no the circle won't be broken

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.

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