star trek whale song

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

STAR DATE: 1986. HOW ON EARTH CAN THEY SAVE THE FUTURE?

" A catastrophe in the future can only be averted by a journey into Earth's past. "

Admiral James T. Kirk is prepared to take the consequences for rescuing Spock and stealing and then losing the starship Enterprise , but a new danger has put Earth itself in jeopardy. Kirk and his crew must travel back in time in an old Klingon Bird-of-Prey to right an ancient wrong, in the hopes of saving Earth – and the Federation – from certain doom.

• 1.1 23rd century
• 1.2 20th century
• 1.3 23rd century
• 2 Memorable quotes
• 3.1 Creation and production
• 3.2 Continuity
• 3.5.1 Merchandise gallery
• 3.6 Awards and honors
• 3.7 Apocrypha
• 4.1.1 Opening credits
• 4.1.2 Closing credits
• 4.2.1 Performers
• 4.2.2 Stunt performers
• 4.2.3 Production staff
• 4.3.1 Other references
• 4.3.2 Unreferenced material
• 4.3.3 Related topics
• 4.4 External links

Summary [ ]

23rd century [ ].

Sensor analysis

It is the year 2286 , and an alien vessel is moving through space . The huge vessel is detected by the USS Saratoga , and sensor analysis reveals it to be some sort of probe . The captain of the Saratoga contacts Starfleet Command and informs them that this alien probe is apparently headed to the Terran solar system . Starfleet tells Saratoga to continue the tracking and they will analyze their transmissions and advise.

" James T. Kirk, renegade and terrorist! "

Back on Earth, the Klingon Ambassador to the United Federation of Planets demands the extradition of Admiral James T. Kirk for murdering a Klingon crew and for stealing a Klingon vessel. The ambassador also denounces the failed Genesis Project as a mere weapon and the Genesis planet as a staging area from which to launch the annihilation of the Klingon race. Just then, Ambassador Sarek arrives in the council chambers and says that Genesis was named for creating life and not death. He goes on to accuse the Klingons of shedding the first blood in attempting to possess the secrets of Genesis. Sarek points out that the Klingons destroyed USS Grissom and killed Kirk's son , which the Klingon ambassador does not deny, saying they have the right to defend their race. Sarek then asks if the Klingons have the right to commit murder, which causes an uproar in the council chambers; breaking his silence by calling for everyone else to make silence, the President states that there will be no further outbursts. Sarek says that he has come to speak on behalf of the accused, which the Klingon ambassador decries as a personal bias, as Sarek's son was saved by Kirk. The president tells Sarek that the council's deliberations have already concluded. He then tells the Klingon ambassador that Admiral Kirk faces nine violations of Starfleet regulations . The Klingon ambassador says that the fact Kirk is only facing Starfleet regulations is outrageous and decries that as long as Kirk lives, there will never be any peace between the Federation and the Klingon Empire . As he and his aides storm out of the council chambers, someone in the council chambers calls the ambassador a "pompous ass."

The crew of the Enterprise

On Vulcan, Kirk surveys his crew and they all vote " Aye, sir. " Kirk states then to them " Let the record show that the commander and the crew of the late starship Enterprise have voted unanimously to return to Earth , to face the consequences for their actions in the rescue of their comrade, Captain Spock . " Scott tells Kirk that it'll take him one more day to get their Klingon ship, named by McCoy as the HMS Bounty , ready to go; saying that while damage control is easy, reading Klingon is hard. McCoy laments that Starfleet could have at least sent a ship to pick them up as it's bad enough to know they will be court-martialed and likely imprisoned but the worst is going home in the "Klingon flea trap." Kirk says the "Klingon flea trap" has a cloaking device "which cost [them] a lot." McCoy comments that he wishes they could cloak the stench. Kirk looks up and sees Spock standing at a cliff looking down at them and the ship. Spock then walks off and goes back in a room and resumes computer testing of his mental faculties. While the tests show Spock has regained full control of his faculties once again, he is confused when the computer asks him how he feels.

Spock retrains his mind

Then, Spock's mother Amanda enters and reminds Spock that as he is half-Human he has feelings and the computer is aware of this. Spock says he must go to Earth with the others and offer testimony because he was there when the events occurred. Amanda asks if the good of the many outweighs the good of the one and Spock says it does. Amanda then says that it was a mistake by his flawed, feeling, Human friends for them to sacrifice their futures because they believed that the good of the one, Spock, was more important to them. Spock says that Humans make illogical decisions. Amanda smiles and agrees that they do indeed.

Saratoga disabled

Just then, at the Neutral Zone, the probe comes close to the Saratoga . The captain orders yellow alert , but the probe, issuing a powerful signal, begins draining the ship of all power. As the Saratoga begins to drift, the captain tries to issue a distress call to Starfleet Command.

" Saavik… this is goodbye. " " Yes, Admiral. "

Meanwhile, at Starfleet Command, the President asks Starfleet Admiral Cartwright for a status update and he tells the president that the probe is headed directly toward Earth and that its signal is disabling everything it comes into contact with. According to Cartwright, two Klingon ships have been lost while two Federation starships and three smaller vessels have been neutralized. He then orders contact with the USS Yorktown and their captain says his chief engineer is trying to deploy a makeshift solar sail hoping they can generate enough power to keep themselves alive.

Heading home

As the probe continues toward Earth, on Vulcan the Bounty is almost ready for launch. Kirk comes on the bridge and asks for status reports, Uhura says communications systems are ready and the communications officer is "as ready as she'll ever be." Sulu reports the on-board computer will now interface with the Federation memory bank. Chekov reports the cloaking device is repaired and is now available in all flight modes. Kirk admits to being impressed with all that work for such a short flight. Chekov then tells Kirk since they're in an enemy vessel, he didn't want to risk being shot down on the way to their own funeral. Kirk compliments Chekov's thinking and then calls Scott, who tells him that they are ready to go. Scott says the dilithium resequencer has been converted into something not quite so primitive and that he has personally replaced the Klingon food packs as they were giving Scott a sour stomach. Kirk turns and tells all who are not going to Earth that they better get off. He then turns to Saavik , who is remaining on Vulcan, to tell her goodbye and to thank her. Saavik says that she's not yet had the opportunity to tell Kirk how bravely his son David died and that he saved her and Spock and she wanted Kirk to know. Just then, Spock arrives on the bridge and Saavik wishes him a good day and hopes his journey be free of incident. Spock tells Saavik to " Live long and prosper. " Spock gets permission from Kirk to come aboard, and Kirk tries unsuccessfully to get Spock to call him "Jim" as he is in a command situation. Spock also apologizes for only wearing his Vulcan robes as he seems to have misplaced his uniform. Kirk tells Spock to take his station, a move that concerns McCoy as after all that Spock's been through, he's not liable to be ready to assume such responsibilities but Kirk expresses confidence that it will all come back to him. Kirk then tells Sulu and Chekov to take them home. Sulu and Chekov gently lift the Bounty off the surface and as Saavik and Amanda watch, the Bounty heads off into the Vulcan sunset, on course for Earth.

The probe disables Spacedock

At the same time, the probe has reached Earth and begins the process of neutralizing Spacedock One before they can get the space doors open. All ships inside the dock, including the USS Excelsior , are neutralized and disabled. The probe then continues into Earth orbit and begins pulling water and moisture from the oceans, and clouds begin gathering over the Earth as the probe continues its transmission.

"You really have gone where no man's gone before!"

Sulu reports planet Earth 1.6 hours away, and Chekov reports there are no Federation vessels on assigned patrol stations, which Kirk finds odd. Uhura tells Kirk that the comm channels are flooded with overlapping multiphasic transmissions sounding almost like gibberish. She asks Kirk for some time to try to sort it all out. Just then, McCoy sits next to Spock and asks if he's busy. Spock says that he is simply monitoring and that Uhura is busy. McCoy says that it's sure nice for Spock's katra to be back in Spock's head and not his, stating that he might have carried Spock's soul but he couldn't fill Spock's shoes. When Spock doesn't understand the quip, McCoy drops it and asks if he and Spock could speak about philosophical matters such as life and death but Spock says he didn't have time on Vulcan to review philosophical disciplines. McCoy tells Spock, " You really have gone where no man's gone before " and is amazed that Spock can't tell him what it felt like. Spock says that they can't discuss the subject because they don't have a common frame of reference. When McCoy asks if Spock is joking, Spock defines a joke as "a story with a humorous climax." McCoy is amazed that Spock is inferring that McCoy would have to die in order to discuss Spock's insights on death. Just then Spock tells McCoy he's receiving a number of distress calls , which McCoy doesn't doubt as he gets up and walks away.

Starfleet emergency

Back on Earth, the situation is worsening. Reports from all over the world pour into Starfleet Headquarters . These reports include weather conditions worsening around the planet, such as how temperatures in Juneau , Alaska were dropping and cloud cover was up to 96%. In Tokyo , Japan , all power was gone and only available from reserve banks. Both it and Leningrad had 100% cloud cover and their temperatures were decreasing rapidly. The president asks about worldwide cloud cover and a report of 78.6% comes in. At that point, Cartwright orders a planet-wide emergency and declares red alert . Just then, the influence of the probe comes over and power begins to fade. Cartwright tells the president that even with planetary reserves, they are doomed without the sun. The president states he is well aware of that fact. Just then, Sarek enters into the command center and the president laments that there may be no way to answer the probe. Sarek comments that one cannot answer easily if you don't understand the question. Then Sarek suggests that the president issue a planetary distress signal while there is still time.

" Avoid the planet Earth at all costs!"

Still en route to Earth aboard the Bounty , Uhura tells Kirk that a signal is finally coming through from the Federation. Kirk tells her to put it on screen and they all watch in shock as the president tells all ships everywhere to not approach the planet Earth as the probe is causing critical damage to the Earth, almost totally ionizing the atmosphere. The president says that all power sources have failed and all Earth-orbiting starships are powerless. The probe, according to the president, is vaporizing Earth's oceans and that everyone on Earth will not survive unless they can find a way to respond. The president warns all ships to save their energy and to save themselves and they should avoid the planet Earth at all costs. He then bids farewell and the transmission fades. A stunned Kirk and crew are amazed at what they saw and heard. After a moment, Kirk asks to hear the probe's signal and Uhura patches it through. Spock says that the probe signifies aliens of great intelligence that somehow, are unaware of the signal's destructive nature and that he thinks it illogical that the probe's intention is hostile. When McCoy asks if this is the probe's way of saying hello to the people of the Earth, Spock points out that only Human arrogance assumes the message must be meant for them. When Kirk asks if it could be for some other lifeform, Spock does point out the signal is pointed at Earth's oceans. Kirk asks Uhura to adjust the probe's signal to account for what it would sound like underwater. When she does so, Spock theorizes there can be no response to the message. He then excuses himself to test the theory and he is quickly followed by Kirk and McCoy.

Spock's theory

In the Bounty 's lab, Spock discovers that it is in fact a whale song , specifically that of the humpback whale . McCoy at first wonders who would send a probe across the galaxy to speak to whales, but Kirk and Spock recognize that whales were on Earth ten million years before Humans. Humpback whales, Spock points out, have been extinct since the 21st century , and so it is possible an alien intelligence sent the probe to establish why they lost contact. Kirk wonders if they could simulate a response to the probe's call, but Spock says the language would be gibberish. Kirk asks if the species could exist on some other planet, but Spock answers that they were indigenous to Earth. When Kirk says they must find a way to destroy the probe before it destroys Earth, Spock reminds Kirk the probe would neutralize the Bounty with no effort. Spock does say then that they could theoretically go find some humpback whales. McCoy realizes what Spock is suggesting and is about to ask Kirk to " wait just a damn minute, " but is interrupted by Kirk, who orders Spock to start computations for a time warp .

Kirk's bright idea

In the Bounty 's cargo bay, Kirk asks Scott if they can enclose it to hold water and Scott says he could and McCoy agrees that Kirk is about to go swimming " Off the deep end, Mr. Scott! " Kirk tells Scott they have to go find a couple of humpback whales. McCoy asks Kirk if he is seriously going to attempt time travel in " this rust bucket. " Kirk responds that they have done it before . As he and McCoy head back toward the bridge, McCoy wonders aloud about the plan;

Kirk says that's it and McCoy comments that Kirk's plan is crazy. Kirk tells McCoy if he has a better idea now's the time to tell him. On the bridge he asks Spock about the computations and Spock is working on them. Meanwhile, Kirk has Uhura open a channel to Starfleet Command.

"We're going to attempt time travel. "

Meanwhile the situation on Earth is worsening. A faint transmission believed to be from Admiral Kirk is received and Cartwright orders it put through. Kirk advises Starfleet of their analysis of the probe's signal, tells them that Spock's theory is that only the extinct humpback whale can properly answer the probe and they are going to try time travel. At that moment, Kirk's signal degrades. Cartwright orders the transmission picked back up, but just then the windows behind him shatter and the wind and rain begin to blow into Starfleet Headquarters. At this point, all anyone in the command center can do is wait.

On the Bounty , Spock has completed his calculations and informs Kirk their target is the late 20th century . Unfortunately he can't be more precise because of the limits of the equipment aboard the Bounty . Additionally he had to program some of the variables for his time travel computations from memory. When McCoy worriedly recites a line from Hamlet , " Angels and ministers of grace, defend us, " and Spock recognizes it as act one, scene four, Kirk establishes his faith in Spock's memory and has the ship prepared for warp speed. Kirk orders Chekov to raise the shields and then tells Sulu to engage the Bounty 's warp drive. " May fortune favor the foolish, " Kirk says as the Bounty engages to warp speed.

The Bounty slingshots

The ship slowly accelerates up over warp nine and then as they get closer and closer to the Sun, the ship begins to shake seriously between the effects of high warp and the high solar gravity. A console next to Uhura blows out, but she says she's ok. At the last moment, Kirk orders Sulu to kick in the last of the thruster power, and the Bounty successfully performs the slingshot effect around the Sun . For a brief time, the crew is unconscious as Kirk dreams of their voices and faces (quotes from later are heard here, including Scott saying " Admiral, there be whales here! "), of a whale, and eventually of a person falling from space, through Earth's atmosphere and landing in a lake in a tranquil forest, with a sound of what may be a ship landing.

20th century [ ]

20th century Earth

Kirk awakens to find ship and crew seemingly still intact. He rouses Sulu from his unconsciousness and Sulu finds the braking thrusters have successfully fired. When the viewer is activated Spock determines by the atmosphere's pollution content they have successfully arrived in the latter half of the 20th century. He then reminds Kirk they may already be visible to the Earth's tracking devices of the time and so Kirk orders the cloaking device engaged. The Bounty crosses over the terminator into night and Spock homes in on the west coast of North America . There, Uhura finds a whale song , but is confused to find it coming directly from San Francisco . Just then Scott calls needing to see Kirk immediately.

Dead in the water

Scotty reports a new problem, informing Kirk and Spock the Klingon dilithium crystals have been drained by the time travel and are de-crystallizing. Unfortunately, even in the 23rd century, re-crystallization is not possible and Scott gives them 24 hours before they lose all power and become visible – and dead in the water. Spock theorizes that because of the use of nuclear fission reactors in this time period, they could construct a device to collect some high-energy radioactive photons safely which could then be injected into the dilithium chamber which, in theory, could cause crystalline restructure. Spock then points out that nuclear power was widely used on Naval vessels.

Mission briefing

From his seat at the Bounty 's helm, Sulu recognizes San Francisco and tells everyone he was born there. McCoy remarks that it really doesn't look all that different from the San Francisco of their time. Kirk instructs Sulu to set the ship down in Golden Gate Park . He then assigns everyone to teams, Uhura and Chekov will take care of the photon collection. McCoy, Sulu, and Scott are assigned to find materials to construct a whale tank aboard the ship; and Spock and Kirk are to attempt to find the two humpback whales they detected in San Francisco. Kirk then tells everyone to be very careful as most of the local customs will doubtless be surprising to the time travelers. Everyone then looks at Spock and Kirk says " It's a foregone conclusion none of these people have ever seen an extraterrestrial before. " With that, Spock tears a piece of fabric from his robe and wraps it around his head like a headband which covers his eyebrows and ears. Kirk calls late 20th century culture extremely primitive and paranoid. Chekov is to issue everyone a phaser and communicator but the crew is to maintain radio silence except in emergencies, and anyone in uniform should remove their rank insignia. Kirk firmly tells everyone that they should do their job and get out of there as their own world is waiting for them to save it, if they can.

The Bounty lands in Golden Gate Park , accidentally crushing a trash can (as well as indenting the surrounding ground) under its invisible landing gear, and when the hatch opens, it scares two sanitation workers, who drive out of the area leaving trash behind. Oblivious to this, the Enterprise crew continues onward, Uhura gives the coordinates of the whales to Kirk who quips, " Everybody remember where we parked! "

"Well, double dumbass on you!"

In San Francisco, the crew has trouble adjusting, from watching out for traffic – to which Kirk swears back at a taxi driver – to Kirk's realization that they're going to need some money , being that Earth of then still saw it as a driving force. Kirk and Spock go to an antique shop to sell the glasses McCoy earlier gave Kirk on his last birthday . Kirk receives one hundred dollars (wondering aloud if that's a lot) and then divides it among the teams. He and Spock walk down the streets of San Francisco and Kirk wonders how they're going to find the whales. Spock finds a city map and starts to work out the coordinates on the map. Kirk sees an ad for the Cetacean Institute and the two attempt to get on a bus , only to be tossed back off because they don't have "exact change" and don't know what the term means, either.

In another part of town, McCoy, Scott, and Sulu walk the streets. McCoy wonders how they'll make the whale tank. Scott says he'd normally do it with transparent aluminum but he and Sulu both realize the material doesn't exist yet, so they'll have to make do with a 20th century equivalent. Just then they notice a mural ad on a wall for the Yellow Pages .

"Nu-cle-ar… wessels."

Elsewhere, Chekov and Uhura have also been perusing the phone book and have found the address for the Alameda Naval Base . Unfortunately, their luck in getting those directions isn't entirely successful with people (including one SFPD police officer ) completely ignoring them and a lady telling them the ships are in Alameda , which they already knew but they don't know how to get to Alameda.

Spock takes a dip

Kirk and Spock finally find a bus and, after Spock renders a punk rocker unconscious with a nerve pinch , they arrive at the Cetacean Institute and join in with a tour group which is being led by Dr. Gillian Taylor , a guide and whale lover. Taylor escorts the tour group to the Institute's pride and joy, the only two humpbacks in captivity, named George and Gracie . Kirk comments on the amazing stroke of luck in finding a male and a female humpback in a contained space, they can beam them up together and be on the way home. Spock jumps into the whale tank and performs a mind meld with one of the whales. During Spock's mind meld, he is noticed by a completely astonished Kirk and then an elderly lady in the tour group, which raises Taylor's ire and she and Kirk run back up to the tank and she confronts Spock. Spock tries to explain that he was trying to communicate. Kirk attempts to act as if he's there to help Taylor, but when Spock tells him that if they think the whales are theirs to do with as they please, then they'd be as guilty as those who caused the whales' extinction. At that point, Taylor throws both of them out, threatening to call the police as Spock was messing with her tanks and whales. Spock says the whales like her very much, but they are not " the hell "her" whales, " and when she asks if they told him that, he admits they did.

Kirk and Spock review

As they walk away, Kirk asks about Spock's mind meld. Spock says the whales are not happy with how Humans have treated their species, which Kirk finds understandable and asks if they will help. Spock says he believes he was successful in communicating the Enterprise crew's mission.

Dr. Taylor is outraged by their actions, but later tries to relax with the whales and tells them the intruders didn't mean them any harm. Just then her boss, Bob Briggs , steps up and asks how Gillian is doing and she admits she's very upset. Briggs sympathizes but points out again that they endanger the whales' lives by keeping them at the Institute and they take the same risk letting them go. He tries to calm her by reminding her that they've never been proven to be as intelligent as Humans, but Taylor doesn't buy it, angrily saying she doesn't limit her compassion for someone based on an intelligence estimate.

The nuclear wessel

Chekov and Uhura finally find the location of a nuclear vessel. Chekov begins attempting to make contact with Kirk as Uhura locates the exact coordinates of the reactor. Once Kirk is reached, Chekov reports they found the ship which pleases Kirk, and then Chekov tells Kirk "And Admiral… it is the Enterprise ." Kirk acknowledges and asks the plan. Chekov says they'll beam in that night, get the photons and beam out before anyone can ever know they were there. Kirk approves the plan and tells them to keep him informed.

"I love Italian… and so do you."

Just then Taylor approaches in her truck and agrees to give Kirk and Spock a ride back to San Francisco. Taylor asks Kirk where he's from and he says Iowa . Then asking what Spock meant about the whales' extinction, Kirk says he meant if things go as they are, the humpbacks will disappear forever, but Taylor recounts what Spock said exactly, including referring to the whales as already extinct. Kirk promises that they have nothing to do with the military teaching whales to retrieve torpedoes or "dip shit stuff" like that. Spock then blurts out the fact that Gracie is pregnant , which causes Taylor to slam on her brakes, stopping the truck in amazement because this is something nobody outside the institute knows. She demands to know how Spock knows this. Kirk says he can't say but if she gives them a chance, he'll promise they're not in the military and have no harmful intentions toward the whales. He then says that they may be able to help them in ways she can't imagine. Taylor figures she probably won't believe it either. Kirk and Spock manage to agree that she's not catching them at their best. Kirk then suggests that they all go out to dinner and discuss this further. Taylor asks if they like Italian food and Kirk and Spock banter back and forth for a moment before Kirk can get out that he loves Italian and he tells Spock he does too.

"Professor Scott" and his assistant

In the meantime, Scott and his team have managed to find a manufacturer of large plexiglass walls – Plexicorp – and he and McCoy masquerade as scientists from Edinburgh who are to tour the plant – unbeknownst to the plant's head, Dr. Nichols . Scott makes a scene, but is given a tour of the plant by Nichols and Scott, playing the role, asks if McCoy (his "assistant") can accompany. Nichols says he can and as he commandeers a forklift for them to ride on, McCoy tells Scott " Don't bury yourself in the part! "

Sulu approaches a helicopter pilot and begins speaking to him about the old Huey 204 helicopter on which the pilot is working. The pilot asks Sulu if he's flown any and Sulu says he's flown "here and there." Sulu then tells the pilot that he flew something similar during his Academy days, and the pilot recognizes that the helicopter must be old to him which Sulu admits, but says it's still interesting. He then asks if he can ask a few questions and the pilot agrees to answer them.

Altering the future or preserving history?

Meanwhile, at Plexicorp, after the tour, Scott tells Nichols that they have a very fine plant here and Nichols compliments Scott's impressive knowledge of engineering skill. Scott then says he sees Nichols still working with polymers . Nichols asks what else he'd be using. Scott asks how big a piece of the plexiglass need to be at the measurements they'll need for the Bounty 's cargo bay , holding the pressure of the water that will be inside. Nichols says that a six inch piece would do it. Scott then supposes he shows Nichols a way to make a wall that would do the same thing but only be one inch thick. At first Nichols thinks Scott is joking but McCoy suggest Scott make use of Nichols' computer and he obliges. Although Scott mistakes the old computer for one he can talk to, when Nichols finally tells him to just use the keyboard , Scott does so and quickly comes up with the formula for transparent aluminum. Nichols says it'd take years to work out the dynamics of the matrix, but McCoy tells him he'll be richer than he can dream. When Nichols asks what Scott wants, McCoy excuses them and they go over to the corner. McCoy tells Scott that if they give Nichols the formula, they alter the future . Scott then asks how it is they know Nichols didn't invent transparent aluminum? McCoy agrees to Scott's logic and they go off to make the deal.

Out to dinner

Kirk and Taylor bring Spock back to Golden Gate Park. She asks if Spock won't change his mind about dinner and Spock wonders if there's a problem with the one he has. Kirk says that's a little joke and then tells Spock goodbye. Taylor asks how Spock knew that Gracie is pregnant when nobody knows that. Spock says that Gracie knows she's pregnant and he'll be here in the park. Taylor asks Kirk if Spock is going to just hang out around the bushes and Kirk just shrugs and says it's his way. As Gillian and Kirk drive away, Spock is beamed back aboard the Bounty . Kirk and Taylor are at a pizza restaurant and Kirk allows Gillian to order for them. He then asks how she ended up as a cetacean biologist. She says she is just lucky and a sucker for hard luck cases, mentioning that while she'll never see the whales again after they're released, they'll be tagged with radio transmitters so they can keep track of them. She then asks why Kirk hangs around with " that ditzy guy who knows that Gracie's pregnant and calls you admiral. " Just then, Kirk's Klingon communicator beeps. He tries to ignore it, but it keeps beeping and Taylor notices, calling his communicator a pocket pager and then asks Kirk if he's a doctor. Kirk finally answers it and feigns irritation, saying he said not to call him. Scott is the one calling, he apologizes for the interruption but he thought Kirk would want to know he's beaming Chekov and Uhura in now. Kirk says to tell them to set their phasers on stun and wishes them good luck. He then kills the transmission. Taylor asks for an explanation, Kirk asks when the whales are leaving. Gillian asks who he is, he asks who she thinks he is. Taylor then speculates he's from outer space. Kirk reiterates he's from Iowa, but that he works in outer space. Taylor says she was sure outer space would play a role sooner or later. Kirk then decides to tell her the truth to try and gain Taylor's cooperation in getting the whales. Kirk reveals that he is, by her calendar, from the late 23rd century and he's come back in time to bring two humpback whales with him so they can repopulate the species in his century. Taylor is enthusiastic about getting the details (while not believing a word of it). Kirk asks again when the whales are leaving. Taylor decides to go ahead and tell Kirk that Gracie is indeed very pregnant and that at noon the next day, the whales will be shipped out. At that point, Kirk jumps up and tells Taylor they have to leave just as the pizza arrives. Gillian asks if they can have it to go and then asks Kirk if they use money in the 23rd century and Kirk confirms they don't.

Sneaking aboard

At the same time, aboard the Enterprise , Chekov and Uhura hide briefly from a guard and his dog. They then finish their way to the reactor and Chekov attaches the collector to the reactor. When Uhura asks how long this is going to take, Chekov says it will depend on how much shielding there is between them and the actual reactor.

Back at Golden Gate Park, Taylor tells Kirk that was the briefest dinner she's ever had and the makes it clear she doesn't believe Kirk's story at all. Kirk asks what the whale's radio transmitter's frequency is, but Taylor refuses to tell him, citing that it's classified information. Kirk then tells Taylor that he is here to take two humpbacks to the 23rd century and if he has to do so, he will go to the open sea to get them but he'd much rather have hers as it'd be better for him, for Taylor, and for the whales. Gillian once again implores Kirk to tell her who he really is, but he ignores the question and asks her to think about this but not to take too much time and if Gillian changes her mind about helping them, he'll be right there in the park. As Taylor drives off, Kirk walks toward where the Bounty is parked and Taylor hears the transporter beam taking Kirk aboard and sees the light in the corner of her eye. She looks back and sees Kirk gone and drives on, puzzled.

Aboard the Bounty , Kirk asks for an update. Spock says the tank will be finished by morning and there has been no word yet from Chekov and Uhura since beam-in. Kirk grows frustrated that they are so close with two whales that will work great for them if they don't let them slip from their grasp. Spock says there is a possibility then their mission will fail. Kirk reminds Spock he's talking about the future of everyone on Earth and as he walks away angrily ask Spock that as he's half-Human does he not have any feelings about that? McCoy and Scott look at Spock but he does not answer and simply stands there contemplating Kirk's words.

Wrong place, wrong time

Chekov and Uhura continue to collect the photons. On the Enterprise bridge, their attempts have been noticed in the form of a power drain evidently coming from somewhere aboard and the Enterprise crew begins investigating. Meanwhile, in the reactor area, Chekov and Uhura have gained enough photons and Uhura calls for transport but the signal is very weak. At that same time, the Enterprise crew confirms the power drain and the duty officer calls the commanding officer and reports intruders aboard. Uhura finally makes contact with Scott but as power is down to minimum, he'll have to transport them out one at a time. Chekov sends Uhura first with the collector. Uhura transports out safely with the collector, but due to radiation, Chekov's beam-out fails, and as soldiers converge on the reactor area, Chekov continues to try to contact Scott but his signal fails and he is discovered and taken prisoner. Chekov is held for interrogation. Chekov kept his Starfleet ID with him which is discovered by the investigator. He asks Chekov why he is on the Enterprise and what the communicator and phaser are for. Chekov simply reiterates the truth about being a commander in Starfleet and gives his rank and serial number. The investigator and his aide see that he's obviously Russian but the main investigator says about Chekov " …of course he's a Russkie, but he's a retard or something! " While they're distracted, Chekov picks up the phaser and tries to hold the investigators saying if they don't lie on the floor he'll have to stun them. The investigator tells him to go ahead and do so. Chekov apologizes and tries, but the radiation has disabled his phaser. He attempts to escape captivity but just before he can get off the Enterprise , he falls off a ledge landing in the ships elevator shafts and is injured. The Marines who were chasing Chekov call for a corpsman.

On the Bounty Uhura is desperately searching for any sign of Chekov. Kirk comes on the bridge and asks if she's found anything and Uhura says she should never have left Chekov behind, but Kirk tells her to keep looking and that she did what was necessary. He then contacts Scott and asks for a progress report on the recrystallization. Scott says it'll be well into the next day but Kirk says that's not going to be good enough and he needs to speed it up. Scott acknowledges and mutters to Spock how Kirk is in "a wee bit of a snit." Spock agrees and offers that Kirk is a man of deep feelings and Scott wonders what else is new.

That same day, Taylor arrives at the Institute and lets herself in. She then heads back to the aquarium where she is shocked to see the whales gone. She runs back inside, horrified, only to be intercepted by Briggs who tells her that to avoid a mob scene with the press they were taken away the night before and they felt it would be easier for her. In tears and anger, Taylor slaps Briggs hard across the face and calls him " You son of a bitch! " before storming out of the Institute, getting back in her truck and speeding back to the park in hopes of finding Kirk.

Desperately seeking Kirk

" Hello Alice. Welcome to Wonderland. "

Sulu meanwhile, has the helicopter he was speaking to the pilot about earlier and is using it to transport the large pieces of plexiglass to Golden Gate Park to be installed aboard the Bounty . Just then, Taylor arrives in the park and begins yelling for Kirk, when she sees the helicopter lower itself down and then she sees a man seemingly appear waist up out of thin air. After being stunned for a brief moment, Taylor begins running toward that spot still screaming for Kirk when she bumps into something invisible. She stands and feels along the cloaked Bounty 's landing gear, screaming for Kirk still and saying she needs his help as the whales are gone. Scott notices her and yells down at Kirk that they have a problem. Kirk sees Taylor screaming for him on a monitor and then transports her aboard. When Taylor materializes in the transporter chamber Kirk tells her " Hello Alice , welcome to Wonderland . " Taylor is amazed then that what Kirk had told her before was true. Kirk shows her the whale tank and she tells him that the whales were taken the night before without her knowledge. She says that while they're in Alaska by this point, they're tagged, as she said, so they can track them. Kirk says that they can't go anywhere just yet. When Taylor wonders what kind of a ship this is, Kirk says it's a ship with a missing man. Just then Spock appears to tell Kirk full power has been restored. He then greets Gillian and welcomes her aboard and Taylor can only nod back at Spock, seeing him without the headband for the first time and his ears and eyebrows are exposed to her. Just then an upset Uhura calls Kirk and says she's found Chekov in Mercy Hospital . Chekov is going into emergency surgery and he is not expected to survive. McCoy comes up and tells Kirk he's got to be able to go to the hospital and begs Kirk not to leave Chekov in the hands of 20th century medicine. Spock comes up and tells Kirk he believes McCoy to be correct and they must help Chekov. Upon questioning from Kirk, Spock concedes that it is not the logical thing to do, but it is the Human thing to do. Kirk asks if Gillian can help them. She asks how and McCoy says they'll have to look like physicians.

Unexpected guests

In the hospital, McCoy, Kirk, and Dr. Taylor begin their search for Chekov. While McCoy walks down a hall he passes by an elderly woman who is in serious pain. He stops and asks what's wrong with her and she says it's kidney dialysis . McCoy mutters to himself about this being the Dark Ages . He reaches into his bag, gives the woman a pill and tells her to swallow it and if there's any problem for her to call him, then very kindly touches her face. She takes the pill and he walks away. Kirk and Taylor finally locate Chekov and after meeting up with McCoy, the three grab a stretcher, put Gillian on it, cover her up, and run for the elevator. They reach the next floor and when they try to go into the operating room where Chekov is in, they're stopped by hospital security. Taylor screams as if in pain and McCoy tells the police guards that the woman has " Immediate postprandial upper abdominal distention! " The guards let them in, Kirk asks McCoy what he said she had and he says cramps. Just then, McCoy steps up to the operating table before the attending surgeon can start drilling on Chekov's head. The surgeon demands to know who they are and then what sort of device McCoy is using. McCoy diagnoses Chekov's problem as tearing of the middle meningeal artery. The surgeon asks if McCoy's degree is in dentistry. McCoy gets angry and asks how the surgeon would explain a slow respiratory rate and pulse with coma and he says fundoscopic examination , which McCoy argues is useless in this case. The surgeon says the pressure can be relieved by a simple evacuation of the expanding epidural hematoma. McCoy passionately tells the surgeon that the artery must be repaired and you can't do that by drilling holes into the patient's head. He then asks the surgeon to " put away [his] butcher knives, " and let him save Chekov before it is too late. The surgeon threatens to have the new arrivals removed, but Kirk takes his phaser out and moves the surgeon and the nurses into a small room where he melts the lock. McCoy heals Chekov's injury with a cortical stimulator . When Chekov comes to, Kirk asks him his name and rank. Chekov recites his name and gives his rank after looking at Kirk as admiral.

McCoy, Kirk, and Taylor come out with Chekov on the stretcher. The guards ask how the patient is doing and Kirk says he'll make it. But the guards realize they came in with a woman, to which Kirk simply mutters " One little mistake! " The guards run in, see the surgeon and others are trapped, and are informed the patient has escaped.

"Surprise!"

Realizing their cover has been blown, the three start running the gurney down the hospital corridors with the police guards after them. They run around several corners and pass the elderly woman to whom McCoy gave the pill, who is happily telling everyone that a doctor gave her a pill and she grew a new kidney, which has all the hospital doctors and nurses stunned. They continue running and when Chekov tries to look up, Kirk puts his head back down on the gurney. They finally run into an elevator and the police officers run down the stairs intending to catch them at the next level but the four have disappeared from the hospital and have been beamed to safety while the elevator was in motion. When Kirk asks where the whales might be, Gillian says she can show them if there's a chart on board. But all Kirk wants is the radio frequency. Taylor wants to go with Kirk but Kirk says their next stop is the 23rd century but Taylor, saying she has no one there, insists on helping the whales but Kirk won't hear of it. He then asks her again for the radio frequency and Taylor tells Kirk it's 401 megahertz . Kirk thanks her for everything and then orders himself beamed up but Taylor jumps into his arms just as he's being beamed aboard.

On a whale hunt of their own

On the Bounty , Kirk and Taylor come on the bridge just as Scott calls Spock to tell him that he's ready. Sulu is taking a few moments to readjust to the Bounty 's helm console as he got used to the Huey. Kirk accuses Taylor of tricking him but Taylor says Kirk will need her. He tells Taylor to sit down and orders Sulu and Chekov to take off. The Bounty , still cloaked, lifts off from Golden Gate Park just as a couple of joggers are running by and they get blown over by the dust and wind. The Bounty lifts up into the skies above San Francisco and head toward Alaska. As power settles in and stabilizes, Kirk orders Uhura to start scanning for the whales on the frequency Gillian gave him. When they reach the proper altitude, Kirk orders full impulse power which Sulu estimates should get them to the Bering Sea in twelve minutes. Scotty reports the whale tanks are secured but this will be the first time he's ever beamed up four hundred tons before. When Kirk asks why it's that much, Scotty reminds Kirk they're having to beam aboard not just the whales, but the water around them as well. Kirk then checks with Uhura but the whales haven't been located yet.

The Bounty over the whalers

At that same time, McCoy checks on Spock who appears to be concerned. Spock says that he has tried to use the calculations he used to get them to the 20th century as a reference when calculating to return to the exact moment they left the 23rd unfortunately there are some issues with the calculations that just aren't working out. McCoy says Spock will have to take his best guess. Spock says guessing isn't in his nature and McCoy says that no one is perfect. Just then, Taylor recognizes the whales' signal and Uhura confirms. She detects another signal, which is determined to be a whaling ship. Kirk orders the Bounty into a full power descent and they arrive over the whales just in time to prevent the whaler's harpoon from hitting one of them. When the harpoon bounces off seemingly nothing the whalers are confused. Then the Bounty decloaks over the whaling ship causing the whalers to panic and turn away from the whales in terror. Scotty asks for ten seconds to redirect power from all over the ship to the transporter. Scotty then beams the whales and the surrounding water into the whale tank. The tank creaks, but holds the whales and water securely. Scotty tells Kirk they have full power and as the Bounty leaves Earth behind and enters warp, Kirk takes Taylor to see the whales. But first, he stops and asks Spock about his time calculations and because Scotty couldn't give Spock exact figures he will have to make a guess. This statement surprises Kirk, who calls it extraordinary. When he and Gillian leave, Spock thinks Kirk is confused but McCoy tells him that means Kirk feels better about Spock's guesses than he would most anyone else's facts. Spock then understands it as a compliment and endeavors to make the best guess he can.

"There be whales here!"

At the whale tank, Kirk quotes a line from "Whales Weep Not," which Taylor recognizes. Kirk then notes the irony of how in the past when men were killing the whales, they were destroying their own future. Scotty notes the whales seem happy to see Gillian and hopes she likes the tank. She calls it a miracle but Scotty says that's still to come and Kirk explains that their chances of getting home aren't great and she might have been better off staying where she belonged. Taylor says she belongs with the whales as she is a whale biologist. And suppose they do make it to the 23rd century, who there knows anything about humpback whales? Kirk admits her point there. Just then the ship shudders and Scotty reports a power fall-off. Kirk tells Gillian to stay with the whales and heads to the bridge.

Altering the trajectory

The ship is at high warp approaching the sun and Scott reports that warp 7.9 is the best he can do. Spock reports that not only can they not make breakaway speed, they might not even escape the sun's gravity so he shall try to compensate by altering their trajectory. Spock then requests thruster control which Kirk grants. At the right moment, Spock orders the thrusters fired and the Bounty again disappears behind the Sun.

Abandoning ship

Everyone wakes up again and Kirk asks if the thrusters fired. Spock reports they did and Kirk wonders where they are. Just then, he hears the drone of the probe as the Bounty begins to lose power. As the ship's systems shut down, the Bounty plunges through the Earth's atmosphere and when McCoy wonders where they might be Kirk can only tell him " Out of control and blind as a bat. " At Starfleet Command, the original transmission from Kirk to Starfleet fades. Cartwright calls for it to be restored just as the window shatters as it did before. This time Sarek points at something which is revealed to be the Bounty , and Cartwright notes it's heading right for the Golden Gate Bridge. The Bounty sails under the bridge and crash lands in San Francisco Bay . Kirk orders the hatch blown . He looks outside, sees it's the right place and now the task at hand is to get the whales out before the Bounty sinks. Kirk orders everyone to abandon ship. When he can't reach Scott, Kirk runs toward engineering after telling Spock to ensure the safety of everyone else. Kirk runs down toward the whale tank and manages to force the door open, and pulls Scott and Taylor out of the tank area which is almost completely submerged. Taylor notes the whales are trapped and if they're not freed, they'll drown. Scott says the bay doors have no power and that the explosive override is underwater. Kirk sends them out through the bridge hatch and he swims underwater to the explosive override and pulls it open, knocking the hull of the Bounty open and allowing Kirk and the whales to swim out of the ship. Kirk reaches the surface just in time and is pulled up to safety by Spock and Taylor. After a few moments the whales are seen swimming. Meanwhile, the probe keeps calling for the whales and everyone at Starfleet just watches and waits as the power completely fails.

Whale songs

Having oriented himself pointing straight downward, George begins to sing back to the probe, to which it also orients itself downward to a vertical position before replying. After a few minutes of communication with the whales the probe deactivates its scanner and the weather on Earth begins to calm. Power begins to be restored all around the planet and as the probe leaves the way it came, it passes Spacedock and power is restored aboard the station. As the skies clear over Earth, the Enterprise crew and Gillian celebrate at the Bounty 's crash site.

Vulcan overboard

Kirk pulls Taylor in the water and everyone else except Spock jumps in. Kirk gets up on the ship and manages to toss Spock in, going with him as well. The crew celebrates the end of the crisis in the water as a Starfleet shuttle heads toward them to pick them up. Having saved the Earth, George and Gracie head towards the Golden Gate Bridge for open water to explore the new world they've entered, free from the threat of Human hunters.

Standing trial

However, Kirk and crew still have to face court martial. In the Federation Council Chambers, the President calls the trial to order. Kirk, McCoy, Scott, Chekov, Sulu, and Uhura are brought in from where they were being held, only to be joined by Spock, who was sitting in the Council with his father. The president reminds Spock that he does not stand accused, but Spock intends to stand with his shipmates and the president accepts. He then lists the charges and specifications against the Enterprise crew: conspiracy (which is directed at Bones), assault on Federation officers (which is directed at all of them), theft of Federation property (the starship Enterprise ) (which is directed at Kirk, Scotty, Bones, Sulu, and Chekov), sabotage of the USS Excelsior (which is directed at Scotty), willful destruction of Federation property (again, the USS Enterprise ) (which is directed at Kirk, Scotty, and Chekov), and disobeying direct orders of the Starfleet commander (which is directed at Kirk). The president asks Kirk for his plea, and on behalf of all the officers, Kirk announces he is authorized to plead guilty. The president then says that because of "certain mitigating circumstances," though, all charges are dropped, except for one, and that charge: disobeying a superior officer, is directed solely at Admiral Kirk. The president asks Kirk if he recognizes the need for keeping discipline in any chain of command and Kirk tells the president he does. The president announces that Kirk's punishment is that he will be reduced in rank to captain, and as a consequence of that rank, he is given the duty for which he has demonstrated unswerving ability: the command of a starship. The council chamber begins to cheer until the President silences them and he then tells Kirk that he and his crew have saved Earth from its own short-sightedness and the people of Earth are forever in their debt. At that point, the council chambers breaks into cheering and applause, with people coming down to congratulate the Enterprise crew.

"See ya around the galaxy."

Kirk sees Taylor and she says how happy she is for him and thanks Kirk before starting to leave. Kirk stops her and asks where she's going. Taylor says since she's got three hundred years of catchup learning to do, she's going on board a science vessel. Kirk asks if this means goodbye, especially as one might say back in the 20th century, he doesn't even have Gillian's telephone number and asks how he'll find her. Taylor says she'll find him and kisses him goodbye. " See you around the galaxy, " she says just before departing.

Father and son

Meanwhile Spock has caught up with Sarek and as his father is planning to return to Vulcan, he wants to take his leave of Spock. Spock thanks Sarek for the effort he put out for them, Sarek says there was no effort as Spock is his son and in any case, he was very impressed with Spock's performance during the crisis. Sarek then recalls how he initially opposed Spock's entrance into Starfleet, saying that his judgment may have been incorrect. Sarek says that Spock's associates are people of good character. Spock tells Sarek they are his friends. Sarek accepts that and then asks if Spock has a message for his mother. Spock says he does, and to tell Amanda that he feels fine. He raises his hand in the Vulcan salute and tells his father to " Live long and prosper, " and Sarek reciprocates. Then Spock turns from Sarek, who starts to leave Council chambers en route to Vulcan, and Spock rejoins Kirk and they walk out of the chambers themselves.

"My friends…we've come home."

Flying through spacedock in a travel pod , following an orbit shuttle leading them, the crew heads toward their new assignment. McCoy, saying the bureaucratic mentality is the only constant in the universe, expects they will get a freighter, while Sulu hopes for Excelsior . When Scott asks why Sulu would want "that bucket of bolts " Kirk simply tells Scott that " A ship is a ship ," to which Scott begrudgingly agrees.

" Let's see what she's got. "

From the forward window, the crew notes the Excelsior come into view, but, rather than docking with it, the travel pod continues over it revealing their true destination – a Constitution II -class starship, USS Enterprise , with the primary hull proudly displaying its Starfleet registry : NCC-1701-A. The crew beams as Kirk joyfully announces " My friends… we've come home. " As the new Enterprise departs the Spacedock, the crew takes up their familiar positions on the bridge. With eager anticipation, Sulu informs the captain that the helm is ready. As Kirk takes the center seat, he gives the order: " Let's see what she's got! " With a flash, the Enterprise engages her warp drive, ready to once again boldly go where no man has gone before.

Memorable quotes [ ]

" Behold the quintessential devil in these matters! James T. Kirk, renegade and terrorist! Not only is he responsible for the murder of a Klingon crew, or the theft of a Klingon vessel! See now the real plot and intentions. Even as this Federation was negotiating a peace treaty with us, Kirk was secretly developing the Genesis torpedo, conceived by Kirk's son and test-detonated by the Admiral himself! And the result of this awesome energy was euphemistically called the Genesis planet, a secret base from which to launch the annihilation of the Klingon people!! "

" We demand the extradition of Kirk! We demand justice! " " Klingon justice is a unique point of view, Mr. President. Genesis was perfectly named the creation of life, not death. The Klingons shed the first blood while attempting to possess its secrets. " " Vulcans are well known as the intellectual puppets of this Federation! "

" Your vessel did destroy USS Grissom . Your men did kill Kirk's son . Do you deny these events? " " We deny nothing. We have the right to preserve our race! " " Do you have the right to commit murder? "

" Mr. Ambassador, with all respect, the Council's deliberations are over. " " Then Kirk goes unpunished? " " Admiral Kirk has been charged with nine violations of Starfleet regulations. " " Starfleet regulations?! That's outrageous!! Remember this well. There shall be no peace as long as Kirk lives! "

"You pompous ass!"

" You'd think they could at least send us a ship. It's bad enough to be court-martialed and to have to spend the rest of our lives mining borite, but to have to go home in this Klingon flea trap? " " We could learn a thing or two about this flea trap. It's got a cloaking device that cost us a lot. " " I just wish we could cloak the stench! "

" Emergency channel 0130. Code red. It has been three hours since our contact with the alien probe. All attempts at regaining power have failed. " " It's using forms of energy we do not understand. " " Can you protect us? " " We are launching everything we have. " " Our systems engineers are trying to deploy a makeshift solar-sail. We have high hopes that this will, if successful, generate power to keep us alive. "

" Cloaking device now available on all flight modes. " " I'm impressed! That's a lot of work for a short voyage. " " We are in an enemy wessel, sir. I did not wish to be shot down on the way to our own funeral. " " Good thinking. "

" …and Admiral, I have replaced the Klingon food packs. They were giving me a sour stomach. " " Oh, is that what that was? "

" Saavik… this is goodbye. Thank you. " " Sir, I have not had the opportunity to tell you about your son. David died most bravely. He saved Spock. He saved us all. I thought you should know. " (to Spock) " Good day, Captain Spock. May your journey be free of incident. " " Live long and prosper, Lieutenant. "

" I don't know if you've got the whole picture, but he isn't exactly working on all thrusters. " " It'll come back to him. "

" I may have carried your soul but I sure couldn't fill your shoes. " " My shoes? " " ...Forget it. "

" Come on, Spock. It's me, McCoy! You really have gone where no man has gone before! "

" You mean I have to die to discuss your insights on death? " " Forgive me, Doctor. I am receiving a number of distress calls. " " I don't doubt it! "

" There are other forms of intelligence on Earth, Doctor. Only Human arrogance would assume the message must be meant for man. "

" Are you planning to take a swim? " " Off the deep end, Mister Scott. "

" You're proposing that we go back in time, find humpback whales, then bring them forward in time, drop 'em off, and hope to hell they tell this probe what to go do with itself?! " " That's the general idea. " " Well, that's crazy! " " Got a better idea? Now's the time. "

" Angels and ministers of grace, defend us. "

" May fortune favor the foolish. "

" Did you see that? " " No, and neither did you, so shut up! "

" Everybody remember where we parked! "

" Why don't you watch where you're going, you dumb-ass! " " Well, a double dumb-ass on you! "

" It's a miracle these people ever got out of the twentieth century. "

" The rest of you, break up. You look like a cadet review. "

" Weren't those a present from Doctor McCoy? " " And they will be again. That's the beauty of it. "

" I'll give you one hundred dollars. " " Is that a lot? "

" What does it mean, exact change? "

" Excuse me, sir. Can you direct me to the naval base in Alameda? It's where they keep the nuclear wessels . " (no response) " Nu-cle-ar wes-sels. "

" Ooh, I don't know if I know the answer to that. I think it's across the bay. In Alameda." " That's what I said, Alameda. I know that. " " But where is Alameda!? "

" Excuse me! Excuse me! Would you mind stopping that noise? (punk rocker turns up boombox louder) EXCUSE ME! WOULD YOU MIND STOPPING THAT DAMN NOISE?! (punk rocker flips Kirk off) "

" Your use of language has altered since we arrived, Admiral. It is currently laced with... shall we say, more colorful metaphors." " You mean the profanity. " " Yes. " " Well, that's simply the way they talk here. Nobody pays any attention to you unless you swear every other word. You'll find it in all the literature of the period. " " Such as? " " The collective works of Jacqueline Susann. The novels of Harold Robbins. " " Ah. The giants. "

" To hunt a species to extinction is not logical. " " Whoever said the Human race was logical? "

" They like you very much, but they are not the hell your whales. " " I … I suppose they told you that, huh? " " The hell they did. " " Right. "

" If we play our cards right, we may be able to find out when those whales are leaving. " " How will playing cards help? "

" Very little point in my trying to explain. " " Yeah, I'll buy that. What about him? " " Him? He's harmless. Back in the sixties he was part of the free speech movement at Berkeley. I think he had a little too much LDS . " " LDS? "

" I have a photographic memory. I see words. "

" Are you sure it isn't the time for a colorful metaphor? "

" You're aren't one of those guys from the military, are you, trying to teach whales to retrieve torpedoes, or some dipshit stuff like that? " " No, ma'am. No dipshit. "

" Gracie is pregnant. " (Gillian suddenly stops her truck) " Alright, who are you, and don't jerk me around anymore. I wanna know how you know that? "

" You're not exactly catching us at our best. " " That much is certain. "

" I love Italian. " (Kirk looks at Spock) " And so do you. " " Yes. "

" I find it hard to believe that I've come millions of miles! " " Thousands! Thousands! " " Thousands of miles on an invited tour of inspection! "

" Don't bury yourself in the part! "

" Hello, computer. "

" NOT NOW, MADELINE!!! "

" You realize, of course, if we give him the formula, we're altering the future. " " Why? How do we know he didn't invent the thing? "

" Are you sure you won't change your mind? " " Is there something wrong with the one I have? "

" Wait a minute! How did you know Gracie's pregnant? Nobody knows that. " " Gracie does. "

" Don't tell me. You're from outer space. " " No, I'm from Iowa. I only work in outer space. "

" Okay, the truth. I am from, what on your calendar, would be the 23rd Century. I have come back in time to retrieve a pair of humpback whales in an attempt to... repopulate the species. " " Well, why didn't you just say so? Why all the coy disguises? "

" You play games with me, mister, and you're through! " " I am? May I go now? "

" All right, make nice. Give us the ray gun. " " I warn you, I will have to stun you. " " Go ahead. Stun me. " " I'm very sorry, but... " (Chekov uses the phaser but it doesn't work, making only a weak noise) " Must be the radiation. "

" They left last night. We didn't want a mob scene with the press; it wouldn't have been good for them. Besides, I thought it would be easier on you this way. " " You sent them away without even letting me say goodbye?! You son of a bitch!! " (slaps him hard)

" Hello, Alice. Welcome to Wonderland. "

" Is that the logical thing to do, Spock? " " No, but it is the Human thing to do. "

" Well, what's wrong with you? " " Kidney dialysis. " " "Dialysis"? What is this, the Dark Ages? (McCoy gives her a pill out of his bag) Now you swallow that. And if you have any more problems, just call me. "

" This woman has immediate post-prandial upper abdominal distension! Get out of the way! Get out of the way! " " What did you say she's got? " " Cramps. "

" Tearing of the middle meningeal artery. " " What's your degree in, dentistry? " " How do you explain slowing pulse, low respiratory rate and coma? " " Fundoscopic examination... " " Fundoscopic examination is unrevealing in these cases! " " A simple evacuation of the expanding epidural hematoma will relieve the pressure. " " Good God, man! Drilling holes in his head's not the answer! The artery must be repaired! Now put away your butcher knives and let me save this patient before it's too late!"

" We're dealing with medievalism here! Chemotherapy! Fundoscopic examinations! "

" Pavel, talk to me. Name! Rank! " " Chekov, Pavel. Rank, admiral! "

" He's gonna make it! " " He? You went in with a she! " " One little mistake. "

" Doctor gave me a pill and I grew a new kidney! The doctor gave me a pill and I grew a new kidney! "

" Where would the whales be by now? " " At sea. If you have a chart on board, I'll show you. " " No, no, no. All I need is the radio frequency to track them. " " What are you talking about? I'm coming with you. " " You can't. Our next stop is the twenty-third century. " " Well, I don't care! I've got nobody here. I have got to help those whales!! " " I have no time to argue with you, or even tell you how much you've meant to us. The radio frequency, please. " " The frequency's 401 megahertz. " " Thank you, for everything. Scotty, beam me up! " " Surprise! "

" Spock, where the hell's that power you promised? " " One damn minute, Admiral! "

" Guessing is not in my nature, Doctor. " " Well, nobody's perfect. "

" Admiral! There be whales here! "

" He means that he feels safer about your guesses than most other people's facts. "

" They say the sea is cold but the sea contains the hottest blood of all. "

" My God, Jim. Where are we? " Out of control and blind as a bat."

" Captain Spock, you do not stand accused. " " Mr. President, I stand with my shipmates. "

" The charges and specifications are: conspiracy, assault on Federation officers, theft of Federation property, namely the starship Enterprise , sabotage of the USS Excelsior , willful destruction of Federation property, specifically the aforementioned USS Enterprise , and finally, disobeying the direct orders of the Starfleet Commander. Admiral Kirk, how do you plead? " " On behalf of all of us, Mr. President, I'm authorized to plead guilty. " " So entered. Because of certain mitigating circumstances, all charges but one are summarily dismissed. The remaining charge, disobeying the orders of a superior officer, is directed solely at Admiral Kirk. "

" James T. Kirk, it is the judgment of this council that you be reduced in rank to Captain, and that as a consequence of your new rank, you be given the responsibility for which you have repeatedly demonstrated unswerving ability: the command of a starship. "

" I'm so happy for you I can't tell you! Thank you so much. " " Wait a minute! Where are you going? " " You're going to your ship, I'm going to mine. Science vessel. I've got 300 years of catch-up learning to do. " " You mean, this is goodbye? " " Why does it have to be goodbye? " " Well... like they say in your century, I don't even have your telephone number. (they laugh) How will I find you? " " Don't worry. I'll find you. (kisses Kirk) See you around the galaxy. "

" I am returning to Vulcan within the hour. I would like to take my leave of you. " " It was most kind of you to make this effort. " " It was no effort. You are my son. Besides, I am most impressed with your performance in this crisis. " " Most kind. " " As I recall, I opposed your enlistment in Starfleet. It is possible that judgment was incorrect. Your associates are people of good character. " " They are my friends. " " Yes, of course. Do you have a message for your mother? " " Yes. Tell her... I feel fine. "

" The bureaucratic mentality is the only constant in the universe. We'll get a freighter. " " With all due respect, Doctor, I'm counting on Excelsior . " "Excelsior? Why in God's name would you want that bucket of bolts? " A ship is a ship, Mr. Scott. " " Whatever you say, Sir. Thy will be done. "

" My friends. We've come home. "

" All right, Mr. Sulu, let's see what she's got. "

Background information [ ]

The dedication displayed at the beginning of the film

Australian poster for The Voyage Home

• The film is dedicated " to the men and women of the spaceship Challenger ", which exploded shortly after liftoff on 28 January 1986 , almost ten months before the release of Star Trek IV .
• Prior to the release of the 2009 film Star Trek (which as of October, 2009, grossed over $384.9 million), The Voyage Home was the highest-grossing Star Trek film, making $109.7 million in the United States. Due to the success of this film, Paramount decided to make the second Star Trek TV series a reality (after the unsuccessful attempt of Star Trek: Phase II ). That series eventually became Star Trek: The Next Generation , which premiered the next fall. The first US VHS tape release of the movie contained a small promo clip for The Next Generation , briefly introducing the new Enterprise and characters.
• Outside of North America, the film's title was changed to The Voyage Home: Star Trek IV (see UK trailer below), and references to the Star Trek brand were consciously avoided. This was done largely because Star Trek III: The Search for Spock had suffered badly from competition with Ghostbusters outside of North America and only grossed just over ten million dollars. A special prologue (see Trivia section below), in the form of a captain's log was created to detail the events of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock to aid newcomers, narrated by William Shatner himself. [1] (X) While the tactic was somewhat successful, the rest-of-the-world gross of around $24 million was still less than a fifth of the film's overall total, and so Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country was marketed as normal worldwide ( Star Trek V: The Final Frontier was not theatrically released in most countries). Although the early VHS releases also carried the inverted title, when the film was eventually released on DVD, its title reverted to Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home worldwide.
• The Voyage Home was released in the United Kingdom on 10 April 1987 . It launched at the top of the box office and stayed there for two weeks. It earned £2,697,776 overall. [2]
• The Voyage Home is ranked #2 out of the #11 Star Trek-based films according to Box Office Mojo, not adjusting for inflation, which makes it the most successful film until the 2009's Star Trek . [3]

Creation and production [ ]

• This film marked the start of Michael Okuda 's nineteen year relationship with the Star Trek franchise, both movies and television. For this film, he designed the computer displays as well as introducing the "touch screen" computer consoles, seen in the rest of the Star Trek films and television shows (except for Star Trek: Enterprise ).
• According to several issues of the DC Star Trek comics letters page, the film was originally scheduled for release in the summer of 1986, but was delayed due to William Shatner still filming episodes of TJ Hooker and they had to wait until its shooting season was completed before Shatner could join the project.
• The letters page of at least one issue (26) of the DC Star Trek comic also refers to the film by its apparent working title, Star Trek IV: The Adventure Continues .
• The character of Dr. Taylor was originally a male character who was a wacky college professor who was a " UFO nut," and, for added humor to the lighthearted script, actor Eddie Murphy was offered the role. Mike Okuda 's DVD text commentary, as well as William Shatner's Star Trek Movie Memories , indicate that Murphy, as a fan of Star Trek, had approached Nimoy and Bennett about a role in the film, but later he decided to appear in The Golden Child instead (a decision he admits later was a big mistake), and Catherine Hicks won the rewritten and revised role. Nicholas Meyer later stated that when he came in to write the 20th century section of the film, he realized the earlier drafts were written with Murphy in mind.
• An early draft of the script had Sulu meeting a young child on the streets of San Francisco who was his distant ancestor . According to William Shatner's Star Trek Movie Memories , the scene was an idea pitched to Harve Bennett by George Takei, who was delighted when he discovered the scene was to be shot. However, when it came time to film the scene, the child they hired to play the role of Sulu's great-great-great grandfather was not a professional actor, and his mother was on set, causing the child to be extremely nervous. Consequently, they couldn't get anything done with the boy and eventually they had to move on. The scene was scrapped, much to the heartbreak of Takei. The scene survives in Vonda McIntyre 's novelization . In the novel, while Sulu, McCoy and Scotty are walking the streets of San Francisco, a young Japanese boy walks up to Sulu, thinking him a relative and begins speaking to Sulu in Japanese and Sulu would find out the boy's name was Akira Sulu. After the boy leaves, McCoy asks who that was and Sulu tells him that the boy was in fact, his great-great-great grandfather.
• Early drafts of the script had Saavik remaining on Vulcan due to her being pregnant with Spock's child, following the events of the previous movie when young Spock went through pon farr as he aged rapidly, implying that he had sex with Saavik on the Genesis Planet .
• The scene where Kirk says "LDS" instead of "LSD" originally called for Gillian Taylor to ask if he was dyslexic on top of everything else.
• Most of the shots of the humpback whales were taken using four-foot long animatronics models. Four such models were created, and were so realistic that after release of the film, US fishing authorities publicly criticized the film makers for getting too close to whales in the wild. The filmmakers reportedly said that they enjoyed telling those same authorities that except for the live shots toward the end of the film, the whale scenes weren't real. The scenes involving these whales were shot in a swimming pool in a Los Angeles area high school. A large animatronic tail was also created, for the scene on the sinking Bird-of-Prey, filmed on the Paramount car park, which was flooded for the shoot. The same spot was previously seen as a part of planet Vulcan in Star Trek: The Motion Picture . The shot of the whales swimming past the Golden Gate Bridge was filmed on location, and nearly ended in disaster when a cable got snagged on a nuclear submarine and the whales were towed out to sea.

The crew of the USS Enterprise in San Francisco, 1986

• Some of the Bird-of-Prey footage is reused from Star Trek III: The Search for Spock .
• A shot of the Bird-of-Prey heading to the Sun at warp speed was reused, with added disruptor fire in TNG : " Redemption II ".
• The aircraft carrier sequences were actually filmed aboard the conventionally-powered Forrestal -class carrier USS Ranger (CV 61) . Ranger can be distinguished from Enterprise by her longer rectangular superstructure (barely visible behind the hair of Nichelle Nichols ) and different arrangement of aircraft elevators. Enterprise was out at sea at the time and unavailable for filming. Even if available, in 1986, the engineering spaces of the nuclear carriers were deeply classified and filming a movie in them would have been impossible. All Enterprise sailors and marines were played by Ranger personnel (in certain scenes, freeze-frame reveals sailors wearing Ranger ball caps rather than Enterprise ones).
• Dr. Taylor orders Michelob beer over dinner, one of the few instances where an actual product is named in Star Trek . While the beer's label was never shown, another company managed to have a rare Trek moment of product placement . The computer used by Scotty at the Plexicorp factory is clearly a period-appropriate Macintosh Plus , and Apple Computer Company – as it was then known – receives a credit at the end of the film. Pacific Bell advertising is also prominently visible. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier offers one of the few other instances of product placement in the franchise's history, when Kirk, Spock and McCoy go camping wearing Levi's jeans. Another instance of this was in the opening sequence of Star Trek Generations , when a bottle of Dom Perignon was smashed on the hull of the Enterprise -B at the ship's christening. In Star Trek , a young Kirk uses an integrated Nokia mobile car phone, while Uhura is seen ordering Budweisers in an Iowa bar .
• The Voyage Home is the first Star Trek production to be directed by a member of the main cast. While Leonard Nimoy had also directed the previous film, he was not a member of the main cast, only appearing at the end.

Continuity [ ]

• This film establishes that Hikaru Sulu was born in San Francisco.
• This marks Majel Barrett 's final performance as Christine Chapel .
• The slingshot effect used by the Bounty to travel into the past was previously used in " Tomorrow is Yesterday " and " Assignment: Earth ". Kirk directly references these events when he says " We've done it before ", referring to the slingshot maneuver. In Assignment: Earth and this movie, the Enterprise travels back exactly three hundred years, a fact perhaps explained by Spock's comment that he had to program some of the variables from memory.
• The film marks the last on-screen appearance of a Starfleet commodore , seen as a non-speaking extra in the Federation Council chambers, until the Star Trek: Enterprise episode " First Flight ". It remained the chronologically-latest sighting of the rank in-universe prior to the appearance of Commodore Oh in Star Trek: Picard .
• The city of San Francisco would be visited by time-traveling Star Trek characters again, in the episodes TNG : " Time's Arrow " and TNG : " Time's Arrow, Part II ", and DS9 : " Past Tense, Part I " and DS9 : " Past Tense, Part II ".
• Brock Peters, who plays Admiral Cartwright in this film (and later in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country ), also played the father of Benjamin Sisko in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine .
• This film establishes that Kirk is from Iowa. However, Kirk doesn't specifically say he was born in Iowa but was from there. According to Roberto Orci , one of the writers of Star Trek , the USS Kelvin was headed to Earth where James T. Kirk was eventually going to be born in Iowa and not on the Kelvin or Medical shuttle 37 in the alternate reality created by the Narada 's arrival in 2233 .
• During the final courtroom scene, one shot of the crew filing in has the entire main TOS cast in it: Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty, Uhura, Chekov, and Sulu are entering the room, and Rand and Chapel are visible in the audience behind them. This is the only shot in the entire franchise in which all of these characters are on screen at the same time.
• A copy of the San Francisco Register seen in the film dates the 20th century part of the film to Thursday, 18 December , 1986 . This is consistent with marketing for the film, which used the phrase "Stardate: 1986". Leonard Nimoy, in an interview about the film's release on "Good Morning America" in November 1986, mentions that the crew journeys back in time "300 years to now," which strongly suggests 1986 as the destination year and, perhaps less strongly, suggests the crew's own time is 2286.
• The headlines and text in the newspaper are fictional, and can't be straightforwardly linked to real events. Notably, however, one headline mentions that a "Geneva summit [is] in doubt". This is in the context of "nuclear arms talks". Two Geneva summits have been held between the US and other nuclear powers; one in 1955 and one in 1985.
• Kirk states in his Captain's log near the opening of the film that he and his crew are in "our third month of our Vulcan exile", following the final events of Star Trek III . The date of the events of Star Trek III however are not entirely clear . Upon traveling to the 23rd century , Gillian mentions that she has "three hundred years of catch-up learning to do" after being transported to the future, though may have been casually approximating the time difference. StarTrek.com , Star Trek Chronology and Star Trek Encyclopedia , 3rd ed., p. 691 use this the line from Gillian to date the film to 2286. Memory Alpha also uses this year.
• Kirk makes a reference to the HMS Bounty mutiny having occurred five hundred years ago (from his own time). Since that event took place in 1789, it suggests his own time is 2289, though he, too, may have been casually approximating.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium , used as the setting for the Cetacean Institute . The top picture shows how the aquarium looks in real life, and the bottom is how it was adapted for the film

• The lighted table in Starfleet Command eventually became the famous "pool table" located in main engineering of the USS Enterprise -D .
• The USS Saratoga seen in early scenes was actually a slightly modified shooting model of the USS Reliant from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan .
• The bridge set for the aforementioned USS Saratoga was a simple redress set of the bridge of the Grissom from Star Trek III (which itself was a redress of the Enterprise bridge from the first three films). The camera angles used for scenes aboard the Saratoga do not make clear whether modifications seen to the bridge set at the end of the film had yet been made. The shot of the Captain from the Yorktown , which sent a transmission to Starfleet HQ, was also filmed on this set.
• The Bridge of the HMS Bounty was different from its appearance in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock .
• This film has a sense of historical irony regarding ship names. The film depicts the USS Saratoga and mentions the USS Yorktown (which Roddenberry claimed became the Enterprise -A) while featuring the aircraft carrier Enterprise (which was actually portrayed by the real life USS Ranger ). During the period before World War II, the aircraft carriers USS Enterprise , USS Saratoga , USS Yorktown , and USS Ranger , were four of the seven fleet carriers in United States Navy service. The other three were Saratoga 's sister-ship, Lexington , the unique Wasp , and Enterprise 's sister, USS Hornet . All seven of these ships served in the Pacific. Only Enterprise, Ranger, and Saratoga survived the conflict, and were decommissioned shortly after its conclusion.
• The clothes worn by Leonard Nimoy as Spock during his swim in the whale tank were auctioned off in the It's A Wrap! sale and auction . [5]
• During Spock's retraining, an original configuration Constitution -class ship appears on the monitor.
• The whaling ship used in the film was a World War II minesweeper called Golden Gate . [6]
• The whale hunters speak Finnish , even though the script called for a crew of famous humpback hunters like the Norwegians, Icelanders or Russians to be used. [7] Finland has never had any sort of whale hunting industry. However, Norway, a prominent whaling country, has a minority of Kvens, who speak a dialect of the Finnish language.
• Director Nimoy mentioned in the film's DVD commentary that in the scene where Gillian Taylor slaps Bob Briggs for letting the whales leave without letting her say goodbye to them that Catherine Hicks really did slap Scott DeVenney rather hard, and that while DeVenney was neither expecting it nor very happy about it, he took it and was a good sport about it later.
• Since the producers decided not to use subtitles for the Finnish dialogue or the probe/whale song sequence (although Paramount at one point did want subtitles for the film's climax), this is the only film of the first six Star Trek movies to not have any subtitles – not even to establish location or timeframe.
• Due to Star Trek III: The Search for Spock being released direct-to-video in some European and South American territories, a prologue recapping the events of The Search for Spock , narrated by Shatner, was added to release prints of this film in the territories listed above. The UK home video masters were also used for the Australian video release. Some of these releases omitted the Challenger dedication in order to make room for this prologue, but some releases kept both the prologue and the dedication.
• Though he had been distinctly unimpressed by Star Trek III: The Search for Spock , US President Ronald Reagan viewed this film, at the White House , on 20 December 1986 . ( Star Trek Magazine  issue 160 , p. 53)
• Several costumes, props, and items from this movie were sold off on the It's A Wrap! sale and auction on eBay, including a puppet which stood in as an alien ambassador. [8]
• The Voyage Home and Star Trek Beyond are the only two Star Trek films to not feature a starship Enterprise as the primary setting of the film. In both cases, it is due to the destruction of the Enterprise , and its replacement, the Enterprise -A, is seen at the end of the film.
• The Saratoga is popularly assumed to have been harmlessly disabled by the probe even though it's not seen again. And it is generally surmised that the probe just made a big mess on Earth for everyone to clean up. The overall light, comedic nature of this film tends to lead credence to the widely popularized sentiment of Star Trek IV being the only film in the series in which absolutely no one dies.
• This is the only film where none of Star Trek 's signature weapons (phasers, photons, and disruptors) are fired at a ship or individual with the intent to neutralize, kill or destroy. Only two attempts at using a handheld weapon are made; once by Chekov aboard the Enterprise , which fails, and once by Kirk, in which he melts the lock on the door to the room where the surgical staff is confined adjunct to Chekov's operating room at Mercy Hospital.
• Due to the events of the movie, DC Comics' first set of comics had to change course with their stories to accommodate the events of the movie. To this end, they had Spock's mind ravaged by a virus, forcing Kirk and his crew to take the HMS Bounty , which was docked within the Excelsior , and return to Vulcan. Thus, Kirk and his crew were fugitives again, this time for abandoning the Excelsior .
• This is the last Star Trek film to use the 1975-1986 Paramount Pictures logo.
• Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home 's network television premiere occurred on the March 4, 1990 edition of The ABC Sunday Night Movie , the fourth consecutive and last such TV broadcast debut of a Star Trek film on the American Broadcasting Company until the 1999 TV premiere of 1996's Star Trek: First Contact .
• For the occasion of the film's 35th anniversary , Fathom Events organized a limited theatrical release on 19 and 22 August 2021 in select North American cities of the 4K Ultra HD version of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home , whose remastering to such had just been completed. Aside from the film itself, the 2009 The Three Picture Saga special feature was also shown. [9] [10] [11]

Video and DVD releases [ ]

• US Betamax release: 1987

Merchandise gallery [ ]

Awards and honors [ ]

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home received the following awards and honors.

Apocrypha [ ]

• The novel The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh, Volume One established that Chekov's Klingon phaser and communicator, which he threw at the investigators on the Enterprise in order to make his escape attempt, were sent to Area 51 and then subsequently recovered by Roberta Lincoln (who was sent by Gary Seven ) before they could be analyzed and potentially alter history.
• In the novelization of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home , during the court martial, when the president tells Spock that he's not accused, Spock tells the president " Mr. President, I stand with my shipmates. Their fate shall be mine. "
• The novelization also expands on McCoy and Scotty's discussion on whether or not they should give Dr. Nichols the formula for transparent aluminum. In the novel, Scotty knows for certain that Nichols did indeed invent transparent aluminum and so it is OK for them to give him the formula and it may well be essential that they do so .
• The unfilmed scene between Sulu and his great-great-great grandfather (see above) was also featured in the novelization .
• In the novelization Kirk recaps the tragic events of " The City on the Edge of Forever " while discussing a possible time travel with Spock and McCoy.
• After her initial shock, Gillian begins to like the transporter and is actually quite surprised when she finds out Doctor McCoy dislikes and distrusts it.

Links and references [ ]

Credits [ ], opening credits [ ].

• William Shatner
• Leonard Nimoy
• DeForest Kelley
• James Doohan
• George Takei
• Walter Koenig
• Nichelle Nichols
• Mark Lenard as Sarek
• Jane Wyatt as Amanda
• Majel Barrett as Commander Chapel
• Robert Ellenstein as the Council President
• John Schuck as the Klingon Ambassador
• Brock Peters as Admiral Cartwright
• Robin Curtis as Lt. Saavik
• Catherine Hicks as Gillian
• Gene Roddenberry
• Leonard Rosenman
• Peter E. Berger
• Jack T. Collis
• Don Peterman , ASC
• Ralph Winter
• Leonard Nimoy & Harve Bennett
• Steve Meerson & Peter Krikes
• Harve Bennett & Nicholas Meyer
• Harve Bennett

Closing credits [ ]

• Kirk – William Shatner
• Spock – Leonard Nimoy
• McCoy – DeForest Kelley
• Scotty – James Doohan
• Sulu – George Takei
• Chekov – Walter Koenig
• Uhura – Nichelle Nichols
• Amanda – Jane Wyatt
• Gillian – Catherine Hicks
• Sarek – Mark Lenard
• Lt. Saavik – Robin Curtis
• Federation Council President – Robert Ellenstein
• Klingon Ambassador – John Schuck
• Admiral Cartwright – Brock Peters
• Starfleet Communications Officer – Michael Snyder
• Starfleet Display Officer – Michael Berryman
• Saratoga Science Officer – Mike Brislane
• Commander Rand – Grace Lee Whitney
• Alien Communications Officer – Jane Wiedlin
• Starship Captain – Vijay Amritraj
• Commander Chapel – Majel Barrett
• Saratoga Helmsman – Nick Ramus
• Controller #1 – Thaddeus Golas
• Controller #2 – Martin Pistone
• Bob Briggs – Scott DeVenney
• Lady in Tour – Viola Stimpson
• 1st Garbageman – Phil Rubenstein
• 2nd Garbageman – John Miranda
• Antique Store Owner – Joe Knowland
• Waiter – Bob Sarlatte
• Cafe Owner – Everett Lee
• Joe – Richard Harder ( deleted scene )
• Nichols – Alex Henteloff
• Pilot – Tony Edwards
• Elderly Patient – Eve Smith
• Intern #1 – Tom Mustin
• Intern #2 – Greg Karas
• Young Doctor – Raymond Singer
• Doctor #1 – David Ellenstein
• Doctor #2 – Judy Levitt
• Usher – Theresa E. Victor
• Jogger – James Menges
• Punk on Bus – Kirk Thatcher
• FBI Agent – Jeff Lester
• Shore Patrolman – Joe Lando
• CDO – Newell Tarrant
• Mike Timoney ( Electronics Technician #1 )
• Jeffrey Martin ( Electronics Technician #2 )
• Marine Sergeant – 1st Sgt Joseph Naradzay , USMC
• Marine Lieutenant – 1st Lt Donald W. Zautcke , USMC
• R.A. Rondell
• Gregory Barnett (also Starfleet technician )
• Steve M. Davison
• Clifford T. Fleming (Stunt helicopter pilot)
• Eddie Hice ( Mercy Hospital patient )
• Bennie E. Moore, Jr. ( Starfleet technician )
• Charles Picerni, Jr.
• Sharon Schaffer ( Mercy Hospital nurse )
• Spike Silver ( Stunt double for Walter Koenig )
• Patrick Kehoe
• Douglas E. Wise
• Frank Capra III
• Ken Ralston
• Brooke Breton
• Kirk Thatcher
• Amanda Mackey
• Bill Shepard
• Keith Peterman
• Kenneth Nishino
• Jay Peterman
• Gene S. Cantamessa , CAS
• Steven G. Cantamessa
• Mark Jennings
• Michael Lantieri
• Clay Pinney
• Brian Tipton
• Don Elliott
• Robert Spurlock
• Robert Fletcher
• Eric Harrison
• Joseph Markham
• Dan Bronson
• Mary Etta Lang
• James L. McCoy
• Silvia Abascal
• Carol O'Connell
• Monique DeSart
• Lily LaCava
• Kal Manning
• Lloyd Gowdy
• Frank McKane
• Calvin Sterry
• Waverly Smothers
• Mike Brooker
• Richard Dow
• Ron Greenwood
• Bart Susman
• Charles Sertin
• Dick Bayard
• John H. Matheson
• Ed Charnock
• Jerry Gadette
• Joe Hubbard
• James Bayliss
• Richard Berger
• Michael Mann
• Michael Meehan
• Stu Statterfield
• Ray McLaughlin
• Andrew Lipshultz
• Bruce Birmelin
• George Villaseñor
• Thomas Bryant
• Reel People, Inc.
• Harry Moreau
• Mark Mangini
• David Stone , MPSE
• Michael J. Benavente
• Warren Hamilton , MPSE
• Stephen Flick , MPSE
• John Pospisil
• Alan Howarth
• George Budd
• Solange Schwalbe
• Tim Mangini
• Dan O'Connell
• Ellen Heuer
• Destiny Borden
• Christopher Flick
• Doug Hemphill
• Else Blangsted
• David Marshall
• Leonard Rosenman and The Yellowjackets
• Ralph Ferraro
• Record Plant Scoring
• Terry Porter
• Dave Hudson
• Mel Metcalfe
• Jack Cooperman , ASC
• Gina Neilson
• Robert Cecil Thorson
• John R. Craig
• Joe Adamson
• Barbara Harris
• Sylvia Rubinstein
• Brigette Roux-Lough
• Rebeca R. Brookshire
• Susan Sackett
• Susan Smith
• Kevin F. Barry
• Industrial Light & Magic , Marin County, CA
• Ralph Gordon
• Mike Gleason
• Chris Evans
• Ellen Lichtwardt
• Warren Franklin
• Erik Jensen
• Selwyn Eddy III
• John V. Fante
• Peter Daulton
• Toby Heindel
• Pat Sweeney
• Ray Gilberti
• Pete Kozachic
• Marty Rosenberg
• Jim Hagedorn
• Bruce Vecchitto
• Lori J. Nelson
• Tim Geideman
• Todd Heindel
• Rick Anderson
• Tony Hudson
• Mark Miller
• Pete Romano
• Craig Barron
• Frank Ordaz
• Caroleen Green
• Randy Johnson
• Eric Christensen
• Bruce Walters
• Ellen Ferguson
• Ralph McQuarrie
• Bob Finley, Jr.
• Brad Jerrell
• Mike Olague
• ILM Computer Graphics
• Craig Caton
• Allen Feuerstein
• Shannon Shea
• Nancy Nimoy
• Richard Hollander
• Mark Peterson
• Michael Okuda
• Hal Landaker
• Alan Landaker
• Donald Hansard, Sr.
• Music by Alexander Courage
• Craig Huxley
• Written by Kirk Thatcher
• Arranged by Mark Mangini
• Performed by Edge of Etiquette
• MCA Records and Tapes
• Monterey Bay Aquarium , Monterey, California
• Humpback Whale Sounds, Courtesy of Roger Payne and New York Zoological Society
• Mark Ferrari and Debbie Glockner-Ferrari of the Humpback Whale Fund
• Howard Weinstein
• Apple Computer Company
• Roy Danchick
• RAdm Charles Reynolds McGrail
• Capt. Walter Davis
• Lt. Sandra Stairs
• Lt. Lee Saunders
• Mr. John Horton
• Marine Detachment, USS Ranger
• US Coast Guard , Long Beach
• US Coast Guard, San Francisco
• Westheimer Company
• Todd-AO/Glen Glenn Studios
• Technicolor
• Industrial Light & Magic

Uncredited [ ]

Performers [ ].

• Joe Adamson as Mercy Hospital doctor
• Cynthia Brian as street passerby
• Michelle Chateau as nun
• Ron Cragg as Federation Council guard
• Jay Crimp as Vulcan electrician
• Monique DeSart as Madelaine
• Michael DiMente as Deltan ambassador
• Paul Giebner as Enterprise (CVN-65) sailor
• Brooks Gulledge as Enterprise (CVN-65) sailor
• Christine Hansen as nun
• Robert Jack as Enterprise (CVN-65) sailor
• Stephen Liska as Torg (archive footage)
• Joel Marston as Starfleet Admiral
• Genevieve Martin as Vulcan noblewoman
• Mary Mascari as Mercy Hospital patient
• Nanci Meek as mental patient
• Ralph Moratz as Mercy Hospital visitor
• Leonard Nimoy as Mercy Hospital visitor
• Ken Peacock as Enterprise (CVN-65) sailor
• Trainee Enterprise crewmember
• Layla Sarakalo as street passerby
• Louise Schulze as Female cafe employee
• Melanie Shatner as Female jogger
• Madge Sinclair as Saratoga captain
• Teresa E. Victor as Aamaarazan councilor
• Philip Weyland as tourist
• Rhoda Williams as alien vocals
• Aamaarazan councilor
• Andorian admiral
• Andorian commodore
• Arcadian delegate
• Arcadian councilors
• Ariolo councilor
• Caitian officer (brown)
• Caitian officer (black)
• Civilian FBI agent
• Three Deltan ambassadors
• Mercy Hospital nurse 1
• Mercy Hospital nurse 2
• Mercy Hospital OP nurse 1
• Mercy Hospital OP nurse 2
• Mercy Hospital PA announcer
• Eleven Mercy Hospital staffers
• Nine Mercy Hospital visitors
• Five street passersby
• Aquarium tourists
• Bus passengers
• Plexicorp workers
• Restaurant cooks
• Restaurant patrons
• Street passersby
• Whale hunters
• Kasheeta councilor
• Purple-skinned alien councilor
• SFPD officer
• Saratoga navigator
• Saratoga bridge crewman and woman
• Tellarite dignitaries
• Vulcan Federation councilor 1
• Vulcan Federation councilor 2
• Vulcan female delegate
• Vulcan delegate
• Xelatian councilors
• Animatronic puppet – Bzzit Khaht councilor

Stunt performers [ ]

• Vince Cadiente
• R.A. Rondell as taxi driver
• Unknown stunt performers as two Starfleet technicians

Production staff [ ]

• Gregory Barnett – Assistant Stunt Coordinator
• Jim Bissell – Technical Advisor: Opening Sequence
• Tom Boyd – Musician: Oboe
• Al Fleming – Makeup Artist
• Pieter Folkens – Advisor, Designer, and Sculptor: Humpback whales mechanics
• Casey Simpson – Lighting Technician
• Rick Stratton – Makeup Artist

References [ ]

18th century ; 19th century ; 20th century ; 1960s ; 21st century ; 40 Eridani A ; .45 automatic ; 747 ; Aamaarazan ; " abandon ship "; ability ; acceleration ; acceleration curve ; acceleration thruster ; act ; act of war ; accusation ; accused ; ailing patient ; aircraft carrier ; Alameda ; Alameda Naval Base ; Alaska ; Alice ; " all ears " ( ear ); " all hands "; " all the tea in China " ( tea , China ); alternative ; AMC Hornet ; American ; amplification wave ; Andorian ; anesthesia ; angel ; annihilation ; answer ; appointment ; aquarium ; Arcadian ; Ariolo ; Arkenite ; arm ; arrival ; arrogance ; arson ; assault ; assistant ; assistant director ; associate ; Atlanta Falcons ; atmosphere ( air ); Atomic Energy Commission ; attention ; attire ; aux power ; axiom ; band ; bathroom ; base ; bearing ; beer ; behavior ; Bering Sea ; " between a rock and a hard place "; binoculars ; bio-sterilization capsule ; birthday present ; " blind as a bat " ( blind , bat ); " bloody "; " blow the hatch "; blue whale ; BMR ; BMW 2002 ; bolt ; " Bones "; borite ; Bounty , HMS ; bowhead whale ; brain ; braking thruster ; breadstick ; breakaway speed ; brochure ; bucket ; Buick LeSabre ; Buick Riviera ; bumper sticker ; bureaucratic ; " bury yourself in the part "; bus ; bus stop ; Busch Gardens ; bush ; buster ; butcher knife ; button badge ; Bzzit Khaht ; Cab Co. ; cable car ; cadet review ; Caitian ; calendar ; calf ; California ; California State Assembly ; camera ; candy striper ; cannula ; Canon ; Captain Video ; captivity ; cargo bay ; cargo bay door ; Carlton ; case ; Cernan, Eugene ; cetacean ; cetacean biologist ( whale biologist ); Cetacean Institute ; chain of command ; chance ; charge ; chemotherapy ; Chevrolet ; Chevrolet C 30 Step Van ; Chevrolet Caprice Classic ; Chevrolet Chevette ; Chevrolet Townsman ; Chevrolet truck ; China ; choice ; CIC ; City Council ; Chrysler LeBaron ; classified ; climax ; cloaking device ; closing speed ; cloud ; cloud cover ; clue ; Coca-Cola ; Code Red ; coefficient ; coffee ; coffeemaker ; coin operated laundry ; Coit Tower ; collector ; colorful metaphor ( profanity ); Columbus Avenue ; coma ; combat information center ( CIC ); command duty officer ; commanding officer ( commander ); common sense ; communicator ; comm channel ; communications ; communications officer ; communications system ; compassion ; compliment ; computation ; computer ; comrade ; conclusion ; condition report ; conspiracy ; constant ; Constitution IIi -class ( unnamed 1 and 2 ); contact ; coordinates ; Copernicus , USS ; court martial ; contact ; corpsman ; country ; cops ; crab ; cramps ; creature ; credit card ; crisis ; critical condition ; crop top ; Crown ; crutch ; crystalline restructure ; cubic foot ; culture ; custom ; damage ; damage control ; damage report ; Dark Ages ; data ; Datsun ; Datsun 510 ; Datsun Truck ; day ; " dead in the water "; death ; degree (academic); degree (angle); deliberation ; demotion ; density ; dentistry ; departure ; deposition ; destruction ; device ; devil ; DeSoto Cab ; dialysis ; Diet Coke ; Diet Pepsi ; dilithium chamber ; dilithium crystal ; dilithium sequencer ; dinner ; discipline ; distance ; distress call ; Doctor ( physician ); Dodge 600 ; Dodge Lancer ; dollar ; Do not enter sign ; door ; Earth ; Edinburgh ; Efrosian ; elapsed time ; electrical power ; electronics technician ; Embarcadero ; emergency ; emergency channel ; emergency channel 0130 ; emergency light ; emergency reserve ; emergency surgery ; emergency system ; emergency thruster ; enemy ; energy ; energy reserve ; engineering ; Enterprise , USS (CVN-65); Enterprise , USS (NCC-1701); Enterprise , USS (NCC-1701-A); epidural hematoma ; escape hatch ; escape route ; estimated time of arrival (ETA); estimating ; Excelsior , USS ; exile ; exit sign ; explosive override ; extinction ; extradition ; extraterrestrial ; E-Z Scrub ; fact ; Fairground Hotel ; false killer whale ; farm boy ; Federal Bureau of Investigation ; Federation ; Federation Council ; Federation President ; feeling ; Feinberg's Loan and Pawn ; Fiat 124 Sport Spider ; Fiat X1/9 ; figure ; " fill your shoes "; fin whale ; finger, the ; Finnish ; fire alarm ; fireman ; fish ; fishing ; " fish story "; Fisherman's Wharf ; flea trap ; floor ; floor plan ; Flyer Industries E800 ; fog ; foot ; Ford Escort ; forklift ; formula ; frame of reference ; Free Speech Movement ; freighter ; frequency ; Friar Tuck ; friend ; friendship ; fuel component ; fundascopic examination ; funeral ; fusion era ; gangway ; garbage can ; garbage truck ; garbageman's significant other ; Genesis ; Genesis Device ; Genesis Torpedo ; Geneva ; genocide ; George and Gracie ; ghetto blaster ; giraffe ; glasses ; GM New Look ; God ; " God damn "; Gold Dust ; Golden Gate Bridge ; Golden Gate Park ; Gottlieb ; Gramalkin ; gravity ; gray whale ; Great Northern Railway ; Grissom , USS ; ground cushion ; Grumman LLV ; guest ; guidance system ; guide ; guilt ; gumball machine ; gums ; gun ; habit ; Hamlet ; 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Other references [ ]

Memory test: 1987 ; anti-graviton ; anti-neutron ; bioengineering ; Cambridge ; carrot ; checkmate ; Constitution -class ; electron configuration ; gadolinium ; Kiri-kin-tha ; Kiri-kin-tha's First Law of Metaphysics ; Klendth ; Klingon mummification glyph ; knight ; Loonkerian outpost ; New York Times ; magazine ; magnetic envelope ; Massachusetts ; matron ; metaphysics ; molecular formula ; object ; pawn ; queen ; rook ; sensor ; sine wave ; three-dimensional chess ; toroidal space-time distortion ; T'Plana-Hath ; universal atmospheric element compensator ; Vulcan philosophy ; white ; yominum sulfide

Phylum search mode : Alopex lagopus ; amphibian ; armadillo ; Beardius baerdi ; Cancer productus ; cattle ; Cervus elaphus ; Chama arcana ; chameleon ; Ciona intestinal ; Coleonyx brevis ; Crisia occidental ; crocodile ; Dasypus novem ; feline ; flatworm ; insect ; kangaroo ; lamprey ; lion ; Martes pennanti ; Megaptera novaeangliae ; moth ; Myotis volans ; nautilus ; Orcinus orca ; Ovis dalli ; Physeter macro ; Plethodon dunni ; Podiceps auritus ; Sciurus griseus ; Sebastes mustinus ; trilobite ; Tursiops tancts ; virus ; Vulpes velox ; Ziphius cavitro

MUNI system map : Albany ; Alcatraz ; Angel Island ; Bay Farm Island ; Belmont ; Berkeley ; Brisbane ; Brooks Island ; Burlingame ; Daly City ; East Richmond ; El Cerrito ; Foster City ; Hillsborough ; Kensington ; Millbrae ; Oakland ; Oakland Army Base ; Oakland Supply Depot ; Piedmont ; Richmond ; Richmond-San Rafael Bridge ; San Bruno ; San Francisco State Fish and Game Refuge ; San Mateo ; Tiburon

San Francisco locations : 101 California Street ; 123 Mission Street ; 30-Stockton ; 345 California Center ; 44 Montgomery ; 50 Fremont Center ; 580 California Street ; 601 California Street ; 650 California Street ; Baker Beach ; Bank of America Center ; Bathhouse Building ; Bay Street ; Embarcadero Center ; Fort Mason ; Fort Point ; Gateway, The ; Greenwich Street ; Holiday Inn Chinatown ; Hoyt Street ; Hyatt Regency San Francisco ; Marina Green ; Mason Street ; Mount Davidson ; Mount Sutro ; One Maritime Plaza ; One Market Plaza ; One Sansome Street ; Sentinel Building ; Stockton Street ; Sutro Tower ; Treasure Island ; Twin Peaks ; Van Ness Avenue ; Yerba Buena Island

Unreferenced material [ ]

A-13 ; Adams ; Argus ; Bandit V ; bio-sterilization capsule ; Clampett ; Com Sat 4 ; Com Sat 12 ; Delta V ; dirt bike ; dyslexia ; Engineering Control ; four dimensional time gate ; great flood ; hiber-sedative ; Intrepid , USS ; Jesus ; Joe ; K-12 ; Leaning Tower, The ; Lee ; maternity leave ; Mona Lisa ; Noah's Ark ; parallex matter echo ; Pleadian Quadrant 5 ; Pleadian Quadrant 7 ; Quadrant 12-340 ; Reon VII ; rescue shuttle ; Rigel ; Rigel IV ; Rigel V ; San Francisco Bay Area ; Sector 15 ; Seron, Ralph ; shore patrol ; Shres ; Sphinx, The ; Sulu, Akira ; Vegan D virus ; warp drive regulator ; Zanxthkolt Dynasty

Related topics [ ]

alternate timeline ; Riverside ; Starfleet ranks ; time travel

External links [ ]

• Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home at Memory Beta , the wiki for licensed Star Trek works
• Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home at Wikipedia
• Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home at the Internet Movie Database
• Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home screenplay  at Star Trek Minutiae
• Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home screenplay at CCDump.org
• Filming locations at FilmInAmerica.com
• " Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home " at MissionLogPodcast.com , a Roddenberry Star Trek podcast
• 1 Daniels (Crewman)
• 2 World War III

In Media Res

Regarding star trek iv: a very brief cultural history of whale song.

Curator's Note

Early in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (Leonard Nimoy, 1986), in which a space probe threatens to annihilate the earth unless it gets a response to its cryptic, ocean-directed signal, Kirk instructs Uhura to manipulate a recording of the signal. Modifying it to account for “density, temperature, and salinity factors,” Uhura reveals what the signal, in Kirk’s words, “would sound like underwater.” For many viewers in 1986, the resultant “mroo”s would have been instantly recognizable: humpback whale song—sounds that had proliferated in pop culture for most of two decades. The sonic history of whale song begins with the 1970 LP Songs of the Humpback Whale , a collection of hydrophone recordings released by marine biologist Roger Payne, who furnished Nimoy with the recordings used in the film. The same year heard Alan Hovhaness’s And God Created Great Whales and Judy Collins’s “Farewell to Tarwathie,” both of which featured humpback songs, as well as Pete Seeger’s anti-whaling plaint “The Song of the World’s Last Whale.” In 1977 NASA launched whale songs into deep space on its Voyager Golden Record; the following year, Kate Bush hit #1 in Japan with “Moving,” which opened with a twenty-second whale aria. The high-water mark for whale song was arguably the January 1979 issue of National Geographic , which delivered to millions of readers a flexi disc of humpback phonations set to an explanatory narration by Payne. Bookending this history was Paul Winter’s 1987 Grammy-nominated New Age record Whales Alive , coproduced by Payne and featuring prose and poetry readings by Nimoy, whose presence on the record reinforced Star Trek IV ’s place in this lineage. In using whale songs to motivate its save-the-whales time-travel narrative, Star Trek IV deploys them in a manner consistent with the discourse that surrounded them from start. Throughout the seventies, whale songs were pivotal in spreading the idea that cetaceans were supremely benevolent and intelligent beings threatened by “human arrogance” (to quote Spock) before the natural world—arrogance that would drive not only whales but eventually humankind itself to extinction. In having the crew return to 1986 San Francisco to transport a pair of humpbacks to the twenty-third century, where they’re extinct, to sing to the probe and save the planet, Star Trek IV literalizes Seeger’s earlier call to conscience: “If we can save our singers in the sea, perhaps there’s a chance to save you and me.”

• whale songs
• sonic culture

Hi Jon, thanks for the post! I always enjoyed Spock's line here about "only human arrogance would assume the message must be meant for man." Recently I've been reading Other Minds, by Peter Godfrey-Smith, which talks about the fuzzy areas between consciousness/non-consciousness (something also explored in the recent show Westworld). There seems to be a tentacle turn of sorts in theory, from Flusser's Vampyroteuthis infernalis, to Harraway's Staying With the Trouble. When it comes to nonhuman intelligence, people seem to be talking about cephalopods, rather than cetacea. Have you noticed this shift and if so what do you attribute it to?

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Thanks for your response! That’s a great question. However, I actually don’t think there’s been a marked shift from cetaceans to cephalopods in humanist thought. Consideration of marine life in philosophy and critical theory has been pretty unusual until recently. Rather, the shift seems to have been from mammals to non-mammals—or perhaps more broadly from vertebrates to invertebrates. Without getting into specific arguments, this may have to do a general intellectual acceptance of the complexity of mammalian life and a consequent interest in our affinities and differences with the radically other, whether slime molds (Steven Shaviro) or cephalopods (Flusser, Haraway, Godfrey-Smith)—a project that has, I think, great ethical import as people grapple with climate change and the prospect of mass extinction.

great response, thanks! i

great response, thanks! i think you're right that non-mammals/invertebrates are really what people are thinking about, and that is a pretty neat explanation.

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Songs of the Final Frontier: Listening to Whales in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

2023, Music in Star Trek

In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986), an alien probe in the twenty-third century wreaks ecological havoc on Earth while emitting a signal reminiscent of the song of a long-extinct humpback whale. In order to rescue the planet, Admiral James Kirk and crew must time-travel back to the San Francisco Bay of the 1980s to find living whales capable of translating the probe's message. Representing whale song as both the harbinger of, and antidote to, environmental crisis, The Voyage Home displays an ambivalent approach to whale vocalization. While Admiral Kirk hears the whales’ indecipherable song as a means to the anthropocentric end of saving the Earth's climate-distressed humans, the Vulcan Spock resists imbuing their vocalizations with self-serving meaning. This essay explores The Voyage Home's contradictory framing of cetacean vocalization as the sound that will ironically save humanity—even as it remains unintelligible to humans. The film's rendering of whale song as meaningful vocalization impervious to human linguistic translation suggests an ethical listening practice that The Voyage Home cannot itself realize due to the film's violent spatiotemporal displacement of the sound's very makers: the whales. However, scientists, artists, and scholars, such as Katy Payne, Daniela Gesundheit, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, take speculative approaches to whale song that attend to cetaceans without demanding their sound's accessibility to dominant regimes of comprehension that include not merely anthropocentrism, but white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy. Guided by these thinkers and creators, the essay advocates for a turn from modeling environmental activism as “stewardship” to shaping such action as “apprenticeship” (in both Gesundheit's and Gumbs's phrasing)—a decolonial practice rooted in listening.

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Musings of a Middle-Aged Geek

… observations from a lifetime of geekiness.

“Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home” (1986); the ‘one with the whales’ is still seaworthy…

34 years ago this November, I went to see “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home” with my Trekkie sister over Thanksgiving weekend. I was a month shy of my 20th birthday, and still filled with much of the optimism for the years ahead that is often reflected in the Star Trek universe. Star Trek III was terrific; a strong outing for first time feature director Leonard Nimoy, so I was hopeful. But all I knew in that pre-internet, spoiler-lite age was that the new story involved humpback whales and time travel. Since some of the better Trek episodes also involved time travel, this could be icing on the cake.

1986 was a good time to be a Star Trek fan. The original series was rerun almost nonstop in syndication, and the episodes were also being released to video (VHS, Beta and laserdisc), including the original pilot, “The Cage” (1965). There was also announcement of a new syndicated Star Trek series coming the following year (which, of course, became “Star Trek: The Next Generation”). There were also many terrific original Star Trek novels from writers such as the late Vonda McIntyre and Ann Crispin. While not quite the ‘golden age’ of Star Trek that was the mid-1990s, the 1980s weren’t half-bad either. Less content, yes, but a few real gems to be found.

Star Trek IV would be the end of an unofficial trilogy (tying off loose plot threads from Star Treks II & III) while also offering something new in the Star Trek franchise–bona fide mainstream success, which made other avenues of Star Trek possible. This would be the Trek movie that non -Trekkies enjoyed as well.

******CETACEAN PROBE-SIZED SPOILERS AHEAD!!******

For this retrospective, I decided to take yet another look at this old favorite of mine through my newly acquired digital projector (my COVID-quarantine sanity machine). Pulling the collapsible screen out to its full diagonal width (80”/203 cm), this would be the first time in 34 years that I’d watched this movie on a big(gish) screen, in the dark, with my undivided attention…

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.

The movie opens with Alexander Courage’s original TOS theme before it segues into a new main title track by Leonard Rosenman. We see an incandescent nebula warming and then cooling, followed by what looks like a giant scanning electron micrograph of a hair follicle out in space…

On the soundtrack we hear unearthly sounds blasting over the comms that have an oddly familiar resonance. We then cut to the bridge of the Federation starship USS Saratoga under the command of Star Trek’s first onscreen unnamed female captain (Madge Sinclair), who asks her science officer to analyze these strange sounds, but to no avail.

The Saratoga captain calls Starfleet command to advise them that the large probe is on a trajectory into the Terran solar system (aka the Sol system… us ). At Starfleet Headquarters, the absentia trial of James T. Kirk and his officers is underway. The president of the Federation Council (Robert Ellenstein) is personally presiding. A visiting Klingon ambassador (John Schuck) shows footage of the last moments of the starship USS Enterprise right before its self-destruction over the Genesis planet, which killed several Klingons who commandeered the ship. The Klingon wants Kirk to answer not only for the deaths of that Klingon crew, but also the theft of their Bird of Prey as well as his part in creating the terraforming Genesis device; which the Klingon government sees as a threat to galactic peace.

Note: Could someone explain how a civilian Federation president can legally preside over a Starfleet court-martial? Shouldn’t it be a military court-martial? Isn’t the Federation civilian? So many potentially disturbing questions on that one…

Interrupting the Klingon’s rhetorical ranting about “Klingon justice” is the cool-headed Vulcan ambassador to Earth, Sarek (Mark Lenard), father of the resurrected Mr. Spock. Sarek reminds the Federation Council that Genesis was created as a terraforming device, not a weapon. Speaking on behalf of Kirk and his exiled officers, Sarek also reiterates that the Klingons shed first blood when they attempted to steal Genesis for themselves. The Klingon ambassador denies nothing, arguing it was an act of racial preservation. Angered that the Council isn’t adding his grievances to the official list of charges, the Klingon warns, “There will be NO peace as long as Kirk lives!” An anonymous voice in the observers’ gallery calls the Klingon a “pompous ass” as he leaves (‘colorful metaphors’ are indeed alive & well in the 23rd century…).

In the third month of their exile to the planet Vulcan, Admiral Kirk (William Shatner) and his comrades, Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley), Mr. Scott (James Doohan), Uhura (Nichelle Nichols), Sulu (George Takei) and Chekov (Walter Koenig) make a unanimous decision to return to Earth in their stolen Klingon ship (renamed the HMS Bounty , of course) to face the charges for their mutinous actions in Star Trek III. They have spent the last three months repairing their recently acquired Klingon ‘rust bucket,’ and are ready to go home, whatever the cost…

The recently rejuvenated Spock is elsewhere, undergoing rigorous computerized testing to ensure that his vast scientific knowledge survived the “Fal Tor Pan” ritual, which restored his memory from McCoy’s mind back into his body. Essentially Dr. McCoy served as Spock’s backup hard drive, following the Vulcan’s ‘death’ in STII. Now, Spock is his old self (more or less), and his scientific knowledge is intact, but the emotional growth and wisdom he was beginning to show in the recent films appears to have wiped clean. Spock stumbles when the computer asks him a very simple question; “How do you feel?” Unable to answer, Spock’s mother Amanda (Jane Wyatt) enters, and tells her restored son that the computer is aware of his half-human lineage, and is testing his emotions. Spock dismisses the question of emotion as irrelevant, as Amanda then makes the case for their value. Making the decision to return to Earth with his colleagues, Amanda still seems confident that her son will eventually come to realize the importance of his human heritage…

In deep space, the USS Saratoga is now immobilized by the loud cries of the unknown alien probe, which wrecks havoc on electrical power systems as it passes. As the ship begins to drift and life-support systems fail, the Saratoga issues a distress call to Starfleet Command.

Back on Vulcan, Kirk and his officers prepare to liftoff for Earth. It’s here that we say goodbye to the character of Lt. Saavik (Robin Curtis), who is choosing to remain behind, under the apparent care of Amanda. Both watch as the Klingon vessel ascends into the sky and flies off into the sunset…

Note: In a (wisely) deleted scene, there was supposed to mention of Saavik being pregnant with Spock’s child, as she ‘eased his suffering’ during his bout with the Vulcan mating urge of ‘pon farr’ back on the Genesis planet. Last time I watched STIII, that ‘fingers’ scene became very difficult to watch, as it now feels (post-MeToo) like statutory rape when viewed out of context. Spock was supposed to be, physically at least, a teenaged boy in that scene, so her being pregnant with his child from that act just feels genuinely wrongheaded.

Aboard the Klingon ship, Uhura is getting multiple distress calls that are “almost a gibberish” as multiple ships are hit with massive power failures. Uhura attempts to sort them out. Speaking of sorting things out, a worried McCoy checks in on Spock. McCoy is worried that Spock isn’t exactly “firing on all thrusters” following the ritual which separated Spock’s essence from his own mind. The good doctor also prods the Vulcan for insight into the experience of death and rebirth, trying to understand for himself what it must’ve been like to have gone “where no man has gone before.” Spock offers no insights however, as his newly literal manner doesn’t seem to grasp what McCoy asks of him. He waves the doctor’s questioning off, telling him he’s receiving “a number of distress calls,” to which McCoy sarcastically adds, “I don’t doubt it.” Their exchanges together are some of my favorite moments in the movie, as they capture the essence of the loving but prickly Spock/McCoy relationship to a tee . So help me, DeForest Kelley gets the best lines in all of the original cast’s Star Trek movies (going all the way back to The Motion Picture) and he delivers them with his unique, wild-eyed charm.

The probe reaches Earth orbit, immediately immobilizing Earth’s massive orbiting spacedock complex. Once directing its shrieks towards the planet’s oceans, they immediately begin to vaporize, causing severe weather storms and electrical blackouts all over the planet. If allowed to continue, the probe’s call to Earth could lead to the planet’s destruction. The Federation president, on Sarek’s urging, issues a planetary distress call which effectively warns all space vessels to avoid the doomed planet and save themselves. The message is met by the stunned silence of Kirk and his officers, as their home planet faces imminent extinction . Kirk sullenly asks Uhura if she can replay the probe’s message for them.

The vaguely familiar wailing noises fill the Klingon ship’s bridge. Spock appears to recognize the sound, which he later confirms to be the songs sung by humpback whales, a species extinct on Earth since the 21st century ( though I certainly hope not ). Since the species doesn’t exist on any other planet in the galaxy, Kirk decides their is but one course of action left; time-travel into Earth’s past, retrieve some humpback whales, and take them into the 23rd century to communicate with the probe. McCoy raises an objection (“Now wait, just a damn minute!”), but Kirk and the crew are adamant; it’s the only solution left to save their home planet. He orders Spock to start calculations for ‘time warp’ using the same dangerously unpredictable time-travel technique seen in TOS’ “Tomorrow Is Yesterday” and “Assignment Earth”; slingshot around the sun at high warp speed, create a time warp, and hope to hell that they wind up in the right era…

Calculating the complex variables for time travel from Spock’s patchy memory, and flying toward the sun in their creaky Klingon craft, it’s a dangerous move. The ship nearly shakes apart as Sulu shouts their warp speeds (“Nine point three! Nine point five…”). It’s a moment that conveys the danger of time travel in a way the old TV show never really could. The crew, pressured by increasing heat and g-forces, lose consciousness as their time-travel drive program continues automatically.

Kirk’s dream sequence is, as an old review in CFQ magazine once put it, “like something out of Russian science fiction.” Early, crude computer graphics show rough forms of the crew’s faces, as well as an abstraction of a humpback whale. We hear spoken dialogue from both earlier and later in the film, giving the impression that the dream is precognitive. There is a weird image of a clay doll flying over the Earth which is more suitable for “The Twilight Zone” than Star Trek. Despite the hit-and-miss graphics, there’s a surreal oddness to the dream sequence that is daringly experimental. Nimoy’s directorial ambition clearly exceeded the available technology, but the result was intriguing. Kirk wakes up to discover that the braking rockets fired on time, and they are indeed over Earth. Spock scans the planet and with almost undetectable sarcasm, tells the crew, “Judging by the pollution content in the atmosphere, I believe we have arrived at the latter half of the 20th century.”

Note: According to the commentary on the DVD, that last line of Spock’s was Nicholas Meyer’s entry point in the screenplay. Writer/producer Harve Bennett wrote all the 23rd century stuff, and Meyer did all of the 20th. There were some legal issues regarding the creative input of credited co-writers Steve Meerson and Peter Krikes, but Nimoy had dismissed their ‘contributions’ as largely irrelevant. Ouch!

Spock advises Kirk to engage the cloaking device of their ship, noting that they may already be visible to radar and satellite tracking of the era. Once cloaked, Kirk arranges for Sulu to set their ship down in Golden Gate Park (really inconspicuous , guys). The admiral then divides his crew into teams. Uhura and Chekov will collect high energy photons from the nuclear reactor of a nearby naval vessel to reconstitute their ship’s drained dilithium crystals; McCoy, Scotty and Sulu will convert one of the ship’s storage bays into a massive aquarium, while the admiral and Spock track the humpback whale songs to their source–somewhere inside the city. Spock takes a moment to disguise his Vulcan ears and eyebrows with a strip of cloth torn from his robe (!). Landing at night, the crew’s eerie arrival from an invisible spaceship causes a bit of UFO trauma for a pair of early morning garbagemen cleaning up at the park (and into the trash goes Starfleet’s ‘non-interference directive’ apparently… ).

We then cut to a bright sunny day in 1986 San Francisco with a blast of ‘hip’ contemporary music to remind us we’re not in the mild-mannered 23rd century anymore. Noticing a newspaper dispenser with a coin box, Kirk remembers that “they’re still using money” in the 20th century. Kirk then decides to pawn his 18th century antique reading glasses (a birthday gift from McCoy in “The Wrath of Khan”) for $100, which he divides among the teams.

Note: Excellent use is made of Union Square, the cable cars, the Golden Gate, and other downtown Frisco locales. Product placements abound as well, with signs for Winchell’s Donuts, Junior Mints, Yellow Pages, etc. Hey, a movie’s gotta eat, right? Product placement, however vilified, is a ‘logical’ means to get extra financing bucks for one’s film.

This following scenes are some of the loosest and most comical in the entire movie, as we see Uhura and heavily Russian-accented Chekov asking locals if they can help them find “nuclear wessels ” (according to the commentary, this scene was largely improvised using real locals as extras). We also see Sulu, McCoy and Scotty roaming the back alleys, trying to find a 20th century equivalent for ’transparent aluminum’ (there was a never-completed scene where San Franciscan native Sulu was to have met his own great-great grandfather, but an uncooperative child actor dashed the scene before it could be finished). Meanwhile, Spock quietly disables an obnoxious punk rocker on a local bus with his famed Vulcan nerve pinch, much to Kirk’s satisfaction. The bus takes the two time travelers to the source of the whale songs, which are coming from the fictional “Cetacean Institute” (nee: Monterey Bay Aquarium). A pair of stray humpback whales named George and Gracie wandered into the bay as calves, and have since taken up residence in a massive outdoor aquarium at the facility. Once there, Spock and Kirk go on a guided tour led by Dr. Gillian Taylor (Catherine Hicks; don’t ask me why a whale biologist at the Institute would be conducting visitor tours; that’s usually an exhibit worker’s job, but oh well).

Note: If there’s one weak link in this otherwise crowd-pleasing Star Trek film, it would have to be Leonard Rosenman’s score. While generally competent, it’s a significant downgrade from the lush scores of Jerry Goldsmith and James Horner in the previous movies. The punk song “I Hate You” is very generic (though the lyrics are hilarious ), and the music used for the later hospital escape sequence sounds dangerously close to something one might use for a gaggle of clowns exiting a Volkswagen. Even the orchestral main title track sounds dangerously close to Rosenman’s own music for the 1978 animated version of “Lord of the Rings”; so much so that when I first heard the 1978 “Rings” theme years later, I thought it was the same track. While not a bad score per se, it calls attention to itself largely in contrast to the previous three films’ objectively superior music.

During the tour, Gillian wears her passion for her subjects on her sleeve, as she brings up disturbing videos and statistics regarding humanity’s cruel and heinous slaughter of whales over past centuries. Composing herself, she then takes the tour group over to an underwater observation window of George and Gracie’s giant tank. Kirk looks around to find that Spock has gone missing. As he looks for his errant Vulcan friend, a woman notices a man swimming in the tank with the whales… Spock . The Vulcan is mind-melding with Gracie in order to communicate their intention to save their species. Gillian, of course, is enraged, and she temporarily leaves the tour, rushing to the upper deck of the aquarium, where she ( and Kirk) confront a soaked Spock, who is putting on his robe after his little swim with the fishies.

Spock is dismayed to find Kirk seemingly taking Gillian’s side (the admiral is trying to keep his ‘cover’ as a native). As Gillian angrily shouts and hurls a few curses at Spock, the Vulcan calmly retorts that neither Gillian nor the rest of humanity ‘owns’ the whales, and that such arrogance is what will lead to the creatures’ extinction in the future. Kirk steps in as peacemaker, and assures Gillian he and Spock will leave peacefully if she promises not to escalate the situation. Gillian, a self-professed “sucker for hard-luck cases” agrees to let the two middle-aged pranksters go.

Meanwhile, at San Francisco Naval Bay, Uhura and Chekov discover a rich source of high-energy photons, ripe for collection–inside of the US aircraft carrier, USS Enterprise (CVA-65); an earlier namesake of their own lost starship. The two plan to beam aboard the carrier later that evening, collect their photons, and beam out. Easy-peasy. What could go wrong?

Note: The now decommissioned USS Enterprise’s near-identical twin, the USS Ranger, doubled for the USS Enterprise in the exterior and interior sequences. In the spring of 1985, my late father and I got to go aboard a tour of the USS Constellation, which is of the same Nimitz-class as Ranger and Enterprise. It was a huge ship; more like a small city on the inside. The view from the bridge, overlooking the flight deck, was amazing as well. I even took a seat at the navigation table. I’ll never forget that tour. The carrier’s appearance in the movie was the only way I could get my father, who hated Star Trek, to watch this movie (after we bought it on laserdisc a year later). He grudgingly admitted to enjoying “the one with the whales.”

Leaving the Cetacean Institute on foot, Kirk and Spock run into Gillian once again, who is heading home herself in her old blue Chevy pickup truck. Feeling sorry for the two sad sacks, she graciously offers them a lift, but warns that if they try anything, she’s got a tire iron right where she can get at it. During their ride out of the parking lot, Kirk tries to pass Spock off as some wild ex-professor hippie from Berkeley who did “a little too much LDS.” She’s also very curious about Spock’s past-tense usage when referring to the whales. Not wanting to blow their cover completely, Kirk nevertheless assures Gillian that he and Spock intend no harm or other “dipshit” for the whales, and in fact, they’re all equally motivated to help the creatures. Their cover is nearly blown for good when Spock blurts out, “Gracie is pregnant.” This fact is known only to Gillian…and, of course, to Gracie . Kirk offers to smooth things out over dinner. Asking if the two guys “like Italian”, Spock immediately answers Gillian with a brutally honest and repeated “no” until Kirk tells him that they both like Italian food. Dropping Spock off at Golden Gate Park instead (actually Will Rogers Park in L.A), Gillian and Kirk drive away…. just as Spock is beamed aboard the ship , barely out of sight.

Note: Gillian’s beat-up old pickup truck, which is more function over form, says a lot about a woman whose life is more clearly about her work rather than personal luxuries or indulgences.

We then catch up with McCoy and Scotty, who manage to locate a business called PlexiCorp, which specializes in large, thick, clear plexiglass panels–perfect for use in a giant aquarium. Mr. Scott pretends to be an indignant professor who has come “millions–er, thousands of miles” from Edinburgh Scotland for a tour of the facility, along with his ‘assistant’ (McCoy). After a tour to sooth the ‘professor’s’ feigned indignity, plant manager Dr. Nichols (Alex Henteloff) takes the pair of tourists back to his office, where Scott piques Nichols’ curiosity by asking what thickness of material would be required to construct a large ( theoretical ) aquarium. Nichols mentions the six inch-thick material they carry in stock. “Burying himself in the part”, Scotty proposes a material that could do the same job–but with one inch thickness. After Nichols laughs him off, Scotty offers to show him by using his vintage 1980s Mac computer. Unsuccessfully trying to voice-activate the device (hehe), Scotty then uses the ‘quaint’ keyboard to create the formula for “transparent aluminum.” He offers to give Nichols the formula in exchange for several sheets of six-inch plexiglass. McCoy whispers to Scotty that giving Nichols the formula for transparent aluminum in 1986 might ‘alter the future’ until Scotty reminds him that for all they know, Nichols himself might be the future ‘inventor’ of the stuff. Outside of the plant, helmsman Sulu makes casual conversation with a Plexicorp helicopter pilot, asking the young pilot “a few questions” about flying such a “old” vehicle.

Note: According to a 2009 article from Science Daily, ‘transparent aluminum’ is, in fact, possible, and can be made by bombarding aluminum with powerful soft x-ray lasers. Google it!

Over dinner at a high-end pizzeria, Kirk and Gillian chill over Michelob beers while they wait for their food. Gillian is deeply and insatiably curious as to who Kirk really is (much as Edith Keeler was in TOS’ “City on the Edge of Forever”). Their conversation is interrupted by a chirp from Kirk’s communicator. He grabs the device, chiding Scotty for the needless interruption. Gillian’s curiosity is fully aflame now; she begins to wonder if Kirk is some kind of secret agent or if he’s working for the military somehow. Coming clean, Kirk tells Gillian he is from the late 23rd century and has come backward in time to retrieve two humpback whales in an attempt to “repopulate the species.” Kirk tries to get information out of Gillian as well–specifically, the radio transmitter frequency the Cetacean Institute will use to track the humpback whales after their return to the open sea. Gillian refuses to answer that (classified) question until the evasive Kirk gives her a reason to trust him. After paying for their pizza (Kirk has no money), Gillian assumes the admiral’s story is a crock and disappointedly drives him back to Golden Gate Park. With a rapidly running clock until the humpbacks are released into the open sea ( noon , the following day), Kirk tells Gillian he will go out into the open sea to get those humpback whales if necessary, but that both of their interests could be better served by cooperation. Kirk reminds her that if she changes her mind, he’ll be “right here” in the park.

Note: The scene when Kirk tries to answer his communicator discreetly may get chuckles today, but one has to remember that tiny mobile/cell/smartphones weren’t yet a thing in 1986. The closest we had to such devices in those days were “pocket pagers” as Gillian assumed Kirk had. Mobile phones were available, but they were the size of bricks. Pocket pagers were much smaller, but they only let you know if someone called; they were incapable of making or receiving calls themselves (let alone send/receive texts). These devices were the preferred emergency contact means of doctors, lawyers and even drug dealers of that time.

Chekov and Uhura’s mission of high-energy photon collection aboard the nuclear reactor room of the USS Enterprise doesn’t quite go as planned. Radiation around the reactor room makes communications and transporters dodgy, so only Uhura is able to be safely beamed back with the photon collector, while Chekov has to wait for a second transport window…which never comes. Chekov is then captured as a suspected Russian agent, interrogated by the FBI, and later chased by armed marines until he falls from the carrier’s flight deck and suffers a head injury after hitting the asphalt below. The suspected saboteur is then taken to Mercy Hospital in San Francisco’s Mission District, where he is listed in critical condition. It’s a really bad day to be Pavel Chekov…

As Sulu gets the hang of flying a 20th century Bell-Huey helicopter to facilitate transport of the heavy plexiglass panels to Scotty aboard the waiting cloaked Klingon ship at Golden Gate Park, Gillian arrives at the Cetacean Institute to find George and Gracie gone! Their giant outdoor tank has been drained. Gillian’s supervisor Bob Briggs (Scott DeVenney) released the whales into the ocean ahead of schedule to spare Gillian the pain of their separation. Understandably, Gillian is super -pissed that Bob denied her a chance to say goodbye, and she delivers a thunderous slap across his chops. With nothing left to lose, the angry, heartbroken Gillian goes back to her truck and makes a spontaneous decision to trust that weird “admiral” and that “ditzy guy” he hangs around with at the park…

Note: The smarmy character of Bob Briggs is the closest thing this atypical movie has to a villain; a welcome relief after the various revenge-seeking Khan-imitators that would plague the rest of the Star Trek movies (including a rebooted Khan in the Kelvinverse movies).

Arriving at the park, Gillian begins shouting for Admiral Kirk. Running into one of the park’s open spaces, she slams right into the invisible Bird of Prey starship, which is given away only by the crushed grass beneath its landing struts (and the sight of Sulu’s helicopter delivering plexiglass panels into open sky ). Just as Gillian begins to realize she might be in over her head, she feels the tingle of a transporter beam and begins to scream… only to finish her scream aboard the Klingon ship. Kirk meets her in the transporter bay, and shows her the progress they’re making in building the tanks for the whales. Jolted out of her awe by mention of her beloved whales, Gillian tells Kirk that the whales were taken out to sea ahead of schedule. She figures the whales might be out near the Bering Sea by now, where they are at risk from whale hunters in that region. Kirk tells her that they can’t leave yet, because their comrade Chekov has been captured. Monitoring phone calls, Uhura tells Kirk and Gillian that Chekov is being prepared for emergency brain surgery at Mercy Hospital. Gillian offers to help them get their man back.

Stealing hospital scrubs, Kirk, McCoy and Gillian disguise themselves as doctors and infiltrate the hospital. Gillian lies on a gurney, pretending to be in agony (“cramps”) in order to get into the operating room where Chekov is being readied. Locking Chekov’s would-be surgeons into a supply room, McCoy uses his advanced, non-invasive 23rd century medical tools to heal Chekov’s brain hemorrhage without drills or other ‘medieval’ 20th century medical tools. With a recovered Chekov, the four of them make for a broadly comical escape from the hospital (as mentioned earlier, Rosenman’s music bludgeons the humor instead of punctuating it). Along the way, McCoy casually slips an elderly dialysis patient a pill, which allows her to grow a new kidney within minutes (forget that whole ‘non-inference directive’ thing, right?). Once inside a hospital elevator, the four are beamed back to Golden Gate Park, where Kirk offers Gillian his thanks in exchange for the whales’ radio frequency. She tells him it’s 401 megahertz, and just as the admiral calls to be beamed up, she grabs him in a bearhug (“Surprise!”), allowing herself to be beamed aboard as well (good thing the Klingon transporter didn’t splice their DNA together.. . just saying ).

Lifting off from the park, the still-cloaked Bird of Prey makes course for the Bering Sea, between Alaska and Russia. Kirk confronts Gillian for tricking him, but she irrefutably reminds him that he will need her whale expertise in the 23rd century. Point taken. As they close in on the whales’ transmitters, they see a Scandinavian whaling vessel in hot pursuit! Closing the distance between them, Sulu hovers over the whaling ship—and turns off the cloaking device! The shock of the massive UFO causes the whalers to abort their hunt and get the hell out of there. With the whalers no longer a threat, Scotty beams George and Gracie (and the water that surrounds them) aboard their “little aquarium.”

Taking Gillian down to have a look at the whales, Gillian is delighted to see her whales again, safe and sound…for the moment. Scotty then reports a power drop, and Kirk rushes to the bridge, where he learns Sulu is unable to achieve the necessary escape velocity from the sun’s powerful gravity well. Spock takes control of the craft’s acceleration thrusters, giving the ship the necessary oomph to make ‘breakaway speed’ in order to achieve time warp. They enter time warp, and again, lose consciousness…

Note: There are major continuity issues with warp speeds in the film. At warp 9 point whatever it was, the journey around the sun should’ve happened in the blink of an eye, not several minutes. Furthermore, Sulu takes the ship to warp speed within Earth’s atmosphere after they rescue George and Gracie… really? Warp drive within a planetary atmosphere ? In Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Kirk was reluctant to engage warp drive while still “within the Solar system.” Oh, and did I mention their cloaking shields were off, meaning that anyone on the ground or in the air could’ve seen that little trick? Moving on…

Safely ‘back to the future’, the Klingon ship is rendered powerless by the orbiting cetacean probe, which causes it to splash down into San Francisco Bay. As their spaceship begins to sink, Kirk orders the crew to abandon ship. Gillian tells Kirk they have to free the air-breathing whales from the cargo hold before they drown; humpback whales can only hold their breath for about a half hour before they need to surface. Holding his own breath, Kirk swims below and opens a manual release to the bay doors, which frees the whales into the Bay. As rain pours outside, Kirk, Gillian and the crew gather along the still-buoyant uppermost hull of their sinking vessel. Curiously the freed whales remain silent, not yet answering the thunderous calls from the orbiting probe…

The whales hear the call of the probe, and angle their bodies into a downward bearing. A conversation between the whales and the probe ensues (much like the musical ‘conversation’ in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”). Suddenly, the conversation ceases, and the probe moves away from Earth orbit.

Note: I love that the writers/filmmakers refused to subtitle the conversation between the whales and the probe. Like the monolith in “2001: A Space Odyssey”, their conversation should remain enigmatic; it’s between them , not us . It’s also never explained exactly why the probe wreaked havoc with Earth’s weather systems when it failed to contact the whales. Was this a natural side-effect of its signal, or was it deliberately vaporizing the oceans in response to a lack of response? And if only seeking out humpback whales, why was its devastating signal activated so far away from the Sol system? I wonder if Spock could mind-meld with the whales and learn exactly what they said to each other, and if it will ever return again? Perhaps that’s a potential subject for a future Star Trek novel (unless someone’s tackled it already).

As the probe exits our solar system, the weather, as well as Earth’s artificial power systems, both begin to function normally again. Storm clouds break and sunlight hits the Bay. The crew are overjoyed, and they begin playing in the water like kids in a swimming pool. Kirk even yanks Spock off of the Bird of Prey’s exterior ladder right into the drink, forcing the Vulcan to break out with an uncharacteristic grimace of indignation (you can hear Nimoy make an audible “Aaaagh!” ). The aquatic frivolities soon come to an end, as we see a rescue shuttle from Starfleet Command close in on the sinking Bird of Prey…

The action then returns to the business of Kirk and his crew’s court-martials over the charges stemming from their actions in Star Trek III. Spock, back in Starfleet uniform, leaves the gallery to stand with his shipmates. Due to the “certain mitigating circumstances” (saving the world and such), the Federation president informs them that all the charges have been dropped, save one; the charge of disobeying a senior officer, which is directed solely at Admiral Kirk. For his ‘punishment’, Kirk is reduced in rank to captain, and as a consequence of his new rank, he’s being given what he’s best suited for–command of a starship. The court martial is dismissed as the gallery breaks into applause, hugs, handshakes and smiles (we even see a pair of smiling Vulcan delegates… oops!). Gillian meets up with Kirk to tell him she’s been assigned to a science vessel (300 years of catch-up learning). Before she leaves a near-speechless Kirk, she gives him a kiss on the cheek, promising to “see ya around the galaxy” (that line still sounds positively Buck Rogers ). This is one of the rare times Kirk didn’t get the girl, though she did pay for their dinner date.

There is also a nice, understated reconciliation of sorts between ambassador Sarek and his resurrected son Spock. After years of disapproving of his son’s military career, Sarek tells his son that his associates are people of good character. “They are my friends,” replies Spock. Asked if he has a message for his human mother back on Vulcan, Spock says with the slightest of smiles, “Yes, tell her… I feel fine .” Father and son then give their customary “live long and prosper” farewells to each other, as Spock joins his captain.

Aboard a travel pod within the massive orbital spacedock complex, the former mutineers-turned-heroes are off to their next assignment, which remains a subject of mystery and speculation. Cynic McCoy assumes they’ll get a freighter. Sulu pines for the USS Excelsior (his future command in Star Trek VI), but Kirk doesn’t really care, simply saying, “a ship is a ship.” Their tiny pod travels towards the giant saucer section of the USS Excelsior…

… only to glide over it, to the ship beyond– another refit-Constitution class starship. This new ship bears the name the USS Enterprise, NCC-1701-A (in the movie’s novelization, it was a rechristened USS Yorktown). Overjoyed at a second chance, Kirk speaks for his shipmates, and perhaps the audience, when he says, “My friends? We’ve come home .”

On a gleaming white bridge, Kirk tells helmsman Sulu, “Let’s see what she’s got!” The ship then streaks off at warp speeds into ‘the final frontier’ (both figuratively and literally, as that would be the title of the William Shatner-directed next feature film, released three years later in 1989).

Note: The graphics on the new bridge, as well as the Klingon bird of prey, were inexpensive backlit transparencies called “Okudagrams,” named after graphic artists (and future Star Trek historians) Michael and Denise Okuda, who would also work together on The Next Generation, and every subsequent Star Trek movie and TV series through 2005.

Spock in Command.

Star Trek IV was director Leonard Nimoy’s second feature film, and when contrasted with his work in Star Trek III, it’s clear that, as Nimoy put it, “the training wheels came off.” Star Trek III was a fine entry in the canon, but it’s often maligned for its shortcomings (lack of scope, predictable story, a television- look ) rather than its strengths (emphasis on character, humor). With Star Trek IV, Nimoy’s style had matured dramatically.

Even the cinematography (under new director of photography Don Peterman) was much more natural, and less harshly lit. Actual locations around San Francisco (as well as Monterey and Los Angeles) gave the film tremendous scope that the somewhat claustrophobic, all-indoor sets of STIII lacked. Even the widescreen images are better composed this time, as Nimoy’s confidence clearly grew.

Even the humorous interplay between the actors, who were already a longtime troupe of 20 years at this point, feels more natural as well. Nimoy had already directed theater and television (“T.J. Hooker”, “The Night Gallery”), but he was clearly coming into his own as a feature film director as well. He would find even greater mainstream success a year later with the hit comedy “Three Men and a Baby” (1987).

Personal Log.

I was privileged to have met Leonard Nimoy in the summer of 2009, at San Diego Comic Con, when he was enjoying mainstream success with JJ Abrams’ “Star Trek” movie. When I met him, we spoke only briefly, but he was very kind and was very forgiving of starstruck fans like myself. In fact, meeting Nimoy was one of only a handful of times I recall being genuinely starstruck, and I freely admit this. This was a man whose talents I’ve idolized since I was a little kid– not to mention that my kid sister had a huge crush on him as well (hehe).

My sister and I were also big fans of Nimoy’s admittedly cheesy but fun syndicated investigative series “In Search Of” (the name of which was jokingly referenced for “The Search For Spock”). I also enjoyed his role in 1978’s “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (where he played an ‘emotionless’ pod person who’s snatched the body of a renowned pop psychologist). The actor-director was also known for his somewhat controversial nude photography of plus-sized women, which was quite innovative and arguably ahead of its time, now that acceptance of different body images has permeated the mainstream, including the covers of Sports Illustrated and various glamour magazines. Nimoy also shot fascinating photos of abstract Jewish iconography as well, which were his way of recognizing and honoring his lifetime faith. Nimoy’s passing was the lost of an innovative artist in so many fields. Despite the actors who’ve played the Spock character since (Zachary Quinto, Ethan Peck), there was only one Leonard Nimoy. Others can certainly assume the Spock role, but Nimoy’s interpretation was both iconic and unique. Sadly, Leonard Nimoy, actor, director and photographer, passed away in 2015 at age 83.

I also had a chance to meet the delightful Catherine Hicks at a convention in Burbank back in 2013. Sweet lady with a beaming smile. We talked a bit about her playing Marilyn Monroe in theTV movie “Marilyn: The Untold Story” (1980). In the film, Hicks captured both the innocence and sadness of the late movie star, and she seemed to really enjoy talking about the role. She told me she didn’t do many conventions and wasn’t even sure how largely to sign her autograph. It was all very new to her, and she was somewhat taken aback by the enduring popularity of her role as Dr. Gillian Taylor ( still can’t imagine Eddie Murphy in that role, however differently written …). I really enjoyed talking with her.

I’ve met other stars of Star Trek, including Nichelle Nichols, whom I’ve met several times, in San Diego, Las Vegas and in Los Angeles. Such a grand lady. While I’m saddened that she’s retired from doing conventions (due to various health issues), I’m just grateful that I’ve had opportunities to meet this lovely woman, and that I can share those encounters here on this site. A friend of mine recently met her last summer at the annual Star Trek Vegas convention, and I loved seeing him geek out over meeting her as well.

Achieving balance.

STIV would be the first Star Trek movie that managed to break out into the mainstream (a feat not repeated until 2009’s “Star Trek”). Suddenly even non-Trekkies talked around water coolers about “the one with the whales.” In a decade full of popular movies about various fish-out-of-water (“Beverly Hills Cop,” “Crocodile Dundee,” “Red Heat,” “Twins,” “Moscow on the Hudson”), “Star Trek IV” fit right in. Despite its mainstream popularity, the film was no less Star Trek, either. STIV managed to steer away from the heavier, black-hat sagas of the previous two (and subsequent ) Star Trek movies and told a genuine science fiction story.

Screenwriters Harve Bennett and Nicholas Meyer (both of whom were longtime good luck charms for the Trek franchise) crafted a deft screenplay about contemporary species extinction and its possible effect on future ecological balance, which was precisely the kind of story Star Trek might’ve done back in the 1960s (time & money permitting, of course). Key to the movie’s success was that it also brought back much of the humor we saw in the original series as well. The humor sold the heavier ecological message, and the result was a popular sci-fi crowd pleaser that works just as well as a mainstream comedy, but without compromising its integrity. “The Voyage Home” was, and is Star Trek “firing on all thrusters.”

COVID-Friendly Viewing.

“Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home” is available for streaming on CBS All Access & Tubi TV in the United States, and for rental on Prime Video, YouTube ($2.99 US). It can, of course, also be purchased on Blu Ray/DVD via contact-free shipping through Amazon.com, among other retailers.

To my readers, I once again wish you and all of your loved ones good health and strength during the current coronavirus pandemic as well.  The current number of COVID-19 related deaths in the United States is nearing  182,   000  as of this writing (that number is increasing  daily ).  So, for the time being, please continue to practice social safe-distancing wherever possible, wear masks in public, and avoid crowded outings as much as possible.

Live long and prosper!

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33 comments add yours.

Star Trek IV is one of my favourites in the whole series. Its such a fun, feel good sci-fi adventure, and a wonderful story as well. So great you got to meet so many of the stars at conventions, must have been awesome to see them in person. Glad to hear you are well. The COVID 19 situation is far from over, here in the UK our government continues to bumble their way through things, and the information / guidelines seems to change every day at the moment. Take care and be safe.

Glad you’re okay as well, Paul. 🙏 And yes, things haven’t exactly been rosy under our current government, either (no secret that I’m not a Trump fan).

And yes, I’d almost forgotten what an unbridled joy this movie was, especially in times such as these!

Live long and prosper Paul! 🖖🏼

Very nice write-up. ST IV is not my favorite movie installment, but it’s still a good movie.

I don’t know, I always thought that “See you around the galaxy” line fit Catherine Hicks’ character perfectly.

By the way, I’ve always been confused about the precise relationship between Starfleet and the Federation myself. Sometimes I think the people in charge of the TV show / movies are *also* a bit uncertain about it!

Great article in remembrance of a great movie. What do you think the point of the transparent aluminum guy saying “Not now, Madeline!!!” was? I’ve seen the movie so many times and it always sticks out to me.

LOL! It’s such a throwaway moment, but I always assumed they were having a workplace affair.

And thanks so much for reading. 🙏

That’s what I thought, but if you read the novelization, she’s bringing news that the research team has just discovered how to make transparent aluminum … meaning Dr. Marcus Nichols didn’t have to make his deal with Scotty.

I have the novelization, but it’s been a good 30-odd years since I’ve read it (it’s in my garage…somewhere). Thanks for the refresher (and the context)!

Much appreciated.

Thanks for this! It makes sense that Madeline would be of course telling him that they have just discovered transparent aluminum, so Scotty wouldn’t end up robbing the ACTUAL person who came up with the idea already in the past. A little TOO snug a tie of a loose end if you ask me, but ok. Good to finally know.

Also, you know what doesn’t hold up for me, is when Kirk says, the novels of Jacquelin Susann, and Spock says, “The greats”. That seemed like an easy laugh and a wink to the audience that Spock was being sarcastic. Maybe next century those books become revered, but it was a little bit if a stretch as well.

Actually Spock referred to them as “the giants” as in, giants of literature.

I assume Spock was being literal, which I took as a wry comment on how often mediocre art/books/movies + time = classics.

I remember being in college when this movie came out, and a friend told me he had tickets to a club in NYC where the cast members would be appearing. We made the 4 hour drive to NYC, worked out how to gain entrance to a bar as under-aged students, and patiently waited for our chance to meet the cast. Few people were there, and a projector showed stills from the movie on the back wall. We asked the manager when the cast would be appearing, and he said, “There they are.”, pointing to the images on the back wall. My head nodded slowly as I understood what he was saying, and a gullible, naive side of me died forever.

My friend DID say helpfully and optimistically on the way back to school, “Well, the ticket didn’t say in what FORM they would be appearing.”

Thanks again for your well written homage. I have your nostalgia, I’m glad your dad liked the whale movie, and it was a great time to be a Star Trek fan,

Love that story! Thanks for sharing it! 😊🖖🏼

They did write a post ST IV book about the probe and the civilization that sent it. It was called “Probe.” Worth reading. One of the better TOS books.

Thanks for that heads up! I’m going to take a look.

I’ve only read about a dozen or so Star Trek novels but I will seek that one out.

ST:IV isn’t my favorite Star Trek movie, but it certainly is special to me, as I played the Plexicorp helicopter pilot. The company had rented the helicopter and painted it with temporary paint. But when the shoot day came, it rained, so the production company had me stay overnight at a hotel close to the location. I was invited to have dinner with the crew and had the honor of eating Mexican food at a table for four with James Doohan, DeForest Kelley and George Takei. The next day, I was directed by Leonard Nimoy in the scene. So, yeah, pretty special.

Oh my goodness! I’m very pleased to hear from someone who worked on the film. That is an amazing and very special story and I sincerely thank you for sharing it!

My Pleasure!

Surprised you did not reference Kirk “tasting beer” for (obviously) the first time at the pizza joint. Pretty much what MY face looked like at age 12 when I first sampled it. Classic facial expression for what is an “acquired taste”. I assume beer is neither available nor replicated in the future.

We’ve seen Kirk drink alcohol (including “powerful” Romulan ale). For me, that moment was lost among dozens of other great moments; the movie is an embarrassment of riches.

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The Voyage Home softened a lot of blows from Trek II and III and for a time travel adventure that certainly says lot. Because this one thankfully doesn’t have to be about the constricting laws of time. It’s a feel-good story about a beautiful species being saved from extinction and our world being saved in the process as well. For Star Trek’s 20th Anniversary year, it was a very nice way to celebrate. Thank you for your review.

Appreciated, Mike! Lots of warm memories from that movie.

Never have I ever read such a long, detailed and delightful review of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. I have a special connection to this particular movie because I played the Plexicorp helicopter pilot. It was a great pleasure to be directed by Leonard Nimoy in the film. Years later, when I was working as a Mac consultant, I ended up helping him set up his iPad. I remember sitting at his desk and seeing a small Lucite cube containing a pair of ear tips. It kind of blew my mind that I was sitting there. Anyway, keep up the great work and thanks again.

Oh my goodness Tony, I am moved by your reply. Responses like yours are why I do this, and I thank you.

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Published Nov 25, 2016

The Voyage Home: 30 Facts for 30 Years

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home marks its 30th anniversary on November 26th. To celebrate, we are sharing 30 favorite facts from the production we learned while researching the film's co-writer Nicholas Meyer's library archives at the University of Iowa. Let's sling shot around the sun, pick up enough speed, and time warp back to the 1980s for a celebration of one of Trek 's most enduring and beloved adventures.

• Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home was originally named “The Adventure Continues” in its early drafts, a nod to the ending title card of the previous film The Search for Spock which promised “…AND THE ADVENTURE CONTINUES…”
• Contrary to the myth that no Star Trek sequels were planned until the previous film had been released, The Voyage Home actually began preliminary preproduction and story development during the spring of 1984, a few months before the premiere of The Search for Spock .
• Producer Harve Bennett and director Leonard Nimoy agreed that they wanted to use time travel and also avoid the use of villains and violence in the film very early in the story development process – in essence, to make what they called a “nice” movie.
• Bennett referred to The Voyage Home as a “local location” production (a TV term referring to shows that use near-by outdoor locations as a setting to save money on building sets). He referred to The Wrath of Khan as a “bottle show” because almost 65% of the movie was made on the same set (the Enterprise and Reliant were the same sets).
• When time travel was mentioned as a story possibility for The Voyage Home , Gene Roddenberry suggested the use of a story he had previously developed about the Enterprise crew going to the 1960s and interacting with the actual historical event of John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

• Leonard Nimoy was inspired by the book Biophilia by Edward  O. Wilson, which outlined the concept of a “keystone species” – that if a keystone species were to go extinct, it would threaten all other species.
• Bennett originally suggested that the species that the Enterprise crew needs bring back to the 23rd century could be the then-recently discovered species of the snail darter, a small species of fish about the size of two paper clips. Bennett joked that the reason for his suggestion was the cost saving, but really it was an inspired idea because the notion that something very small, the tiny of creatures, could have the greatest of impacts is very much a Trek -ian idea.
• Whales were chosen because of their epic and cinematic size in addition to their gentility and intelligence.
• It was Paramount executive Jeffrey Katzenberg who contacted Nimoy and Bennett with what he called either the best idea or worst idea: having Eddie Murphy, an avowed fan, appear as the film’s guest star. A script was written by Peter Krikes and Steve Meerson featuring Murphy’s character, an English professor who believed in UFOs.
• An interesting sequence of that script had the Klingon Bird of Prey decloaking above a football field during the Super Bowl. Everyone there, except Murphy’s character, would have believed it to be part of the halftime show. The idea of having Murphy star in the film was eventually abandoned. Eddie Murphy and William Shatner eventually would team up... in the 2002 film Showtime .

• With production looming and script concerns, Nimoy and Bennett asked Wrath of Khan director and writer Nicholas Meyer to help by joining Bennett in co-writing a new version of the script. Meyer accepted because his friends needed him, and because he liked the duo’s goal of making a “nice” Star Trek movie.
• Meyer’s portion of the script begins with the line “Judging by the pollution content of atmosphere…” and ends right before the D.H. Lawrence poem, which was co-writer Bennett’s contribution.
• Admiral Lance Cartwright’s character, played by the amazing Brock Peters, was originally not in the script. Instead, the character was supposed to be Admiral Harry Morrow, played by Robert Hooks, previously in The Search for Spock .
• Speaking of names, Gillian's character was at one time named Shelley.
• At one time, George and Gracie were called Adam and Evie.

• Filming began in February 1986. Cinematographer Donald Peterman was nominated for an Academy Award for his amazing work on Star Trek IV . At the time of his passing, Leonard Nimoy called him a "gentleman and a talent." Nimoy had wanted an unusual style for the film and one of Peterman’s contributions, along with production designer Jack Collins, was to use panels to light characters on the Klingon ship to be a contrast to how the characters were usually presented on the Enterprise.
• There was a sequence scripted, but not filmed, explaining the reason for Saavik staying behind on Vulcan - she was pregnant from her Ponn Farr experience with Spock.
• The Voyage Home used not only real world external locations, but also real world interiors. The antique store, U.S.S. Enterprise and Cetacean Institute were all real world exterior and interior locations. The Cetacean Institute was actually the famous Monterey Bay Aquarium. John Tenuto's parents happened to be there during filming at the aquarium during the April 1986 production and brought this footage back with them: www.youtube.com .
• Showing the contribution that special effects technicians, set builders and editors make to a film, the sequences where Spock jumps into the tank with George and Gracie and Kirk reacts while on the tour conducted by Gillian is a masterful example of behind-the-scenes artistry: no less than four locations were required to make that scene work (the real Monterey Bay Aquarium, an ILM created blue-screen environment, a swimming pool in El Segundo, and a set at Paramount). Through editing tricks and slight of hand, all appear to be the same location in the various sequences.
• The U.S.S. Enterprise CV-65 was actually unavailable for filming. The USS Ranger CV-61 stood in for the Enterprise and if you look very closely you could see the Ranger name on a few of the hats of the real military who served as extras.

• An unseen tag used by the antique dealer to catalog Kirk's glasses gives the date of the crew's visit to Earth as August 19, 1986. However, the newspaper that Kirk and crew look at a few minutes earlier in the film has the date December 18, 1986.
• The Plexicorp company that "Professor" Scott and his "assistant" Leonard McCoy visit was actually the Reynolds & Taylor Plastics factory in Santa Ana. Interestingly, the real company made custom plastic panels, including ones reportedly for the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
• The police officer at the hospital was played by Joe Lando, who would go on to fame as Byron Sully from Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.
• This film includes the first contributions of one of Star Trek 's most important behind-the-scenes geniuses, Michael Okuda.
• The dream sequence used to symbolize time travel was originally envisioned by the immensely talented Ralph McQuarrie, the creator of the look of Star Wars. McQuarrie contributed also to the look of  Starfleet Headquarters in The Voyage Home. His unused designs for the refitted Enterprise of Star Trek: The Motion Picture are an inspiration for the look of the U.S.S. Discovery of the new Star Trek: Discovery . The final dream sequence, with ideas from Leonard Nimoy, was created using Cyberware's pioneering 3D scanning and morphing technologies.

• The effects of the film are so incredible that the production received letters of protest for getting that close to real whales during filming. In reality, there are only a few images of real whales in the film, mostly in the breaching sequences. What is usually seen are remote-controlled models created and manipulated under the supervision and design of Michael Lanteri, Walt Conti and their teams of artists.
• The probe was designed by Nilo Rodis Jamero and built by ILM's model shop. It was meant to be five miles long script-wise, but in reality were an approximately 8 foot and 20 foot model. The probe is meant to be whale-like, with barnacles and the light being reminiscent of a whale's blow-hole.
• Composer Leonard Rosenman earned an Academy Award nomination for the music of The Voyage Home .
• The "punk" rocker on the bus was played by Kirk Thatcher, who also created the music used in the famous nerve-pinch sequence. Thatcher was an associate producer on The Voyage Home and was the voice of the testing computer at the start of the film. In fact. Kiri-kin-tha's First Law of Metaphysics, which Spock identifies as "Nothing unreal exists," is named for Kirk Thatcher. Thatcher had worked on Star Wars: Return of the Jedi in the creature shop, and is now a talented director for The Jim Henson Company productions
• In 1987, Leonard Nimoy and Harve Bennett were invited to screen The Voyage Home in Russia at the Spaso House to celebrate Russia agreeing to join the world community in banning factory whaling. This afforded Nimoy a chance to visit the town his family was from in the Ukraine, his parents being from the same community and both having to escape to the United States from the terrible pogroms against Jews that were occurring at the time. This was the first time a Star Trek film screened in Russia. Bennett wondered if the humor would translate, and was happy that it did... another symbol of the universal connection between people that The Voyage Home celebrates.

Happy Birthday Voyage Home!

Special thanks to Dan Madsen for allowing us to digitize images from the pages of the Star Trek Communicator fan club magazine of the era and to share these special photographs from the set of the film.

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Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

Intrada (MAF 7114)

Release Date: December 13, 2011

• Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)
• Leonard Rosenman

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Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home MCA (MCAD 6195)

Released: November 26, 1986

Formats: CD, Digital (36 min)

The Star Trek Album Silva America

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Star Trek - The Astral Symphony Paramount Pictures

Released: October 1, 1991

Formats: CD, Cassette (72 min)

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Released: October 25, 1990

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Whale Probe

“They are not the hell your whales.”

In 1986, Star Trek pushed a Greenpeace agenda as a blockbuster movie. It worked.

The legacy of 'Star Trek IV: The Voyage' is more than just a goofy movie time travel movie. Here's how it changed our world for the better.

After James T. Kirk stole Doc Brown’s ride, he decided to go back in time and save the whales.

You might think I’m describing some quirky fanfiction or a deleted scene from Ready Player One . But, the truth is, the Klingon ship Kirk and company commandeered in Star Trek IV to travel back in time to 1986, was owned by Klingon Commander Kruge, who, in 1984’s Star Trek III , was played by Christopher Lloyd (who went on to become much more famous as Doc Brown in 1985’s Back to the Future ).

By stealing that specific craft, the crew of the late Starship Enterprise was destined to go on a time-travel adventure. But unlike any other time-travel romp dating to the 1980s, this journey is a creative piece of commentary on a nascent environmentalism movement that put endangered species at its heart. In the fall of 1986, one year after Back to the Future , Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home not only became a transtemporal box-office hit, it also propelled climate change and concern for endangered species into the mainstream.

In short, Star Trek tried to literally save the whales in 1986, and it basically worked.

Welcome to FUTURE EARTH , where Inverse forecasts 100 years of possibilities, challenges, and who will lead the way.

Prior to J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek reboot in 2009, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home held the record for the Star Trek feature film with the most successful box office, ever . The movie opened over Thanksgiving weekend in 1986 and went on to gross $109,713,132. To put this in perspective, Top Gun , which was the number one movie of 1986, made $176,781,728. Yes, Top Gun was the top gun, but The Voyage Home was right up there. Until J.J. Abrams, it was Star Trek’s most popular crossover film, which is saying something considering the film lacks both violence and sex. In 1986, the Trek franchise went toe-to-toe with the horror of Aliens and the sexy action of Top Gun and, while it didn’t quite win, it came out as a serious contender.

The mysterious probe in The Voyage Home . All it wants to do is to talk to some whales...

Co-written by Wrath of Khan maestro Nicholas Meyer , and directed by Leonard Nimoy, The Voyage Home was a political film imbued with environmental activism masquerading as a fish-out-of-water comedy. So, it turns out, humpback whales are just as intelligent as humans, and, at some point in the past, communicated only in whale song to this particular alien probe that looks like a smoother version of ʻOumuamua.

The movie sets out a humbling idea: If aliens were to make contact with Earth, they might not necessarily want to talk to humans. As Spock (Leonard Nimoy, directing himself) puts it “Only human arrogance would assume the message must be meant for man.” When this alien probe rolls up on Earth, hoping to talk to some whales, the probe’s transmission sounds one way from the air, but totally different underwater. These signals are also destructive and require an answer that can’t be given because, in the Star Trek universe, humpback whales are extinct.

Once Spock and Uhura realize that the probe’s signals sound different underwater, there’s only one option; get some whales and hope those whales, as Bones says, “tell this probe what the hell to go do with itself.” Kirk decides time-travel to 1986 is the only possible solution. So, not only is their mission to find humpback whales in the past but also to bring them forward in time to the future. No one has ever called this movie Star Trek Some Whales Back to the Future , but that’s what happens.

The Voyage Home starts with this tough talk, and then, less than 15-minutes later, dumps the famous Starfleet crew into a comedy of errors on the streets of San Francisco in 1986. During the trip back in time, the stolen Klingon ship is broken (of course) and the crew has to figure out how to build a whale tank that can fit inside of their (broken) spaceship.

Kirk (William Shatner) and Spock (Leonard Nimoy) in a pawn shop, selling some antique glasses to have enough cash to get around in the 20th Century.

This means Kirk, Spock, Sulu, Bones, Uhura, Scotty, and Chekov are super busy. Sulu flies a helicopter expertly but forgets how to use windshield wipers. Chekov gets mistaken for a quirky Russian spy. And, best of all, Spock tries out profanity for the first time, referring to swear words as “colorful metaphors.” There’s never been a science-fiction time-travel romp quite like The Voyage Home , probably best exemplified by the moment Spock uses a Vulcan nerve pinch to silence a rowdy punk’s boom box on a city bus.

But The Voyage Home’s overarching message comes to the fore in an over-the-top scene in which Spock literally connects his mind with that of a whale. The idea is elegant: If human beings possessed Spock’s telepathic powers, we too might connect with other creatures and, in turn, have a greater understanding and compassion for the other, defenseless denizens of our world. The heart of the movie is when Spock jumps into a giant whale tank and mind-melds with a humpback whale named Gracie. Later, when cetacean biologist Gillian Taylor (Catherine Hicks) accuses Spock of “messing with my whales,” Spock fires back “They like you very much, but they are not the hell your whales.” The whales own themselves and Spock respects that.

The Star Trek characters come from a more enlightened future, and they’re ashamed of the actions of humankind in the “past” — the present for moviegoers of the ‘80s. In 1986, humpback whales really were on the endangered species list. In the movie’s final scenes, Kirk puts his stolen Klingon spaceship directly between a whaler’s harpoon and Spock’s new whale friends, saving them from humanity. For an audience unaware of environmental activism, it was a wake-up call.

“Greenpeace used to go out in rubber rafts in front of the Russian ships to try to prevent them from firing their harpoons, and that’s where that idea came from.”

“There’s a homage to Greenpeace in the movie because the idea of putting the spaceship between the whaling ship and the whales and being hit by the harpoon has Greenpeace roots,” Leonard Nimoy said in a 1986 interview. “Greenpeace used to go out in rubber rafts in front of the Russian ships to try to prevent them from firing their harpoons, and that’s where that idea came from.”

In 1986, Greenpeace representatives noted that while The Voyage Home played fast and loose with the truth, “the message is right on the money.″ After the movie’s release, there was an uptick in donations to Greenpeace, according to the organization. In fact, Greenpeace went so far as to say that the film “subtly reinforces why Greenpeace exists.”

Appropriately, Star Trek IV did not employ real whales in filming. Other than some stock footage toward the end of the film, the vast majority of the whales in the film were animatronic; a special effect so good that nobody noticed.

Star Trek IV’s influence on real conservation efforts in the 1980s is hard to quantify today. In 2016, the humpback whale was removed from a federal endangered species list, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration called the humpback whale comeback “an ecological success story.” When that happened, several publications pointed out a link between Star Trek IV and the resurgence of humpback whales. Quite literally, Star Trek’s cautionary tale seemed to usher in a better future in which whales didn’t go extinct in the 21st century.

It is impossible to prove a direct link between The Voyage Home and the de-escalation of whale hunting in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Correlation and causation are two different things, after all. In truth, years of dedicated environmental activism, political action, and education did the hard work. But it’s also true that Star Trek IV opened up a lot of people’s eyes to humanity’s cruelty toward whales and the perilous state of their survival.

At one point in the film, Bones quips that the 20th century is like “the Dark Ages” to his future, enlightened eyes. But, perhaps because of a quirky and bold Star Trek movie, some of us started to see the light.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is streaming for free on Pluto TV . It’s also streaming on Paramount+.

This article was originally published on April 20, 2021

• Environment
• Science Fiction

The 50 Most Disappointing Movie Sequels of All Time

By Andy Greene

Andy Greene

Sequels are almost as old as Hollywood itself. Even before talkies hit the marketplace in 1927, studios were churning out follow-up movies like The Fall of a Nation and Don Q, Son of Zorro. The trend continued throughout the Golden Age of Hollywood with The Bride of Frankenstein , Dracula’s Daughter , The Thin Man Goes Home, Mr. Belvedere Rings the Bell, Jolson Sings Again , and Father’s Little Dividend. Blockbusters of the Seventies and Eighties like Star Wars, The Exorcist, Halloween, Ghostbusters, Batman , and Raiders of the Lost Ark launched film franchises that continue to this day.

It’s easy to understand why risk-averse studios are so eager to green-light sequels. If a formula worked once before, why not simply try again? It’s also much easier to market a familiar story than it is to introduce something new. The only problem is that precious few sequels in Hollywood history have ever lived up to the original. And for every Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back and Terminator 2: Judgment Day that truly justify their existence, there are about 300 movies like Weekend at Bernie’s II and Son of the Mask that, to put it kindly, do not.  

A list of the worst sequels in history could be almost endless, and almost too easy. Few people turned on Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles or American Pie Presents: The Naked Mile and expected some great masterpiece. So in picking our list of the worst movie sequels, we limited the list to movies that seemed at the time like they might actually be worthwhile. We admit it’s very subjective. And it’s easy to fault us for expecting anything decent out of the latter-day Die Hard or Terminator movies, but they somehow managed to get our hopes up at least a little every single time. (If they made Terminator 37, we’d still walk in feeling hopeful. We’re fools.)

Please join us on this sad journey through Hollywood history where Michael Meyers is never truly dead, John McClane transforms from a regular police officer into an immortal killing machine, the odd numbered Star Trek movies always suck, and we wait in vain for the day any Jurassic Park sequel is even halfway watchable. 

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003)

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines had a lot working against it before the cameras even started rolling. The first two Terminator movies were the brainchild of James Cameron. He wrote them, directed them, and oversaw every detail of their production. He’s also a genius that’s basically never made a bad movie. But Cameron wasn’t involved with Terminator 3. The film also didn’t have Linda Hamilton or Edward Furlong on board to play Sarah and John Connor. The only thing it had from the first two movies (besides a cameo from Earl Boen as Dr. Peter Silberman) was the Terminator himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger. And as we’ve learned from Batman and Robin, End of Days, The Sixth Day, and many other turkeys, Schwarzenegger alone doesn’t guarantee a great movie. And this is far from a great movie. It’s a reprise of T2, where yet another advanced Terminator comes back in time, played by Kristanna Loken, and John Connor (now Nick Stahl) has to find a way to stay alive with help from another T-850 Terminator, played by Schwarzenegger. There’s almost no scene worth remembering up until the very end when a nuclear war begins and John Connor fulfills his fate by taking command. It’s a genuinely chilling moment, but it can’t make up for the nearly two hours that precede it. To be fair, nothing was ever going to top T2. It’s one of the greatest sequels in Hollywood history, rivaled only by The Godfather II, but Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines doesn’t even come close.

Staying Alive (1983)

The dance sequences in 1977’s Saturday Night Fever are some of the most iconic images in the history of film. But they’re just a few fleeting minutes in an otherwise dark movie about a Brooklyn teenager (played by John Travolta) desperate to improve his lot in life. Gene Siskel considered it the greatest movie in the history of Hollywood. By the time we catch up with Travolta’s Tony Manero character in 1983’s Staying Alive, he’s a waiter who dreams of Broadway stardom. Sylvester Stallone is the director, and he invited his brother Frank to contribute songs to the soundtrack. And with all due respect to Frank Stallone, his work doesn’t exactly stand up to the Bee Gees. (They have some deeply unmemorable songs of their own on the soundtrack.) But bad music is far from the biggest problem in Staying Alive. There’s simply no heart to the story, and Manero finds himself acting in an abysmal Broadway musical that feels like a Flock of Seagulls fever dream. “ Staying Alive is a sequel with no understanding of what made its predecessor work,” Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times. “The first film was funny and touching, powered by a phenomenally successful score. This one is clumsy, mean-spirited, and amazingly unmusical.”

Jurassic Park: The Lost World (1997)

With the very big exception of the Indiana Jones movies, Steven Spielberg has largely resisted the lure of sequels throughout his long career. He could have made a fortune directing follow-up movies to Jaws, E.T., and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but he knew they’d never live up to the originals, and that his time would be better spent on new projects. But 1993’s Jurassic Park was such a mega-hit that he went against his better judgment and agreed to direct 1997’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park. It’s an adaptation of a novel that Michael Crichton reluctantly churned out in 1995 so that this very movie could exist. It’s about another island where the Jurassic Park dinosaurs were bred. Jeff Goldblum heads there alongside Julianne Moore and Vince Vaughn. The dinos attack. People die. In the end, a T. rex is set loose in San Diego. It all feels very humdrum and lacks any sense of wonder found in the original. It made a ton of money, and they’re in the midst of creating a seventh Jurassic Park right now, but only the first one is a genuinely good movie. The sequels are all varying degrees of terrible. 

Bad Santa 2 (2016)

When comedy sequels truly work, which is exceedingly rare, they come out within a couple of years of the original, and are assembled by the same creative team. Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey and Addams Family Values are the gold standard here. They hit theaters within two years of their predecessors, and the key behind-the-scenes players (Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon for Bill & Ted, Barry Sonnenfeld for Addams Family ) were back. Bad Santa 2 came out 13 years after Bad Santa, without the help of original director Terry Zwigoff or writers Glenn Ficarra and John Requa. They did have Bad Santa himself, Billy Bob Thortnon, along with Tony Cox as his conniving partner, and even former child actor Brett Kelly reprising his Santa-obsessed Thurman Merman character. The old gang reunites to pull off another Christmas heist, but the dirty jokes just don’t land in this one. “There’s a going-through-the-motions vibe to the whole affair,” wrote Rolling Stone’ s David Fear. “The original believed in its sodden, everyone-sucks with every ounce of its hardened, pitch-black heart — ironically, its horribleness made it that much more humanistic (and hilarious). The sequel is closer to fool’s coal: You can blow the thin patina of painted darkness off it with a breeze and find there’s nothing underneath.”

Teen Wolf Too (1987)

To be very clear, the original Teen Wolf is far from a great movie. But Michael J. Fox had more than enough Back to the Future -era charm to pull off the role as a nerd turned werewolf who becomes a high school basketball star and unlikely ladies man. Sadly, Fox is nowhere to be seen in the sequel. It stars Jason Bateman as the cousin of his character. He goes to college, discovers he’s also a werewolf, and uses his powers to win boxing matches. “College Boxer Transforms Into Werewolf” should have generated headlines all across the globe, but it’s treated as little more than a regional curiosity in this horrid movie. “The pacing is near-cataleptic and the movie’s intended comic highlight is a frog fight in the biology lab,” wrote Michael Wilmington in the Los Angeles Times. “Isn’t that just what you’re dying to see and hear? Bad dialogue, lugubriously paced; awful jokes about werewolves, and guffawing actors churlishly hurling around a lot of little frogs?”

Men in Black: International (2019)

If any movie franchise was poised to create a cinematic universe, it was Men in Black. There’s literally an entire galaxy of wacky aliens to explore, and a small army of Men in Black spread across Earth to battle them. If Sony handled this IP properly, we could be 10 seasons into a Men in Black cable show, eight seasons into an animated program, and somewhere around spinoff movie 12 or 13. But their first attempt to move beyond the Will Smith/Tommy Lee Jones movie trilogy was 2019’s Men in Black: International, starring Chris Hemsworth, Tessa Thompson, Rebecca Ferguson, Liam Neeson, and Kumail Nanjiani. It centers around a London Men in Black office, and the search for a powerful weapon hidden somewhere on the planet. It grossed just enough to possibly break even, but not nearly enough to justify another one of these things. ”It has been 17 years since Men in Black was a hot property, and the intervening gap has done nothing to revive interest in it,” wrote film critic James Berardinelli. “Whoever spearheaded this half-hearted resurrection should be fitted with a golden parachute. For those who remember the Men in Black movies fondly, stick with your memories. Seeing this latest installment is more likely to degrade than enhance them.”

Airplane 2: The Sequel (1982)

When it comes to comedy sequels, the temptation to simply recreate the exact structure of the original movie, along with all of the signature gags, is just too tough for most filmmakers to ignore. That’s why the genius trio of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker opted against creating a sequel to Airplane! so they could devote their time to developing the TV series Police Squad. That show — which eventually morphed into the Naked Gun movie franchise — is also why Leslie Nielsen wasn’t free to appear in Airplane 2: The Sequel. It did reunite Robert Hays, Julie Hagerty, and Lloyd Bridges, but writer-director Ken Finkleman simply doesn’t have the same comedic instincts as Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker. (His prior movie was Grease 2. Need we say more?) He wrote a screenplay about a lunar shuttle headed to the moon, but it’s basically just a straight remake of Airplane! minus about 500 laughs. The only good thing about the whole fiasco is that Naked Gun exists because Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker were smart enough to avoid this movie. You won’t see either of the Naked Gun sequels on this list. Unlike Airplane 2: The Sequel, they’re both extremely funny.

Lethal Weapon 4 (1998)

If we were making a list of the best sequels in Hollywood history, Lethal Weapon 2 would be near the top of the list. The third one was slightly underwhelming, but the series didn’t crap out until the fourth one arrived in 1998. By this point, Joe Pesci and Rene Russo were part of the Lethal Weapon family along with series stars Mel Gibson and Danny Glover. Chris Rock and Jet Li came on board for the fourth chapter, cramming in so many big names they barely fit on the poster. In this one, Riggs and Murtaugh battle an Asian counterfeiter/slave trader. Glover is beyond “too old for this shit” by this one, considering that his character planned on retiring from the police force a decade earlier, and it feels like everyone is just going through the motions, and counting how much money they’re making per second. The script was nowhere near ready when filming started, and that’s clear in most every frame. “I felt like Lethal Weapon 4 was outtakes [from the previous movies],” wrote critic Roger Ebert, “stuff they didn’t use earlier, pieced together into a movie that doesn’t really, in its heart, believe it is necessary.”

Iron Man 2 (2010)

The first Iron Man movie forever changed Hollywood. It marked the beginning of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the start of a broader superhero fixation that grips the industry to this day, and a new dawn for the career of Robert Downey Jr. But when it came time to make a second Iron Man movie in 2010, just two years after the original, Marvel was still fine-tuning its movie operation. Justin Theroux took over as screenwriter for this one, and he cobbled together a convoluted tale where Tony Stark is forced to confront a serious health scare, a powerful new Russian enemy portrayed by Mickey Rourke, and pressures that came after the public learned of his true identity. “Everything fun and terrific about Iron Man, a mere two years ago, has vanished with its sequel,” wrote the Hollywood Reporter’ s Kirk Honeycutt. “In its place, Iron Man 2 has substituted noise, confusion, multiple villains, irrelevant stunts, and misguided story lines. A film series that started out with critical and commercial success will have to settle for only the latter with this sequel.” 

Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)

The initial announcement that Natalie Portman was returning to the Marvel Cinematic Universe for 2022’s Thor: Love and Thunder was greeted with real excitement. She’d been AWOL since 2013’s Thor: The Dark World, despite playing a pretty big role in the saga as Jane Foster, Thor’s astrophysicist girlfriend. Excitement grew when fans learned she was going to finally wield the hammer herself and take on the role of the Mighty Thor. But then word slipped out that the character was battling stage 4 cancer. The script tries to balance out this colossal bummer with an endless series of comic sequences that creates a very odd overall tone. If you don’t believe us, listen to Thor himself, Chris Hemworth: “I got caught up in the improv and the wackiness, and I became a parody of myself,” he told Vanity Fair this year. “I didn’t stick the landing.”

Alien Resurrection (1997)

The first three Alien movies were directed by three of the best directors of their time: Ridley Scott, James Cameron, and David Fincher. The third one was a letdown, since Fincher was still a novice, the studio didn’t fully trust him, and the screenplay was never really finished. But it remains a David Fincher movie that’s intermittently innovative and interesting. The same can’t be said for 1997’s Alien Resurrection. It takes place on a military spaceship 200 years after Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley character died at the end of Alien 3. She’s cloned from a drop of her blood, and somehow her memories are intact. They also bring back the Xenomorph alien species, which is a very, very bad idea. (Haven’t these people heard about the events of the first three movies?) Needless to say, the Xenomorphs grow, reproduce, and start killing. Winona Ryder enters the story, and we eventually learn she’s a robot. Ripley once again batters the shit out of the Xenomorph, but haven’t we seen this all before? “This is a series whose inspiration has come, gone, and been forgotten,” wrote Roger Ebert. “I’m aliened out.”

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)

For a while, it was popular to cite Spider-Man 3 as the low point of the franchise. But time has been somewhat kind to Emo Spider-Man and his Pete Wentz haircut, and a small cult (as well as endless memes) have grown around its weirdness. And even if you think Spider-Man 3 is a bloated sludge of a movie with too many villains, it’s clearly superior to The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which marked the premature end of the Andrew Garfield era. It’s the one where Jamie Foxx plays Electro, Paul Giamatti takes on the Rhino role, the Green Goblin returns, and Gwen (played by Emma Stone) falls to her death. This was the fifth Spider-Man movie in a 12-year period, and it all just feels like a rehash of things we’ve seen before, along with an effort to set up about six different spinoff movies and sequels. “The studios and the producers have to split the difference — between excellence and adequacy, between darkness and light, between seriousness and fun,” Wesley Morris wrote on Grantland. “ The Amazing Spider-Man 2 might have been split too far. It doesn’t taste like anything.” 

U.S. Marshals (1998)

The huge success of 1993’s The Fugitive meant a sequel was somewhat inevitable, even though any such project was basically doomed from the start. There was no logical way for Harrison Ford to be framed for a second murder, escape from the law, and get chased around again by Tommy Lee Jones. It would have been preposterous, and Ford was never going to sign on to such a thing. The only move was to send Jones’ Samuel Gerard character and his team of U.S. Marshals after another unjustly accused man. That’s what happened in 1998’s U.S. Marshals, where Wesley Snipes takes over for Harrison Ford as the man on the run. The movie was a modest hit, but it has aged terribly. Jones himself isn’t even willing to defend it these days. “The thing that drove The Fugitive was that we weren’t chasing just a normal doctor,” he told Rolling Stone in our 2023 oral history of The Fugitive. “Whatever we were doing, we were chasing Harrison Ford, and I think he was the engine of the movie. With U.S. Marshals, we had a different director, had a different approach, and it just wasn’t … the movie wasn’t as good as The Fugitive. ” It’s impossible to argue with that. 

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989)

The Star Trek film franchise got off to an extremely shaky start with the snoozefest that is 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which just made 1982’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan all the more stunning. Star Trek III: The Search For Spock was a minor letdown in 1984, but words can barely describe our love for 1986’s Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. That’s the bonkers time-travel one with the whales that’s as fun to watch the 200th time as the first. Leonard Nimoy was given the chance to direct that one, which is why William Shatner demanded the director’s chair for Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. It’s about the search for God at the center of the universe and an evil Vulcan named Sybok, but it barely matters. Nothing about the movie works, especially the cringe scene of Spock, Kirk, and Bones singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” around a campfire. It was such a fiasco that 1991’s Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country was designed as a farewell to the OG cast. 

Caddyshack 2 (1988)

Imagine a version of Caddyshack without Bill Murray, Rodney Dangerfield, Lacey Underdall, a single quotable line or even a single laugh. Whatever comes to mind is surely nowhere near as horrid as Caddyshack 2. Chevy Chase is the only returning cast member, and he’s joined by Robert Stack, Randy Quaid, Dyan Cannon, Chyna Phillips, and Dan Aykroyd in the thankless Bill Murray role as the groundskeeper. That’s a good cast, but they can’t save this terrible movie about a millionaire buying the country club and turning it into an amusement park. Original Caddyshack director Harold Ramis is credited as a co-writer, but he denounced the movie in later years and said he nearly had his name removed. The ultimate red flag here is that Dangerfield deemed this movie beneath his standards. This is a man (albeit a comic genius) that took parts in Meet Wally Sparks, My 5 Wives, and The 4th Tenor. He was willing to accept almost any role that put him on the big screen, but not Caddyshack 2. It was the right move. Nothing could have saved Caddyshack 2, not even Rodney. 

Halloween Kills (2021)

The original Halloween, in 1978, is a horror classic that paved the way for A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, and many other slasher films of the Eighties. But much like the franchises it spawned, Halloween begat sequel after sequel that fell flat in profound ways. A miracle happened in 2018 when Jamie Lee Curtis returned to the fold for Halloween, which ignored every film after the first one, and managed to create genuine chills by showing a grizzled, gray-haired Laurie Strode battling Michael Meyers yet again. They should have left it there. The 2021 sequel isolates Strode in a hospital room for much of the movie while Meyers wanders through the town of Haddonfield on yet another killing spree. Familiar faces from the original movie show up, including Kyle Richards from The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, who acted in the first movie as a child. But the whole thing feels like a tired, pointless rerun. It was also designed to set up a third and final movie, 2022’s Halloween Ends, but they should have learned the lesson of the first movie. You can’t just keep redoing these things over and over. More important, a movie should stand on its own. It shouldn’t feel like connective tissue between two others.

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023)

Future film historians will have real fun trying to pinpoint the exact moment the Marvel Cinematic Universe jumped the shark. Some will point to Eternals in 2021, Thor: Love and Thunder in 2022, or Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness that same year. But it’s a safe bet that 2023’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania will be mentioned many times. Marvel was pounding out content at a furious clip when the movie went into production, and resources were spread way too thin across numerous TV shows and movies. Postproduction was rushed on this third Ant-Man movie, and the special-effects team was focused on wrapping up Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. The result was a movie that literally didn’t look finished when it hit theaters. When you throw in a confusing, tired plot about Ant-Man and his family accidentally entering the “Quantum Realm” (ask your 11-year-old nephew what that means), you’ve got a real mess on your hands. “Everyone just kind of wanders through this movie — through its elaborate, colorful, cluttered, psychedelic-album-cover-style environments,” wrote New York critic Bilge Ebiri. “They occasionally crack jokes or cross their arms. Nothing seems to match. If you told me that the actors had been shot before the filmmakers decided what they would be looking at or interacting with, I’d believe you.”

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 1 (2014)

The Harry Potter franchise set a very bad precedent when the final book in the series was turned into two movies. This was justifiable in the Potter case, since that’s a 607-page book that would have been tough to boil down to one satisfying movie. But it made no narrative sense whatsoever to take the 390-page Mockingjay, the final Hunger Games novel, and stretch it into two movies. The first one clocks in at an agonizing 123 minutes, where very little happens of any real importance. Katniss and her buddies enter an underground district and prepare for a grand revolution, but it’s all just a setup for the second chapter. (There’s also the problem that this is a Hunger Games movie where we don’t get the payoff of an actual Hunger Games.) The movie was a hit and critics were once again impressed by the performance of Jennifer Lawrence, but even director Francis Lawrence says it was wrong to make two movies out of one book. “What I realized in retrospect — and after hearing all the reactions and feeling the kind of wrath of fans, critics, and people at the split — is that I realized it was frustrating,” he told People in 2023. “And I can understand it.… I totally regret [splitting the movies]. I totally do. I’m not sure everybody does, but I definitely do.”

The Godfather Part III (1990)

It would be deeply unfair to put the third Godfather movie on a list of the 50 worst sequels in Hollywood history. It’s a much better film than its reputation suggests, and placing it alongside Alien vs. Predator or Weekend at Bernie’s 2 would be cruel. It also has perhaps the most quoted line (“Just when I thought I was out … they pull me back in”) in any Godfather movie. But this is a list of disappointing sequels, and expectations for this movie were just off the charts. The Godfather is arguably the greatest movie in history. The Godfather II is inarguably the greatest sequel in history. There was no way a third film that came 16 years after the second one would do anything but disappoint. The fact that Robert Duvall backed out over a salary dispute, and Winona Ryder quit shortly before filming, causing director Francis Ford Coppola to give his teenager daughter Sophia a key role, didn’t help matters much. The movie still reunited Al Pacino, Diane Keaton, and Talie Shire with director Coppola, and grossed $137 million, but to call it anything short of a disappointment would be wrong.

Jaws 2 (1978)

Jaws 2 has one of the greatest taglines in history: “Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water …” That’s just about the only memorable thing about the movie, which is about another killer shark descending on Amity Island that Roy Scheider is forced to battle. This time around, it nearly kills his son before he electrocutes it and once again saves the town. (Does work like this really fall under the jurisdiction of the police chief?) Steven Spielberg was too busy working on Close Encounters of the Third Kind to direct it, but he also had little desire to head back into the water after all the difficulties he faced making the first one. He also knew that topping it would be impossible. To be very clear, the third and fourth Jaws movies were significantly worse. Jaws 2 fails in rather pedestrian ways. Jaws 3-D and Jaws: The Revenge fail in spectacularly inept (and often hysterical) ways. But nobody walked into either of those movies thinking they were seeing any sort of masterpiece. People had high hopes for Jaws 2, and they left deeply disappointed. 

Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000)

The 1999 film calendar was crammed with so many remarkable movies that many critics are now calling it one of the single greatest years in Hollywood history. And even in the middle of all of that brilliance, The Blair Witch Project stood out. The “found footage” horror movie was shot on a microbudget of just $60,000, but still managed to scare the living shit out of everyone who saw it. A sequel was inevitable. Sadly, it completely disregarded the DIY feel of the original, along with anything that felt even remotely original despite being directed by Paradise Lost creator Joe Berlinger. We instead get a very traditional horror flick about a group of Blair Witch Project fans who head to the site of the first movie, Burkittsville, Maryland, and find themselves battling an evil force. “ Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 is a not a very lucid piece of filmmaking (and contains no Book of Shadows ),” wrote Roger Ebert. “I suppose it seems clear enough to Berlinger, who co-wrote it and helped edit it, but one viewing is not enough to make the material clear, and the material is not intriguing enough, alas, to inspire a second viewing.”

Live Free or Die Hard (2007)

Die Hard: With a Vengeance is one of the greatest threequels in the history of action movies, largely because they brought back original Die Hard director John McTiernan after leaving him out of the underwhelming second movie. A fourth movie didn’t materialize for another 12 years. This time around, Underworld director Les Wiseman was at the helm. He was working with a ridiculous script where John McClane battles a cyberterrorist in Washington, D.C. Bruce Willis practically has superpowers in it. At one moment, he destroys a flying helicopter by driving a car into it. It’s so ridiculous that even Michael Scott on The Office couldn’t enjoy it. “Here’s the thing about Die Hard 4, ” he said in one episode. “ Die Hard 1, the original, John McClain is just this normal guy, you know? He’s just a normal New York City cop who gets his feet cut, he gets beat up. But he’s an everyday guy. In Die Hard 4, he is jumping a motorcycle into a helicopter in the air. You know? He’s invincible. It’s just sort of lost from Die Hard 1. It’s not Terminator. ” For once, Michael Scott is completely right. 

Major League II (1994)

Creating a sequel to Major League wasn’t a crazy idea. We never even saw the misfit group of Cleveland Indians play in the World Series in the original movie, which remains one of the best sports films in history. And Major League II did manage to reunite the original cast, with the sole exception of Wesley Snipes, who was replaced by Omar Epps. The crazy idea of Major League II was downgrading the R rating from the original all the way to PG. It neutered the characters in every way possible. Who wants a Ricky “Wild Thing” Vaughn who can’t swear? You want to hear “locker-room talk” in the locker room. The movie also felt like a bland rehash of the original. “There has rarely been such a steep and strange decline between a movie and its sequel as the one between the fast, silly original and the dismal, boring Major League II, ” Caryn James wrote in The New York Times. “While the first film ran riot with baseball cliches, this one plods along and almost takes them seriously.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2017)

In 2003, Disney somehow turned its Mad Men -era Pirates of the Caribbean theme-park attraction into a Johnny Depp movie that grossed more than $650 million. The first two sequels racked up an astonishing $1 billion each, and earned surprisingly respectable reviews, considering the source material. But director Gore Verbinski stepped aside for the fourth movie in favor of Rob Marshall, though it’s slightly unfair to blame him for the bloated, painfully unfunny mess that is Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. The franchise simply ran out of gas at this point, and no amount of special-effects wizardry was going to change that. “Its pleasures are so meager, its delight in its own inventions so forced and false, that it becomes almost the perfect opposite of entertainment,” wrote A.O. Scott in The New York Times. “To insist otherwise is a variation on the sunk-cost fallacy. Since you exchanged money for fun, fun is surely what you must have purchased, and you may cling to that idea in the face of contrary evidence. But trust me on this: This movie would be a rip-off even if someone paid you to see it.”

More American Graffiti (1979)

The original American Graffiti, in 1973, was such a colossal pop-culture force that it somehow gave the world Happy Days, Star Wars, and the entire concept of rock & roll oldies. (We’re only slightly exaggerating here.) The George Lucas film took place during one very long night in 1962, but the 1979 sequel, written and directed by Bill Norton, is spread across four New Year’s Eves between 1964 and 1967. Nearly the entire cast, except Richard Dreyfuss, returned from the original (there’s even a Harrison Ford cameo), but the story leaps erratically back and forth through time, sometimes using split screens, and it’s very hard to follow. It also simply lacks the fun and innocence of the first one. Unsurprisingly, it was also a huge box-office bomb that marked the end of Ron Howard’s acting career.

Coming 2 America (2021)

Eddie Murphy spent decades resisting calls to make a sequel to 1988’s Coming to America before finally surrendering in 2021. It was a mistake. The movie is so desperate to evoke nostalgia by bringing back characters, set pieces, and sight gags from the original that it fails to tell a compelling story of its own. Yes, there’s a thin plot about Murphy coming back to Queens, New York, in search of his lost son, but it’s just an excuse for Murphy to lather on latex and makeup to play the old men in the barber shop that are somehow still alive. The scenes back in the fake African nation of Zamunda are even less effective. It’s briefly fun to see Murphy, Arsenio Hall, and the old gang back together, but how many of you watched it even a single time after the first viewing? Be honest. 

Wonder Woman: 1984 (2020)

The problem with Wonder Woman: 1984 isn’t the cast or even the director. Patty Jenkins, Gal Gadot, Chris Prine, Kristen Wiig, Pedro Pascal, and Robin Wright are all capable of remarkable work. And the first Wonder Woman movie in 2017 is one of the great superhero movies of the past decade. And the problem isn’t even the decision to move the action from World War I to the Reagan decade. That was clever since it opened up so many creative possibilities for the narrative. The problem is the script, which finds Wonder Woman working at the Smithsonian, where she comes across an ancient artifact that grants wishes. This causes her co-worker to transform herself into an evil cheetah, and grants a twisted businessman immense power. This is all much cheesier than it even sounds. The movie hit near the peak of Covid, and most people saw it on Max instead of the big screen. The reaction was not kind, to put it mildly. “Three years ago, Wonder Woman emerged amid a reckoning on male abuse and power; the timing was coincidental, but it also made the character feel meaningful,” Manohla Dargis wrote in The New York Times. “In 2017, when Wonder Woman was done saving the world, her horizons seemed limitless. I didn’t expect that her next big adult battle would be at the mall.”

Zoolander 2 (2016)

The temptation for Ben Stiller to film a Zoolander sequel must have been intense. The 2001 fashion-industry spoof wasn’t a huge commercial or critical hit, but that was largely because it had the misfortune of landing in theaters just weeks after 9/11. We weren’t exactly in a laughing mood at the time. A giant cult of Zoolander fans emerged in the years that followed, but what they really just wanted to do was watch it over and over, sprinkle quotes into everyday conversation, and attend the occasional midnight screening. They didn’t want a second one packed with more celebrity cameos than actual jokes, and endless callbacks to the original. “There are some clever bits, and the satire is at times scathing,” wrote film critic James Berardinelli, “but, on the whole, moments of hilarity are like oases in a desert of tedium.” 

Star Trek: Insurrection (1998)

After years of shoddy odd-numbered Star Trek films, fans hoped for a new pattern once the Next Generation crew took over in the mid-Nineties. Their hopes were raised with the release of 1996’s Star Trek: First Contact, which is one of the greatest science-fiction movies of the Nineties. But then came the crushing disappointment of 1998’s Star Trek: Insurrection . Captain Picard and the gang were back together, and Jonathan Frakes was once again directing, but the movie was an enormous step backward. The story centers around the Federation’s attempt to displace the population of a peaceful planet that had discovered a way to live forever. This would have been an interesting two-part episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but it simply didn’t feel like a movie. “ Insurrection is a muddled, gimpy mess, filled with the worst sort of Trek clichés and ill-timed humorous outbursts,” Marc Salvov wrote in The Austin Chronicle . “On top of that, the film might as well have been edited by Mr. Scott in the midst of a Romulan-ale bender: Plot points appear out of nowhere, and voluminous backstory seems to have been dropped in favor of bigger, better explosions and forehead-slappingly bad double entendres. Is this Star Trek or Friends in Space ?”

City Slickers 2: The Legend of Curly’s Gold (1994)

Babaloo Mandel and Lowell Ganz are a brilliant writing duo that gave the world A League of Their Own, Parenthood, Splash, Spies Like Us, and Mr. Saturday Night . “We’ve done one sequel in our entire career,” Ganz told Rolling Stone in 2022. “That’s City Slickers . And the reason we don’t do more is we put our characters where we want them to be.” Mandel framed the issue in a more concise way: “The story is over. It’s done.” The story of City Slickers was definitely over after the events of the first movie, but it was such a giant hit that they were coaxed into writing a sequel. It finds Billy Crystal and Daniel Stern back on horses in the West on a mission to find lost gold. (Bruno Kirby had the good sense to avoid this one. He was essentially replaced by Jon Lovitz.) And even though Jack Palance’s Curly character dies in the original City Slickers, he returns in this one as Curly’s brother Duke. “What I missed was the rich humor and the human comedy of the original film — where the people, not the plot, were what mattered,” Roger Eberot wrote. “By the end of the film, with Slickers II also borrowing from the Indiana Jones movies, I was overcome with deja vu and indifference.”

Blues Brothers 2000 (1998)

There are a lot of problems with Blues Brothers 2000, starting with the fact that John Belushi died 16 years before it came out. That’s an insurmountable issue that should have ended any talk of a sequel. But Dan Aykroyd’s never come across a franchise he isn’t willing to drive into the ground. And if he was willing to participate in My Girl 2, five Ghostbusters (and counting) movies, and even (shudder) Caddyshack 2, he was certainly down to try and revive The Blues Brothers in 1998 with help from John Goodman, Joe Morton, and child actor J. Evan Bonifant. They were joined by a truly impressive lineup of musical icons, including Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Wilson Pickett, Bo Diddley, Isaac Hayes, Eric Clapton, Dr. John, and many, many others. It could be the greatest assemblage of musical talent ever to appear on film. But it’s not enough to make Blues Brothers 2000 a watchable movie. It’s about Elwood Blues getting out of prison and putting the band back together, but it just feels sad and pointless without Jake by his side. 

Independence Day: Resurgence (2016)

Independence Day was the highest grossing movie of 1996, raking in more than $800 million. It was also an incredibly fun popcorn movie as long as you don’t spend too much time thinking about the fact mankind foiled an alien invasion by uploading a virus to their ship’s mainframe from a rinky-dink Windows 95-era laptop. (The aliens mastered interstellar travel, but they didn’t have even rudimentary virus protection? How did these computer systems even line up in the first place?) Rumors of a sequel swirled for years, but Will Smith wanted such a colossal payday they eventually moved forward without him for 2011’s Independence Day: Resurgence . They did manage to bring back Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman, Judd Hirsch, Brent Spiner, and Vivica A. Fox, but what they didn’t have was an original idea. The aliens return. The world unites against them. Pullman gives another inspiring speech through a bullhorn. Yawn. If this movie hit in 1999 or so, it would have likely been a huge hit. But we had to wait 15 years for this thing. By that point, the Marvel Cinematic Universe was in full swing. It made this limp Independence Day retread feel very tired and just wildly unnecessary. 

Cars 2 (2011)

The original Cars is basically Doc Hollywood in a bizarre, post-human world where cars are talking, autonomous beings. They should have ripped off another great movie for the sequel, which sends Lightning McQueen and his team to Europe to compete in the World Grand Prix. Along the way, they get entangled with some British spies. The whole thing reeks like a quickie cash-grab designed to sell toy cars. It’s one of the few Pixar movies to have a “rotten” rating on Rotten Tomatoes. “Will your kids have fun?” Logan Hill asked in his Vulture review. “Sure, though the green-energy subplot is too intricate. As for the parents, politically, it feels like a focus-grouped cop-out. Lefties will be flattered by the cars’ environmental ideals; conservatives will cheer when it turns out that green energy doesn’t work. Worry not, Disney shareholders: No automotive cross-branding opportunity was risked.” (The movie never explains what happened to the humans in the Cars universe. The cars clearly went Terminator and killed them all when they became self-aware, right?)

Terminator: Salvation (2009)

There’s something about The Terminator that keeps bringing people back into the theaters despite the plainly obvious fact that the series simply cannot work without James Cameron. And as much as Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines disappointed the Terminator faithful, it at least had Arnold Schwarzenegger and a powerful ending that gave the series somewhere to build toward. The nuclear holocaust was here, and now John Connor had to lead the resistance. That’s a premise for a pretty great movie. But 2009’s Terminator: Salvation was nothing even remotely great, despite casting Christian Bale as the newest John Connor. Arnold was busy serving as the governor of California at the time, and there’s not a single actor in it from the previous movies. It’s about the early days of Connor’s leadership during the war against Skynet. Lots of things blow up. There are chases. It’s all just an endless green screen of blah. An infamous audio leak from the set revealed that Bale had a complete meltdown at one point and chewed out director McG and members of the crew when a take was interrupted. “Am I going to walk around and rip your fucking lights down, in the middle of a scene?” he roars. “Then why the fuck are you walking right through like this in the background. What the fuck is it with you? Give me a fucking answer!” This audio was 100 times more entertaining than any moment in Salvation . 

Superman 4 (1987)

It’s tempting to put Superman 3 on this list since it’s such an oddball outlier in the history of the franchise, but there’s a certain goofy charm to the movie. Throwing Richard Pryor into the world of Metropolis as a computer genius still makes us chuckle. But there’s nothing even remotely amusing about 1987’s Superman IV: The Quest for Peace . It’s a shockingly inept movie about Superman trying to rid the world of atomic weapons, and battling the foe Nuclear Man. The film was shot on a shoestring budget, and that’s clear in every single frame. It’s hard to believe the original film came out less than 10 years prior. “The script of Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal contains neither bite nor gleam, and the movie has no propulsion,” wrote Michael Wilmington of the Los Angles Times . “By the end, the editing takes on a meat-ax fervor, as [one character] disappears mysteriously and the loose ends are given a violently perfunctory last-second wrap-up. The overall effect is of a story atomized and dying before our eyes, collapsing into smashed pulp, ground down into big-budget Kryptonite ash.” The film was such a disaster that it wasn’t until 2006 that another Superman movie hit theaters. It was a direct sequel to the original two Superman movies, and pretended like Superman 4 didn’t exist. Sadly for us, it does exist. 

Sex and the City 2 (2010)

The temptation in sequels is often to move the action to an exotic overseas location since it opens up all sorts of new storytelling possibilities. The Hangover 2 (Bangkok), Oceans 12 (Amsterdam, Paris, Rome), Cars 2 (France, Italy, England), The Karate Kid 2 (Okinawa), and National Lampoon’s European Vacation (Europe, duh) are just a few of the examples. And in the second Sex and the City movie, Carrie Bradshaw and her friends take an extended trip to Abu Dhabi, though they actually filmed it in Morocco. It’s part of an absurdly bloated two and a half hour movie where the four ladies deal with professional and personal dilemmas, discover the power of friendship for the 600th time, and wear designer outfits that must have collectively cost them about $18 million. The whole thing is so abysmal and boring that even hardore Sex and the City fans rarely defend it. It sent the series onto life support before it came back to Max as the 99.9 percent Kim Cattrall-free …And Just Like That in 2022. 

Space Jam: A New Legacy (2021)

Is Michael Jordan the GOAT in the NBA, or is it LeBron James? It’s a basketball debate that’s likely to rage for eternity. Both sides have very strong arguments to make in terms of total points scored or the number of championship rings they wear. When it comes to their Space Jam movies, however, it isn’t really a contest. Jordan made a very fun live-action/animated Warner Bros. movie back in 1996. And James delivered a turkey of a sequel in 2021, where the Lakers great and his fictional son Dominic find themselves trapped in the Warner Bros. Serververse. They come into contact with all sorts of studio IP, including Rick and Morty, The Wizard of Oz, Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, and King Kong, but the whole thing feels more like a Warner Bros. shareholders presentation than a movie. When it comes time for the big basketball game, it’s hard to even care. “It is a film that has no reason to exist,” wrote Alex Shepherd in The New Republic, “except as a vehicle for reminding people that various pieces of content, all of them merchandisable, are available for instant streaming now.”

Rocky V (1990)

The first four Rocky movies followed a familiar formula. A powerful opponent challenges Rocky Balboa to a boxing match, his devoted wife, Adrian, expresses some doubts (“You can’t win, Rocky!”), he furiously trains, and the film climaxes with the fight. In 1990’s Rocky V, however, the formula was completely upended. It begins with the Balboa family losing all of their money after Rocky is diagnosed with a brain disorder that makes it impossible for him to fight. They move back to Philadelphia, and Rocky trains a young fighter named Tommy Gunn. It ends with Rocky and Gunn briefly fighting in the street, but audiences were less than thrilled. The movie didn’t capture the heart of the original Rocky or the cheeseball joy of the sequels. “The dramatic moves are so obvious and shopworn,” wrote the Chicago Reader ’s Jonathan Rosenbaum, “that not even the star’s mournful basset-hound expressions can redeem them.” It would be another 16 years before Stallone was given the green light on another Rocky movie. That one ends with Balboa back in the ring even though Stallone was 60-years-old by that point. It’s also an infinitely better movie than Rocky V . 

Revenge of the Nerds 2: Nerds in Paradise (1987)

The insane success of Animal House inspired roughly 100 knockoff movies about wild college campuses. The best of the bunch, by far, is 1984’s Revenge of the Nerds . This one twists the formula by casting nerds as the heroes, and the cool frat boys as villains. It’s hysterical and infinitely rewatchable. (And, yes, there’s a heinous scene near the end where one of the nerds dresses up in a jock’s costume and fools his girlfriend into having sex with him.) The sequel was unable to bring Anthony Edwards back for anything more than a cameo (he made a little film called Top Gun the prior year), but the rest of the cast is back for a movie that takes them down to Florida for a frat convention where they once again battle evil jocks. But it’s rated PG-13, when the original was a very hard R. That means the jokes are much softer, and the laughs never come. The only positive thing we can say about it is the made-for-TV sequels are even worse. 

Batman and Robin (1997)

The Batman franchise was already in serious decline by the time 1997’s Batman and Robin came around. Michael Keaton handed over the Batsuit to Val Kilmer for 1995’s Batman Forever, and Tim Burton ceded his director’s chair to Joel Schumacher. The result was a less-than-stellar movie, especially when compared to the dark brilliance of Batman Returns, but Jim Carrey’s manic energy as the Riddler (along with great songs by U2 and Seal) prevented it from being a total train wreck. Nothing could have prepared us, however, for the horrors of Batman and Robin . George Clooney is the Dark Knight in this one, and he battles Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mr. Freeze, and Uma Thurman as Poison Ivy. He’s joined by not only Chris O’Donnell as Robin, but Alicia Silverstone as Batgirl. It’s a clusterfuck of characters, plot incoherence, and cheeseball, pun-filled dialogue straight out of a McBain movie (“It’s ice to see you”; “Let’s kick some ice.”) Nearly every person involved with the movie condemned it in the years that followed, especially Clooney. “It’s a terrible screenplay,” he told Howard Stern in 2020. “I’m terrible in it. Joel Schumacher, who just passed away, directed it, and he’d say, ‘Yeah, it didn’t work.’ We all whiffed on that one.”

Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)

It wasn’t until the Seventies that hit movies routinely generated sequels. That’s why we have The Godfather II, Jaws II, Rocky II, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, and many others. The astronomical success of The Exorcist in 1973 guaranteed a follow-up chapter. But Exorcist novelist William Peter Blatty and original movie director William Friedkin didn’t want to be involved in 1978’s Exorcist II: The Heretic since they were in the midst of a lawsuit with the studio over profits from the first one. The studio did manage to bring back Linda Blair and Max von Sydow, but that wasn’t nearly enough to salvage this low-budget trainwreck of a movie where poor Regan, now a teenager, deals with the aftermath of the demonic possession from the first movie. “There had to be a sequel,” wrote Vinceny Canby in The New York Times, “but did it have to be this desperate concoction, the main thrust of which is that the original exorcism wasn’t all it was cracked up to be?”

Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)

After the stunning ineptitude of 2009’s Terminator: Salvation, the franchise bounced back to “somewhat watchable” status with 2015’s Terminator Genisys . The critics disagree with us here, and it’s not like Genisys is a masterpiece, but at least it was a little fun. (It wasn’t nearly as enjoyable as the criminally underrated 2008-09 Fox series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles .) And when news hit that Linda Hamilton was finally returning to play Sarah Connor in 2015’s The Terminator: Dark Fate, it was hard not to feel genuine excitement. James Cameron signed on as producer. Hope was in the air. Then we saw the actual movie. In the first few minutes, a de-aged Hamilton watches a teenage John Connor get killed by a Terminator shortly after the events of T2, basically nullifying the entire movie. We flash-forward several years, and Skynet is at its old tricks again. It has sent yet another robot back in time. A grizzled Connor has to protect people that will be pivotal in the future. They meet up with an elderly Arnold, who once again helps them survive. We’ve seen this many times before. Once the thrill of seeing Hamilton in her badass Sarah Connor mode wears off, this becomes just another rote action movie. There’s been talk of another Terminator reboot, but let’s hope it doesn’t happen. Haven’t we all suffered enough at this point? 

The Hangover 3 (2013)

The third Hangover ditches the premise of the first two movies where four buddies have a debauched night on the town, wake up without any memories of it, and try to retrace their steps to find someone they lost along the way. It was insane enough this happened a second time, but moving the action from Las Vegas to Bangkok in the sequel was clever and occasionally quite funny. In the third one, they head back to Sin City for an adventure that’s heavy on plot and action, but very light on actual laughs. It also gives Ken Jeong a much bigger role than he had in the first two, but a little bit of his psychotic Leslie Chow character goes a very long way. And bringing everything back to Vegas just reminded us of the superiority of the first movie. “The second didn’t have to be funny, and wasn’t, but at least existed somewhere in the general vicinity of that borderless country known as Comedy,” Rick Groen wrote in The Globe and Mail . “Part Three doesn’t, not even remotely, which makes it not just bad, but weirdly, fascinatingly bad. What exactly is this? Certainly a cash cow, definitely an exercise in cynicism, maybe even a cri de coeur from the self-hating principals. Whatever, a comedy it ain’t.”

A Good Day to Die Hard (2013)

Live Free or Die Hard is not a good movie by any standard. But it’s practically Raiders of the Lost Ark compared to the flaming pile of dog shit that is 2013’s A Good Day to Die Hard . There’s no pretext that John McClane is a regular human being in this one. He’s a superhero that couldn’t be killed by conventional or even unconventional weapons. The plot barely matters, but it revolves around an ill-fated trip to Russia where he teams up with his son, played by Jai Courtney, and fights all sorts of evil dudes. They visit Chernobyl, fire off about 10,000 rounds of ammo, and a helicopter flies into a building. Bruce Willis says, “ Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker!” and everyone laughs because it reminds them of better Die Hard movies. There was talk of a sixth Die Hard for years, but that’s impossible now that Willis is retired from acting. Tragically, the franchise ended with A Good Day to Die Hard . The best thing we can do now is pretend the last two Die Hard movies were just bad dreams McClane had in the final years of his life. 

Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997)

Keanu Reeves isn’t opposed to signing on for sequels. He’s made four Matrix movies, four John Wicks, and three Bill and Ted’s . But when the makers of Speed 2: Cruise Control came to him, he had some doubts. “It was just a situation in life where I got the script and I read the script and I was like, ‘Ugh,’” Reeves recalled to Jimmy Kimmel in 2015. “It was about a cruise ship, and I was thinking, ‘A bus, a cruise ship.… Speed, bus, but then a cruise ship is even slower than a bus, and I was like, ‘I love you guys, but I just can’t do it.’” They carried forward with Jason Patrick essentially in the Reeves role, but it was a mistake. Reeves was 100 percent right to realize that a speeding cruise ship simply isn’t very scary. The film was a critical fiasco that forever killed the franchise and was nominated for eight Golden Raspberry awards. This was a good lesson. If Keanu Reeves thinks your movie is dumb, don’t do it. He knows what he’s talking about. 

Star Trek: Nemesis (2002)

The initial expectations for Star Trek: Nemesis were very high. Fans were desperate to see the Next Generation cast after a four-year hiatus, and they were returning in an even-numbered movie. The ironclad rule up to that point was that the even-numbered Trek films were all great. Tragically, the streak ended with Star Trek: Nemesis in spectacular fashion. The enemy this time around is Shinzon, a young clone of Picard (played by Tom Hardy) that took over the Romulan empire. (Pay no attention to the fact that Hardy doesn’t look a damn thing like Patrick Stewart at any age.) At the climax of the movie, Data sacrifices himself to save Picard. That’s probably the only moment anyone that saw Nemesis in the theater can recall. The rest is a boring blur of cheesy special effects and dialogue that reads like it was written by ChatGPT. What went wrong? “The director was an idiot,” said Counselor Troi actress Marina Sirtis. “I guess that’s a fair assessment of someone that wasn’t willing to take advantage of the help he was offered.” The movie was such a bomb that TNG never appeared on the big screen again. Thankfully, they returned for the Paramount+ show Star Trek: Picard in 2020. In a clear acknowledgement that Nemesis was a complete turd, they gave Data another death scene. 

Dumb and Dumber To (2014)

Comedy sequels are notoriously hard to pull off. For every successful attempt like Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey or Addams Family Values, you have 50 fiascos like Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment or Meet the Fockers . We won’t list either of those films on this list since no reasonable person expected them to be any good. That’s not the case for Dumb and Dumber To, which reunited Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels with directors Peter and Bobby Farrell 20 years after the original Dumb and Dumber . The moronic duo of Lloyd Christmas and Harry Dunne travel cross country again in this one, but this time they’re searching for Dunne’s lost daughter. After the initial thrill of seeing Carey and Daniels back in character wears off, it becomes clear a Dumb and Dumber sequel is way better as an idea than an actual movie. It’s also so shockingly unfunny it almost makes you question the value of the first one. But don’t do that. The first one is one of the funniest movies of the Nineties. It’s Jim Carrey at his absolute peak. Dumb and Dumber To is a sad retread. 

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)

It may be slightly hard to remember now, but there was enormous excitement surrounding Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull back in 2008. We’d waited through 19 very long Indy-free years at this point, and we finally had Harrison Ford back in his fedora with Steven Spielberg in the director’s chair. They even brought in Karen Allen to reprise her role as Marion Ravenwood from Raiders of the Lost Ark . They also brought in Shia LaBeouf as Indy’s greaser son, Mutt, Cate Blanchett as an evil Soviet, a muddled plot about KGB agents and extraterrestrial life, and sequences where Mutt swings from vines like Tarzan and Indy survives a nuclear blast in a refrigerator. It simply doesn’t cohere into a fun movie that can remotely compare to the first three. “Reckless daring is what’s missing from Crystal Skull, ” David Denby wrote in The New Yorker . “The movie leaves a faint aura of depression, because you don’t want to think of daring as the exclusive property of youth. There must be a way for middle-aged men to take chances and leap over chasms, but repeating themselves with less conviction isn’t it.”

Highlander II: The Quickening (1991)

If you were at least a somewhat dorky teenager in the Eighties or Nineties, you probably have fond memories of the first Highlander movie. It stars Christopher Lambert as an immortal being from the 16th-century Scottish Highlands who battles other immortals in mid-Eighties New York City. The 1991 sequel, Highlander II: The Quickening, roped Sean Connery into the saga, and holy mother of God, it is an unholy mess. Not only does it completely violate established Highlander canon by transforming the immortals into aliens from another planet, it was filmed on the cheap in Argentina, and director Russell Mulcahy was removed from the postproduction process so the producers could totally butcher his original (admittedly flawed) vision. It often ranks very high on lists of the worst movies in history. “ Highlander II: The Quickening is the most hilariously incomprehensible movie I’ve seen in many a long day — a movie almost awesome in its badness,” wrote Roger Ebert. “Wherever science-fiction fans gather, in decades and generations to come, this film will be remembered in hushed tones as one of the immortal low points of the genre.”

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019)

Being a Star Wars fan means dealing with a lot of bitter disappointment. This is a franchise with 12 movies, of which only about four or five are universally loved. Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace is often cited as the low point, but we’re not counting prequels on this list. (It’s also not quite as awful as the lore suggests. Watch it again with an open mind.) But the biggest disappointment in Star Wars history came in 2019 with the release of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker . After 42 years and 50 bazillion hours of fevered fan speculation, the world was finally seeing the (supposed) conclusion of the Skywalker saga. This was going to be the one that resolved all of the lingering issues, gave our heroes one last adventure, and ended the franchise on a perfectly satisfying note. Things got off to a bad start in the opening crawl when we learned Emperor Palpatine was back in the picture, which is something they never bothered to explain beyond Poe’s infamous “somehow Palpatine returned” line midway through the film. And after the prior film told us that Rey came from a humble background, meaning anyone could rise from obscurity and become a Jedi, we learn she’s actually a Palpatine. It was one of many ways that returning director J.J. Abrams tried to nullify Rian Johnson’s work on The Last Jedi . We spend time with Luke Skywalker as a force ghost, Han Solo as some other sort of apparition, Princess Leah via clumsily edited archival footage, Chewie, R2D2, C-3PO, and even Lando Calrissian, but nothing feels satisfying about any of it. It just feels like a bunch of random Star Wars images and characters thrown into a blender. It still earned more than $1 billion, but the reaction was so abysmal that Disney radically switched course and put all of its Star Wars energy into TV shows. We’re heard endless reports and rumors about additional movies, but none of them have actually gone into production. Something has to happen eventually. The Star Wars cinematic experience can’t forever end on Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker . Somehow Star Wars has to return. 

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