Synopsis: The Enterprise transports an acting troop to the Benecia Colony that may include an actor who was once “Kodos the Executioner.”
There are a couple topics regarding this episode that I want to briefly touch on.
First, there is the title “The Conscience of the King.” The way I remember how to spell “conscience,” meaning the will to do what is correct, is to recall that it includes the word “science”; science based on the premise that what is correct is what can be proven by empirical data. This as opposed to the word “conscious” which means to be rationally awake and aware of one’s surroundings, which is not limited to science when it comes to knowing what is real. Also, the title of the episode comes from a piece of dialogue at the end of Act II of Hamlet: “The play’s the thing, wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.” As was true in Shakespeare’s day, sometimes a play or other work of art can reach the unconscious of a king where a conscious confrontation cannot. This imaginative knowledge was depth psychology before we even knew it existed.
The other idea I would like to explore by means of this episode is the concept of pathologically feeling that one is embodying a god. In this story, the gods in question would be Zeus and his daughter Athene.
Twenty years prior to when the events of “The Conscience of the King” is set, Captain James T. Kirk, Lt. Kevin Riley, Dr. Thomas Leighton, and six others witnessed and survived a mass extermination of 4,000 of the 8,000 inhabitants of Earth Colony Tarsus IV, by its governor, Kodos, also known as “Kodos the Executioner.” Under somewhat false pretenses, Leighton summons Kirk to Planet Q where an acting company is performing, because he believes that the leader of the troop, Anton Karidian, is in fact Kodos. Karidian has a daughter, Lenore Karidian, who is also a part of the company. As it turns out, although Karidian thought he had hidden his past from his daughter, she has been killing one by one all the witnesses to his earlier action. Lenore is found out; accidentally kills Karidian and ends up in a psychiatric hospital, a place where Dr. Leonard McCoy assures Kirk she will get the best of care.
Being in power as governor, as Kodos was on Tarnas IV, is an embodiment of Zeus – the god above all the other Olympians in Ancient Greece. In his position Kodos believed that like a god, he had the right and ability to decide who would live and who would die for the benefit of the colony. Such a colossal act of hubris on the part of a human almost always ends in disaster, or as the doer of the deed often laments, is not understood. After his actions were discovered, Kodos fled and created a new identity as Anton Karidian. He believed that the only thing that had not been touched by his misdeed had been his daughter. Lenore can be seen to be a physical manifestation of the goddess Athene – the Olympian who sprung fully formed from her father’s head and is known for her strategic abilities. In “The Conscience of the King” Lenore strategically sought out all the eyewitnesses to her father’s transgression and systematically killed them, believing that this would free her father from any possible danger of being found out. In her case, the pathological embodiment of the goddess led to her mental ruin after she inadvertently killed her father. Another act of hubris punished by the gods and goddesses.
Original post created 16 January 2021
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