“Return of the Archons” is a pleasingly shambolic outer area model of Invasion of the Physique Snatchers, with Nineteenth-century costume and, by some means, much more blatant anticommunism. There’s a contact of horror, a touch of totalitarian dystopia, and greater than a little bit of farce.
Watching the episode this time, although, I used to be most struck by how the Vietnam-era plot portrays native resistance forces. The on-the-ground information of resistors is important, and our heroes could be useless and/or assimilated with out them. Nonetheless, Captain Kirk (William Shatner) treats his native helpers with steadily constant contempt. By doing so, he inadvertently calls into query his personal standing as a heroic liberator.
The Invaders Are Physique Snatched
The episode begins as Lt Sulu (George Takei) and one other crew member, each wearing Nineteenth-century apparel, run from ominous robed unhealthy guys on the planet of Beta III. Sulu manages to name the ship to beam him up, however earlier than he does, one of many robed weirdos touches him with the workers. The zap does one thing to his thoughts, and he doesn’t keep in mind the Enterprise. As a substitute, he will get a faraway manic glint in his eye (George Takei all the time goes mad magnificently). He begins babbling about peace and concord and the way he’s a part of the “physique.”
You’d suppose a touchdown occasion misplaced and transformed could be a sign for the Enterprise to get out of Dodge. However Kirk is there to research the disappearance of the USS Archon, misplaced a century earlier whereas orbiting the planet. So, in typical Kirk vogue, he doubles down and beams down with a fair greater touchdown occasion, together with Science Officer Spock (Leonard Nimoy) and Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley).
As soon as on the planet, the touchdown occasion discovers everyone seems to be weirdly peaceable and spaced out, like Sulu.
(Or they principally are. There’s a Crimson Hour competition of 12 hours throughout which everybody goes wild and pillages and fights and engages in ready-for-prime-time sexual acts. That is by no means actually defined, although presumably, it’s a confused nod to Orwell’s two-minute hate.)
The place Have been We? Oh Proper.
The crew discovers everybody has been “absorbed” into the “physique” by a mysterious god/chief named Landru. Regardless of the apparently primitive expertise on Beta-III, Landru has entry to nice energy. He blasts warmth rays on the Enterprise, requiring full shields to deflect, and stopping the ship from beaming up the touchdown crew or leaving orbit.
In the meantime, the touchdown occasion meets up with some members of a resistance. Reger (Harry Townes) makes an attempt to assist them escape, however Landru’s Lawgivers seize all of them and put together to assimilate them. They soak up McCoy. However one other member of the resistance, Marplon (Torin Thatcher), who’s the official assigned to zap their brains, sabotages the machines and leaves them un-zapped.
Marplon then leads the touchdown occasion to the chamber of Landru. Kirk and Spock work out that Landru is a pc programmed 6000 years in the past by the unique Landru. The pc is set to create a superbly peaceable world. However with out a soul or creativity, society has stagnated.
Kirk (who has defeated evil robots earlier than) convinces Landru that the pc itself threatens the well being of the physique. The antagonist promptly and helpfully destroys itself.
Kirk leaves a sociologist behind to show the Beta-III’s inhabitants the that means of freedom and tips on how to quarrel amongst themselves. The Enterprise then flies away, forsaking it a liberated world. Yay!
You Can’t Belief the Resistance
The Chilly Struggle dynamics listed below are pretty apparent. Landru’s Beta-III is a Communist hive-mind, by which individuality and soul are suppressed by fanatic leaders for the great of the collective. “Your individuality will merge into the unity of the great,” Landru intones, “and in your submergence into the widespread being of the Physique, one can find contentment and achievement.” To which Kirk, swashbuckling cowboy inheritor of the USA, responds, “With out freedom of alternative, there isn’t a creativity. With out creativity, there isn’t a life!”
The battle traces are drawn. On one aspect, a stagnant imposed totalitarian peace. On the opposite, battle and freedom.
At first, it looks like Reger and Marplon have chosen freedom. They’ve spent their lives below the thumb of the physique, however have fought again at nice private threat. Landru’s management is so terrifying and so absolute that Kirk and firm aren’t even certain how resistance is feasible. The truth that Reger and Marplon have survived looks like it ought to rely for one thing!
Extra, the resistance is completely very important to the touchdown occasion’s success. Reger explains to the touchdown occasion the risks they face, stopping them from waking an assimilated crew member who would immediately betray them to Landru. Marplon, for his half, saves the crew from closing absorption. With out his interference, they’d have been brain-zapped wholesale, just like the Archons earlier than them.
So is Kirk grateful for this invaluable assist? The reply is, not likely. He’s skeptical of Reger’s recommendation, and appears nearly contemptuous of the person’s worry—even after he watches considered one of Reger’s colleagues murdered in chilly blood!
Director Joseph Pevny and author Boris Sobelman share Kirk’s low estimate of indigenous resistors. They resolve to make Reger betray his useless pal and his whole life on the final minute.
When Kirk and Spock resolve to go confront and destroy Landru, Reger balks. He says that 6000 years earlier than Landru introduced peace to Beta-III. (“There was conflict. Convulsions. The world was destroying itself. Landru was our chief. He noticed the reality. He modified the world.”) Then he loses his nerve utterly and begins begging Landru to assimilate him.
Marplon appears prepared to show too. Disgusted, Kirk contemptuously tells these two individuals who have been courageously preventing a dropping battle for freedom for many years, “You stated you wished freedom. It is time you discovered that freedom isn’t a present. It must be earned.”
Landru, Meet Landru
Kirk marches Marplon to Landru’s chambers, the place he and Spock stage the ultimate debate. This human victory over the machine is meant to be a triumph of freedom over tyranny.
But it surely’s not a triumph of the individuals of Beta-III. Quite the opposite, Kirk has to overrule the resistors and seize management of the resistance from them. Freedom, in “Return of the Archons” isn’t one thing revolutionaries seize for themselves. It’s one thing that they’ve been gifted to them by wiser, extra highly effective outsiders. You need to study (from sociologists!) tips on how to be free.
The concept that you want a Kirk to show a Marplon tips on how to be free is a staple of American Chilly Struggle pondering throughout the Chilly Struggle, and for that matter after the Chilly Struggle. In Vietnam, in Iraq, and in lots of different locales, American rule and American objectives have been known as “freedom,” with out a lot reference to the preferences of the individuals supposedly being freed.
You do marvel if Reger misplaced his nerve as a result of he was afraid of liberty, or as a result of he had change into disillusioned with Kirk’s nagging, reckless vanity. Possibly he feared he was going from one Landru to a fair worse one.
The machine ordered Beta-III’s society, after which the machine blows up, and Federation consultants are available to order the society. You possibly can think about Reger and Marplon collectively fading again into the shadows, plotting to overthrow this new highly effective benefactor, not so totally different, maybe, from the outdated.
RATING: 6.0/10 SPECS
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Featured Picture Courtesy of Desilu Productions.
Noah Berlatsky is a contract author based mostly in Chicago. His e book, Surprise Girl: Bondage and Feminism within the Marston/Peter Comics was printed by Rutgers College Press. He thinks the Adam West Batman is the perfect Batman, darn it.