Kodos the Executioner

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Kodos the Executioner in 2266

Governor Kodos, or Kodos the Executioner, a fictional character in the Star Trek television series episode "The Conscience of the King," was the governor of a Federation colony on the planet Tarsus IV circa AD 2246. Arnold Moss played the part of Kodos.

In 2246, a rare fungus destroyed most of the colony's food and the 8,000 colonists were faced with starvation. To combat the crisis, Governor Kodos began implementing his own theories of eugenics and subsequently executed 4,000 of the colonists - among whom, according to computer records taken from the USS Defiant (NCC-1764), was former Enterprise (NX-01) communications officer Hoshi Sato and her husband Takashi Kimura.

	The revolution is successful. But survival depends on drastic measures. 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. Therefore I have no alternative but to sentence you to death. Your execution is so ordered, signed Kodos, Governor of Tarsus IV.
—Governor Kodos, excerpt from Kodos' speech to the 4,000 people he murdered

What Kodos meant by "the revolution" is never explained.

Shortly afterwards, relief ships arrived sooner than expected. A burned, unidentifiable corpse was subsequently discovered and presumed to be Kodos's. Although the episode takes place in the mid-23rd Century, it was written before DNA testing began to be used to identify otherwise unidentifiable bodies and human tissue. A retcon possibililty may be that Kodos used a sample of his own DNA to suggest that the corpse was his.

Twenty years later, Captain James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise, one of the last survivors of the massacre, learns that Kodos had not died but had fled and is in fact currently a passenger on board the USS Enterprise - having established a new identity as Shakespearean actor Anton Karidian.

In the ensuing drama, Karidian/Kodos, striving to hide his past and stricken with remorse for it, is unintentionally killed by his deranged daughter, Lenore, as he tries to prevent her from killing the last remaining witnesses to his deeds as Kodos.