Underrated Trek: “The Conscience of The King” (TOS)
“The Conscience of the King” rarely makes the list of anyone’s favorite episodes of Star Trek. When I was a little kid watching Star Trek in syndication in the 80s (we didn’t call it TOS in those days because there was no other series) I was never thrilled when this episode came up in the rotation. I’d watch it, because it was Star Trek, but there were always more exciting episodes I was anticipating more.
On paper, I think my childhood reaction is why this episode gets overlooked. There are no interesting, exotic aliens. No space battles. No high-concept, fantastical story elements. At its heart it isn’t really a science fiction story at all, it’s a revenge story set in a science fiction franchise.
When I started regularly rewatching Star Trek TOS as an adult (there’s a gathering on social media called #TOSSatNight where an online group all watch the same episode at the same time and chat about it in real time), when we got to “The Conscience of the King” I was very much surprised at how different my view of it turned out to be. It’s great! It’s intriguing, it’s entertaining, it’s got a great twist at the end. And it’s a fantastic character study into Kirk (and also into Spock and McCoy to a lesser extent).
If you need a quick recap of the episode, twenty years ago Governor Kodos of Tarsus IV, believing his colony was on the verge of starvation, ordered the execution of half of the population. Which half of the 8,000 colonists would die was based on Kodos’ own theories of eugenics (a topic the franchise would regularly revisit). When the relief ships arrived unexpectedly early, Kodos was overthrown and assumed killed. The body discovered was burned beyond the ability to completely identify, but the authorities were satisfied and the case was closed. Now the only people who can identify Kodos by sight are mysteriously dying and there seems to be a connection to a traveling group of Shakespeare players whose leading man, Anton Karidian, bears a striking physical resemblance to Kodos. He and his daughter Lenore are on the planet now being visited by Kirk and the Enterprise.
“The Conscience of the King” is not the first reference to Shakespeare in the Star Trek canon (“Dagger of the Mind” named for a line in Macbeth had aired about a month earlier) but it is the first one where the references are so overt. The franchise would return to this well many times in its future in stories like Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (featuring characters insisting that Shakespeare is best when experienced in its original Klingon) or TNG’s “Thine Own Self” (named after a line from Hamlet and a candidate for another under-appreciated episode).
But the references to Shakespeare both overt and subtle would have gone completely over my head as an eight-year-old watching this. Not just starting with the title as a quote from Hamlet, the episode opens literally with the play Macbeth being performed with Kirk anonymously in the audience. His companion is Leighton, the eyepatch-wearing scientist who pulls Kirk and the Enterprise into the story. If you’re looking for Shakespeare parallels, Leighton is serving the same story role as the Ghost in Hamlet. They immediately tell the protagonist (and the audience) who the villain is, what the stakes are and what the protagonist must do. The protagonists, both Kirk and Hamlet, have their doubts but reluctantly enter the story.
The villain attempting to murder Riley via poison is a wonderful callback to many such instances in Shakespeare plays. Setting a phaser on overload to assassinate a ship’s captain is not something that Shakespeare could have produced in the 17th century, however I have a suspicion that were the Bard of Avon writing for TV in the late 1960s, it’s the sort of thing he would have come up with.
There are moments that are not necessarily Shakespearean but are definitely theatrical. Leighton’s aforementioned eye-patch and Reilly learning a key element of the plot by overhearing it in a doorway spring to mind. But the more times I re-watch this episode, the more I appreciate the wonderful character interactions between Kirk and Anton Karidian/Kodos and between the central three of Kirk, Spock and McCoy.
We’re still relatively early in TOS here, about halfway through the first season. The three main characters are still evolving and not yet locked into the dynamic that they would fall into later. As Star Trek later became more established, the relationship between Spock and McCoy became more cemented. There are some cases in future episodes where I feel that the writer would make the pair argue for no reason other than it had been established that those two always argue, so that’s what they had to keep doing. But this early in TOS, that isn’t always the case. Here, Kirk is keeping his thoughts to himself and doesn’t yet trust Spock and McCoy enough to seek out their advice. Spock is disturbed by what he sees as Kirk’s erratic behavior, so he seeks out McCoy’s counsel. Here (as in “Charlie X”) we see much more organic conversations where two intelligent people observe the same situation and naturally come to different conclusions. It’s not just simple bickering.
But Kirk is the regular character who is given the most depth. He’s given a tragic backstory; he’s one of the survivors of Kodos the Executioner (one of those wonderful names that TOS was so good at creating). We see Kirk as indecisive as we ever see him. He isn’t sure if he wants to believe that Kodos is still alive and on his ship. Like Hamlet, it must be that his personal relationship to the tragedy is holding him back from being the more action-oriented, direct character we usually know.
We are also shown the more obsessive part of Kirk’s personality (something we’ll see more of in season two’s aptly-named “Obsession”). He will not let this problem go. He won’t simply hand it off to someone else. He uses his rank to manipulate the situation so that the group of players is brought aboard his ship, regardless of this putting the Enterprise eight light years off course. This not only puts himself in danger, but later we learn that one of his crew, Riley, would be on the murderer’s list of potential victims.
Captain Kirk could, of course, simply hand Karidian over to the relevant authorities and let Federation justice decide if this man is Kodos. He won’t. He must do this himself. Even confronting the man who may be Kodos and forcing him to read the execution statement to the computer, Kirk does this alone.
And that incidentally is a wonderful scene. It’s about 32 minutes into the episode and Karidian hasn’t been seen in the flesh since the pre-credits opening. Kirk bluntly demanding to know if Karidian is Kodos. Karidian refusing to confirm or deny it. Kirk pressing forward but still unsure of himself. The performance between William Shatner and Arnold Moss as they bounce dialog off each other is outstanding. Shatner’s body language is especially interesting to watch as he alternates between angrily accusing Karidian and weakly, passively slumping against a wall.
The twist at the end of the story is also wonderful. We should have seen it coming though. After all, Lenore Karidian was playing Lady MacBeth in the episode’s cold open.
The performances across the board are wonderful as is Anton Karidian’s realization and genuine anguish that the daughter he thought he had been protecting for all these years has secretly been sharing the blood on his hands.
Every time I watch this one I pick up on something I hadn’t noticed before. An underrated thing about doing a full rewatch of a series is not skipping over the episodes you don’t have fond memories of. You may discover a classic.
This article is in response to a December 2023 writing prompt on the Make It So publication. Please check out that publication for more responses to this and other Star Trek related writing prompts.
