first time Star Trek attempted to deal with issues of war and peace raised by the Vietnam War, and established a template that would be 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". 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. 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. 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. Scholars Michael A. Burstein and John Kenneth Muir note that the plot of "The Return of the Archons" (in which Kirk and company discover a stagnant society worshiping a god-like being whom Kirk destroys with human illogic) became something of a cliché in the decades after the series ended. Burstein criticizes the episode for attacking organized religion, which it presented as suppressing freedom and creativity. But religious scholar Michael Anthony Corey praises the episode for realizing that the elimination of a huge number of moral evils can occur only by causing a single, massive moral evil (the loss of free will). 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). Zack Handlen of The A.V. Club gave the episode a "B" rating, describing the episode as having a "loose, unpolished feeling" and lacking "the force of the series' best story lines", but praised the story's ambition. "Return of the Archons" is one of actor Ben Stiller's favorite episodes of Star Trek. "Red Hour", the time of day when the "Festival" begins, is the name of his production company. This was noted as one of the episodes of Star Trek that does not have a traditional villain, and noted that computers gone wrong as a villain might be expected in a technologically