The Conscience of the King (TOS episode)
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| Star Trek: TOS episode | |
| "The Conscience of the King" | |
 Kirk questions the mysterious Kodos, The Conscience of the King. |
|
| Episode no. | 13 |
|---|---|
| Prod. code | 013 |
| Airdate | December 8, 1966 |
| Writer(s) | Barry Trivers |
| Director | Gerd Oswald |
| Guest star(s) | Grace Lee Whitney Majel Barrett Arnold Moss Barbara Anderson Bruce Hyde William Sargent Natalie Norwick Karl Bruck Marc Adams Eddie Paskey |
| Year | 2266 |
| Stardate | 2817.6 |
| Episode chronology | |
| Previous | "The Menagerie (Parts 1 & 2)" |
| Next | "Balance of Terror" |
"The Conscience of the King" is an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series. It is episode #13, production #13, and aired on December 8, 1966. It was written by Barry Trivers and directed by Gerd Oswald.
Overview: Captain Kirk crosses paths with an actor suspected of having been a murderous dictator many years before.
Contents |
[edit] Plot
On stardate 2817.6, the starship USS Enterprise, under the command of Captain James T. Kirk, is transporting a Shakespearean acting troupe led by Anton Karidian to Benecia Colony from Planet Q.
Before their arrival, Captain Kirk is contacted by a Dr. Thomas Leighton who wishes to inform Kirk about the development of a new synthetic food. Leighton however, uses the opportunity to tell Kirk that Karidian is really Kodos the Executioner, the former tyrannical governor of Tarsus IV, who is responsible for many deaths - including members of both Kirk's and Leighton's families. He takes Kirk to watch a performance of Macbeth with Karidian in the title role. Karidian is shown having just killed King Duncan and delivering the lines:
- Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
- Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather
- The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
- Making the green one red.
Twenty years before, Governor Kodos ordered that 4,000 colonists on his planet be put to death, thus acuiring the grim sobriquet of "the Executioner". His rationale for the slaughter was that there was a critical food shortage on the planet, to combat which some lives had to be sacrificed; but he apparently applied some personal theory of eugenics to decide who lived or died. Furthermore, the vital supply ships that could have saved the whole colony came much sooner than Kodos anticipated, rendering his measures unnecessary.
Kodos was commonly believed to have been killed sometime later and his body burned beyond recognition, but Leighton claims that he escaped and assumed a new identity. Until recently there were nine known people left who could identify Kodos, but the only three now surviving are Captain Kirk, Lt. Kevin Riley (also serving on the Enterprise), and Dr. Leighton. All the others have recently died.
Unsure if Karidian really is Kodos, Kirk decides initially just to keep a close eye on him - and his lovely but mysterious daughter Lenore. When Dr. Leighton is found dead, Karidian is the primary suspect, but Kirk takes no action for the moment.
Mr. Spock becomes curious about the Captain's behavior and decides to do some investigating of his own. Of the original nine eyewitnesses, only two now remain - Kirk and Riley - and when each previous witness died, Karidian's acting troupe has always been somewhere nearby. Later, Lt. Riley's milk is poisoned, and he would have died if he hadn't been communicating with other crewmembers at the moment of the poison's effect, allowing them to immediately dispatch assistance. Spock is certain that Karidian and Kodos are the same person; however, Kirk - deeply haunted by what happened on Tarsus IV - remains reluctant to draw the same conclusion regarding the gentlemanly and noble-seeming actor. A further complicating factor is that Kirk has fallen for Lenore.
Kirk's and Spock's discussion is interrupted by the ominous humming of an overloading phaser hidden in Kirk's quarters. While Spock is clearing the deck, Kirk finds the weapon and jettisons it before it explodes.
Kirk now decides to confront Karidian and demands point-blank to know if he is Kodos. Karidian is evasive (though clearly pained), but enough of his dialogue is recorded to determine whether it matches a voiceprint of Kodos. Meanwhile Lt. Riley is recovering in sickbay and overhears Dr. McCoy's log entry, learning that this Karidian is suspected of being Kodos - the man responsible for killing Riley's family. Riley sneaks out of the sick bay, clearly bent on revenge. Meanwhile, Spock runs the voiceprint analysis; the results reveal a close but not exact match, and Kirk is still reluctant to pass this final, damning judgement on the man.
The Karidian troupe begins their stage performance of Hamlet at the Enterprise's theatre. We see Karidian playing the Ghost, speaking to Hamlet:
- I am thy father's spirit,
- Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night,
- And for the day confined to fast in fires,
- Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
- Are burnt and purged away.
Lt. Riley sneaks backstage, phaser in hand, ready to exact his revenge on Karidian; however, Kirk finds him and persuades him to surrender the phaser. Their conversation is overheard by Karidian, who goes backstage to investigate, followed by Lenore. Karidian - who for 20 years has tried to forget his past and shield Lenore from it - learns to his horror that his adoring daughter has (by her own admission) been on a crazed crusade to protect him by assassinating the witnesses. She plans to complete her killing spree by eliminating the last two witnesses.
Lenore then produces a phaser and takes aim at Kirk. Desperate to prevent any more bloodshed in his name, Karidian/Kodos jumps into the line of fire as Lenore tries to shoot Kirk. As her beloved father lies dead, Lenore - quoting some poignantly apposite lines from Shakespeare - slumps over his body in a paroxysm of grief, driven out of her mind by the realisation of what she has done.
[edit] Trivia
[edit] Shakespeare parallels
The episode takes its title from the concluding lines of Act II of Hamlet: "The play's the thing/Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king." But its use of Shakespeare goes further than that.
Karidian is the only one of the acting troupe shown doing so at length. The lines from Macbeth and Hamlet that he is shown speaking provide analogous insight into his character and past. Hamlet is particularly important since Kirk and several of the other main characters are written in this episode to correspond to characters in that play.
- Leighton represents the Ghost, who lures Kirk to a private discussion to tell him that a terrible secret has been kept from him, and then dies not long afterwards. We see him first partially in shadow, and his face is partially masked from his injuries, linking him further with the Ghost through Karidian's use of a mask when he plays the part at the end of the episode (In the shooting script, the connection was further established through Karidian's habit of wandering the ship's corridors late at night, much as the Ghost wanders the ramparts of Elsinore, but the scene was cut from the aired episode).
- Karidian represents King Claudius, as his seemingly comfortable and routine life hides a terrible crime.
- Lenore is somewhat like Ophelia, whom she is set to play in Hamlet. Her innocence, however, is but a façade for her murders; and while she too ultimately goes mad she does not kill herself. She can also be seen as owing something to The Tempest's Miranda: she has no mother, has become very well-read from her father's tutelage and is too young to understand his past. As her father lies dead in front of her, she first recites the line "Those are pearls that were his eyes" from The Tempest, as well, before launching into Fortinbras's speech upon discovering the dead bodies at the end of Hamlet.
- Finally, Kirk himself acts like Hamlet in this episode. Usually known for his decisive actions, Kirk is at first skeptical that Karidian is really Kodos and wants more solid proof than just the assertion of a now-dead man. Even when he gets that proof, he still hesitates to take action. When Riley acts without reflection, Kirk tries to talk him out of avenging his father, much as Hamlet dissuades himself when he has the opportunity to kill Claudius alone. Kirk also, like Hamlet, makes use of deception (when he asks a fellow captain to abandon the Karidian players on Planet Q so the Enterprise can take them to their next date) to get closer to the truth.
The episode also mirrors Hamlet with the use of a poisoned drink as a murder weapon (although the attempt fails) and the presentation of a play during the action as a plot device.
Lenore also alludes to Antony and Cleopatra when she asks Kirk if he is a "Caesar of the stars, waiting for a Cleopatra to worship him?"
[edit] Holocaust allegory
Yet another of this episode's layers is Star Trek's first Holocaust allegory.
Kodos's massacre took place, according to the episode, 20 years previously ... about the same amount of time that had elapsed between the end of World War II and the episode's airing in real life. Spock refers to "parents separated from children ... whole families destroyed," much as happened in the ghettos and camps. Also, in the shooting script, but not aired, a line of Kirk's referred to the victims entering an antimatter chamber and being killed, somewhat a parallel to the Holocaust victims being herded into gas chambers for execution.
Like Hitler, Kodos was believed to be dead but there was no objective proof since his body had been burned and could not be positively identified.
Karidian's current existence is blameless, like that of many real-life Nazi war criminals who lived as fugitives under assumed names for years after the war. And like them, he nevertheless (though clearly guilt-wracked) attempts to justify his crimes: "Things had to be done, horrible things."
[edit] Other trivia
- This is one of many episodes, where the title is uttered onscreen. Some examples are "Court Martial", "For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky", "Obsession", "A Piece of the Action", "Mudd's Women", "By Any Other Name", "Spock's Brain", "Wink of an Eye", "Wolf in the Fold", and "Shore Leave".
- It also marks Grace Lee Whitney's quiet departure from the series, as her character, Yeoman Rand, can be seen entering the bridge. She does not speak. Her absence in future episodes is never explained. The creators of the series decided it wasn’t a good idea for Kirk to have a love interest on the ship, and Whitney's alcoholism was affecting her work in any event. The actress and character later returned in the Star Trek feature films as a minor character, and eventually even as a guest-star on an episode of Star Trek: Voyager, ("Flashback").
- Lt. Riley (in the script the character was Lieutenant Robert Daiken, but when Bruce Hyde was cast, "Kevin Riley" was handwritten in), also seen in "The Naked Time", was meant to show that the Enterprise had other regular crew members. However, he too was never seen or referenced again — possibly another example of Chuck Cunningham syndrome.
- The Enterprise's observation deck is shown here for the first of only two times in the entire series. The other instance is in the third season (MOS #71) episode "The Mark of Gideon", in which Kirk and Odona enter the observation deck, gaze at the viewport, and see masses of people instead of stars.
- The "Conscience of the King" is one of only two episodes in the original series in which we saw a woman actually fire a hand-held phaser (although one can argue that the android Andrea from "What Are Little Girls Made of?" was not a real woman).
- According to the USS Defiant's computer records shown briefly onscreen in the Star Trek: Enterprise 2-part episode In a Mirror, Darkly, communications officer Hoshi Sato of the Enterprise (NX-01) and her husband Takashi Kimura are among the 4,000 colonists executed by Kodos.
- "Kodos" is one of the two Trek-named aliens who appear in the halloween episodes of The Simpsons, the other being named after the Klingon character "Kang."
- Guest star Barbara Anderson ties with France Nuyen (in the third season's "Elaan of Troyius") for the most number of costume changes in a single episode (4). Anderson's costumes (a fur dress, a blue and green mantle, a black dress and the Ophelia dress) aren't nearly as revealing as Nuyen's, however.
[edit] External links
- The Conscience of the King article at Memory Alpha, a Star Trek wiki.
- Star Trek.com's Episode Summary
| Last produced: "Miri" |
Star Trek: TOS episodes Season 1 |
Next produced: "The Galileo Seven" |
| Last transmitted: "The Menagerie (Part 2)" |
Next transmitted: "Balance of Terror" |
