Was Karidian Kodos?

[MAGolding]

Almost certainly. It seems like he pretty much admitted it during the scene in the theater with Riley, Kirk, and Lenore.

But maybe Kodos had a twin brother. Maybe that twin brother of Kodos the Executioner changed his name from whatever it was before - I always wondered if Kodos was his real time or an alias - to Karidian and started a new life. Karidian said he could no longer remember. Maybe his guilt over what his brother did, and his desire that his brother could have somehow survived, drove him insane and he came to believe that he was Kodos.

How did Leonore learn that Karidian was Kodos if keeping it a secret from her was one of his main goals in life?

Possibly years before the episode, Lenore met some kids at a planet the company was giving several performances at. She met them again, and one of the kids said that after talking to her he looked up her father and was surprised to find that there was on record of him except since just a few years ago, right after the massacre on Tarsus IV. And one of the other kids made a mean joke and said Lenore's farther must be Kodos. And Lenore probably fought him to make it take it back.

And then, over the years, she secretly investigated her father's background and the Tarsus IV disaster and became convinced that her father Karidian was Kodos. And then she began to murder every one of the nine witnesses to Kodos ordering the massacres, one by one. And Leonore went insane, murdered seven men, and ended up accidentally killing her father, because of the strong circumstantial evidence that Karidian was Kodos, even though she had no proof.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Fanfic forum is downstairs.

 

[Timo]

It doesn't seem as if there's any forensic way in TOS to establish whether X is an alias for Y.

After all, there's nothing missing from the forensic record. The Federation has Kodos' voiceprint, his face, his corpse, and nine eyewitnesses. Kirk is able to verify that the voiceprint is a match; he could further get some DNA from Karidian (using a clever hero trick or then just brute authority), or do something more 1960'ish about it in order to see whether Karidian is related to the supposed corpse of Kodos, but he sees no need to probe further.

So science no doubt already tells Kodos is Karidian, but this has no apparent legal sway. Why? Because the Kodos case is closed? Because nothing Kodos did is punishable, at least not by the authority Kirk represents? Because the Trek universe is so full of weird possibilities that mere 99.5% certainty from forensics is far from sufficient?

Of course, the role of the eyewitnesses is even odder. They can contribute little to the identity question. Perhaps they would be eyewitnesses to an action instead? But they wouldn't need to stay alive to testify, then - their testimony would already be on record.

I can only fall back on my usual interpretation here, of Kodos being a nom de guerre for a stranger who came to the town on the same ship with the nine kids and then organized a coup, perhaps by first organizing the food crisis. The kids would then be witnesses to his real, original identity (or at least his previous cover identity), the only bit missing from the records. The significance of this knowledge would not be obvious originally, but with Kodos found alive, the ability to track down his full chain of aliases would be key to prosecuting Karidian, a fact available to Lenore (perhaps even erroneously?) but only slowly dawning on the heroes (or then they had their own misconceptions about their significance, different from Lenore's).

Timo Saloniemi

 

[alensatemybuick1]

Pass

 

[Herbert]

Karidian wasn't Kodos. Karidian was Kang

 

[ChasFink]

Karidian wasn't Kodos. Karidian was Kang

...or Clin-ton. (And always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!)

 

[Greg Cox]

FYI: The new DISCOVERY novel by Dayton Ward is all about the Tarsus IV incident and how Kodos came to power.

 

[Phaser Two]

Yes.
Next!

 

[MAGolding]

It doesn't seem as if there's any forensic way in TOS to establish whether X is an alias for Y.

After all, there's nothing missing from the forensic record. The Federation has Kodos' voiceprint, his face, his corpse, and nine eyewitnesses. Kirk is able to verify that the voiceprint is a match; he could further get some DNA from Karidian (using a clever hero trick or then just brute authority), or do something more 1960'ish about it in order to see whether Karidian is related to the supposed corpse of Kodos, but he sees no need to probe further.

So science no doubt already tells Kodos is Karidian, but this has no apparent legal sway. Why? Because the Kodos case is closed? Because nothing Kodos did is punishable, at least not by the authority Kirk represents? Because the Trek universe is so full of weird possibilities that mere 99.5% certainty from forensics is far from sufficient?

Of course, the role of the eyewitnesses is even odder. They can contribute little to the identity question. Perhaps they would be eyewitnesses to an action instead? But they wouldn't need to stay alive to testify, then - their testimony would already be on record.

I can only fall back on my usual interpretation here, of Kodos being a nom de guerre for a stranger who came to the town on the same ship with the nine kids and then organized a coup, perhaps by first organizing the food crisis. The kids would then be witnesses to his real, original identity (or at least his previous cover identity), the only bit missing from the records. The significance of this knowledge would not be obvious originally, but with Kodos found alive, the ability to track down his full chain of aliases would be key to prosecuting Karidian, a fact available to Lenore (perhaps even erroneously?) but only slowly dawning on the heroes (or then they had their own misconceptions about their significance, different from Lenore's).

Timo Saloniemi

IMHO if Kodos and all the killers were presumed dead because of corpses that could be identified after shooting it out with the relief force and a sufficient number of burnt and unidentified corpses, there would be no trials. Presumably the 4,000 surviving colonists said that they didn't know (or merely suspected) what happened to the 4,000 missing colonists who the 9 witnesses said were exterminated, and the the 9 witnesses would back them up saying that they themselves didn't know and only had vague suspicions and fears until it was their turn and they were saved in the nick of time by the relief force.

Presumably the 9 surviving witnesses told the authorities what they witnessed but did not legally testify during any trials if if it was presumed that there was nobody left to try. And possibly there was some silly rule that nobody could be convicted on the word of witnesses unless the witnesses testified during the trial and presumably were being scanned by truth and lie detecting devices. Possibly nobody could be convicted without psychotricorder examination, as was attempted in "Wolf in the Fold", because the memories of witnesses can play tricks on them. And maybe it was illegal to use a psychotricorder on witnesses except during a trial, and there were no trials, because all the killers were presumed dead. Thus what the witnesses said they saw and heard was recorded, but it was not legal testimony because it had not been said during a trial that would establish its legal validity.

Each of the witnesses would have told their story to the authorities and the media several times, but never under psychotricorder examination which would have established the truth of their statements for legal purposes.

And possibly the desperate Leonore put too much faith in this aspect of Federation law, and was merely hopeful that killing all the witnesses would make it impossible to convict Kodos. Though Spock seemed to think that the two surviving witnesses Kirk and Riley would be the only hope of convicting Kodos.

The episode seems rather contradictory about whether Kodos was the normal governor of Tarsus IV or a usurper and revolutionary. He is usually called the governor, but his speech to the condemned says the revolution has succeeded. Maybe if he was a revolutionary with a false identity that would make the process of legally identifying him a bit harder.

I wonder what the legal penalty for killing 4,000 colonists would be, and whether it made that much sense for Karidian and Lenore to be so desperate to avoid it.

 

[johnnybear]

Kodos must have had some sort of plastic surgery to become Karidian, because the red bearded guy in the other picture sure isn't Arnold Moss! Wonder who he was?
JB

 

[Timo]

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.

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

 

[johnnybear]

I always assumed that Kirk was one of the team sent to alleviate the crisis on Tarsus IV rather than as a colonist! Kirk's parents were they mentioned as being colonists there? I know Kevin Riley's family were and they were murdered in Kodos's purges!
JB

 

[Timo]

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?

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...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Herbert]

I find it amazing that only a handful of people knew what the governor of the colony looked like. That seems odd as hell.

 

[Timo]

Nobody claims this. Leighton only says a handful "saw Kodos".

Kodos' likeness is for everybody (with a proper clearance?) to see in the database. The photograph isn't that of a corpse, so must have preceded the culmination of his tyranny in his death. If he agreed to being photographed (this is no spy shot!), he can't have been all that secretive about his looks.

So Leighton and the others apparently "saw Kodos" doing something or being something, while the other 8,000 merely knew what he looked like.

(I mean, we could argue that since there clearly was a coup, Kodos came to power from utter anonymity and kept the anonymity - perhaps he was the Masked Executioner or something. But the photograph contradicts that. Or is the photograph a reproduction created from the dictation of the nine witnesses?)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Leviathan]

 

[Phoenix219]

Yeah, there is definitely the implication of a deeper, more complicated story here.

 

[Samuel]

One of the Lost Years novels has Kirk (pre The Motion Picture) encountering Kevin Riley and Kirk silently musing to himself that he and Riley went "way back".

In Kirks recollection, he was a young boy who was simply passing through the Tarsus colony on his way from his parents to visit other family members and got caught up in the events there. Because he wasn't one of the regular colonists he wasn't included among the 4,000 executed so that the other 4,000 wouldn't starve.

Kirk came upon the 4,000 colonists being collected for execution Kevin Riley's mother and father glimpsed young James Kirk hiding nearby. Riley's father attacked the guards to draw their attention (and was killed) while Riley's mother ran with her young son (Kevin Riley, barely more than a toddler) handed him to James Kirk and screamed at him to flee with Kevin before she was phasered to death by the guards. Kirk fled with Kevin Riley and minutes later while hiding in the upper floors of a nearby building they heard Governor Kodos's death proclamation to the condemned 4,000 and then Kirk (while covering the yes of Kevin Riley) watched as Kodos's loyal guards phasered the 4,000 out of existence.

Kirk never told Kevin Riley that it was he that saved him. Riley thought for the rest of his life that an adult on Tarsus had saved his life.

 

[Maurice]

Forgetting which document I saw it in from the production but I believe Kirk was supposed to have been a cadet when the Tarsus accident happened.

 

[Commishsleer]

Forgetting which document I saw it in from the production but I believe Kirk was supposed to have been a cadet when the Tarsus accident happened.

I thought I read it somewhere too a long time ago. Maybe it was the Blish adaption? I'm not sure.
However Kirk's age does not match - he would have been too young to be a cadet if he's 34 in TOS.

The explanation for Kodos not being tracked down by his DNA was that they didn't have a record of Kodos's DNA. Perhaps he didn't originally come from Earth but another colony before he became governor of Tarsus 4. Looks like some of the colonies in TOS and TNG were developed by alternate lifestyle people so I'm thinking Tarsus 4 was occupied by people who didn't have DNA on record.

So when the relief ships came to Tarsus, Kodos destroyed records of his DNA by perhaps mixing it up with others and organised his fake death. The authorities thought justice was done and didn't bother investigating further.
20 years later all they had was the picture, voice recording and 9 um 2 witnesses.