The Conscience of the King by: Barry Trivers and directed by: Gerd Oswald

 

“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 13^th 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.