"The Return of the Archons" is the twenty-first episode of the first season of the American science fiction television series Star Trek.
Written by Boris Sobelman (based on a story by Gene Roddenberry), and directed by Joseph Pevney, it first aired on February 9, 1967.
In the episode, the crew of the Enterprise visit a seemingly peaceful planet whose inhabitants are "of the Body", controlled by an unseen ruler, and enjoy a night of violence during "Festival".
[5] Lt. Sulu is the only member of the landing party who beams up from the planet's surface, and exhibits inexplicable euphoria, as well as insisting the crew "is not of the Body" and referring to them as "Archons".
They find the inhabitants living in a 19th-century Earth-style culture, ruled over by cloaked and cowled "Lawgivers" and a reclusive dictator, Landru.
Reger and Marplon tell how Landru saved their society from war and anarchy 6,000 years ago and reduced the planet's technology to a simpler level.
Kirk and Spock use their phasers to blast through the wall and expose a computer programmed by Landru, who died 6,000 years ago.
[13] Character actor Sid Haig has a role as one of the hooded Lawgivers who first confront the landing party in Reger's boarding house.
[16][17] Scholar Eric Greene argues this is reflective of the "frontier myth" of Star Trek and American foreign policy in the late 20th century, in which a superior culture expands to impose its understanding of freedom and progress on others.
[22] When the landing party rests in a bedroom at Reger's boarding house, the windows are blacked out in all wide shots, but clearly transparent and showing the street outside in all close-ups.
[23] Eric Greene observes that "Return of the Archons" is the first time Star Trek attempted to deal with issues of war and peace raised by the Vietnam War, and established a template that was used in a number of subsequent episodes such as "A Taste of Armageddon", "This Side of Paradise", and "For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky".
[24] The Federation's moral superiority is exhibited through its emphasis on individual freedom, progress, and resort to violence only in self-defense, while the Betan society is criticized for its state control, stagnation, and reliance on aggression.
[24] Greene argues that these episodes prefigure the Borg Collective, a far more overt totalitarian (even Soviet) metaphor introduced in the series Star Trek: The Next Generation.
[25] Scholar M. Keith Booker notes that the episode presents Kirk "at his most American", valuing struggle against obstacles as the highest virtue and denouncing the Betan utopia (equated with Stalinism) as dehumanizing.
[29] Corey points out that the episode seems to draw heavily on German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz's "Principle of Radical Optimism", which concludes that ours is the best of all possible worlds because it contains the conditions for human existence (and not because it has a greater or lesser number of moral evils).