"The Conscience of a King" - Season 1, Episode 13
Kirk's backstory comes out on another Shakespearean detour.
John Wilkes Booth was the most popular actor of his day. This often gets lost, for obvious reasons, but it bears repeating that Booth killing Lincoln is the equivalent of Tom Cruise killing Joe Biden. Booth was a draw everywhere; as was common for the time, he toured constantly and played on the biggest stages in the country. Roads were distribution before film. Booth pounded pavement. Travelling troupes were big business in those days and often the only way for an actor to have a consistent career. There’s a reason the expression goes: “they’re the only show in town.”
“The Conscience of a King” opens with Kirk and an old pal, Tom Leighton, watching Macbeth. The Scottish Play seems fixation for Star Trek’s writers, but as we see by the end here, this is more of a Hamlet production. It’s a great opening, full of mystery in the premise, and speeds up quick with Leighton telling Kirk that he believes the lead actor of the troupe, Anton Karidian, is in fact Kodos the Executioner. Kodos earned the ominous eponym while governor of the Earth colony of Tarsus IV, when he had arbitrarily killed half of the population during a severe food shortage so that the other half may live. Thanos envies the man’s resolve. More interesting than his motives were his victims: survivors of the massacre included Leighton and a very young James T. Kirk. In fact, they are two of nine people alive who even seen Kodos in person.
Leighton plans to confirm his suspicions at a party for Karidian and his troupe. Kirk, initially skeptical and convinced Kodos is dead, refuses to attend. But computer research shows that Karidian has no documented history before Kodos’ death twenty years before, and has a nineteen-year-old daughter with him now. Both pique the Captain’s interest.
Kirk chats up Lenore Karidian, played by Barbara Anderson. Anderson won an Emmy for playing Eve Whitfield on the late 60s cop show Ironside. She intermittently acted on television throughout the 70s and 80s but retired after appearing in an Ironside television reunion movie in 1993.
At the party, Kirk meets Lenore Karidian, the man’s daughter, and quickly turns on the charm. Within around four minutes he’s convinced her to leave the party for a romantic stroll, which is spoiled when they find Leighton dead along their path.
Kirk’s suspicions, along with other things, are fully aroused at this point. He arranges to transport the Koridian players to their next show to buy time and investigate. Spock and McCoy, troubled by Kirk’s odd behavior, go behind his back for their own investigation. This dynamic forms the backbone of the episode, and it’s lovely. Spock and McCoy have not shared much one-on-one time in the episodes preceding, but the writing establishes the two as a prickly pair whose personalities may not fully mesh, but whose goals and interests almost always align. It’s not that they dislike each other, it’s that they’re somewhat annoyed they don’t like each other more.
During their investigation, they learn of Kirk’s connection to Kodos and also that there’s another crew member who survived the massacre: Lieutenant Riley, he of the Irish folk ballad in “The Naked Time.” Spock learns an even more concerning coincidence: Kirk and Riley are the only known witnesses of Kodos’ massacre still living. After Riley survives a poisoning and Kirk survives a jury-rigged bombing by way of an overloaded phaser, Spock confronts his Captain and urges him to finally meet with Karidian.
Kirk confronts Karidian, played by Arnold Moss, with a speech from Kodos that has been seared into his memory since he was a child. The reveal that Kirk survived such a tragedy gives his intense devotion to the crew a personal, rather than merely professional, dimension. He has seen the consequences of bad leadership.
Karidian barely attempts to hide his identity. Speaking in thinly veiled objectivity, he defends Kodos’ actions as necessary, if misguided, and takes a voice confirmation test while hardly glancing at his script. As we learn, the man is wracked with guilt over his choices, time has weathered his face and resolve into nothing but fractures, his acting career is a coping mechanism. But Kirk refuses to give into his own impulses. When Riley moves to kill Kodos during a production of Hamlet staged for the Enterprise, Kirk intervenes.
RILEY: I know that voice, that face, I know it. I saw it. He murdered them.
KARIDIAN (on stage): Thy soul, freeze thy young blood.
KIRK: It’s an order. Give me the weapon.
Riley relents. His conscience is saved, for it is quickly revealed that Lenore has been the real murderer all along. “All the ghosts are dead. I’ve buried them. There’s no more blood on your hands,” she tells her father, who reacts with outrage. He had spent decades fleeing his past, Lenore was his untainted salvation. Regardless of his views on redemption, he lives it out by stepping in front of his daughter’s gun, taking a blast meant for Kirk and sending her into hysterics. Lenore finishes his monologue from Hamlet as she cries over his body:
“Father. Father! O, proud, death! What feast is toward in thine eternal cell, that thou, such a prince at a shot so bloodily hast struck? The curtain, the curtain rises. It rises. There's no time to sleep. The play. The play. The play's the thing, wherein we'll catch the conscience of the king.”
Karidian, as Macbeth, holds the bloody dagger that gives “The Dagger of the Mind” it’s name. Here, the dagger is deeply literal.
Despite the staging and opening, this episode is more Hamlet than Macbeth. Lenore’s final line, from which the episode pulls its title, is itself pulled from the end of Act II of Hamlet. Before his death, Karidian is shown to be playing Hamlet’s father, who haunts his son and begs for vengeance from the grave throughout the play. He is first shown to be playing Macbeth, an ambitious ladder-climber who seizes power because of a prophecy that contains its own end. His journey on stage mirrors that of his life; he has gone from striver to tyrant to specter but learned a different lesson than Shakespeare’s vengeful ghost.
Vengeance is quite pointedly what the episode is about. Spock and McCoy question Kirk about his motives in bringing Karidian aboard.
SPOCK: Even in this corner of the galaxy, Captain, two plus two equals four. Almost certainly an attempt will be made to kill you. Why do you invite death?
KIRK: I'm not. I'm interested in justice.
MCCOY: Are you? Are you sure it's not vengeance?
KIRK: No, I'm not sure. I wish I was. I've done things I've never done before. I've placed my command in jeopardy.
Shatner sells Kirk’s confliction throughout the episode. Kirk’s solitary nature here works well at setting his behavior apart. In previous installments, Kirk is an exceedingly collaborative Captain, he seeks feedback and welcomes opposing views even if he often dismisses them. The sounding board increases his confidence. But here, he is dragged into a consult, ambushed by his two best friends.
Lenore weeps over her father after he defends Kirk. Later, McCoy tells Kirk that Lenore cannot remember this moment, she imagines her father still alive and receiving cheers from crowds. The ending is brief but provides a nice texture to the thematic loop here. Much like her father, she could only run from evil.
Whether Karidian gets what he deserved is perhaps a personal question. But what we see are Star Trek’s utopian ideals again, for the third episode in a row. Consider that of those personally impacted by the massacre, all ultimately reject vengeance. Kodos refuses to kill the survivors despite the danger they pose to him. Riley puts down his phaser at Kirk’s urging. Kirk himself saves the man’s life numerous times. It is only Lenore, born after the massacre, who can re-enact its cruelty on some level. She seeks to bury the ghosts, to cover the past as if it never happened.
This can be read two ways. Perhaps, as another show recently posited, “the poison seeps through.” The evil of Kodos’s act infected his daughter from the day of her birth, vengeance for her father’s persecutors was in her blood. She saw her past as either consciously shameful or unfairly maligned. Either way, it needed to be killed.
The other reading does not contradict the above, but is more cleanly endorsed. This kind of evil cannot truly be avenged. Vengeance, to those it would serve, is pointless. They have already suffered. For Kirk, Riley, and Kodos, the past has been scored already and cannot be “won” today. There’s only what can be done in the now and what can hopefully make a better future. Punishment has a strictly non-personal purpose. And “the conscience of a king” is its own punishment altogether.
Stray Thoughts
I believe that the Macbeth → Hamlet’s Father journey was very intentional by the writers, because I cannot come up with another reason why Karidian would have his daughter play Lady Macbeth while he plays the title role.
The party and play on Leighton’s planet have been part of a trend of seeing larger gatherings in the past few episodes. I think it’s great. These scenes, like those in “The Menagerie,” make the galaxy feel alive and lived in, rather than a ship and collection of small outposts.
While being given a tour of the Enterprise, Lenore is in awe of the ship. “All this power surging and throbbing yet under control, are you like that, Captain?” she asks Kirk. Keep in mind, this is the less sexual version of Star Trek than what Roddenberry would typically write.
This episode marks the last appearance of Grace Lee Whitney as Lieutenant Rand until Star Trek: The Motion Picture. As I’ve previously written about, Whitney’s time on the show ended in sexual assault and being fired. It’s good that she was eventually brought into the fold, but shameful how often crimes like these have to be made up for rather than dealt with at the time.
Spock mentions that Kodos “had his own ideas for eugenics,” and while I considered basing this piece around that, the Shakespearean parallels ultimately come through stronger. The episode never expounds on Kodos’s ideology or what he actually believed about eugenics in enacting the massacre, and I figured it was best to only deal with such sensitive topics when I could be specific about what I was saying.
Photo Credits
Karidian with mask: https://them0vieblog.com/2013/05/13/star-trek-the-conscience-of-a-king-review/
Kirk and Lenore: https://www.tvmaze.com/episodes/44389/star-trek-1x13-the-conscience-of-the-king
Kirk and Anton Karidian: https://www.tor.com/2015/06/02/star-trek-the-original-series-rewatch-the-conscience-of-the-king/comment-page-2/
Karidian with dagger: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Conscience_of_the_King_(episode)
Lenore over her father: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0394903/