Was Karidian Kodos?

[MAGolding]

Getting Kodos associated with the killing of the 4,000 colonists is a no-brainer: Kirk makes Karidian read a bit of text that he says can be compared to Kodos' voiceprint - and it turns out that the text contains Kodos' full confession. Karidian furthermore knows the text by rote, indicating it's a genuine piece of Kodos' posturing.

It is very difficult to argue, then, that Starfleet would not have Kodos' full confession on file, in his own voice.Timo Saloniemi

You are assuming that the recording of the voice of Kodos that is on file is the voice of Kodos sentencing a batch of victims to death. But possibly the recording of the voice of Kodos that is on file is the voice of Kodos making a victory speech saying that his group had taken control of Tarsus IV and that he was the new governor, "Kodos the Kind".

Since it is uncertain how long Kodos ruled Tarsus IV using the name of Kodos, and little is known of his leadership style except for the massacres, it is uncertain how many public speeches Kodos made, without mentioning the massacres, that were recorded.

Why Kodos/Karidian is untouchable does not depend on lack of physical evidence at all, it seems. Three lines of speculation all apply:

1) Kirk could make Karidian burn, but is too good a man to do that.
2) Kirk cannot legally prove that Karidian is Kodos, even though he could make Kodos burn.
3) Kirk cannot even make Kodos burn, because
3.1) of a legal technicality
3.2) what Kodos did was not punishable in the first place, not by Kirk's organization at any rate
3.3) what Kodos did is punishable but only by the now customary mental conditioning, after which Karidian would walk - and the old-fashioned Kirk cannot bear the thought of the killer of those 4,000 (perhaps including his parents?) soon being innocent in the face of law

Kirk's line "If I had gotten everything I wanted, you might not walk out of this room alive" does not appear to concern the legal aspects of the issue at all - Kirk killing Karidian in his quarters is unlikely to be an action he could legally perform once proving that Karidian is Kodos! So we cannot consider anything Kirk did in Karidian's room to be directly relevant to the legal process. It's more like Kirk wanted to meet a monster he could kill (and then retire to one of 'em penal colonies for a week or two), but only met a confused former monster he didn't have the heart to kill after all.

Timo Saloniemi

It does seem like Kirk might have murdered Kodos/Karidian then and there if he got what he expected.

Timo said:

Kirk's parents were not mentioned at all, but there was some emphasis on Kirk having been very young at the time.

We never got a clear picture of what this youth meant in practice. Had all other witnesses but the nine kids died of old age? Probably not - the nine already included several people now dead. So if Kirk was part of a relief force (a cadet or an army brat, considering), why was this youngster a witness when the supposed adults accompanying him were not?

Of the nine witnesses, two (Kirk and Leighton) are in their thirties or forties, and one (Riley) is a tad younger. Perhaps some of the unseen others were older. But what could nine people see that 4,000 survivors did not? Did a landing party of just nine (including at least three kids) gun down the cohorts that had managed to kill 4,000, while nobody else participated in the relief and therefore did not see anything?

About Kirk's age. In "The deadly Years" in the 2nd season Kirk says he his 34 years old. So if the Tarsus IV disaster was 20 years before the first season, emphasizing Kirk's youth when he was on Tarsus IV would be consistent.

We know that Kirk's father, whether on Tarsus IV or not, survived to see Kirk become captain of the Enterprise a few years before this episode, according to future Spock in Star Trek (2009).

This script dialog that was cut from the episode establishes Kirk's status on Tarsus IV:

MARTHA
It was different for you, Jim.
A young midshipman, no family there...

KIRK
I know. Tom's parents were
there, two brothers...

And:

KIRK
Now yes... but what about before?
Fresh out of the Academy. Young,
inexperienced, a midshipman...
stationed on a colony which was
disintegrating before my eyes!
Starvation! Rioting! Disaster!
I saw men, women and children
forced into an anti-matter chamber
... and a self-appointed messiah
named Kodos threw a switch, and
there wasn't anyone inside anymore!
Four thousand people! Dead!
(distraught)
And you know something funny? I was one
of those Kodos spared! He ordered me left alive!
I was one of the fittest!
(incredulous)
And you want me to forget that?
I'm sorry, doctor. I'm a human
being... and there are some things
human beings simply do not forget.

http://www.orionpressfanzines.com/articles/conscience_of_the_king.htm

Since those lines were omitted from the final script it is uncertain if they are canon. The reason for omitting them may be that they make Kirk a midshipman in his early teens according to his established age. But then there was Midshipman Peter Preston in WOK, played by 19-year-old Ike Eisenmann but looking younger. The script and the novelization describe Preston as 14.

Thus there is a slight possibility that Kirk (and maybe Leighton also) was a midshipman in his early teens, and perhaps was part of some scientific survey on Tarsus IV, and graduated and was commissioned, and then was later forced to reenter Starfleet Academy and take the courses again because of new laws about the mininmum age.

As for Riley:

RILEY: He murdered my father, and my mother.
KIRK: You could be wrong. Don't throw away your life on a mistake.
RILEY: I'm not wrong.
KARIDIAN: But that I am forbid to tell the secrets of my prison house,
RILEY: I know that voice, that face, I know it. I saw it. He murdered them.

http://www.chakoteya.net/StarTrek/13.htm

So Kirk and Leighton might have been on Tarsus IV when the famine started and were rescued in the nick of time, or else beamed down as very young members of the relief party and helped overthrow Kodos. Riley seems to have been living on Tarsus IV with his family but may have had better genes than his parents in Kodos's opinion, or else was scheduled to die in a later batch but was rescued.

Timo said:

I prefer to assume that while everybody knew Kodos' face and his deeds, a couple of kids had innocuously witnessed something private about Kodos in circumstances where Kodos did not consider kids a threat (thus not the circumstances where he was ruling the colony and executing his perceived enemies and/or random folks!). A revealing bit about the identity of the man who named himself Kodos might fit the bill. Perhaps a bit the kids were unwilling to share because they thought it compromising of something they valued?

But let's go back to the roots. Leighton says "there were only eight or nine of us who actually saw Kodos. If he's to be exposed-".

- Who were "us"? (Colonists?)
- Why the uncertainty about numbers? (Was there a special occasion involved, one where Leighton only managed to make an approximate head count? "8 or 9" is very specific, as opposed to "a dozen"...)
- What does seeing Kodos mean, in a world where his photograph is part of the public record? (Seeing him doing something? Being something? Something better left unmentioned even in the original debriefing?)
- What is to be exposed? (Something that was not exposed originally? Something that should not be exposed even now? Leighton does say "if"!)

The conspiracy theorist in me really wants to say that the man who became Kodos was a family friend and/or a Starfleet officer...

So what would the witnesses have seen? Kodos without his fake beard? That Soylent Green was people? (Yuck! But better perhaps than wasting the bodies. I guess they might not want to reveal to the other 4,000 colonists what had kept them alive).

Leighton does say:

LEIGHTON: Jim, Jim, I need your help. There were only eight or nine of us who actually saw Kodos. I was one, you were another. If he's to be exposed,

The computer gives a list of witnesses:

COMPUTER: Data being received. Kodos file of all survivors. There are nine actual eye witnesses who can identify Kodos.

And Spock says:

SPOCK: He'd better. There were nine eye witnesses who survived the massacre, who'd actually seen Kodos with their own eyes. Jim Kirk was one of them. With the exception of Riley and Captain Kirk, every other eye witness is dead. And my library computer shows that wherever they were, on Earth, on a colony, or aboard ship, the Karidian Company of Players was somewhere near when they died.

Spock says the nine eye witnesses survived the massacre, indicating that they saw Kodos exterminate earlier batches, and were about to be killed themselves when rescue arrived. Or maybe some of them were in the Starfleet relief force that overthrew Kodos, and some of them saw the last part of the massacre and survived the fierce fight with Kodos's men where many starfleet men might have been killed.

Note that whether it was the birth name or not, he used the name of Kodos on Tarsus IV, and Karidian afterwards. Who used a lot of names starting with K? Klingons. Maybe Kodos chose K because he was a Klingon spy, or a human working for the Klingons.

Timo said:

The conspiracy theorist in me really wants to say that the man who became Kodos was a family friend and/or a Starfleet officer...

So maybe Kodos was a family friend and/or a Starfleet officer who may have had a surname starting with K. Maybe a surname of Kirk?

 

[johnnybear]

The Soylent Green theory has a lot of merit that I don't think the viewers of a 1966 television show would have been able to stomach to be honest! But I liked it!
JB

 

[Timo]

You are assuming that the recording of the voice of Kodos that is on file is the voice of Kodos sentencing a batch of victims to death.

Yup. This would be the logical way to compare the voices: to have them speak the very same words.

We can speculate that Kirk either didn't care about making the computer's work easier, or in fact didn't care about voice matching at all. Quite plausibly, he merely wanted to see Karidian speak these specific words, and then judge whether he should strangle the man dead right there or not.

Since it is uncertain how long Kodos ruled Tarsus IV using the name of Kodos, and little is known of his leadership style except for the massacres, it is uncertain how many public speeches Kodos made, without mentioning the massacres, that were recorded.

It's a bit unclear what gets recorded and what doesn't - even aboard a starship, there's detailed footage from the Birgde and from Main Engineering describing events during alerts, but comparable footage in "The Menagerie" is declared unusual and indeed implausible. But if Kodos did make speeches (via technological media or from his balcony or at a dinner table), there'd probably be at least one or two among 8,000 who'd make personal recordings for assorted reasons.

We know that Kirk's father, whether on Tarsus IV or not, survived to see Kirk become captain of the Enterprise a few years before this episode, according to future Spock in Star Trek (2009).

Indeed - and nothing in the episode confirms original writer intent of Kodos having Executed Kirk's parents, even if nothing contradicts it there at that stage yet. It's always nice to get information added to the Trek universe afterwards.

This script dialog that was cut from the episode establishes Kirk's status on Tarsus IV:

...Well, it's always nice not to get this sort of information added to the Trek universe! I mean, this would basically mean Kirk was directly responsible for those 8,000 people in an official capacity, even if minor, and completely blew it. This is not much reflected in his behavior in the actual episode.

So what would the witnesses have seen? Kodos without his fake beard? That Soylent Green was people?

...I can't imagine the latter aspect hinging on the testimony of the witnesses. Or Kodos really caring much about the survival of those not killed/eaten, as long as he got to play Executioner.

Spock says the nine eye witnesses survived the massacre, indicating that they saw Kodos exterminate earlier batches, and were about to be killed themselves when rescue arrived.

Then again, the earlier snippets (that is, Leighton's formulation) indicate that nobody but these survivors ever "saw Kodos", whatever that means. No witnesses were killed back then, it seems.

Note that whether it was the birth name or not, he used the name of Kodos on Tarsus IV, and Karidian afterwards. Who used a lot of names starting with K? Klingons. Maybe Kodos chose K because he was a Klingon spy, or a human working for the Klingons.

Or perhaps he was just batshit Krazy? Or thought himself Klingon agent. In any case, me likes.

So maybe Kodos was a family friend and/or a Starfleet officer who may have had a surname starting with K. Maybe a surname of Kirk?

Perhaps the uncle whose fate in the Abrams movies was rather different?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Samuel]

There are all sorts of inconsistencies in Conscience of the King but to me they all fall by the wayside when you get to Kodos/Keridian's talk to his daughter, Lenore at the end of the episode when he realized she had murdered seven people to protect her father.

"You've left me with nothing!!!. All my life you were the one thing untouched by what I'd done".

It is evident by his earlier conversation with Kirk that Kodos/Keridian wanted to be known for something other than being a monster. A murderer. And he thought he had at least kept his beloved daughter away from knowing about his past. But the anguish, rage, sadness in his voice when he finds out that not only does Lenore know he is a mass murderer but that she has become one as well just to protect him is so terrible.

IIRC, Lenore is just under 20 when the episode occurs. This means she was born not long after the massacre.

It makes you wonder three big things:

1) How did Lenore find out her father was a mass murderer? Because obviously he tried desperately to keep that k knowledge away from her.
2) How old was Lenore when she found out?
3) When did Lenore start murdering the other seven witnesses who could identify Kodos?

My speculation:

Lenore's mother. Kodos/Keridian's wifef presumably. IIRC she is not seen or mentioned in the episode. I figure she is dead but that prior to her death she revealed the truth to Lenore feeling that the girl needed to know.

 

[Timo]

That's a good one - but it would definitely have to be the wife of Karidian and not of Kodos! (Otherwise, Lenore knowing would be a no-brainer, and his father could not be ignorant of the fact, either.)

And if she's the wife of the actor, the question then becomes, how did she know?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Samuel]

I got the idea that there was very much a "hiding in plain sight" aspect to Karidian being able to conceal his identity. I mean to hear Spock lay it out seems pretty obvious. Karidian apparently had no known background prior to the "death" of Kodos. There were pictures of Kodos that could easily be compared to Karidian.

Of course there might've been a strong element of wishful thinking involved. No one wanted to admit that a mass murderer who killed 4,000 people totally unnecessarily based on his weird ideas about who was "worth saving" had managed to escape. Probably right under the nose of the relief forces who arrived on Tarsus IV.

Oddly enough Kodos/Karidian must've had some pretty decent acting talent from the beginning as he went from mass murderer to acclaimed actor almost instantly.

One wonders. Was Kodos an amateur actor before taking over Tarsus IV? Could've been.

 

[johnnybear]

Didn't Spock mention a body burned beyond all recognition in the episode that could have been Kodos?
JB

 

[Maurice]

Blish sometimes worked from not-final materials, so and I've seen/have access to a lot of the production docs, so he was possibly working from the same thing I saw.

 

[Tenacity]

Karidian apparently had no known background prior to the "death" of Kodos.

I wonder if this is the norm for Humans in the TOS time period. Hundreds of colonies, Humans being born on alien worlds, Earth might be different. You're basically unknown unless you join something like Starfleet, commit a criminal act, or become a celebrity.

No birth certificate, finger prints, DNA records.

Was Kodos an amateur actor before taking over Tarsus IV?

Or a professional one, who saw a opportunity and grabbed it.

 

[Samuel]

Wasn't Kodos listed by Garth of Izar in "Dagger of the Mind" among the would be conquerors of the past or was that simply a name that sounded like Kodos? If it was Kodos that Garth mentioned it would appear that he had ambitions well beyond simply killing 4,000 people so 4,000 others wouldn't starve.

 

[Samuel]

Note, while we focus naturally on Kodos ordering the executions of 4,000 colonists, I think the episode implies that Kodos used staggeringly brutal methods against the people he didn't kill as well.
After all, how did Leighton end up with half his face gone.

 

[MAGolding]

Wasn't Kodos listed by Garth of Izar in "Dagger of the Mind" among the would be conquerors of the past or was that simply a name that sounded like Kodos? If it was Kodos that Garth mentioned it would appear that he had ambitions well beyond simply killing 4,000 people so 4,000 others wouldn't starve.

Krotus.

GARTH: On your knees before me! All the others before me have failed. Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, Lee Kuan, Krotus! All of them are dust! But I will triumph! I will make the ultimate conquest!
(Kirk reaches for the forcefield control and gets stunned for his efforts.)

http://www.chakoteya.net/StarTrek/71.htm

 

[Timo]

Krotus, Krotos or Crotos would of course be a worthy alias for a man also calling himself Kodos - "the Hunter" (and also the Patron of Muses!) as opposed to "the Law". Garth appears to be going for chronological with his list, meaning Krotus could be a recent addition to the menagerie.

(Lee Kuan could be the prominent Singapore figure of authority Lee Kuan Yew, only redefined much the same way Trek redefines Elon Musk. Either he did different things in Trek, or then history on him has been rewritten by the time of TOS.)

It doesn't appear contrary to UFP standards that Karidian would have no past - Kirk can query the relevant records, and said records do not list Karidian as "mysterious fugitive" or "likely alias" outright. I'm all for a relatively lawless Outer Rim where self-made men are the norm...

...Also, being an acclaimed actor is no doubt simply a matter of choosing your audiences. Karidian would face little competition if just touring the outer colonies where the very profession would be rare and absolute talent a secondary issue.

We could easily imagine a frontier actor, fed up with all 'em rotten tomatoes the rowdy colonists usually throw at him, arriving on Tarsus IV, seeing an opportunity and assuming a new role. Basically we're talking Wild West here anyway, so by the rules of the drama, "the new Sheriff in town" could plausibly fake his credentials and do "necessary" things without having to mind central authority or common standars of ethics.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[johnnybear]

Maybe Krotus was a Klingon leader that wanted conflict with the Federation because of it's ambitions near to Klingon space! Shame that was never picked up by the writers in ENT!
JB

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

Maybe Lenore read/listened to her father's diary.

The Kodos feeds half with the other half, turned into food, presenting himself as a savior when he's really a killer that turned you into cannibals thing is a very sci fi idea. I wonder if these kids snuck into a facility and saw what he did with the dead.

He might have staged a fake way for them to have apparently died (a fire that burned up their buildings and killed them - even added the corpse of the man who might have tried to stop him (that's the burned body), then Kirk, Riley, etc saw him performing the actual killings and turning people into food.

 

[Timo]

The thing about the Nine is the greatest mystery in the episode, really.

- The Nine "saw Kodos", and are the ones who can "identify Kodos", but one can point out that only the first of those claims is accompanied with the specifier "only". Can others, that is, people outside the category of "actual witnesses", identify Kodos or not? Is the ability to identify crucial to why Lenore is killing these people, or not?
- Nothing about the looks of Kodos is unknown to the authorities, so how does "seeing" help with "identifying"? Or does it not?
- Why doesn't Leighton remember whether there were eight or nine "of us", both very specific numbers?
- Who are "us"? What connects them? Are the Nine who saw Kodos the entirety of "us", or just a subset?
- Why is the list of the Nine not completely alphabetical, placing Eames after Riley instead of before Kirk? Or is that a mishearing of the name, and it actually begins with some post-R letter? Yeames? Are the remaining four then Zachary, Zephram, Ziggy and Zorn?

The thinking put into this would be fun to quantify. Writers/fans = 0.000001?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[johnnybear]

Surely many of the colonists on Tarsus saw Kodos before the disaster as well? How could a colony of so many not have seen it's Governor? Sounds odd!
JB

 

[MAGolding]

Surely many of the colonists on Tarsus saw Kodos before the disaster as well? How could a colony of so many not have seen it's Governor? Sounds odd!
JB

There are several references to Kodos as the governor of Tarsus IV, that sort of imply that he was the regular normal governor, and they do have a photograph of Kodos. But the speech that Karidian reads says that "The revolution has succeeded" implying that Kodos led a group that seized power and might be using an alias. These inconsistencies are really annoying.

 

[johnnybear]

This was written before Kirk's character and history had been properly formalized I'm sure! Either that or Governor Kodos was one of many Governors on the planet who realized that their world was in great danger of starving and took action to save those that he favoured in the long term! He does state that if help had arrived sooner he would have been considered a hero rather than a butcher! Not sure how, but there you go!
JB

 

[Timo]

Clearly the writers and rewriters had their wires crossed here, on many issues. So it's up to us to figure out a working alternative to the thing they had in their confused minds.

The saving grace here is that nowhere in the episode does anybody actually say words to the effect of "what Kodos looked like". Kodos' looks are not stated to be a mystery - which is great when we consider there's a photo of him.

The mystery is the nine "eyewitnesses", and what they "saw", and how this will help "identify" Kodos. Those are the three words we have to worry about, not the looks of Kodos. Generally, eyewitnesses see something happen. They then tell the authorities, and out of nine (no doubt conflicting and wildly inaccurate) stories, the truth is deduced. But if something is left unsaid for reason X, it may remain unsaid when the eyewitnesses think Kodos is dead.

Enter Karidian. And enter his daughter, who realizes an eyewitness has identified Kodos. This is reason enough for her to kill the witness, regardless of the thing left unsaid.

So my interpretation is that the eyewitnesses can identify Kodos as somebody (Kirk rudely interrupts the computer at the exact point where "...as XYZ" would be heard), and their identifying Karidian as Kodos is sort of incidental to the whole thing.

This sort of covers all the bases.

- Everybody knew what Kodos looked like.
- Only the nine saw Kodos do something that is revealing to who he was.
- The computer knows that the nine can identify Kodos as XYZ, but also that they have not spoken their piece to the authorities because they thought Kodos was dead, and the authorities did not press the kids further to no apparent gain.
- Lenore kills people who can identify Karidian as Kodos; she doesn't care about them identifying Kodos as XYZ. But the killings obscure the true knowledge the eyewitnesses uniquely had.
- Lenore doesn't need to kill all the 4,000 survivors who all can identify Karidian as Kodos. But she stumbled onto an eyewitness who had more intimate knowledge and was quick to make the connection; killed him but got worried; and started hunting for the other nine.
- For all we know, she nevertheless has also killed sixty-eight others out of the 4,000, and Kirk is none the wiser about that.

The plot works, then. And we don't need to know the exact dirty secret of Kodos' true identity for it to work. My bet is the kids wanted to protect somebody who would be compromised through his or her connection to the true identity of Kodos - and furthermore that the somebody had already died prior to the episode, removing or lessening the need to stay quiet, but Kirk still felt no need to tell Spock anything extra, an Kirk and Riley had no need to discuss the thing between themselves.

Timo Saloniemi