Star Trek boldly went Greenpeace in this whale tale, but for all the fun there's a lot of dumb.
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00:00For the longest time, Star Trek IV was the most profitable and popular film of the franchise,
00:05known even to non-Trekkies as the one with the whales. It was a hit because it didn't require
00:09you to know much about Star Trek in order to get it, and because it was a family-friendly film
00:14released in time for the 1986 holiday season. The Voyage Home is a bit of a romp, a fish out
00:20of water romp with tongue planted firmly in cheek, and plenty of comedic moments so you can't take it
00:26too seriously. But at the same time, it's not unreasonable to expect events in a film to make
00:31some sense, and for the characters to behave appropriately. In the case of this film, a number
00:36of silly things happen because they're expedient to the plot, not because they make a lot of sense.
00:42So get ready to strap in with me, Brie, as we slingshot around the sun to find the 10 dumbest
00:47things that happen in The One with the Whales. 10. The space tugs stop when they lose power
00:54Even as the Excelsior and the other starships and space docks sit on their figurative hands
00:59and are disabled, we see the engines go dead on a pair of tugboat shuttles, and they come to a halt.
01:05I'm sorry, but huh? These are not motorboats on a lake whose engines die and their momentum
01:11bleeds off pushing against the water. These are spaceships in a near vacuum. Even if the
01:16preposterous airship hangar was pressurized, which there's no evidence of, their momentum
01:21should have carried them in straight lines until they smashed into a space dock wall or one of
01:26those disabled starships. Which makes you wonder, if the probe disrupts all the power sources
01:31employed by Starfleet and on Earth, what exactly happened to everything else when it pulled into
01:36orbit? It clearly didn't kill all the power, because at Starfleet Command we see dimmed
01:42lights and scrambled, but operating, screens. So what level of power was affected? As the
01:48Bird of Prey gets knocked out immediately upon popping back into the 23rd century,
01:52we have to assume that every powered vehicle and delivery drone in the air above Earth plummeted
01:58and crashed. One hopes Earth's government grounded everything before this could happen, but given
02:03Starfleet's wait till after the last minute incompetence, this is unlikely. Which means
02:08Starfleet is dumb. Number 9. If you're going to San Francisco. Kirk. There she is. From the
02:15Institute. If we play our cards right, we may be able to find out when those whales are leaving.
02:20Spock. How will playing cards help? Jillian. Well if it isn't Robin Hood and Friar Tuck-
02:26Where you fell his head. Kirk. Back to San Francisco. Sure, Kirk is a fish out of water
02:31in 1986, but he seems a little lost here. Perhaps he needs to turn around and take notice that the
02:38Golden Gate Bridge is behind Spock and himself, and that they're walking away from it. They're
02:43already in San Francisco when Jillian picks them up. In fact, they're on the Marina Green. And no,
02:49they're not on the Sausalito side where Cetacean Institute is purportedly located. The view we have
02:55of the bridge is impossible to get from the other side. Kirk may be from the 23rd century, but by
03:01all indications in this and previous films, the Golden Gate Bridge is still in the same place.
03:07Kirk must know where he is, so to paraphrase Jillian, why the coy geography?
03:13Number 8. The Father of Transparent Aluminum. With no transparent aluminum to be found in Ronald
03:19Reagan's America, Scotty and Bones have to seek out the clunkier 20th century equivalent, big slabs
03:25of plexiglass. There's no such thing as a free lunch, so they have to barter to get what they
03:30need. And the only thing of value to PlexiCore planet manager Dr. Nichols is Scotty's 23rd
03:36century knowledge of materials not yet invented. The movie has some fun with this by hanging a
03:41lantern on it. McCoy. Well, a moment alone, please. You do realize, of course, if we give
03:47him the formula, we're altering the future. Scotty. Why? How do we know he didn't invent the
03:53thing? How indeed? But even if Dr. Nichols was indeed the inventor, when something was invented
04:00could affect history just as much as who? And wait a second, why does it need to be transparent or
04:07even plastic? Clear plastics are not as durable as opaque ones, and plastics in general are less
04:13durable and more prone to leaking than stainless steel, so why? Oh wait, yeah, it's a movie and we
04:20want to see the whales, not slabs of steel. Number 7. He's a Rooskie, but they're idiots.
04:26FBI agent. Commander Chekhov. Starfleet. United Federation of Planets. Right. Commander, is there
04:34anything you want to tell us? Chekhov. Like what? FBI agent. Like who you really are and what you're
04:41doing here and what these things are. Chekhov. I am Pavlov Chekhov, commander in Starfleet,
04:47United Federation of Planets, service number 65658207D. Kirk told everyone to remove insignias
04:55before they left the ship, so why did Chekhov bring his ID with him? And why does he bother
05:01telling his interrogators his serial number? Sure, they're meaningless in 1986, but anything he tells
05:07them is going to be meaningless. He might as well claim that he's Antov Chekhov the playwright.
05:12Speaking of dumb, the agents here are beyond stupid. They have no idea what the devices
05:18Chekhov carries are and they just keep them on the table where he can reach them. Also,
05:22why is Chekhov being interrogated by a civilian when they're on board a ship? They're at the
05:28Alameda Naval Base. Surely they'd take him to a base facility. Number six, the whale horizon.
05:34Zooming in on something hundreds or thousands of kilometers away in space is easy because there's
05:40effectively nothing between you and almost anything you want to look at. Down on the
05:44Earth's atmosphere, that's something else. Uhura. Affirmative. Contact with the whales.
05:50Kirk. Bearing. Uhura. Bearing 237, range 600 nautical. Kirk. Put them on screen. Jillian.
05:57How can you do that? How? Indeed, Jillian. Unlike in space, the trouble with looking at
06:03things far away on Earth is that Earth itself tends to get in the way. The further away something is,
06:09the higher above the surface you have to go to get a line of sight on it over the horizon.
06:14600 nautical miles is 1,111 kilometers, and to even see the whales just on the horizon at such
06:21a distance, the bird of prey would have to have been at a minimum altitude of 96,179 meters or
06:30315,548 feet. But moments earlier, before Uhura reports the distance, we get a POV zipping through
06:38clouds under bright blue skies. Down where the clouds are anything over 200 to 280 kilometers
06:45away would be invisible over the horizon, and the lower you are in the atmosphere, the denser it is
06:50and the harder it is to see through atmospheric haze. This is definitely an example of a science
06:57dumb. Number 5. Let's do the time warp again. And again. Time travel, as routinely depicted on
07:05screen, is pretty silly and almost never holds up to the barest of scrutinies because it usually
07:11ignores, or at least hand waves away, one basic fact. Nothing in the universe is truly stationary.
07:19The Earth spins on its axis as it moves on its orbit around the Sun, which itself orbits the
07:24Milky Way's galaxy center of mass, and the galaxy is in turn moving through space, which itself is
07:30expanding at an accelerating rate. Hop forward in time just one hour and the Earth would have moved
07:35eight times its diameter out from under you. As someone said, it's very cold in space. The slingshot
07:42around the Sun thing at least avoids most of this, but in 300 years the Sun will have moved along its
07:48orbit just over two trillion kilometers, or about a third of a light year. So every time the bird
07:53of prey does its spin around the Sun to go backwards or forwards 300 years, it ought to have to boogie
07:59a couple of trillion clicks to find the Earth. Time travel in movies? Kind of dumb. Number four.
08:06One little mistake. Star Trek 4 is a charming movie, but action-packed it is not. So the chase
08:12through the hospital is a welcome bit of up-tempo fun at just the right point in the story. But what
08:18the characters are doing? That's pretty foolish. Why the heck do Kirk, Bones, and Jillian hang around
08:24in the surgical suite to save Chekov, and then try to roll him out from under the noses of the police
08:29instead of just beaming back to the bird of prey? Oh sure, they don't want the surgeons and nurses
08:34to see the transporter whisk them away, but that's an easy fix. Just use a blanket or a surgical
08:39gown to cover the window in the door to the room where Kirk traps them. And sure, sure, there'd be
08:45impossible to answer questions about how the patients and three intruders escaped a guarded
08:49room with only one exit, but it would have been a lot less risky. Fun scene though, even if they're
08:55behaving like the Keystone cops. Number three, Ahead Whale Factor 1. It's fairly preposterous
09:02that the Scandinavian whale catcher just happens to locate George and Gracie mere hours after
09:07they've been released into the ocean. Not only because what are the odds, but because presumably
09:13said whales were liberated from a port as Jillian explains. Jillian. They'll be flown in a special
09:19747 to Alaska and released there. Territorial waters only extend 22.24 kilometers or 12 nautical
09:27miles from the baseline of a country's coasts, and humpback whales normally swim between 4.8 to 14
09:33kilometers or 3 to 9 miles per hour, which means they could be out into international waters in a
09:39few hours. But even if the whales are outside the U.S. territorial water, that doesn't make them
09:45fair game for foreign nations. The 1982 U.S. exclusion economic zone around Alaska extends 321
09:52kilometers or 200 miles. It would have taken George and Gracie at least a day and a half to be fair
09:58game, even if they'd made a beeline perpendicular to the coast. Of course, one could pretend the
10:04whalers were violating U.S. waters. They're clearly bad, bad men, but who knew they were that bad?
10:11Number two. He's dead, Jim? One of the big crowd-pleasing moments in the film was when
10:17Spock executes his famous Spock neck pinch on the rude punk blasting his boombox, a gag paid homage
10:23to in Picard season two. But put yourself in place of the other passengers on the bus. They see this
10:29punk being rude and then this weird looking character in a robe does something and the punk
10:33falls face first onto his boombox shutting it off. From their point of view, what happened? Do you
10:39know anyone who can put someone to sleep like that? For all they know, Spock killed a guy right
10:45in front of them. Maybe they hate punk rock music that much? In any case, Kirk and Spock were lucky
10:51the cops weren't waiting for them at the Cetacean Institute. Funny, but dumb. Number one. Starfleet's
10:58sitting ducks. Starfleet Command. Space dock, this is Starfleet Command. Launch all vessels,
11:04launch all vessels. Controller two. Sir, space dock doors are inoperative. All emergency systems
11:10are non-functional. Controller one. Engage reserve power. Controller two. Aye, sir. Controller one.
11:16Starfleet Command, this is space dock on emergency channels. We've lost all internal power. What's
11:22wrong with this picture? Starfleet knows this giant probe is making a beeline for Earth and
11:27that it's knocked out at least five ships in route. Cartwright. Mr. President, the probe is headed
11:33directly for us. The signal is damaging everything in its path. The Klingons have lost two vessels.
11:38Two starships and three smaller vessels have been neutralized. So with this seemingly unstoppable
11:44unknown bearing down on them, does Starfleet set up a picket line of starships? Launch ships to
11:50approach this unknown from various trajectories in order to figure out the radius of its power
11:54neutralizing force? Or study it from afar? None of those. No, no. Starfleet does none of that.
12:00Starfleet keeps its great experiment, the Excelsior, and other ships parked in space dock
12:06with the doors closed until the probe is literally on top of them. With the result that none of them
12:12can make an attempt to contact or escape the probe. Starfleet saw this one coming. That's not
12:17just dumb. It's criminally negligent and dereliction of duty. And those were 10 of the dumbest things
12:24in Star Trek, the one with the whales. If you enjoyed this video and or this ongoing series,
12:30then make sure to give us a like and tell us what you thought was dumb in the movie.
12:34If you're not already, go ahead and hit that subscribe button so you never miss a new upload.
12:39Don't forget to check us out on whatculture.com too because this is also an adaptation of an
12:44article which has four additional dumb things. So you can check that out there. Until next time,
12:50I've been Brie with Trek Culture and don't forget to live long and prosper.