Does the daughter remind anyone else of Sally Field?
50th Anniversary Rewatch Thread
- Thread starter dahj
- Start date
I feel sorry for her and her mother, having to deal with the knowledge of what her father did. Hope it didn't fracture their family (apparently) beyond repair.
"The Return of the Archons", Episode 21, February 9th
Tonight's Episode: The search for a lost starship only returns a stoned Sulu, prompting the crew to investigate further. Also, after being accused of murder by the computer the previous week, Kirk's ready to take out his hostilities on another computer. Let's get ready to verbally rumble!
Tonight's Episode: The search for a lost starship only returns a stoned Sulu, prompting the crew to investigate further. Also, after being accused of murder by the computer the previous week, Kirk's ready to take out his hostilities on another computer. Let's get ready to verbally rumble!
This is 1967..."timeshifting" is waiting to see if they rerun it in the summer. 
Caught this one a bit early, as I had a snow day. In fact, I happened to put it on a few minutes before 6:00, though it was a few minutes after when the Red Hour struck.
In a way that other installments up until this point haven't, for whatever reason, this episode feels like exactly what the show's supposed to be...like the show's identity is at last fully formed.
I like how they do a planet that resembles historic Earth without going out of the way to make it parallel to a specific culture. Sure, it's vaguely 19th-century America, but it's not "the Roman planet," "the gangster planet," "the Nazi planet," etc. This is how the "parallel planetary development" thing should be done...giving us something vaguely Earth-like, but still an alien society.
Landru's society isn't fully realized, though. We see several older men who are spared the Red Hour, but we don't see any older women or children, do we?
Does Bilar remind anyone else of Billy Crystal?
Spock sleeping with his eyes open...that's an interesting touch that was never followed up on with him or any other Vulcans to my knowledge...and it goes along nicely with the later-established inner eyelid.
Note how Spock manages a forced smile when mingling with the Body.
I never got what the episode was going for when Spock discovered that the Lawgivers' staffs were hollow tubes...I think a story point might have been lost somewhere. Was Landru projecting his power remotely?
Landru's hair looks kind of '80s to me...vaguely reminiscent of Thomas Dolby or Howard Jones.
I guess they were going for a gag when Spock punched the guy, but I'd rather have just seen a nerve pinch.
Meanwhile, back on the Enterprise, they deliberately angled one shot so that we'd be seeing up Uhura's mini as she walked past the camera.
Ah, the first reference to the Prime Directive--they couldn't have known the can of worms that they'd be opening for future generations of Trek. Also, it's interesting that they use that specific term in a completely different context when dealing with Landru.
And Kirk's first proper computer killing...a Trek trope is born.
Leaving crewpeople behind on alien worlds...not something you typically get in later Treks, is it? Feels more real...we don't know when the next ship is coming out this way, so we have to put the people on hand to work in this place.
In the coda, note not only the acknowledgment that 23rd-century humanity isn't perfect, but also the specifically anti-utopian message. Not your son's Star Trek.
Next week:
(Disclaimer: Not an actual clip from the episode. Duh.)
In a way that other installments up until this point haven't, for whatever reason, this episode feels like exactly what the show's supposed to be...like the show's identity is at last fully formed.
I like how they do a planet that resembles historic Earth without going out of the way to make it parallel to a specific culture. Sure, it's vaguely 19th-century America, but it's not "the Roman planet," "the gangster planet," "the Nazi planet," etc. This is how the "parallel planetary development" thing should be done...giving us something vaguely Earth-like, but still an alien society.
Landru's society isn't fully realized, though. We see several older men who are spared the Red Hour, but we don't see any older women or children, do we?
Does Bilar remind anyone else of Billy Crystal?
Spock sleeping with his eyes open...that's an interesting touch that was never followed up on with him or any other Vulcans to my knowledge...and it goes along nicely with the later-established inner eyelid.
Note how Spock manages a forced smile when mingling with the Body.
I never got what the episode was going for when Spock discovered that the Lawgivers' staffs were hollow tubes...I think a story point might have been lost somewhere. Was Landru projecting his power remotely?
Landru's hair looks kind of '80s to me...vaguely reminiscent of Thomas Dolby or Howard Jones.
I guess they were going for a gag when Spock punched the guy, but I'd rather have just seen a nerve pinch.
Meanwhile, back on the Enterprise, they deliberately angled one shot so that we'd be seeing up Uhura's mini as she walked past the camera.
Ah, the first reference to the Prime Directive--they couldn't have known the can of worms that they'd be opening for future generations of Trek. Also, it's interesting that they use that specific term in a completely different context when dealing with Landru.
And Kirk's first proper computer killing...a Trek trope is born.
Leaving crewpeople behind on alien worlds...not something you typically get in later Treks, is it? Feels more real...we don't know when the next ship is coming out this way, so we have to put the people on hand to work in this place.
In the coda, note not only the acknowledgment that 23rd-century humanity isn't perfect, but also the specifically anti-utopian message. Not your son's Star Trek.
Next week:
(Disclaimer: Not an actual clip from the episode. Duh.)
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Let's all run around in silly robes! Here are my thoughts on my blog.
Unlike the video The Old Mixer posted.... here are some clips from next week...
Unlike the video The Old Mixer posted.... here are some clips from next week...
There is a lot that seems to have gotten lost somewhere in this episode.
Like Sulu gets absorbed just with the pointing of the hollow tube, but the others need to be led to a special machine. The Festival is just there, and then forgotten with no explanation of its purpose. Ladru controls everyone, but some are immune, but Landru somehow doesn't know that it doesn't control some people and who those people are? Even the original motivation that got them there, the Enterprise is searching for a ship that crashed 100 years ago. 100 years? That's a really slow response time to an emergency.
And then they leave a planet full of people who haven't known free will for 6000 years and just hope everything will turn out all right with a small away team guiding them?
It's not a particularly well written episode overall, granted the first half is pretty great and weird and creepy but then it slows down into just repeating "What is Landru? Where is Landru? Take me to Landru!" for 20 minutes with basically nothing happening except the Enterprise falling down from orbit yet again.
The speech that kills the computer is also a bit incoherent, and then it boils down to "you're evil, kill yourself" with barely any proper arguments to support it or any attempt by the computer to defend its point.
And despite of all that, the episode somehow actually... works.
The atmosphere, the weirdness and the mystery do manage to sell it.
And she doesn't even get a single line, not even "opening hailing frequencies"...
Kirk immediately dismisses it because that only applies to a "living, growing culture".
By Picard's time that provision obviously got struck, because he was willing to let civilizations go extinct on more than one occasion...
This episode was obviously an inspiration for The Purge film series(which I haven't seen, any good?), but another thing that I just realized is that Ladru was probably a partial inspiration for A.L.I.E. on The 100, with the computer that deletes free will to "save" people angle, though The 100 did it slightly differently (and better).
I always thought that was for a controlled release of their primal urges, that sort of thing...was there no explanation to that effect in the episode? I hadn't noticed.
Yet this isn't the last time that the Enterprise will be following up on the fate of a ship that was lost that long ago, or at least decades ago in some cases. Space is big, and warp drives have improved somewhat since then. I've long pictured the era 100 years before Kirk as having been one in which spacefaring humanity's reach exceeded its grasp...probing far into the unknown with a few too many expeditions never returning. Starfleet waited until they had a better foothold in those regions of space to go out to some of these far-flung places again and follow up on the various lost expeditions.
To clarify my own position on the episode...I don't think it's one of the best episodes, or a personal favorite. But on the broader level, I just think that it clicks as "this is Star Trek".
Or they were all drawing inspiration from another source.
Archer's Starfleet, which wasn't conceived of at the time, didn't go there either. Maybe the region was in an enemy's hands/too close for comfort? And for whatever reason, said enemy didn't bother to attack them. Figured they'd all exterminate themselves, or enjoyed watching.
I'd have loved to have gotten more on that, but since the people are all remotely controlled psychically, clearly something psychic is going on, in the tubes. In real life, you don't get handed 100% explanations, and they've just been dropped down into a whole world of complex mysteries, with a day or two to figure it all out and get gone. Fill air time with explanations, and there isn't so much time for spooky detail. We can guess at it, though, and that's great. They give us just enough to get our own logic working on it to figure it out.
Oh no, oh no, no.... It's great that they set up the situation, then leave it to soak in and have us connect the dots. They're dealing with a population who have been reduced to imagination-free, emotion-blunted half-people, in the name of eliminating passions and thereby creating "perfection". There are people in this life who seem inclined to want us to go this way; there have been for centuries.
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Take away passions by controlling, managing, blunting personalities, getting people "under control", and there have to be practical problems. One is reproduction. No passions, no reproduction. Solution: Festival. They aren't apparently mass-raping for no reason. It's the horrible result of "managed" feelings and urges. It's a pressure valve where they make up for lost time during which reproduction could NOT happen.
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Festival is also a necessary safety valve for repressed emotion in general, imagination... and for the feeling one can get when the spirit needs to be released from some limit, some sort of irresistable control. It's hardly a healthy release, but the lid has been screwed on SO tight that when it's let off, people explode. Landru probably experienced big problems with his "perfect" society when he/it tried to have total continuous unending control. Deaths? Insanity? And crazy computer came up with crazy solution.
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A lot of Trek was about this theme, what happens with emotional suppression, especially in s1. Like the whole concept of Spock and Vulcans.
Landru is aware of those he has the psychic link with. The others have to be very good actors and some are. Processing everyone's knowledge and co-ordinating it, to guess at people who might be "holes" in his otherwise total control, might be too big a task. A biological unit has to suspect a person before Landru knows.
Intentionally so. Space is big. The Enterprise is very far out. Some areas are just too far away for anyone to get back to soon.
Yeah, well, I guess it was the best that could be done under the circumstances. No one else is going to get back out there anytime soon. They can't afford to leave hundreds from their own crew. It was a big gamble. It could all go horribly wrong.
Maybe after some point they had to concentrate on the business of getting them safely off the planet with the planet saved. So, all the steps in unseating Landru. I love the writing, and this has always been a favorite for its content as well as mood. I've been seeing it for 50 years now, and I love it more each time, while it gets darker and more disturbing, and relevant.
It could have used some more time to be built up through more argument, because who's ever persuaded of anything so fast... but the argument we see is substantial. A Cliff Notes version of the perfect one they didn't have time for.
Who brought up that the tubes converted, but our heroes had to be taken to some facility with a booth for that? I only noticed that for the first time in my last recent viewing, after 50 years of seeing this episode...
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Landru wasn't used to being argued with, nor given commands...it wasn't designed for either. Notice how snappily Landru responds when Kirk asserts that Landru is a machine and demands that it answer his question.
As for the Festival, I think that it serves as a more dramatic way of demonstrating the control that Landru has over these people than just having them walk around slowly with silly smiles praising Landru.
As for the Festival, I think that it serves as a more dramatic way of demonstrating the control that Landru has over these people than just having them walk around slowly with silly smiles praising Landru.
Yes, but...
That is how I read it as well, and that would have been a really good point to bring up when convincing the computer to shut down and stop, because even the computer realizes on some level humans don't really work properly if they're all vacant smiles all the time. Also, the Festival is clearly harmful to "the Body" which goes against the prime directive. But Kirk doesn't even bother mentioning it...
But they could have easily made the time, as I've mentioned before, the middle portion of the episode is a lot of repeating "What is Landru? Take me to Landru!" and the immune guys looking scared at the mere mention of his name, and they could have also cut out the fake danger of the Enterprise falling from orbit.
Is it? It might be harmful to individual components of the Body, as we perceive things...but the Body is the whole society, and from Landru's perspective, the Festival may be doing exactly what it intends.
But the hologram Landru says something to the effect of "There's no conflict, no disease, no crime...", yet all of that does happen during the Festival, so it's clearly in contradiction with itself.
But it's Landru's planned, controlled way of releasing those urges, without the messy randomness of having people doing nasty things all of the time.
50 years ago this week:
Never one to let a good Donovan song go to waste...holdover from last week:
"Epistle to Dippy," Donovan
(#19 US)
New on the U.S. charts this week:
"The Love I Saw in You Was Just a Mirage," Smokey Robinson & The Miracles
(#20 US; #10 R&B)
"The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)," Harpers Bizarre
(#13 US; #4 AC; #34 UK; Originally recorded by Simon & Garfunkel for their 1966 album Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme)
And airing Thursday night:
Star Trek
"Space Seed"
Stardate 3141.9
Never one to let a good Donovan song go to waste...holdover from last week:
"Epistle to Dippy," Donovan
(#19 US)
New on the U.S. charts this week:
"The Love I Saw in You Was Just a Mirage," Smokey Robinson & The Miracles
(#20 US; #10 R&B)
"The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)," Harpers Bizarre
(#13 US; #4 AC; #34 UK; Originally recorded by Simon & Garfunkel for their 1966 album Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme)
And airing Thursday night:
Star Trek
"Space Seed"
Stardate 3141.9
MeTV said:
Mass rape and rioting ARE harmful to the Body, times twelve. They're truth-telling, not trying to appeal to him/it on its/his level.
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Dodge... I suppose I agree with all of that, except next time I see it, I might find purposes for all those later scenes. The one with the two older men caving in to their fear was crucial, I think. We get a glimpse into how dictatorships work away at people, instilling this dread at the mere thought of opposing.
The question is what Landru thinks of it. You can't impose our values on an alien computer.
That seems to presume that Kirk even brought the Festival into his argument with Landru, which he didn't. I was specifically responding to @dodge , who brought up that point:
Since Ladru was originally designed precisely to stop and prevent that kind of behaviour it would seem that initially it probably did share our values.
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