The dream sequence turns out to be really happening, but this is still 1960s TV so the guys with the poles who are dressed as ominous monks merely shoot fairy dust from the ends of their sticks directly into Sulu's face, after which he gets beamed up to the Enterprise with a look of utter bliss on his face. There really ain't a lot of subtext here, people.
Sulu is so happy from his large pole adventure with the anonymous, faceless men down on the planet, that even he-man Kirk is intrigued, so he, Spock, McCoy and a couple of expendable guys beam down wearing Gunsmoke cowboy costumes. I just thank God he left the ass-less chaps back on the ship.
Actually, I'm not sure at first what Spock is wearing, since the Enterprise tailor once again cleverly disguised the first officer's pointy ears by tossing a blanket over his head, so it's possible he's dressed as a cop or a construction worker. It's fun to stay at the NCC-1701!
Why Kirk thinks it's a brilliant idea to take the only officer on his entire ship who looks like an alien down to a planet of people who look like humans and thinks yet again that a blanket tossed over him is a brilliant disguise is a topic once more left unexplored. I mean, one gust of wind and the jig is up, stupid.
The planet is conveniently on 24-hour time, which is a lifesaver because Kirk doesn't have to reset his watch. It also has an even more convenient analog clock hanging in the planet's town square, which people point to ominously and tell the new arrivals -- including the weirdo draped in a blanket -- that it's "festival." The clock strikes six and everybody starts abusing and raping women and throwing rocks. I now understand that "festival" has been going on in the Mideast for years.
I'd figure Kirk would be right at home with at least one major part of festival, but instead of swinging his pants over his head and shouting "yee-haw!," he and his pals take refuge in a Paramount backlot apartment building where a creepy old man accuses them of disobeying the will of Allah by not running around like maniacs and killing people outside.
Did I say Allah? I meant Lando.
Lando is apparently the guy who runs the whole planet, so the fact that he was running only Cloud City fifteen years later means that at some point he was demoted.
The creepy old man runs out to obviously rat out Kirk and co. First off, how does a geriatric negotiate the planet-wide riot that's going on outside? Second, why doesn't Kirk just bash him over the head with a rock and say it was a festival-related fatality? At the very least have the old buzzard beamed over to a desert island until they can sort out whatever is going on down there. Just a little sci-fi tip: if you have the opportunity and the means to beam screeching Donald Sutherland to an uninhabited atoll before he can rat you out to the other pod people, do it.
A couple of monks with big sticks arrive and zap an old man, but Kirk decides he isn't into that.
Kirk and the rest escape the horny monks and hide in the same secret dungeon they hide in every week. Not only is it clearly the one from the spooky Halloween episode with the giant pussycat, they even redress the set and reuse it later in this exact same episode. Maybe the set people blew their budget on the weed they bought from the writers.
Up in space, the Enterprise is suddenly getting pulled down to the planet and Scotty doesn't have a clue what to do. I'd say locate the source and shoot it with those precise laser-beam weapons, but Scotty is too busy dramatically running around the bridge and looking for a Ring-Ding that rolled behind a console to think of that.
Down in the painted-plywood dungeon, Lando shows up looking way fruitier than he did in Cloud City. He's still partial to capes, though.
Lando is a floating ghost with hair like Betty White's. He blows a dog whistle and everybody passes out, but William Shatner's contract says he's so heroic that he gets to pass out last. (Also, that he's first in line at the craft services table, although I don't blame him there because if he let Uhura and Scotty go first there'd be no doughnuts left.)
CUE: BURT BACHARACH'S "WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS NOW IS LOVE"
FADE TO BLACK.
Kirk is also so completely heroic that he's first to wake up in the different plywood jail cell (which is the same plywood jail cell with a couple of different walls) after the commercial break. So Spock, who is supposed to be physically superior to humans, is first to get knocked out but is not the first to wake up. Apparently all you need to take over Vulcan is a referee's whistle and a very big megaphone.
Bones shows up, and he's been turned into a blissed-out zombie by the pervert monks, but Spock either doesn't remember that he used a mind-meld to fix the screwed-up brain of a mental patient a couple of weeks ago, or he conveniently forgets because of all the "pointed-eared," "green-blooded" racist comments he's had to put up with from Dr. Jerkwad all these years.
Kirk gets taken to be brainwashed next, and this week's script says that he can't beat up two slow-moving monks whose only weapons are a pair of unwieldy sticks, so he doesn't even try.
Spock gets taken after Kirk appears to have been zombie-fied, and I wonder why these guys are all just lining up like kids at a cotton candy machine to get brainwashed and aren't getting dragged kicking and screaming to the brainwashing booth. Even wimp me would have kicked a monk in the crotch and made a run for it.
Kirk wasn't brainwashed after all. Surprise!
A guy in the orange Bea Arthur bathrobe who is supposed to be running the brainwasher sets the dial on low, so Kirk's brain is safe and only his toupee gets lightly rinsed. Back in the jail cell, he and Spock plot their brilliant plot to overthrow Lando two inches away from McCoy who, recall, is brainwashed as all get-out. Personally, I would have used the Vulcan nerve-pinch to put the spy in the lifeboat to sleep so that I could plot my escape in private, but maybe that's why I don't command my own starship. Also, because starships are pretend, a fact Sulu still didn't understand twenty years later when he used to complain that Shatner was keeping him from getting his own ship. (I wish I was kidding about that. I'm not.)
The guy in Bea Arthur's orange bathrobe, Mr. Bea Ex Machina, takes Kirk and Spock to fruity Lando's special secret room, and they blast a hole through the wall and find out that Lando is really a computer running the whole planet. So on a huge planet, they just happened to beam down to the exact little town where the computer is. What are the odds? Actually, remarkably good, since I can remember offhand there were at least two other Star Trek episodes where the exact same thing happens. Wait, there was the Indian one where Kirk got amnesia, too. Make that three.
Fruity Ghost-Lando floats in the room and makes their phasers stop working, because that hadn't magically happened yet. Why do they even bother to bring those things? After the second time some alien waved his hand and made mine stop working, I'd leave it on the ship and just bring a big club down with me.
A couple of monks in bathrobes run in, and Kirk forgets that his phaser was broken by the omnipotent, 6,000 year old computer two seconds ago and threatens them with it.
Hey, if this computer is 6,000 years old, who maintained it all those years? Or maybe it's one of those magic computers that never needs a Windows mind-control-upgrade and it's living in a magic room where the air conditioning never breaks and there's no dust and humidity.
Kirk outsmarts the magic computer by asking it if the chicken or the egg came first and if a tree fell on Tampax 12 and no one was around to hear it would it make a sound? The computer starts smoking like crazy. Then it starts drinking heavily and gets into a fatal car accident on the way home.
The entire planet is liberated from six millennia of captivity, so Kirk leaves one crummy sociologist behind to run the joint because everyone knows sociology is a precise science and the guys who get degrees in it aren't weirdos with no grasp on how the real world works.
Back on the bridge, Spock says that people have longed for a planet as peaceful and secure as Lando's, apparently forgetting all about the nightly six o'clock rape-and-murder-fest, but that's okay because after the first act the writers forgot all about it too.
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