You know the meme that goes around the internets, that asks for a list of five movies that you’ve seen at least five times? Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is always on mine, and I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve seen it. Many multiples of five, that’s all I can say. In my personal canon, it’s The One With the Whales.
It’s the conclusion of an arc that includes the death and resurrection of Spock and the destruction of the latest incarnation of the Enterprise. The gang is back together, and they’re headed home to face the consequences of some highly controversial, dare I say criminal, life choices. Their transport is a captured Klingon warship that has been christened, with profound irony, the HMS Bounty.
As Star Trek stories go, it’s just about perfect. It’s got the light touch, the easy give-and-take of old friends and crewmembers, the Treknobabble, and one of my favorite Star Trek tropes: Earth is about to be destroyed, and only our heroes can save it—by traveling back in time to the (then) present day.
Even better, it has a space whale. It’s a probe so alien no one in the Trekiverse has ever seen one like it, and its arrival shuts down every form of human tech and starts to vaporize the planet.
It doesn’t seem to know or care what it’s doing. It’s only there to find some of its old contacts, which, Spock deduces, happen to be extinct: humpback whales. The language it’s calling in is whale song.
As light as the tone of the film is, it’s deeply poignant at its heart. The death of a species is a tragedy. Humans caused this one, and they’re paying for it with the destruction of their home planet.
Unless, of course, our old friends can rig the rackety old Bounty to break the bounds of space and time, find a humpback, and bring it back to tell the probe to back off. They find their way to Earth in 1986, give or take, and just happen discover a pair of humpbacks in captivity in an aquarium in Alameda, outside of San Francisco (the only captive humpbacks in the world—the logistics of which are daunting, beginning with the need to feed them two tons of shrimp per day).
What a happy coincidence. Just like the one that provides a nuclear vessel (or as Mr. Chekov calls it, a nuclear wessel) with just the right components to repair their time-travel-damaged dilithium crystals. And the one that lets Mr. Scott “invent” just the right kind of lightweight but super-strong material for the tank that will transport the whales back to the twenty-third century. And the one that promises a whole new world, and a whole new lease on life for the species, when and if the whales make it to the future.
We don’t ask too many questions. Like how we hope the tank is open on top, because whales have to breathe air. Or whether “inventing” transparent aluminum changes the future—and let’s not even ask how they manage to get whale-sized panels manufactured and transported in well under twenty-four hours. Just sit back and enjoy the ride.
The humpbacks seem to. The aquarium has named them George and Gracie, after classic comedy duo George Burns and Gracie Allen. They do bear a certain resemblance to George, who in 1986 had become an icon of film and television. It’s cutesy, but it’s the kind of thing a zoo will do to make its animals more appealing to the public. (Fiona the hippo, anyone?)
In true Trek fashion, the film has a serious message about the ways in which humans destroy their environment. Spock identifies the late twentieth century by the levels of pollution in the atmosphere. Whales are not yet extinct, but cetacean biologist Dr. Gillian Taylor (Catherine Hicks) has a great deal to say about the threats to their existence.
We meet her as she leads a guided tour of the Maritime Cetacean Institute (as played by the Monterey Bay Aquarium), delivering a concise and informative spiel to a gaggle of appropriately concerned visitors. (The nun in the front is particularly noticeable, as are the three ladies of a certain age.) She touches on the main points: A whale is not a fish but a mammal. Most whales are not at all aggressive; many don’t even have teeth. Instead they have “a soft, gum-like tissue that strains vast amounts of tiny shrimp for food.”
The principal enemy of the whale is man. We’re treated to a film clip showing in grim detail the butchering of a whale. Commercial whaling, she says, has driven the blue whale to the brink of extinction. The humpback, once numbered in the hundreds of thousands, by 1986 has been reduced to under 10,000 individuals. Nearly all of the whales caught are not yet mature, and many of the females are pregnant, which is a double loss to the species.
Gillian’s love for the whales radiates off the screen. Her passion and Spock’s ability to communicate telepathically with alien species help us understand the otherwise inscrutable stars of the show. We can deduce that Spock has explained the situation to the whales, and they’ve agreed to travel to the future and save the world—and their species.
Whatever George (since it’s only the males who sing) says to the probe, it must be something like, We were lost, humans found us, they brought us back, please don’t destroy the planet. We need a place to live and raise our baby.
The probe—what it is, who sent it, why it’s so destructive until the whales call it off—remains a mystery. The story is about the good, the bad, and the ugly sides of human nature, and the ways in which even the worst of humanity can achieve redemption. It may take the near-destruction of the planet, but we do eventually try to fix what we’ve broken.
The whales are as alien to us as anything from space. And yet they’ve been around far longer than humans. Earth was theirs before it was ours. We owe it to them to let them be, to stop killing them. Or something truly alien may just come along and do its best to stop us.
Scotty doesn’t have transparent aluminum manufactured.
He gives the formula in exchange for the six-inch-thick 20th-century material that he actually uses in the whale tank. Dr. Nichols mentions in the scene that he already has the necessary stuff in stock at the plant.
And Nichols is worried that it will take him years to actually figure out the formula and use it.
Even better, Mr. Scott is a wiz with the desktop Mac in spite of never having seen a computer interfaced via keyboard. Always makes me think, “Oh, an abacus. How quaint!” Good luck calculating!
In my head-canon, Scotty is fucking with McCoy a bit here. Hilarious.
They had plenty of keyboards in TOS. They were just made of multicolored, backlit, gumdrop-shaped buttons instead of square letter keys.
If only Star Trek had only used the “We must save the Earth!” trope once. Even in the movies they used it 3 or 4 times. I haven’t seen “Star Trek: Save the Whales” in a few years, but it seems to have aged better than most movies of that vintage.
There were a couple of tie-in books that went into the history of the probe.
Well, technically there are two versions of a single tie-in book about the probe, one unpublished and one published. The late Margaret Wander Bonanno wrote a sequel picking up immediately after ST IV called Music of the Spheres, which featured characters from her earlier Trek novel Dwellers in the Crucible. But this was at the time that Gene Roddenberry’s aide Richard Arnold had approval over the tie-ins, which he wielded with a very heavy hand, demanding that books had to conform to his rather inflexible interpretation of Roddenberry’s vision — including a ban on any continuity between novels or continuing book-original characters. So the book had to be rewritten, and though normally any revisions would be made by the original author, things got really weird during the Arnold era, so the situation ended up with Gene DeWeese being brought in to ghost-write a massively different version of the novel under Margaret’s name, now titled Probe — and because of the delay, it’s nominally set after ST V, despite obviously being meant as a direct followup to IV. Margaret’s version was never officially published, but she made the manuscript available for free download.
The (fortunate) irony is that this film helped raise awareness and promote conservation efforts for humpback whales, so that their populations recovered and they’re no longer considered an endangered species (except for one isolated population in the Arabian Sea). So a science fiction film was partly responsible for invalidating its own prediction of the future, but that’s okay, since it’s exactly what the filmmakers hoped would happen.
Nice when dystopian fiction becomes a self-UNfulfilling prophecy, is it not? Reminds me of the criticisms of Y2K “hype” that ignore how much work we put in to fix the Y2K bugs before they could trigger.
This is also my favorite Star Trek movie — the one I watched on VHS until my VHS player kicked the bucket. It has so much charm and I love the crew’s relationship and their older age…wrapped up in a solid environmental message and I just ate it up as a kid and adult. The soft compassion that Spock has for the whales (and that Kirk has for Spock during this tumultuous time) surpasses the bit of absurdity of the plotline.
“One damn minute, Captain”
A little picky but the shipyard is in Alameda; the whales are in Monterey at a conveniently shortened distance from Golden Gate Park (not the hour+ it actually takes.).
In-story, the Cetacean Institute is in Sausalito, despite being represented by the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
Also, when Kirk and Spock are supposedly walking on the Sausalito side of the Golden Gate Bridge when Gillian drives up to give them a lift, the scene was actually filmed on the San Francisco side.
That’s funny– as Bay Area kid it never occurred to me that they were supposed to still be across the bay. That location is unmistakable. It does make more sense that Gillian would find them within walking distance of the Institute.
Remember, Gillian told Kirk later, “You can’t even get from Sausalito to San Francisco without a lift!” Therefore, they must’ve still been on the Sausalito side when she gave them a lift.
Still love this movie, I don’t what part hits me harder, the dedication frame for The Challenger at the beginning or Chekov’s “….and sir, it’s The Enterprise”.
I was always partial to, “Actually, I’m from Iowa. I only work in outer space.”
My favorite line was “Admiral — there be whales here!”
I said “nuclear wessels” in a conversation about nuclear powered ships just last week. No one asked me to clarify. True art is timeless, I suppose.
The funny joke about “wessels” is that Russian has no W sound, in fact, a Russian would say V for W rather than the other way round. I’m sure Walter Koenig knew quite well at the time that his Russian accent bore the same relationship to Russian that the beverage brewed on the Heart of Gold had to tea.
My Russian riding instructor in the same era did that exact thing: V to W. One day we were dealing with a colicky horse, and he said, “Let’s call ze wet.” Ze what? “Ze weterinarian.”
We helped a family of Russian-speaking immigrants at one point who regularly referred to my in-laws’ Volvo as the “Wolvo.”
I see it as a case of overcorrection, the way that British people trying to do American accents say things like “Americker” because they think that correcting from a non-rhotic “uh” to a rhotic “er” is something you do for the letter A as well as the letters ER. So it’s not that Chekov would use a W sound in Russian, but that he knows English people use W for things he’d pronounce with a V, and he assumes the inverse is true as well and overcorrects. I think I’ve heard of cases where speakers of Russian or similar languages actually do that.
Walter Koenig’s parents were Russian immigrants, although they’d lived in Lithuania before they emigrated, and I think the accent Koenig learned from them was a mix of Russian and Lithuanian. It’s possible, though, that he exaggerated it to conform to American audiences’ expectations of a Russian accent.
See my response above re. actual Russian doing that exact thing. No Lithuanian required. He had lived in then-Yugoslavia before he emigrated to the US, and his wife was from there, but her accent was quite different from his.
I wasn’t saying that the Lithuanian influence was the reason for Chekov’s substitution of W for V; I’d started a new paragraph addressing the broader question of how his accent is perceived to be inaccurate.
Last year there was a sequel published by Greg Cox called Lost to Eternity that I believe follows what happened to Gillian Taylor after her disappearance from Earth. I’ve been putting it off but this just reminds me I need to read it asap.
So, because it’s always like this with Trek, Transparent Aluminum is a real thing now. It’s very nearly as cool as the Trek version even.
Oh, not this again. First off, it’s not transparent aluminum, it’s alumina-based glass or ceramic. Alumina (aluminum oxide) is not aluminum any more than salt is chlorine or water is hydrogen. Alumina is a component of certain types of glass in the same way that silica is a component of ordinary glass. Nobody would call regular glass “transparent silicon.”
Second, aluminum oxide is also known as corundum, the stuff that rubies and sapphires are made of, and emery, the stuff we file our nails with. It’s always existed, and it’s always been transparent.
What drives me crazy is that every few months for decades now, some clickbait site will post an article about alumina glass or ceramic armor under a headline like “They Just Invented Transparent Aluminum!,” and people will ooh and ahh over the “new” invention because they’ve somehow forgotten all the many, many previous times it’s been reported as a “new” invention.
The probe’s destructive effect is explained in the film. It’s not a hostile or aggressive act– the “where are you?” signal is simply SO strong that it vaporizes ocean water and disrupts the atmosphere. One must assume that it would stop at a prescribed point to avoid completely destroying the whales’ habitat…
Do supporting materials explain the diplomatic situation of Kirk and his mutineers on Vulcan, a Federation planet? Why aren’t they in custody? Are the charges against them solely Earth-based?
Or is the answer to all of the above that Ambassador Sarek has THAT much pull?
This and Harold and Maude are tied for my all-time favorite movie. I can recite it, I’ve seen it that many times. Sometimes I wish they fired on a giant Japanese whaling factory ship instead of the little one they threatened, but otherwise it is a perfect movie.
I loved this movie so much that I sat in front of the TV with my tape recorder and put it on audio tape so I could listen to it in the car 😁
This was and always wil be my favorite Trek movie. The comical one liners, especially from Spock, ALWAYS cracks me up, no matter how often I watch it.
I always recommend the movie to people if they need something to laugh at…