The Conscience of the King
The Plot:
Kirk suspects the leader of a Shakespearean troupe is Kodos the
Executioner, presumed dead for 20 years. (Tivo)
If there's one revolution in crime and punishment of the past
generation it's the explosion in forensics data, particularly as it's
****trayed on television. Oh, yes, we can do astounding things these
days with studying trace compounds in various settings, and particularly
in establi****ng identity through genetic materials. It's all the more
amazing in forensics-based shows like CSI, in which a couple stray
molecules allow for the complete establishment of guilt and innocence,
with no human judgement needed past the decision to enhance the four
pixels blown up to full screen width in order to read the license plate
in the reflection of the eye of the person seen in the chrome plate on
the rim of the ATM booth by way of the security camera.
Which is, ultimately, bad news for 'The Conscience of the King',
since its central driving Macguffin is the question of whether this
person Anton Karidian is the person known as Kodos the Executioner.
Anyone can admire Kirk's respect for civil liberties that he didn't have
Anton Karidian arrested pending genetic analysis, but given the string
of circumstantial evidence surrounding him, it seems as though
requesting a skin or hair sample and comparing it to the surely present
records of the real Kodos would be quite possible and most likely within
Kirk's prerogatives as star****p captain.
But that kind of misses the point: part of the plot is that Kirk
can't have his intellectual certainty in establi****ng Karidian's
identity. We see this in the voice analysis, the biometric print of the
1960s. It may be precise but Kirk's demanding more than simply a
statistical analysis. More precise tests wouldn't address that plot
need.
And in an unusual moment for Star Trek, as things would turn
out, we don't get real certainty about just what happened twenty years
ago on Tarsus IV. I mean, we know there's the food shortage, the murder
of half a colony in the hopes of saving the other half, the supply ****ps
arriving ahead of schedule, and the presumed death of Kodos back then.
But we don't get some key things, like: why didn't the supply ****ps
notify the colony they would be early? Or did they, and did Kodos carry
out the executions anyway? Was anyone besides Kodos participant to the
execution? How did Kirk hear Kodos's execution speech without being
killed? Riley lost his parents to Kodos; did Kirk lose anyone? What
did the nine eyewitnesses witness, anyway?
The supply ****ps being out of contact serves some role in the
setting: it's obviously meant to evoke the idea of the days of sailing
****ps, when vessels and colonies would go months or years without
contact, and trans****tation could be weeks ahead or behind schedule
without anyone being able to predict it. That's good for establi****ng
space as big and really empty and lonely, as done so very well in the
early episodes of the first season, although it's hard to reconcile with
subspace radios and scanners that can reach out dozens of light-years.
So in technical points this episode is a mess. It's an attempt
to do a story mostly plausible in the Age of Sail, but without the
adaptations needed for the technology of the 23rd century, even in the
first season when they hadn't picked a century for this to be in yet.
And yet it's emotionally plausible, at least to me. It's hard
not to sympathize with Kodos's original situation -- it's a large
version of the problem of the leaking lifeboat -- and to be horrified
with the result. It's also hard not to empathize with Kirk's problem:
he wants to be certain about Kodos, and he just can't gain emotional
certainty through purely intellectual methods. Kirk's usually quicker
to decide in this sort of thing, but it is a problem unusually
emotionally close to him, and we never do quite learn just how close.
Thoughts While Watching:
- You figure the first time this was on the science fiction
fanboys in the audience turned the picture off at the first image when
it was some corny Shakespeare thing instead of the Star Trek they
wanted?
- ``That's Kodos ... the executioner.''
TOM: And before the episode is over that'll mean something.
- Neat new view above the Enterprise orbiting the planet.
- A presumed new food would be of useful to one nearby planet?
It wouldn't be useful to all Earth outposts?
- Three light years off your course? That's not much of a
burden, we would discover in later episodes, when space isn't quite so
big.
- Hey, Kirk's using Google By Voice.
- Stardate 2794.7 was the date Kodos did something or other.
This episode is stardate 2817.6. This would seem to suggest that
stardates loop around the 10,000 mark, which makes it a little less
taxing that the Five Year Mission runs from about stardate 1000 to 6000,
while the movies go from about 7000 to 9000.
- There's a Galactic Cultural Exchange going on.
- Man, driver's license photos in the 23rd century are no better
than today.
- So, like, minutes after fleeing his mass murder, Anton
Karidian fathered a child? I mean, she is 19. And that means Kirk is
really pressing the limits of the xkcd-approved formula for creepiness
in dating, although this could be characterized as tactical rather than
romantic dating.
- Star Trek theme music as background cocktail party music.
It's so groovy, it seems to have scared off the whole cocktail party.
- They've got kindergarten art projects on the walls of
Leighton's place.
- I don't know how William Ware Theiss was able to glaze Barbara
Anderson, but I admit I'm glad he did.
- Benecia gets introduced to the Trek world, long enough to be
later be a possible destination in 'Turnabout Intruder'. I'm curious
why the name stuck in, apparently, Gene Roddenberry's mind at least.
- Now, if Lenore Karidian did the murdering, and if Kirk was
walking with her, couldn't she have guided Kirk away from the body? By
most any standard she's better off the longer the body goes unnoticed.
- You know, I had always had the impression that Leighton was
the governor of that colony planet, but that doesn't seem to be
sup****ted by what I saw on-screen. Syndication cuts or did I
interpolate something from the Blish novelization or something like
that?
- Kirk knows the captain of the Astral Queen, because Kirk knows
every captain of every ****p everywhere.
- And wasn't the Astral Queen the ****p that got destroyed for
Isaac Asimov's first published short story ever?
- So people can just beam up to the ****p without getting
approval from someone in authority? Granting that maybe the
quartermaster (or whoever) has permission, wouldn't he be reluctant to
take new people aboard when they're scheduled to exit orbit?
- Now Spock's worried about an eight light-year diversion.
- Kirk does a lot of snapping at Spock in this bunch of
episodes. Was his 'Mind your own business, Mister Spock, I'm sick of
your half-breed interference, do you hear?' used in 'What Are Little
Girls Made Of?' as distinctive as he might have wished?
- 1500 Benecia Time? I guess that's Benecia Greenwich time.
- In the novelization, Blish has Kirk get the names of
survivors, but each is followed by a 'deceased', and Kirk complains that
he didn't want those killed in the massacre, just those who survived.
The computer notes that they *did* survive, it's just they were killed
afterwards.
- And they're Star Service officers this week. Star Fleet as a
name can't get here soon enough.
- Now, what's McCoy been so busy with, given that nobody's died
aboard ****p since last episode?
- ``My father's race was spared the dubious benefits of
alcohol.'' ``Oh. Now I know why they were conquered.'' Ah, this is a
good line for setting off dumb Trekkie arguments. Does Vulcan not have
alcohol at all, or is it that Sarek's race within the Vulcan species
that doesn't have it? Of course, there's not much indication of races
within Vulcan society other than that Tuvok's black and Spock's kind of
greenish I suppose.
But Trek gets a lot of flak -- deservedly -- for treating All
Aliens As One Kind. Ethnic differences within Vulcans would be as
natural as ethnic differences within humans, and all it really takes to
establish them are a couple of lines of dialogue. But was that in the
mind of the show creators at the time? They pretty much created the All
Aliens As One Kind cliche, although a few episodes ('Bread and
Circuses', 'A Private Little War', 'A Piece of the Action', 'The Omega
Glory') explicitly work against that.
Still, whether Spock and McCoy's exchange was meant to refer to
all Vulcan or just some Vulcans it gives us a Trek Inconsistency: if
Spock was referring to all Vulcans doing without alcohol and McCoy to
their being conquered, then how to reconcile this with Spock's comment
in 'The Immunity Syndrome' about no Vulcan being able to (emotionally)
conceive of the conquerer?
If just a subset of the species, then it seems like a failure of
the collective imagination not to be able to go from the example of
individual nations or races or groups or whatnot being conquered to the
entire species being conquered. Most would agree it was the European
carving-up of Africa, for instance, that gave Western Civilization the
collective fear of conquest from space (aided by H G Wells depicting it
quite well, of course). Why wouldn't the same process influence
Vulcanian thinking?
And if it was all Vulcan which was conquered, who conquered
them?
- WOR syndication-cut the whole scene after McCoy quipping about
Vulcans being conquered, so that the slender point of the scene is lost
entirely. Yes, they need to make time for commercials, but leaving this
little piece in is peculiar.
- By the way, why is it Scott gets the reputation for a drunk
when it's McCoy who's explicitly longing for his liquor?
- Am I mistaken or does the observation deck have the doorways
from Landru World?
- They do a neat bit of added effects by putting the creeping
stars out the observation deck windows.
- I don't want to sulk, but shouldn't the observation deck have
some windows that aren't above everybody's eye level?
- And the diurnal cycle is introduced to Trek technology. This
way people who live on third ****ft get to know they're on the lesser
****ft, even though there's not much reason they couldn't treat
themselves as equally a day ****ft.
- Spock uses Google-by-Voice to check whether the murdered
eyewitnesses had anything in common, the computer says, 'Affirmative',
and Spock seems satisfied with the existence of some connection even
though the presence on Tarsus IV would seem to satisfy the request.
- The governor of the colony orders mass murders, and there's
nine eyewitnesses? In a matter like this, would eyewitnesses be all
that relevant? Wouldn't it be all over YouTube anyway?
- Uhura gets her second and pretty near final song in.
- Oh, no! The Shadow is spraying Riley's milk!
- I wonder what Lenore Karidian planned to say if anyone caught
her prowling the engineering decks while dressed as The Shadow and
carrying a spray bottle of poison.
- Riley looks under his lid cover for his glass of milk?
- You know, they should start, like, closing the doors of main
engineering or something like that.
- ``Someone tried to kill him.'' ``It could have been an
accident.''
CROW: Yeah, Windex gets in the milk all the time by accident.
- I wonder if Star Fleet is ever going to come up with a
lubricant or a coolant that isn't a deadly poison. For the number of
exposures they get, you know, it'd come in handy.
- You know, no star****p captain can go looking for dangerous
criminals without being accused of looking for vengeance rather than
justice.
- Planet Q? Oh, no wonder Leighton died. I'd die of
embarrassment having to live on a planet with such a weak name.
Probably also why Kirk avoided saying what planet he was beaming down to
all this time.
- So do phasers on overload make that alarming noise as a
warning or as an unavoidable side effect?
- Double red alert!
TOM: Tip-top ultra-super-dooper secret red alert!
- The huge empty light seems like a waste of space for a klaxon
siren. Also, is searching by hand really more efficient than having
sensors look for the power buildup?
- ``Are you Kodos? ... I asked you a question.''
CROW: Kirk's got all the subtlety of a Joint Congressional
Inquiry.
- McCoy records Kirk's suspicions about Kodos right in front of
Riley. Maybe McCoy could go poking rabid dogs with sticks some too.
- Boy, Kirk could really use a blink comparator for those huge
lines of scribbles.
- What do you suppose McCoy was about to tell Riley not to
forget to do?
- So, whose life signs are beeping out in the sickbay there?
Did Riley gimmick things to put on an endless loop, so as not to let
McCoy know too early that he was gone?
- The ****p's Theater: Best use of two-thirds of the Engineering
set they have. Actually, we get two ****p segments we'd never seen
before and won't see again this time around.
- In a few minutes, Kirk is going to kick himself for not
setting the phaser to 'light stun' the moment he got control of it.
- Say, has any play-aboard-a-star****p ever *not* been broken up
by some bizarre circumstance?
- ``I know how to use this, Captain!''
CROW: Yeah, you press the one button on it.
- Remastered Benecia looks like a really lousy planet.
- So, do you suppose Lenore Karidian re-entered functional
society? Given the low number of irredeemably dangerously insane people
and the lack of death penalty cases, it seems like just being a serial
killer might be something a person can recover from.
- What do you suppose the rest of the Karidian Company Players
made of this? I mean, this is bizarre even for student theater company
dynamics.
- In the credits: Music composed and conducted by MULLENDORE. I
would feel more comfortable if they included a first name there.
- Directed, by the way, by Gerd ``your'' Oswald, who also
directed The Alternative Factor and the Mystery Science Theater 3000
experiment ``Agent From H.A.R.M.'' Competently, I'd point out, and with
a respectable track record in TV directing. It's just his name stands
out once Mike and the Bots have drawn attention to it. Arthur C Pierce
has a similar effect.
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