Rewatching Star Trek (The Original Series, 1966-1969)

Episode o' the Day
"The Conscience of the King" (season one, episode thirteen; production code: 013; 8 December 1966): Wikipedia-link.

Commentary: The influence of Shakespeare on Star Trek is profound & persistent. The title of the earlier "Dagger of the Mind" was a Shakespeare quote. "The Conscience of the King" turns the Bard's influence up to eleven, with on-screen performances, plays within the teleplay, of both Macbeth & Hamlet.

"The Conscience of the King" features the return of Lieutenant Kevin Riley from "The Naked Time."

The main plot of "The Conscience of the King" has never worked for me: Twenty years before the episode, the Federation colony on Tarsus IV has threatened with starvation after a fungus ruined the food supply. The colony's governor, the mononymous Kodos, imposed martial law & ordered the execution of half the population according to his own eugenic principles. (It's unclear how murdering four thousand people will prevent four thousand other people from starving to death if there is no food.) A Federation starship arrived with relief aid, but too late to prevent the executions. Kodos officially died, but no positive identification could be made of a burned body reputed to be his. Somehow, only nine survivors of Tarsus IV could positively identify Kodos. What? One cannot impose martial law with martial forces; none of Kodos's executioners could identify Kodos the Executioner? Two of the nine eyewitnesses served on the Enterprise, Captain Kirk & Lieutenant Riley. Kodos did escape from Tarsus IV, becoming the actor Anton Karidian & siring a daughter, Lenore. Kodos, as Karidian, spent the next twenty years traveling the Federation performing Shakepeare's plays, making sure that thousands upon thousands of people saw him, instead of, say, going into hiding or at least isolation as, for example, a lithium miner (as seen in "Mudd's Women"). Lenore Karidian, aware of her father's true identify as Kodos the Executioner, has spent the previous few years systematically murdering the Tarsus IV witnesses, including the seventh, Dr. Thomas Leighton, on Planet Q in the first act of the episode. When confronted, Lenore holds Kirk at phaserpoint & accidentally shoots her father instead of Captain Kirk.