How Star Trek IV’s Time Travel Works

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home Kirk and Spock in very colorful portraits

A promise was made that after examining the time travel exploits of the Back to the Future series , similar examinations of temporal activities would be in the offing here at CinemaBlend. More specifically, it was promised that the far flung future of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home’s 2286 would be called into question, as that film’s events saw the crew of the USS Enterprise venturing backwards by two centuries. Well, we’re back… we’re back from the future to tell you how it all worked in the movie that some would call the best Star Trek film ever .

However, since our last adventure saw the DeLorean destroyed by a freight train, it looks like our first big trip into the Star Trek cinematic canon will need a new vessel, not to mention a new method and an entirely new set of circumstances that start off this journey. Ah, time travel: you never know when, where or how the action is going to happen; but it’s always a good time! So brush up on your Klingon and humpback whale language skills, as we’re about to dive into how Star Trek IV’s time travel really works.

The Time Travel In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

The time travel in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home isn’t terribly complicated, as it’s similar to that of what we saw in the current universe’s Back to the Future timeline. Which is good, considering the rules set forth in the alternate version of that series’ events were rather interesting to behold. That being said, Star Trek IV does have some really interesting views on time travel, and how CGI is used to depict such events.

Who's Time Traveling

The crew of the USS Enterprise: Admiral James T. Kirk ( William Shatner ,) Captain Spock ( Leonard Nimoy ,) Captain Montgomery Scott (James Doohan,) Commander Hikaru Sulu ( George Takei ,) Commander Nyota Uhura (Nichelle Nichols,) Commander Pavel Chekov (Walter Koenig) and Dr. Leonard McCoy (DeForest Kelly) are all the main crew of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home’s mission. Though by the end of the journey, Dr. Gillian Taylor (Catherine Hicks) is in tow for the return to the future.

From When To When

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is a round trip, no-stops adventure between the far flung future of 2286 and a time warp to 1986. Though it’ll take more than a jump to the left and a step to the right to get this band of misfits home from temporal exile.

The Purpose Of Their Trip

At the tail end of a loose trilogy that started with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan , the crew of the USS Enterprise find themselves on a mission to save the human race. After a probe searching for humpback whales in the year 2286 starts attacking the Earth’s atmosphere, our heroes must retrieve two specimens, George and Gracie, who are about to be released into the wild in 1986 San Francisco. So these whales aren’t exactly going to be missed by anyone but their minder, Dr. Taylor of the Cetacean Institute.

How Time Travel Happens In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home , time travel is achieved through some pretty strenuous circumstances. A vessel attempting to travel through time needs to calculate an exact slingshot orbit around the Sun, while speeding at close to Warp Factor 10. This is pretty hard no matter what ship you’re using, but it’s even harder when the only craft available is a rickety Klingon Bird of Prey. Time travel also requires a lot of energy, as the Dilithum Crystals of said vessel need a recharge through some nuclear energy stolen from the a naval vessel, coincidentally named the Enterprise, in 1986. When the conditions are right, one hell of an LDS trip awaits, as traveling in time apparently involves rudimentary CGI likenesses of all the participants as they travel through the time stream. Seriously, it’s weird, even for Star Trek .

The time travel that takes place in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is a very exact science, right down to calculating the location your vessel is supposed to wind up in. The Enterprise is extremely lucky to have Captain Spock on board to help, seeing as Christopher Lloyd was killed off in the previous film, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock . If only he’d had some sort of warning from the Klingon equivalent of Marty McFly before boarding the Enterprise. Though by the time Spock makes the suggestion of time travel, Admiral Kirk’s reaction ordering him to draw up the calculations confirms that this sort of enterprise is old hat to the USS Enterprise. And, as we all know, it’s not the only/last time travel mission we’ll see in the Star Trek movies.

Can History Be Changed As A Result Of Time Travel In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home?

It’s actually a bit of a mixed bag when it comes to answering the question of whether or not history can be changed in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. This is because we see a clear example of things changing and a potential example of history actually being made because of this trip. But, starting with the basics, this is a singular timeline with actions existing in their own time and context. So there are no disappearing photographs or the future of our protagonists depending on a first kiss this time.

In fact, no past history is being rewritten when all is said and done in Star Trek IV's story. So when George and Gracie are brought to 2286, we see them waving off the nefarious probe, but the actions that took place before still happened in the future time period. And since those whales were going out to sea anyway, there was no way to keep tabs on them past that point. Though it does look like whales will still become extinct in the 21st century, only to be miracled back into the ecosystem through time travel. So history isn't really changed in that instance.

The one questionable moment of potentially altering the future comes when Scotty and McCoy make a deal with Plexicorp’s Dr. Nichols (Alex Henteloff) to produce the transparent aluminum they need to carry the whales safely into the future. With that material not existing in the ‘80s, Scotty basically gives Dr. Nichols the formula for free, with McCoy questioning if this is going to ruin the future timeline.

Interestingly enough, Scotty waves it off in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home’s cinematic incarnation, by asking his shipmate, “How do we know he didn’t invent the thing?” However, [in the film’s novelization](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (novel), Mr. Scott knows damned well that Dr. Nichols did invent Transparent Aluminum, which means history was never changed in this instance as it was always the way things were meant to pan out. Time travel fans will recognize this as a “Predestination Paradox,” where a trip in time was always built into the fabric of history to begin with.

What Are the Consequences of Time Travel In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home’s greatest consequence of time travel is the fact that humanity gets to live to see another several entries in the Star Trek motion picture canon. Strangely enough, that means the heroic Admiral Cartwright (Brock Peters) lives long enough to become the villain, as he’s part of the political intrigue that drives Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country . But on the more long term side of things, the USS Enterprise’s crew does a really good job of not screwing up the time continuum.

George and Gracie were always going to go into the wild, with no important moments relying on their existence; and the same could be said for Dr. Gillian Taylor, as she was really only close with her whale friends. Her existence in the future doesn’t screw anything up a bit, as all of her knowledge is from the past. When all is said and done, the shaky historical ground that the whole invention of transparent aluminum rests upon is the only potential quandary in Star Trek IV’s scenario, and it’s never mentioned again in the series. But as far as great consequences are concerned, it’s just humanity’s survival in the future that is effected by these actions.

My Friends... We're Home

At the end of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home , home has indeed been voyaged to and saved! Humpback whales now exist in 2286, Captain Kirk is busted down a rank and given a new Enterprise for saving the human race, and it’ll all eventually be rendered useless thanks to events in the future past, but that’s a story for another time. Speaking of another time, we should probably lock in another adventure’s worth of discussion for next week. It might be a little too early to melt minds with Primer , and we’re probably not going to touch time loops like Palm Springs or Happy Death Day just yet.

So… why don’t we keep things simple with the clearest, most sensible timeline known to sci-fi audiences: The Terminator! It’s okay, folks, we’ll keep it limited to the Cameron timeline, and you’ve already got a head start on some of the rules with this week’s lesson in Bootstrap Paradoxes. But if you want to read up on the various timelines that exist throughout the non-canonical sequels, we’ll leave you some extra credit reading at the end. Which is where we are now; although, depending on how you’re traveling through time, this could be the beginning. In which case, don’t spoil the future for us, as we don’t want to jeopardize the timeline. Just meet us back here next week, and we’ll hash it all out in due time.

star trek 4 time travel scene

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Memory Alpha

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

  • View history

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 [ ].

Saratoga sensor data

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.

Klingon ambassador and Kirk image

" 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."

Enterprise crew outside Bounty

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.

Yominum sulfide structure

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

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.

James T

" 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.

HMS Bounty leaves Vulcan

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.

Whale Probe disables Spacedock

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.

McCoy and Spock on the Bounty

"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.

Cartwright and President at headquarters

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.

President broadcasts message

" 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.

Phylum search mode - Humpback whale match

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 .

McCoy and Kirk on the Bounty

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.

Kirks message to Earth

"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.

HMS Bounty slingshot approaching Sol 1

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 [ ]

Earth on Bounty viewscreen

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.

Scott, Kirk, and Spock on the Bounty

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.

Enterprise crew aboard Bounty

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! "

Kirk Cab Co taxi 2

"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 .

Chekov nuclear wessels

"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 swimming

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 in San Francisco

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.

USS Enterprise (CVN-65), 1986

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.

Kirk and Spock Italian

"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.

McCoy and Scott at Plexicorp

"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.

Scott, McCoy, and Nichols

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.

Taylor and Kirk at Dinner

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.

Uhura Chekov collector

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.

FBI Agent and Chekov

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.

Cetacean institute deserted

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.

Taylor hits the cloaked ship

Desperately seeking Kirk

Gillian Taylor aboard the HMS Bounty

" 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.

Kirk Taylor McCoy in surgery

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.

Taylor surprise

"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.

HMS Bounty crew

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.

HMS Bounty

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.

George and Grace in aquarium

"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.

HMS Bounty slingshot approaching Sol 2

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.

HMS Bounty evacuation

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.

George and Gracie sing

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.

Enterprise crew in bay

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.

James T

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.

Kirk and Taylor kiss

"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.

Spock and Sarek Federation council

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.

USS Enterprise-A in spacedock

"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.

Spock, Kirk, McCoy, and Scott on Enterprise-A, 2286

" 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 [ ]

Challenger dedication

The dedication displayed at the beginning of the film

The Voyage Home Australian poster

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.

Enterprise crew, 1986

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.

Monterey Bay Aquarium

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 [ ]

story album

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 ; Handi-Wrap II ; hangar deck ; harm ; harpoon ; harpoon gun ; hatch ; hate ; head ; headline ; heat shield ; helicopter ; hello ; high school ; " hit the deck "; home ; Honda Accord ; Honda Civic ; horoscope ; hostility ; hospital bracelet ; hospital gown ; hour ; Huey 204 ; Human ; humpback whale ; hundred ; hunting ; Hyster ; " I Hate You "; ice cream sandwich ; idea ; identification card ; " If we play our cards right "; image therapy ; impulse power ; inch ; infrared ; insight ; intelligence ; intention ; International Harvester Scout ; intruder ; Iowa ; irony ; Italian food ; job ; jogger ; joke ; judgment ; judo ; Juneau ; Junior Mints ; justice ; juxtapose ; Karmann Ghia ; Kasheeta ; katra ; Kearny Street ; kelp forest ; keyboard ; kilometer ; kidney ; kidney pill ; killer whale ; Klingon ; Klingon crew ; Klingon food pack ; Klingon language ; Klingon vessels lost to Whale Probe ; Knott's Berry Farm ; knowledge ; " kook "; L.A. International Airport ; landing pad ; landing procedure ; landlubber ; language ; Latin language ; Lawrence, D.H. ; lay-away ; Lay or Bust Poultry Feeds ; LDS ; " learn a thing or two "; learning ; leave ; Leningrad ; lens ; lie ; life ( lifeform ); lightbox ; lighthouse ; light year ; Lincoln Continental Mark VII ; lion ; literature ; location ; lock ; logic ; luck ; M16 rifle ; M203 grenade launcher ; macho ; Macintosh ; Magic Mountain ; magnetostatics ; mains ; main power ; mammal ; manufacturing ; manual control ; Marcus, David ; MARDET ; marine theater ; Market Street ; mass ; master chief petty officer ; mating ritual ; maximum speed ; Mazda ; Mazda B-Series ; mean sea level (MSL); media circus ; medievalism ; medical degree ; medical tricorder ; medicine ; megahertz ; megaton ; memory : memory bank ; memory test ; mentality ; Mercury Capri ; medical system ; Mercy Hospital ; message ; metaphor ; MG B ; Michelob ; microphone ; middle meningeal artery ; mind meld ; mile ; military ; milk ; million ; mind ; mining ; minke whale ; minute ; miracle ; miracle worker ; Miranda -class ( unnamed ); mission ; Mission District ; mistake ; mitigating circumstance ; MMR ; Moby Dick ; money ; monitoring station ; morning ; mouse ; Movieland Wax Museum ; M Series Walkie Stacker ; multiphasic transmission ; murder ; museum ; mushroom ; Mustang ; mutineer ; name ; name tag ; nautical mile ; naval vessel ; navigational signal ; negotiation ; news machine ; Neutral Zone ; night ; Nissan 280ZX ; noise ; noon ; North America ; nose ring ; novel ; nuclear fusion ; nuclear fission ; nuclear fission reactor ; nuclear power ; nuclear vessel ; nun ; nurses station ; nurse's cap ; Oberth -class ; ocean ; officer ; " off the deep end "; Oldsmobile Ciera ; Oldsmobile Cutlass Calais ; Olvera Street ; OMNI ; " on course "; onion ; open sea ; operating room ; opinion ; orbital shuttle ( unnamed 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 ); Orbital shuttle 5 ; Orbital shuttle 7 ; order ; OrthoLav ; outer space ; owner ; Pacific Bell ; Pacific Basin ; pager ; Palace of Fine Arts ; paper towel ; paper towel dispenser ; parking ; past tense ; patient ; peace ; peace treaty ; pedestrian crossing sign ; pepperoni ; percent ; performance ; permission ; phaser ; photographic memory ; photon ; picnic table ; piercing ; pill ; pirate ; pizza ; place ; plan ; planet ; planet distress signal ; Planetary Reserve ; plant ; plant manager ; plastic wrap ; playing card ; " play our cards right "; plea ; Plexicorp ; plexiglass ; Plymouth Reliant ; plot ; poker ; police ; pollution ; polymer ; Pontiac Fiero ; Pontiac Firebird ; Pope Olive Oil ; Portola Brand Sardines ; pound ; Powell & Mason ; Powell Street ; power ; power drain ; power source ; pregnancy ; press ; pressure ; priority 1 ; probability ; probe ; problem ; professor ; property ; pulse ; puppet ; pygmy sperm whale ; quadrant ; question ; Queen Mary, The ; radiation ; radio frequency ; radio silence ; radio transmitter ; range ; rank ; rank insignia ; ray gun ; red alert ; reentry ; reference ; renegade ; rescue ; reserve bank ; reserve power ; respiratory rate ; result ; " rich beyond the dreams of avarice "; right ; Robbins, Harold ; Robin Hood ; " Roger "; room ; Russian language ; Russkie ; rust bucket ; sabotage ; St. Paul Hotel ; salinity ; Saloon, The ; Sam ; San Diego Zoo ; San Francisco ; San Francisco Bay ; San Francisco City Hall ; San Francisco Chronicle ; San Francisco Department of Sanitation ; San Francisco Ferry Building ; San Francisco Municipal Railway ; San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge ; San Francisco Police Department ; San Francisco Register ; Saran Wrap ; Saratoga , USS ; Sausalito ; scene ; Scots language ; screen ; scrubs ; Seaboard Air Line Railroad ; seal ; sea otter ; seat ; seawater ; SeaWorld ; secret ; Sector 5 ; security corridor ; service number ; Shepard , USS ; shield ; shipmate ; shoes ; short-sightedness ; shrimp ; shorts ; side effect ; signal ; silence ; singing ; slaughter ; slingshot effect ; Slits, The ; Smith & Wesson Model 15 ; smoking ; solar flare ; solar sail ; SONAR ; " son of a bitch "; Sony ; soul ; sound ; " sour stomach "; Spacedock One ; spacedock door (aka space door ); Spanish Inquisition ; speaker ; species ; specimen ; speed ; stairs ; " stand by "; Starfleet ; Starfleet Academy ; Starfleet Command ; Starfleet Commander ; Starfleet regulations ; Starfleet uniform ; starship ; status report ; stench ; storage tank ; story ; street ; Stryker ; subject ; subbscription ; sucker ; summit ; Sun ; superior officer ; surgical mask ; surprise ; Susann, Jacqueline ; suspicion ; swim ; system map ; systems report ; " tango ; Taylor's science vessel ( science vessel ); teaching ; team ; team leader ; Team 2 ; teeth ; Telegraph Hill ; telephone ; telephone booth ; telephone number ; temperature ; terminator ; terra incognita ; Terran solar system ; terrorist ; testimony ; test program ; " that's the ticket "; theater ; theft ; theory ; thing ; thousand ; three smaller ships neutralized by Whale Probe ; thruster ; thruster control ; time ; time continuum ; time re-entry program ; time travel ; time warp ; tire iron ; tissue ; toast ; toaster oven ; Tokyo ; ton ; torpedo ; tour ; tour of inspection ; tracking device ; trajectory ; Transamerica Pyramid ; transmission ; transparent aluminum ; transporter ; transporter beam ; transporter power ; trash can ; travel pod ; travel pod 05 ; tricorder ; tricycle ; truth ; toucan ; Toyota Corolla ; unicorn ; universal constant ; underground storage system ; United States Government ; United States Marine Corps ; United States Navy ; United States of America ; Universal Peace and Hello ; universe ; University of California, Berkeley ; Universal Studios ; uranium ; Valvoline ; value ; variable ; violation ; visit ; visor ; Volkswagen Beetle ; Volkswagen Rabbit ; vote ; Vulcan ; Vulcan (planet); Vulcan language ; Vulcan nerve pinch ; Vulcan salute ; walker ; wall ; warm-blooded ; warp drive regulator ; warp speed ; Washington, DC ; water ; weapons system ; " wee "; Weintraub ; Wendy's ; west ; West Coast ; whale ; whale hunter ; whale song ; " Whales Weep Not! "; whale tank ; whaling ; whaling ship ; whiteboard ; White Rose ; White GMC Xpeditor ; Winchell's Donut House ; Winchester Model 1200 ; Wonderful World of Whales, The ; Wonderland ; word ; year ; yellow alert ; Yellow Pages ; Yerba Buena Island ; Yorktown , USS ; Yorktown chief engineer ; zebra ; Zober, Sandi

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 StarTrek.com
  • 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 Kenneth Mitchell
  • 3 Kol (Klingon)

Inside 'Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home's Famous Bus Scene and Leonard Nimoy's Real-Life Inspiration (Flashback)

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If Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home has a Friends episode-style nickname, it’s "The One With the Whales." But it speaks to the power of the movie's comedic moments that among Trekkies it's also referred to as "The One That's Funny" 35 years after its debut. 

Speaking with ET upon The Voyage Home ’s premiere in 1986, the late Leonard Nimoy , who died in 2015 at age 86 , revealed the humor wasn’t happenstance. In fact, for his second outing as director and actor following Star Trek III: The Search for Spock,  it was a mandate. 

“I said I want to have some fun here,” Nimoy explained. “We said intentionally right from the very beginning. We want this lighter in tone than these previous films.” Noting the amount of deaths that transpired in I-III, including Mr. Spock, Nimoy quipped, “[The characters] were having eulogies all the time.”

One step of Nimoy's initiative was a memorable incident as Spock and Captain Kirk ( William Shatner ) traversed San Francisco circa 1986, or “the Dark Ages” according to Bones (DeForest Kelley). While riding the city bus, they’re disturbed by a quintessential ‘80s punk blasting loud music from a boombox. At first, Kirk applies his 23rd century manners and politely requests he lower the volume. But the “Punk on Bus” -- the character’s official name in the credits -- replies by flipping him the bird and raising the audio even higher. That’s when Spock resorts to his people’s go-to defense: the “Vulcan nerve pinch,” which renders the unruly passenger unconscious and cuts off the music after he collapses onto his boombox.

As Nimoy told ET, the comic moment was the filmmaker living out a personal fantasy following a similar interaction in his real life that later inspired the scene. “I was walking on Columbus Avenue in New York one day and suddenly was hit with a wall of noisy music,” he recalled, explaining that he then discovered the source was a man who just walked past him carrying a “gigantic” boombox. “I thought if I was Spock right now, I'd 'pinch' his brains out and that's how that got into the movie. It really happened.” He added, “I got hit with that noise and I thought, ‘I've gotta make a comment on that.’” 

On top of the real-life inspiration, Nimoy employed his real-life assistant at the time, Kirk Thatcher, to play “Punk on Bus” (he was also an associate producer for the movie, in addition to co-writing the song playing on the boombox). Thatcher went on to be a prolific writer and director for multiple projects at The Jim Henson Company, including this year’s Muppet Haunted Mansion on Disney +. But ultimately, it would be the notoriety from his less than a minute of screen time that led to a serendipitous invitation to join the Marvel Cinematic Universe , albeit briefly. 

As Thatcher later discovered, MCU overseer Kevin Feige is a big fan of The Voyage Home and, in particular, Spock and Kirk’s bus scene. And sometimes that’s all it takes to end up in a Marvel film, such as 2017’s Spider-Man: Homecoming . As Thatcher explained to StarTrek.com at the time, not only did he film a cameo in the movie, it’s comically -- and very non-canonically -- implied that he reprised his role as “Punk on Bus” for a quick moment early in the film (as seen below).

Thatcher explained to the outlet: "I was having a meeting with the guys at Marvel and Kevin Feige had to leave early to catch a plane to New York for the last few days of shooting and wrap on Homecoming . I mentioned that I was going to New York too, only two days later. He got excited and asked if I would be interested in doing a cameo as a punk in Spider-Man ? I, of course said, 'Sure!'” While the moment had been 30 years in the making, Thatcher noted that “about 48 hours” passed between his initial invitation and breaking out the boombox again on the set of a big-budget Marvel film. 

Spock becoming a public transit hero also derived from Nimoy’s wish to get Star Trek “off the lot,” which for this franchise mostly pertains to the Paramount Studios backlot in Hollywood, where a majority of the original series and the first three movies were filmed. His objective culminated with him and veteran Star Trek writer Harve Bennett crafting a plot that in part weaved together a lethal threat to Earth, time travel, nods to global warming and the Vulcan’s recovery after being resurrected from the dead in  The Search for Spock . 

But the production ultimately did circle back to Melrose Avenue to film The Voyage Home ’s climatic finale at Paramount, which saw the crew crash their borrowed Klingon Bird-of-Prey into the San Francisco Bay. Still, shooting that sequence in a water tank adjacent to the parking lot was a little more exciting than their run-of-the-mill soundstage production sets. “It was a lot of fun to shoot that scene,” Nimoy said, which he also jokingly referred to as his “Cecil B. DeMille moment” on account of the wind, wave and smoke machines around the set that were reminiscent of productions in Hollywood’s “Golden Age.” 

Despite the excitement, Nimoy said he faced extra challenges while pulling double duty on set. “I had to be taken back and forth in a boat in order to get into the shot, and then [another boat ride] to get back out of the shot and look behind the cameras,” he remembered.

Nimoy’s initial instincts paid off when The Voyage Home was released on Nov. 26, 1986. The movie brought in $130 million at the worldwide box office and garnered several favorable reviews. It also won over a very important figure in the Trekkie community. “I have seen the rough cut of [the movie] and I was very, very pleased,” Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry told ET leading up to the release. “I think it's the best of all the Star Trek movies. Leonard Nimoy has done a fine job.”

Looking at the canon in the 35 years since, it’s easy to see the movie’s influence on both the franchise’s TV shows and films. Time travel has proven to be one of Star Trek ’s most fertile storytelling devices, which The Next Generation took advantage of nearly 10 years later to the day. And its influence on the comedy end has reverberated all the way to Lower Decks , which referenced  The Voyage Home ’s pair of whales as one of many Easter eggs on Mariner’s conspiracy tac board in "Cupid's Errant Arrow" (seen below). 

Looking past the movie’s humor and dynamic set pieces, Nimoy believed the magic behind The Voyage Home could be attributed to his long-time collaborators. “I think every one of them makes an extremely valuable contribution to Star Trek ,” Nimoy expressed. “One of the most important things is this particular group of people and the special chemistry that happens when we all come together.”

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home  is streaming on Paramount+.

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Star Trek: Picard's Voyage Home Tribute Is Absolutely Note-Perfect

Star Trek: Picard's latest episode finds its time-travelling crew in a very familiar -- and funny -- dilemma that evokes a classic Star Trek film.

WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Star Trek: Picard Season 2, Episode 4, "Watcher," currently streaming on Paramount+.

Easter egg placement is becoming an art form in and of itself as legacy franchises like Star Wars and Star Trek  find increasingly creative ways to pay homage to their roots. Star Trek has proven quite bold in its usage of the device. It started with Star Trek: Discovery , which placed itself on the timeline directly in the path of The Original Series and even brought Mr. Spock back before jumping to the 32nd century and leaving Strange New Worlds to navigate those waters. Star Trek: Picard is its own kind of Easter egg, as it's brought back one of the franchise's most beloved figures and several of his friends.

In the process, it’s dropped some ferocious nods to the past, but few as bold – or as successful – as the capper to Season 2, Episode 4, “Watcher.” One scene expounds upon this season’s apparent theme of rebooting Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home , as Picard and his friends travel back in time ( and potentially change Next Generation history ) to undo another dark and dystopic future . As delivered by director Lea Thompson and a very game cast, the moment is a pitch-perfect nod to what the fans affectionately refer to as “The One with the Whales.”

RELATED:  Star Trek: Picard Season 2, Episode 3, "Assimilation," Recap & Spoilers

Star Trek IV

The Voyage Home completed a kind of trilogy that started with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and continued through Star Trek III: The Search for Spock . The idea was wild. With the powerful emotional arc of Spock’s death and resurrection behind them, the Enterprise crew finished their journey with what amounted to a temporal screwball comedy. With the Earth under assault by a mysterious alien probe, they traveled back to then-contemporary 1986 in search of a pair of humpback whales, who were subsequently driven to extinction in the 21st century... but were the only beings capable of communicating with the probe in the 23rd.

The film was a massive success, celebrating the original crew’s enduring friendship by letting them romp through 20th century San Francisco without blending in nearly as well as they thought. One of its high points was when Kirk and Spock traveled on a public bus through San. A punk on the seat across the way played obnoxious music – giving Kirk the finger when he asked the man to turn it down – only for Spock to rise silently and deliver his signature Vulcan nerve pinch. The man collapsed and the music shut off, to the applause of the remaining passengers.

RELATED:  Did Star Trek: Picard Really Just Kill Off [SPOILER]?

Star Trek: Picard

It's a very funny moment, and Picard all but demands a reference to it after embracing the same time-travel premise. Season 2, Episode 3, “Assimilation” used the same method as T he Voyage Home to get Jean-Luc and his crew into the past: sling-shotting around the sun until they achieved time warp. It was perhaps only a matter of time before a repeat of the punk gag showed up, and “The Watcher” lands on it with both feet.

San Francisco has been replaced by Los Angeles, and Kirk and Spock by Seven and Raffi. But the punk is still there on the bus, and still playing the same loud song as they make their way across L.A. He’s even played by the same actor: Kirk R. Thatcher, who acted as an associate producer on The Voyage Home and has a long career both in front of and behind the camera. He might even be the same character, which forms the scene's subtle punchline. This time, when Seven glares at him and tells him to turn down the noise, he quickly complies -- with an apology to boot.

Seven’s implied menace aside (she might not have stopped with a nerve pinch if he made her get up), this scene gets the elephant in the room out of the way. Picard's Season 2 plot is clearly riffing on The Voyage Home (and some other time-traveling episodes from Star Trek canon) so comparisons are inevitable. By wrapping things up in such an elegant way, and even forming an organic connection to The Voyage Home in the process, it can proceed with its own story about Picard facing his worst enemies without having to look over its shoulder at what came before.

Created by Akiva Goldsman, Michael Chabon, Kirsten Beyer and Alex Kurtzman, Star Trek: Picard releases new episodes Thursdays on Paramount+.

KEEP READING:  Star Trek: Picard Season 2, Episode 4, "Watcher," Recap & Spoilers

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Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

1986, Sci-fi/Adventure, 1h 58m

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Critics Consensus

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is perhaps the lightest and most purely enjoyable entry of the long-running series, emphasizing the eccentricities of the Enterprise's crew. Read critic reviews

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Star trek iv: the voyage home videos, star trek iv: the voyage home   photos.

Living in exile on the planet Vulcan, the ragtag former crew of the USS Enterprise steal a starship after receiving a planetary distress call from Earth: a space probe has entered into orbit around Earth, disabled global power on the planet and evaporated the oceans. Captain Kirk (William Shatner), Spock (Leonard Nimoy) and the rest of the officers travel back in time to retrieve now-extinct humpback whales, which Spock has deduced will communicate with the probe and send it away from Earth.

Genre: Sci-fi, Adventure

Original Language: English

Director: Leonard Nimoy

Producer: Harve Bennett

Writer: Leonard Nimoy , Harve Bennett , Steve Meerson , Peter Krikes , Harve Bennett , Nicholas Meyer

Release Date (Theaters): Nov 26, 1986  wide

Release Date (Streaming): Dec 16, 2009

Box Office (Gross USA): $104.7M

Runtime: 1h 58m

Distributor: Paramount Pictures

Production Co: Paramount Pictures

Sound Mix: Dolby Stereo, Dolby A, Magnetic Stereo 6 Track, Surround, Stereo, Dolby Digital, Dolby SR

Aspect Ratio: Scope (2.35:1)

View the collection: Star Trek

Cast & Crew

William Shatner

Admiral, Captain James T. Kirk

Leonard Nimoy

Captain Spock

Catherine Hicks

Dr. Gillian Taylor

DeForest Kelley

Commander Leonard H. McCoy, M.D.

James Doohan

Captain Montgomery Scott

George Takei

Commander Hikaru Sulu

Walter Koenig

Commander Pavel Andreievich Chekov

Nichelle Nichols

Commander Nyota Uhura

Amanda Grayson

Mark Lenard

Ambassador Sarek

Robin Curtis

Lieutenant Saavik

Robert Ellenstein

Federation Council President

John Schuck

Klingon Ambassador

Brock Peters

Admiral Cartwright

Harve Bennett

Steve Meerson

Peter Krikes

Nicholas Meyer

Brooke Breton

Associate Producer

Kirk R. Thatcher

Ralph Winter

Executive Producer

Leonard Rosenman

Original Music

Donald Peterman

Cinematographer

Peter Berger

Film Editing

Amanda Mackey

Jack T. Collis

Production Design

Peter Smith

Art Director

Nilo Rodis-Jamero

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Critic Reviews for Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

Audience reviews for star trek iv: the voyage home.

Star Trek's attempt at making a veiled political statement. Like other films at the time in the 80s that were writing scripts with familiar characters to take on world issues, Star Trek decided to jump on the "Save the Whales" campaign. An alien probe comes to earth and threatens the planet. Since all of the humpback whales had long been extinct in the future, the Enterprise has to go back in time to get a few whales to communicate with the probe. Some comic relief with crew members going from the future to the 80s and dealing with the time jump but other than that, it is a flat film that is too obvious in its reach as far as the point the script is trying to make.

star trek 4 time travel scene

The Voyage Home may very well be the goofiest, most incoherent, and outright strangest of the original series. But it's also funny, re-watchable, and probably the most entertaining. As weird as the film can get, thanks to a wonderful score, gorgeous cinematography, and a step back into the TV format, it's one of my favorites of any of the Trek films. The Voyage Home centers on the the Enterprise's hopes of finding something to communicate with a dangerous probe that wants to destroy the earth. The only possible way to communicate with the probe is to travel back in time to the late 20th century and bring Humpback Whales to the probe. Yes, that is the real premise. As a whole, it's a fun ride. Not only do we get to see the crew of the Enterprise go somewhere other than the seats of the ship, but it's the only Trek film that could be considered a comedy. Watching the crew attempt to fit in with 1980's San Francisco is good TV for sure. And that's what this film essentially is. It doesn't really fit into the film series at all, and it may have been better served as an extended episode. In fact, the only real link to Search For Spock is just the fact that Spock still hasn't fully adapted to being a member of the Enterprise as his memory is still weary. Ironically, it out-grossed all of the other Trek films leading up to it by far. It's domestic gross was the highest for the franchise up until 2009's Star Trek, so it's safe to say it was an crowd-pleaser. Perhaps it's success had to do with this film focusing less on overdone special effects and over the top villains and more so on a story people could get behind and humanized characters. As goofy as Catherine Hicks' Gillian character can get, I think she resonated with the audience. With all that said, the film is pretty nuts. The idea that the crew could just walk around San Francisco, in and out of hospitals and restaurants and not be captured by police at any time seemed a bit far fetched. Sometimes the reach for comedy was definitely felt and sadly there aren't any great "sci-fi moments" like the others have. But I think everybody can have some fun with this one. If nothing else, perhaps you can do something to help whales next time you come across one. +Has its funny moments +Goofy fun +Cinematography +Score -Stupid and incoherent moments -Why is a Trek film focusing on whales anyway? 7.2/10

Ambitious, exciting and memorable, The Voyage Home, being the fourth installment further the increasing quality in storytelling in the series, and is another good sequel that is directed yet again by actor Leonard Nimoy. Nimoy's direction is terrific and bring some much needed depth to the plot that makes it that much more enjoyable. There are hints of humor strewn throughout the film, and it complements the thrills and action perfectly. There are plenty of improvements in this entry, most notably the film's special effects and more layed back tone. I feel that the filmmakers were much more confident with this release, and it shows on-screen. The story is good, and the cast deliver some good performances. I really was surprised by this one, and like I said, it's an entertaining Science Fiction picture worth seeing, and it's a well crafted affair that is sure to delight fans. Nimoy does impressive behind the camera, and he helped make two outstanding films in the film adaptations of the classic TV show. It's rare for a fourth film in a series to be entertaining, but in the case of The Voyage Home, it's a highly engaging film going experience that manages to be amusing for a good two hours of entertainment. There are aspects that could have been improved upon, but overall, it's a solid sequel worth seeing and it's one that stands out among the franchise's very best films. This is a different type of Star Trek film, and it works well on many levels. With good performances, a well thought out story, and good direction, The Voyage Home continues the quality of good films in the series. This is one of the better movies I've seen, and though a bit different, is a refreshing idea that is thoroughly engaging.

Tiresome. Thank God the cast started to die off by this date.

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Published Jul 12, 2022

Strange New Worlds 101: Time Travel

A look back at the times Star Trek boldly went back and forward in time.

Illustrated art of Strange New Worlds 101: Time Travel with Time Crystal

StarTrek.com

Welcome back to Strange New Worlds 101! It’s been a blast covering this season with all of you, and we’re closing it out with a look at the way time travel has been used across the Star Trek franchise. As the season opened with Captain Pike reckoning with the tragic glimpse into his future, the finale continued that theme as Pike confronted another future in a tangible sense.

Time travel has been present in Star Trek from the very beginning of the series, and many shows have featured the crews traveling through time to prevent disaster. The original crew of the Enterprise went on several time travel adventures, most notably in the film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home . When Earth was threatened by a probe that only wanted to chat with some humpback whales, Kirk led his crew to a very strange world — San Francisco, 1996. There they contended with colorful language, punks on buses, and as McCoy put it, the barbarism of an '80s hospital. Luckily, with the help of two whales named George and Gracie, the crew was able to return to their present and save Earth.

Data and Picard in All Good Things

The Next Generation also did a fair bit of time traveling (even meeting Mark Twain!). The most notable time that Picard explored time travel was during the series finale “ All Good Things …”. Q , determined to test Picard and humanity one more time, showed Picard glimpses of his future, as well as glimpses of his first mission aboard the Enterprise . As Picard jumped through timelines, he once more managed to prove to Q that humanity was worth saving. Of course, this timeline changed with the series Star Trek: Picard . Though in the second season, Q created a darker timeline that required Picard and his allies to travel back to the present day in Los Angeles.

Captain Sisko and his crew engaged in some time traveling, thanks to a Bajoran orb, when they had to travel back to the events of the TOS episode “ The Trouble with Tribbles ” to save Kirk — and the timeline — from destruction due to the actions of a vengeful Klingon operative. The Department of Temporal Investigations got involved afterwards, though Sisko assured them that his actions didn’t affect the timeline in any way. In Voyager , Captain Janeway concluded her adventures with some time travel in series finale “ Endgame ,” in an attempt to save her crew, Seven , and herself from the Borg Queen ; they also emerged victorious and with the timeline secure.

Star Trek: Enterprise -

Star Trek: Enterprise introduced the Temporal Cold War through the character Daniels, who was tasked with preventing temporal incursions on the NX-01 . Daniels was especially focused on preserving Archer’s life, as Archer was key to the creation of the Federation. In one notable arc, he and the crew traveled to the 1940s, where the Nazis have allied with a 29th Century force called the Na’kuhl. Daniels died attempting to save Earth, but when Archer ultimately succeeded, Daniels’ death was reversed and was able to return to his own time. It was Archer’s actions that helped end the Temporal Cold War, and laws were created against time travel following the war’s conclusion as referenced by Cleveland “Book” Booker in the Discovery episode “ That Hope is You, Part 1 .”

Star Trek: Discovery famously used time travel to send the crew of the Discovery over 900 years into the future. There, Michael Burnham and her friends were able to save the Federation following the Burn . The crew remained in this time period and built their new home there, leaving behind their family in hopes of a better future. Discovery also marked the first time that Pike had a brush with time travel, all thanks to the Time Crystals that sealed his fate.

Recap Through the Valley of Shadows

What are Time Crystals, you might ask? Time Crystals are a mineral that has a non-equilibrium matter state. Found on the planet Boreth , they are guarded by the Timekeepers. Harry Mudd used one to trap the crew of the Discovery in a time loop, and one was used to send the Discovery forward in time to stop the destruction of the universe. Pike, who retrieved that crystal in Season Two of Discovery , was able to see his future via that crystal.

In the Season One finale of Strange New Worlds , a future version of Pike who decided to avoid his fate appeared to the present Pike. After seeing the Federation begin a war with the Romulan Star Empire, one that would destroy Spock’s life, the Future Pike couldn’t let that happen. He traveled back in time to warn his younger self to continue on his path, and Pike — ever noble — agreed. The elder Pike showed him what the future would hold if he didn’t accept nor followed his destiny. He ultimately made the choice to follow his destiny, even if it leads to a future he never saw for himself.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - Future Pike

There have been plenty of time travelers throughout the 56-year history of Star Trek . Which one was your favorite? Let us know @StarTrek on social, read our recap of “ A Quality of Mercy ” here , and start counting down the days until the next season of Strange New Worlds . Until then, let’s boldly go!

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Julian Gardner (they/them) is on the editorial team for StarTrek.com.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds streams exclusively on Paramount+ in the U.S., U.K., Australia, Latin America, Brazil, South Korea, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland and Austria. In addition, the series airs on Bell Media’s CTV Sci-Fi Channel and streams on Crave in Canada and on SkyShowtime in the Nordics, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal and Central and Eastern Europe. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is distributed by Paramount Global Content Distribution.

Star Trek: The Original Series - "The Way to Eden"

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Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is pure, joyful cinema

Entertainment Geekly's 'Star Trek' series looks at the best whale movie ever made

Darren is a TV Critic. Follow him on Twitter @DarrenFranich for opinions and recommendations.

star trek 4 time travel scene

2016 marks the 50th anniversary of the Star Trek franchise – and the release of Star Trek Beyond , the 13th feature film in the series. To celebrate this big year, and ponder the deeper meanings of Trek ’s first half-century, the Entertainment Geekly column will look at a different Star Trek film each week from now till Beyond . This week: The only Trek film that feels like a Howard Hawks comedy. Last week: The Trek film about the clashing egos of William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy . Next week: Shatner unleashed .

In 1965, Leonard Nimoy said the first words ever uttered in the Star Trek universe. “Check the circuit!” says Spock at the start of “The Cage,” the original pilot for Star Trek and the first time Star Trek was boring. To modern eyes, Spock doesn’t look like Spock: Eyebrows too big, hair too mussed, a noose-collar atop a too-baggy uniform, flanking an un-Kirk Captain who looks too much like Jay Leno’s chin chest-bursting out of Ray Liotta’s face.

NBC didn’t like Star Trek , didn’t like Spock. A year later, Gene Roddenberry filmed a new pilot. He fired everybody — he fired his mistress! — but he kept Nimoy.

Twenty years later, Roddenberry was gone — to Next Generation , not for long — and Nimoy was in control. Tricky thing, applying words like “control” or “authorship” to anything Star Trek . Nimoy directed Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home , and received a “Story By” credit. So did Harve Bennett, the producer of Movie Two through Movie Five, making him another Man Who Saved Star Trek and another Man Who Almost Destroyed Star Trek . Bennett shares screenplay credit alongside three other men. One of those writers later wrote Double Impact , the movie where Jean-Claude Van Damme headbutts Jean-Claude Van Damme.

And one of those writers was Nicholas Meyer, the man who made Wrath of Khan . Meyer’s generally credited with writing the film’s 20th Century-set Act 2. Perhaps not coincidentally, The Voyage Home has one of the greatest and daffiest Act 2’s of any film ever. Here is a movie that begins as A Race Against Time To Save The Earth and then takes a sharp detour into aquarium etiquette and Bay Area geography; a movie where the stakes are global, and there’s plenty of time for Kirk to take a marine biologist out for an Italian dinner; a movie where Kirk is a noble romantic protagonist who makes his date foot the bill. There’s a wonderful lack of seriousness powering The Voyage Home , recalling Howard Hawks’ loopy genre exercises To Have and Have Not or The Big Sleep . It is the kind of movie where characters spend the whole movie taking a break from the movie.

So it was a team effort, in front of the camera and behind the scenes. But it was a team effort with a leader. And the leader wanted to make a different kind of film. Nimoy later explained the core concept: “No dying, no fighting, no shooting, no photon torpedoes, no phaser blasts, no stereotypical bad guy.” His previous Star Trek film had all those things, and outer space, and aliens, and sets. Nimoy wanted to make a movie about Earth, right now, shot on location, with human people.

Nimoy was an actor, a director, a photographer, a memoirist, a musician, a cameo cartoon voice, a face in advertisements that baited your nostalgia and dared you not to smile. In all things he was Spock. Sometimes that bothered him: He wrote I Am Spock , but also I Am Not Spock . Nimoy was never a dilettante, a preening highbrow — never the Alan Rickman character from Galaxy Quest, that self-loathing Shakespearean slumming for fanboy dollars and residual fame. Nimoy liked Spock, truthfully. He liked the work, occasionally. He liked the money, naturally: $2.5 million for Trek IV . (That’s more than Hemsworth made on Avengers — and that’s mid-’80s dollars, unadjusted.) Nimoy was frustrated with Spock, but it wasn’t merely the frustration of typecasting or of repetition. It was the internal struggle, the human condition: Nimoy struggled with Spock the way Hamlet struggles with Hamlet.

And Nimoy loved people. That sounds like a simple thing to say, until you watch The Voyage Home , one of the loveliest and strangest and lightest comedies ever made, and you realize that “loving people” can be something tangible, like an added filter on the camera. Nimoy loved the supporting players, and his film bestows each of them with a Hall of Fame moment. Scotty: “A keyboard. How quaint .” Chekov: “Nuclear wessels .” Uhura: “But where is Alameda ?” McCoy, undercover as a surgeon, asks an old lady in a hospital what’s wrong with her. Kidney dialysis, she says. “Dialysis!” McCoy sputters — an actual honest-to-god sputter, DeForest Kelley’s voice like an old engine cackling. “What is this, the Dark Ages ?”

Sulu was supposed to get a showcase scene meeting his own great-great-great-grand-something. It didn’t work out — the kid got scared — and Nimoy was still bummed about it a decade later when he wrote I Am Spock . But oh, how I treasure Takei, in his baritone voice, narrating the Enterprise’s warpspeed run into the center of our solar system: “Nine point five! Nine point six! Nine point seven! NINE POINT EIGHT! ” (And The Voyage Home continues one of the great embedded subplots in Trek history: The love story between Sulu and the Excelsior .)

Did I mention that they’re warping straight into the sun so they can travel through time? There’s an energy-sapping probe destroying Earth, apparently because no one can respond to the probe’s message. Is the probe saying “hello” to humanity? “Only human arrogance would assume the message must be meant for man,” Spock chastises.

It’s been said there are no villains in Star Trek IV. In the future, the probe hails from some unknown intelligence that almost destroys Earth by accident. In the past, every hint of antagonism is quickly undercut. At one point, Chekov is captured by the FBI, and there’s a much simpler, more on-the-nose version of this movie where the FBI becomes the bad guys. Maybe that wouldn’t be terrible; maybe it would be sharp, playing the utopian sensibility of the Federation against Cold War paranoia. But in The Voyage Home , it’s an opportunity for a “Who’s On First” routine:

FBI AGENT: Let’s take it from the top.

CHEKOV: The top of what?

FBI AGENT: Name?

CHEKOV: My name?

FBI AGENT: No, my name.

CHEKOV: I do not know your name!

FBI AGENT: You play games with me, mister, and you’re through.

CHEKOV: I am? Can I go now?

At this point, the FBI agent — who looks like the uncanny valley between Paul Rudd and Armie Hammer — whispers to his partner, “What do you think?” His partner says, “He’s a Russkie.” The FBI agent, completely deadpan, missing a beat: “That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard in my life.” Every one-scene character in The Voyage Home is smarter than they should be, wittier than they have to be. Chekov grabs his phaser and tries to fire it, but it’s run low on batteries. He tosses it to the FBI agent, and watch closely here.

The actor is Jeff Lester — who naturally played both “Lane Brody” and “Lance Jarvis” on Baywatch — and he catches the phaser with a look of weary amusement. Here’s a film where the shady FBI guys feel tired, and a bit embarrassed, about being shady FBI guys.

The Voyage Home reminds me of something Dan Harmon told Vulture regarding Cheers : “The characters were so distinct. As with Peanuts , you could put them in outer space and still know which one was Charlie Brown.” The Voyage Home is the inverse of that theorem: It takes its characters from outer space and sets them down on the streets of San Francisco, in the halls of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, in the front seat of a truck. And here’s something strange. You’ve seen Kirk and Spock on alien planets production designed like pop art comic strips, in cosmic mountain ranges battling aliens beyond our ken; you’ve seen them battle gods and monsters.

Yet I don’t think there is any single moment in Star Trek history where Kirk and Spock look better — at once grander and more approachable, like statues of the Founding Fathers buying rounds at sports bar — than the moment when they walk along Marina Boulevard. Behind them: The bay, the Bridge, the fog.

Kirk’s still wearing his magenta-maroon disco suit, looking like the communist dictator of Studio 54; Spock’s wearing a karate bathrobe. You can giggle at the buried joke of the movie — they fit right into pre-digital San Francisco — but you can also appreciate how the movie makes them seem so much bigger by bringing them down to Earth.

No other Star Trek film has done location shooting like this; maybe The Voyage Home is Trek as neo-realism. Legend holds that the “nuclear wessels” scene was shot in secret, with Walter Koenig and Nichelle Nichols talking to random passers-by. That’s maybe not true — counter-legend holds that those are all paid extras — but in the most memorable part of the scene, Russian Chekov asks a nearby policeman for directions to the closest nuclear reactor. The cop says nothing, doesn’t even move; he was an actual San Francisco, working with the production crew in an official capacity. So, actually, hang the neo-realism: The Voyage Home is as close as Trek ever gets to the start of “Duck Amuck,” when Daffy walks off his own film strip.

The humor of The Voyage Home is playful without ever becoming sarcastic, self-aware without ever feeling like self-loathing. The characters feel engaged — watch how Takei is constantly looking around San Francisco, a great grin on his face. Think of how this movie shifts from Act One to Act Two: Spock says they need to save the whales; Kirk says “Let’s time travel!”; and then they aim their ship right into the sun. Think, too, of Catherine Hicks, in a tricky role. She plays Gillian, the whale-loving marine biologist. She thinks Kirk and Spock are crazy, but intriguing; she doesn’t really believe they’re from the future, but she intuitively understands that they’re people she should hang out with.

A lesser film might try to architect this interaction somehow. (Maybe Gillian is an FBI agent; maybe the wrong thing for America circa 1986 is the right thing for the world .) Hell, one of the greatest hours of television ever is a Star Trek time travel episode where Kirk goes to the past and falls in love with the most important woman in history. The Voyage Home has no time for such pretensions. Gillian’s an obvious love interest, but they never really have a “romantic” scene. Gillian thinks Kirk is interesting; Kirk likes how much she cares. And Gillian is allowed to come to the future — where she promptly says goodbye to Kirk, because there’s just so much more to see.

Their final scene together is one of the most graceful light-comedic romance moments in any movie I can think of. “How will I find you?” he asks her — kidding but not quite, Shatner’s laugh a bit too forced. “Don’t worry,” she says. “I’ll find you.” Nimoy holds his camera for two long moments, first of Gillian saying farewell:

Then of Kirk, astonished. What do you think is going through his mind?

Is he amazed that, for once, he’s the one left behind? Is he bemused at the grand divine comedy of existence? Maybe I’m a shameless romantic, but I can’t help but imagine his thought bubble in Shatnerian overspeak: “My god, Bones! I think I’m in love!”

Shatner! My god, Shatner! Another one of the graceful jokes powering The Voyage Home is that, here in the past, Captain Kirk remains the most confident man in the galaxy, despite all indications that he doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing. Needing money, he pawns McCoy’s birthday glasses at an antique shop. The owner will pay a hundred dollars for them. “Is that a lot?” Kirk asks, smiling wide like a con man.

Later, at the aquarium, Kirk spots Spock swimming with the whales, and his wild overreactions belong in a silent movie museum:

Of course, Kirk is a con man in The Voyage Home . To his crew, he pretends to know everything about the past. (“Double dumb ass on you!”) To people in the past, he offers one BS line after another. (“I think he had a little too much LDS.”) The joke of his brimming confidence paired against Spock’s Holy Fool confusion reaches Chico-and-Harpo levels:

But the film isn’t some shallow self-parody of Kirk, or Star Trek . It has heart, and passion — Save the Whales! — and a tremendous sense of fun. When the crew crash-lands into the Bay, they need to climb out of their sinking ship. The whales start singing; the probe is vanquished. Another film might cut away, but Nimoy’s camera lingers, and we watch the crew of the Enterprise cheerfully jump into the water. The line between character and actor falls away, phasered into nonexistence. James Doohan does a bellyflopping dive into the water; Nichelle Nichols splashes water toward DeForest Kelley. At one point, Kirk pulls Spock into the water — or maybe that’s Shatner and Nimoy, fooling around.

And yet, there is a seriousness to the wonderful, exuberant silliness of The Voyage Home . At the film’s beginning, the resurrected Spock is asked a question: “How do you feel?” At the end of the film, Spock has traveled across space and time, has rescued a dead great species from the dustbin of existence, has saved the Earth one more time. And none of that plot stuff matters half so much as Spock saying, nonchalant: “I feel fine.” To feel “fine” is not to feel “perfect” or even “happy,” does not imply tremendous success nor some massive personal change.

To feel “fine” in The Voyage Home is to be aware of your place in the great scheme of existence, content in your place among your fellow creatures. There is such optimism in this movie, and perhaps that optimism is residual from Roddenberry — but Roddenberry preferred grand statements, not whimsy. The Voyage Home needed Nimoy, a thoughtful man with a sense of humor, a leader who loved his people, and loved people in general, and damn it, who loved the whales, and Earth, and the Golden Gate Bridge, and the nightmare intersection where Columbus and Kearny and Jackson hit each other right in front of the Zoetrope Building.

Nimoy died last year, age 82: A long life, and prosperous. Spock will live forever, of course — and The Voyage Home is his magnum opus. Quickly, listen to the theme music for Voyage Home by Leonard Rosenman.

Can you hear the festive melody? Aren’t those bells ringing vaguely yuletidal? There’s no obvious comparison in movie history for Star Trek: the Voyage Home , not many time travel message movies about family and friends and the fear that we’re all doomed because of sins in the past, and how that fear will always crash like waves against the shore of the eternal human hope that it’s not too late, that we can change.

But there is that famous story about heavenly visitors and time travel, a myth about how any person can change a dark-sad future into a happy-better one, a parable that argues that the great heroic act of existence is being an engaged part of a community. So maybe The Voyage Home is our new A Christmas Carol . Maybe Ebenezer Scrooge can save Tiny Tim; maybe the Earth isn’t doomed; maybe, in 2286, whales will still be swimming through oceans unrisen; maybe our descendants will be here, too, in this world someone saved for them. Probe bless us, every one.

THE WHOLE MOVIE IN ONE SHOT:

A specific aircraft under the Golden Gate Bridge

“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.

A view on Earth in "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home" movie

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.

William Shatner as Kirk and Leonard Nimoy as Spock in Star Trek

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.”

A whale in water

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

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Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

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Quark's 10 best star trek episodes.

DS9's Quark is Star Trek's best-loved Ferengi, and his best episodes showcase his quest for profit, nefarious scheming, and his good-hearted nature.

  • Quark from Star Trek: DS9 proves to be more than a typical Ferengi, showcasing complex layers beyond greed and criminality.
  • His best episodes reveal Quark's capacity for redemption, positive influence, and defiance of Ferengi stereotypes.
  • Quark's evolution in relationships with characters like Odo and Pel depict his growth and depth as a character.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine 's Quark (Armin Shimerman) is the Star Trek universe's best-loved Ferengi, and his best episodes showcase all the reasons why. In DS9 's early days, Quark's reputation as a swindler and a scoundrel defined him. However, even those early episodes showed that Quark had layers of complexity beyond his criminality and relentless pursuit of profit . By defying the Ferengi stereotypes established in Star Trek: The Next Generation , Quark was one of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine characters that best exemplified the show's more nuanced approach to character.

Quark did some pretty bad things in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine , but the show was always careful to provide the Ferengi with a way back on to the right path . Even Quark's worst crimes in DS9 were tempered by his guilt and desire to make amends. Captain Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks) saw the potential in Quark from the very beginning, and many of the Ferengi's best DS9 episodes showcase his positive influence on life aboard Deep Space Nine. Another key relationship was with arch-nemesis/best friend, Constable Odo (Rene Auberjonois), who heavily features in Quark's best Star Trek episodes.

Benny Russell pleading, Nog in tears, and Odo as an umpire against the backdrop of the wormhole

Star Trek: Deep Space 9’s 20 Best Episodes Ranked

10 star trek: ds9, season 2, episode 7, "rules of acquisition", story by hilary j. bader, teleplay by ira steven behr.

"Rules of Acquisition" is the first episode to hint that Quark is about more than just profit. By falling in love with a female Ferengi, Pel (Hélène Udy), Quark is already foreshadowing the huge societal changes that his mother Ishka would later spearhead. The final scene is really the moment that Star Trek: Deep Space Nine confirms to the audience that Quark does have a heart. With Pel gone, Quark tries to convince Lt. Jadzia Dax (Terry Farrell) that their brief romance meant nothing. Dax knows otherwise, and the melancholic look on Quark's face confirms it in a subtle moment, played beautifully by Armin Shimerman.

9 Star Trek: Lower Decks, Season 3, Episode 6, "Hear All, Trust Nothing"

Written by grace parra janney.

Some tourists snap a selfie with Quark in Star Trek: Lower Decks

Star Trek: Lower Decks returned to Deep Space Nine in the episode "Hear All, Trust Nothing" , which revealed how Quark had built a huge business empire post-Dominion War. Predictably, his methods were less than legal, as he used stolen Dominion technology to revolutionize Quark's Bar on DS9. Lower Decks ' DS9 episode was a great Quark story because it showed how Quark's old habits die hard, but didn't undermine his ending. By the end of "Hear All, Trust Nothing", Quark gets to keep his vast business empire, but now has to share the profits with the Karemma from whom he stole the technology.

8 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Season 3, Episode 3, "The House of Quark"

Story by tom benko, teleplay by ronald d. moore.

Armin Shimerman as Quark and Mary Kay Adams as Grilka

"The House of Quark" is a classic example of Quark's big mouth getting him into a situation that veers wildly out of control. In this case, his lies about killing a Klingon warrior in battle inadvertently results in him becoming the head of the dead man's house. It's a scam orchestrated by Grilka (Mary Kay Adams), who has been the true power behind the throne but, due to sexist Klingon laws, cannot control her own house. Grilka and Quark successfully convince Chancellor Gowron (Robert Reilly) to give her the power she deserves, and once again, Quark proves himself to have a more progressive outlook than other Ferengi.

7 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Season 7, Episode 8, "The Siege of AR-558"

Written by ira steven behr and hans beimler.

Most of Quark's best Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episodes are comical, but "The Siege of AR-588" is a very different beast. While it's an ensemble piece about the horrors of war, Quark shines through as he gets to do things that are completely new for the character. In Star Trek 's most harrowing depiction of warfare, Quark is thrown into a desperate battle against the Dominion. It's horrific to see DS9 's heroes in such a desperate situation, and Quark's fear and eventual courage under fire is a delicate balancing act that Armin Shimerman pulls off with aplomb .

Armin Shimerman was proud of "The Siege of AR-588", praising it for depicting war as " a horrible and scary thing" that had "consequences to it."

A composite image of Captain Sisko and Weyoun from Star Trek Deep Space Nine

Star Trek: The Dominion War Timeline, Explained

6 star trek: deep space nine, season 5, episode 9, "the ascent", written by ira steven behr and robert hewitt wolfe.

"The Ascent" is possibly the best Odo and Quark episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine because it forces them together in a desperate battle for survival. After their runabout is sabotaged by the Orion Syndicate, Odo and Quark become stranded on a freezing, inhospitable planet, where they must climb a mountain and send out a distress signal. It's a brilliant episode that solidifies Quark and Odo's strange Star Trek friendship . The final scene in which Quark and Odo say they " meant every word " about hating each other is as close as those characters will ever get to saying " I love you ".

"The Ascent" was conceived to highlight Odo's frailty after he was briefly turned into a Solid, exposing him to serious injury and the effects of the elements.

5 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Season 4, Episode 25, "Body Parts"

Story by louis p. desantis & robert j bolivar, teleplay by hans beimler.

When Quark is led to believe that he's dying, he sells his remains, as per Ferengi tradition . When it's revealed that he's not dying, Quark has to go back on the sale, risking his business and reputation. It's a pitch-black Ferengi comedy that's also touching in how it depicts the Deep Space Nine crew coming to Quark's aid. From Garak (Andrew Robinson) offering to murder Quark to honor the sale, to Sisko, Dax, and Dr. Julian Bashir (Alexander Siddig) helping to rebuild the bar after Quark loses everything. It all shows how beloved he has become by this stage in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine .

4 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Season 6, Episode 12, "Who Mourns for Morn?"

Written by mark gehred-o'connell.

star-trek-ds9-who-mourns-morn-2 - Copy

"Who Mourns for Morn" is another comic portrayal of how Quark processes death, after his best customer Morn (Mark Allen Shepherd) is apparently killed in an ion storm. Quark is bereft over the loss of Morn, because he never paid his bar tab. However, the Ferengi bartender is soon thrown into a search for lost gold as Morn's former criminal associates come looking for him. It's a hugely enjoyable caper episode that puts Quark front and center, while revealing the hidden depths of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine 's most enigmatic character.

3 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Season 3, Episode 23, "Family Business"

star-trek-ds9-family-business-ishka

"Family Business" is one of the Star Trek: DS9 episodes directed by Rene Auberjonois , and it dives into Quark's family dynamics. It was the first of DS9 's more serious Ferengi episodes, as it explored the estranged relationship between Quark and his mother Ishka (Andrea Martin). The episode reveals that Quark's mother defied Ferengi laws to earn profit, something that she is under investigation for. Quark and his brother Rom (Max Grodenchik) travel to Ferenginar, and it's fascinating to see how the dynamics shift between the two brothers when they're back in the family home.

Ishka, Quark and Nog in Star Trek: DS9

9 Ways DS9's Ferengi Changed Star Trek History

2 star trek: deep space nine, season 6, episode 10, "the magnificent ferengi".

A group of Ferengi look towards the camera in Star Trek Deep Space Nine

Quark leads a not-so crack team of Ferengi to Deep Space Nine's sister station Empok Nor in "The Magnificent Ferengi". Their mission is to rescue Quark's mother Ishka from the Dominion, while handing over one of the Federation's Vorta prisoners. It's a fun spin on a hostage transfer thriller, as the Ferengi's skills for negotiation end up being the thing that wins the day. The wild scheme concocted by Nog to reanimate the corpse of the dead Vorta prisoner and outsmart Yelgrun (Iggy Pop). It's a hilarious Ferengi action comedy that is confidently led by Armin Shimerman as Quark .

1 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Season 4, Episode 8, "Little Green Men"

Story by toni marberry & jack treviño, teleplay by ira steven behr and robert hewitt wolfe.

Quark and the US military in Roswell

"Little Green Men" is the best Quark episode because it completely subverts everything that audiences expect from a Star Trek time travel episode. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine 's Ferengi trio - and a hidden Odo - find themselves stranded in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. Rather than rigidly stick to the non-interventionist policies of the Temporal Prime Directive, Quark sees it as a perfect opportunity to make substantial profit. That is, until the US military want to begin experimenting on him. It's one of the standout episodes in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine 's seminal fourth season, and represents Quark's finest hour.

All episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Lower Decks are available to stream on Paramount+

Star Trek Deep Space Nine Poster

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, also known as DS9, is the fourth series in the long-running Sci-Fi franchise, Star Trek. DS9 was created by Rick Berman and Michael Piller, and stars Avery Brooks, René Auberjonois, Terry Farrell, and Cirroc Lofton. This particular series follows a group of individuals in a space station near a planet called Bajor.

/Film

What Star Trek Looks Like Before Special Effects

"Star Trek" is one of the most iconic and enduring science fiction franchises of all time, following the adventures of Starfleet in the far-future as they explore space, the final frontier. To bring strange new worlds and civilizations to life, "Star Trek" leans heavily into visual effects, many of them cutting edge for technology available at the time. These special effects did everything from showcasing the starship Enterprise to making the ship's memorable transporter look seamlessly functional. Simply put, "Star Trek" wouldn't be what it is without its meticulously realized visual effects.

It takes a whole team and a whole process to bring these futuristic sights to the screen and these behind-the-scenes photographs offer a look at how it was all made. From extensive use of models and bluescreen to modern digital projection, "Star Trek" uses every visual effect trick in the book to thrill audiences. Here is what "Star Trek" looks like before all the special effects magic.

Read more: Celebrities You Didn't Know Were In Star Trek

Khan Gets His Own Space Ride

One of the most notable episodes from "Star Trek: The Original Series" is "Space Seed" from the first season. The episode introduces genetic superhuman Khan Noonien Singh (Ricardo Montalban), who went on to become the primary antagonist in "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan" in 1982. Khan and his fellow superhumans are exiled from Earth on an automated freighter, the Botany Bay, encountered centuries later by the Enterprise. After finding the ship in deep space, the Enterprise docks alongside it to investigate the wayward starship for themselves.

American Cinematographer recalled the lengths the production went to capture the deep space adventures of the Enterprise, using a number of different effects. Like the Enterprise, the Botany Bay had its own scale model constructed, a technique used since the series' second episode "Charlie X." Both ships were filmed together against a blue screen, with the starry background added to the shot in post-production. This method demonstrates the scale of the Enterprise, compared to the much smaller freighter.

The Enterprise Takes Flight Again

A full decade after the cancellation of "The Original Series," fans were treated to the return of the Enterprise and its crew with 1979's "Star Trek: The Motion Picture." A special reverence was taken in bringing the Enterprise to the big screen, including a sequence of Kirk and Scotty touring the outside of the hull in a shuttlecraft. After reuniting on board, the Enterprise sets out to confront V'Ger, a cloud-like entity headed towards Earth destroying all in its path. Like many visual effects of the era, the Enterprise's recommissioned voyage is a mix of practical and digital effects.

The behind-the-scenes documentary "Sense of Scale" depicts the painstaking attention to detail and work that went into creating the Enterprise model for "The Motion Picture." A photo from the documentary by Piercefilm Productions reveals the sheer size of the Enterprise model during production on the 1979 movie. Crew members around the model assemble plates, which will be used to impose the Enterprise in space in post-production. Back and literally bigger than ever, the Enterprise's cinematic debut used the best in contemporary special effects technology to impress audiences.

The Klingons Strike In Star Trek III

Leonard Nimoy took the helm of 1984's "Star Trek III: The Search for Spock," pitting the Enterprise against the Klingons. The longtime "Star Trek" enemies make their grand entrance in the film as their Bird of Prey decloaks while searching for information on the Genesis Project. The sight is one of the more impressive moments in the film, firmly reestablishing the Klingons as a genuine threat. For help developing the visual effects for "The Search for Spock," Nimoy turned to "Star Wars" effects company Industrial Light & Magic .

Nimoy approached ILM early during production on "Star Trek III," creating scale models for the Bird of Prey and Starfleet's orbital space station, Spacedock. A behind-the-scenes photo from the production shows VFX supervisor Ken Ralston working with ILM for shots involving the Bird of Prey. Impressed by their work on "Star Trek III," Nimoy collaborated with ILM when he resumed his directorial duties for "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home."

Spock Joins Kirk At Yellowstone

The first time Captain Kirk and his friends are seen in 1989's "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier," they aren't on an interplanetary mission, but enjoying a much-needed vacation. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy decide to go on a camping trip at Yellowstone, with Kirk going on a free solo climb of El Capitan. Spock interrupts his climb, rapidly catching up with the aid of hover boots, to question why his friend would indulge in such a dangerous activity. While long shots were filmed on location at El Capitan, the close-up shots involving actors William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy were not.

This behind-the-scenes picture  from the special edition DVD release of the movie shows Nimoy standing comfortably on a platform, with a fiberglass composite of El Capitan's face positioned next to him and Shatner. Yosemite and its sweeping vista is seen in the background, with the production taking advantage of the on-location filming. Having the actual landscape in frame helps lend the illusion that Kirk and Spock are actually by Yosemite as Kirk makes his daring climb.

The Borg Queen Makes Her Entrance

One of the most sinister antagonists in all of "Star Trek" is the Borg Queen, introduced in 1996's "Star Trek: First Contact." After the Borg Collective infiltrates the Enterprise, turning its engineering bay into a makeshift headquarters, the Queen reveals herself to Data. As the Queen delivers her opening monologue, the upper half of her torso is lowered onto a waiting body. Seamlessly executed, the Queen attaches to her lower half and walks to Data in a single take, without missing a beat.

A behind-the-scenes photo from Paramount Pictures  shows "First Contact" director Jonathan Frakes on set with actor Alice Krige in her Borg make-up. The robotic torso is fixed to the floor while Krige's lower half is covered by bluescreen material to facilitate the illusion of it initially being missing. Though Krige moves normally during filming, post-production creates the effect of her affixing to her body and walking. The resulting scene is one of the most visually impressive moments in "Star Trek" history, with a variety of tricks used to bring it all together.

The Star Trek Reboot's Innovative Outdoor Shoot

When filmmaker J.J. Abrams resurrected "Star Trek ," starting with an eponymous reboot film in 2009, this new take on the franchise had a decidedly more action-oriented approach. One of the biggest set pieces in the 2009 movie has Kirk and Sulu skydiving from a shuttlecraft above Vulcan onto a Romulan mining platform blasting into the planet. While the precariously hanging platform, Kirk and Sulu fight the Romulans operating it before destroying it in a desperate bid to save Vulcan. Rather than being filmed inside of a studio, the sequence was filmed outside, albeit far from being shot on-location.

Footage from an Industrial Light & Magic "Star Trek" featurette shows production of the mining platform scene, which reveals that it was shot in a parking lot. This exterior approach gave the scene the natural feeling that the actors were outside while still in a tightly controlled environment. The skies above Vulcan and, of course, the massive mining laser, were added digitally in post-production, with greenscreen on the ground to facilitate this. This approach paid off, with "Star Trek" earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Visual Effects for its hard work.

The Klingon Home World Is A Digital Construction

One of the biggest action set pieces in "Star Trek Into Darkness" involves a covert mission to recover the villainous Khan (now played by Benedict Cumberbatch) on the Klingon home world of Kronos. The Klingons themselves are heavily redesigned from past "Star Trek" appearances, introduced moments before Khan massacres them in a prolonged gunfight. The battle is set in a rocky region of Kronos, with ash atmospherically falling around the combatants before Khan surrenders himself to Kirk and his landing party. Of course, none of the background on Kronos is actually real.

While the costumed actors are on set for the Kronos sequence, the landscape around them was created and superimposed around them via blue screen, as revealed in a VFX reel from Pixomondo . Lights around the set help make the Klingons appear more intimidating, lending a subtle shadow effect. With so much of "Star Trek Into Darkness" set in Starfleet locations, Kronos is among the most visually striking places in the movie. And though the entire sequence feels like it's shot on a soundstage, how much of it never physically existed is a bit surprising.

Star Trek Into Darkness Digitally Creates Another Planet

To take down Khan in "Star Trek Into Darkness," Starfleet Admiral Alexander Marcus (Peter Weller) has the Enterprise loaded with specially designed torpedoes. Suspicious about this secret weapon, Hank McCoy (Karl Urban) and Doctor Carol Marcus (Alice Eve) defuse and disassemble one of the torpedoes on a remote planet. A brief but tense scene in the movie, things nearly turn explosive when the torpedo's failsafe program is accidentally triggered until it is successfully disarmed. Though the landscape resembles any number of Hollywood productions filmed in expansive exteriors like Iceland, it was digitally constructed.

Like Kronos, the planet where McCoy and Marcus carry out their dangerous investigation was largely created in post-production. Actors Karl Urban and Alice Eve stand on set in costume, with the ground and torpedo prop also physically on set. However, as revealed in a behind-the-scenes photo from Atomic Fiction , the background was created through green screen behind the actors. In comparison to its predecessor, so much of "Star Trek Into Darkness" takes place outdoors, with the production digitally creating distinct environments for the story to unfold in.

Star Trek Beyond Puts Jaylah Into Focus

Whereas much of the action in "Star Trek Into Darkness" takes place on the Enterprise, its sequel "Star Trek Beyond" takes place on solid, if unfamiliar, ground. The 2016 movie opens with the Enterprise lured into a trap on the faraway planet Altamid where it crashes on the surface. As the crew faces the villainous Krall, they are joined by the formidable scavenger Jaylah, who has her own violent history with Krall. Taking refuge in the wreckage of the lost Starfleet vessel the USS Franklin, Jaylah is prepared to deal with any enemies with extreme prejudice.

Like many of the planetary environments in "Star Trek Into Darkness," Altamid is similarly largely created from special effects magic. A behind-the-scenes photo from Rodeo FX depicts actor Sofia Boutella in full costume and makeup as Jaylah taking aim with a sniper rifle. Though the wreckage of the Franklin is a physical presence on set, the mountainous background was created through a green screen behind the actor. Like 2009's "Star Trek," the Altamid exteriors were filmed outdoors, to give the movie a natural lighting to help accentuate the illusion.

The USS Discovery's Window To The Galaxy

The start of this new wave of "Star Trek" programming on Paramount+ began with the prequel series "Star Trek: Discovery" in 2017. Initially set before the events of "The Original Series," the second season of "Discovery" ended with the crew whisked away to the 32nd century. Many episodes feature intense sequences set in the USS Discovery's bridge, with the crew peering out the ship's viewscreen at incoming threats. Like similar viewscreens in the franchise's numerous starships, the Discovery's viewscreen, of course, isn't functional at all.

In a scene from the fourth season of "Discovery," the bridge crew is seen peering out at a strange starship from their viewscreen. The behind-the-scenes photo, courtesy of  OutpostVFX , the visual effects studio behind much of the special effects magic in "Discovery" reveals the entire screen and wall to be a greenscreen. "Discovery" completely reinvigorated "Star Trek" 50 years after the franchise launched after a big part of that is the significant upgrade in visual effects.

The Romulan Double Agent Stands Revealed

The first season of "Star Trek: Picard" revolves around two tragedies: The destruction of Romulus and an artificial intelligence attack carried out on Mars. In the years since Jean-Luc Picard's retirement after the Mars incident, the remnants of the Romulan Empire infiltrate the upper echelons of Starfleet. One of the early twists is that high-ranking Starfleet officer Commodore Oh is secretly in league with the Romulans. After revealing her true colors, Oh leads a rebuilt Romulan armada to confront Starfleet from her own starship.

While "Picard" does feature a healthy amount of practical sets and on-location filming, the interior of Oh's Romulan ship isn't one of them. This behind-the-scenes image  from Paramount reveals that the inside of the Romulan is entirely blue screen, with the interior added in post-production. Actor Tamlyn Tomita, in costume, is filmed in front of the screen, with a boom mic capturing her dialog. Given that the scenes inside the Romulan ship aren't extensive, creating digitally rather than dressing an entire set is certainly a cost-effective decision.

Captain Pike's Crew Braves The Elements

The 2022 prequel series "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" follows the adventures of Kirk's predecessor on the Enterprise, Captain Christopher Pike (Anson Mount). In the first season's finale, Pike and a small landing party investigate a crashed starship on an icy planet. The small ensemble beams a safe distance away from the starship, which is balanced precariously at the edge of a rocky cliff seen in the horizon. These landscape shots, like many seen throughout the series, are part of a relatively new visual effects technique popularized by "Star Wars."

"The Mandalorian" uses a facility, known as StageCraft, that projects a digital background on a limited set, offering a more immersive experience for actors than a bluescreen. "Strange New Worlds" uses a similar technique for its landscapes, employing a wall of LED screens on set. The behind-the-scenes photo (via American Cinematographer ) reveals the cast and crew on set filming a scene from the finale as the landing party approaches the wreckage. Featuring a mix of physical set and digital background projected in real-time, "Strange New Worlds" continues the franchise's tradition of using cutting-edge visual effects.

Read the original article on SlashFilm .

Star Trek Beyond Visual Effects VFX

NBC Los Angeles

‘Star Trek' and ‘Captain Marvel' actor Kenneth Mitchell dead at 49

Kenneth mitchell, known for roles on "star trek: discovery" and "captain marvel" and the husband of actress susan may pratt, has passed away after a battle with als., by corinne heller | e • published february 25, 2024 • updated on february 26, 2024 at 4:12 am.

This story originally appeared on E! Online

The " Star Trek " and acting communities have lost a beloved member.

Kenneth Mitchell, an actor known for roles in "Star Trek: Discovery" and "Captain Marvel," and the husband of " Center Stage" actress Susan May Pratt, has died . He was 49.

The actor passed away Feb. 24 in Los Angeles after a long battle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. In addition to his wife, Mitchell is survived by their daughter Lilah, 16, and son Kallum, 11, as well as his parents, brother and other family members, according to an obituary posted on his Instagram Feb. 25.

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View this post on Instagram A post shared by Kenneth Mitchell (@mr_kenneth_mitchell)

"Ken was diligent and hardworking in everything he did, but as a father these traits found their fullest expression," it read. "He was extremely dedicated to being a positive and playful force in the lives of his children. Regardless of his later disabilities, Ken discovered a higher calling to be more fully himself for his kids. Ken will be forever proud of who his children have become."

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The obituary also included an essay written by Mitchell himself, titled "Connect."

"When I die, when I leave this life, I want to become a tree, a Ginko, White pine, Jacaranda, Lemon, Cedar, Oak, Myrtle or Maple," he wrote. "I want to be buried under the roots, so I can be soaked up, all my matter, my energy, my love, my laughter, my tears and I want to reach up through the branches and touch the night sky. I want to twinkle with the stars and when the earth turns, I want to feel the sun on the face of my leaves."

Mitchell, a Toronto native, made his onscreen acting debut in the early aughts, appearing in Showtime's "Leap Year." He later played Eric Green on the series "Jericho" and Sam Lucas on "Ghost Whisperer." In 2019, he starred on the CW's "Nancy Drew" and in "Captain Marvel."

Meanwhile, he had begun appearing on "Star Trek: Discovery," playing four roles between 2017 and 2021: Klingons Kol, Kol's dad Kol-Sha and Tenavik, and later, as he began to suffer the effects of ALS, Aurellio, a human character who used a hoverchair, or wheelchair-like device. Mitchell also portrayed several other roles on the animated series "Star Trek: Lower Decks." Throughout his time on the franchise, he occasionally made appearances at "Star Trek" fan conventions.

Mitchell last appeared onscreen in a recurring role on the FX series "The Old Man," which stars Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow.

Mitchell was diagnosed with ALS, a neurological disease that causes muscle weakness and paralysis, in 2018 and had used a wheelchair since 2019.

"For five and a half years, Ken faced a series of awful challenges from ALS," his obituary stated. "And in truest Ken fashion, he managed to rise above each one with grace and commitment to living a full and joyous life in each moment. He lived by the principles that each day is a gift and that we never walk alone. His life is a shining example of how full one can be when you live with love, compassion, humor, inclusion and community. Ken was an inspirational work of art to all the hearts he touched."

Among those were his friends and colleagues.

"Rest in peace, Ken. Was just thinking of you," Ethan Peck, who plays Spock on Star Trek: Discovery, commented on the obituary, using an emoji of the Vulcans' "Live Long and Prosper" hand gesture.

And Jonathan Frakes, who directed several episodes in the series and played William Riker on "Star Trek: The Next Generation," wrote, "One of the best RIP."

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star trek 4 time travel scene

IMAGES

  1. How Star Trek IV’s Time Travel Works

    star trek 4 time travel scene

  2. The Star Trek IV Time Travel Scene with Interesting Music

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  3. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

    star trek 4 time travel scene

  4. Star Trek: 10 Best Time Travel Episodes

    star trek 4 time travel scene

  5. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

    star trek 4 time travel scene

  6. "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home" (1986) poster artwork by Bob Peak

    star trek 4 time travel scene

VIDEO

  1. Top 10 Star Trek Time Travel Episodes

  2. Time Warp

  3. Star Trek

  4. Star Trek A journey through time & space

  5. Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home (7/10) Movie CLIP

  6. Star Trek First Contact Retrospective/Review

COMMENTS

  1. Star Trek IV

    Time Travel scene from Star Trek IV

  2. How Star Trek IV's Time Travel Works

    How Star Trek IV's Time Travel Works. A promise was made that after examining the time travel exploits of the Back to the Future series, similar examinations of temporal activities would be in ...

  3. STAR TREK IV: The Voyage Home

    All 4 Original Star Trek Movies are together on 4K for the first time! Get Star Trek: The Original 4-Movie Collection on 4K Ultra HD and Digital.Get it now: ...

  4. Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home (1/10) Movie CLIP

    Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home movie clips: http://j.mp/1J9zolDBUY THE MOVIE: http://amzn.to/t2YsYoDon't miss the HOTTEST NEW TRAILERS: http://bit.ly/1u2y6prC...

  5. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

    Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is a 1986 American science fiction film, the fourth installment in the Star Trek film franchise based on the television series Star Trek.The second film directed by Leonard Nimoy, it completes the story arc begun in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), and continued in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984). Intent on returning home to Earth to face trial ...

  6. 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." - 1986 TV ad 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 ...

  7. Inside 'Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home's Funny Vulcan Nerve Pinch Scene

    Time travel has proven to be one of Star Trek 's most fertile storytelling devices, which The Next Generation took advantage of nearly 10 years later to the day.

  8. What Spock and Sarek's STAR TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME Moment ...

    It is a bit underwhelming that Spock goes through everything he does over the course of the movie and ends up feeling "fine.". He's time traveled, had to hide his identity, mind-melded with ...

  9. Can someone explain the time travel scene in The Voyage Home?

    I took it that the moment of time travel caused Kirk to interrupt his conscious thoughts and begin dreaming, including a fragmentary injection of future memories (because wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey-psychic-whale-hippy-dippy), and culiminating with an image of Earth wetlands, possibly from his home in Iowa. It kinda worked for me, actually.

  10. Star Trek IV The Voyage Home Time Warp

    The crew travel back in time to San Francisco of the past. All credit goes to Paramount Pictures. Time Travel scene from Star Trek IV. Time Warping from the future to the past. In order to save Earth of the 23rd Century,the exiled Admiral Kirk and the crew of the late Starship Enterprise take their . Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home movie clips: BUY THE MOVIE: Dont miss the HOTTEST NEW TRAILERS ...

  11. The City on the Edge of Forever

    After Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, in which time travel was an integral part of the plot, was released in 1986, Luis Aguilar of The Washington Post said that "The City on the Edge of Forever" was superior to the film, calling it a "brilliant, beautifully executed story".

  12. Star Trek: Picard Recreates The Voyage Home's Bus Scene

    One scene expounds upon this season's apparent theme of rebooting Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, as Picard and his friends travel back in time (and potentially change Next Generation history) to undo another dark and dystopic future. As delivered by director Lea Thompson and a very game cast, the moment is a pitch-perfect nod to what the fans ...

  13. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

    Living in exile on the planet Vulcan, the ragtag former crew of the USS Enterprise steal a starship after receiving a planetary distress call from Earth: a space probe has entered into orbit ...

  14. Star Trek IV

    Clip from Star Trek IV - The Voyage Home when Spock, played by the Great Leonard Nimoy, solves the puzzle of the humpbacks.

  15. star trek

    I would assume that time travel is most likely banned because doing so would cause alterations to the universe, for instance in the New Star Trek movies it caused a second divergent timeline to emerge and caused the original Spock to be stuck there. Anyway Spock actually did most of the computations for the time jump from memory.

  16. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

    Trek's crowd-pleasing '80s time-travel tale has its share of memorable, even iconic scenes; it's a warm, human respite from space intrigue, fine characterization keeping the proceedings from getting dull. ... Incredible score plays majestically in one poignant or funny scene after another. A Star Trek story for everyone. Connie Curts. more_vert ...

  17. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (4K UHD Review)

    Review. Directed once again by series regular Leonard Nimoy, The Voyage Home is arguably the most accessible Star Trek film for non-fans, even as it relies upon one of the franchise's most tried-but-true plot devices—time travel. Set immediately after the events of Star Trek III, it begins with Kirk and his crew preparing to return home from Vulcan to face the music with Starfleet for ...

  18. Strange New Worlds 101: Time Travel

    The original crew of the Enterprise went on several time travel adventures, most notably in the film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. When Earth was threatened by a probe that only wanted to chat with some humpback whales, Kirk led his crew to a very strange world — San Francisco, 1996.

  19. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is pure, joyful cinema

    2016 marks the 50th anniversary of the Star Trek franchise - and the release of Star Trek Beyond, the 13th feature film in the series.To celebrate this big year, and ponder the deeper meanings ...

  20. 20 Best Star Trek Time Travel Episodes & Movies, Ranked

    The second movie in the Star Trek: TNG film franchise. Star Trek: First Contact is widely considered the best of the TNG movies, and featured an engaging time travel story involving the Borg and the birth of the Federation. In the film, Picard and crew traveled back in time to 2063 to stop the Borg Queen (Alice Krige) from interfering with ...

  21. Star Trek IV: Voyage Home- Time Travel Scene Breakdown

    #StarTrek, #Spock, #PatrickStewartBreaking down the wonderfully weird time travel "slingshot around the sun" scene in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home--consider...

  22. In 1986, Star Trek pushed a Greenpeace agenda as a ...

    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 ...

  23. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

    This is without question the best STAR TREK movie in the series. It is full of great special effects, clever dialogue, sharp humor, and absolutely dazzling action sequences. It is the most fun to watch out of all the STAR TREK movies and is the most creative of them too. This is was easily one of the best movies of 1986.

  24. Quark's 10 Best Star Trek Episodes

    Story by Toni Marberry & Jack Treviño, Teleplay by Ira Steven Behr and Robert Hewitt Wolfe. "Little Green Men" is the best Quark episode because it completely subverts everything that audiences expect from a Star Trek time travel episode. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine 's Ferengi trio - and a hidden Odo - find themselves stranded in Roswell, New ...

  25. What Star Trek Looks Like Before Special Effects

    Movies. /Film. What Star Trek Looks Like Before Special Effects. Story by Samuel Stone• 1w. "Star Trek" is one of the most iconic and enduring science fiction franchises of all time, following ...

  26. 'Star Trek' and 'Captain Marvel' actor Kenneth Mitchell dead at 49

    Online. The "Star Trek" and acting communities have lost a beloved member. Kenneth Mitchell, an actor known for roles in "Star Trek: Discovery" and "Captain Marvel," and the husband of " Center ...