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^ Like I said, the Betans were so clueless that they really could have no clue. Any figure of a set number of years would be hopeless. They can't possibly know the truth. Landru would probably have kept it from them anyway. He probably intentionally fudged the date.
And be honest, isn't it more likely that Beta III is an Earth colony anyway? Those people all look completely human, they dress human, their city looks human. Occam's Razor would seem to indicate that they pretty much ARE human.
^ Like I said, the Betans were so clueless that they really could have no clue. Any figure of a set number of years would be hopeless. They can't possibly know the truth. Landru would probably have kept it from them anyway. He probably intentionally fudged the date.
And be honest, isn't it more likely that Beta III is an Earth colony anyway? Those people all look completely human, they dress human, their city looks human. Occam's Razor would seem to indicate that they pretty much ARE human.
But Spock affirms the estimate of 6000 years in the episode. If Landru's origins are as suggested in that comic, wouldn't Spock and Kirk have known better...at least by the end of the episode?
SPOCK: Then the body dies. Creativity is necessary for the health of the Body.
LANDRU: This is impossible.
MARPLON: Is this truly Landru?
SPOCK: What's left of him, after he built and programmed this machine six thousand years ago.
Spock doesn't throw numbers around unless he is farily certain about them.
Why would Landru (as opposed to the costume designers) use Earth history as the template for his "perfect" society? Landru is a reactionary who pined for the "good old days". I doubt Earth's history would be the good old days to him.
If he lived 6000 years ago, it wouldn't be history to him, it'd be the future. Again, the writers' intent was to assume parallel evolution, which was a convenience to let them reuse existing costumes and backlot sets. I'm sure they knew it was silly, but they didn't have a choice.
An interpretation that Roddenberry sometimes put forth is that what we saw on the show was just a dramatized approximation of what "really" happened, so the clothes might not have actually looked like that at all. Although in my novel Ex Machina I did offer an explanation for why the Betans wore Earth clothing (Landru got the designs from the Archon's database and imposed periodic changes in fashion and architecture on the society as a substitute for genuine creativity and progress).
The recent Abramsverse comics suggest that Beta III is an Earth colony, and that Landru is actually a Starfleet officer who designed an AI which would help run it. Which, when you think of it, is entirely compatible with the episode as aired, as we have no certainty as to how long it's been since Landru took over anyway. Even the Betans don't know anything specific - the 6000-year figure was just a guess. The Betans had been so wussified by Landru that they are pretty much clueless as to Landru's origins. So the Abrams interpretation is just as valid as any other, IMHO.
I don't see any way the Abramsverse's comic can be reconciled with what we saw in the episode. Of all the comics stories, it's the one that's most impossible to justify within the premise that the Abramsverse only diverged from the Prime universe in 2233. The way Beta III and Landru are depicted is completely incompatible with what the episode asserted -- not only the dating references, but the physical appearance of Landru, the appearance of the planet and the behavior and wardrobe of its people, and so forth. It's not just a "hidden history" reevaluation of what the episode showed, it's a profound and fundamental reinvention of the whole premise of the episode.
It seems to me that the early issues of the comic entailed a lot of feeling out of how to handle the difference in timelines. The first two storylines were far too slavishly exact in their adaptations of the episodes, and it was quite implausible that things would play out so identically in such different timelines. The third storyline ("Operation: Annihilate") struck a pretty good balance of familiar and new, and then they did a fully original story after that, but the "Archons" adaptation that came next seemed to veer too far in the direction of reinvention, so that it was completely irreconcilable with the original timeline. After that they pulled back and have managed to strike a more reasonable balance. But the "Archons" story just doesn't work. I mean, as a completely alternative take on the concept of the episode, it's an interesting story, but it's impossible that it could be part of a timeline that branched from Prime in 2233.
The fundamentally odd thing about the clothes change is that a perfect society should have no need to evolve... Especially if perfection is a set of parameters jealously supervised by Landru. Surely any evolution would be deviation from perfection!
If fashion does change, it's probably another sign of Landru's construct being something else than our heroes' (and the Betans') simplified understanding of it.
Landru was credited with taking Beta "back to a simpler time". Perhaps this was not an end-all solution, but rather simply a reset for a new and better cycle of free evolution, which has now reached the 19th century in some superficial respects at least?
However, Landru explicitly says he "reserves creativity" to himself - and it is with accusations that this reservation is destroying the Body that Kirk manages to drive Landru to suicide. We're left thinking that Landru is running either essentially meaningless imitations of development, then, purely because he thinks this makes the Body happy...
...Or, possibly, exploring various ways of attaining paradise through evolution, but making all the important choices himself. Driving Beta from North American colonialism to early North American sovereignty doesn't appear a likely path to the avoidance of war and chaos, but perhaps it's a valid experiment among others, the difference being made through minor adjustments. Or perhaps through the addition of the Red Hour, the meaning of which is never satisfactorily explored.
Also, there's the Valley. Did Landru "save the planet" by allowing billions to die and only a tiny village to continue existing? Or is the village we see just one of the many experiments Landru is running in parallel, on a global scale? With each sub-experiment kept isolated by discouraging people from traveling? One can't achieve 19th century North American existence with the industrial and intellectual resources of a single village! Or even that village plus a surrounding rural Valley. Unless Landru cheats...
We never quite learn the extent of knowledge or ignorance of our heroes in this respect; all we know is that they somehow stumble onto the very village that is home to Landru himself. Lack of alternate targets, or some knowledge of the primacy of this target? We aren't told.
As far as rationalizations go, Landru is quite entitled to running simulations of old Earth thanks to obtaining data from the Archon, which allows us to tickmark yet another "Parallel Earth" as a perfectly rational phenomenon.
As for the six millennia figure, Landru doesn't dispute it, which may count for something. Then again, he probably just ignores Kirk's mention of it, like he does much of Kirk's argumentation.
