Title: The Conscience of the King
Airdate: 12/8/1966
Plot Summary
A Shakespearian troupe boards the Enterprise which might be hiding a criminal who killed thousands 20 years earlier. The mystery deepens as one person is killed and another is poisoned in an effort to keep the secret.
Risk Is Our Business
Kirk seems to have moved on from the Tarsus massacres but once his friend is killed, he begins obsessing, even doing some questionable things with his command privileges. Although Kirk is perceived as a loose cannon, he really wasn’t in the show. Here, however, it does support the perception a bit.
Logical
Spock is pretty on top of things, stating the obvious that Karidian is Kodos which is pretty apparent. The mystery is not whether he is Kodos, but who’s doing the killing. Even Spock wasn’t right about that.
He’s Dead Jim
McCoy is not really involved in this too much.
Canon Maker
Phasers can be set on overload, a trope that will be useful. We see that colonies can be a mess and run by governors.
Canon Breaker
Uhura is using Spock’s harp. This and some other early moments might’ve lent to JJ Abrahm’s misguided decision to make Uhura and Spock a couple. It does seem odd she just has it.
Kirk calls for “double red alert” which I’m pretty sure is BS. It reminds me of “double secret probation.”
Man It Feels Bad To Be a Red Shirt
Riley nearly dies from being poisoned but he was specifically targeted, not a typical red shirt death. Kirk’s friend does get killed.
Technobabble
Just last episode Spock was able to disguise his orders with Kirk’s voice. Now we have a way to absolutely determine whether the voice is accurate or not. While it clearly has to be analyzed, it seems like something that probably should’ve been analyzed on the fly to prevent such things.
I Know That Guy:
Arnold Mos play Karidian in The Conscience of the King with suitable gravitas. He had a long career of supporting roles and TV guest spots but nothing more of note than here.
Barbara Anderson played Lenore in her first major role. She went on to play Eve Whitfield in the show Ironside in the late 60s/early 70s. She also guest starred in the pilot episode of The Six Million Dollar Man.
Bruce Hyde makes his second and last appearance in Trek as Kevin Riley, having previously appeared in The Naked Time. I’m guessing between this and the last episode, Riley put in for a transfer before he ended up dying screaming.
William Sargent and Natalie Norwick play Thomas and Martha Leighton. Weird they had the same first names as Superman’s parents.
What It Means To Be Human – Review
The Conscience of the King is one of those episodes that bored me to tears as a kid and I find really interesting as an adult. Karidian/Kodos comes across as a haunted man, feebly trying to defend his actions to Kirk but more trying to defend himself from himself. He knows he’s a damned soul and hiding from it in a Shakespeare troupe isn’t going to get that blood off his hands.
Using the play at the beginning to show actual blood on his hands during a particular scene should come off a little on the nose but it doesn’t. They also don’t make much effort to try to fool the audience into wondering whether or not he is Kodos, it’s pretty obvious.
The real mystery is who is doing the killing and Lenore being the killer should be obvious. Yet the actress sells her “sanity” so well that the reveal is satisfying. She also does a great job descending into insanity after accidentally killing her father, someone she was desperate to save.
I found it an interesting idea, a daughter who loves her father but finds out what a monster he was. A remorseful monster, but a monster nonetheless. Trying to put the two ideas in her mind together, her love for a father and the facts of his actions, is probably what drove her insane. A nice comment on how important our actions as parents can be.
But there is a few things that you have to accept. Some of it is a hazard of being made in 1966, cameras just weren’t that ubiquitous. Today, the sheer volume of pictures out there from smart phones alone is staggering. The idea there wasn’t any real pictures out there of Kodos, that no one had a visual record of a high ranking government official of a colony? You have to put that aside.
Then there’s the idea that starvation was such a problem in the federation. While I understand more in the Next Gen era that there were planets needing help that weren’t a part of the federation, this wasn’t an issue with federation planets. There should’ve been food brought well in time, there’s no reason to Thanos the colony.
Of course there was Tasha Yar’s planet with rape gangs and whatnot so who knows a hundred years earlier.
Overall The Conscience of the King is a pretty good murder mystery and really is just worth it for the performances alone. Well worth your time.
