Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
Written by Leonard Nimoy & Harve Bennett and Steve Meerson & Peter Krikes and Nicholas Meyer
Directed by Leonard Nimoy
Release date: November 26, 1986
Stardate: 8390.0
Captain’s log. A giant log flies through space making funky noises. The U.S.S. Saratoga investigates; it appears to be a probe, and it’s also heading directly toward Earth.
On Earth, the Klingon ambassador demands that Kirk be extradited to the Klingon Empire for several crimes, including the theft of Kruge’s ship, the death of Kruge and his crew, and his involvement in Genesis, which the ambassador describes as a doomsday weapon Kirk developed via his son (no mention of Carol Marcus) to be used against the Klingons.
Sarek shows up and counterargues, and then the Federation President announces that Kirk has been charged with nine counts of violations of Starfleet regulations. The Klingon ambassador is outraged, and declares, “There shall be no peace as long as Kirk lives!” before stomping out in a huff.
On Vulcan, McCoy has painted “HMS BOUNTY” on the side of Kruge’s ship. It’s been three months since the last movie, and Spock has spent his time re-training his brain meats. At one point, he answers a barrage of questions, some verbally, some by typing them in. Spock’s mother Amanda has programmed an extra question into the mix: “how do you feel?” Spock finds the question to be a silly goose, no matter how Amanda tries to explain it to him.
The Saratoga is hit with a communication from the probe, which burns out all its systems, leaving the ship adrift. And it’s not the only one: two Klingon ships, and several other Starfleet vessels have also been neutralized by the probe. And it continues to head straight for Earth.
On Vulcan, the crew gets the Bounty ready for departure. Everyone’s wearing the same outfit they had on three months ago when they landed on Vulcan (an entire planet full of logical beings, and nobody has a change of clothes?????). Kirk says his goodbyes to Saavik—who, for reasons nobody bothers to explain, isn’t coming along—and his hellos to Spock, who takes the science station. Saavik says she hasn’t had the opportunity to tell Kirk how David died, which makes you wonder what they’ve been doing for the past three months that that opportunity didn’t present itself.
The probe arrives at Earth, killing power to Spacedock and directing its communications at Earth’s oceans. This causes tremendous upheaval, including tsunamis and storms.
As the Bounty approaches Earth, Chekov reports no ships on assigned patrols, and Uhura’s having trouble deciphering the comm traffic. However one thing gets through: a planetary distress call from the president, warning everyone not to approach Earth. The probe has ionized the atmosphere, wiped out power systems, and is burning the oceans.
After the crew takes a minute to be gobsmacked, Kirk has Uhura put the probe’s signal on the speakers. Spock points out that the signal is directed at Earth’s oceans, and Kirk has Uhura modify the signal to what it would sound like underwater. Spock recognizes the sound, and confirms it in the Federation database that was downloaded into the Bounty‘s computer: it’s the song of the humpback whale. Unfortunately, there are no humpback whales, having been hunted to extinction in the 21st century. They can simulate whalesong, but they don’t know the language, so they can only provide gibberish. The only solution Spock can see is to find humpback whales—which only exist on Earth of the past.
So they go back in time. Because of course they do.
Using Spock’s computations, Sulu flies the ship around the sun and through time, winding up in 1986. Chekov engages the cloak and Uhura picks up whalesong—in San Francisco, oddly. However, they have a bigger problem: the dilithium crystals are destabilizing. However, Spock has a theory that they could recrystallize the dilithium using the high-energy photons from a nuclear reactor.
Sulu lands in Golden Gate Park (scaring the crap out of two garbage collectors). Since they’re using money in this time period, Kirk sells the antique glasses McCoy gave him in The Wrath of Khan, getting a hundred bucks for them, which he divvies up among the group.
Kirk and Spock track down the whales, Uhura and Chekov are tasked with collecting the photons needed to fix the ship, while Sulu, Scotty, and McCoy get to figure out how to construct a tank in the cargo bay of the Bounty to hold the whales.
After Kirk sees an ad for the humpback whales George and Gracie at the Cetacean Institute in Sausalito, he and Spock hop on a bus, Gus, and head to Sausalito. They get a tour from Dr. Gillian Taylor of the institute, who talks about the slaughter of whales, before introducing their “pride and joy,” George and Gracie, a pair of humpback whales who wandered into the institute as calves.
Kirk sees this as a godsend, as they can beam them up together from the tank. But they have a ticking clock, as the plan is to release the pair of them (George and Gracie, not Kirk and Spock) into the wild. And then they get released into the wild, too, as Taylor tosses them out of the institute because Spock dives into the tank and mind-melds with the whales.
Spock wanted to make sure they had the whales’ consent before they just yanked them onto a space ship. He seems to think that he has it, and says so to Kirk as they walk back to San Francisco.
Taylor talks with her boss, and says that the decision to let George and Gracie out is tearing her up. She doesn’t want to lose them, but they’ll die in captivity, plus the institute can’t afford to keep them. She drives home, and sees Kirk and Spock walking along the bay. Against her better judgment, she offers them a lift. Also against her better judgment, she agrees to dinner with them—though Spock winds up declining—mostly because Spock somehow knows that Gracie is pregnant. That information hasn’t been released to the public.
Uhura and Chekov track down a nuclear submarine to Alameda, though directions to Alameda prove difficult to come by. Eventually they find their way there, and one of the ships in dock in the yard is the Enterprise. Yay symbolism! Their plan is to beam in at night, snag the photons, and beam out with no one the wiser.
Scotty and McCoy go to Plexicorp, where the former poses as a visiting professor from Edinburgh who is outraged that there’s no record of his scheduled tour of the facility. Dr. Nichols, however, is more than happy to provide that tour. At the end, Scotty offers him the formula for transparent aluminum in exchange for enough Plexiglas to construct the tank they need (since that will cost more than the thirty bucks Kirk gave them). Sulu, meanwhile, makes friends with a helicopter pilot.
Taylor and Kirk have pizza and beer. Kirk takes a shot at convincing Taylor that he can save the whales. He goes ahead and tells her the truth—well, he leaves out the part about the probe destroying Earth, just saying that they want to repopulate the species in the 23rd century—but when she informs him that they’re being shipped out at noon the next day, Kirk ends dinner early. Before they go their separate ways in Golden Gate Park, Kirk says that he has to take two whales to the 23rd century. He can go out to the open sea to get them, but he’d rather have George and Gracie. Taylor is now completely convinced that he’s nuts.
Uhura and Chekov beam onto Enterprise and collect the photons Scotty needs to recrystallize. Unfortunately, the carrier crew tracks the power drain. Scotty is only able to beam one at a time, so Uhura goes first with the collector, but the radiation interferes with the signal and Scotty can’t get a lock before Chekov is captured. He’s interrogated, to very little effect, and then he makes a break for it. Unfortunately, he’s injured in the escape attempt and is brought to a nearby hospital.
Scotty has finished prepping the cargo bay for the tank, and now is working on the recrystallization. Uhura is scanning the radio waves for any news on Chekov.
In the morning, Taylor shows up for work to find that the whales are already gone. Her boss sent them out quietly the previous night to avoid a media mob scene. Taylor is furious that she didn’t get to say goodbye, and storms out, heading straight for Golden Gate Park, just as Sulu is flying the tank into the Bounty with the helicopter. Taylor screams out Kirk’s name and crashes into the cloaked ship. Kirk beams her up and she’s rather stunned to realize that everything he said was true—and more, as she sees Spock without the headband hiding his ears and eyebrows.
Uhura has finally found Chekov, in Mercy Hospital, going for emergency surgery. He’s listed as critical and not expected to live.
Kirk, Taylor, and McCoy infiltrate the hospital (they’re all wearing scrubs) and find Chekov—McCoy bitching and moaning about 20th-century medicine the entire time—in a secure ward. They manage to bully their way in and then lock the surgical staff in a closet so McCoy can cure Chekov without drilling holes into his head. They wheel him out of the room and get chased by security before beaming out while in an elevator out of sight.
Taylor bullies her way onto the ship—she has no family and they need her help to acclimatize the whales to the future—and they take off. Uhura tracks the radio transmitters on George and Gracie and they arrive just as the pair are being pursued by a whaling ship. Sulu manages to maneuver the Bounty between the harpoon and the whales, and then Kirk orders the ship decloaked. Scared shitless, the whalers bugger off, and Scotty beams George, Gracie, and the water around them onto the ship.
They head out into space and do the time-warp again (it’s just a jump to the left!), arriving right after they left the 23rd century.
Unfortunately, in order to deliver the whales, they have to land on Earth, and that puts them in the probe’s path. Main power is shot to hell, and the Bounty crash-lands near the Golden Gate Bridge. The release for the tank is underwater, so Kirk orders everyone to abandon ship while he manfully swims down to release the whales. (It’s fun watching Shatner’s weave go wobbly as he swims, too…..)
George and Gracie respond to the probe, they have a nice talk, and then the probe buggers off. The Earth is saved.
However, now that that’s taken care of, there’s the matter of the charges against Kirk and the others. They stand before the president and the council, accused of conspiracy, assault on Federation officers, theft of the Enterprise, sabotage of the Excelsior, destruction of the Enterprise, and disobeying Starfleet orders. Kirk pleads guilty, but then the president announces that all charges are dismissed save one, thanks to the mitigating circumstances of the crew saving the planet. The one charge that sticks is disobeying orders, which is only on Kirk. His sentence is to be demoted to captain and to be put back in charge of a starship. Gawrsh.
Taylor takes her leave of Kirk—she’s off to a science vessel to catch up on three hundred years—and Sarek also takes his leave of Spock. Spock gives him a message for Amanda: “I feel fine.”
The seven of them take a shuttle through Spacedock to their new assignment. Because even though three of them are captains, and the other four are commanders (and of those four, one is ready for command and the other was until very recently a first officer of a starship), they’re all being assigned to the same ship in the same positions they were in two (or more) rank grades ago. Because that totally makes sense. (It makes no kind of sense.)
McCoy is expecting them to get a freighter. Sulu is hoping for Excelsior, to Scotty’s disgust. Instead, they get a Constitution-class ship that has the designation NCC-1701-A: the U.S.S. Enterprise.
On the bridge of their new ship, Kirk tells Sulu, “Let’s see what she’s got,” and off they go into the wild black yonder.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Apparently travel back in time makes you see images that look like busts of your friend’s heads that grow up out of the ooze. Or something.
Fascinating. At the end of the movie, Sarek mentions that he disapproved of Spock’s entry into Starfleet, and now—decades later—he admits that he might have been mistaken in that disapproval. Real fucking generous there, Dad.
I’m a doctor not an escalator. McCoy is beside himself at Mercy Hospital, snarking off at every medical professional he meets, and also giving a patient on dialysis a pill that grows her a new kidney.
Ahead warp one, aye. A scene was written and attempted to be filmed where Sulu meets a young boy who turns out to be an ancestor of his. However, the child who was hired for the role was having trouble performing the scene, and it had to be scrapped.
The film establishes that Sulu was born in San Francisco.
Hailing frequencies open. While Uhura has no standout scenes like she did last time, she is quietly superbly competent throughout the film, playing the probe’s communication as it would sound underwater, tracing the whalesong in 1986, finding out what happened to Chekov, and tracking the whales once they’ve been released.
I cannot change the laws of physics! Scotty has a grand old time playing the blustery professor at Plexicorp, to the point where McCoy cautions him not to bury himself in the part.
It’s a Russian invention. Chekov does a lovely job of stonewalling his interrogator aboard the Enterprise when he’s captured, and then almost manages to escape, done in by a fall from a great height. After McCoy repairs the damage to his noggin, Kirk asks him for name and as he’s coming out of it, and he says, “Chekov, Pavel. Rank: admiral,” that last word said with a goofy smile.
Go put on a red shirt. While it’s likely that some people on Earth died when the probe started kicking up the oceans, there are absolutely no on-screen deaths in this movie. Indeed, only once is a weapon actually fired, when Kirk uses a phaser to zap the door locking the surgical team in the closet while McCoy works on Chekov. (Chekov threatens his captors with his phaser, but the radiation from the Enterprise‘s nuclear reactor makes it futz out, so it won’t fire.)
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Kirk’s tropism for brainy blondes continues unabated, as he flirts outrageously with Taylor, and it actually works. That he’s there to save Taylor’s beloved whales from extinction certainly doesn’t hurt…
Channel open. “Cloaking device now available on all flight modes.”
“I’m impressed. That’s a lot of work for a short voyage.”
“We are in an enemy vessel, sir. I did not wish to be shot down on the way to our own funeral.”
Chekov being efficient, Kirk being impressed, and Chekov showing a knack for fatalism and humor all at the same time.
Welcome aboard. Back from the previous film are both Mark Lenard as Sarek and Robin Curtis as Saavik, the latter very briefly and left on Vulcan for no reason the script can be arsed to explain. Sarek will next be in The Final Frontier played by Jonathan Simpson, with Lenard reprising the role in The Undiscovered Country and TNG‘s “Sarek” and “Unification I.” Ben Cross will play the role in the 2009 Star Trek, with James Frain set to play him in Discovery.
Jane Wyatt reprises her role as Amanda from “Journey to Babel“; a younger version of the character was seen in “Yesteryear,” voiced by Majel Barrett, and younger versions will be seen again in The Final Frontier and the 2009 Star Trek, played by Cynthia Blaise and Winona Ryder, respectively.
Majel Barrett returns as Chapel, last seen in The Motion Picture. This is Chapel’s final onscreen appearance, though Barrett will continue to provide the voice of Starfleet computers, and also play Lwaxana Troi on TNG and DS9, starting in “Haven.” Grace Lee Whitney returns as Rand; she’ll be back in The Undiscovered Country and Voyager‘s “Flashback” as a member of Sulu’s Excelsior crew. Both Chapel and Rand are working at Starfleet Headquarters.
Madge Sinclair plays the Saratoga captain, significant in that she is the first female ship captain seen in Trek history, finally putting the lie to Janice Lester’s comment. And she’s a woman of color, too! Sinclair will return to Trek in TNG‘s “Interface” as another starship captain, Silva La Forge.
Catherine Hicks debuts the role of Taylor. Brock Peters plays Cartwright; he’ll be back in The Undiscovered Country, and also have the recurring role of Joseph Sisko on DS9, starting in “Homefront.” Robert Ellenstein plays the Federation President, the first person to be seen playing the occupier of that office; the actor will also appear in “Haven” as Troi’s almost-father-in-law. John Schuck plays the Klingon ambassador; the character is next seen in The Undiscovered Country, while the actor will also return as a Cardassian legate in DS9‘s “The Maquis Part 2,” a member of the chorus in Voyager‘s “Muse,” and Antaak in Enterprise‘s “Affliction” and “Divergence.” And two of the Marines on the Enterprise were played by actual Marines assigned to the Ranger (the ship they filmed on): 1st Sgt. Joseph Naradzay and 1st Lt. Donald W. Zautcke.
We get a Robert Knepper moment, as Alex Henteloff plays Nichols. He had the recurring role of ambulance-chasing lawyer Arnold Ripner on Barney Miller, one of your humble rewatcher’s favorite shows.
And, of course, we have James Doohan, George Takei, Walter Koenig, and Nichelle Nichols, as ever.
Trivial matters: The film is dedicated to the astronauts who were killed when the space shuttle Challenger exploded ten months prior to the movie’s release.
This movie is a sequel to The Search for Spock, picking up three months afterward and dealing with the ramifications of the events of that film.
Originally intended to be released in the summer, just like the other Trek films, it had to be pushed back to accommodate William Shatner’s shooting schedule for T.J. Hooker.
The movie was released in 1986, which was the twentieth anniversary of Star Trek‘s debut. In addition, this was the year in which Paramount announced that the next year would see a new Trek TV show, Star Trek: The Next Generation, which some dork rewatched on this site a few years ago.
The method of time travel used is the same as that employed in both “Tomorrow is Yesterday” (to get home) and “Assignment: Earth.”
Kruge’s Bird-of-Prey is renamed after the HMS Bounty, the 18th-century Royal Navy ship on which the crew famously mutinied against Captain William Bligh.
The early drafts of the script had Taylor as a male UFO nut, and Eddie Murphy was considered for the role. He decided to do The Golden Child instead (not one of his brightest career moves, though probably a good one for the Trek franchise, all things considered), and Taylor was rewritten as a woman.
The Klingon ambassador was given the name Kamarag in Vonda N. McIntyre’s novelization. The character will return in The Undiscovered Country, and also be seen in the novels Sarek by A.C. Crispin, several issues of DC’s second run of monthly Star Trek comics by Peter David, James W. Fry III, & Arne Starr, and your humble rewatcher’s novella The Unhappy Ones in Seven Deadly Sins.
McIntyre’s novelization also included the scene with Sulu’s ancestor, includes Kirk and McCoy discussing the events of “The City on the Edge of Forever” when the notion of time travel first comes up, gives the garbage collectors who saw the Bounty land a subplot for some strange reason, and establishes that Nichols really did invent transparent aluminum, thanks to this helping hand from Scotty, and that Scotty has, in fact, heard of him for this reason which, if nothing else, keeps Scotty and McCoy from being irresponsible assholes.
The Federation President was named Hiram Roth in your humble rewatcher’s Articles of the Federation and Alistair Fergus in the Star Trek IV Sourcebook Update of FASA’s role-playing game. In the former novel, I established that Roth died in office during the reconstruction of Earth following this movie.
This is Taylor’s only onscreen appearance, but she is seen in the graphic novel Debt of Honor by Chris Claremont, Adam Hughes, & Karl Story, the short stories “Whales Weep Not” by Juanita Nolte (Strange New Worlds VI), “Scotty’s Song” by Michael Jasper (Strange New Worlds IV), and “The Hero of My Own Life” by Peg Robinson (Strange New Worlds II), and the reference book Federation: The First 150 Years by David A. Goodman.
The Saratoga captain is given the name of Margaret Alexander in McIntyre’s novelization, and she later appears with her family name changed to Sinclair-Alexander after marrying. She shows up in the Crucible trilogy and Serpents Among the Ruins, all by David R. George III, Forged in Fire by Andy Mangels & Michael A. Martin, and Cast No Shadow by James Swallow.
Early drafts of the script had Saavik remaining behind on Vulcan because she was pregnant with Spock’s child after their little pon farr experience on the Genesis planet. With that dropped, there’s no reason given why Saavik doesn’t go with the Bounty to Earth. This winds up being Saavik’s last onscreen appearance as well, though the early drafts of The Undiscovered Country had Saavik in the role that eventually wound up with Valeris. The character has continued to be seen in tie-in fiction, such as the novels The Pandora Principle by Carolyn Clowes (which gave her origin), Dwellers in the Crucible and The Unspoken Truth by Margaret Wander Bonanno, and Vulcan’s Forge, Vulcan’s Heart, and the Vulcan’s Soul trilogy all by Josepha Sherman & Susan Shwartz (in which Spock and Saavik are married in the early 24th century), the Mere Anarchy novella The Blood-Dimmed Tide by Howard Weinstein, the short stories “Infinity” by Susan Wright (The Lives of Dax), “Just Another Little Training Cruise” by A.C. Crispin (Enterprise Logs), “Prodigal Father” by Robert J. Mendenhall (Strange New Worlds II), and “The First Law of Metaphysics” by Michael S. Poteet (Strange New Worlds II), as well as more comic books than I can possibly list here.
Michael Okuda was hired to create the computer displays for this film, beginning a relationship with Star Trek that would continue for decades, as Okuda would continue to be the go-to guy for computer displays (among many other things, including co-authoring The Star Trek Encyclopedia with his wife Denise Okuda).
While Chekov and Uhura were on the aircraft carrier Enterprise, those scenes were actually shot on the Ranger, which was in dock. The Enterprise was at sea, and also on active duty, so they wouldn’t have been allowed to film on it in any case.
In Greg Cox’s The Eugenics Wars: The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh, Roberta Lincoln, the partner of Gary Seven from “Assignment: Earth,” infiltrates Area 51 and retrieves Chekov’s phaser and tricorder so 20th-century Earth won’t get their hands on 23rd-century technology. Earlier in that same duology, Lincoln briefly meets Taylor at a conference.
The novel Probe, nominally written by Margaret Wander Bonanno (the whole sordid story is on Bonanno’s web site), is a sequel to this film, which explores the origins of the probe.
Novelist and writer of “The Pirates of Orion” Howard Weinstein served as a story consultant of sorts in the early development of the film, and he is one of the ones who turned Bennett and Nimoy on to the notion of having the crew save humpback whales from extinction. Weinstein is given a thank-you credit in the film, and he used those talks as a jumping-off point for his novel Deep Domain.
To boldly go. “Everybody remember where we parked!” This is a fun little movie, probably the most genuinely enjoyable of a bad lot—and by “bad lot,” I mean “Star Trek movies,” as I maintain that Trek and movies are a bad fit.
It’s best remembered as the “save the whales” movie, and the overriding message is a very important one, as sledgehammery as the script has it be. Luckily, things are better now than they were thirty years ago, as humpback whales went from being classified as endangered in 1986 to being upgraded to vulnerable in 1996 and least concern in 2008. The movie’s prediction of a 21st-century extinction for the species is looking less likely. I, for one, am grateful to see that Trek‘s track record for predicting the immediate future remains dreadful (viz. the lack of any Eugenics Wars in the 1990s), as I really don’t want to live to see World War III and the post-atomic horror, thank you very much.
And the dialogue in this movie simply crackles. Just as with The Search for Spock one suspects Harve Bennett’s influence (one of four credited scriptwriters), as the conversational humor is just as strong in this one as it was in the last film, this time aided by a more lighthearted storyline (the stakes are high, and there’s plenty of social commentary, but the basic story is the, ahem, fish-out-of-water story of the crew in the 20th century). McCoy’s snark, Kirk and Spock’s banter both with each other and with Taylor, Scotty’s bluster with Nichols, Sarek and the Klingon ambassador trading insults, and so on. “Double dumb-ass on you!” “You look like a cadet review!” “What does it mean,’exact change’?” “I love Italian—and so do you.” “I’m from Iowa, I just work in outer space.” “We’re dealing with medievalism here!” “One little mistake.” “The bureaucratic mentality is the only constant in the universe.” Just a lot of fun.
It’s not without its flaws. Saavik’s remaining on Vulcan is utterly incomprehensible on every possible level. Just a few scenes earlier, Spock told his mother that he had to go to Earth to offer testimony because “I was there.” So was Saavik, so shouldn’t she be offering testimony, too, as the only survivor of the Grissom? (Of course, the characters can’t actually say, “Sorry, Saavik, you could come with us, but nobody liked you as much as the person who played the role before you, and you were created to replace Spock who we wound up bringing back instead, so as we say on Earth, c’est la vie.”)
Scotty’s cavalier granting of the invention of transparent aluminum to some schlub he needs Plexiglas from is spectacularly irresponsible, and in a franchise that has generally done a good job of stressing the need to not muck with history (Christopher’s son’s importance in “Tomorrow is Yesterday,” Edith Keeler’s tragic influence in “The City on the Edge of Forever,” the knife’s edge of Gary Seven’s work in “Assignment: Earth,” not to mention future works like First Contact and DS9‘s “Past Tense” two-parter), Scotty’s recklessness is appalling. Worse, it’s played for a cheap laugh.
Plus, how did nobody bump into the invisible spaceship that was in the middle of a big clearing in the most popular public park in the Bay Area? How come Uhura and Chekov have no idea where Alameda is when both of them went to Starfleet Academy, which is headquartered in San Francisco? (This stands out particularly coming after McCoy’s comment that San Francisco hasn’t changed much in three hundred years as they’re flying over it.) Why are three captains and four commanders being assigned to the same ship? (Just in general, the crowbarring of everyone into the same roles they were in fifteen years earlier in their careers is stupid, and will sour every remaining Trek film in this timeline.) Sending George and Gracie out before their scheduled press event makes no sense for the institute, as museums rarely pass up opportunities for publicity. And the climax is very anti, as the endless flight toward the whaling ship is tedious and uninteresting.
To be fair, that last sequence is the only pacing misstep in the film. Leonard Nimoy’s sophomore effort as a feature film director is far more successful, as the performances are looser and less stiff, the visuals are stronger—just in general, Nimoy is far better at framing shots in this one than he was in The Search for Spock.
All in all, a fun outing. Enjoy it, ’cause it’s the last good outing for this crew. (Cue crowds ready to tar and feather me for disliking The Undiscovered Country. Just wait two weeks, and you can beat me up then…)
Warp factor rating: 6
Next week: Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
Keith R.A. DeCandido talked about The Voyage Home once before, in 2011 when Tor.com did a Trek movie marathon.
It’s San Francisco. People bump into invisible spaceships all the time, even when they’re not there.
I truly cannot wait for the Undiscovered Country review. I’ve always felt there was something slightly off about that movie, despite liking it overall. I felt the same about the Wrath of Khan, and you managed to put it into words perfectly during that review, so I look forward to some very interesting insights.
Time travel, in addition to making you see your friends’ heads in the ooze, also makes you hear lines in the movie that haven’t been spoken yet.
The main thing that I dislike about ST IV is that the time travel plot seems like such a transparent way to economize on sets, effects, costuming, etc. There’s not much reason for them to travel to the exact year the movie came out other than “now we can just film it on the streets of San Francisco and save a ton of money.” I agree they made good use of the conceit, but a movie that mainly happens in the 20th century feels to me like not quite a Star Trek movie.
“Why are three captains and four commanders being assigned to the same ship?”
Because it’s a common practice on large and/or important ships even in today’s Navy. When I was stationed on the USS George Washington many years ago, our Captain, XO, Reactor Department Officer, Supply Officer and Chief Medical Officer were all full-bird Navy Captains with assorted bunches of Commanders and LtCDRs in various roles.
Regarding the films, I think this is where the evens good/odds bad trope began. I don’t know that it was necessarily better than STIII, but it was certainly lighter in tone after the events in II and III and that generated lots of goodwill after the darkness of the previous 2. As you noted, this film’s strength is it’s dialogue and banter rather than its plot, and that will let people paper over any huge flaws the rest of the film might have.
I remember enjoying this immensely when it first came out and I think I maybe watched it one time between now and then and I think that was before DS9 launched. This time, while it was entertaining, it seemed to be way more corny to me now than originally. I think a lot of that has to do both with the maturation in my tastes of SF (I was 18 when it first came out) and the maturation of SF in TV and movies in general – especially TV with TNG, DS9, SG-1,B5, the new BSG, etc all showing how deep, weighty SF could be.
I enjoy this film a lot, but if I think about it too much, it starts to feel a bit like self-parody. The humor is unrelenting at times, and it’s really more of a comedy than anything else. And Keith really underscores the weakness of the overall story by including none of the great lines in the recap.
Uhura has no standout scenes like she did last time
Thank God she has no standout scenes like she does next time.
@5: But that hasn’t been common in the Star Trek universe until now – its a consistency break more than anything.
“Everybody remember where we parked!” <– remains my favorite Star Trek movie line ever.
@7 – mine is Chekov’s line Keith used in the article – “I did not wish to be shot down on the way to our own funeral.” is so layered, especially with Koenig’s delivery.
And, let’s not forget the scene on the bus where Spock neck pinches the jerk with the boom box at top volumne. The audience always cheered. Mine certainly did.
Well, krad, you certainly classify a lot of things as flirting that I classify as chatting and being friendly. It has never occurred to me that Kirk was flirting with Taylor. Actually, the fact that they’re not flirting or falling in love, that they simply seem to like each other as friends, is one of the things I love about this film. Similarly, I like it that Saavik and David aren’t paired up in TSFS. And now I’m never going to read the Vulcan’s Soul trilogy, because I don’t want to see Saavik married to Spock either.
I’m glad they dropped the idea that Saavik had to stay behind because she was pregnant. For starters, that isn’t a good reason for staying behind. But more importantly, it’s annoying that women in films constantly get pregnant after having sex once.
I like this film, but I would have liked it better if it had been less of a comedy. It isn’t nearly as funny as, for example, “A Piece of the Action”, and the ecological theme would have merited a more serious treatment. My favourite bits aren’t funny at all – they’re the surreal time travel sequence and the scene where Kirk and Taylor watch the whales in the tank and Kirk quotes D.H. Lawrence.
I enjoyed this movie a lot. The most quotable of all Star Wars movies, at least to me. “Nuclear wessels” is pretty much part of the lexicon now. And I quote the scene where Scotty tries to talk to the computer at least once a week, if not more. (I do not always pick up the mouse when I do, but on occasion…).
It doesn’t make tons of sense, sure, but is still probably my favorite of the original cast Star Trek movies. I’m not the hugest Wrath of Khan fan, honestly. I did, however, enjoy The Undiscovered Country quite a bit, so I’m looking forward to seeing why Keith dislikes it so much.
I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for this film. I first saw it in high school in the early 90s and was watching TNG at the time. This was my introduction to original cast Star Trek and I think it serves as a good entry point for newbies, especially those new to sci-fi in general, since the contemporary setting kind of eases you in. It’s very lighthearted and funny and has probably the broadest appeal of all the original cast movies.
Oooh, conspiracy theory, is that why it was made just before TNG started up? Paramount wanted to pull in a wide audience for the new series?
Quoth J Town: “The most quotable of all Star Wars movies, at least to me.”
I know this was a typo, and these things happen, so I’m just gonna put this here:
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@5: “Why are three captains and four commanders being assigned to the same ship?”
Your explanation has the advantage of corresponding to fact, but I like mine, too: They got “demoted” for the same “insubordination” that got Kirk “demoted”.
Quoth brightbetween: “Oooh, conspiracy theory, is that why it was made just before TNG started up? Paramount wanted to pull in a wide audience for the new series?”
I doubt it. They were produced by two different subsections of Paramount, with two different people in charge. Harve Bennett was in charge of the movie production, with Brandon Tartikoff in charge of the TV production. Gene Roddenberry was directly responsible for developing TNG while he was virtually shut out of any involvement with the movies.
Besides, every movie is designed to have as broad an appeal as possible. That’s kind of how these things work. *wry grin*
Anyhow, TNG was being developed because the franchise was two decades old and they had three money-making movies happening, with a fourth on the way, they had novels from Simon & Schuster and comic books from DC that were selling like gangbusters, they had a role-playing game that was a huge success for FASA, and they figured the time was ripe for a new TV series.
This movie was made in 1986 because they were on a pretty stead two-year cycle, with Wrath of Khan in 1982, Search for Spock in 1984, and this in 1986 (also the 20th anniversary).
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Keith, is it possible that Saavik did not speak to Kirk for three months regarding David’s death because it was a very sensitive subject and she put it off as long as possible? Literally waiting until right before they leave. Being a Vulcan, I don’t know that she would have been as likely to avoid unpleasantness in such a way, but its possible.
Side note, Having just finished “A Time for War, A Time for Peace” (starting “Articles of the Federation” this weekend), I can’t help but think how Nan Bacco would have reacted to this? “Piñiero, why the hell is a giant baseball bat trying to kill us?” :)
The back story of the punk kid, from Wired, is pretty interesting.
I’ve only watched this film in its entirety once, and my eyes were set on roll pretty much from the the moment the crew decides to time-travel. All fiction operates on the ability to suspend the consumer’s disbelief. When it appears that the author (or in this case writers and actors) can’t take this seriously, then neither can I. This makes one boring film and three bad films, so far. I’m more than a little surprised they kept going. Still, I actually enjoy the next two films the most, regardless of their weaknesses.
#18
Star Trek had already established this method of time travel in the series, so it’s not like they suddenly introduced the idea here just for giggles. Besides, fish-out-of-water comedies were big in the ’80s. I don’t blame them for wanting to lighten things up for a change, something the series also did. Certainly had its fair share of silly comedy.
@15: They were produced by two different subsections of Paramount, with two different people in charge.
That’s why it’s a CONSPIRACY. :)
krad, to quote Ousier Boudreaux in Steel Magnolias “You are evil, and you must be destroyed”.
“Captain Kirk is climbing the mountain, why is he climbing the mountain”…..aaaaagggghhhh (I would suggest avoiding krad’s blog today if you value your sanity….)
@17 / wiredog: That’s a great story! Thanks for sharing that.
To be fair, critter41, Emmet Asher-Perrin was the one who started it in this post from yesterday…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@5,
While the GW may have several O-5/O-6s, it also has a crew of 5,000. ST Enterprise has approx 450 and should have a crew complement closer to that of a CG.
@19
I think a TV show can get away with this sort of thing moreso than a film, if for no other reason than because it is one amongst tens or hundreds over a span of years on a weekly basis, rather than one of six over a span of years on a multi-year basis. And yes, I did remember this time-travel method from the series, and that 80s films loved this type of story, but it doesn’t absolve this film in my opinion. Silly episodes in the run of a television show can be a mood lightener in an otherwise serious series. Silly films in the run of a film series can be a franchise killer in an otherwise serious film series. If this had been anything other than Star Trek, well… Anyway, I’m glad it continued. Regardless, it’s just my opinion. I’m sorry if I offended you or anyone else.
I’m still getting my thoughts in order about this film (I have conflicting views about its general merits), but I’ll start by noting the musical score. Leonard Rosenman (1924-2008)–the composer of “East of Eden,” “Rebel Without a Cause,” and “Fantastic Voyage” (as well as concert pieces)–became the third composer to work on this film series. I have a fondness for the “Hospital Chase” music.
#26
Oh, no offense taken. Not at all. I see your point. Cheers.
Back to the movie, I just want to say how much I enjoy John Shuck as the Klingon ambassador in this and the sixth installment. I want to see a spinoff with him walking around bellowing at people and nothing else. “You call this COFFEE!!! There will be no peace as long as that waiter lives!” :-)
“It’s best remembered as the “save the whales” movie”…
True story. Prior to the release, I was an attending member of LASFS, the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, a group of readers/fans and not a few authors (I remember Jerry Pournelle attending at times) of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It was a pre-internet place to go hang out and talk about books and films, and generally do fan stuff, as you do. I remember one meeting, where someone had shown up and said they had just had leaked to them the plot of the next upcoming Star Trek movie, which was “Kirk and Spock go back in time to save the whales” – and there was much hooting and derision, and a general consensus that the franchise was doomed.
I’m happy to say it ended up one of the best of the Trek films (IMHO), second only to Wrath. Yes, the plot is a bit looney, but it was fun and very Trekky, so hey.
Correction: Gillian Taylor does not appear in DTI: Watching the Clock, although she does get a passing mention.
One of the oddest things about Gillian’s appearances in the literature is how often people assume that the science vessel she was assigned to at the end was a spaceship. She’s Earth’s only living expert on humpback whales! They need her with George and Gracie, because nobody else is qualified to take care of them! So of course the vessel has to be a seagoing vessel from which she can take care of G&G and their baby. It would be insane to send her out into space, not only because she’s singularly qualified to take care of the whales, but because she’s singularly unqualified to serve as spaceship crew. So it’s bizarre to me that people hear “vessel” in the movie and assume it can only be a space vessel. At least Debt of Honor got this right, showing her supervising the birth of Gracie’s calf (albeit on a small boat accompanied only by Kirk).
Although I don’t agree with DoH’s assumption that Gillian was another of Kirk’s romantic conquests. I always got the impression that his attempts to flirt with her basically bombed. She didn’t go with him to the future because she fell in love with him, but because she was a cetacean biologist and George and Gracie needed her. At the end, she only gave him a peck on the cheek rather than a passionate kiss. After all, let’s face it, he was a couple of decades older than she was.
Anyway, yeah, this is a fun movie, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense. It plays fast and loose with time-travel logic (kind of refreshing, actually), it’s unclear whether the probe’s impact on Earth is intentional or accidental, and the science is pretty much gibberish. (How can Uhura pick up the sound of whalesong from orbit, through the vacuum of space? How does one “collect” photons without absorbing them? And so on.) It also has what’s arguably the franchise’s weakest musical score, from Leonard Rosenman (also known for Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Battle for the PotA, the Ralph Bakshi Lord of the Rings, and RoboCop 2). It’s actually pretty distinctive music, but it’s an acquired taste.
And I’ll never forgive the film for introducing the conceit of “NCC-1701-A.” It makes no sense to reuse a registry number for a different ship, even with a letter appended. The registry number should go with the ship, not with its name. The number is meant to be a unique and specific identifier for a ship even if it changes its name or shares its name with another ship, and it conveys information about the ship’s class and other attributes that remain the same regardless of its name. So it’s nonsensical to give two different ships — let alone six or more different ships — the same number with a letter appended. It defeats the whole purpose of using a registry number. It’s a stupid idea that I wish this movie had never started. They could’ve given it a number like, oh, NCC-1781, say, if they wanted something similar-yet-different. That would’ve made immensely more sense.
Still, it gave us “Admiral — there be whales here!” and other fun lines, so there’s that.
Oh, another bit of trivia: Spock’s first appearance on Vulcan in the movie is atop the famous jagged rock formation at Vasquez Rocks, the iconic location previously used in “Shore Leave,” “Arena,” “The Alternative Factor,” “Friday’s Child,” and others, and later used in TNG: “Who Watches the Watchers” and VGR: “Initiations” (IIRC). It would again be used for location shooting in Vulcan scenes in the 2009 movie, albeit heavily augmented with CGI.
30. ChristopherLBennett – Actually, the idea of appending an A onto the registry came from Matt Jeffries. In his original numbering scheme, the 1701 would stand for the 17th class of ship and the first ship of the class. When the ship went though a major modification, the letter would be added onto the registry as seen here:
This movie was the first to use the idea but it came from the man himself.
@30 CL Bennett: “After all, let’s face it, [Kirk] was a couple of decades older than [Gillian Taylor] was.”
And when as that ever been a deterrent for an onscreen Trek romance? (I’m thinking Vash, among others.)
I hear what you’re saying about Rosenman’s music. As I stated above, I have a soft spot for the “Hospital Chase.” I have to agree that the title music (and a collection of other cues) is inferior to Goldsmith and Horner–as much “Spaceballs” as “Star Trek.” (There may be a Third Composer problem worthy of discussion; I honestly find Nicholas Hooper’s music the least memorable of the scores for the Harry Potter films.)
After killing off Spock in II and David in III, and destroying the Enterprise, I don’t blame them for wanting to do something light and comic. I enjoyed the film when I saw it as a teenager in 1986. And I remember enjoying the novel. (Personal note: my great-aunt had Alzheimer’s, so I remember being moved by the passage in the novel that mentions the absence of the disease in the 23rd century; I hope that’s a prediction Trek gets right, sooner than later!) As a conclusion to the plot threads started in II and III, it does its job.
But there are problems. I cannot believe that more has not been made of Chekhov throwing a phaser and not worrying about someone from 1986 picking it up and learning about the technology too early. Also, I wasn’t overwhelmed by the design of the probe; it could have been more detailed. And aside from the strange look, the time travel takes a lot longer than it needs to; I feel about those sequences the way some feel about the shuttle-traveling-to-the-Enterprise sequence in TMP–only without Goldsmith’s beautiful music.
The fish-out-of-water time travel story was amusing (“Back to the Future” from the previous year, anyone?), though I’m glad they didn’t do it again. Until ten years later (in Voyager).
I suppose my general feeling is that the film is enjoyable but–like TWOK–over-rated. I don’t find its successor much worse, if at all (I know that’s not going to be the least bit controversial). But I’ll hold most of that discussion for next week…
Why would Starfleet assign all its rebellious officers whom they cannot fire due to them having incredible PR for the saving the planet thing all to the same vessel? The same broke-ass busted vessel as it will turn out. Why would Starfleet shove all its awkward squad into the same tub?
It is a mystery.
One can only assume the name USS Troutbridge was already taken.
The Saavik thing is more explicable. In a word, lawyers. The Starfleet Lawyers probably ordered her not to talk to Kirk until he was ready to return to Earth and the lawyers had decided whether or not her testimony was needed or wanted. Sure, she ought to be a hot witness but if Starfleet is trying to downplay the whole Genesis-Superweapon then her testimony hurts them more than it helps convict Kirk. So her name is probably off the witness list, and with Kirk and Co seemingly planning a guilty plea or a nolo contendere, they’ve probably stipulated that any deposition taken from her is accurate. She wouldn’t be free to speak to them until that happened, and she is probably waiting for orders to her next posting.
This is my favorite of all the Star Trek movies. Because it has no warfare, and no villains, I think it does a better job of presenting Roddenbery’s vision than any other. Just misunderstanding between alien species, and protagonists struggling to undo the ecological sins of the past.
And it definitely has the best script, and the best lines, with all the actors on top of their games.
In my headcanon of original-cast Trek, the first two movies are real and that’s it. They lost me with ST III: We Take It All Back. I wish that Spock had remained dead and that Kirstie Alley’s Saavik had been given a future and that the original crew had gotten leadership roles appropriate to their rank and experience on various vessels. That said, I enjoyed ST IV a lot. Smart, funny dialogue, with the humor based on character as much as it is on fish-out-of-water jokes. It’s not “real” in my mind, but I’m glad it was made, given that the “real” possibilities in my view had all been thwarted by ST III anyway.
@10 JanaJansen–I agree with krad that Kirk is clearly flirting with Taylor, which is my least favorite thing about the movie. I found it annoying and a bit creepy, in part because he’s so much older than she is. (Though I realize that in Hollywood it’s often seen as normal for a woman to be paired with a much older man.) It wouldn’t have bothered me quite so much if she’d been closer to his age…though as CLB notes, happily she doesn’t seem to respond by getting all twitterpated. I also found it annoying because it’s irresponsible—what if he alienates her with his flirting, and they lose a necessary ally? But of course there’s no way of imagining that any red-blooded woman would be creeped out by a Kirkflirt, even when he’s a total stranger to her who is apparently spouting nonsense!… It might have helped me read their interaction as you did, as nonsexually friendly, if the script had allowed Spock to eat dinner with them.
@30 CLB–I agree that the only outcome that makes sense is for Taylor to be assigned to an oceangoing vessel, to be with Gracie and George. I think it’s natural, though, for people watching a Star Trek movie to assume “spacecraft” when they hear “science vessel” unless otherwise specified. So the script should have made that explicit.
If I try to take the plot seriously, it’s a big problem to me that Taylor is willing to go to the future without saying goodbye to anyone. Single persons without immediate family, if emotionally healthy, should still have close personal connections of some kind. If she has normal human connections, her leaving is bereaving those she is leaving behind as well as herself.
But happily, I don’t have to worry about that because I don’t take the movie that seriously!
Oh, and I would have loved for Gracie and George to have the last word–some wise and funny comment on the whole adventure. Even if it had just been worked into the credits (I know, people didn’t do that so much back then).
This is easily the most fun of the Trek movies, although the story is kind of a rehash — seriously, how many giant planet-destroying behemoths are there out cruising through the galaxy? And why do they all beeline straight towards Earth? But it was fun to see everybody in 1980s San Francisco.
As far as I’m concerned seeing Amanda again made it all worthwhile. And for a Cold War baby watching Chekhov ask for the ‘Nuclear Wessels’ in his thick Russian accent was all kinds of funny. As for Saavik, maybe she reported in to Starfleet Vulcan HQ and was reassigned, her last ship being so much wreckage.
Fond memories of this one. I saw it on the largest screen in the southeast, on a 70mm print, the day it came out. 14 of us stood in line for 4 hours for the second showing, swapping places in line as people went to and from class. The box office staff, not realizing how long it actually takes to seat everyone if you sell out the whole theater, didn’t open up the box office until shortly before the time for the first showing, which they didn’t delay. People were throwing $20’s down and running in without waiting for their change from the $2 ticket.
We were in the second or third row. While not usually optimal seating for a Cinerama sized screen, it made the time travel special effects look very good.
@@.-@, maybe we can stretch it a bit and say that they suspected their power might burn out… so they had to hit the tiny window when they could find both humpback whales and a nuclear submarine. Or something.
The movie was alright, but not that good.
And apparently nobody on the project had any understanding of nuclear reactors, nuclear power, or radiation at all. Nowadays I just figure that when Hollywood portrays anything, the people who have real life experience with it (newspaper offices, police departments, botany) either grit their teeth or roll their eyes.
@31/kkozoriz: The flaw with your argument is that Jefferies’s memo is clearly using it to indicate an upgrade to the same ship. If his proposal had been used, it would’ve been the TMP refit that was called 1701A. But it wasn’t. That ship stayed 1701 despite being completely rebuilt, it was then completely destroyed, and a totally different ship — one that must have already been built under a completely different registry number, because there’s no way they could’ve whipped up a whole Connie in however long the trial took — was reassigned to that number. And the later NCC-1701-Xs are all of completely different ship classes. Under Jefferies’s scheme, only ships of the same class as the original Enterprise would have numbers beginning with 17.
@32/Don S.: We have different tastes. Nicholas Hooper’s Order of the Phoenix score was the only Harry Potter score I liked enough to buy the CD for.
As for the probe’s design, I think it was meant to suggest something similar to the whales it was trying to contact, something vast and smooth and semi-organic. So a more elaborate design wouldn’t have been fitting.
@35/Saavik: I think the movie does make it explicit that Gillian would not be going to a space vessel, because it makes it explicit that the whole reason she’s coming to the future is to be with George and Gracie. There’s no reason the film would set that up and then change its mind and send a 20th-century whale biologist out into space. By all rights, that should be self-evident, without any need to spell it out specifically. Okay, yeah, of course someone who hears “vessel” in a Trek movie would have “space vessel” as their first kneejerk impression — but any further thought should shoot that impression down.
I suppose Uhura can pick up the humpback whales because humpbacks can actually transmit and receive their song via subspace. Why else would the probe we calling to them from space? Too bad they went extinct before any humans could build a radio.
@42/Theo16: In the novelization, McIntyre rationalized it as Uhura picking up a radio broadcast of whalesong from the Cetacean Institute.
41. ChristopherLBennett – Yes, I’m aware of that. However, it clearly shows that the IDEA for using a letter suffix came from Jeffries. All Starfleet did was resuse the number and add the letter to show that it was different. Not exactly as Jeffries intended but the result is much the same. After all, it’s not like they built a brand new ship from scratch for them. This ship obviously was renamed from something else, probably the Lexington that we see lost due to loss of power at the beginning. They painted over the name and number and added the A. You may not agree with their reasoning but it’s obvious that TPTB didn’t share your concerns. After all, if someone refers to NCC-1701-D or NCC-1701-B, you’re not going to think that it’s the ship from TOS. Adding the letter does make the registry unique. The registry is not just the number, it icludes the NCC (or whatever) prefix as well as any letter suffix. Simply saying a ships registry is 1701 means that number could never be used for any other vessel, military or civilian, NAR-1701 for example.
Gillian also says that she has three hundred years of catch up learning to do. Hopefully she’ll be too busy to be bothering the whales as they attempt to raise their family. They may like her very much but they were last seen heading out into the ocean, presumably to get away rom the crazy humans.
@43 I can attest that in the 1980s Whalesong was broadcast on some stations, mostly small stations with specializing in the new age market, and whalesong albums (usually songs of the whale and rainforest, for some reason) were marketed on even mainstream stations, so Uhura should pick up advertizing using it if nothing else.
@30/Christopher: I think the notion that Taylor’s science vessel is a spaceship comes from the novelisation, but I can’t check because I no longer own it. I remember that it bothered me at the time, because of the reasons you mentioned.
@35/Saavik: Funny, I have the exact opposite feeling – for me, Star Trek films only really start with the third one, because I’m uncomfortable with the first two for various reasons. Although none of them is as good as they could have been.
Taylor leaving everyone behind didn’t bother me. She didn’t have the chance to say goodbye to anyone, she had to seize the opportunity. This way she could stay with the whales, who seem to be the most important beings to her. She also strikes me as a person who makes new friends easily. And from a Star Trek fangirl point of view, it’s nice that one of “us” gets to live in the 23rd century.
I just rewatched the restaurant scene and still don’t think Kirk is flirting. It’s true that he gives her a long look in the beginning, but that’s in response to a similar look from her. The line about “a nice girl” is tongue-in-cheek. And then they get right down to business and talk about the whales. He doesn’t say anything flirty, and the way he looks at her isn’t any flirtier than the way he looks at his friends in the TV show. Possibly even less so. I also think that it would make no sense – as you wrote, it would be irresponsible, they have only just met, he hasn’t been romantically interested in younger women before, and he already knows that she considers him a “hard-luck case”.
I’ve always imagined that they immediately take to each other (as friends) because they are kindred spirits. They’re both passionate about their work, they both like to help, and they’re both outgoing. They’re also both played by actors who have rather expressive faces.
Completely unrelated, after the discussion in one of these rewatches whether “Chekov” is a real name or just “Chekhov” misspelled, it’s funny to to see people spelling him “Chekhov” in this thread.
I’m glad they added an A to 1701 instead of changing the registry number. Makes it easier to remember which ship is which. I have a hard enough time remembering phone numbers, addresses and the like, haha.
My second-favorite Trek movie, after Khan. It’s a feel-good movie that always leaves me grinning.
As I understand it, Harve Bennett basically wrote the bookends in the 23rd century, while Nicholas Meyer handled the fish-out-of-water stuff in San Francisco, which was familiar territory for him after doing the same shtick with H.G. Wells in TIME AFTER TIME a few years earlier. (Both feature scenes where the heroes scrounge up some 20th century cash by hitting a pawnshop.)
Meanwhile, I can’t resist pointing out that Saavik also plays an important role in my recent Trek ebook, MIASMA.
@46/Jana: Maybe it’s a matter of fine distinctions… Kirk may not be “flirting” with Gillian in the sense of trying to seduce her sexually, but he’s definitely trying to charm her into helping him out. Same methods, different goals.
Oh, and Don S., thanks for reminding me of Hooper’s Harry Potter score. I’m re-listening to it now for the first time in a while, and I’m rediscovering how many really beautiful and fun moments it has. (The “Fireworks” cue is a particular favorite.)
@49/Christopher: Agreed, he’s definitely trying to charm her.
@49 CLB: Maybe I’ll give it another listen. I don’t dislike it, it just didn’t make the impression on me that Williams and Doyle’s did for the previous four. I do remember liking the Patronus lesson music.
Re: Kirkflirt with Dr. Taylor – I took it, then and now, that he was flirting with her but the goodbye scene in which she declines to give her “phone number” was her telling him to forget it. And with Sarek so conspicuously in the background of that scene, I’d always thought Sarek told her Kirk was a notorious womanizer, esp. fond of very smart blonds.
I like this movie a lot – except Dr. Taylor, because her acting was reeeeeaallly bad. Jeesh. And Walter Koenig had on WAY too much makeup, especially in the hospital scenes. I was very relieved later when he’s a villain in “Babylon 5” that MJS’s crew didn’t try to make him look so very young.
@52/Xena Catolica: It wasn’t until I saw Walter Koenig as Bester in Babylon 5 that I realized what a good actor he is. As Chekov, the accent always got in the way.
Worrying about Scotty’s cavalier attitude towards Nichols is like complaining that Kirk nearly got everyone on Sherman’s Planet killed because he didn’t take Barris seriously. Sometimes you’ve just gotta say, “It’s a comedy episode, don’t think too hard.”
@52/Xena Catolica: As I’ve said before, I don’t agree that Kirk ever was a womanizer. But even disregarding that, I don’t think you’re right about Sarek, for several reasons. Sarek is a Vulcan, and I don’t think that Vulcans interfere in humans’ emotional affairs. He was also quite the old-fashioned patriarch in “Journey to Babel”, always ordering his wife around and such. I don’t see him taking the woman’s side. And finally, he’s immensely thankful to Kirk for bringing back Spock, whereas he has never met Taylor before.
I take the “phone number” scene at face value – Kirk has been looking forward to showing Taylor his world, and now it turns out that she doesn’t need him. She doesn’t give him her “phone number” because she doesn’t know it herself yet, or because at that moment she’s looking forward, not back, she’s excited about her new job and her new life, and he’s a person from her past. Of course she is more important to him than he is to her – she’s the only person he ever brought back to his world from one of his trips. If anything, there may be a hint of the perennial aging theme here – Kirk has momentarily forgotten how adaptable young people are. He’s stunned that she does so well on her own.
I guess you’re right that Hicks’ acting isn’t very good, bit I still enjoy the character a lot (as my previous paragraph probably shows). After all the calm, composed female guests of the previous three films, she’s like a breath of fresh air. I would love to read a reverse fish-out-of-water story about her adventures in the 23rd century, provided she is not paired up with Kirk, but I don’t think there are any.
By the way, is there any in-story reason why Kirk doesn’t simply convince her by showing her a piece of future technology? I can see that he wouldn’t want to give her a tour of the Bounty for fear of contaminating the timeline, but if they can sell the formula for transparent aluminium to an engineer, surely they can show a marine biologist a little piece of equipment?
Apart from that, I think the scene between her and Kirk was done well. I like that he never mentions the threat to Earth – he simply says that they want to repopulate the species. He probably knows that his story sounds ludicrous enough as it is.
This film is not only my favorite Trek movie, but my favorite movie of all time! I get the flaws, but it’s just so damned much fun that none of that matters. All the characters seem to be genuinely themselves (even the dude who is allegedly NOT himself at the moment so is, in his own way), and the dialogue is so good it overshadows everything else. Hell–thirty years later, every time I’m around my Dad and something isn’t going quite right (especially if it’s REALLY not quite right), one of us will say “Are you sure it isn’t time for a colorful metaphor?”
Some thoughts on others’ comments: I thought TVH’s score, especially the title piece, were the best of the lot. I thought Kirk’s interactions with Gillian showed that he was totally charmed by HER, not that he was trying to charm her. I always took Scotty’s “Why, how do we know he didn’t invent the thing?” line to mean that he DID invent it, and Scotty was just playing dumb so as to not gush over Nichols, or whatever.
@56/DonRudolphII: That’s a great reading of Scotty’s line.
I love this movie so much. One of my family’s all-time favorite movies…one we can quote so many lines from. We definitely didn’t watch it with an analytical mind(probably a good thing!!), but I agree with the multiple comments that have stated that all the actors were on top of their game here – characters just felt “right”. I also really like the fact that there’s no “big bad” in this movie and no massive battle or firefight or any of that! Just the crew doing what they do best…encountering the unexpected and dealing with it in a way that brings benefit to all. =) Me and my friend are currently watching S1 of TOS…and it’s so refreshing how many episodes are just that. Exploration. Discovery. Alien life. The final frontier. (Saw The Menagerie 2-parter last night…Spock is such a rebel!! Love him)
In a way, I wish this movie had never introduced the concept of “transparent aluminum.” See, there’s a mineral called alumina, which is aluminum oxide and is also known as corundum or emery. It’s the stuff emery boards are coated with, and it’s the stuff rubies and sapphires are made of, and it can be used as the basis for a strong form of glass that can be used for armored windows and stuff like that. It is, of course, not the same thing as aluminum, any more than water is the same thing as hydrogen or salt is the same thing as chlorine. It’s a commonplace mineral that’s been known about for ages, and of course it’s naturally transparent.
But the news media are reliably idiotic when it comes to science, and obsessed with filtering every bit of science news through pop culture metaphors. So every time there’s a news item about some slight advance being made in the application of alumina-based armor glass or the like, the online press goes crazy with “OMG THEY JUST INVENTED TRANSPARENT ALUMINUM JUST LIKE IN STAR TREK!!!” Never mind that it’s not actually aluminum, never mind that it’s not even remotely a new invention since we file our nails with the stuff, never mind that it’s not at all surprising that a material found in gemstones is transparent. And then it’ll burn out in the news cycle after a few days, and then several months later there will be another minor news item about alumina, and the online press goes crazy with “OMG THEY JUST INVENTED TRANSPARENT ALUMINUM” all over again, completely forgetting that it’s only been a few months since the last reports about this “new invention.” I’ve seen this happen two or three times a year, and the Internet’s lack of long-term memory is as frustrating as its lack of scientific savvy.
DonRudolphII and JanaJensen: In fact, that was how Vonda McIntyre played it in the novelization. She actually took it a bit further and had Scotty fangoober Nichols for a minute before getting ahold of himself (especially since Nichols was very confused by the fangoobering in question), and then provides additional conversation between Scotty and McCoy establishing that, yes, Nichols actually did invent transparent aluminum, and Scotty is actually quite appalled to learn that McCoy’s never heard of Nichols. McCoy then rattles off the names of some famous doctors, none of whom Scotty has heard of. It’s a fun scene. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@60/krad: I’m afraid I didn’t find McIntyre’s novelization of TVH particularly fun. I always felt she was the wrong choice for adapting this movie, since the tone of her books tended to be pretty serious and somber, and I didn’t think she captured the movie’s wit at all.
@45 — I still have a CD of whalesong somewhere. And another CD of dolphin noises, which are actually a lot more … obnoxious. The whalesong is oddly calming.
As far as the numbering/registration thing, if we apply the Jeffries logic (letter denotes a refit), then I think the ship that they used in ST:TMP should have been NCC-1701A — honestly, I’m not even sure which parts of the TOS Enterprise were retained for the TMP ship, given the changes in physical shape in hull, saucer and engine nacelles & struts.
Christopher: I actually tend to agree — while I maintain that her novelizations of the previous two were brilliant, she was indeed a poor fit for this one.
Having said that, the novelization did have its moments, and the Scotty-McCoy-Nichols scene was one such.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Ah the Big Tin Can in the Sky Trek movie. Besides THE FINAL FRONTIER and the original, this was the worst of the Star Trek movies. From the moment the Big Tin Can in the Sky shows up this movie is a ridiculous guffaw marathon. I remember sitting in the movie theater dumbfounded at just how bad it was. When Spock swims with the whales I can hear Fonzi off camera saying, “I can jump that whale tank!” Granted I only like Wrath of Khan and the Undiscovered Country when it comes to the original Trek crew’s movies and First Contact with the NG crew. Did I have a nightmare that Chris Pine was in a trilogy of bad Star Trek movies just a few years ago? Awful dream, good cast though.
Great post Keith!
Absolutely agree that this was the last decent film of the original crew- my second favorite overall, after Khan…
I think this has the same problem as the previous one, in that the climax point is overly long and a bit dull, basically consisting of a conversation in a language we don’t understand between two parties that aren’t particularly expressive. Every time I see it I just think “Man, shut down already!” But then, I guess if the conversation was shorter it would be even more ridiculous that the probe came all that way for such a brief chat. Shame, because up until then the movie’s pretty fun.
After two reviews that seem to take it as read that Robin Curtis was The Worst Saavik, I have to say I never found her any worse than Kirstie Alley. In fact, I have to say it took me years to even realise it was a recast. At least that made sense of having two films with “Introducing Some Actress as Saavik”captions at the start.
I love the title music for this. I couldn’t pick the title music for II, III or VI out in a line-up and TMP and V are the TNG music, but this is superbly hummable. And then you get actually clips from the film over the end credits instead of a long, long, long list that makes you think you’re dying of old age!
Odd trivia: One reference book claims that Kirk Thatcher, who plays the Punk on the Bus and was credited as associate producer, was the son of then-British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. Now pretty sure that it isn’t true but it confused me for years and left me with a truly bizarre image.
Also, the print used by ITV, which is the one I have on home video, has an odd title caption that names the film The Voyage Home: Star Trek IV. I know when the BBC finally snapped up the rights their version had a title caption more in line with the other films but did anyone else see this?
And have to say I’ve never liked the scene of Chekov being interrogated by the FBI. Chekov comes across as an idiot and it doesn’t seem like an act. I guess they were going for a fish-out-of-water thing but he’s so incapable of understanding idioms and sarcasm that I wonder if there’s a draft where it was meant to be Spock and it didn’t get changed that much. Worse, there’s no real pay-off: Chekov nearly gets himself killed in a botched escape attempt and the jerkass FBI guy just disappears.
@66/cap-mjb: I’m pretty sure it was the UK or European release of the film that inverted the title like that. Star Trek wasn’t as big on that side of the pond as in the US, so they downplayed the Trek part of the title.
I’m looking forward to your review of The Undiscovered Country, because I thought if judged just as a movie, it was pretty good, but if judged as Star Trek, it was pretty bad. To hear Kirk say (of the Klingons), “Let them die” was horrible, and watching everyone but Spock be prejudiced … it felt as if someone had thrown mud on my heroes.
In “Day of the Dove,” it took an alien entity to make the crew of the Enterprise behave like jerks, but in TUC, they did it all by themselves. Bleah.
Part of why I like TOS is because they’re unabashedly GOOD guys, and maybe that’s not as realistic as having them be prejudiced, but I watch Star Trek for inspiration, not realism. :-)
So here’s at least one reader who’s rooting for you to call out the flaws in TUC. ;-)
@59,
So how do you know the Star Trek transparent aluminum isn’t just alumina glass? And that they call it transparent aluminum because its catchier than alumina oxide substrate in a silicon oxide matrix?
@69/ragnar: Is “transparent silicon” catchier than “glass?” No. Nobody would call it that. And it’s chemically incorrect. Silicon is not silica. Aluminum is not alumina. Iron is not rust. They’re very distinct materials. Nobody would call water “liquid hydrogen,” because LH is a radically different substance with different properties.
Besides, like I said, alumina is normally transparent. That’s not a novel or unusual property for it to have, so it would be silly to call attention to it in the name.
Granted, people do use “carbon” as a shorthand for “carbon dioxide” when talking about the environment, but that’s because the compound doesn’t have a shorter name. Aluminum oxide has several shorter names, like alumina and corundum.
Voyage Home is far more confident film than Search for Spock. It’s also the funniest and most successful entry on a pure entertainment level, even though I still prefer The Motion Picture overall.
The dialogue alone carries this film. There’s a sense of camaraderie that you don’t get on any of the other films.
To me, one of the reasons Saavik was left aside from this voyage is because the story is about the core group more than anything, how they work together in such a strange world. Saavik was a product of the films, designed to replace Spock and create a new dynamic. The core characters, on the other hand, had been together since TOS. I feel it would have been out of place having her onboard for this mission, especially when you already have Spock involved (either she’d have to stay on the Bird of Prey or find some other ridiculous disguise). What would she bring to the table, really? Most of her Wrath of Khan arc revolved around being the new vulcan who didn’t understand Kirk’s passion, unlike her mentor. In the next film, she was an emotional link to bring Spock back to his former self, plus carrying her Kirk arc to being the person who challenged David.
Nimoy and Bennett made a decision to leave a lot of baggage aside in order to make this film as lighthearted as it could be. Saavik was a reminder of somber times.
Besides that, I have zero problems with this film. Easily the most fun one to rewatch and it never feels like a chore. The Kirk Thatcher bus scene alone brings me to laughter every single time. Gillian has a sharp tongue meshed with an unyielding idealism that makes her one a worthy opponent/ally on Kirk’s quest for George and Gracie.
This is also the one film where every supporting character gets a memorable scene. Keith argued Uhura didn’t get one, but I find she gets to shine in the Alameda gag as much as Chekov. Plus, she’s a supportive and reliable companion for the whole nuclear ship infiltration. It’s still more material than what little Nichelle got to do in all of TOS.
I assume Steve Meerson and Peter Krikes were responsible for the draft that included Eddie Murphy. It’s the only reason I can think of as to why they’d bring outside writers with no Trek experience for this one film. Whatever their inclusions were before Nick Meyer stepped in to write the 1986 scenes, I’m glad we didn’t get Murphy in the biologist role. It would have felt odd, to say the least.
As for Rosenman’s score, I like it more than Horner’s. While certainly not on Goldsmith’s level, I adore his crescendo when the whales are released in the 23rd century and promptly talk the probe away, plus the following climax. It’s also one of the reasons I always stay for the very end of the credits crawl (which is the only instance in any Trek film where they kept rolling footage while the names rolled past).
@30/Christopher: I don’t believe the relationship not working out for them had anything to do with an age gap. Hicks was way past 30 by the time she filmed this, and she looked almost as old as Shatner by the time 7th Heaven premiered a decade later.
FWIW, Shatner was 55 when this film was released and Hicks was 35. Kirk, though, would be 48 (33 in “Space Seed,” based on him being 34 in “The Deadly Years,” with the second through fifth movies being 15 years after “Space Seed”). Assuming Hicks and Taylor are the same age, that’s a 13-year difference, which is not horrible when both parties are over 30.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@41 It occurs to me that the fact there is no physical continuity between TOS Enterprise and Enterprise-A, may not mean there is no legal continuity. A few hundred years ago, the Royal Navy had accounting rules which made it difficult or impossible to build a complete new ship, but quite possible to rebuild an existing one. In an extreme case, ship A might be legally described as having been rebuilt into ship B, even when they had not a single plank in common.
If Starfleet has similar rules, all the Enterprises we have seen might be legally the same ship as the original they are supposed to replace, with the same registry number, with an A or B added to allow people to refer to physically,but not legally, distinct ships. This might be a foolish nomenclature, but not the most foolish in the history of bureaucracy.
OMG, I had never noticed that McCoy is wearing BELL BOTTOMS!!! And Scotty using the computer mouse as a microphone is priceless. Not the most spectacular Trek movie ever, but I’ve always enjoyed it, because it feels pretty Trek.
@6 – Demetriox: Hehe, you’re right about Uhura.
@10 – Jana: It’s not just krad, I also think Kirk is flirting with Taylor.
@52 – Xena: Oh yeah, Koenig has a ton of make up on, it’s really weird!
@66 – cap-mjb: I read that Margaret Thatcher reference once, and believed it for years.
@67 – Chris: Yes, because “The Voyage Home” is so much more of a selling point than Star Trek. As less popular as ST could be in Europe as opposed to the US, it still makes no sense to use the generic title first instead of the name of the franchise a lot of people still recognized.
@67: Old VHS copies here in Brazil had the title inverted as well (using a blue-ish font as I recall). I just assumed it was made this way for international distribution.
@71/Eduardo: “To me, one of the reasons Saavik was left aside from this voyage is because the story is about the core group more than anything, how they work together in such a strange world. Saavik was a product of the films, designed to replace Spock and create a new dynamic. The core characters, on the other hand, had been together since TOS.”
That’s part of the problem with the later movies, and then with the TNG movies — their insistence on artificially maintaining the status quo indefinitely, even reversing changes when they occur. It’s unrealistic, it deprives the characters of growth, and it’s too conservative from a creative standpoint. Movies should ideally be about life-changing events, the most important and transformative events in their characters’ lives. They shouldn’t be about maintaining a perpetual status quo.
As for the Kirk/Gillian age thing, I’m certainly not saying that I personally believe such a relationship can’t happen or that there’s anything wrong with it. My point, which I failed to convey, was that I had the impression that it was the filmmakers’ intention to show that Kirk was aging out of his “irresistible to women” years, to get humor out of him trying his usual charm and striking out for a change. Just as TWOK was about acknowledging and using the characters’ aging rather than ignoring the passage of time, I saw this as a more humorous slant on the same thing.
@74/MaGnUs: Don’t blame me, I’m just passing along what I’ve been told about the reason for the title inversion.
But it turns out I didn’t remember quite right. According to superfan Therin of Andor on the TrekBBS:
In short, a lot of European audiences hadn’t yet seen the previous film, and hadn’t reacted too well to TMP, so it was deemed better to present it as if it were a standalone rather than emphasizing that it was the fourth in a series.
ST III VHS copies also had the ST II prologue (aside from the Spock death scene which is also replayed after the Paramount logo).
@76/Christopher: If there is something I’m glad the films avoided, it was going back to doing romance stories for Kirk.
If anything, the scene in Trek VI where shapeshifter Martia kisses Kirk feels awkward and out of place with the rest of the films (but then again, Meyer was clearly going for awkward during that scene).
Not blaming you, Chris, just saying that it doesn’t make much sense. De-emphasize that it’s part of a series, yes, but not downplaying the Star Trek brand.
I think Kirk was definitely flirting with Taylor. The shocked look on his face when she walks away at the end is not the look of a man who wanted to just be friends. ‘What? My charms didn’t work? First time for everything I suppose…’
Priceless moment.
@68/Corylea: “Part of why I like TOS is because they’re unabashedly GOOD guys, and maybe that’s not as realistic as having them be prejudiced, but I watch Star Trek for inspiration, not realism. :-)”
A big part of why I like TOS is because the characters are unabashedly good guys and still feel like real people.
I don’t like flawless, perfect characters, because they don’t feel real. On the other hand, I don’t like seriously flawed characters either. I see no point in spending hours and days of my life with fictional people I would try to avoid in real life, or who are less nice than my neighbours and my friends. The main TOS characters all have their imperfections – Kirk can be stubborn or obsessed or too much of a soldier, Spock can be arrogant or ashamed of his emotions, and McCoy can be mean. But at the same time, they are clearly nice people who care about each other and about the world, who admit their mistakes and try to do better. I find that inspirational.
@74/MaGnUs: Well, I’m glad these questions aren’t decided by majority vote, because I like their relationship much better the way I see it.
No question that this is the most fun of the movies. Damn the plot holes and the silly science. Full warp ahead!
The nice thin that stands out for me is that everyone gets their moment to shine. Sure, it’s mostly centered on Kirk & Spock but the rest of the crew get to be more than window dressing this time out. It would have been cool to see the scene with Sulu’s great (great-great…) grandfather but at least that wasn’t the only Sulu centric scene. Chekov and Uhura get some comedy on the streets and some cloak and dagger stuff on the “Enterprise”. Scotty and McCoy are a lot of fun together as well.
As for the story, well…. They had to have the crew be the only ones go back in time since it’s their movie but is it really the best idea to allow fugitives to fly back on their own in a stolen enemy ship?
Once they do travel back to the dark ages of 1986, the fun really begins. Usually when time travel is involved they do their best to stay out of the way. Here, they’re standing out like sore thumbs and it’s great to see. It’s Star Trek time travel. Everything will end up back where it was before so why not just have fun with it?
Sure, there’s way too many coincidences but that’s also to be expected. The guy who invented transparent aluminum? Check. A couple of whales just ripe for the picking? Check. The “Enterprise” being in dock? Check. The list goes on but you’re having so much fin that if you notice the flaws, they don’t bother you. At least not until you think about it even a little. But even then you’re remembering them with a smile.
The one major problem I had was that it completes the big reset button push that started with the resurrection of Spock and the death of the Enterprise. At the end, we’re back where we were at the end of the series. Everyone’s back at their stations. Spock’s alive and has his marbles back. And they’re off on another adventure. But that’s a problem with Star Trek since it became a “FRANCHISE.” You can’t change things too much. You can take the toys out of the box and play with them but they have to go back in the box when you’re done.
8/10
JanaJansen@46
The relevant lines in the novelization are “Science vessel, bound for Mer to recruit some divers to help the whales. Why, the next time you see me, I may have learned to breath underwater!”
Which does suggest a space vessel, but it’s still whale-related so there’s still a reason for Taylor to be there. And the “breathe underwater” part suggests why they might want to go to that particular planet.
Regarding Scotty and Nichols and the transparent aluminum, I mentioned in the rewatch for “Yesteryear” that this and the Kirk-pawning-the-glasses scene were my favorite uses of the Bootstrap Paradox (a term I learned from Doctor Who — “Google it!”) whereas the use of it in “Yesteryear” was my least favorite (because the implication is that young Spock was supposed to die in an unpolluted time stream). It recently occurred to me that in Deep Space 9, the Ferengi appearing in Roswell and Sisko becoming Gabriel Bell could also be examples of the Bootstrap Paradox. Maybe even “Assignment: Earth”, in which Gary Seven believed that he accomplished the mission despite Enterprise interference, but history tapes showed that what happened as a result of the “interference” was exactly what should have happened, would be a minor example of it. Even though I liked the two uses of the Bootstrap Paradox here, in retrospect I’m thinking now that two uses in the same movie was, at best, pushing the paradox a little past the point of cuteness, and in general it’s used more often than it should be. (And not just in Star Trek.)
@82/mikeda: Oh yes, thank you. Now I remember!
@83/richf: Kirk pawning the glasses was part of a causal loop? I’ve always assumed that they simply existed in two places at the same time afterwards.
@68: No, I don’t buy that. Kirk and co were always prejudiced towards Klingons, it’s just that every other time those prejudices were shown to be right and the Klingons were just evil backstabbing scumbags who kill helpless natives for fun. “The Trouble With Tribbles” opens with Chekov making jokes about Klingons smelling and shows an Enterprise crew who can’t drink in the same bar as them without starting a fight. “Errand of Mercy” has Kirk building them up with a big speech about how evil and nasty Klingons are and ends with him getting angry that their confrontation was interrupted. “Friday’s Child” has an Enterprise crewmember instinctively drawing a weapon at the sight of a Klingon, who the crew treat with instant contempt and who Kirk clearly wants to give his comeuppance. (“I want the Klingon?”/ “Revenge, Captain?”/“Why not?”) In TOS, the Klingons are pretty much exclusively treated as a totalitarian militaristic culture, not the proud warrior race that later versions recast them as.
@76: Okay, having started all this…I’m far too young to remember the film’s release or how well-known the previous one was but the home video I’ve got doesn’t…Oh wait, hang on! Yes! I’d actually forgotten that. There is a bunch of clips, mostly from STIII but obviously also covering Spock’s death, with an in character voiceover from William Shatner as Admiral Kirk pre-credits of the version of STIV I’m most familiar with. I always assumed that was simply to recap the story rather than an indication that the earlier films weren’t that well known.
@84: Yes, silly lines from Kirk aside, I prefer to believe that the glasses were brought back to a time period where they already existed rather than appearing out of nowhere because paradoxes.
@82
Why does Gillian need to go to “Mer” to learn to breathe underwater? She could go to the same planet that turned Kirk into a merman back in The Ambergris Element of TAS. Oh, wait, no she can’t. They were Banned From Argo, Every One, Banned From Argo Just For Having A Little Fun. Tough luck there Gillian Taylor.
*falls over laughing at random22’s post*
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@85/cap-mjb: Regarding the Klingons, there’s an important distinction you’re overlooking. TOS did not portray “all Klingons” as being treacherous and evil. It portrayed the Klingon military that way. It never attempted to show Klingon civilians or explore Klingon culture beyond the government and military.
It’s one thing for a member of the Federation’s defense force to feel hostility toward Klingon military personnel because of the harm they inflict. It’s something profoundly, horrifically different for that member to express the belief that all Klingons, civilians included, deserve to die. So the level of racism portrayed in TUC was not just more of the same. It went to a whole other, much uglier level.
@88: That’s a distinction that might exist in the minds of liberal democrats but it’s unlikely to exist in the minds of military or civilians in a society that’s been on a cold war footing for probably their whole lives (given the reference to fifty years of emnity in “Day of the Dove”). At no point in TOS did anyone make a distinction between the Klingon military and the Klingon species. As far as they were concerned, those guys in the uniforms with the ships and the guns were “the Klingons”. They didn’t see a civilian population that needed protecting any more than the Allied pilots who dropped bombs on Berlin did.
In a sense, Kirk’s line is taken out of context. It’s a moment of anger, when he’s been pushed to taking his argument to an extreme. He’s used to seeing these people – not the military, the people – as the enemy. And now suddenly it’s being proposed that they invite these dangerous people into their space, these people that he doesn’t trust and who he probably suspects will then form a fifth column and undermine the Federation from within. He’s not advocating genocide, not advocating attacking them when they’re down. He’s simply expressing the belief that they should be left to reap what they sow, that they should suffer the consequences of a situation of their own making having wrecked their own environment providing power for their war machine. It’s an ugly view to be sure, as Kirk himself realise when he sees it reflected back at him. But it’s really not all that different from the previous twenty-five years of attitude towards the Klingons.
@89/cap-mjb: “Liberal democrats?” Huh? Isn’t it rather insulting to moderates and conservatives to assume they’re too stupid or fanatical to distinguish between the policies of a military state and the right of its civilians to exist? As I recall, even in the height of the Cold War, for all the Reaganite rhetoric about the “evil empire” of the Soviets, the hostility was directed primarily at the state, not the rank-and-file citizenry who were seen as victims of the state. Certainly there were some extreme right-wingers too full of hate and paranoia to make the distinction, but I prefer to believe those are a fringe minority of American conservatives even today, and they certainly weren’t as dominant in conservative politics back then as they are now.
I like this movie a lot but I gotta say that’s some EASY time travel. Brain damaged spock in a klingon ship and it works?!
90. ChristopherLBennett
@89/cap-mjb: “Liberal democrats?” Huh? Isn’t it rather insulting to moderates and conservatives to assume they’re too stupid or fanatical to distinguish between the policies of a military state and the right of its civilians to exist?
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were targeted specifically because they did not have much in the way military targets and so were relatively untouched by prior bombing. The idea was to have a test site for real world results of an atomic bomb. And Nagasaki was the second target for the second bomb. Kyoto was the original but one of the generals has gone there on his honeymoon and liked the city.
In a nutshell, the cities were targeted specifically because they were primarily civilian targets. Not much in the way of distinguishing the people from the military.
There’s also the much larger population of Japanese citizens sent to internment camps than Germans or Italians or other Axis powers. Could it be since they didn’t look like “us”, it was that much easier to treat them as something less than “we” were?
Fighting racism is a process not a destination. In Arena, Kirk has to remind himself that the Gorn is an intelligent being.
“Like most humans, I seem to have an instinctive revulsion to reptiles. I must fight to remember that this is an intelligent, highly advanced individual, the Captain of a starship, like myself, undoubtedly a dangerously clever opponent. “
There’s a seed of racism in Kirk even then.
To brighten the conversation here (snort), I present to you the full lyrics of “I Hate You” by Kirk Thatcher. Hilariously over-the-top in its punkness and completely at odds with Star Trek’s message, it makes me laugh every time. Can’t help it.
The line about “sins of all the fathers” is interesting, since this movie is about the future dealing with the sins of the past.
Just what is the future?
The things we’ve done and said.
Let’s just push the button.
We’d be better off dead!
And I hate you!
and I berate you !
and I can’t wait to get to you…
The sins of all the fathers,
being dumped on us – the sons
The only choice we’re given is:
How many megatons?
So I eschew you!
And I say “SCREW YOU”!
And I hope you’re blue too!
We’re all bloody worthless,
Just greedy human scum,
The numbers all add up
to a negative sum…
And I hate you!
And I hate you!
And I hate you…too!
BLOW IT ALL TO BLOODY F____N’ ‘ELL!!!
@85/cap-mjb: “Errand of Mercy” doesn’t end with Kirk getting angry that the confrontation was interrupted, it ends with Kirk being embarrassed because he has gotten angry. That last scene is important.
You’re right about “Friday’s Child” (and the exchange you quote has always bothered me), but looking beyond the second season gives a different picture. In “Elaan of Troyius”, Kirk fights the Klingon attackers off and then allows them to get away. Elaan is surprised that he doesn’t pursue and “finish him off”. In “Day of the Dove”, Kirk manages to overcome the hatred the alien creature has implanted in him, prevents Chekov from raping Mara and works together with Kang. In TSFS, he tries to rescue Kruge (who is responsible for his son’s death) and only kills him in self-defense. In TFF, they even party with Klingons.
@90/ChristopherLBennett: Okay, not for the first time, it feels like you’ve picked out a single phrase to beat me with while ignoring the rest of the post. Apologies to any moderates or conservatives out there who can make a distinction between a nation that’s their enemy and the people that live there. But I suspect most mere mortals aren’t quite as perfect as that. Again, rather than picking out a single phrase of Kirk’s and using it to label him as a genocidal racist, look at the scene. The Federation has long-regarded the Klingons – whether that means the Klingon nation, the Klingon government, the Klingon military or the Klingon species – as a dangerously hostile foreign power. Kirk has had plenty of first hand experience of the brutality they can inflict. And suddenly, because of an accident entirely of the Klingons’ own making, the Federation decides to dismantle their defences and offer them aid: Not because the Klingons have suddenly turned nice and decided that they don’t want to conquer other races, but because they need help digging themselves out of the mess they’ve made. I imagine a lot of less-than-perfect mere mortals like Kirk would suspect that the Klingons would take that help, get back on their feet and then come charging across that now-undefended border and bite the hand that fed them. (Indeed, “Yesterday’s Enterprise” presents us with a timeline where they did exactly that and the Federation’s on the verge of being wiped out!) So when Spock resorts to emotional blackmail and says the Klingons will die if they don’t, Kirk’s response is “Let them die.” Not because he hates them, not because he believes every last one of them deserves to die, but because he doesn’t trust those in a position of power and believes the alternative is the Federation being the ones who die instead.
But this is probably a discussion better suited for two weeks’ time!
@94JanaJensen: Okay, there’s an extra beat on the end but then there is in TUC where Kirk similarly ends up embarrassed by his original reaction. I think you’re slanting things slightly. It’s hard to tell how much Kirk is being influenced in “Day of the Dove” and whether the alien made him sock Kang in the face for no real reason, so perhaps we can excuse him that one. But yes, he might hold out his hand to Kruge in TSFS but only after setting a fairly gratuitous trap that killed most of his crew. At the start of TFF, when McCoy reminds Kirk the Klingons don’t like him, he simply replies “Mutual.” I do accept that TUC mostly ignores that movie, giving us Kirk’s bizarre claim that he’s never been that close to a Klingon ship before. But I think his prejudice is well documented. Kirk’s not the type to kill anyone unnecessarily and he’s not blinkered enough not to work with the Klingons when they share a common goal, but I think he’s a long way off liking or trusting them.
@95/cap-mjb: I just don’t like the suggestion that the ability not to be a bigot has anything to do with one’s place on the political spectrum — at least, a sane political spectrum, as opposed to the dysfunctional mess we currently have. That kind of binary labeling just gets in the way of real discussion.
#94
I don’t know if I’d call that a “party” in TFF. The Klingons are by themselves on the other side of the room. Chekov and Sulu attempt to get First Officer ProteinShake’s phone number, and Kirk gives a half-hearted salute to Captain BigHairMetalBand. That’s about all we see. It seemed more like an awkward afterparty.
“This has been a disappointing movie, hasn’t it?”
“Yep, I hope we get a proper dinner party and space battle in the next one.”
“Word.”
@96/cap-mjb: Was it a gratuitous trap? What would you have done in his place?
I didn’t mean to say that Kirk likes or trusts Klingons, only that the hatred he displays at the beginning of TUC is over the top. I like TUC, but a lot of the details feel off. Without these flaws, it would probably be my favourite Star Trek film.
@97/ChristopherLBennett: Okay, apologies if that’s how it came across. It was possibly a poor choice of phrase, I simply meant that it’s easier to take that point of view if you’re in a peaceful country with fair laws and aren’t living in constant fear of another culture.
@99/JanaJansen: Hmm, good question. I guess there was a net gain in that it was easier to take the Klingons’ ship when they were almost all dead. But couldn’t Kirk have just beamed his people down to the surface without blowing up the ship? Or if he was worried about Federation secrets falling into Klingon hands, blown up the ship without inviting the Klingons across to get killed?
@101/cap-mjb: But he had to pretend to surrender the Enterprise to prevent Kruge from killing Spock or Saavik.
@100/cap-mjb: But even in the height of the Cold War, the fears of the American and Soviet populations were more about the opposing governments and their military agendas. The fear and hate were not directed at each other’s civilians — indeed, from what I gathered at the time, the respective populations generally wished each other well. They probably saw each other more as victims of their corrupt and immoral leaders, rather than blaming every single member of the civilization for the evils of their leaders. That’s the distinction I’m talking about. Condemning the actions of an enemy government or military can be rational, but condemning every single citizen of their population for the actions of their leaders is stupid, thoughtless, and bigoted. There is a profound distinction between the two. I can buy that Kirk feels the former, but I can’t buy that he’d extend it to the latter, because he has never been stupid.
@103/ChristopherLBennett: Maybe so, but I don’t believe anyone rushed to offer aid after Chernobyl. Indeed, they pretty much did what the “hawks” in TUC recommend: Sat back and waited for the Soviet Union to collapse. But as I said, I don’t think Kirk genuinely hates every Klingon everywhere and wants them to die, he just doesn’t think offering aid to a hostile and untrustworthy power and then offering them a free shot at their backs is a good idea.
@104/cap-mjb: As far as I know, people did offer aid, but the Soviet government didn’t accept it.
104. cap-mjb – The US basically pushed the Russians into bankruptcy with massive increases in military spending under Reagan. Gorbachev saw the writing on the wall, that they couldn’t keep up. It’s a similar strategy that ISIS and Al Quaida are trying to turn against he US. Kick up spending on the military at the expense of the people.
As part of the effort to bankrupt the Soviet Union, America financed the opposition to the Russians in Afghanistan, which just happened to include a chap you may have heard of, Osama bin Laden. Strange bedfellows indeed. That’s not to say that the Russian backed government had clean hands but the American response was to turn it into a Russian Vietnam.
Kirk’s attitude towards the Klingons in TUC is, obviously, colored by Kruge having David murdered just to spite Kirk, but also by the Klingon government’s painting Kruge as Kirk’s victim at the start of this film, whitewashing Kruge’s crimes and pinning Genesis as a conspiracy cooked of by him. I think a certain degree of resentment is perhaps ugly, but human reaction to Klingon government’s cynicism.
@106,
Slightly off topic, but it wasn’t the Reagan defense spending that did in the Soviets. It was the final straw, coming after nearly 40 years of concerted efforts to prevent the Soviets from succeeding. I can’t find it online, but there was a plan to plan to limit Soviet access to technologies that was instituted by western european countries that prevented the Soviets from getting things like hi-tech oil drilling equipment, computer tech, med tech, etc. Read an article about how successful it was in the CIA’s “Studies in Intelligence” ages ago.
@108/ragnar: It was Gorbachev’s reforms that “did in” the Soviets — or rather, that loosened the control of the state enough to allow the long-festering resistance among Russia’s own people to burst free and bring down the Soviet regime. It’s typical American egomania to assume that it was exclusively about us.
@109.
It was having the economic problems and the political reforms occur at the same time. Note that China has very consciously avoided political reforms until after it restructured its economy in order to avoid the same fate.
109. ChristopherLBennett – The inverse is the American habit of propping up dictators that support them and then claiming their hands are clean. See Iran in 1953 or the Pinochet coup in Chile for just two examples. So many people buy into the American mythology that everything the country does is good and that everyone that opposes them is evil.
I always felt bad for Bob (Gillian Taylor’s co-worker). After he sends the whales out early, she arrives at the institute, totally wigging out, and upon finding out what he’s done slugs him in the face, takes off in her truck and is never seen alive again. Think of the guilt poor old Bob must feel….
#112
In the commentary Nimoy said Hicks really gave a hard slap to the actor playing Bob and he wasn’t expecting it. That’s a genuine surprise we see from him.
Thanks for remembering my SNW story in your rewatch, Keith! I feel honored you mentioned it. :)
My 9-year-old daughter says she is a Star Trek fan but, really, she is mostly a fan of this movie. She “LOVES it” (direct quote). She likes it for the whales; she likes it for the music (yes… when it’s her turn to pick music for car rides, as often as not she picks the Star Trek IV CD); she loves it for the funny; she loves it for Madge Sinclair as a “girl starship captain.” (Huzzah!) Hoping to get at least one of my two kids into Trek fandom, of course I have shown her some TOS and quite a bit of TNG at this point, but she’s seen this movie three times in the last year and would be just as happy to watch it again.
And while it doesn’t seem like a lasting love of much Trek beyond it may stick (although who knows), I gotta say there are much worse exemplars of the franchise and its philosophy. Goodness knows we need stories where the good guys face the future and its problems with resiliency and optimism. and this movie just wears those qualities on its sleeve. It’s not the most serious Star Trek, but right about now I’m feeling like it may be even more relevant than it was 30 years ago!
@108/ragnarredbeard: The CoCom embargo?
The Wikipedia article is a bit misleading; it wasn’t only about arms, but about technology in general. The German Wikipedia article is more extensive, but it’s in German.
@114/Mike: Did you show your daughter all the films? I skipped TWOK, TSFS and TUC because of the violence when I watched the films with my (then) twelve-year-old daughter.
@92: Hiroshima contained the headquarters of the Japanese 2nd General Army. (The force responsible for the defense of southern Japan). It was a very important military target.
As for Nagasaki, while it was of less military significance than Hiroshima it was still a major industrial center for the production of warships, munitions, and aircraft parts which made it a valid military target as well. (It was also the alternative target for the August 9 bombing. The primary target that day, Kokura, had greater military importance than Nagasaki and was also a smaller city, but the cloud cover over Kokura was too heavy to conduct the bombing.)
Folks, I’ve got deadlines crashing down all around me, so I’m gonna need another day or so for Star Trek V……
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@115/Jana – No, she’s only seen TVH so far. I would like to show her at least TWOK and TSFS, so she can see the whole “Genesis Trilogy,” although there is some violence in the other two. I think it’s tame by today’s standards, and nothing worse than what you’d see in a Star Wars movie (and she’s seen all of those except Episode III – but the ones she’s seen, she enjoys).
(Although I might be wrong – she gave up on Star Wars Rebels, which was her favorite show, when there was even the mildest “danger” that Ezra might actually fall fo the dark side…!)
Mainly, though, her Trek phase was late last summer through Christmas. Now, she has kind of moved on – although she still likes to play Star Trek Scene It! for some reason, even though most of the episodes and movies are big unknowns to her. I keep saying, “See, we should watch some more, so you can answer more questions,” but it hasn’t worked…
Every kid is different, and every adult has to make the best judgments they can.
@112 – Clay: Poor Bob.
@112
Just wait until the cops show up looking for Gillian and start asking Bob questions about the fight he got into with her and her subsequent disappearance. Someone will have some ‘splaining to do.
ragnarredbeard: Well, Bob’s probably the one most likely to file a missing-persons report in the first place when she keeps not turning up for work……
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
There’s a story in one of the Strange New Worlds anthologies about a detective investigating Gillian’s disappearance. It didn’t really work for me, though, because it had all of the eyewitnesses he interviewed remembering things exactly as they happened in the film, beat for beat and word for word. That would never happen. Eyewitnesses never have perfect recall, so every account should’ve been erroneous in some way. Plus, it would’ve been a more interesting story if the eyewitnesses’ slants on the events reflected their personalities or biases in some way, a la Rashomon, rather than just having them be human tape recorders on playback. I mean, we know these events already because we’ve seen the movie, so just hearing them recapped isn’t all that engaging. If they’d been recapped in a skewed way, though, that could’ve been more fun.
@121,
Which in cop world makes him the prime suspect. Just like whenever the wife disappears its always the husband.
@123 I think Bob would be in the clear pretty quickly. The weird guy dressed like a monk who swam with the whales, and the stocky older guy with him who she had dinner with. Then she was seen at a hospital springing a Soviet spy with that stocky guy and another older guy with a Southern accent. They got to figure she is either defected to the Soviets and maybe fingered as a sleeper agent all along, or gone to live in a religious commune somewhere. Bob is in the clear, but his security rating will be in the toilet though.
61/CLB:
“I’m afraid I didn’t find McIntyre’s novelization of TVH particularly fun. I always felt she was the wrong choice for adapting this movie, since the tone of her books tended to be pretty serious and somber, and I didn’t think she captured the movie’s wit at all.”
I couldn’t agree with you more. I felt that McIntyre drained nearly all of the life and the humor and the FUN out of Star Trek IV in her novelization–and if I remember correctly, I was expecting this to be the case when I bought the book.
83/richF:
“the implication is that young Spock was supposed to die in an unpolluted time stream”
I wrote a whole essay about that in the book OUTSIDE IN BOLDLY GOES, a collection of essays about every episode of TOS, including the animated series and the movies.
My premise is that the Star Trek universe was altered long before J.J. Abrams came along, and the culprit is “Yesteryear.” In the original, unaltered timeline, Spock died as a child–it’s the Star Trek we know and love that’s really the alternate timeline!
http://www.atbpublishing.com/product/outside-in-boldly-goes-117-new-perspectives-on-117-classic-star-trek-stories-by-117-writers/
I would join those who like this movie for the sheer escapist entertainment of it all, plot holes and inconsistencies be damned. Things that stood out to me:
I thought the tribute to the Challenger shuttle crew before the opening credits was a nice touch.
Ordinarily I would like the fact that the probe threatening earth didn’t look so gratuitously menacing (I weary of unnecessarily tricked-out sci-fi vessels, e.g. Nero’s ship in the 2009 reboot. That ornate razor-wire design just looked ridiculous to me), but this went to the other extreme. It’s like someone got lazy and magnified a length of licorice stick and said “that’s it. That’s our alien probe.”
Speaking of alien vessels, although the pursuit to save the whales from the eeeeeeeevil whalers was long and boring, I remember being blown away at the theater by the special effect of the bird of prey decloaking and deflecting the harpoon. I still think that is one of the more stunning and realistic effects in all of the franchise.
I’ll defend Taylor’s acting here a bit. As someone else noted, after the first three movies, which featured a Vulcan and a Deltan as 2 of the 3 non-regular female characters (the third being the rather bland Dr. Marcus), it’s refreshing to have a character that emotive and passionate getting so much screen time, and I thought her chemistry with Shatner was delightful. The only line that still makes me cringe is when she whispers “see ya round the galaxy” at the end…. lol.
Love the way when Kirk and Spock rendezvous in the hallway at the end, they instinctively begin to walk in lockstep. Just a nice touch…..
@126/Glenn Greenberg: The thing is, the conceit of “the original, unaltered timeline” is a myth. “Original” is a term predicated on the assumption of time and causality moving in a specific direction — the version that comes “before” all the others. But “before” relative to what? The very concepts of “before” and “after” as absolutes cease to exist if time travel is real, so it’s a basic fallacy of logic, a self-contradiction, to talk about time travel in such terms. The concept of “original” has to be thrown out the window. There is no absolute “first” version when time is bidirectional, any more than there’s an absolute up or down in weightless space. There is simply a complex set of interrelated, ramifying timelines that have causal links connecting them, and “before” and “after” are simply relative positions on a given observer’s worldline through those timelines, differing for observers who follow different temporal paths. And the laws of physics absolutely do allow for circular causal loops where an event causes itself. There is no “original version” where the loop didn’t happen — there’s just the single loop consistently generating itself. (Although “Yesteryear” is a more complex situation, more a Moebius strip of two timelines circularly generating each other.)
To put it another way, if time travel exists at all, if the future can influence and alter the past, then it stands to reason that there never was a version of history that wasn’t influenced by time travel. If time travel exists now, then it and its influences have always existed, by the nature of what it is. In a universe where time travel is possible, then influence from the future is simply a natural, integral part of causality, and there never was a “pure” state of the universe unaffected by time travel.
@128: And right there you have the reason I HATE Time Travel!!!! Okay, I don’t hate it, I’m a big Doctor Who fan, I just don’t want to think to hard about it.
@128/CLB
Uh… yeah, OK!
Just so you know, my essay was written with tongue planted firmly in cheek, as a way to tweak fans who were so up in arms about the JJ Abrams movies creating a new timeline–and, in part, to take Abrams himself to task for using the new timeline as an excuse to turn Khan Noonien Singh from a dark, barrel-chested, exotic, charming and charismatic figure into a pale, skinny, one-note Brit.
So I really didn’t take into account all the stuff you brought up–nor did I think there was a need to! :-D
@130 — My entirely incorrect headcanon is and shall forever be that Cumberkhan was actually not Khan Noonien Singh, but was another member of Khan’s party who adopted the name, possibly out of respect after actual Khan died in cryosleep in the JJVerse.
(I’m also mentally constructing a scene in which Old Spock is warning them that Khan is the most dangerous opponent they’ll ever, etc., etc., then sees an image of New Khan and says, “Wait, what? That’s not him!”)
@131/hoopmanjh: We never needed an explanation for why Saavik’s face changed between TWOK and TSFS. Fans today have become too literal-minded, too obsessed with superficial details. These are works of fiction. They’re not documentaries from an alternate universe, they’re dramatizations of conjectural events. So a change of actors is just a change of actors. It doesn’t have to mean the characters actually look or sound different in-universe. Heck, the 2009 movie made that explicit — Spock Prime recognized Kirk and Scotty on sight. To him, they looked the same as they always did, even though the actors pretending to be them looked different to us.
After all, that’s the way it was done on stage for thousands of years — actors would rotate in and out of roles in an ongoing play, and sometimes an actor would get sick and their understudy would have to step in. Sometimes the understudy might take over during the performance, if the main actor had a mishap or something. The audience just accepted it because they understood the difference between acting and reality. (And this has happened with Benedict Cumberbatch. He and Jonny Lee Miller — yes, both modern-day TV Sherlocks — starred together in a 2-man stage version of Frankenstein where they would swap the roles of Victor and the Creature on alternate nights.)
I’ve come to realize that Gene Roddenberry himself approached Star Trek as a dramatization. In his ST:TMP novelization, he presented himself as a 23rd-century producer who’d created a fictionalized version of Kirk’s adventures and apologized for their inaccuracies and exaggerations, promising that TMP represented a more authentic dramatization created with Admiral Kirk as a consultant. That was how he accounted for the changes in the depiction of the universe: The universe itself hadn’t changed, we were just getting a more accurate dramatization of it.
And that makes sense when you consider that Roddenberry got his start in TV as a police consultant for Dragnet, a show that did dramatic recreations of real police cases, framed by narration in the form of police reports. Star Trek was structured in much the same way, framed by narration in the form of log entries. Implicitly, I think what we were seeing was meant to be taken as a dramatization based on those log entries — Dragnet in space, only not quite so dispassionate.
The Saavik thing didn’t bother me. TBH, at the time that I was seeing the movies in the theater, I’m not sure if I would’ve even noticed the recasting (not having cable and this being in the infancy of the VCR, so I didn’t necessarily have a way to obsessively rewatch films back then).
In general, I’m not opposed to recasting — I might not always be happy with it, but I understand the reason for it, and I’m willing to let it slide. Sometimes, though, it feels like the recasting is done in a way that fundamentally changes the role, and not for the better — Cumberbatch is a fine actor, I love him in just about everything I’ve seen him in, but the version of Khan in Into Darkness was so utterly divorced from the original version that I just couldn’t reconcile them.
(Another example of recasting that really bothered me was Evie in the third Mummy movie — again, not because of any issues with the new actress herself, but because the version of Evie in that movie was so utterly at variance with Rachel Weisz’ performance that I couldn’t convince myself it was the same person.)
@133/hoopmanjh: Actually I think Cumberbatch’s Khan is much closer to the original Khan of “Space Seed” than the TWOK version was. The “Space Seed” Khan was a rational, intelligent, nuanced antagonist who was ruthless in the pursuit of power but still cared for his people; the STID Khan was basically the same. The TWOK Khan, though, was just a one-note vengeance-crazed madman, hardly anything like the original version of the character despite being played by the same actor.
@132/CLB:
The comparison to the Saavik recasting doesn’t really work.
And mind you, I wasn’t really bothered by the switch to Robin Curtis. Sure, I prefer Kirstie Alley’s Saavik, and I wish she had come back for STAR TREK III, but I thought Curtis did a good job and I accepted her in the part. (She’s a sweetheart in person, incidentally.)
I think you’re painting fans with too broad a brush when you accuse them of being “too literal minded and too obsessed with superficial details.” And since this is not the first time that you’ve made that comment in response to one of my posts, I tend to think you’re including me in that assessment.
For one thing, details that YOU may consider to be superficial may be important to someone else–like me, for example. We had this conversation a few weeks ago, with regard to why I didn’t care for the Star Trek novels written by authors like Diane Duane and, to a lesser extent, Vonda McIntyre. I would expect you to understand and respect my point of view, without judgment, as much as I do yours.
It’s not that Khan was recast that was the problem. It’s that the casting DIDN’T WORK. Audiences will embrace recasting if it feels right. In the Avengers movies, Mark Ruffalo is playing the same exact character that Edward Norton played in THE INCREDIBLE HULK, and audiences embraced it immediately and enthusiastically. Ruffalo wasn’t the IDEAL replacement for Norton (I would have gone with Lee Pace), but overall, it worked.
Keep in mind that according to reports, JJ initially approached Benicio del Toro to play Khan, but del Toro apparently wanted too much money.
So there was an effort, at least initially, to cast someone who was at least within the same ZONE as Ricardo Montalban–dark, exotic, powerful-looking, charismatic, and who could convey the presence of a super-strong, highly intelligent warrior king. Was del Toro a perfect match for Montalban? No. But at least he was in the same zone.
Ditto Robin Curtis. She didn’t look exactly like Kirstie Alley, of course–who does?–but she was an attractive Caucasian woman with long brown hair and could play a Vulcan woman who barely controlled her emotions (check out her face when she has to tell Kirk that his son is dead). Had Leonard Nimoy, as her director, allowed Curtis to keep her natural eyebrows, and had instructed her to follow Alley’s interpretation of Saavik, she would have. But he specifically wanted her not to.
In my opinion, casting Benedict Cumberbatch for the role of Khan Noonien Singh was as questionable as casting John Wayne as a certain other guy named Khan. Nestor Carbonell would have been a near-perfect choice, and had even expressed interest in the role. Plus he had worked for Abrams and Damon Lindelof before, on LOST. Which makes the casting of Cumberbatch (supposedly instigated by Lindelof) even MORE questionable.
P.S. The TMP novelization aside, Gene Roddenberry was the one who, in his later years, became very focused on what constituted “canon” in Star Trek, declaring that everything we saw on screen was canonical (with the fifth movie being a rare exception), having happened as we saw it. I NEVER got the impression that what we were seeing was meant to be taken as “dramatizations” based on the captain’s log entries, nor do I think that was what was intended. But I don’t judge you for seeing it that way–as I’ve said to you before, more power to ya.
@135/Glenn: What you say about Roddenberry’s claims contradicts what I’ve heard. My understanding was that he personally discounted just about all Trek that he didn’t personally supervise — ST V and the animated series were just two examples. I once read comments from someone who knew him during TNG (possibly Paula Block, though I can’t swear to it) that he even considered a fair amount of TOS apocryphal and approached TNG as a soft reboot of sorts, a chance to get it right this time. After all, what ended up onscreen in TOS was not a pure encapsulation of his vision, but was compromised by budgetary limits, network notes and censorship, production errors, occasional bad judgment, and so forth. No doubt he saw it as less than what he’d hoped it would be in many ways. Few creators ever see their released work as perfect; most see plenty of mistakes in it and welcome the chance to correct them.
And of course, when TMP came out, he often told fans to pretend that the Klingons had always had ridges but that TOS hadn’t been able to show it, or that there was “interference in the transmissions from the future.”
As for the importance of the log entries, see Inside Star Trek by Solow and Justman. Solow actually presents it as his suggestion to start with: “The voyages of the Enterprise have already taken place; all Star Trek adventures are already history. The captain is setting up and recounting the particular adventure.” (p. 18) He presented it more as telling the story in flashback than as a dramatization, but it was Roddenberry himself who later posited the dramatization idea in his TMP novelization, and I’ve realized that he may have gotten that idea from his history with Dragnet. No doubt stating it as a single, exclusive cause-and-effect path is an oversimplification — albeit an informed one that I present mainly for effect, since I think it’s an interesting unconsidered angle that I’m trying to focus attention on for the sake of discussion — but it seems that it might’ve been an ingredient in the conceptual mix.
Oh, and as for Khan, I’ve never quite gotten the attitude that casting someone of Montalban’s ethnicity was the important thing, given that he was a Mexican wearing brownface makeup meant to pass him off as an Indian Sikh. Ideally, shouldn’t they have tried to cast an Indian actor instead, rather than repeating that act of whitewashing? At least a British accent makes more sense for an Indian than a Mexican accent does.
Quite frankly, they shouldn’t have recasted him at all.
Making the new “Star Trek II” about Khan was a thousand kinds of wrong. It screamed “we are now officially out of ideas!”… not to mention the fact that reminding us of TWoK every 5 minutes is hardly doing the Abrams version any favours.
It was a stupid, stupid idea which should never had happened.
@137/OThDPh: As I said, I think the version of Khan in STID worked for me because he mostly was more like the “Space Seed” version than the TWOK version — plus he actually got to interact directly with Kirk, like, being in the same room with him and everything! I think if they’d just left out the gratuitous warp-core death scene homage, which was stupid and totally yanked me out of the movie, then the rest would’ve been more or less okay. Well, leave out the gratuitous city-destruction disaster porn too.
This movie has a special place in my heart. It was thanksgiving, and we were at the in-laws. After dinner, the football games didn’t look very interesting, so we decided to go to the movies and see STIV with my brothers in law and sister in law. Usually, when I saw a movie, it was just my wife, and NEVER on opening day, so this was a unique experience! On the final scene, as the NCC-1701A came into sight, the entire theater burst into cheers. This has made it one of my favorite films in memory…
@136/CLB – Re: log entries. I can think of some, early on, that are clearly telling the story in flashback (“The Enemy Within,” “The Man Trap”), but didn’t they by and large become a way to quickly sum up the action for those who might be joining the show already in progress? (Or had forgotten the thread of the aciton during the commercial breaks?) My sense is they pretty much became “in real story time” updates, regardless of Solow’s original intent.
I think this community has wondered before about whether Discovery will have them, or needs them – TV storytelling standards have changed a lot since the 1960s, and I wouldn’t think audiences would need much narration at all.
Of course, Star Trek Beyond had the one long set-up log entry near the film’s beginning, and that worked quite nicely.
@135 – Glenn: Can we please stop referring to Hispanics as “exotic” and “dark”? Thanks.
@140/MaGnUs
I was not referring to Hispanics in that way. I was describing the type that I felt was right to play Khan Noonien Singh.
Please note that I NEVER included “Hispanic” as a prerequisite–I only mentioned the qualities and physical features that I felt were right for the part. The fact that both Montalban and del Toro are Hispanic is beside the point.
@141; What’s wrong with dark and exotic? Granted dark isn’t necessarily exotic and exotic isn’t necessarily dark but the combo is pretty attractive.
@141/MaGnUs
Just to clarify — by dark, I only meant hair color. Dark black.
And by exotic, I mean not traditionally “white,” and someone without an American accent.
No offense was intended.
Come to think of it Cumberbatch is kind of exotic looking with those almond shaped eyes of his and sharp cheekbones….
@140/Mike: Yes, definitely the use of log entries evolved over time, from the original “flashback” idea to a more “here and now” approach (that often made a lot less sense — when did they get a chance to record these entries?). If you look at the early episodes, often the first log entry would be in the past tense, as if setting up the “flashback” afterward, while the other log entries would be in present tense, as if recorded at the time. Eventually they stoppped bothering with that.
But I’m talking about what the original thinking behind the log entries may have been influenced by. It’s just interesting to consider that Roddenberry got his start in TV in connection with a show (Dragnet) framed by narration in the form of an official report by an authority figure, then ended up doing a show framed by the same device. Solow says it was his idea, but memory is imperfect, sometimes deliberately; maybe he and Roddenberry arrived at the idea together during that conversation, or maybe Solow had Roddenberry’s past work in mind when he brought it up.
By the way, on YouTube you can find a 1960 Roddenberry pilot called 333 Montgomery, starring DeForest Kelley as a crusading lawyer based on a real person. It was also narrated in retrospect by its lead character. Of course, that wasn’t an uncommon practice in TV at the time, but it proves that Roddenberry was already using the technique before he met Solow.
@roxana & Glenn: The problem with using “exotic” as a term for non-whites is that it implicitly defines white as the “normal” state of humanity and everyone else (as in, the other 5/6 of the species, at least) as unusual. It literally means “from outside,” which makes it synonymous with “foreign.” It’s a parochial and ethnocentric term that should be avoided.
@146/CLB
“The problem with using ‘exotic’ as a term for non-whites is that it implicitly defines white as the ‘normal’ state of humanity and everyone else (as in, the other 5/6 of the species, at least) as unusual. It literally means ‘from outside,’ which makes it synonymous with ‘foreign.’ It’s a parochial and ethnocentric term that should be avoided.”
That’s fine and fair. I accept that, and in the future will be careful not to use the word “exotic” in that context again. As I noted above, no offense was intended. I was not aware that the word had taken on a negative connotation of late.
Thank you for providing the explanation, Christopher. It would have been very helpful for MaGnUs to have taken the time to do that, instead of just issuing a terse comment that succeeded only in putting me on the defensive.
@138/CLB
My point was that they shouldn’t have done a Khan story at all.
The whole point of the reboot was to have a fresh slate and to be able to tell new stories. So what’s the point of doing this homage/ripoff/whatever of a 30-year old film?
I guess… if the new film was really really superior to TWoK, it would have been acceptable. But is it really? I mean, most of your points-of-criticism against TWoK also apply (with much more force) to STiD. Kahn himself may be more in-character, but that’s about the only advantage the new film has (and it is kind of ruined by giving him comic-book-style superpowers. No, guys, that is not what the term “genetic supermen” mean).
Let’s see:
Militarization of Starfleet? check.
Dumb plot? check.
Gratitious overdramatic moments? check.
Familiar characters behaving way OOC? check.
I can understand the view of people who dislike TWoK (I don’t agree, but I see their points). What I can’t understand, is how a person who rips apart TWoK for being militaristic and dumb and OOC can think that STiD is a better film (or at least – a “less bad” film).
At least the other two Kelvin-Timeline movies had an original story.
@148/OThDPh: I don’t disagree with you that they should’ve focused more on original stories, but these things are not all-or-nothing. Something can be a flawed idea but still have merit. We have Roberto Orci to thank for its merits; when Damon Lindelof pushed for using Khan, Orci insisted that they break the story with an original antagonist, make sure its plot could work without dependence on Khan’s history, and only then decide whether the antagonist would actually be Khan. That made it more than just an empty continuity-porn exercise — at least for me.
Besides, it’s pointless to say “They shouldn’t have done Khan,” because they did. That is the fact on the ground, and we have to take things as they are rather than wasting our energy wishing for counterfactuals. This is the movie we got, we have zero power to alter that reality, so the question is, what are its merits and its flaws? Certainly it has plenty of flaws, but it also has some good things going for it. Of the three existing Khan stories in canon, I think it handles the Khan character better than TWOK does. It feels more like a logical followup to “Space Seed,” even though it’s in a separate reality where “Space Seed” never happened (and it’s set 7-8 years earlier).
“Militarization of Starfleet? check.”
Huh? The whole point of STID’s story was the rejection of the militarization of Starfleet. Admiral Marcus was pushing Starfleet in a more warlike direction, while Pike and others were trying to turn it back toward its original mission of exploration (a thread hinted at in the discussion of the new 5-year mission program that Kirk was hoping to get assigned to). And in the end, Marcus failed, the war was averted, and we saw the Enterprise setting out on its mission to explore strange new worlds. Militarization lost.
One thing I like about STID is how it recreated the Gene Coon Kirk-Spock dynamic seen in “The Devil in the Dark” and “Arena.” Someone or something kills Starfleet personnel. Kirk is angry and thinks like a soldier, wanting to hunt them down and destroy them. Spock argues for a more peaceful approach, but Kirk shuts him down. But when Kirk finally confronts the threat, he hesitates and ends up taking the more peaceful route after all. And by making that choice, he prevents something even worse from happening.
@149/CLB:
“Orci insisted that they break the story with an original antagonist, make sure its plot could work without dependence on Khan’s history, and only then decide whether the antagonist would actually be Khan. That made it more than just an empty continuity-porn exercise”
Orci’s heart seemed to be in the right place, but this approach was the wrong way to go, based on everything I learned about story-writing from my old mentor at Marvel Comics—the late, great Mark Gruenwald.
If you could tell the same exact story without Khan, then there’s no real reason to have Khan in the story.
Glenn: No offense was taken, and my comment was not meant to be “terse”. I just thought the reasons for my comment were self-explanatory; describing people as “exotic” sounds like something out of 1960s Trek, and not something to be used around in 2017. I thank Chris for elaborating, I would have done so had I known it was necessary.
Glenn: Agreed w/r/t that being a reason not to use Khan, but that’s Lindelof’s fault, not Orci’s. Orci was just making the best of a bad situation.
I haven’t actually watched Into Darkness since I saw it in the theatre and reviewed it for this site. Be curious to see what I think of it the second time ’round in a few weeks…………………
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Why was my last response to ChristopherLBennett deleted?
@157 – Thanks for alerting us to this issue. It looks like a few comments were lost during site maintenance overnight. We’re looking into it.
Yeah, Glenn Greenberg’s response to me went poof! also…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Oh, believe me, Keith, I know EXACTLY where to point the finger of blame when it comes to Into Darkness and the decision to use Khan. :-)
@149/CLB
What a strange response.
Pointing a flaw in a film is exactly synonamous to saying “they shouldn’t have done X”. You can’t have one without the other. And what I’m saying is that the very choice of having Khan as the villian is a big flaw of the movie.
Especially when you say that they’ve specifically created a story that doesn’t need Khan to work. Why use him, then? And if the story doesn’t need Khan, why make such a big deal of the reveal of Harrison’s identity?
Yeah, I didn’t like Khan being used as a villain again in Into Darkness. There was a moment I got a little excited, when Khan and Kirk teamed up to infiltrate the big bad ship. That was interesting… for about ten minutes, then he turned into a scowling villain again.
It made me think: what if Khan had been a good guy in the alternate timeline? Or at least a tragic villain? What if he had died saving the Enterprise? And Kirk learned what it meant to be a leader from Khan Singh of all people! Haha.
It’s frustrating they have this new universe to play in, but they’re still bogged down in the iconography of Star Trek to try something different. Although I thought Beyond was a step in the right direction. Not a Klingon or Romulan in sight. That was nice.
@154/OThDPh: “Pointing a flaw in a film is exactly synonamous to saying “they shouldn’t have done X”. You can’t have one without the other. And what I’m saying is that the very choice of having Khan as the villian is a big flaw of the movie.”
What I mean is, yes, it’s a flaw, but it is what it is. We can’t change the way the film turned out; all we can do is try to look for the good parts that can redeem the flaws. It’s simply a fact of life that things are often imperfect. You can either use that as an excuse to complain and be exclusively negative, or you can acknowledge the things you cannot change and move on to focus on the positive. If it had been up to me, I wouldn’t have chosen to make the second movie about Khan; but it is about Khan, and I think it actually works pretty well as a Khan story except for some bits. Something can be a flawed idea yet still end up working anyway, because life is not about absolutes.
@Everyone: The missing comments have been located and should all be back on the site! Thanks again for alerting us to this issue.
Correction: I wrote in comment #55 that Taylor is the only person Kirk ever brought back to his world from one of his trips, but that isn’t true. I had forgotten about Alexander in “Plato’s Stepchildren”.
@128. ChristopherLBennett – Have you ever read Timemaster by Robert L. Forward? In that story you can travel to the past but you cannot travel any further back that when the time machine was invented. In that case, then there is a “pure” state, namely one that existed before the first time machine was invented. Of course, Star Trek doesn’t concern itself with real world physics and simply represents time travel as some swirly light and such. Even the slingshot around the sun is nowhere near accurate except for the travelling near a massive, object. They essentially used the very basic idea of a Tipler Cylinder (that had not yet been postulated, therefore not basing it on any real physics) and ignore the fact that the cylinder would have to be extraordinarily dense as well as infinite in length AND rotating close to the speed of light. The sun is more tenuous that out finest vacuum compared to that.
However, even Stephen Hawking has shown that it’s nonsense. Therefore, it’s totally possible to have a “pure” universe since it’s as much a work of fiction as transporters, warp drive and Vulcans.
What does Stephen Hawking knows about all of this?
Since you asked…
An objection to the practicality of building a Tipler cylinder was discovered by Stephen Hawking, who provided a proof that according to general relativity it is impossible to build a time machine in any finite region that satisfies the weak energy condition, meaning that the region contains no exotic matter with negative energy. The Tipler cylinder, on the other hand, does not involve any negative energy. Tipler’s original solution involved a cylinder of infinite length, which is easier to analyze mathematically, and although Tipler suggested that a finite cylinder might produce closed timelike curves if the rotation rate were fast enough,[5] he did not prove this. But Hawking comments “it can’t be done with positive energy density everywhere! I can prove that to build a finite time machine, you need negative energy.”[6] Hawking’s proof appears in his 1992 paper on the chronology protection conjecture (though the proof is distinct from the conjecture itself, since the proof shows that classical general relativity predicts a finite region containing closed timelike curves can only be created if there is a violation of the weak energy condition in that region, whereas the conjecture predicts that closed timelike curves will prove to be impossible in a future theory of quantum gravity which replaces general relativity). In the paper, he examines “the case that the causality violations appear in a finite region of spacetime without curvature singularities” and proves that “[t]here will be a Cauchy horizon that is compactly generated and that in general contains one or more closed null geodesics which will be incomplete. One can define geometrical quantities that measure the Lorentz boost and area increase on going round these closed null geodesics. If the causality violation developed from a noncompact initial surface, the averaged weak energy condition must be violated on the Cauchy horizon.”
Tipler Cylinder -Practicality
@164/kkozoriz: I had no idea that there’s really such a thing as “negative energy”.
@165/Jana: Well, it’s debatable whether negative energy is really a thing — it’s more like a localized state of lower energy than the baseline energy level of the surrounding vacuum. It’s relatively negative rather than absolutely. But in theory, that’s close enough.
kkozoriz, I think your sarcasm detector is broken.
167. MaGnUs – Not at all. I was originally planning on having that information in the original post but decided it was too much. You just gave me the chance to change my mind.
““After all, let’s face it, [Kirk] was a couple of decades older than [Gillian Taylor] was.”
Actually, he’s a couple of centuries younger than she is. :)
As for Scotty mucking with the timeline, I believe there’s an escape clause in the Temporal Prime Directive which says you can do anything you want to the timeline to save Earth. And they did it in First Contact too. (Don’t give me flak about the Borg messing with it first.) And besides, the beauty of time travel is that if you f**k it up the first time, you have unlimited do-overs, at least as long as the dilithium holds out.
Finally, about Alameda, I’m just gonna say that it’s gone by the 23rd century. Everyone’s ignorance of it is ironclad proof of that fact! Heh, I dare you to prove me wrong.
Oh, and also, they ride a Muni bus to Sausalito. That’s, like, just wrong.
@169/gharlane: “Finally, about Alameda, I’m just gonna say that it’s gone by the 23rd century. Everyone’s ignorance of it is ironclad proof of that fact! Heh, I dare you to prove me wrong.”
One of the Trek universe Mythbusters‘ experiments at the Alameda Navy Yards must’ve gone really wrong…
It’s rather kooky to credit Harve Bennett with the “crackling” dialogue when nearly all of the good lines were written by Nick Meyer, whose contributions are completely ignored by this review. Harrumph.
I grew up in the Bay Area (Palo Alto) and I don’t recall ever setting foot in Alameda. If I had to get there in the pre-internet era, I too might ask for directions (otherwise, all I know is, go to Oakland and then look for some kind of bridge). The Bay Area is a big place – nine counties! So double dingdong on you. *snorts*
Nice Guy Yeti: I was basing my speculative crediting of Bennett with the crackling dialogue based on the previous movie, which was scripted by Bennett. Since I don’t have access to the different script revisions, it’s merely speculation, but it’s based on Bennett’s recent work on the last movie.
What is your source for the assumption that Meyer wrote all the good dialogue?
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@174/krad: My understanding is that Harve Bennett wrote the final draft of the 23rd-century portions while Meyer wrote the final draft of the 20th-century portions.
@@@@@171/ ChristopherLBennett
As the good Captain would say, “One little mistake…..”
Personally, I blame it on the transporters. Never trusted the damn things.
This is a fun movie, and is a much-needed lighthearted adventure after the heaviness of STII and STIII. Turn off your brain for a while and enjoy the ride. No space battles, no villains to defeat, just a fun time with a very Star Trek message.
The score is okay, even though it’s not on par with Goldsmith’s or Horner’s scores.
I really appreciate how all of the main cast seem to be genuinely enjoying themselves (this probably wasn’t the case at their next outing).
Two short comments:
1) KRAD re Female captain…they both could have been true. After all, twenty years is a LONG time for social progress. In the 80s being gay was a death knell in society, and in politics even more so. Who foresaw gay marriage back then? So no, I don’t think Lester was lying THEN; I think more precisely that in the words of the Monkees, “That was then, and this is now”.
b) @96cap-mjb “No reason?” He says quite clearly ”there’s a little something I owe you” and for those of us with a greater memory than a goldfish’s, we recall the scene in Day of the Dove (TOS 3) on the planet where Kang used the agonizer on Chekov. A punch in the face is actually a very small payback for that kind of brutality.
My only real problem with the Plexicorp scene is that Scotty, as an engineer, should know who invented transparent aluminum. It would be a significant development in the engineering field.
It would also be an interesting “timey-winey, wibbly-wobbly” comment on time travel–y’know, a version of that old saw about if you go back in time and kill your grandfather, then how could you exist to go back in time to kill your grandfather?–
So that it was Scotty who was there to give the formula to the Plexicorp guy, and if the HMS Bounty and the crew hadn’t gone back to “save the whales,” then would transparent aluminum ever been invented, and it is THAT which would have changed the entire timeline.
@179 Scotty is from the other side of two global conflicts and at least one economic collapse (1990s Eugenics wars, 2026-2053 nuclear WW3, and 2010s-2024s economic collapse; NB the last one is sadly looking all too real) plus 4 years of Jonathan “The Vulcans Speak To Me Through My Fillings” Archer screwing things up, from the 1980s. It is very plausible that the records concerning exactly who invented what from that era are lost, especially with something that has military benefit which was probably immediately classified as soon as the US govt learned of it and destroyed when the US military collapsed.
Star Trek posits a Utopian free future, but never forget that it also says we’ll almost destroy ourselves in appalling brutality in order to get there. In many ways, we’re right on track :(
I just watched VI and IV in that order. There is a long discussion in the comments to VI on the rapey vibe Spock gives off in forced mindmelding with Valeris, which is broadened to other moments in the series, most notably being When Spock essentially jams his consciousness into Mccoy’s brain at the end of TWOK. No one seems to have a big problem with that. And now, here, I’m guessing Spock didn’t exactly have Gracie’s permission before mindmelding with her. That was the whole point to begin with. Spock doesn’t speak whale. Nor does anyone else on 23rd century earth. Point being, I think Spock mind melds when it appears useful to do so, and he’ll pretty much find a way to justify it regardless of the circumstances.
Minor quibble about McCoy. All that bitching and moaning about the barbarian 20th century doctors. He acts like he doesn’t know they’re doing the best they can with 200+ years less experience. In context he comes across arrogant and ignorant himself.
I think my favorite moment in the movie is the scene with the garbagemen. Did you see that? No, and neither did you. The delivery of that last line kills me every time.
@181/fullyfunctional: “When Spock essentially jams his consciousness into Mccoy’s brain at the end of TWOK. No one seems to have a big problem with that.”
That’s because Meyer didn’t intentionally direct that scene with rape subtext, as he did with the Spock/Valeris scene. As I’ve already stated at length in the TUC thread, the Spock/Valeris meld scene could have been perfectly okay if it hadn’t been deliberately directed with a subtext of coercive sexuality. It’s not about what happened in the story, it’s about the tasteless way it was presented.
Also because at the time the TWOK scene was shot, nobody really knew what Spock’s “Remember” meant. They hadn’t yet worked out what they’d do in the third movie, so what exactly it was Spock did when he melded with McCoy was nebulous at that point. That bit and the reveal of the intact torpedo tube were just meant to leave the audience with a bit of hope to soften a downer ending.
As for Gracie, she was conscious at the time and thus could have resisted if she’d had a problem with it. There was no indication in the scene that Spock was forcing anything. No doubt she sensed that his intent was merely to communicate and thus permitted the meld.
Heck, cetaceans’ sonar lets them pretty much see through each other’s bodies and read their emotional states anyway, so they may not really have much concept of mental privacy.
@181/fullyfunctional: Using a mind meld to communicate when there is no shared language goes back to my favourite TV episode “The Devil in the Dark”. That’s what Spock does here. If there’s no other way to communicate, you can’t ask for permission first. That isn’t the same thing as forcing a mind meld against the other person’s will.
@183/Jana: Yeah, I’d say that the melds with the Horta and Gracie were analogous to knocking on a door, asking to come in, and being granted entry. Initiating contact is not the same as forcing it. The “Remember” meld with McCoy was kind of like using your spare key to get into a friend’s home while they’re out (remember, Spock and McCoy had melded before in “Spectre of the Gun,” following a failed meld attempt with the “absorbed” McCoy in “Return of the Archons”). The Valeris scene was more like battering down someone’s door while they’re trying to hold it shut from the inside. Not even close to the same.
Yes but when you use a friend’s spare key usually you don’t have to give him the Vulcan neck pinch first. That analogy really doesn’t work for me, because in all of the discussions about the mind meld topics there’s an emphasis on how intimate and intrusive it is. Borrowing a friend’s key to get into his house is not close to borrowing a friend’s head to store yourself inside it, especially when you find it necessary to render him unconscious before you do it just to make sure he can’t object. Your comment raises an interesting point though, sounds like Spock should have simply Vulcan neck pinched Valeris before mind melding with her. She wouldn’t have been able to resist and that would make it OK. I guess.
As I said, watching the scene with Gracie, just after watching the one with Valwris, made me revisit all of the mind meld instances, and it seems to me Spock has no qualms about it when its a utilitarian thing for him to do, regardless of consent or resistance.
@185/fullyfunctional: It makes no sense to talk about the actions of fictional characters as if they were the characters’ responsibility. Spock does not exist. Nicholas Meyer does. The problem with the Valeris scene was Meyer’s choice to direct it with rape subtext. And Meyer himself has said that he regrets his decision to portray it coercively (though more because of his discomfort with Bush-era torture). If the person responsible for the scene has admitted that it was a mistake and should’ve been written/directed differently, then there’s really nothing more to argue.
I was a fan of the radio show, “Hearts of Space” in the mid-80’s, which was produced in the SF Bay area. I had assumed that Uhura picked up one of their broadcasts that happened to feature whale songs.
Also, sorry to nitpick, but the actor’s name is John Schuck.
BeeGee: I remember “Music from the Hearts of Space” too!
And thank you for noticing that typo that I’ve missed for the past *checks date* 32 months. *sigh* It’s fixed.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
For some insight into U.S. foreign and military policy from 1900 to 1940, I recommend reading Smedley Butler’s War is a Racket (1935). Somethings never change.
@186: ” It makes no sense to talk about the actions of fictional characters as if they were the characters’ responsibility.”
That comment is the equivalent of picking up the chessboard and scattering it across the room because you don’t like the way the game is going. We debate the actions of fictional characters on these boards all the time. That is largely the point. And with all due respect to Nicholas Meyer, or any other scriptwiter for that matter, his after-the-fact judgment as to how he should have written a scene is no more definitive than how he wrote the scene in the first place. Spock forcibly mind-melding with Valeris fits that character’s actions perfectly. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from Spock’s use of the mind-meld technique, it’s that he’ll use it whenever he feels it’s pragmatic to do so, and he’ll rationalize it in any way he needs to. I also know Spock well enough to know that he doesn’t always successfully control his human emotions. Valeris hurt him, and he didn’t see it coming. He reacted as many other people would. Not particularly admirably, but consistent with the character. I think Meyer got it right the first time.
@190/fullyfunctional: “That comment is the equivalent of picking up the chessboard and scattering it across the room because you don’t like the way the game is going.”
No, it’s just clarifying what the subject of the conversation actually was to begin with. Yes, you can analyze the behavior of fictional characters all you want, but when it comes to discussing who’s culpable for a bad story choice, you can’t absolve the writer by pretending they were just objectively reporting what the character somehow did independently of them. A criticism directed at the creators of a story cannot be meaningfully refuted by blaming the characters. That’s apples and oranges — analysis within the story is a totally separate thing from critique of the creative process.
“Spock forcibly mind-melding with Valeris fits that character’s actions perfectly. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from Spock’s use of the mind-meld technique, it’s that he’ll use it whenever he feels it’s pragmatic to do so, and he’ll rationalize it in any way he needs to. I also know Spock well enough to know that he doesn’t always successfully control his human emotions. Valeris hurt him, and he didn’t see it coming. He reacted as many other people would. Not particularly admirably, but consistent with the character.”
We are not just talking about a forced meld. We are talking about one that was deliberately depicted by the director as a sexual assault. I find it horrifying and disgusting that you would think a man being angry at a woman was somehow a legitimate excuse for doing such a thing to her.
I really like seeing Spock’s slight change of character in IV and VI. (V took things too far with him imo, although it was a dumb film overall anyways.) He’s still more or less the Spock we know and love, but dying and then coming back to life still left at least some consequences for him — less emotional control, forgetting about exaggerating, treating Kirk too formally, etc.
At this point in the franchise, it appeared that the off-label use of the warp drive for time travel wasn’t as risky as using the time portal from The City on the Edge of Forever. I would think the Federation would give serious consideration to a full-scale, Dragonflight-level temporal migration of the humpback whales. Barring divine intervention, two whales is really too few to repopulate the species. If they take their time, and use specially-constructed ships with cloaking devices, …
Now here’s a fun movie! The Voyage Home feels the most like one of the classic episodes, especially one of the humorous ones. A pretty good effort.
Somebody must have been a Burns and Allen fan going by the whales names.
If I’d been commanding that Bird-of-Prey, I’d have fired one photon torpedo directly into that whaling ship. Overkill? Perhaps, but more than deserved
(196)
Typically, the heroes committing murder doesn’t fit well within a comedy.
After arriving in the 23rd century, Gillian married Commander Decker’s twin brother and they had something like ten kids. It was crazy!
As the 35th anniversary’s coming up, and since I forgot to do this back during the re-watch and I’m reminded now…
SF Debris made a fun observation about the 1986 movie season and how Nimoy essentially did the same kind of film twice that year:
Chuck: The year is 1986, and Leonard Nimoy will be bringing a much known character, or rather, a reborn version of that character, back into the light in a popular science-fiction franchise while attempting to deal with his overweight and egotistical co-star.
* Cuts to Transformers: The Movie *
Galvatron: I will rip open Ultra Magnus, and every other Autobot until the Matrix has been destroyed!
Chuck: But lets spend some time talking about Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home…
I remember laughing when Dr. Taylor grabbed Kirk so she was beamed in as well. Apparently whoever was in charge of the transporter (Scotty, maybe, if he wasn’t too drunk yet) couldn’t figure out there were two beaming up instead of one.
Now she is on the ship! I guess it is too much of a hassle to beam her back.
Kirk has a good shot at hooking up with Dr. Taylor, so no one objects to taking a 20th century person to the 23rd century.
It would have been a better movie if the writers understood that Kirk and the gang learned some lessons from their previous adventures.
@200: Trek has often shown that people or things are able to hitch a ride on a transporter beam, as questionable as the logic of that is. For instance, the alien entity in “Beyond the Farthest Star.”
I would surmise that once the transporter is locked onto someone, it continues to rescan them throughout to adjust for body movement, respiration, and such, and thus can update its scan to accommodate a new person entering the beam. It all happened in seconds, so there wouldn’t have been time for Scotty to abort.
And I think the film made it pretty clear that Gillian had no interest in “hooking up” with Kirk, who was kind of old for her. His attempts to flirt with her bombed pretty spectacularly. She was only there for the whales.
I can’t disagree with KRAD’s questions and complaints towards the end of his analysis, yet this is still a largely delightful film if you’re even passingly familiar with Star Trek. Maybe it’s even better, subjectively, to/for purely casual fans, especially those more into “sci-fi” than “SF” and mostly into Trek for the character interplay.
I’m sure I enjoyed it more at 16 on first viewing — when I don’t think the head-scratchers like Uhura and Chekov not knowing how to get to Alameda or the general antics bumped up against my critical faculties — but I still laughed out loud more than once rewatching it for the first time in a while and this crew was just excellent at doing what they did.
I feel bad for the Federation that of all the minds on and immediately surrounding Earth, at minimum, only the renegade crew of the makeshift Bounty had the collective imagination, competence, and intellect to figure out the signal in time.
I’ve heard criticisms of the existence of Kirk’s reading glasses being a closed loop based on his dialogue, but obviously they could’ve been made, used by whomever for centuries, purchased by McCoy in 2386-ish, sold by Kirk during the trip back to 1986, and used by whomever else for however long until their end date. That frankly makes a lot more sense as it avoids not just the issue of their creation but the problem of how they’d have to be kept in entirely untouched condition for hundreds of years within the loop.
I’m curious how trippy it was for the whales on the ride to the future.
Forgot to add that, while there may be funnier lines in the movie, the pure wonderment of Scotty’s “There be whales here!” is pretty much one of my favorite things ever.
Extremely underrated line: according to the subtitles some dude yells “you pompous ass” at the Klingon ambassador after he says there can be no peace as long as Kirk lives. That might be my favorite line in all of Trek.
@204/Jono: I guess if someone did say that, it would contradict the later discussion about colorful metaphors like “dumb-ass” not being used in the 23rd century. Although I think that in both terms, the “ass” probably means the animal of that name, i.e. a donkey, rather than the 19th- and 20th-century variation on “arse” as a vulgar term for the buttocks. The Online Etymology Dictionary posits that “dumb-ass” is derived from the latter usage, in the same way that “-ass” is used as a vulgar intensifier for many adjectives, but the ass/donkey has traditionally been associated with stupidity and stubbornness, so it’s hard to say.
Do we have any idea who on the creative decided to basically drop the character of Carol Marcus?