R. steered The U.S.A., Hitler GERMANY, and STALIN The then USSR, and MAO Red China). In fact, GOVERNMENT as a term is actually derived from the verb To STEER a SHIP: Gubernare in Latin, in French, "Guber" becomes Governer. At the other Pole of Thought, the SHIP is the CHURCH, or some other Religious Org or Cult or Institution. in the original Hindu Cult SHIVA was the deity of DESTRUCTION, while KRISHNA the Polar Opposite: Creation; in the 1960s while STAR TREK was being filmed, KRISHNA Consciousness was becoming popular among the Beatnik-Hippie Movements. This is a very broad and open yet controversial subject. WE have seen the genuine Saintliness of MOTHER TERESA, yet the Tragedy of The Reverend JIM JONES in the GUYANA Massacre: 2 opposite EXTREMES in the Spectrum of RELIGION: in Human BEHAVIOR, not necessarily on Doctrine or Tenets. Then in the political sphere in the 20th century, POLITICS in different nations showed the 2 extremes of SHIVA: Destruction or Krishna Birth of Bliss Happiness in Consciousness and Deeds. FDR's NEW DEAL of "the Only Thing to FEAR is FEAR Itself!" Then there's HITLER's Nightmarish Massacre of the Jews, STALIN's Gulag Purges. Now, when GENE RODDENBERRY was creating this very Episode "The RETURN of the ARCHONS", was He not taking all this common thought in, whether consciously or unconsciously? One can ponder further. The very word ARCHON is a classical Greek term for a Chief Magistrate of the City-State that was Athens under the great PERICLES! Yet in the very STORY, the ARCHON longed for, and prophesied about by those electronically SLAVES of LANDRU the global mega Machine RULING, GOVERNING their World was not at all a Magistrate of The actual political or military World of LANDRU! Instead, the Archons were envisioned as OUTSIDERS as LIBERATORS to FREE the People of this Planet from the selfsame Mass Slavery wrought by this Computer Machine giving out propagandistic IMAGES of LANDRU: Someone who DIED Centuries ago on their Home Planet! METHINKS What GENE RODDENBERY hit upon was a Story with a very deep THEME. It is a superb Classic, despite the fact that the Depthiness of that Topic or Theme, and Its full expression in the Dialogue or Scenes, could not be fully wrought through the Star Trek Episode RETURN OF THE ARCHONS, of only a mere Hour duration in TV Time, flooded with intermittent commercials in the original 1960s Television mode of Presentation to the Public as Audience! Even the Dialogue ha to be brief, laconic, but not succinct enough? If GENE Roddenberry were thatseriously committed to explicate His THEME. this short Episode would end up as long as GONE WITH THE WIND, or become another PILOT for a new TV Series THE ARCHONS RETURN, running as long as BONANZA, or GUN SMOKE. The very characters resembled MORMONS or Mormon Missionaries, but that may be going too far: no Prejudice or Diatribe or Attack of any specific religious church was intended by GENE in His Story. He respected ALL CHURCHES as well as Political Parties of His Day. It was not His Intention to Target any Institution, Religious or Political, or Military: He respected Them All. But he HAD TO give It All Out in His Own Way the Problem of GOOD or EVIL , again expressable as SHIVA versus KRISHNA, in anything Established through Time as Soppesedly Flawlessly Sacrosanct to WARN Humanity of the DANGER yet around in Times of Fear and Distrust and Instability of.......(let the Reader fill in the Blank in his other own Freedom of Conscience, fulfilling "Ye Shall Know the TRUTH, and the TRUTH shall make You FREE!" is not that what The FOUNDING FATHERS HOPED FOR in The BILL of RIGHTS in the U.S. CONSTITUTION of 1787?

Sadly, this episode seems really half-baked. First, take the resistance movement against Landru that they stumble upon. They oppose Landru's despotic rule but when actually given a chance by Kirk and company to end it, they freak out and start hugging each other in fear. Second, (I know Lore pointed this out but it's a big one) exactly just what is "Red Hour" and "The Festival"? Given that's it's such a HUGE part of the episode, it's amazing that it's never once explained in any way, shape, or form. Third, at several points the people of this world are openly referred to as Humans. Kirk declares they're going to restore the culture to a "normal Human form". Lindstrom has a near freak-out when Reger doesn't protect his daughter from "The Festival" the way a Human father would. These people aren't Human but the script seems to be awfully confused about that. But the biggest problem is how small-scale the story seems. I'll grant that many, many Star Trek episodes have this exact same problem but this whole civilization is reduced to one small town. However, most of those episodes don't involve our heroes completely upending an entire planet's culture, system of government, and way of life that has endured for six thousand years (which means Landru has been in charge since before recorded Human history began!). Was it right for Kirk to destroy Landru? Well, probably. But it would have been nice to get a little wider perspective on this society. 3/10

Do you own the star trek tos compendium?🖖

I call this episode The Return of the Jehovas Witnesses."

Kirk I mean

Doctor Who syndrome?

spaaace!

I used to dislike the episode until I started to see it as an anti-Cult polemic. Insert for Landru any charismatic cult leader from history. Leaving behind someone to help the members of Landru's cult to acclimate to life outside of Landru's rules feels appropriate.

i have never made it through this episode without skipping or falling asleep. the screams of the woman in the beginning are so awful it’s easy to press the “next button” but then the rest of the episode is sleepy/slow/quite...after listening to this rumination i tried to watch it (for prob the 10+ time) and still didn’t make it. Meanwhile Sulu and frankly the whole away team do look really good in their costumes lol.

Never was a fan of this episode... Lower Decks do something good with it though.

Although I love your reviews of TOS, I have to disagree with some of your points. Somehow I condider this one of the better episodes of season 1.

Thematiclly its fine. Prime Directive has good points but is in practice likely impossible short of massive totalitarian control over known space. Someone is going to intefere. Marvel's the Watcher's and the Time Lords in Underworld tell how they destroyed civilizations by gifting technology they were not ready to handle. In the case of the Timelords ( Underworld was a 4th Doctor story with Leela 77/78?) Where the people gifted time travel and turned their history inside out. Yeah no idea what that means, just the result is a shattered society. This theme best picked up in the novel The Wounded Sky. Where its brought up to a literal protogods?, hive mind) that after the first attempts to help have such terrible results, anybody with a conscience would be horrified, traumatized and retreat back home ans refuse to go back out and try again with such a start. But, a saner voice teaches them that just because it was not done right the first time, does not mean it can never work. Or that its an absoloute rule that you must never ever try if there is a chance it could go wrong. To create anything is to take a risk. Getting involved is a risk. But sometimes in certain circumstances it is the only moral option. This seems the latter. The natural evoloution of the society ended 6, 000 years ago. To kickstart the growth again. Get them in their feet on allowing them to grow again until they reach a point they can be a self sustaining civilization and determine their own future seems the best course of action.

Thumbs down for click baiting and WAISTING peoples time. This is a random review and you needed to state so in your title.

Return of the Archons - Dark Blue (If I'm gonna be perfectly honest this was the worst episode of Season 1. It actively sucks. Some of the acting's good - DeForest Kelley or whatever his name is - And Kirk monologuing at the computer to kill it is kind of funny but overall it's just a badly paced, relatively boring episode that uses shock value to pull you in and explains nothing of the most interesting aspect of it, that being the Festival)

Rewatching season one now, this was the first episode I did not like. The script is a complete mess of ideas, giving none of them any proper exploration or explanation. There's way too much exposition and standing around too. I kept checking how much time was left. The whole thing just feels off.

This episode sucks tbh. I don't think it's lamentation status but it's my second least favourite from TOS Season 1. It's all Landru now.

God, I got tired of listening to you moan about things. If you hated this so much why did you bother?