The Red Hour?

[Brutal Strudel]

There is a real world example. In some Buddhist societies, monks have a one-day festival in which they get drunk and generally act wild. The local citizens fund it and take care of the monks.

Monks Gone Wild!

An example more familiar to Westerners is Mardi Gras. And for American college students there's spring break -- although that's really just an excuse to act a little wilder than they normally do.

I wonder about the Mardis Gras aspect--the Landrieus are a powerful family in Louisiana/New Orleans politics. Probably just coincidence...

Anyway, I never wondered about Festival. I always assumed the consensus here.

 

[Orcus]

If the people of that planet (the entire planet?) went crazy because Landru simply turned off his control for a few hours, then what happened on the streets after Kirk and Spock destroyed Landru? Or did Landru have to "push" everyone to run wild?

Landru was never "offline" until Kirk destroyed it/forced it to destroy itself. The Red Hour wildness was part of the peoples' programmed behavior.

At the end of the episode there is a brief conversation with the 23rd century equivalent of a social worker who is among the cultural team sent to help the inhabitants adjust to making a stable society without Landru - apparently the people were so used to being controlled that they simply did not know what to do without Landru. The cultural team member mentions several domestic quarrels in a slightly approving way, and Kirk relaxes - obviously these people are on their way to a normal life, and he himself did the Right Thing Once Again.

That last sentence in particular is especially cynically funny. Yes...

I also think the episode in question is load of old cock too...

 

[scotpens]

. . . I'm more worried about the mixed message being sent: freedom is bad, but freedom is good. Moderation of violence is good, but moderation is evil. The government protects family happiness, but the government is the enemy of happiness. Where's the clever, thought-provoking message in that? "Always aim at the middle"? "Vanilla is the best flavor"?

Or perhaps "Moderation in pursuit of the moderate is neither a vice nor a virtue"?

 

[Red Ranger]

I tend to agree with most of you that the Red Hour was a means of emotional release from time to time. Landru, with its machine logic, postulated that people would need to "blow off steam," and since they were peaceful and placid most of the time, all those pent-up negative emotions would just burst out during the Red Hour. It certainly seemed mandated to me by Landru, because one of the elder guys remarks that Kirk and the others were too young to be excused, and should be in Festival. That indicates this was a regular event, scheduled and controlled by Landru. It is curious there's no dialogue mentioning it, though.

 

[Trollheart]

Everything shouldn't have to be spoonfed to the audience. The explanation is implicit in the story.

It's not a matter of it being spoonfed to the audience, it's a matter of a story element actually being important to the story. It was an element that was introduced in grand fashion, then dropped and not mentioned again during the entire episode. It's like taking the time to introduce a character at the beginning of a story, only to have him disappear and never mentioned again, with no apparent affect on the story.

When you set up story threads the need to pay off. They don't necessarily need to be explained in great detail, but they do need to pay off in some way. The episode is initially set up as a mystery as to what the heck is going on with this Festival. Then it's dropped and never touched again.

Prezactly! It's like (sorry to go all Babylon 5 on you, but it's the best example of threads tying up, even if sometimes it's years later) we're told there's a hole in Sinclair's mind in season 1 of B5, and then it's never spoken of again. Or Londo's dream of his own death never comes to pass.
Things like that, when they're highlit in such a powerful way, affect the viewer and should be explained, or at least referred to, as I mentioned earlier. To just simply assume the viewer will form their own interpretation of it (right or wrong) is lazy writing.