In article <nebusj.1208748265@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
nebusj-@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(Joseph Nebus) wrote:
> 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 cir***stantial 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?
Maybe only Signia Minor has a specific problem with their soil or
something.
>
> - 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.
Actually, I won't give you that. We don't know what happened on 2794.7
except that there is detailed information marked with that date. Could
have been the date of a hearing or the release of a do***entary or
anything.
>
> - 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.
He could have fled with his pregnant concubine.
>
> - 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.
It's the Benecia colony. No reason to assume that there's more than one
time zone involved.
>
> - 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!
Means the Captain is in personal danger. :)
>
> - 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?
Drink his milk.
>
> - 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?
You know, that would be a pain. Every time you wanted to go to the
bathroom, the table's going to scream that you're dead and set off an
alarm.
>
> - 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 cir***stance?
>
> - ``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.
Joseph Mullendore
He seems to have not used his first name on sci-fi shows.
>
> - 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.
--
Star Trek 09:
No Shat, No Show.
http://www.disneysub.com/board/noshat.jpg
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