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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
00:20-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, Brie, 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
02:18able to find out when those whales are leaving. Spock. How will playing cards help? Jillian. Well, if it
02:25isn't Robin Hood and Friar Tuck, where are you fellas' head? Kirk. Back to San Francisco. Sure, Kirk is a
02:31fish
02:31out of water in 1986, but he seems a little lost here. Perhaps he needs to turn around and take
02:37notice
02:37that the Golden Gate Bridge is behind Spock and himself and that they're walking away from it.
02:43They're already in San Francisco when Jillian picks them up. In fact, they're on the Marina Green. And
02:49no, they're not on the Sausalito side, where Cetacean Institute is purportedly located. The view we have
02:55of the bridge is impossible to get from the other side. Kirk may be from the 23rd century, but by
03:01all
03:01indications in this and previous films, the Golden Gate Bridge is still in the same place. Kirk,
03:07must 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
03:19Ronald Reagan'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
03:30need. And the only thing of value to PlexiCorp planet manager, Dr. Nichols, is Scotty's 23rd century
03:36knowledge of materials not yet invented. The movie has some fun with this by hanging a lantern on it.
03:43McCoy, well, a moment alone, please. You do realize, of course, if we give him the formula,
03:49we're altering the future. Scotty, why? How do we know he didn't invent the thing? How indeed? But
03:55even if Dr. Nichols was indeed the inventor, when something was invented could affect history just as
04:02much as who? And wait a second, why does it need to be transparent or even plastic? Clear plastics are
04:09not as durable as opaque ones, and plastics in general are less durable and more prone to leaking
04:14than stainless steel, so why? Oh, wait. Yeah, it's a movie, and we want to see the whales, not slabs
04:21of
04:22steel. Number seven, he's a ruski, but they're idiots. FBI agent, Commander Chekhov, Starfleet, United
04:30Federation of Planets? Right. Commander, is there anything you want to tell us? Chekhov, like what?
04:37FBI agent, like who you really are and what you're doing here and what these things are. Chekhov,
04:45I am Pavlov Chekhov, Commander in Starfleet, United Federation of Planets, Service Number 65658207D.
04:52Kirk told everyone to remove insignias before they left the ship,
04:56So why did Chekhov bring his ID with him? And why does he bother telling his interrogators his serial
05:03number? Sure, 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. Speaking of dumb, the agents here are
05:14beyond stupid. They have no idea what the devices Chekhov carries are, and they just keep them on the
05:20table where he can reach them. Also, why is Chekhov being interrogated by a civilian when they're on
05:26board a ship? They're at the Alameda Naval Base. Surely they'd take him to a base facility.
05:31Number 6, The Whale Horizon. Zooming in on something hundreds or thousands of kilometers away in space
05:39is easy because there's effectively nothing between you and almost anything you want to look at. Down on
05:44the Earth's atmosphere, that's something else. Uhura. Affirmative. Contact with the whales. Kirk.
05:50Baring. Uhura. Baring 237. Range 600. Nautical. Kirk. Put them on screen. Jillian. How can you do that?
05:59How indeed, Jillian? Unlike in space, the trouble with looking at things far away on Earth is that Earth
06:05itself tends to get in the way. The further away something is, the higher above the surface you have
06:11to go to get a line of sight on it over the horizon. 600 nautical miles is 1,111 kilometers,
06:18and to even see the whales just on the horizon at such a distance, the bird of prey would have
06:23to
06:23have been at a minimum altitude of 96,179 meters or 315,548 feet. But moments earlier, before Uhura reports
06:36the
06:36distance, we get a POV zipping through clouds under bright blue skies. Down where the clouds are
06:42anything over 200 to 280 kilometers away would be invisible over the horizon. And the lower you are
06:49in the atmosphere, the denser it is, and the harder it is to see through atmospheric haze. This is
06:54definitely an example of a science dumb. Number 5. Let's do the time warp again. And again. Time travel,
07:04as routinely depicted on screen, is pretty silly and almost never holds up to the barest of
07:09scrutinies because it usually ignores, or at least hand waves away, one basic fact. Nothing in the
07:17universe 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's 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
07:34hour, and the Earth would have moved eight times its diameter out from under you. As someone said,
07:39it's very cold in space. The slingshot around the sun thing at least avoids most of this,
07:45but in 300 years, the sun will have moved along its orbit just over 2 trillion kilometers,
07:50or about a third of a light year. So every time the bird of prey does its spin around the
07:55sun to go
07:56backwards or forwards 300 years, it ought to have to boogie a couple of trillion clicks to find the Earth.
08:02Time travel in movies, kinda dumb. Number 4. One little mistake. Star Trek 4 is a charming movie,
08:10but action packed it is not. So the chase through the hospital is a welcome bit of uptempo fun at
08:15just the right point in the story. But what the characters are doing, that's pretty foolish. Why the
08:21heck do Kirk, Bones, and Jillian hang around in the surgical suite to save Chekov, and then try to roll
08:27him out from under the noses of the police instead of just beaming back to the bird of prey. Oh
08:32sure,
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
08:42traps
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.
08:54Even if they're behaving like the Keystone cops. Number 3. Ahead Whale Factor 1. It's fairly
09:02preposterous 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 747 to
09:20Alaska and released there. Territorial waters only extend 22.24 kilometers or 12 nautical miles from
09:27the baseline of a country's coasts. And humpback whales normally swim between 4.8 to 14 kilometers,
09:34or 3 to 9 miles per hour, which means they could be out into international waters in a few hours.
09:40But
09:40even if the whales are outside the US territorial water, that doesn't make them fair game for foreign
09:46nations. The 1982 US 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, even if
10:00they'd
10:00made a beeline perpendicular to the coast. Of course, one could pretend the whalers were violating US
10:05waters. They're clearly bad, bad men. But who knew they were that bad? Number 2. He's dead, Jim?
10:14One of the big crowd-pleasing moments in the film was when Spock executes his famous Spock neck pinch
10:19on the rude punk blasting his boombox, a gag paid homage to in Picard season 2. But put yourself in
10:26place of the other passengers on the bus. They see this punk being rude, and then this weird looking
10:31character in a robe does something, and the punk falls face first onto his boombox, shutting it off.
10:36From their point of view, what happened? Do 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. Maybe they hate punk rock music
10:48that much? In any case, Kirk and Spock were lucky the cops weren't waiting for them at the Cetacean
10:54Institute. Funny, but dumb. Number 1. Starfleet's Sitting Ducks
11:00Starfleet Command. Spacedock, this is Starfleet Command. Launch all vessels. Launch all vessels.
11:05Controller 2. Sir, Spacedock doors are inoperative. All emergency systems are non-functional.
11:11Controller 1. Engage reserve power. Controller 2. Aye, sir. Controller 1.
11:16Starfleet Command, this is Spacedock on emergency channels. We've lost all internal power.
11:21What's wrong with this picture? Starfleet knows this giant probe is making a beeline for Earth,
11:27and that it's knocked out at least five ships en route. Cartwright,
11:31Mr. President, the probe is headed directly for us. The signal is damaging everything in its path.
11:36The Klingons have lost two vessels. Two starships and three smaller vessels have been neutralized.
11:42So, with this seemingly unstoppable unknown bearing down on them, does Starfleet set up a picket line
11:48of starships? Launch ships to approach this unknown from various trajectories in order to figure out the
11:53radius of its power neutralizing force? Or study it from afar? None of those. No. No,
11:59Starfleet does none of that. Starfleet keeps its great experiment, the Excelsior, and other ships,
12:05parked in Spacedock with the doors closed until the probe is literally on top of them. With the result
12:10that none of them can make an attempt to contact or escape the probe. Starfleet saw this one coming.
12:16That's not just dumb, it's criminally negligent and dereliction of duty. And those were 10 of the
12:23dumbest things in Star Trek, the one with the whales. If you enjoyed this video and or this ongoing
12:29series, then make sure to give us a like and tell us what you thought was dumb in the movie.
12:34If you're
12:35not already, go ahead and hit that subscribe button so you never miss a new upload. Don't forget to check
12:40us out on whatculture.com, too, because this is also an adaptation of an article which has four
12:45additional dumb things, so you can check that out there. Until next time, I've been Brie with Trek
12:51Culture, and don't forget to live long and prosper.
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