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).