Genuinely kind of wild to me that the two TOS episodes that are like "so. about Nazis. because they're still around and we keep finding them so we still have to think about them" are one of the greatest Star Trek episodes of all time and one of the most absolutely, unforgivably godawful ones.
"The Conscience of the King" is deeply thoughtful in how it integrates the concept of "so there would still be Adolf Eichmann types in a better world, and they're going to try the same shit for the same reasons, and it's a better world because it has the will and infrastructure to shut that down much earlier, but it's still something you have to engage with" in with Shakespeare and theatre and proto-Empire Strikes Back level cinematography. It's smart about the limits of understanding atrocity via gut empathy and the comfort of denial and minimization vs the place of intellectual rigor in emotionally registering horror and outrage appropriate to what actually happened.
The way that both Kodos and Lenore can't shut the fuck up long enough to not give themselves away, and both openly suggest Kirk is subhuman, and his refusal to play that game while struggling with nuclear rage and yearning for justice, is profoundly true to the people involved. Kodos's attempt to separate his own daughter's life from his atrocities to other people's children and families is pure Nazi shit, and it's sharp about how this is something you don't get to do, with the ultimate result that Lenore, even more of an apologist for Kodos's genocide than he is, ultimately is forced to experience a small part of what Kodos inflicted on so many others (Spock: "families destroyed, children watching their parents die...").
Kirk and Riley have been able to keep themselves from being completely defined by Kodos, however narrowly at times, by building other lives and their connections to their communities. Both survive the episode because of their ties to other people. Kirk is fucked up enough that he's laser-focused on protecting Riley physically, by isolating him from others; however, it's actually Riley's connections to others that saves him. He's lonely and depressed by Kirk's inexplicable treatment, and reaches out to his friends in communications for comfort and Uhura ends up singing to him. The only reason the communications system was already open and his pleas for help got heard in time as he was poisoned is because he'd reached out to his friends.
Meanwhile, it's Kirk's ties to McCoy and especially Spock that actually save him. McCoy and Spock confront Kirk about his nervous isolation and, despite him lashing out, press long enough for him to reveal that he's thinking about just murdering Kodos, but also clinging to uncertainty. McCoy finally gives up and leaves, but Spock stubbornly stays to keep pushing, and it's because of his reluctance to leave Kirk alone that he catches the sound of the charged phaser in Kirk's quarters, allowing them to prevent the destruction of that entire deck (which certainly would have killed Kirk, along with many others).
Then Kirk saves Riley, and himself, in a deeper sense by reaching out to him rather than isolating them from each other and those who care about them in the short-sighted-via-trauma way he's done throughout the early episode. It's less about physically protecting Riley than stopping him from binding himself to Kodos for the rest of his life through unnecessary extrajudicial murder, and stopping himself from doing it in the processânot for Kodos's sake, but theirs. I recently saw someone insisting that the only moral takeaway of COTK is "revenge bad," and it's such a banal poor-faith reading of what's going on there that I was just like... damn. That's a level of media illiteracy you have to work at.
For Kirk and Riley, Tarsus IV haunts them at times, it informs their (esp Kirk's) reactions, it's not something they overcome so much as something they live with. But they can. They have lives beyond that, and people beyond what they've lost. Tom Leighton was never at peace (something also stated of Kirk multiple times in the show), but that was not the totality of his life, either. He loved his wife, his field, he cared about people. But Kodos has turned Lenore into someone isolated, mentally fragile, entirely identified with him. Experiencing a small part of what Kodos inflicted on his victims breaks Lenore. The best they can hold out for is that she'll receive compassionate treatment that, perhaps, will let her become her own person someday.
I also really appreciate the contrast between Kodos and Lenore playing at grand tragedy, neither of them more than adequate actors at it, while Kirk is smiling, smiling, smiling throughout so much of the episode, then utterly solemn when not protecting himself, all of this resting on the jarringly wrong notes embedded into Barbara Anderson's performance of Lenore and Arnold Moss's of Kodos (both fantastic), and William Shatner's unexpectedly spectacular performance of Kirk's brittle charm as performance vs the somber gradations of trauma when he lets the mask drop or can't help it (few ST actors do a haunted stare better, tbh). Then there's the accidental re-casting of Bruce Hyde turning Kevin Riley into one of the most buckwild minor character concepts in the show. There's even the strain of specifically ecofascism in Kodos's rhetoric and specifically dehumanization, absolutely true to his Nazi inspirations and a compelling context for Kirk's kneejerk hostility to culty escapist back-to-nature fantasies as well as technocratic tyranny, qualities about him that persist throughout the entire show.
One season later, we then get "Patterns of Force." It's ragingly antisemitic trash that is not only broadly antisemitic, but custom-tailored to Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner specificallyâboth the sons of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, both born shortly before the Holodomor and old enough to remember the effects of the Holocaust on their familiesâand it's also the reason the list of uncredited people appearing in TOS includes Adolf Hitler. It has basically one idea that doesn't suck (Hitler was not some unique monster, the same systems produce the same shit and it could happen all over again, anywhere, any time), executed in about the worst possible way imaginable, up to and including Spock wrongly Vulcansplaining Nazi Germany to Kirk, but also just finding a different One Bad Guy to pin it all on.
Just a few things that happen in it: Nimoy and Shatner are put in Nazi uniforms (just them, for some reason), Nimoy has to tell Shatner that he looks like a Nazi (yeah, as Spock, but the context is Shatner's actual RL appearance), they're sexily whipped by Nazis (the whole James Somerton Nazi fetish just happens here), the actual Nazis break down the racial inferiority of Nimoy's features detail by detail (Nimoy's actual features, not just made-up Vulcan things), and the Jewish analogues are called Zeons. Nimoy refused to do any publicity for the episode, and more power to him.
I don't know why anyone would go on about "Spock's Brain" as the actual low point when this and "Elaan of Troyius" (written and directed by the same person who wrote "Patterns of Force") exist. I mean, I do know, but still. I'm not sure anything encapsulates the best and worst of Star Trek like getting both episodes in one show.
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