Welcome back to Character Insight! This week, we review Admiral James Komack, a recurring character who appeared on TOS. We also review a potentially related character named Admiral Westervliet.
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Admiral Komack is a flag officer who serves as the head of Starfleet Command in Sector 9, which is one of the Sectors of space where Kirk's Enterprise is exploring during the five year mission. The first reference to this character happens in crew dialogue during the episode This Side of Paradise. He was the oversight on the Omicron Ceti III mission, and he sends orders to the Enterprise to evacuate the colonists who were discovered to survive a bombardment of deadly berthold rays. That would have been easier if not for the effect of some spores on the crew, which leads to some away mission craziness.
Komack appears on screen for the first time in the episode Amok Time. In this episode, he first demands that the Enterprise stay on a mission rather than return to Vulcan to deal with Spock's onset of pon farr, but he later changes his orders when a separate request is made by Vulcan matriarch T'Pau. This episode is notable, of course, as it shows other Vulcan characters for the first time while also establishing some of the important lore of this Federation species.
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It is clear from these appearances and the scripts of these episodes that Admiral Komack is a strong willed and highly competent leader, but he also does not like to have starship Captains question his orders. He is also referred to and re-confirmed as a character in the 2009 Star Trek movie with the Abrams actors, in which we see a nameplate with this Admiral's name during one scene, but he has no active roles or appearances beyond the two episodes in TOS.
Interestingly, Byron Morrow, who played Admiral Komack, was also used to portray a different character named Admiral Westervliet in the episode For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky. The Admiral character in the script for Amok Time was also named Westervliet, but this was changed to Komack before final filming.
Despite some noticeable changes made to Morrow's appearance between the two appearances to differentiate these Admirals, the high amount of overlap makes it unclear if these were really intended to be the same character. So perhaps this Admiral should have more credits to his name in TOS. Regardless, the character or characters are a bit unique in TOS because Kirk often reports to commodores rather than directly interacting with admirals.
The James Komack character is named for a director who worked on other parts of TOS. When not playing Komack and Westervliet, Byron Morrow could be seen in many movies over a 35 year career and in other TV projects like Trapper John, M.D. He was 94 when he passed away a little over 10 years ago.
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