Tumblr crosspost (4 February 2025)

[anghraine]

Okay, so this is the Tarsus IV post I vaguely threatened alluded to here. I wrote most of it before I wrote the post grumbling about movie Kirk, btw, so it’s not a result of that one. I was already thinking about what we know about Kirk and the Tarsus IV massacre from TOS, and what speculations and headcanons make the most sense to me in the context of TOS. I just waited until today to post it because I wasn’t quite done earlier.

Anyway, I was going over the finer details of “The Conscience of the King” to figure this out, and ended up with a ton of thoughts about the Tarsus IV backstory. So here are my (many) personal takeaways:

Firstly, there’s a vague reference to some kind of local coup or uprising that put Governor Kodos in power, I think shortly before the food supply crisis. We don’t get any details about the uprising from TOS, though the next to last version of the episode’s script did mention Kodos setting himself up as a messianic figure once the coup succeeded, and Barry Trivers' original, more expansive backstory does explain pretty much all the vague details in the aired episode [ETA 7/5/2025: I wrote a post later about that backstory, which is entirely consistent with TOS and makes so much more sense to me than the various official explanations of these details that I choose to adopt it pretty wholeheartedly, but I hadn't dug through it all when I wrote this post in February]. In any case, Kodos's power grab was certainly reinforced by the starvation crisis, as revealed by Spock’s research:

“there were over eight thousand colonists and virtually no food. And that was when Governor Kodos seized full power and declared emergency martial law.”

As far as we know in TOS, the crisis was set off by chance: an exotic fungus happened to destroy most of the colony’s food supply, and it wasn’t clear when relief would arrive. In fact, the Federation did send relief to the colony, per their usual practice, but it took them long enough to get there that the situation had become dire by then. Nearly all food was gone, and the colonists were starving. The episode implies that some had even started committing suicide. Nevertheless, the Federation relief force arrived sooner than expected.

Kodos tries to argue in “The Conscience of the King” that the Federation’s relief showing up so soon was just luck, and he couldn’t have guessed it would happen. But given what we know about the Federation as an institution, and given the urgent pressure the Federation puts on the Enterprise crew in multiple episodes to get food/supplies/medicine to some colony or another, it seems like there is a pretty competent, long-established Federation infrastructure for addressing crises like this. I think it's important to remember that for all of his mournful gravitas, Kodos as a character is defined by his refusal to accept accountability for the atrocities he orchestrated, especially accountability to his surviving victims; he offers a lot of excuses while maneuvering around even admitting he is Kodos, and we are given no reason to accept these. Rather, every indication is that in reality, Kodos used the circumstances to justify something he already believed in and wanted to try implementing.

That thing was eugenics. This isn’t ambiguous; the aired episode explicitly describes his atrocities as based on eugenics. The starvation of the colony gave Kodos the opportunity to put his theories into action.

He declared that half the colony would be executed, and the remaining food distributed among the other half. Moreover, the assignment of each colonist to either group was determined by Kodos’s conception and judgment of genetic superiority. The genetically inferior half of the population, according to Kodos, was executed, and the genetically superior survivors (again, according to Kodos) were given all the food supplies. Kodos’s exact words at the time to those slated to die included these lines:

“Your continued existence represents a threat to the well-being of society. Your lives mean slow death to the more valued members of the colony.”

Kirk says of Kodos’s full speech to those chosen for death:

“I remember the words. I wrote them down. […] Are you sure you didn’t act this role out in front of a captive audience whom you blasted out of existence without mercy?”

In the episode, Spock condemns Kodos in strikingly similar terms, as “without mercy” and “ruthless.” He is clearly horrified by what he’s discovered to a degree we rarely see in him:

“Children watching their parents die. Whole families destroyed. Over four thousand people. They died quickly, without pain, but they died.”

The means by which Kodos had thousands of civilians killed isn’t stated in the episode. The above quote, though, indicates that it was done very rapidly.

In an earlier draft, there’s mention of some kind of re-purposed anti-matter chamber as the mechanism, and Kodos deliberately “sparing” Kirk while making him watch as the chamber switch was flipped. In that version, Kirk seems to be personally targeted for some reason, where in the episode as it is, he’s just one of several random eyewitnesses who happened to survive. I personally prefer the episode’s version, which I think better fits a narrative around a mass-scale atrocity.

Anyway, there’s another take on the massacre where the thousands of civilians slated for execution were gunned down with phasers, but I find that more difficult to reconcile with Spock’s description, which sounds more mechanized and efficient to me. I do think there’s reason to believe phasers or some other form of advanced weaponry did get used in the course of events, but not in the executions—more on that later.

As I mentioned in my poll, Kirk is established in TOS as being only 33 during “The Conscience of the King,” and thus was only 13 when he personally saw all this (the episode repeatedly insists the atrocity took place exactly twenty years earlier; I think the emphasis on this time gap is important, but more on that later as well). There is no explanation in TOS of why 13-year-old Kirk seems to be the only member of his family who was an eyewitness to this—and certainly the only one of the Kirks to personally see Kodos—though earlier drafts do have various explanations that make sense.

For instance, there was an idea floating around the drafting process that Kirk might have been a young midshipman stationed on Tarsus IV during the massacre, not a child. His exact age in TOS wasn’t formally settled until the second season explicitly established his then-current age as 34, though “Shore Leave” in season 1 (written and aired shortly after “The Conscience of the King”) strongly indicates he’s currently no more than 33 or 34, making him much too young for that backstory to work. So that idea is not at all canon, but did internally make sense, since there’d be no reason in that scenario for his relatives to be posted with him.

Barry Trivers's more elaborated plan for the backstory (alluded to above) offers the simple explanation that Kirk's parents (at least his father) were on Tarsus IV with him, and the only reason they weren't also among the eyewitnesses is that they were killed with all the others, which I think later ST needlessly dodged around when that's easily the most efficient and parsimonious way to explain his isolation. I believe Kirk Sr was already envisioned as a member of what would become Starfleet, and had been assigned to a post on Tarsus IV some time earlier, which is how a boy born in North America ended up living on a remote colony as a child. However, as I understand, Trivers was forced to remove the reference to Kirk’s father getting killed because higher-ups didn’t want to nail down Kirk’s history too much in S1, in case they later wanted to take his family in a different direction.

TOS never did do anything with Kirk’s parents and we’re never even told in the show if they’re alive or dead, much less told anything about their roles during the massacre. His brother Sam Kirk was envisioned as 10 years older than James (I think the newer shows shrink this, but that’s irrelevant to the vision for TOS), so it also made sense that Sam wasn’t there, since he’d have been in his 20s and early in his own career elsewhere. (Sam and his family are mentioned in both earlier and later S1 episodes than this one, so “they hadn’t invented him yet” isn’t the reason for his absence.)

Beyond all that, another detail I find interesting is that Kodos’s speech announcing the impending massacre is preserved in some kind of audio file that Kirk has access to on the Enterprise. Kirk gives “Karidian” a copy of the exact words of this speech and orders him to read it aloud, and has the computers run a vocal comparison between that reading and the original recording. The computer analysis strongly indicates that both speeches were delivered by the same person, but lacks 100% certainty—perhaps due to vocal changes over the last 20 years, perhaps to a difference in the quality of the recordings, or some other reason.

However, we don’t actually know who recorded the original speech; since so few survivors ever got near enough to even see or hear Kodos in person, maybe the recording was done by Kodos himself or one of his people, and recovered later by Starfleet. The speech only addresses the colonists slated for death, suggesting that the 4000 chosen for survival had already been separated out and likely had no idea what was happening. But it’s possible that it was one or more of the colonists themselves who managed to record the speech.

Only nine of the survivors ever personally set eyes on Kodos (this seems to again imply that the 4000 selected for survival were not present during the speech). There’s a grainy preserved photograph of Kodos from that era, but that’s all, and one of the reasons he’s able to evade discovery for so long is because of the vanishingly few people involved who had ever seen him and could identify him again—this is not only canon, but a major plot point in “The Conscience of the King.”

I read on the wiki that there’s a book about the whole thing, and in that version, Kirk never actually saw Kodos and just found a picture in a database, which honestly I think is stupid as fuck and makes no sense in terms of the episode as written (though very typical of corporate franchises watering down the horror of some element of an original, less sanitized backstory for a major character in their later byproducts, much as Star Wars has consistently tried to retcon Cassian's child soldier backstory in Rogue One). In “The Conscience of the King,” though, Leighton, Kirk, and Riley are explicitly stated to be among the nine survivors who saw Kodos personally.

It’s never explained why they were among this small group of eyewitnesses, especially considering that Kirk and Riley would have been children at the time and Leighton was at most a young man.

Another intriguing data point is the fact that half of Leighton’s face is very heavily damaged, and it does seem strongly indicated that this happened during the events on Tarsus IV. We don’t know why, though, or how old he even was at the time—he seems older than 33-year-old Kirk, but they’re good friends and rough contemporaries, so not that far apart in age.

There’s also some interesting phrasing in the episode:

“There were nine eyewitnesses who survived the massacre, who’d actually seen Kodos with their own eyes. Jim Kirk was one of them.”

This description is also from Spock after his research dive, someone unlikely to be loose with his phrasing. The general assumption, I think, is that the nine eyewitnesses (who I’m going to call the Tarsus Nine for convenience) were among those chosen for survival for eugenics purposes [ETA 7/6/2025: I later realized that a lot of the fannish conversation and conventions that had led to this conclusion were from older sources, mostly pre-AOS; at this point, I've seen a lot of fans favoring either possibility]. The reason such a small number of them had ever seen Kodos is, presumably, that most people who’d seen him were deliberately assigned to the genetically unworthy group and killed. The Tarsus Nine were just the tiny fraction who flew under the radar.

That was my original impression, and it is possible, but there were a lot of things I found puzzling about that scenario. For one, if the Tarsus Nine were separated out with the other survivors, why are they persistently presented as the only direct eyewitnesses to the massacre? If Leighton was separated into the survivor group, why was his face so heavily damaged in all this? Did he try to fight? Would he have been spared from death if he did? And the episode is clear that Leighton, Kirk, and Riley all heard Kodos’s speech and witnessed the massacre in person.

Leighton:

“I remember him. That voice. The bloody thing he did […] Jim, Jim, I need your help. There were only eight or nine of us who actually saw Kodos. I was one, you were another.”

Kirk:

“But I remember. […] I remember the words. I wrote them down. […] All I understand is that four thousand people were needlessly butchered. […] I saw him once, twenty years ago. Men change. Memory changes.”

Riley:

“He murdered my father, and my mother. I know that voice, that face, I know it. I saw it. He murdered them.”

I had been considering possible explanations for the uniqueness of these nine people as the only direct eyewitnesses among some 4000 survivors + the fact that the three eyewitnesses we meet would have been so young at the time (and Spock talks specifically of children seeing their parents die) + Kirk saying he remembers hearing the speech and that he only ever saw Kodos that one time + the Tarsus Nine knowing that nobody left alive except themselves saw Kodos + their very accurate estimates of how many eyewitnesses survived + Leighton’s facial scars.

And then I tripped over an ancient post (on livejournal of all things—I was linked to a post unrelated to the massacre and then followed another link) that collected some of the relevant Tarsus IV quotes and offered a very simple and elegant solution.

What if the Tarsus Nine weren’t assigned to the “genetically more valuable” group? What if Kirk, Riley, Leighton, and the other six were in fact considered genetically unworthy and assigned to the group slated for death? What if they’re the only direct eyewitnesses because everyone else was either removed from the massacre (and never saw the speech), or killed, and that’s why there are so few of them among the survivors? What if they're the ones who weren't supposed to live and that's why they pose such a danger?

me: oh damn, I didn’t think about that and … whoa, I don’t think the episode ever does say what group they were actually assigned to. It’s possible. In fact, it makes way more sense. Holy shit.

So, here’s an alternate possibility/headcanon:

4000-odd colonists including the Tarsus Nine were gathered without any knowledge of the intended massacre. They didn’t know where the other colonists were, or what was going on beyond starvation and martial law. None of them had ever personally seen their reclusive governor. They were just waiting with their families to find out what was going on. Kodos came out to speak to them, at last, and delivered his speech to those slated for death (hence Kirk saying in TOS that he only ever saw him once, 20 years earlier). The “survival” group didn’t hear it and never saw him. But Kirk, Leighton, and Riley did—because they were supposed to die.

Kodos’s description of 33-year-old Kirk is, uh, let’s say intriguing in that context:

“Here you stand, the perfect symbol of our technical society. Mechanized, electronized, and not very human. You’ve done away with humanity, the striving of man to achieve greatness through his own resources.”

Kodos’s murderous daughter Lenore, similarly, says:

LENORE: Are you like that, captain? All this power at your command, yet the decisions that you have to make—
KIRK: Come from a very human source.
LENORE: Are you, captain? Human?

It’s likely that these colonists and other residents didn’t all go meekly to their entirely unexpected deaths. If we go with the concept of Kirk’s father as a Starfleet member serving at a post on the colony, some of these people were in Starfleet and might well have still had weaponry of some kind. They were just as hungry as the rest, but I suspect would have fought to the death against an undisguised atrocity. I think others also would have fought back against Kodos’s people, despite being starved and much less well-armed (if armed at all).

In all probability, none of them expected to win, but hoped to buy time for others, especially their children, to escape (hence the conspicuous youth of the eyewitnesses). The resisting residents would have been massacred by Kodos’s troops as he took control of the situation, even before thousands of more people were sent to their executions, but I imagine this resistance created enough havoc for nine children and young adults to escape with their lives (Leighton’s face getting seared in the process—perhaps by a phaser set to kill that barely missed him).

Most of the literal children among the Tarsus Nine had seen their parents killed as Kodos’s people took control, as had other children who didn’t survive (hence Spock’s description of children watching parents die and of the nine eyewitnesses directly surviving a massacre). The Tarsus Nine may have seen the other colonists forced into the execution mechanism, whatever it was, either during their escape or if any snuck out afterwards to see (Riley’s account sounds like it). Regardless, I headcanon that the Tarsus Nine found each other and hid out together (I’m assuming they ended up finding each other and cooperating because they’re so accurate about just how many of them there were, and because I’m guessing literal children wouldn’t have survived alone).

We don’t know a whole lot about what was going on psychologically with them at the time. But something else I’ve been thinking about is the interesting ambiguity in Kirk’s statement to Kodos about the original genocide speech. Kirk says, “I remember the words. I wrote them down,” which seems a reference to Kirk writing the speech down during the episode to force Kodos to read it. However, something I find fascinating there (/Spock fistbump) is that Kirk’s statement that he himself wrote down the speech follows so directly from “I remember the words.”

I think the implication is that he wrote down the exact words of the speech from memory (indicating that Kodos’s genocide announcement that Kirk heard at age 13 is still seared into his mind). Or possibly, the causality is reversed: he perfectly remembers Kodos’s speech because he wrote it down at some point in the past, reinforcing the memory (likely this would have been not long after surviving the massacre). The former seems a bit more probable to me, but either case would suggest quite a lot about how deeply this affected him.

But whatever the Tarsus Nine were up to, they lasted long enough for Starfleet to arrive and take charge of the situation. We don’t know the details of how that happened from TOS, either, though the fact that Kodos got the hell out of Dodge and left a burned body to be misidentified as him suggests that it was obvious enough what Starfleet’s arrival was going to mean well before any fighting began.

Afterwards, well … some of the Tarsus Nine maintained ties, for sure. Kirk and Leighton seem to be friends; they address each other by familiar nicknames, Kirk knows Leighton’s wife, and he regards Leighton’s deception as something of a personal betrayal. Kirk is a bit vague on Leighton’s professional life and dismisses his suspicions at first, so I don’t think they’re super close, but it’s a trusting and familiar relationship in general.

Meanwhile, others among them lost contact. Kirk clearly has no idea that the Lieutenant Riley he knows on the Enterprise was a little boy among the other eyewitnesses, which isn't even improbable. Riley likely ended up with caretakers who wouldn’t have been all that keen on him being reminded of the horrific trauma he’d experienced. Him ending up on the Enterprise by sheer chance is a hell of a coincidence, but that’s not unusual for Star Trek, let’s be real.

A minor point: I’m guessing Sam Kirk had a hell of a week (month?) as the information about what was happening on Tarsus IV leaked out. I’m guessing from the outside, there’d be the official alert of the food crisis -> the colony’s communications going dark -> Starfleet arriving and discovering what had happened -> their updates as they searched for survivors and those responsible -> their reports of finding the 4000 chosen for survival and the Tarsus Nine.

Moving forwards chronologically, we don’t know that much about the longer-term effects on the Tarsus Nine apart from Kirk, though Riley is clearly haunted to some extent. Thomas Leighton has a respectable career, though his wife says after his death:

“At least he has peace now. He never really had that before.”

As for Kirk, I think the next “version” of Kirk we know anything about via TOS is him as a very young man at Starfleet Academy (i.e., eighteen years old). This Kirk is repeatedly described as bookish and solemn. In “Shore Leave” (which follows very shortly after “The Conscience of the King,” though it’s far lighter), we get this exchange:

KIRK: I know the feeling very well. I had it at the Academy. An upperclassman there. One practical joke after another, and always on me. My own personal devil. A guy by the name of Finnegan.
MCCOY: And you being the very serious young—
KIRK: Serious? I’ll make a confession, Bones. I was absolutely grim.

Yeah, I wonder why.

Even as late as his time as an instructor at the Academy, when he was Lieutenant Kirk, he seems pretty recognizably “that” Kirk. He taught a notoriously challenging class (the subject not stated, but implied to be philosophy) and was known as a demanding teacher. In “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” his friend and former student Gary Mitchell says:

“Well, I’m getting a chance to read some of that longhair stuff you like. Hey man, I remember you back at the Academy. A stack of books with legs. The first thing I ever heard from an upperclassman was, watch out for Lieutenant Kirk. In his class, you either think or sink.”

Mitchell jokes about how he only passed Kirk’s class by orchestrating the campaign of a “little blonde lab technician” to distract Kirk from his usual severity. And even this was not a fling; Kirk’s relationship with the lab technician reached the point that he almost married her. So even that suggests someone who was taking every part of his life deadly seriously.

The personable, dutiful-but-easy-going charm and good humor of Kirk in much of TOS seems to not have been much in evidence for many, many years of Kirk’s life. And even by the time we meet him, this runs much less deep than his powerful sense of responsibility, and his commitment to the ideals of the Federation and to his own philosophical convictions. We often see his outwards charm switch off like a light when it doesn’t serve his purposes.

This is especially apparent in “The Conscience of the King” itself, which includes one of Kirk’s most cold-blooded charm offensives. He can’t immediately reach Kodos to confirm or reject Leighton’s identification, so instead, Kirk deliberately charms Kodos’s nineteen-year-old daughter Lenore in order to dig up information on him (not realizing that Lenore herself is a murderer). There is a chasm between this calculated charm and his manner when he finds Kodos and drops the front:



The last thing I wanted to say about “The Conscience of the King” and this particular backstory for Kirk is that, after all of this, what exactly is the point of the backstory revealed in this episode? It’s Star Trek, there usually is one, even when it’s executed badly or clumsily. What is it gesturing at?

There’s a repeated emphasis on the twenty years between the present moment and Kodos’s atrocity. He is now an old man living a normal life, and doesn’t seem to be a particular threat to anyone. One of the major subplots involves Spock trying to figure out what the hell happened twenty years earlier, then trying to convince McCoy of the threat, then Kirk and Spock and McCoy having this fraught discussion about it.

Spock is not dispassionate; he is horrified by both the past atrocity and current threat to Kirk, and quickly reaches a point of certainty about Karidian’s/Kodos’s identity and what should be done about him. Kirk is more anxious and unsure about getting it wrong, and about his own motives, despite simultaneously wanting to just kill this guy on the spot. McCoy doesn’t want to believe at pretty much every turn, and desperately tries to convince himself on multiple occasions that Kirk is moved by real feelings for Lenore. Even when he does accept the reality of Kirk’s history, he is wary of Kirk acting out of potentially questionable motives so long after the fact and implies he should let it go and move on. It leads to this great scene between all three:

SPOCK: Why do you invite death?
KIRK: I’m not. I’m interested in justice.
MCCOY: Are you? Are you sure it’s not vengeance?
KIRK: No, I’m not sure. I wish I was. I’ve done things I’ve never done before. I’ve placed my command in jeopardy. From here on I’ve got to determine whether or not Karidian is Kodos.
SPOCK: He is.
KIRK: You sound certain. I wish I could be. Before I accuse a man of that, I’ve got to be. I saw him once, twenty years ago. Men change. Memory changes. Look at him now, he’s an actor. He can change his appearance. No. Logic is not enough. I’ve got to feel my way, make absolutely sure.
MCCOY: What if you decide he is Kodos? What then? Do you play God, carry his head through the corridors in triumph? That won’t bring back the dead, Jim.
KIRK: No, but they may rest easier.

Of course, the matter of “oh hey, we keep finding elderly people who committed atrocities some 20 years ago and we’ve got to navigate how to deal with them in the present in a way that honors their victims” was not at all metaphorical at the time. In the 60s, the architects of atrocities who made their escape twenty years earlier and were discovered as ostensibly normal, aging people were just literal Nazis.

While the Tarsus IV massacre is on a much smaller scale, obviously, Erin Horáková provides a good explanation of the topicality when it aired in her fantastic “Kirk Drift” article:

In “The Conscience of the King”, we learn that Kirk is a survivor of a colony-world genocide that occurred during his childhood. As an adult, Kirk attempts to determine whether an old man, now an actor, is actually Kodos, the mass murderer who perpetrated this genocide. “Conscience” is a complex, shifting episode made in the wake of the arrest of aged Nazis in South America by Mossad agents (again, it’s subtextually important to this episode that Kirk is played by a Jewish actor).

For further context, plenty of people involved in TOS had themselves fought in WWII, so “what do we do about elderly Nazis” was not a distant issue. Also, while Roddenberry himself was virulently antisemitic (a quality presumably related to “Patterns of Force” ever seeing the light of day), there were a lot of people working behind and in front of the camera on TOS whose priorities were very different, and many who were Jewish themselves. Of course, this includes both William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy themselves; both are/were Jewish actors from Jewish communities, though in all honesty, ST fans seem a lot more comfortable with Nimoy’s Jewishness than Shatner’s far beyond what can be attributed to Shatner’s personal failings, and (like Roddenberry himself) more comfortable associating Spock with it than Kirk. Even just from general fandom osmosis, I was genuinely surprised when I started finding links to various interviews with Nimoy, Shatner, or both (as I researched production details) that Shatner has talked about his Jewishness pretty constantly for decades, and Nimoy unambiguously acknowledged him as a fellow Jewish man; the downplaying of this and frequent distancing of Kirk from it seems driven entirely by specific antisemites in the production and even more by ST fandom. Horáková also talks about this fandom discomfort in “Kirk Drift,” fwiw (iirc, including the obvious effect of the actors’ physical appearances on it), though for some mysterious reason I have yet to see that part quoted the way the rest so often is. But Kodos is very transparently a Nazi analogue and Kirk’s struggle with the legacy of a genocide he survived as a child twenty years earlier, and now has the opportunity to do something about, was extremely pertinent at the time.

So the whole premise is complex and fraught in real world terms, as well, which I felt was also worth mentioning as a significant element of what’s going on here.