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Star Trek boldly went Greenpeace in this whale tale, but for all the fun there's a lot of dumb.
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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. Number nine, if you're going
02:11to San Francisco. Kirk. There she is, from the Institute. If we play our cards right, we may be able to find out when those whales are leaving.
02:20Spock. How will playing cards help? Jillian. Well, if it isn't Robin Hood and Friar Tuck, where are you fellas' head?
02:28Kirk. Back to San Francisco. Sure, Kirk is a fish out of water in 1986, but he seems a little lost here. Perhaps he needs to turn around and take notice that the Golden Gate Bridge is behind Spock and himself,
02:40and that they're walking away from it. They're already in San Francisco when Jillian picks them up. In fact, they're on the Marina Green.
02:48And no, they're not on the Sausalito side, where Cetacean Institute is purportedly located. The view we have of the bridge is impossible to get from the other side.
02:58Kirk may be from the 23rd century, but by all indications in this and previous films, the Golden Gate Bridge is still in the same place.
03:07Kirk must know where he is. So, to paraphrase Jillian, why the coy geography?
03:13Number 8. The Father of Transparent Aluminum.
03:17With no transparent aluminum to be found in Ronald Reagan's America, Scotty and Bones have to seek out the clunkier 20th century equivalent, big slabs of plexiglass.
03:26There's no such thing as a free lunch, so they have to barter to get what they need. And the only thing of value to PlexiCorp planet manager, Dr. Nichols, is Scotty's 23rd century knowledge of materials not yet invented.
03:39The movie has some fun with this by hanging a lantern on it.
03:43McCoy.
03:43Well, a moment alone, please.
03:45You do realize, of course, if we give him the formula, we're altering the future.
03:50Scotty.
03:51Why? How do we know he didn't invent the thing?
03:54How indeed?
03:55But, even if Dr. Nichols was indeed the inventor, when something was invented could affect history just as much as who.
04:03And, 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 prone to leaking than stainless steel.
04:15So, why?
04:17Oh, wait.
04:18Yeah, it's a movie.
04:20And we want to see the whales, not slabs of steel.
04:23Number seven.
04:24He's a ruski, but they're idiots.
04:27FBI agent.
04:28Commander Chekhov.
04:29Starfleet.
04:30United Federation of Planets.
04:32Right.
04:33Commander, is there anything you want to tell us?
04:36Chekhov.
04:36Like what?
04:37FBI agent.
04:38Like who you really are, and what you're doing here, and what these things are.
04:44Chekhov.
04:45I am Pavlov Chekhov, commander in Starfleet, United Federation of Planets, service number 6565827D.
04:53Kirk told everyone to remove insignias before they left the ship, so why did Chekhov bring his ID with him?
05:00And why does he bother telling his interrogators his serial number?
05:04Sure, they're meaningless in 1986, but anything he tells them is going to be meaningless.
05:09He might as well claim that he's Antov Chekhov, the playwright.
05:12Speaking of dumb, the agents here are beyond stupid.
05:16They have no idea what the devices Chekhov carries are, and they just keep them on the table where he can reach them.
05:22Also, why is Chekhov being interrogated by a civilian when they're on board a ship?
05:27They're at the Alameda Naval Base.
05:29Surely they'd take him to a base facility.
05:31Number 6.
05:33The Whale Horizon.
05:35Zooming in on something hundreds or thousands of kilometers away in space is easy,
05:39because there's effectively nothing between you and almost anything you want to look at.
05:44Down on the Earth's atmosphere, that's something else.
05:47Uhura.
05:48Affirmative.
05:49Contact with the whales.
05:50Kirk.
05:51Baring.
05:51Uhura.
05:52Baring 237, range 600 nautical.
05:55Kirk.
05:56Put them on screen.
05:57Jillian.
05:57How can you do that?
05:59How indeed, Jillian?
06:01Unlike in space, the trouble with looking at things far away on Earth is that Earth itself
06:06tends to get in the way.
06:07The further away something is, the higher above the surface you have to go to get a line of
06:12sight on it over the horizon.
06:14600 nautical miles is 1,111 kilometers, and to even see the whales just on the horizon at
06:21such a distance, the bird of prey would have to have been at a minimum altitude of 96,179
06:28meters, or 315,548 feet.
06:33But moments earlier, before Uhura reports the distance, we get a POV zipping through clouds
06:39under bright blue skies.
06:41Down where the clouds are anything over 200 to 280 kilometers away would be invisible over
06:46the horizon, and the lower you are in the atmosphere, the denser it is, and the harder
06:51it is to see through atmospheric haze.
06:54This is definitely an example of a science dumb.
06:58Number 5.
06:59Let'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
07:09the barest of scrutinies, because it usually ignores, or at least hand waves away, one basic
07:15fact.
07:16Nothing in the universe is truly stationary.
07:19The Earth spins on its axis as it moves on its orbit around the Sun, which itself orbits
07:24the Milky Way's galaxy's center of mass, and the galaxy is in turn moving through space,
07:29which itself is expanding at an accelerating rate.
07:32Hop forward in time just one hour, and the Earth would have moved eight times its diameter
07:36out from under you.
07:38As someone said, it's very cold in space.
07:42The slingshot around the Sun thing at least avoids most of this, but in 300 years, the
07:47Sun will have moved along its orbit just over 2 trillion kilometers, or about a third of
07:51a light year.
07:52So, every time the bird of prey does its 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.
08:02Time travel and movies, kind of dumb.
08:04Number 4.
08:06One Little Mistake
08:07Star Trek IV is a charming movie, but action-packed it is not.
08:12So, the chase through the hospital is a welcome bit of up-tempo fun at just the right point
08:17in the story.
08:17But, what the characters are doing, that's pretty foolish.
08:21Why the heck do Kirk, Bones, and Jillian hang around in the surgical suite to save Chekhov,
08:26and then try to roll him out from under the noses of the police, instead of just beaming
08:30back to the bird of prey.
08:32Oh sure, they don't want the surgeons and nurses to see the transporter whisk them away,
08:36but that's an easy fix.
08:38Just use a blanket or a surgical gown to cover the window in the door to the room where Kirk
08:42traps them.
08:43And sure, sure, there'd be impossible to answer questions about how the patients and
08:48three intruders escaped a guarded room with only one exit, but it would have been a lot
08:53less risky.
08:53Fun scene, though, even if they're behaving like the Keystone Cops.
08:58Number 3.
08:59Ahead Whale Factor 1
09:00It's fairly preposterous that the Scandinavian whale catcher just happens to locate George
09:06and Gracie mere hours after they've been released into the ocean.
09:09Not only because, what are the odds, but because presumably said whales were liberated from a port,
09:16as Jillian explains, Jillian.
09:18They'll be flown in a special 747 to Alaska and released there.
09:22Territorial waters only extend 22.24 kilometers or 12 nautical miles from the baseline of a
09:28country's coasts, and humpbacked whales normally swim between 4.8 to 14 kilometers or 3 to 9
09:35miles per hour, which means they could be out into international waters in a few hours.
09:40But even if the whales are outside the U.S. territorial water, that doesn't make them fair
09:45game for foreign nations.
09:47The 1982 U.S. Exclusion Economic Zone around Alaska extends 321 kilometers or 200 miles.
09:55It 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.
10:03Of course, one could pretend the whalers were violating U.S. waters.
10:06They're clearly bad, bad men.
10:08But who knew they were that bad?
10:11Number 2.
10:12He's dead, Jim?
10:13One of the big crowd-pleasing moments in the film was when Spock executes his famous Spock
10:19neck pinch on the rude punk blasting his boombox, a gag paid homage to in Picard Season 2.
10:25But put yourself in place of the other passengers on the bus.
10:28They see this punk being rude, and then this weird-looking character in a robe does something,
10:33and the punk falls face-first onto his boombox, shutting it off.
10:36From their point of view, what happened?
10:39Do you know anyone who can put someone to sleep like that?
10:42For all they know, Spock killed a guy right in front of them.
10:46Maybe they hate punk rock music that much?
10:49In any case, Kirk and Spock were lucky the cops weren't waiting for them at the Cetacean Institute.
10:55Funny, but dumb.
10:56Number 1.
10:57Starfleet's Sitting Ducks
10:59Starfleet Command
11:01Space dock, this is Starfleet Command.
11:03Launch all vessels, launch all vessels.
11:05Controller 2.
11:06Sir, space dock doors are inoperative.
11:08All emergency systems are non-functional.
11:11Controller 1.
11:12Engage reserve power.
11:13Controller 2.
11:15Aye, sir.
11:15Controller 1.
11:17Starfleet Command, this is space dock on emergency channels.
11:19We've lost all internal power.
11:22What's wrong with this picture?
11:23Starfleet knows this giant probe is making a beeline for Earth,
11:27and that it's knocked out at least five ships en route.
11:31Cartwright,
11:31Mr. President, the probe is headed directly for us.
11:34The signal is damaging everything in its path.
11:36The Klingons have lost two vessels.
11:38Two starships and three smaller vessels have been neutralized.
11:42So, with this seemingly unstoppable unknown bearing down on them,
11:46does Starfleet set up a picket line of starships?
11:49Launch ships to approach this unknown from various trajectories
11:52in order to figure out the radius of its power-neutralizing force?
11:56Or study it from afar?
11:57None of those.
11:59No.
11:59No, Starfleet does none of that.
12:01Starfleet keeps its great experiment, the Excelsior, and other ships,
12:05parked in space dock with the doors closed
12:07until the probe is literally on top of them,
12:10with the result that none of them can make an attempt to contact or escape the probe.
12:15Starfleet saw this one coming.
12:17That's not just dumb, it's criminally negligent and dereliction of duty.
12:22And those were 10 of the dumbest things in Star Trek, the one with the whales.
12:26If you enjoyed this video and or this ongoing series,
12:30then make sure to give us a like and tell us what you thought was dumb in the movie.
12:34If you're not already, go ahead and hit that subscribe button so you never miss a new upload.
12:39Don't forget to check us out on whatculture.com, too,
12:42because this is also an adaptation of an article which has four additional dumb things,
12:47so you can check that out there.
12:49Until next time, I've been Bree with Trek Culture,
12:52and don't forget to live long and prosper.
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