“The Conscience of the King” is written by Barry
Trivers and is directed by Gerd Oswald. It
was filmed under production code 13, was the 13th episode of Star
Trek Season 1, and was broadcast on December 8, 1966.
It’s always interesting when Star Trek does an
episode that doesn’t quite feel like Star Trek. “The Conscience of the King” is one such
episode, not really following a science fiction story but following a deeply
human genre. There really aren’t any
science fiction elements outside of the trappings of the Enterprise and the
fact that there is space travel: they’re just there for the setting, when
really this is an episode about past trauma coming to haunt someone. The setup is that twenty years previous a
governor called Kodos called for half of his population, a total of 4,000
people, to be executed during a horrific food shortage. When the supply ships came they found the bodies
and he was apparently killed, nine people are left alive knowing what he looked
like, and the galaxy moved on. The episode
opens in the present with Dr. Thomas Leighton, played by William Sargent, convinced
that Anton Karidian, an actor in a company travelling the galaxy is somehow
Kodos and he has tricked the Enterprise into arriving. It isn’t long before he winds up dead under
mysterious circumstances, his body found by Kirk, and a plan is hatched to
bring the actors aboard the Enterprise by cancelling their transportation to
their next stop.
Karidian is played by Arnold Moss and he isn’t
actually a large part of the episode, his scenes being short yet given this brilliant
gravitas. There’s a confrontation between
him and Kirk around two thirds through the episode and his final speech at the
end are both beautiful and incredibly well acted, but it’s the fact that he isn’t
there that makes the tension work. The real
inciting incident of this episode is a death and Barry Trivers’ script is one
that builds its tension on reflecting Kirk, Spock, and McCoy off one another. Spock is the one to relate Kodos’ history and
represents the complete belief that Karidian must be Kodos, McCoy is the skeptic,
and Kirk is somewhere in the middle realizing that the strange goings on have
been following this troupe of actors. Seven
of the nine people who could implicate Kodos are dead, and the last two are
Kirk and Riley from “The Naked Time” whom Kirk demotes to engineering and is
poisoned. Riley, it is revealed, is one
of the settlers that escaped Kodos’ massacre despite his entire family dying,
which is really why Kirk demotes him in a misguided attempt to protect
him. The episode is very clear that Kirk
is in the wrong in not bringing Riley into his confidence, once he comes to the
conclusion that Kodos is alive the climax hinges on first Riley trying to kill
Kodos and then the reveal who has been murdering the nine who could incriminate
Kodos.
There are obvious parallels to Hamlet and Macbeth,
made more obvious by the troupe producing both of those shows with Kirk’s plot
reflecting Hamlet’s plan to reveal Claudius and Kodos plot being a reflection
on Macbeth with some interesting twists.
Trivers also does some interesting reflections on what one is to do when
faced with the difficult decision of destruction. Reflecting the nature of Star Trek as
an American frontier drama in space, this episode grapples with the difficulty
of having to end the lives of those under your care to avoid a more horrific
fate and firmly comes down on the side of not giving it an explicit answer. Kodos doesn’t explicitly say what he has done
or even acknowledges himself, but the performance is steeped in subtext and
intrigue of a man who has been living with what he did. He doesn’t get some last minute redemption or
a noble sacrifice, he ends the episode being shot by his daughter who succumbs
tot an Ophelia-like madness. And that’s
basically where the episode ends, it’s certainly an odd climax and the final
set honestly makes it feel like Gerd Oswald is trying to use shadows with the
on-stage setting though is a bit too overlit.
That and the fact that some of the pacing is just a bit off with a first
act whose setup doesn’t quite come together.
Overall, “The Conscience of the King” is an episode
that revels in its drama and tension, with several scenes of peril being shot
in an attempt to emulate Alfred Hitchcock’s definition of suspense (one
including a literal ticking time bomb).
It’s an interesting reflection on looking at the horrific acts people
can do without really reckoning with it and its ideas entirely. As an episode it perhaps is overlooked when
it could easily have entered pop culture as one of the more interesting. 9/10.
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