What Shakespeare-inspired episode features actor Anton Karidian?

The Shakespeare-inspired Star Trek episode featuring actor Anton Karidian is “The Conscience of the King.”

It is the 13th episode of The Original Series’ first season and first aired on December 8, 1966. Karidian leads a traveling Shakespearean troupe performing Macbeth, but Dr. Thomas Leighton suspects that the actor is actually Kodos the Executioner, the former governor of Tarsus IV.

Years earlier, Kodos ordered the execution of half of Tarsus IV’s 8,000 colonists during a famine. Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Kevin Riley witnessed the massacre, and Kirk investigates when witnesses connected to the tragedy begin dying. The episode unfolds as a murder mystery built around identity, guilt, revenge, and the danger of confusing theatrical performance with real character.

Its title comes from Hamlet: “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.” That quotation is performed and discussed within the episode, making the Shakespeare connection explicit. The episode is sometimes confused with other literary or historical stories, but Anton Karidian belongs specifically to this first-season mystery.