I've seen that episode many, many times and never realized this until today. Sulu was absorbed on the spot by the Lawgivers, but Kirk and company had to be taken off to "absorption chambers". Was it simply a dramatic thing so that absorbed Sulu could be on the Enterprise and Kirk and company had to be taken somewhere giving them time to dodge the process or was there another reason that makes sense in-universe.
Return of the Archons question
- Thread starter E-DUB
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There appears to be various people immune to absorption. It could be that Sulu was susceptible to the on-the-spot absorption but Landru calculated that Kirk and his disobedient group needed to go to the absorption chamber with the restraints and more powerful mind control system and if that didn't work to be killed.
Maybe Sulu was processed in the Absorption Chamber, manacled to the wall ("Oh, my! I volunteer"), but he escaped before he got the finishing touch, which is a quick spritz from the Lawgiver's tube.
Then the Lawgiver caught up with him on the street and administered the Activation Code. From then on, it's like when your toaster won't work unless it's connected to the Internet. They own you.
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Great question. I love it when people discuss the handful of eps that are in my personal top ten but not most people's – this one, "Wink of an Eye," "Wolf in the Fold" and "Friday's Child." (The rest of my T10 is very conventional.)
This–and the Lawgivers' abilities given the "hollow tube . . . no mechanism"–are pretty confusing. I like Zap's take (with hilarious added joke) and blssdwlf's theory as well. I've also always assumed that Sulu's LG street absorption was only temporary and would have required the later use of the absorption chamber to make it lasting/permanent. With Kirk & company, the former step wasn't needed, because they were in custody.
Two additional pieces of evidence support this idea. First, the absorption chamber appears to be designed for one, not many, so temporary LG field zaps may have been needed to enable Landru's takeover and maintenance of control. Of course, there could have been unseen mass absorption chambers elsewhere (much like the Enterprise's never-seen, but oft-discussed cargo transporters), but maybe it truly was a one-on-one process. Second, Sulu recovers and is in full uniform backslapping the dude covering for him on the bridge pretty quickly. I suspect the writer(s) was/were implying that Landru's destruction instantly released Sulu from its influence, but I think it's just as easy to conclude that his tempo-zap was wearing off well before we saw him recovered. After all, Scotty doesn't strike me as the sort of commander to release Sulu against Kirk's original order unless Sulu was clearly back to normal and M'Benga or whoever was subbing for McCoy backed that up with medical data.
This–and the Lawgivers' abilities given the "hollow tube . . . no mechanism"–are pretty confusing. I like Zap's take (with hilarious added joke) and blssdwlf's theory as well. I've also always assumed that Sulu's LG street absorption was only temporary and would have required the later use of the absorption chamber to make it lasting/permanent. With Kirk & company, the former step wasn't needed, because they were in custody.
Two additional pieces of evidence support this idea. First, the absorption chamber appears to be designed for one, not many, so temporary LG field zaps may have been needed to enable Landru's takeover and maintenance of control. Of course, there could have been unseen mass absorption chambers elsewhere (much like the Enterprise's never-seen, but oft-discussed cargo transporters), but maybe it truly was a one-on-one process. Second, Sulu recovers and is in full uniform backslapping the dude covering for him on the bridge pretty quickly. I suspect the writer(s) was/were implying that Landru's destruction instantly released Sulu from its influence, but I think it's just as easy to conclude that his tempo-zap was wearing off well before we saw him recovered. After all, Scotty doesn't strike me as the sort of commander to release Sulu against Kirk's original order unless Sulu was clearly back to normal and M'Benga or whoever was subbing for McCoy backed that up with medical data.
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Archons is creepy and effective in the sense of dread it puts in the viewer, but really doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Also, at episode #22 filmed it is the first where they try and mostly succeed in tricking the natives into thinking they are from their planet, with no logical explanation as to how the language issue is dealt with. Afterward they just got lazy and sidestepped making any effort to explain how they could be taken for natives. A universal translator works for advanced races but is absurd to pretend it could work well enough to trick less advanced aliens into thinking they were "from the valley" or any other region of whatever planet they were on.
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This sort of question is the type that can strain the allegory of a story into breaking. A series like Star Trek cannot be taken too literally (the need for "in universe" explanations for everything by some fans).
Without becoming too specific and risk being "too political" for the forum, we've seen many psy-ops in history that require little more than a "hollow tube" to enthrall the susceptible with some controlling idea. (Here is one place where we must take Spock's statement about "hollow tube" literally—no in-universe cop-outs that maybe the material of the tube contained technology too esoteric for Spock to understand. It was, as he said, a hollow tube. Just that. A symbol with no technology behind it.)
There is a demonstrated "herd effect" for people to go along with others, even when they can see that the herd is "wrong" about something:
Sometimes all it takes is one little boy to point out that the Emperor is naked to break the spell. And there are other documented cases where the "brainwashed" will continue to believe the propaganda, no matter what evidence is provided. Or as Mark Twain put it, “It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”
Without becoming too specific and risk being "too political" for the forum, we've seen many psy-ops in history that require little more than a "hollow tube" to enthrall the susceptible with some controlling idea. (Here is one place where we must take Spock's statement about "hollow tube" literally—no in-universe cop-outs that maybe the material of the tube contained technology too esoteric for Spock to understand. It was, as he said, a hollow tube. Just that. A symbol with no technology behind it.)
There is a demonstrated "herd effect" for people to go along with others, even when they can see that the herd is "wrong" about something:
Sometimes all it takes is one little boy to point out that the Emperor is naked to break the spell. And there are other documented cases where the "brainwashed" will continue to believe the propaganda, no matter what evidence is provided. Or as Mark Twain put it, “It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”
Good points, especially about the allegory, but the Lawgivers straight killed Tamar where he stood. That's not mere Jim Jones or other cult-like (geeeee, I am just *straining* to think of a current example) behavior. Somehow the hollow tube with no mechanism was lethal.
Oh, and I like in-universe fan explanations. It's amazing to me how much of a nearly 59-YO TV show can be explained with a modicum of reason and logic – and it's equally inspiring how much such devotion TOS inspires in its fans to this day.
For me, the bigger issue is how an alien planet uses a 12-hour clock face with Arabic numerals, plus Hollywood-backlot Earth architecture and clothing styles that mimic 18th- and 19th-century America.
(In my novel Ex Machina, which featured Lindstrom as a supporting character, I handwaved that Landru had borrowed Earth designs from the Archon's database and introduced them to provide a superficial top-down form of "innovation" in Betan culture. The Kelvin-timeline comics from IDW, which started out depicting the Kelvin versions of TOS episodes before shifting to telling original stories, retconned Beta III to be an Earth colony, although they did so in a way that was irreconcilable with the premise of the Prime and Kelvin timelines being one and the same prior to 2233. Other than that, I kind of liked the idea.
Yes Landru died over six thousand years before so unless time travel occurred then Beta Three could not be an earth colony. Another explanation could be that the preservers seeded the planet and those designs come from them or their mental impregnation upon the population mind.
JB
JB
Tamar was a believer. When Kirk resisted immediately after, he explained to Spock, "Everything we've seen here so far seems to indicate some sort of compulsive involuntary stimulus to action." That people will "die" rather than give up an illusion is what I meant in my post above.
In-universe explanations are fine when they fit. But too often elements that are due to production limitations, or a "common" audience get the Procrustean treatment to "explain" them in-universe. There are examples in this very thread! For example the Enterprise crew passing as locals by appearance and language, that a 12-hour clock with Arabic numerals is used and picayune details like that. If the show had to explain and cover for such minutia—where the aim is to tell parables of our world that the audience can relate to—then none of the stories would ever get off the ground. Instead, Roddenberry adopted the sci-fi trope of matter transmitters to side-step the landfall problem every week.
The insertion of the "Preservers" in the episode "The Paradise Syndrome" was a brilliant stroke that helped explain the ubiquity of humanoids in Star Trek. And it might have provided fodder for later episodes, had the series continued into additional seasons. Aside from its explanatory power, it was a fascinating notion. The idea was touched upon in "Return to Tomorrow" when Spock states that Sargon's star-faring ancestors may explain certain aspects of Vulcan pre-history.
The original TRON (1982) was a "perfect" allegory because the events could be taken both literally (Flynn was really digitized into the computer world) and figuratively (Flynn "fought" the computer from the terminal in the laser lab). Are we thus supposed to believe that programs are self-aware entities within the computer, some of whom believe in the Users (god) who wrote them, and so on? No, that is another aspect of allegory—a foreshortening of the details and complexity of a real-world situation in much the manner of an oblique projection of a cube on 2D paper "represents" an object that requires higher dimensions to exist. Instead, the allegory of TRON moves outward—to our world—rather than inward to the virtual world. (Note the closing, time-lapse shot of the city looking much like the cities of light within the computer, and so on.)
Yes, that's what I meant about the comic being incompatible with the idea that the timelines only diverged in 2233. The comics' author Mike Johnson worked from the assumption that Kelvin was a parallel universe that had always been separate, even though that contradicted what the movies intended.
Except the 18th- and 19th-century designs in "Archons" didn't exist 6000 years ago, so that has the same problem you just pointed out.
These days, rather than trying to handwave things like I did in Ex Machina, I'd be more inclined to go with the Doylist interpretation that Roddenberry himself favored: that Star Trek is just a dramatization of the ship's "actual" missions, and sometimes liberties were taken for creative or budgetary reasons (like how Roddenberry justified the Klingon redesign in ST:TMP by claiming they'd always looked like that and TOS just couldn't afford to show them correctly). So in this case, the dramatization just used stock Earth-style backlot sets and historical costumes as approximations of whatever the structures and wardrobe on Beta III "actually" looked like, and putting Sulu and Lindstrom in 18th-century clothing in the teaser to contrast to the "modern" Betans' 19th-century fashions was just symbolic, so that the audience could recognize the anachronism. (Although that still doesn't make sense, since the episode claimed the culture was stagnant and unchanging, so why would the fashions change? I think that was part of what I was trying to rationalize with that passage in Ex Machina.)
If the "hollow tube" had no power to do anything beyond that imparted by psychology, why are outsiders with no cultural context for what's going on just as susceptible to it (though perhaps more easily cured) as those who are steeped in the planet's "culture" (however stagnant)?
It wasn't psychological. Kirk explicitly said the tubes were "antennae for some sort of broadcast power," whereupon Spock said he was detecting strong power generations radiating in all directions. The tubes just concentrated the broadcast energy to lethal intensity.
The concept of powering devices remotely through wireless energy transfer has been theorized about since the 19th century, most famously by Nikola Tesla, and it was a common idea in science fiction for generations. The first successful use of broadcast power was achieved in 1964, when William C. Brown succeeded in powering a model helicopter with beamed microwave energy. So it's no surprise that a 1960s Trek episode would've included the idea of broadcast power to represent the advancement of Beta III's ancient technology.
So their brains were re-programmed or overwhelmed, then? Either placed into a state where they could receive brainwashing, tuned to the same neurological frequency as the other affected members of the planet, or overwhelmed by a signal that canceled out rational thought?
Earlier than that. Nikola Tesla first envisioned the use of radio frequency broadcasts as a means of transmitting power, rather than information. (Which is to say that neither Tesla's idea of powering the world wirelessly, nor Edison's idea of powering the world with low-voltage DC, were at all practical, and both would have kept the world using line-shaft technology in factories, and living with candle/gaslight levels of night illumination).
Be that as it may, the episode was filled with inconsistencies and non-sequiturs, but that is hardly uncommon in Star Trek, and has never been allowed to stand in the way of good storytelling.
(Note that Tesla himself eventually realized the impracticality of broadcasting power in a way that would make billing for usage impossible, cause massive noise pollution, and have tremendous losses from the inverse square law alone, abandoned the idea, and -- along with air brake pioneer George Westinghouse -- advocated AC power transmission, with the ability to trade current for voltage with simple electromagnetic transformers, leading to the present-day power grid.)
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Evidently the tubes can work as antennae for both the brainwashing rays and the heat rays. I would speculate that the remote brainwashing uses a similar principle to the Neural Neutralizer in "Dagger of the Mind."
Yes, as I said, the concept was experimented with by Tesla and others, but I'm talking about the first successful practical application of the theory (or at least what Wikipedia claims was the first).
Of course, today we routinely use wireless induction to charge our devices, but only through direct contact between device and charger. Doing it over a distance has never been made practical, which is why it's often been depicted in science fiction as a futuristic technology.
Wireless inductive charging doesn't require contact; just extremely short range. And that's because of the aforementioned inverse square law.
Incidentally, the Griffith Observatory houses and exhibits (and probably still demonstrates, assuming the insulation hasn't broken down) a massive (and very old) Tesla coil. In the demonstration, neon tubing -- and bare fluorescent tubes, hand-held by the docent or staffer doing the demonstration -- light up from the RF energy being put out by the coil. No antenna required; the RF itself directly excites the gases in the tubes.
His scheme for wireless power transmission involved what he called a "magnifying transmitter," a refinement of the Tesla coil. A Google search on "Tesla magnifying transmitter" produces a number of relevant articles.
I note that I've found the recent trend of using RF for private conversations (both cellular and short-range wireless landline handsets, as well as WiFi for non-portable devices), and using land-lines for broadcasting (i.e., cable TV) to be ass-backwards.
Incidentally, the Griffith Observatory houses and exhibits (and probably still demonstrates, assuming the insulation hasn't broken down) a massive (and very old) Tesla coil. In the demonstration, neon tubing -- and bare fluorescent tubes, hand-held by the docent or staffer doing the demonstration -- light up from the RF energy being put out by the coil. No antenna required; the RF itself directly excites the gases in the tubes.
His scheme for wireless power transmission involved what he called a "magnifying transmitter," a refinement of the Tesla coil. A Google search on "Tesla magnifying transmitter" produces a number of relevant articles.
I note that I've found the recent trend of using RF for private conversations (both cellular and short-range wireless landline handsets, as well as WiFi for non-portable devices), and using land-lines for broadcasting (i.e., cable TV) to be ass-backwards.
Well, yes, of course, but as far as I know, inductive chargers usually require placing a device directly atop them. I've never owned one, so I don't know how far a device can be from them and still charge, but I doubt it's enough to make any significant difference. Although Wikipedia says that induction can be used to power implanted medical devices in the body.
Given that we're all awash in RF energy from cell phones and wi-fi and such, it would be nice if we could harness it to power streetlights or keep our devices charged or whatever.
https://tos.trekcore.com/gallery/al...2-return-of-archons/return-archons-br-230.jpg
It wasn't just a hollow tube that killed Tamar. It was a hollow tube that had some mechanism to emit a sparkler/smoking effect. The hollow tube was capable of manifesting a physical effect that was visible and lethal to the target. I do like the Christopher's idea that it was used to direct wireless energy at targets.
