Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home - Part 4

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I've finally finished watching Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. And it only took me three weeks. This is the fourth and final part of this review, but if you want to check out PART ONE, PART TWO or PART THREE, you can click one of those links.

I'm really running low on trivia to pad out this intro text now. Uh, the title font looks mostly the same as the one used in Star Trek 1 and Star Trek 3, so they'd pretty much settled on a style by this point.

It also got brought back for the Deep Space Nine and Voyager logos, but they got bored with it after that. Which is a shame I reckon as it looks great. It's not an obviously sci-fi looking typeface but not quite fantasy either. The current TV series have gone back to the equally iconic Original Series logo, so maybe there's hope that the movie logo will also make a comeback someday.

Okay, please be aware that there will be lots of pictures underneath this writing and underneath each of those pictures will be even more writing. And that writing will be 90% SPOILERS. I'll not be spoiling any Trek that comes afterwards however. Well, unless stuff like logo fonts counts as a spoiler for you, in which case I've already given away too much.

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Previously, in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home:

A giant mysterious probe drove up to Earth, shut down all their technology and covered the planet in clouds, and it doesn't seem like it's going to leave until it hears from at least one humpback whale. This is a problem, as Earth doesn't have any anymore. Fortunately Kirk's crew were en route to Earth to stand trial for space crimes at the time, so they were able to pop back to the 20th century on a mission to pick some up. Things haven't gone entirely smoothly, Chekov ended up in hospital, but with the help of whale biologist Dr Gillian Taylor they've managed to get inside and save his life. Now they just need to evade the cops chasing them down the hallways and get back out again.

And now, the conclusion:

Fortunately running around with a patient isn't all that unusual in a hospital, so no one tries to stop the team as they make a break for it. These doctors are all far more interested in the woman who McCoy cured earlier with a fast-acting kidney-growth pill. They're so focused that they're not even paying attention to where they're steering the wheelchair, nearly tripping up the poor extra on the left.

There aren't actually any complications for the team to deal with during their escape. McCoy accidentally knocks someone with with a broken leg over and stops to check on them, but they make it to the lift with time to spare. The cops try to intercept them by taking the stairs, but...

...all the team needed was a bit of privacy so they could transport away with no one seeing. It's fine, no one ever comes to this park in the middle of San Francisco, it barely even counts as public. It seems that Gillian's already gotten used to the transporter, though she does look a little confused about why they're standing outside the ship.

For once in the damn movie they're using the ramp to enter the Bird-of-Prey... and it's the one time when there's absolutely no reason to do so. It was actually more work for the transporter to put them here instead of in the transporter room. And to make it worse, the ramp closes after McCoy and Chekov get on board, leaving Kirk outside!

It's all incredibly contrived to set up the iconic moment where Kirk beams in and Gillian jumps onto him to hitch a ride, but it's a nice scene so I'll let the movie off. She's bloody lucky the transporters don't work like the ones in The Fly though, or else they could've swapped heads or something.

Gillian's decided to give up her life in the 20th century and come to the future with them, which means all the seats on the bridge are being used! It's like the set was specially designed so they could eventually have this shot with all the characters in the frame (with enough space around Kirk to make him the clear focus).

I'm glad they remembered that Chekov's clothes have been left in the hospital somewhere. They're probably made from alien fabrics assembled with 23rd century manufacturing techniques and no one in this century will ever have any clue. This change of outfit means he no longer matches the 'reds and pinks' colour scheme of the shot, but then neither does Sulu's jacket so it works.

Kirk asks Spock where the hell his power is and Spock replies "One damn minute, Admiral". He finally got the hang of swearing!

It's a shame they don't get to keep this ship for the next movie as the sets are really growing on me. Oh see that thing in the middle of the frame with three red lights around it? That's the whale release lever; very important.

Now that all the characters are back in their element (more or less) the movie gives them a chance to show off how competent they really are, with Kirk issuing orders like a proper space captain and Scotty remembering that they also have to beam up the water as well as the whales. That's 400 tons!

We also get another scene with McCoy and Spock, with Spock a little puzzled about how he's going to work out how to get back without knowing all the variables. McCoy helpfully encourages him to make a guess and the guy actually listens to his advice. Man their relationship has really changed since the TV series.

It's not long before they pick up George and Gracie's transmitter and pinpoint their location. In fact if you look carefully you can almost spot the two whales in this screencap! I've never been keen on underwater shots as the water makes it a lot harder to see anything.

Fortunately they're a lot easier to see in motion. They're swimming along in much the same way that whales do, which is pretty impressive as they're radio-controlled miniatures built by ILM. They must have done a good job because it never occurred to me they weren't real. Actual humpback whales are very shy (and protected by law, even in 1986), so only the shots of the whales popping up above the water are legit. 
 

Oh no, whalers! These might be the only people in the whole movie that we're outright supposed to hate. Well except for the Klingon Ambassador maybe. 

Gillian wasn't lying when she said that George and Gracie wouldn't be safe in the wild, as they've only been here a few hours and they're already being hunted! It turns out that all the rushing the crew did to get their ship ready has paid off as they have only seconds left to save their whales!

It's a tense few minutes as we get shots of the whales swimming away, the whalers getting ready to fire a harpoon, and the Bird-of-Prey racing over there to get into transporter range or whatever. Unfortunately the whalers manage to fire! So that's the second and final time a weapon gets fired in the movie. It hits too... hits the side of an invisible Bird-of-Prey that is, with a proper 'clunk'.

The VFX team have cheated a bit with the size here, making the Bird-of-Prey way bigger than the 60m long ship we saw on Vulcan for the sake of a more dramatic shot, but it works! Plus I prefer it to be this size to be honest, as it matches the 150m long version of the ship we got in Search for Spock, and you couldn't fit the cargo bay inside that tiny ship we saw earlier. 

Here's a fun fact about Bird-of-Prey class ships: their shadows are perfectly oval-shaped, like the shadows you see underneath characters in classic video games. And here's an additional fun fact about the the whaling ship: it was played by a fishing vessel called... Golden Gate.

Anyway Scotty actives the transporter and...

"Admiral, there be whales here!"

The Bird-of-Prey's transporter is pretty damn powerful to beam up two whales and the water. It must be useful for shifting a lot of cargo. Or troops. Though this does mean that this is the rare fish-out-of-water story where the fish never actually leave the water. Also they're not fish, so I hope Scotty left a bit of air in there for them. Not that there'd be much room for it, as each side of the cargo bay is actually only big enough for one whale.

Kirk gets to turn the tables on Gillian by taking her on a tour of his aquarium, and she couldn't be happier. Nicholas Meyer's writing has been pretty restrained when it comes to quotes for once, but we do get a line from D.H. Lawrence here. Well, Gillian gets it, I had no idea what Kirk was quoting.

Then it cuts back to the bridge and we're blessed with a a rare appearance by Shouty Spock as he takes over control to get them back to the future.

Then we get a replay of the scene where the window at Federation Headquarters shatters, to show that we're jumping right back in where we left off. Spock absolutely nailed the timing on this one.

Unfortunately that means the Bird-of-Prey has entered the area affected by the probe's signal and they start falling to Earth without power. In fact they start falling to San Francisco to be precise, so it's possible that it was the shockwave from their ship flying by that broke the glass! 

Sulu can't control the ship without power so I'm not sure how he manages to crash it into the water without scattering it in little pieces across a wide area, but he does. Best helmsman in Starfleet.

In fact he manages to get it down just underneath the Golden Gate Bridge! So they've flown from Golden Gate Park to a ship called Golden Gate, then gone to the present day and crashed under the Golden Gate Bridge.

The bridge here is actually a giant forced perspective model. They tried to do this shot with a model Bird-of-Prey flying past it on strings, Thunderbirds/Red Dwarf style, but it wasn't working out so they went back to motion control filming and compositing instead.

I've heard that any landing you can walk away from is a good one, but I'm not sure about landings you have to swim away from. Their captured Bird-of-Prey seems kind of wrecked. They kept the legendary USS Enterprise in one piece for three whole seasons and a movie, but now their ship gets broken or destroyed by the end of every film!

The crew abandons the ship through the handy hatch and this is the last time we ever see this particular type of bridge in Star Trek I believe. In fact it wasn't until The Final Frontier that the bridge design really settled down into a look that later stories made very familiar.

Though hang on, that's the emergency escape hatch and we can see blue light from the lightning flashes pouring in from outside, so why does it look like there's another ladder out there? I suppose it makes sense to have an airlock before you get to the outer hull.

Unfortunately the hatch to let the whales out of the cargo bay is broken, so they're going to drown along with Scotty and Gillian unless Kirk can swim down and save them. The bloody probe might end up killing the whales it came here to talk to! So now the movie's gone from a race against time to get the whales onto the ship, to a race against time to get them off the ship.

People watching the movie don't have to hold their breath at this point, but the ones that do will be holding their breath for about a minute. Oh plus you also need to keep your wig on for a minute as well.

Kirk reaches the whale release lever I mentioned earlier and swims out along with George and Gracie. So now it's Kirk's turn to go swimming with the whales.

Damn, you don't get to see many shots of the crew standing outside on the hull of their ship. Though the bit they're standing on should be a red pipe. Also the prop is missing the underbite and the curves of the dome don't quite match the miniature. They got the curves of the whale right at least, as it swims by and splashes them with its tail. Incidentally I believe that's same whale prop that was used in the Cetacean Institute set, running on the same track, in the same water tank.

That's a fake stormy background behind them, and they blocked out the California sun by putting a tent over the tank. I've heard that this is the first time they ever had rain in Star Trek, though it was all done by spraying water. Which apparently sucked for the actors, as it actually hurt. They weren't having much fun here.

This YouTube video by EC Henry shows that the Bird-of-Prey we're seeing in this shot would be 74 metres long, just about big enough to fit the cargo bay set inside. The water under the bridge is apparently over 100 meters deep, so there's plenty of room for it to sink. Not in this tank though, this water was apparently only 4 foot deep.

One of the whales tilts downwards to move into the whale song position and the probe orients itself to match. Then we get to listen to their whole conversation... though we don't get to know what they're saying as it's not for humans. It was suggested to give them subtitles, but fortunately test audiences said they didn't need them. I mean I generally prefer to have mysteries resolved, but there's no way that subtitles wouldn't have made the whole scene ridiculous instead of just suitably strange.

If you're tormented by the ambiguity and really want to know what they were talking about, the novelisation has you covered. It's basically:

Probe: "Why didn't you answer?"
Whales: "We weren't here and now we are."
Probe: "Where's everyone else?"
Whales: "Dead."
Probe: "Why is your song so simple?"
Whales: "All our tales were lost." 
Probe: "Alright then, hope you make some new songs, bye!"

And then the whale probe just grabs its ball and goes home. We never get an explanation for why it was so fascinated with whales and utterly indifferent to any other lifeforms it came across, it's just a weird-ass whale probe. Another example of the infinite wonders of the universe that keep dropping by to kill us and a reminder of why Starfleet puts people with brains and compassion on its own deep-space exploration vehicles.

The sky clears up, the power comes back on, and the music gets so cheerful I wouldn't be surprised if parts of the track actually did get recycled in a Christmas movie afterwards.

It's such a happy moment that even Spock's clearly grinning, his emotions coming out at the end of the movie. Though he stops when Kirk decides to drags him into the water with everyone else, which is a really bizarre thing to happen, but somehow works.

We see a shuttle flying over to pick them up, so the threat has been resolved and the characters are getting rescued. Some people would argue that the film should finish here, but personally I'm glad that there's more to the resolution than just making a probe fly away.

The film brings us back to the Federation council chambers from the start of the movie, with the makeup team showing off again. This is an Andorian (introduced in TOS) talking to a Caitian (introduced in the Animated Series), and you'd have to try really hard to find another scene in all of Star Trek where you see these two species having a chat like this. Andorians were basically ignored by the Berman era until they came back in a big way in Enterprise, and Caitians more or less vanished for the next three decades until we got Dr T'Ana in Lower Decks.

This was also the last appearance of the pig-like Tellarites until the second season of Enterprise.

The crew of the USS Enterprise HMS Bounty absolutely nothing come out to face their charges, along with Spock. At the start it seemed like he was returning to Earth purely as a witness, but now he chooses to stand with his shipmates. Even though he can totally walk away from this afterwards when they get sent off to mine borite. That'll serve Kirk right for dunking him in the San Francisco bay.

You can tell they're some prestigious prisoners as the President of the Federation himself is reading them their crimes. Which are: conspiracy, assault on Federation officers (to be fair one of them called Sulu 'Tiny'), theft of the Enterprise, sabotage of the Excelsior, the destruction of the Enterprise, and disobeying the direct orders from the commander of Starfleet. They plead guilty, because they are people of good character. But they saved the whole damn Earth so the president's going to let them off!

Well, everyone except Kirk. He's going to be punished with a demotion, so he can go back to being Captain Kirk for the last few movies. So now he has to go back to doing what he loves: commanding a starship and having weekly space adventures with his friends. See, I told you that the Federation was pretty enlightened when it came to its justice system. And Kirk's learned a valuable life lesson from all of this: never let them promote you to admiral.

Also Gillian turned up for his trial, wearing her new space clothes. She's only just got to the 23rd century and she's already getting to hang out in Federation council meetings! Their reunion can't last long though as she's got her own ship to go to now. A science vessel. I'm assuming it's a boat, not a starship, seeing as she's the planet's only whale biologist and they're trying to repopulate the species, but it's left vague. She just says "See you around the galaxy". Romance denied. 

I'm glad the writers made the choice to bring the character into the future as it's so unusual for Star Trek that it may as well be a twist. Plus she seems a lot happier here, in a post-scarcity future where everything is awesome and she can basically get all the pizza she wants for free.

The writers originally wanted her to stay behind in the 20th century to fight against the extinction of humpback whales, as 'people from the future will solve our problems for us' isn't a great message. That doesn't work for the plot though. If she fails to save the whales the message becomes 'trying to fix these problems is futile'. If she succeeds then the message is still 'people from the future will give us a do-over', but now she's rewritten the timeline so that the movie never happened!

Then we get a bit of continuity as Sarek remembers that he opposed Spock's enlistment in Starfleet. There was a rift between father and son for years over this (and other things), but Sarek finally admits that he may have been wrong about that. It's nice for the two of them to finally bury the hatchet, to a degree.

Spock's mother hasn't returned to bookend the movie, but his father offers to relay a message to her. He'd like Sarek to tell her that he "feels fine", answering the question that stumped him at the beginning. Character arc complete! The movie's not quite over yet though. Still one more ending to go.

Next we see them in a travel pod, flying over to their new ship. I'm hoping that a little time has passed since the last since the council scene to let Spock recover more, as the Spock we got this movie isn't exactly who you'd want as an executive officer in charge of managing 300+ people. Hey Kirk's got his captain rank insignia on now. I can tell because it matches Spock's. He's still got the gold stripe on the uniform though, because he just has to be special (it's gone by the next movie). 

The thing is, they haven't actually been told what their new ship is (it's apparently a surprise). I guess the pod's flying itself to the right place on autopilot or else they're just going to have to try each one in turn.

Sulu's hoping for the Excelsior, much to Scotty's despair, and for a while it seems like that's where they're going. Man, Scotty really doesn't like that ship for some reason. Personally I think it looks awesome. Plus it's the most powerful, most advanced, most fastest etc. ship in the fleet. Assuming it can ever make it more than 100 meters out of Space Dock.

But then the Enterprise fanfare plays as they fly over the Excelsior and see what their new ship really is...

It's the USS Enterprise, looking just as it did in the footage at the start of the film! You can tell this isn't a recent film as the ship hasn't been completely redesigned again. There's no damn way a modern sequel would allow that. 

I've read that Gene Roddenberry hated the idea of destroying the original Enterprise in Search for Spock, feeling like she was a character herself, while producer Harve Bennett was a lot less sentimental. They could just put the crew on the shiny new Excelsior instead, a ship is a ship. But he came to realise that fans were also very attached to the Enterprise, so the movie ends with a crowd-pleasing scene of the crew coming home... to a completely new ship that just looks the same and has the same name.

It even uses the same miniature, they've just replaced the registry number decal to add an -A to the end. This began a tradition that carried on into Star Trek: The Next Generation the following year; when the Enterprise NCC-1701-D showed up everyone knew exactly what the letter at the end meant.

The crew actually did end up with the Excelsior in the comics, due to Kirk leaking how awesome he was to the press to avoid facing the consequences of stealing the Enterprise (seriously). The Search for Spock was included in the comic continuity, so they had to come up with a way for Kirk to continue having monthly space adventures after the Enterprise got blown up, and the Excelsior was the obvious choice.

The trouble was that The Voyage Home was also included in the comic continuity, so 20 issues later they had to mess with Spock's head, make the crew criminals again, and put them back on Vulcan with a stolen Bird-of-Prey.

Oh no what have they done to the bridge? It's like the time-travel dream sequence version of it! They've painted it white, replaced the physical controls with touchscreens, put a light strip along the bottom of the walls, and added metal struts. Now it looks really cheap somehow. Especially the floor.

Fake computer screens made from backlit coloured gels under glass are nothing new for Star Trek, they were all over the original bridge. But I'm thinking Gene Roddenberry might have been onto something when he shot down suggestions to use touchscreen consoles in The Motion Picture. To be fair this was legendary Trek artist Michael Okuda's first try at doing Starfleet touchscreens. He did the Enterprise D's iconic LCARS interface next and that was a lot more successful.

I'm glad they've at least put one other officer in the background, to imply that they have a crew now. In fact she's a familiar face as she was on the Enterprise in the last two movies... and she was on Gillian's whale tour in this one.

Anyway, the ship goes to warp and that's the end of the movie. Spoiler: the ship is so broken and unfinished that they have to give it an entirely new (and much better looking) bridge set by the beginning of the next film.

Then it turns out that this is the first and only Star Trek film to put its end credits over clips from the film! Including this clip of Scotty slipping and falling off the ladder that I don't even think is in the movie. (Doohan was apparently alright and they had a bit of a laugh about it afterwards).

To be fair I can't say it's not 'Star Trek' to show a bunch of shots behind the credits, the Original Series did this for its entire run, and I suppose it does remind viewers of all the fun scenes they just saw.

Also there's a credit for 'Time Travel' there, underneath 'Stage Technicians' and 'Production Assistant' which is kind of weird. I assume it means the time travel dream sequence, but I dunno, maybe ILM does actual time travel as well.


CONCLUSION

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I have to admit that this wasn't one of my favourites when I was young, I thought it was a bit cheesy and I didn't like how they were doing boring 80s comedy movie stuff on Earth instead of going out and having proper space adventures. I mean, imagine if they did a Star Wars movie where the Mandalorian and Boba Fett end up on present day Earth and have to ask for directions, it wouldn't necessarily be universally loved! Especially if they kept stopping to talk about the ecological damage we're doing to our world. I was more interested in the real Star Trek films, where they had a spaceship and went seeking out new worlds and new civilisations. Well, they went into space at least.

Then I watched through the Original Series and discovered that I was totally right to think this movie is a strange outlier in the franchise... because it's downright weird seeing everyone get something to do! They don't get much to do, but they each have their scenes and they don't seem forced. The 'nuclear wessels' scene isn't there because they needed to give Walter Koenig some screen time, but because his character provided them with an idea for a gag. They're taking advantage of their iconic cast's charm here instead of just using them to fill chairs.

On the other hand, a team of competent (but slightly eccentric) experts coming together to solve a problem is extremely Star Trek. It's also very Mission: Impossible and Fast & Furious, but this has fewer chase scenes. The film's more of a gentle caper, with comedic music played over the action scenes to make sure there's no risk of tension. It was deliberately designed to give audiences a breather after all the heaviness of the last few stories, so for once there's no tragedy, no death, no villain. Just light-hearted comedy. It's more of a Tomorrow is Yesterday or a Piece of the Action than a City on the Edge of Forever. Which also makes it pretty Star Trek I suppose.

It definitely has fun with all the Star Trek things: the cloaking device, the warp drive, the phasers, the transporter, the dilithium crystals, the Vulcans etc. But it never makes fun of Star Trek, just puts things in a context that would make them amusing. The characters are made to look foolish due to their ignorance as that's how fish-out-of-water comedy works (and Spock's not firing on all thrusters), but they also always succeed. Plus getting them all away from their regular jobs and into a 'present day' setting lets us see another side to them. Especially as they've continued their character arcs from the earlier films and become a lot more relaxed and playful. McCoy's actually nice to Spock! The two of them aren't even trying to win arguments anymore.

In fact a lot of things have been continued from the last two films. This is remarkably continuity-heavy for a movie hoping to draw in a more mainstream audience. Even the threads that were dropped, like Saavik and David's death, get an acknowledgement. It does a pretty good job of being the third in a trilogy and an 80s comedy film about whales both at the same time, which I suppose is partially due to having two different writers tackling the different time periods. Fortunately all the celebrities are found in the 23rd century half of the film, with people like Sarek, Amanda, Chapel and Rand making an appearance. There are no obnoxious cameos in the 'present day' scenes. They did try to get Eddie Murphy to play a major role in the 80s, but he was more interested in the 23rd century side of the plot so things didn't work out for him. I think it likely worked out for the best for us though as it meant the whale expert got a bigger role.

You know what's weird though? A story about fugitive astronauts travelling back in time to get a pair of humpback whales in the hopes that they'll talk with the ultra-powerful space probe that's destroying all-life on Earth and convince it to leave. That's what's weird. It doesn't really feel that way while watching though, as we're taken through the problem step by step as the characters work it out. This is the rare time travel story where the protagonists aren't trying to fix something in the period they're travelling to, though the movie certainly has things it would like to change about the 80s. This is a 'save the whales' movie to its core. It's not strange for Star Trek to have a message, but it's a bit unusual for it to be completely unobscured by sci-fi metaphors and right in your face. We literally get a tour of our real world problems, complete with a gory video of real-life whalers in action. The film's on a mission to entertain however, so it never gets too depressing or preachy. And hey it might have actually helped save a few whales.

The whales here are mostly artificial, thanks to ILM, and they're probably the best visual effect in the movie. The Bird-of-Prey would've been a contender, if it didn't keep changing size. Also I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't mention the continuity issue with the new sets, considering all the crap I give Discovery and Strange New Worlds for the liberties they take. Though it's hard to be too bothered by a problem that could've been explained by a single funny throw-away comment (that we didn't get). If they'd given Scotty a line like "Captain, we've been parked here for 3 months now, I had to do something with my time," except better, it'd be a non-issue. I dunno, maybe they just forgot where they were parked and flew off in the wrong Bird-of-Prey. The important thing is that they didn't retcon any footage from the previous movie. That was still the same Enterprise exploding.

Star Trek 3 dangled the possibility that the former Enterprise crew might get to use their captured Klingon ship for at least a little while (until they inevitably got assigned to the Excelsior) and man this movie delivers on that. The ship is their home base for the entire story, and its rusty cluttered walls do as much to give the film a different feel to its predecessors as the streets of 80s San Francisco do. That, plus the new cinematographer, who does a good job of making this look like a real movie. In fact everything does a good job of making this work. Analysing it scene by scene like this has given me a new appreciation for how well constructed it is on every level. I've even started to come to terms with the music. The other films have better soundtracks, that's an unavoidable side-effect of hiring people like Jerry Goldsmith and James Horner, but I have to concede that Rosenman's score has a goofy playfulness that's perfectly in tune with the movie's tone.

Basically what I'm saying is that it's a good film.

Strange new worlds explored: 0. Unless you count 80s San Francisco.
New life discovered: 0. Though Starfleet did meet a whale probe.
New civilisations discovered: 0.
Boldly gone where no one has gone before: They went to the same place and time the film was released in.
Other ships in range: A few, but they were knocked out by the power-dampening whale probe.

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NEXT TIME

Next on Sci-Fi Adventures, the Star Trek continues with Star Trek: Picard's second season! I've reached the halfway point, where the 'fun' really begins.

Thanks for reading by the way. If you'd like to leave a comment the box below awaits your words.