Star Trek boldly went Greenpeace in this whale tale, but for all the fun there's a lot of dumb.
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00For the longest time, Star Trek IV was the most profitable and popular film of the franchise,
00:05known even to non-Trekkies as the one with the whales. It was a hit because it didn't require
00:09you to know much about Star Trek in order to get it, and because it was a family-friendly film
00:14released in time for the 1986 holiday season. The Voyage Home is a bit of a romp, a fish-out-of-water
00:21romp with tongue planted firmly in cheek, and plenty of comedic moments, so you can't take it
00:26too seriously. But at the same time, it's not unreasonable to expect events in a film to make
00:31some sense, and for the characters to behave appropriately. In the case of this film, a number
00:36of silly things happen because they're expedient to the plot, not because they make a lot of sense.
00:42So, get ready to strap in with me, Bree, as we slingshot around the sun to find the 10 dumbest
00:47things that happen in The One with the Whales. Number 10. The Space Tugs Stop When They Lose Power.
00:54Even as the Excelsior and the other starships and space docks sit on their figurative hands
00:59and are disabled, we see the engines go dead on a pair of tugboat shuttles, and they come
01:04to a halt. I'm sorry, but, huh? These are not motorboats on a lake whose engines die
01:10and their momentum bleeds off pushing against the water. These are spaceships in a near vacuum.
01:15Even if the preposterous airship hangar was pressurized, which there's no evidence of,
01:20their momentum should have carried them in straight lines until they smashed into a space dock wall
01:25or one of those disabled starships. Which makes you wonder, if the probe disrupts all the power
01:31sources employed by Starfleet and on Earth, what exactly happened to everything else when it pulled
01:36into orbit? It clearly didn't kill all the power because at Starfleet Command, we see dimmed lights
01:42and scrambled, but operating, screens. So what level of power was affected? As the bird of prey gets
01:49knocked out immediately upon popping back into the 23rd century, we have to assume that every
01:54powered vehicle and delivery drone in the air above Earth plummeted and crashed. One hopes Earth's
02:00government grounded everything before this could happen, but given Starfleet's wait till after the
02:05last minute incompetence, this is unlikely. Which means Starfleet is dumb.
02:10Number nine. If you're going to San Francisco. Kirk. There she is. From the Institute. If we play our
02:16cards right, we may be able to find out when those whales are leaving. Spock. How will playing cards help?
02:23Jillian. Well, if it isn't Robin Hood and Friar Tuck, where are you fellas' head? Kirk. Back to San
02:29Francisco. Sure, Kirk is a fish out of water in 1986, but he seems a little lost here. Perhaps he needs
02:36to turn around and take notice that the Golden Gate Bridge is behind Spock and himself, and that
02:41they're walking away from it. They're already in San Francisco when Jillian picks them up. In fact,
02:47they're on the Marina Green. And no, they're not on the Sausalito side, where Cetacean Institute is
02:52purportedly located. The view we have of the bridge is impossible to get from the other side. Kirk may be
02:59from the 23rd century, but by all indications in this and previous films, the Golden Gate Bridge is
03:05still in the same place. Kirk must know where he is. So, to paraphrase Jillian, why the coy geography?
03:13Number eight. The father of transparent aluminum. With no transparent aluminum to be found in Ronald
03:19Reagan's America, Scotty and Bones have to seek out the clunkier 20th century equivalent,
03:24big slabs of plexiglass. There's no such thing as a free lunch, so they have to barter to get what
03:30they need. And the only thing of value to PlexiCore planet manager, Dr. Nichols, is Scotty's 23rd
03:36century knowledge of materials not yet invented. The movie has some fun with this by hanging a lantern
03:42on it. McCoy. Well, a moment alone, please. You do realize, of course, if we give him the formula,
03:48we're altering the future. Scotty. Why? How do we know he didn't invent the thing? How?
03:54Indeed. But even if Dr. Nichols was indeed the inventor, when something was invented could affect
04:01history just as much as who. And wait a second, why does it need to be transparent or even plastic?
04:08Clear plastics are not as durable as opaque ones, and plastics in general are less durable and more
04:14prone to leaking than stainless steel. So, why? Oh, wait. Yeah, it's a movie, and we want to see the
04:21whales, not slabs of steel. Number seven. He's a Ruski, but they're idiots. FBI agent. Commander
04:28Chekov. Starfleet. United Federation of Planets. Right. Commander, is there anything you want to
04:35tell us? Chekov. Like what? FBI agent. Like who you really are, and what you're doing here,
04:41and what these things are. Chekov. I am Pavlov Chekov, Commander in Starfleet, United Federation
04:48of Planets. Service number 6565827D. Kirk told everyone to remove insignias before they left the
04:56ship. So, why did Chekov bring his ID with him? And why does he bother telling his interrogators his
05:03serial number? Sure, they're meaningless in 1986, but anything he tells them is going to be meaningless.
05:08He might as well claim that he's Antov Chekov, the playwright. Speaking of dumb, the agents here
05:14are beyond stupid. They have no idea what the devices Chekov carries are, and they just keep
05:20them on the table where he can reach them. Also, why is Chekov being interrogated by a civilian when
05:26they're on board a ship? They're at the Alameda Naval Base. Surely they'd take him to a base facility.
05:31Number six. The Whale Horizon. Zooming in on something hundreds or thousands of kilometers away
05:38in space is easy, because there's effectively nothing between you and almost anything you want
05:43to look at. Down on the Earth's atmosphere, that's something else. Uhura. Affirmative. Contact with the
05:49whales. Kirk. Baring. Uhura. Baring 237, range 600 nautical. Kirk. Put them on screen. Jillian. How can
05:58you do that? How indeed, Jillian? Unlike in space, the trouble with looking at things far away on Earth is
06:05that Earth itself tends to get in the way. The further away something is, the higher above the
06:10surface you have to go to get a line of sight on it over the horizon. 600 nautical miles is 1,111
06:17kilometers, and to even see the whales just on the horizon at such a distance, the bird of prey would
06:23have to have been at a minimum altitude of 96,179 meters or 315,548 feet. But moments earlier, before
06:35Uhura reports the distance, we get a POV zipping through clouds under bright blue skies. Down where
06:41the clouds are anything over 200 to 280 kilometers away would be invisible over the horizon. And the
06:48lower you are in the atmosphere, the denser it is, and the harder it is to see through atmospheric haze.
06:54This is definitely an example of a science dumb. Number five, let's do the time warp again. And again.
07:03Time travel, as routinely depicted on screen, is pretty silly and almost never holds up to the
07:09barest of scrutinies because it usually ignores, or at least hand waves away, one basic fact. Nothing in
07:17the universe is truly stationary. The earth spins on its axis as it moves on its orbit around the sun,
07:23which itself orbits the Milky Way's galaxy center of mass, and the galaxy is in turn moving through
07:29space, which itself is expanding at an accelerating rate. Hop forward in time just one hour, and the
07:35earth would have moved eight times its diameter out from under you. As someone said, it's very cold in
07:41space. The slingshot around the sun thing at least avoids most of this, but in 300 years,
07:46the sun will have moved along its orbit just over 2 trillion kilometers, or about a third of a light
07:52year. So every time the bird of prey does it spin around the sun to go backwards or forwards 300
07:57years, it ought to have to boogie a couple of trillion clicks to find the earth. Time travel
08:02in movies, kind of dumb. Number four, one little mistake. Star Trek 4 is a charming movie, but action
08:10packed it is not. So the chase through the hospital is a welcome bit of up-tempo fun at just the right
08:16point in the story. But what the characters are doing, that's pretty foolish. Why the heck do Kirk,
08:22Bones, and Jillian hang around in the surgical suite to save Chekov, and then try to roll him out
08:27from under the noses of the police instead of just beaming back to the bird of prey? Oh sure,
08:33they don't want the surgeons and nurses to see the transporter whisk them away, but that's an easy fix.
08:37Just use a blanket or a surgical gown to cover the window in the door to the room where Kirk traps
08:43them. And sure, sure, there'd be impossible to answer questions about how the patients and three
08:48intruders escaped a guarded room with only one exit, but it would have been a lot less risky. Fun scene
08:54though, even if they're behaving like the Keystone cops. Number three, a head whale factor one. It's
09:01fairly preposterous that the Scandinavian whale catcher just happens to locate George and Gracie mere hours
09:07after they've been released into the ocean. Not only because what are the odds, but because presumably
09:13said whales were liberated from a port, as Jillian explains. Jillian. They'll be flown in a special
09:19747 to Alaska and released there. Territorial waters only extend 22.24 kilometers or 12 nautical
09:27miles from the baseline of a country's coasts. And humpback whales normally swim between 4.8 to 14
09:33kilometers or 3 to 9 miles per hour, which means they could be out into international waters in a
09:39few hours. But even if the whales are outside the US territorial water, that doesn't make them fair
09:45game for foreign nations. The 1982 US exclusion economic zone around Alaska extends 321 kilometers
09:53or 200 miles. It would have taken George and Gracie at least a day and a half to be fair game,
09:59even if they'd made a beeline perpendicular to the coast. Of course, one could pretend the whalers
10:04were violating US waters. They're clearly bad, bad men. But who knew they were that bad?
10:11Number two, he's dead, Jim? One of the big crowd-pleasing moments in the film was when Spock
10:17executes his famous Spock neck pinch on the rude punk blasting his boombox, a gag paid homage to in
10:23Picard season 2. But put yourself in place of the other passengers on the bus. They see this punk
10:29being rude, and then this weird-looking character in a robe does something, and the punk falls face
10:34first onto his boombox, shutting it off. From their point of view, what happened? Do you know anyone who
10:40can put someone to sleep like that? For all they know, Spock killed a guy right in front of them.
10:46Maybe they hate punk rock music that much? In any case, Kirk and Spock were lucky the cops weren't
10:52waiting for them at the Cetacean Institute. Funny, but dumb.
10:56Number one, Starfleet's Sitting Ducks. Starfleet Command. Space dock, this is Starfleet Command.
11:03Launch all vessels, launch all vessels. Controller two. Sir, space dock doors are inoperative. All
11:09emergency systems are non-functional. Controller one. Engage reserve power. Controller two. Aye,
11:15sir. Controller one. Starfleet Command, this is space dock on emergency channels. We've lost
11:20all internal power. What's wrong with this picture? Starfleet knows this giant probe is making a beeline
11:26for Earth, and that it's knocked out at least five ships in route. Cartwright. Mr. President,
11:32the probe is headed directly for us. The signal is damaging everything in its path. The Klingons
11:37have lost two vessels. Two starships and three smaller vessels have been neutralized. So with this
11:43seemingly unstoppable unknown bearing down on them, does Starfleet set up a picket line of starships?
11:48Launch ships to approach this unknown from various trajectories in order to figure out the radius
11:54of its power neutralizing force? Or study it from afar? None of those. No, no, Starfleet does none of
12:00that. Starfleet keeps its great experiment, the Excelsior, and other ships parked in space dock with
12:06the doors closed until the probe is literally on top of them, with the result that none of them can make
12:12an attempt to contact or escape the probe. Starfleet saw this one coming. That's not just dumb,
12:18it's criminally negligent and dereliction of duty. And those were 10 of the dumbest things in Star Trek,
12:25the one with the whales. If you enjoyed this video and or this ongoing series, then make sure to give
12:31us a like and tell us what you thought was dumb in the movie. If you're not already, go ahead and hit
12:36that subscribe button so you never miss a new upload. Don't forget to check us out on whatculture.com
12:41too, because this is also an adaptation of an article which has four additional dumb things,
12:47so you can check that out there. Until next time, I've been Bri with Trek Culture,
12:52and don't forget to live long and prosper.