The Conscience of The King

DVD, Star Trek S1 (The Conscience of The King)

One of the better episodes of the season thanks to a couple of factors: the developing friendship between Kirk, Spock and McCoy, which is so important to this story, and the quality of the guest stars: if you couldn't believe Anton Karidian as a conflicted, but great actor, he wouldn't have worked as the suspected villain of the piece. But merely because he is so enigmatic and his potential alter ego, Kodos The Executioner, so extreme, we're allowed room for doubt. All of which cunningly pulls the rug from under our feet when it's his daughter that proves the real villain, confounding expectations by showing a former monster as a man grieving his past mistakes, only to see the last bright thing in his life extinguished when he finds his daughter tainted by his heinous past life, and then to die with that knowledge fresh in his mind, by the hand of that same daughter. It may be the first strong link between Trek and Shakespeare, and would be one of many to come, but the quality of the story, the writing and the acting had to be at a high enough level in what was basically a sixties sci-fi series, so that including references to the Bard's work, and even including some of it as a play within a play, shows the ambition for Trek to be recognised for its storytelling and character in the intent of the writers. And Shakespeare was for the people, not some highbrow form of entertainment, just as Trek was for the large TV audiences of the day, and so the two, both attempting and succeeding at commenting on the human condition, would be intertwined forever (except perhaps nowadays when Trek has become mere action adventure).

The story is notable for giving us our only datapoint about Kirk's childhood, aside from his birth, forcing him to relive a terrible time in his formative years that may have had great influence on his life, except he's not too keen to talk of it, even to his closest friends. I like that Kirk keeps it to himself, doesn't run off to his buddies to say, 'look what this guy's been saying, and now he's dead,' or appears to become concerned for his own safety. He acts in a mature, adult way, cautious that the facts and events aren't to be raked over at a whim, or what seems a fancy of Tom Leighton (who could almost be McCoy's son in looks!), one of the nine witnesses to the tragic massacre on Tarsus IV twenty years prior to the episode. This would have made a fantastic opening for 'Star Trek: Discovery' (and might explain the need for a fungus expert since the event occurred due to the food supply of the planet being attacked by a fungus, which led to Kodos taking power), but sadly, I don't think this is going to be the event that was mentioned in Trek that will be seen in that series, since this happened twenty years before 'TOS,' and 'DSC' occurs only ten years before it. It's possible they could flashback to that earlier time, but on the other hand, would a massacre of four thousand colonists be the most appropriate way to open a bright, optimistic new Trek series? Yes, we'd get to see a child Kirk, but that didn't help me get into 'Gotham' when they had a child Bruce Wayne, so it could smack more of a gimmick than a compellingly argued reason for inclusion.

Whether the Tarsus IV massacre returns to play a bigger part in Trek lore or not, it will forever be etched upon the mind of Captain Kirk, and shows him once again using his charm to find out facts: last time it was the wellbeing of Miri, and the desire to keep her onside as they solved the conundrum of her planet, and this time it's Lenore Karidian. Despite 'Miri' taking place mainly in an expansive location shoot, it felt more like a stage play than this one, which is ironic considering how stagey and meta the stage play connection is to this episode. But we see a variety of places and we get a sense of a larger universe, instead of concentrating on one planet, and even more, to one laboratory. Here, we visit Planet Q (absolutely nothing to do with the Q race or their Continuum, as far as is known, of course!), a basic and rather plain designation for a planet, it has to be said, but then it was a slightly plain and basic planet set that we saw, back to the painted sky and foam outcrops of other episodes before it. It's not important, as we're only there long enough for Kirk to attend a cocktail party arranged by Dr. Leighton at which he plans to unmask the dreaded Kodos, and for Kirk to find the body of said Leighton. Lenore is quick to fall to Kirk's charms, at least in a teasing, flirty manner, never suspecting he arranged for the Karidian Company of Players' ride (the Astral Queen - a name that inspires the imagination, and makes you think of something even more swanlike and majestic than the Enterprise herself, though we never do get to see it), to be diverted, calling in a favour, in order to take them aboard his own ship.

Even if Lenore had suspected his Machiavellian string-pulling, she'd probably have been more gratified than shocked, especially as it gave her perfect opportunity to put Lieutenant Riley off his milk forever (there must be some regulation preventing bored crewmen from calling up the Rec Room while on duty! He even requests a song from Uhura! Actually there's good use of that set as it's also used by more of the crew that couldn't fit in the audience of the play to view it on a screen), and to blast Kirk with an overloaded Phaser, cunningly hidden in the Red Alert light fitting in his Quarters, though perhaps not so cunningly giving him time to find it, especially as it was a very noisy overload! The sequence was actually quite tense as Kirk demands Spock clear the rest of the deck, confidently encouraging him with the certainty he'll find the makeshift bomb, a confidence borne of the infallibility of leadership: even if Kirk didn't think he could find it in time, he wasn't going to let anyone think that, and neither was he going to let a chunk of his ship's decks go flying if he had anything to do with it. His determination and control, not panicking, but narrowing down the hiding place and deactivating the buildup in time, shows his great leadership qualities, strongly. Spock too, shows the ability to follow orders when he'd rather stay and help his Captain, overcoming that strong urge to deny such orders on logical grounds. Spock is clearly shown to accept the boundary of command when he notices Kirk's secretive attitude and doesn't question him in front of the crew, or disobey.

What he does do when Kirk isn't being forthcoming is consult the Doctor. McCoy takes it as overreaction at first, quite happy to let such explainable displays of behaviour pass, sitting down for a drink as Spock brings his earnest observations, finding it easy to brush off the First Officer's suspicions, even assuming Kirk had ulterior motives for allowing Lenore aboard, which perhaps shows McCoy's wishful thinking for his Captain's happiness more than for the Captain's actual attitude, always displaying a high degree of professionalism, acting in the interest of his ship and crew, where McCoy can be a little more relaxed about such things if it affects a crewman's morale in a positive way, medically speaking (adding to the errant mythos of Kirk having a constant attitude towards romantic inclinations). Spock seems to know Kirk better, knows his Captain would usually share. Kirk makes enigmatic references such as talking of Leighton's long memory, which, out of context, means nothing to Spock. Then added to that is Kirk's foreknowledge of Lenore's beaming aboard, and keeping such to himself, and especially when he orders the Enterprise's course changed, refusing to give reasons, standing on a Captain's prerogative. Spock must be quite deeply affected - he's far from dispassionate in recounting the terrible history of the Tarsus IV massacre to McCoy, far from the contained, passive Vulcan we expect. He's definitely shown far more emotion in the first half of this season than I ever remembered!

I'm not sure what McCoy meant about Spock's people being conquered - does he mean becoming subsumed into the Federation or is he referring to some other event that we never heard about? Eventually things rise to a head, and Spock and McCoy visit Kirk's Quarters to hash it out. I noticed for the first time a buzzer sounds when they're at the door and Kirk pushes a button on his desk to open it - he must have tired of people walking in unannounced, or shouting through the door to do so! Kirk still isn't forthcoming, but Spock makes it very clear that if it affects the safety of the crew, if there's a chance his predicament could interfere with the performance of his duties, he must be informed, McCoy backing him up, reminding the Captain it's a First Officer's job, in case people think it was only Janeway, Chakotay and the EMH that had these kinds of rows. McCoy opens an interesting point, too: is Kirk's motivation justice or vengeance? That it's not a simple thing for Kirk to wrestle with makes the episode much more complex than simply hero versus villain, and this leads into the eventual meeting between Kirk and Karidian where the two trade parries and thrusts in words, Kirk coming away uncertain of his intention, Karidian never truly confessing, but talking around it all, even being an apologist for Kodos' methods. The man and his troupe are quite removed from the general society of the Federation in spite of their many performances. It's as if they merely attend their various bookings, and the real life, at least of Karidian himself, is in his work. An escape from his past, the play an inversion of real life, an invented reality better for him than the alternative.

He seems to have remained something of an idealist, even if it seems likely his Kodos ideas of eugenics have been abandoned. But like the leader of some kind of hippy commune, he seems to live for the past, rejecting the mechanical society, as he calls it, calling Kirk the perfect specimen of this age. But he's lost the love of living and while Kirk talks of technological advancement as tools, he says words are also tools. Which leads on to Lenore, who asks if she, too, were a tool in Kirk's plans. She appears of much the same mind as her Father, earlier, questioning Kirk on whether women have been changed by the machine. It's almost as if she were from Shakespeare's day, because we know that this 'mechanical' world has been around for over a century, it's not some new development, but that was speaking to the 1960s view of the future, as computers and advances in every field were beginning to pick up as we entered the last few decades of the 20th Century. But it works as the words of a sheltered young lady, who doesn't really know more than the productions of her Father's company. At the same time you know she's more perceptive and shrewd than she ever lets on - if she could find out about her Father's shady past and has the gall for serial murdering, she must know what a technologically dependent society is like, and she was probably being more than a little coy in her interactions with Kirk, perhaps even then having immediate plans to take him out in the killing sense, not the romantic - she must have had every name seared in her mind, and every face who could still harm her Father.

If the Captain's aim was to use her to get to the bottom of the truth and potentially Kodos, it at least gives us the chance to see a bit more of the ship, Kirk taking Lenore to the Observation Deck above the Shuttle Bay. Not that you can observe much, as it would probably have been too expensive to have shown that, but it would have been nice if they'd built a model to look down on. It has the feel of being somewhere important, but only getting the barest impression, like the scene in 'Enterprise' where Archer visits the future Enterprise-J, and all we see is a corridor - both tantalising, but rather unsatisfying. Lenore's madness appears to affect the Captain more than he'll admit, giving us another good, poignant ending, mixed with a lightness of touch, as McCoy asks if he really cared about her, and in answer Kirk continues giving orders, leading to the doctor's observation that he isn't going to tell him, is he? We definitely see the friendships and lore becoming better defined as the season continues. There are still bobbles along the way, such as Kirk referring to McCoy as 'Doc' when he and Spock are discussing Riley's condition when you might have expected a 'Bones,' the more common nomenclature, which hadn't become the standard nickname yet. And the thing about Vulcan being a conquered people. And even the, sadly final, appearance of Yeoman Janice Rand, Grace Lee Whitney sacked for her substance problems. Reviewing the episodes again I'd say she was more than a 'space secretary,' as Uhura was, or McCoy's assistant, like Chapel: she was a space valet, space housekeeper and an excellent personal assistant to the Captain who could hold her own and probably had as much to do in her handful of episodes than those other female characters had in the series' entire run: a worthy addition to 'TOS.'

The one area the episode falls down is on its internal reality when Lenore steals a Phaser and ends up shooting her Father by mistake. For one, Kirk and Karidian are a little jostled by each other, but the staging of it is a bit odd - how could an old man get in front of Kirk to take the blast at the speed a Phaser fires? Nor should a Phaser be automatically set to kill, yet this one does for Karidian. There are answers, as there always are: if Lenore was devious enough to set a Phaser to overload she would have known how to adjust the settings intuitively, and Karidian may have had a heart condition, or the stress of the moment could have been as much to blame as the blast. If the execution of the ex-executioner didn't ring entirely true, it did at least lead to a suitably tragic Shakespearean conclusion, Lenore pathetically babbling words from the play over her dead Father's body, then being torn away from him forever. It can be said that the integration of 'Hamlet' into the story was well… erm, executed, to say the least. Perhaps because it's about humans and not some alien menace, the face of humanity the real villain, the episode remains a timeless story, and regardless of the future setting and technology all around, it's about emotions, motives and important questions such as the value of a man's life, even putting it to the test against technology as when Kirk says the voice prints are a close match, but no machine can make such a decision.

There's also the side story of Lieutenant Riley, brought into it first by Lenore's assassination attempt on him in Engineering, but also when he overhears a careless Medical Log McCoy records in Sickbay, right next door to the antsy patient, hardly the wisest choice! In fact McCoy looks remarkably at ease and lacking his oft seen stress and temper, kicking back with his drink and telling Spock not to worry, and then doing this! It leads to Riley almost becoming a murderer in revenge, and the backstage of the play is just as interesting as the front of house when Kirk and Riley are about, then confession comes and more drama. It's a good mix, and I especially like that Riley's ardour is quickly brought under control by the stern commands of his Captain. Again, it's nice that they brought back a character we'd seen before and went some way to redeem his foolishness (albeit brought out by the virus in 'The Naked Time'), as he was a pretty laughable character in that one. This is also Mr. Leslie's finest hour so far, having the honour of taking Mr. Sulu's station on the Bridge throughout, and even (for the first time, I think), being called by name, several times in fact, by Kirk. He must have thought all his Christmases had come at once!

Other noteworthy details include the period music used in the play - period as in the kind of score heard in period films of the sixties, which makes it quite quaint and appealing. It was also fun to notice a jazzy version of the 'TOS' theme played as quiet background music at the cocktail party. We see a lot of paper for a futuristic setting: it makes sense that an anti-tech group would have props, costumes and sets, as well as the script for the play in a paper volume to flick through, as Karidian is seen to hold in his quarters, but we also see lots of books in Kirk's Quarters (even if he does treat them badly, flinging them about like a frenzied animal in his bid to locate the overloading Phaser!), and most oddly, a scrap of paper is used to provide the Kodos speech for Karidian to recite in the voice print test. Why didn't Kirk give him one of those PADD-like boards that we sometimes see Yeoman's carrying? Even McCoy eschews using one to bring his Captain a medical report on a completely different pad, which features a small viewer in the centre. Is this a specific Medical Tricorder or some kind of device unique to McCoy? I wonder if the photo we see of Kodos from twenty years before was of the same actor as the current Karidian? It could have been an old publicity still of him, if they used those back then. And we learn that the Enterprise retains the day and night conditions of a planet, which explains the low lighting when Kirk gives Lenore the tour. Finally, we learn that Vulcans don't drink, if Spock's attitudes to the 'dubious benefits of alcohol' are anything to go by - he says his Father's race was spared from it.

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