Headscratchers / Star Trek S1 E13 "The Conscience of the King"

• How does Lenore get a hold of a phaser to set on overload. Phasers are normally only carried by security or issued from the armory on an as needed basis with Captain's approval. Also, that security officer from whom Lenore did grab the other phaser later in the episode needs to be fired. And how did she get it into the Captain's personal quarters? And how did she (an actress with, we assume, no technical education) rig an overload timer? And why did that timer run for so long? And how did she get into Engineering to poison Riley? And where did she get the tetrasol? Is there no security at all on the Enterprise?
  • Most of the time it would not be needed. As a starship traveling through interstellar space, it's not as if they have guests coming and going. Everybody on board is accounted for, and most are Starfleet personnel. Plus, Kirk was concealing his reason for allowing the actors on the ship. Hence, Security just assumed that the Captain had vetted them and saw no reason to pay special attention to his guests. As for how Lenore rigged the timer, she's a Serial Killer. She has probably researched many ways to kill people.
  • The overload timer isn't really a timer. Rather, its the phaser building up to unleashing its energy not as however many discrete beams it can fire on a full charge, but one massive explosion. It's basically an Improvised Weapon, not built as a hand grenade or time bomb but capable of functioning as either, if inefficiently. The loud whine of the power cell building that overload allowed Kirk and Spock to find it, and the long time to build up before it exploded allowed them get rid of it before it did. As for how she knew how to do that. . . some supplemental material calls the overload a feature a rather than a bug, so doing it is presumably no more complex than it needs to be to keep it from being done accidentally.
• After the attempted bombing of Kirk's quarters which was intended to kill him and would have severely damaged the ship, likely killing dozens, why does Kirk immediately march down to Karidian's quarters to make accusations and casually do the voiceprint instead of perhaps... putting the ship on lockdown and having intensive security sweeps to determine who just tried to bomb the ship? Would the play really have still been held?
  • Kirk might have been so angry that he didn’t stop to think about putting the ship on lockdown and having the intensive security sweep. Intense anger can often cloud a person’s judgment, especially if they barely avoided being targeted by a Serial Killer.

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