Star Trek: Enterprise's Hoshi Sato Has A Grim Connection To Captain Kirk
The 2001 series "Star Trek: Enterprise" takes place about a century before the events of the original "Star Trek," and a lot of the technologies Trekkies took for granted hadn't been invented yet. Transporters, for instance, weren't yet safe for human use. Starships didn't have shields and instead were equipped with specialized hull plating that needed to be polarized to deflect phase cannon blasts. Instead of tractor beams, the Enterprise had grappling hooks. And, because Earth hadn't yet encountered too many alien species, there wasn't yet a workable universal translator.
That's where Ensign Hoshi Sato (Linda Park) came in. Ensign Sato was a language wunderkind whose ear for language and knack for syntax proved invaluable for making first contact with alien species. She was, however, only 22 years old when she joined the crew of the Enterprise and, like the rest of the crew, had no deep space experience. Ensign Sato was confident in her field of expertise but quite nervous in many other regards. As the series progressed, Ensign Sato became more assured.
"Enterprise," of course, chronicled Sato's early career in detail, and she revealed a lot about her family, her professional ambitions, and her anxieties over the course of the show's four seasons. Her life was hardly obscure. Less well-known, however, is Hoshi Sato's life after the events of "Enterprise." Hoshi Sato was, according to briefly-glimpsed on-screen stats penned by Mike Sussman, born in 2129 in Kyoto. She would die in 2246 at the ripe old age of 117 on the planet Tarsus IV.
Tarsus IV will ring a few bells in Trekkies' minds. As described in the original series episode "The Conscience of the King" (December 8, 1966), Trasus IV site of a notorious massacre. A massacre where a young James T. Kirk was present.
The Conscience of the King
In "The Conscience of the King," Captain Kirk (William Shatner) is asked by an old friend to investigate the past of a well-known Shakespearean actor named Anton Karidian (Arnold Moss). Kirk's friend suspects that Karidian is actually a vicious mass murderer named Kodos who had changed his name and who had been in hiding since a bleak incident many years before. Kodos, it is explained, was the governor of the Federation colony on Tarsus IV when a rare and fast-moving fungus struck the planet's food supply. Without any way to replenish their food, Kodos saw that his colonists were facing death by starvation in a matter of weeks. Kodos, in a fit of villainy, selected the "less desirable" half of his 8,000-person colony and had them all killed in a swift act of unthinkable violence. With only half of his constituents still alive, Kodos could make the remaining food supply last until supply ships came. The writers of "Avengers: Infinity War" certainly were familiar with "The Conscience of the King."
Only nine survivors managed to witness the actual slaughter first-hand, one of them being the 13-year-old James T. Kirk. It has been argued in the past that witnessing the slaughter on Tarsus IV is what made Kirk so staunch and resolute a captain. It's certainly what distinguished him from his more jocund Kelvin-verse counterpart (Chris Pine) who wasn't raised on Tarsus IV.
This wasn't established until a flash across the screen in the fourth-season "Enterprise" episode "In a Mirror Darkly" (April 22 and 29, 2002) when the "evil" parallel universe version of the Enterprise found our Hoshi's personnel file. And even then, only nerds with sharp TV signals might have been able to see it.
Hoshi's fate
In "In a Mirror Darkly," Hoshi's file read:
"Tragically, Hoshi and her family were among the four thousand people who died on Tarsus Four in 2246 when a food shortage caused by an exotic fungus threatened the colony's population. Governor Kodos ordered the deaths of Sato and the others in order to save the rest of the colony. She was buried in Kyoto with her husband, Takashi Kimura."
It seems that the elderly Hoshi Sato was killed by Kodos. A young Kirk witnessed it.
The same fate was not shared by the "evil" Hoshi Sato from the Mirror Universe, however. The plot of "In a Mirror Darkly" saw the evil Enterprise crew, a team of conquerors and sadists, discovering a Kirk-era spacecraft called the U.S.S. Defiant that had phased into their dimension — and back in time — from the "Star Trek" episode "The Tholian Web." Captain Archer (Scott Bakula) took over the Defiant and intended to use its advanced weapons to take over the Terran Empire himself and install himself as the new Emperor.
In a last-minute twist, however, the evil Hoshi Sato killed Archer and arrived at Earth in charge of the Defiant herself. She announced to the world that she, with her superior firepower, was now the Empress.
In the main universe, Hoshi Sato lived a very long life before being killed tragically. In the Mirror Universe, she seems to have done okay for herself.