Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home - Part 1

Writer:

Steve Meerson, Peter Krikes, Nicholas Meyer, Harve Bennett

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Director:

Leonard Nimoy

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Release Date:

1986

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm writing about the film I have to describe as 'The One With the Whales' for SEO purposes: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.  

It's weird to say that the fourth movie is the third in the trilogy, but that's how it kind of worked out, as this continues on from the events in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, two films I wrote about back in 2016. You might be wondering why I jumped ahead to Star Trek VI and never came back to this, especially considering it was the film's 30th anniversary at the time... well, it's never been a favourite of mine. It's all about whales instead of spaceships, and the music sounds like it's from a Christmas movie, and Spock's weird, and etc. Though to be fair I was really young when I formed my first impression.

Speaking of anniversaries, the film was released on Star Trek's 20th anniversary, though I don't think they made a big deal out of it. Not compared to when Star Trek 6 came out on its 25th anniversary. In fact in some countries the posters called it The Voyage Home: Star Trek IV, with the Star Trek part in tiny writing, to not put people off. (The franchise hadn't been doing so well outside of the US).

Alright, I'm going to split this review into four parts, because films are long, and I'm going to split the parts over three weeks, because they take ages to write about. Well they do when you write about every bloody scene at least. The way I see it, I'm only ever writing about this film once so I might as well say everything I want to say now. This means that there will be huge SPOILERS here, but only for Star Trek stories up to November 1986.

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Previously, in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock:

Hang on, this movie has an a 'previously on' pre credits sequence, with Admiral Kirk giving us a captain's log narration over three and a half minutes of scruffy-looking clips! Well, it does on my PAL version anyway. The movies didn't do so well outside of the US so they couldn't assume that people in those regions had seen the story so far. No clips from the episode Space Seed though sadly, even though it's technically part 1 of the saga.

Alright what happened was Kirk and the the crew of the Enterprise got into a bit of a situation involving a stolen terraforming device that led to Spock sacrificing his life and a new planet being formed. The whole situation was a bit controversial so Kirk was forbidden from taking the Enterprise and recovering Spock's corpse from the planet in order to complete a Vulcan custom. He went and did it anyway, bringing a skeleton crew of his senior staff, but found that a Klingon ship had gotten there first. They lost the Enterprise, but with a bit of trickery and a few good kicks to the face Kirk managed to commandeer the Klingon vessel and recover Spock... who had been regenerated by the terraforming effect! They headed to Vulcan to restore his mind and that's where the last film ended.

And now, the continuation:

After the recap there's a dedication to the crew of the space shuttle Challenger, who died earlier that year. It's a nice gesture.

I was starting to think I might have been spared from the typical opening credits, but nope. The Paramount logo comes on, the movie's title beams in. and then there's two whole minutes of names floating in front of a starfield. They must have known people would start getting bored of this as a nebula fades in after the first minute to give the audience something else to look at.

Then a mysterious black cylinder emerges from the inky blackness of space, replacing the music with its own soundtrack of weird noises. Which I'm fine with, personally. I've never been all that keen on Leonard Rosenman's score, though I admit it has grown on me a bit after rewatching RoboCop 2. Because his music sounds way more out of place there than it does here. (He had people singing RoboCop's name!)

The movie cuts to the bridge of a Starfleet ship we've never seen before. It's a lot like the Enterprise's bridge except here they like to keep the lights low, and it hasn't exploded yet.

This is an uncredited Madge Sinclair playing an unnamed officer, but she's a pretty important character in Star Trek history as she's the first female captain we see on screen. Though definitely not the last. The final episode of the Original Series implied that Starfleet doesn't allow women to become starship captains but now they've clarified that isn't true.

The guy with the white hair is also the first Efrosian in Star Trek, of which there have only ever been two. The second one turns up in Star Trek VI as the Federation president though, so he did pretty well for himself.

Oh no, whoever's in charge of the scanners is one of those people that sets the aspect ratio wrong because they want the picture to fill the screen! That's so stretched.

The crew of the Saratoga aren't the heroes of this story, but they do manage to determine that the cylinder is some kind of probe sent by an advanced alien race, and that it's headed to the Sol System. Hey that's where we live!

Then we get a brand new shot of Starfleet Headquarters! No hang on, this is a Federation building. The Golden Gate Bridge in the background threw me off, because that usually means we're visiting Starfleet.

The buildings, bridge, shuttles and sky in this scene were all painted, but the ground and the extras walking around were filmed in an airport and then composited in. Personally I'm giving the visual effects team an A+ for this shot, I think it looks awesome. It's also good to see that there's shuttles parked so close to the bridge, as if anyone were to crash a spaceship in the bay they could swoop in and rescue the crew. Hypothetically.

Speaking of amazing shots, look at that reflection in the floor! Oh hang on, I bet they just projected the footage onto the screen, so the only visual effect here is the recycled footage of the Enterprise blowing up. Still looks great though.

This is the Federation council chamber, the heart of the Federation government... or a space UN. Something like that. You might expect the ambassadors to be discussing the mysterious cylinder that's on its way, but nope they've all gathered to watch Star Trek III together. A version of the film that the Klingons recorded themselves somehow, judging by the Klingon text that appears on screen. So everyone here gets to see Kruge's crew tricked into boarding an empty ship with a self-destruct sequence running and then blown up.

Hang on, the only possible way the Klingons could've gotten this footage is from Kirk, as he swiped the Bird-of-Prey in the end. Unless Kruge was transmitting his logs back home.

Anyway, that's not important. What's important here is that they've cast John Schuck as the Klingon ambassador and he is absolutely furious about the renegade terrorist James T. Kirk. Things have gotten a bit Babylon 5 for a moment here, except this has a much more impressive council set. His costume's pretty awesome as well.

It takes the ambassador several tries to get the people playing the video to pause it for a moment so he can point to Kirk on the screen, which is a nice touch. Makes it feel more real. Plus freezing the video means that a giant image of the hero is there in the background for the rest of the scene, 

The ambassador accuses Kirk of murdering a Klingon crew, stealing a Klingon vessel, and secretly masterminding the Genesis project in order to make a weapon. Then he goes a step further and claims that the Genesis planet was intended to be a secret base he could use to launch the annihilation of the Klingon Empire!

Honestly, it's not out of the realm of believability for a Starfleet admiral to do all of that. But he's got no evidence to back up his wild claims and his audience isn't buying it.

In fact one of them comes strolling down to have a chat with him: Spock's dad Sarek! This was the character's third appearance in Star Trek, after the episode Journey to Babel and the film Star Trek III, but far from his last.

Sarek's here to lay down the facts. The Klingons destroyed the USS Grissom and murdered Kirk's son, and the Klingon ambassador doesn't even deny it! But the Federation president is running things here and he's not interested in any more outbursts from the floor. In fact he doesn't see any point in any of this, as the Federation Council has already decided what they're doing with Kirk! He's been charged with 9 violations of Starfleet regulations.

The ambassador declares that there'll be no peace between the his people and the Federation as long as Kirk lives, and then storms off in a huff. So that went well. But the good news is that all of that was entirely irrelevant for the plot of this movie and the Klingons don't show up again! So if you were looking forward to political intrigue and Kirk being put on trial by the Klingons, it ain't happening in this movie.

It's a good scene though, and it does the job of telling us the story so far, while also establishing the Federation president, Spock's dad Sarek, and the charges that are waiting for the former crew of the USS Enterprise when they get back from wherever they are.

Hey they're still on Vulcan! In fact this is the same shot that the last film ended with, so it seems like they're still on Mount Seleya. This is another beautiful effect, and I'm not sure how they got the blinding sun looking so good. It doesn't look like they pushed a lightbulb up from behind a mountain, but I don't know how else could they have done it.

We finally get to hear from Admiral Kirk again, as he gives us another captain's log voiceover. You might think it's weird for an admiral who went rogue and got his ship blown up to continue recording captain's logs, but he's still got the stolen Bird-of-Prey so it kind of makes sense. He explains that they're in their third month of exile on Vulcan, so it's only been 90 days between the two movies. Though Vulcan is one of the core Federation worlds so they're not exactly trying to evade capture here.

Then we get a beautiful matte painting of their captured Klingon vessel, which hasn't been taken apart and studied by Starfleet scientists on Vulcan yet. Though the Vulcans have been helping them fix it up a bit. In fact they've sent their top men, or at least their tallest, as the guys on the ramp look almost twice the height that Kirk's crew did when they disembarked at the end of the last movie.

It turns out that they've rechristened the ship HMS Bounty, after the 18th century sailing ship famous for a mutiny. They've even written the name on the side in big red text. Or maybe the back? Perhaps the other side?

I can't figure out which part of the ship this is meant to be! It doesn't seem to match anything on the model. At least they painted the prop the right shade of green. Not a whole lot of green ships with red wings in science fiction, and absolutely none as iconic. (Feel free to prove me wrong in the comments).

It's interesting that the Vulcan engineers in this scene are all wearing hats, but it's not to hide the ears and save the makeup department some work like it would've been in the TV series. It's also interesting that they look like giant pointy ear tips but I guess that's the fashion here right now. Makes me think that it's probably for the best that none of our crew has been clothes shopping in the three months they've been on Vulcan. Well, except for Chekov, who's looking way better now that he's changed his pink trousers and gotten rid of the matching top.

The crew unanimously decide to return to Earth and face the charges, even if it means they end up mining borite for their rest of their lives. The more boring of all ores. I can't tell they're joking about their potential punishment or not, as the Federation's been shown to be more enlightened than that in past episodes... unless you go to Talos IV, then they'll straight up kill you. But whatever punishment they end up facing, at least Uhura gets to come with them this time!

Kirk notices Spock staring down at them from Mount Seleya's own version of Vasquez Rocks (as seen in episodes like Arena, Shore Leave, The Alternative Factor, and the movie Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey). There's clearly still some distance between the two of them, especially as the scenes next to the Bird-of-Prey were filmed over in the Paramount backlot.

They didn't include Spock in the vote because he's not facing any charges. He's entirely innocent of the crime of stealing a ship and going to restricted space to recover his own body. Also he's very busy right now in the Mount Seyela Fal-Tor-Pan Recovery Centre, or whatever, making sure that his consciousness has been properly reintegrated into his regenerated brain.

Spock's bright even for a Vulcan though so they've got him answering science and trivia questions on three teleprompters at once. Just ignore the English text, that's probably the universal translator at work. Also ignore the fact that his first answer to "What were the principle historical events on the planet Earth in the year 1987?" was "Computers cloned from carrots", as you weren't supposed to read that. In fact the question gets answered long before the computer voice gets around to asking it.

Turns out that Spock's one of those kinds of people that has things playing back at 1.5x speed because they're impatient, so the computer voice is weirdly high pitched. Plus he has his screens displaying at the wrong aspect ratio like that one on the Saratoga! A lot of this was put together by Assistant Producer Kirk Thatcher, so I'm blaming him. Spock will get his revenge later though, when he neck-pinches him on a bus.

Though it's nice to get a cameo by the original pre-refit Enterprise even if it is a bit stretched! This actually the second time the classic ship shows up on the big screen, as it also appears in the Rec Room in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

It seems like the mind transfer worked fine as Spock's able to answer every question thrown at him with Spock-like efficiency and accuracy. Except for "How do you feel?"

The guy doesn't have an answer for that, he just doesn't get it. Which is funny because the obvious response would be "A series of nerve endings sends an electrical impulse to my brain." Or at least it is if you watched this old Holsten Pils advert starring Jeff Goldblum a couple of times literally decades ago and it's still lodged in your mind somehow: YouTube link.

It's at this point that Spock's mother Amanda makes her presence known. That means we've got his mum and dad in the same movie! Though not the same scene. Amazingly they're both played by same actors who played them 20 years earlier in the episode Journey to Babel.

Bringing Amanda back now was a great choice as talking to his mother helps Spock appear more childlike after his rebirth. She points out that he's half-human and this means that he'll discover that he has feelings. The two of them could've have a long conversation here about how Vulcans all have feelings, they just meditate to repress them etc. but what's important for the movie is the audience knows that right now Spock doesn't get emotions. By that I mean he doesn't feel them and he doesn't understand them. He's lost the epiphany he gained in The Motion Picture about how you need more than just logic.

Which kind of sucks actually, seeing as it took an encounter with a mysterious probe of awesome power to get him to that place the first time.

Then the movie finally gets back to the mysterious probe plot, and we get to see the Saratoga from the outside! Turns out that she's a Miranda-class ship, like the Reliant in Star Trek II, so she's a fairly powerful vessel. Or at least she would've been if the amplification wave from the probe wasn't shutting down her systems. The crew really don't need this, as their bridge was dark enough already!

Why's the thing so damn impatient anyway? We know it's heading to the Sol System, couldn't it just broadcast its message at a lower power when it gets there? Incidentally the sound of the probe was performed by Leonard Nimoy after the sound editor got frustrated and asked him to demonstrate what it should sound like. He made a 'wub wub wub' sound and they recorded it. Totally works.

Well, things are kind of bad for the Saratoga crew, as they need power to keep their life support running, but they could be worse. At least they weren't vaporised by a mysterious ball of energy like everyone who encountered V'Ger was. Though we learn that the Klingons have lost two vessels, so I guess they tried to ram it or something. Why are the Klingons always harassing things heading directly to Earth anyway?

Now we're back at what I assume is the Federation Headquarters on Earth. I mean it looks like a command centre, the president's here, and I can see the Golden Gate bridge out the window, so it ticks all the boxes. It seems like the president's running the planet, so now I'm wondering if this is because Earth's the Federation capital, or if he'd be managing a crisis on Vulcan or Andoria the same way.

They've received a distress call from the USS Yorktown, captained by famous Indian tennis player Vijay Amritraj. He had a much larger role in the Bond film Octopussy three years earlier so he would've been used to appearing on a big screen at this point. There's also a cameo by Jane Wiedlin, lead singer of The Go-Gos, in a bit. Oh plus that's Brock Peters on the right, playing Admiral Cartwright. There's no sign of Admiral Morrow from the last movie, so I guess he got fired for having one of his admirals steal a starship right from under his nose. Either that or he's in a different room.

You can't criticise the science of any of this by the way, as it's revealed that the probe's using forms of energy they don't understand. It doesn't make sense to them, so it's not going to make sense to us either.

Back on Vulcan, the engineers are finishing off what they're doing and the Bird-of-Prey's systems all seem to be working well.

This Klingon design is a lot darker and more muted than the Enterprise bridge, especially the one from the classic series, and they've filled it full of maple-scented oil fog to make it look even more dingy. This definitely isn't a dazzling display of colour designed to shift new colour TVs. In fact the only thing in the room that isn't a shade of brown or red is Sulu's shirt. The bridge actually looked brighter and more colourful when the Klingons had it in the last movie:

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock

In fact the bridge looks basically nothing like it did in Star Trek III. Even the captain's chair is entirely different now. It doesn't look bad in Star Trek III, but I can see why its design was considered to be a bad fit for this movie. Giving William Shatner a throne would've been a bit much.

The only problem is, there's absolutely nothing in the movie to justify why the bridge looks radically different now. Well okay there was a line earlier about Scotty upgrading the dilithium sequencer, so maybe he upgraded the bridge too, but going from one Klingon design to another Klingon design is kind of inexplicable.

There's also a throwaway line here about them interfacing with Federation memory banks which will be important in a bit. 

Then we get a brief appearance by Saavik! The Star Trek III version, played by Robin Curtis. She mentions that Kirk's son David died bravely to save them, so the character has gotten a bit of acknowledgement. We're not going to pretend that Kirk didn't lose his son three months ago.

It's nice that she got a cameo, which is more than Dr Carol Marcus got in the last film. But I guess they've already got more than enough characters to juggle, so this time we're keeping Uhura and she'll be staying behind. Saavik was a good character to have around when it looked Leonard Nimoy was going to quit the movies, but things are a bit crowded now. An earlier version of the story had her staying behind because she was three months pregnant with Spock's child, but I'm glad that's not the case in the final movie. We don't need Spock flying off and abandoning his kid, even if he is a bit childlike himself right now.

Kirk wants to get back to how things used to be, with Spock calling him Jim, but McCoy comes over and warns him that his friend's not exactly firing on all thrusters right now. So we've been firmly assured that all his out-of-character behaviour for the rest of the movie is deliberate.

Then we get a beautiful shot of Saavik and Amanda watching the Bird-of-Prey taking off and flying towards the Vulcan sun (they just can't resist flying towards the sun in this movie, they're like a crew of moths). I stitched it together the best I could, but there's multiple layers of parallax, a lens flare, and it even zooms in a bit at the end, so it's not perfect.

This is the final appearance for both characters... and it was actually filmed on a wooden platform at the Paramount backlot, so it was a lot less dramatic for the actors. In fact it's not as dramatic as it could've been for us either, as the music's not really on the same level as the visuals. In my opinion.

By this point the probe has finally made it to Earth... probably. I mean they've deliberately given us a shot of Space Dock without the Earth behind it for a change, so it's hard to know for sure that it's same iconic space station from the previous movie.

I think the reason for this choice was that showing the station on its own emphasises its distance from the Earth, so it can be a landmark for the probe to pass by on its journey. If they showed the Earth as well, then it feels like the probe's already there.

Incidentally the probe is absolutely huge compared to Space Dock. Whoever sent this thing, they are really serious about probing.

Hey it's the Excelsior! I guess the engine trials didn't work out as it's still here three months later. Hopefully that's not because they're still trying to fix Scotty's expert sabotage.

They're told to launch all vessels but the probe's signal is messing with their systems, so the doors aren't working and neither's anything else. Which means the mighty Excelsior just got owned for the second movie in a row. It's pretty bad for the people who need life support to live, but even worse for the two shuttles we see whose engines cut out inside the cavernous dock. They're just going to keep drifting at the same speed until they hit something. Oh damn, I hope Space Dock doesn't fall out of orbit!

We get another exterior shot that follows the probe as it sails past the un-illuminated space station and continues onward... to Earth!

The movie's given us a few shots of the probe, but it's dark and weird and they keep filming it in close ups, so as a kid I could never get my head around what I was looking at. It's like V'Ger all over again. Though now I know it's just a black cylinder with a rough surface and a ball sticking out of it.

Anyway the incredibly huge and powerful craft has finally reached its destination, though we still don't know why it's come here. Only that it doesn't seem to care about any of us. So it's like V'Ger all over again. Except this time there's no Enterprise around to deal with it.

Turns out that the signal its sending has a pretty bad effect on oceans as well, vaporising a strip of water and causing clouds to form. I'm not sure how they pulled this effect off in 1986, but it's some good solid 80s visual effects.

The Bounty crew are still a fair distance away from Earth and completely unaware of any of this, though they are getting a bit confused about the lack of Federation vessels around, and they're picking up some confusing transmissions.

Man I hope the actors could breathe okay in all that fog.

This new Klingon bridge has two seats at each of the rear stations, so McCoy's able to sit down next to Spock for a chat. He's actually trying to be nice to him for once, but Spock's struggling with basic human expressions at the moment so he doesn't quite catch his meaning. Poor McCoy, every time he gets Spock back in a movie the guy's acting out of character. In The Motion Picture he'd become so cold and logical he was practically a robot and now he's like a confused child. They'll never be able to trade insults while he's like this!

McCoy tries changing the subject to Spock's death and rebirth, but Spock says they can't discuss that until they have a common frame of reference, i.e. McCoy has to die first. Funny thing is McCoy had died, in the episode Shore Leave, when he got stabbed by a Black Knight on horseback. It was kind of a weird day for everyone.

Back on Planet Earth, things have not improved. 78.6% of the planet is covered in clouds and they're having to switch to planetary power reserves. Well that's not so bad, we've been using planetary-based power for ages. Though Cartwright points out that they do need the sun to survive, which the president considers to be fairly obvious.

Sarek's still around, as he's stuck on Earth along with everyone else, and he suggests sending a planetary distress call. This turns out to be a good idea, as Uhura's able to pick it up despite all the interference from the probe. Which means that the heroes are finally aware of the threat! Only took 25 minutes. That's like a quarter of the movie!

Actually the pacing's been pretty good so far I reckon, though people who don't care about spaceships and only want fish-out-of-water 80s comedy might disagree.

Kirk's crew get on the task immediately, seeing if they can have any better luck than all the experts on Earth in figuring out what the probe's transmitting and what it's here for..

Spock presumes that the probe is evidence of a very high intelligence so it's probably just too dumb to know it's causing harm to all the other lifeforms outside of its extremely narrow focus. It seems to be sending a message but he feels it would be arrogant to assume that humanoids are the only creatures on the planet that aliens would be interested in chatting to. Okay Spock, list all the other intelligent life forms on Earth and then explain why we never see them at the Federation council.

The message is being directed at the oceans so Kirk asks Uhura to see if she can alter it so they can hear what it would sound like underwater.
 

Turns out that Uhura knows how to do that, even on a Klingon computer with giant fruit machine buttons. It's lucky for them she can understand Klingon I guess!

Spock has a theory about what they're hearing, but for some reason he has to go off to a different set to test it. I guess the movie's been on this bridge for a while and they wanted to give people a change of scenery.

So now they're in the Bird-of-Prey's animal-call playback room. This is why they needed that line earlier about connecting to the Federation database, as it'd be weird to for a Klingon ship to have this data. Spock has determined that the noise the probe is making is the song of a humpback whale, but unfortunately they can't speak whale, and the creatures went extinct on Earth years ago. Now this dumb probe is going to make everything extinct just because no one will pick up the phone! It's like it's the concept of short-sightedness and carelessness leading to ecological damage personified.

It's interesting that they don't try to figure out the language themselves and fake a response, especially as they have a universal translator which generally does the job for them. Then again the universal translator doesn't work on cats, so it clearly has its limits. 

Hang on, this room looks weirdly familiar to me. There's something about those hexagonal panels with the array of circular lights on them.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

They're standing in Spock's sacrifice room from Star Trek II! The walls are basically the same, they've just made the screens red instead of blue. Damn, it shows how much of the Klingon aesthetic is just painting the walls brown and dimming the lights.

Between the two of them Kirk and Spock figure out that they need whales and the only place to find whales is the past, therefore they'll just have to do the time warp again. It's a ridiculous premise for a movie, and McCoy's there to act as the audience surrogate and point that out. The film makes sure to go through every step of their thought process though, so we know there's no alternative. They can't communicate with the probe, they can't blow it up, so their only choice is to give it what it apparently wants. McCoy has to admit that he can't come up with a better suggestion.

The Enterprise travelled into the past a whole bunch of times in the Original Series, in The Naked Time, Tomorrow is Yesterday and Assignment: Earth, but people who haven't seen the classic series will just have to accept that the crew have known how to time travel all this time. It's not a huge stretch though I suppose. I mean it's only a year after Back to the Future and they are driving around in Christopher Lloyd's ride.

So check out part two to see how that goes I guess!

TO BE CONTINUED IN PART TWO

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NEXT TIME

Next week on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's the second part of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home! I would've preferred to drop all four parts on the same day, but it takes time to write this stuff.

Though you don't have to wait to leave a comment. You can share your thoughts about the first quarter of the movie right now. The one without the whales in it.