I saw 'Return of the Archons' again recently. Maybe I missed something, but what was the point of the Festival? Was it so Landau could give up control for a little while, and do maintenance on it's systems, or was it to let the humans experience some relief from it's control? It also goes against it's claim of a peaceful society.
That we can't really tell is what makes this episode so much better.
However, in the teaser we already learn that the local society is in a state of constant change: our heroes beam down in costumes that are all wrong and result in the landing party cover getting blown, presumably because those were the correct ones when they last checked. Which must have been just hours ago!
It would make sense for Landru to try everything within its powers to steer the society under its rule towards the optimum. And this means experimentation, or else Landru would already have gotten there. Perhaps the place looks so much like small town America because Landru is currently running a social experiment based on data it confiscated from the
Archon, and jumping ahead a century at a time?
I also wonder how many times they have the 'Festival'?
Not too often, because our heroes' cover story (invented for them by the natives they encounter!) involves them arriving
for the festival. It's clearly a big event, even if the sandbox in which Landru plays is a small one (only one Town and one Valley, it seems, or else the heroes and the "Archons" both zeroing in on this apparent "capital of Landru" complete with the lair for the master computer would be too unlikely).
We could argue the Festival is related to the big change that suddenly outdated the costumes Sulu's landing party wore. Perhaps the society changes several times a year - but then the natives would need to suffer from pretty frequent forced amnesia, and the organizing of secret resistance clubs would be all the more difficult. A change once in a lifetime, or once per five generations, would cover all the bases, but perhaps leave the Festivals too widely separated (if they indeed tie into the changes at all).
seems like a lot of damage to fix up afterwards.
Oh, I dunno. The rioters actually take great care
not to shatter any windows (apart from some very small panes next to a doorway)! Those are presumably too expensive in the reality of the fiction, in addition to being that in the reality of the studio backlot...
Timo Saloniemi
That is unless someone can point me to concrete evidence of a link from Return of the Archons to the introduction of the Borg in Next Gen.
