Star Trek Fest - Star Trek IV The Voyage Home (1986)

HB, I've got a song. Yeah, say the whales with nuclear wessels. Say the whales, double dumbass on you say the whales. Put away your butcher knives. Now you have to the end of the program to compose a backbeat.

I don't know that might work better acapella. I took too much lds. Oh hey, welcome midnight viewers. This is my show I'm supposed to take over here. Welcome to night viewers.

Back to track fest. We've reached the most popular film in the entire run of Star Trek up until the jj Abrams Afterbirth. This is this is Star Trek four, the Voyage Home, and here to talk about it with me. The one who does all the fests with me, even though he claims to not is HP. I love it.

Not only do I love the fests, fahim alone. I love Italian and so do you. Yes, oh, I should have sung that part now. Spock hates Italian food because he says no the entire time. He does, but he never gets well, we'll talk about it, but he never gets to eat Italian food.

That's right, because they fucking just unceremoniously drop him off. We'll get there. All right, ladies and gentlemen, we are talking about star trek for at all. Notify all stations. Starfleed emergency.

Berth is on the edge of destruction. He can't survive. The way to be found, to repond the key to shaving the future fun. You're talking about the end of every life on Earth can be phound only in the past. To attend time travel.

So take us home. These are the voyages of the crew of the starship Enterprise. Judging by the pollution content of the atmosphere, I believe we have arrived at the latter half of the twentieth century. Start eight, nineteen eighty. Six, San Francisco.

Our own world is waiting for us to save it. They have twenty four hours. Everybody, remember where we burned break. Up to complete their mission. You look like a codet review.

People deem into night to collect the photons and bemouts. I want you all to be very careful without being discovered. We have an intruder. All right, who are you? You're not exactly catching us at our best.

That much is certain. This is an extremely primitive and paranoid culture. What does it mean? Exact change? Many of their customs will that list take us my surprise.

We're ready for beam out. I transport our power us down to minimum. Got to bring in one at a time. You're from outer space. I'm from my awhile they work in outer space.

It stew a job and get out of here. Tack off. Can you hear me? I've lost quiet. I'm coming with you.

You can next time. It's the twenty third central No. Sheil said, maximum, steady, hold on. Tight, Lassie, can I make breakaway? Speed?

Give you. Eight? Woot nine Now. Star Trek four, the voyage. O Star Trek four.

Oh, there was the trailer Boy. That sounds fun, didn't it? Directed by Leonard Nemoy. Screenplay by Steve Meerson, Peter Criikes, Nicholas Meyer, and Harve Bennett, based on a story by Heart Bennett and Leonard Nimoy. Based on Star Trek by Gene Rod and Barry.

We have a new composer here, Leonard Rosenman, Television Extraordinaire. Did you say Rosenman? That sounds like a fake name from the movie Fletch, doesn't it Rosenman? It sounds like any fake che Vijay's name. It's always just it trails off into gibberish rosenheimba Yeah, okay, thanks Jevy.

Thirty years of that bullshit bleased on November the twenty sixth Thanksgiving nineteen eighty six. Budget a twenty one million, pulled in one hundred and thirty three. Now, the production story for this one is actually pretty quick. The other ones, we all stay struggled here and there to get a maid. This was a no brainer.

Paramount Pictures basically had had a green light for Star Trek four before the end of opening weekend of Star Trek three. Now they basically just handed it to Leonard Meemoy and said, what do you want to do? So Leonard Nimoy and harm Bennett get together. Leonardniemoy doesn't want phasers, he doesn't want villain, he doesn't want fistfights. He wants it to be a traditional Star Trek story where it's a little more thoughtful and a little less violent and dark, which is what we've gotten for the past two should be noted.

Paramount Pictures, on the other hand, felt exactly the opposite. They thought it should go even darker, and I might not disagree with them. Okay, So Harve Bennett hires those two screenwriters I mentioned Steve Meherson and Peter Crikes. They turn in their first draft of the screenplay an entirely different screenplay. It should be noted because at that time Paramount Pictures also had the number one star in the world who was also a large Star Trek fan.

That was Beverly Hills Comp's own Eddie Murphy, So that first script was written with Eddie Murphy in mind. There's no Catherine Hicks character. That instead was going to be Eddie Murphy as a cetacean scientist who is also a ufologist. He's at a UFO nut so he's the perfect person to make contact with the enterprise. And then they hand in that script and Eddie Murphy reads it and says, I thought I was going to be in Starfleet Pass.

I'm gonna go do the Golden Child, at which point Harve Bennett it's true. At which point Harve Bennett calls Nicholas Meyer and says, please help us, and they basically split the script up into portions where Harve Bennett is working on the twenty third century parts and Nicholas Meyer, who was very familiar with San Francisco, having sent his film time after time there takes care of all of the nineteen eighty six present contemporary day stuff. And in fact, because he had done time after time, he got to reuse some or use for the first time some bits that he had written for that movie, so they end up showing up here, including the punt. But anyway, one of the things I loved because I read a little bit of trivia around this.

We just talked about it. The thing about Eddie Murphy that draft. Apparently he saw the Klingon ship decloaking during the Super Bowl, which I did something about that. I think that would have made that would have been a really very interesting sort of shot. I like the idea that it's somebody who's a UFO ufologist that nobody believes, but there's act and it's not an alien coming to destroy the planet.

It's actually a friendly sort of thing. So I a part of me wishes I could see that Eddie Murphy version of this, But there's no way Eddie Murphy in a start Fleet uniform would have could have worked at all. Yeah, but he could have been an alien and they could have made him a big old villain, and I bet he would have gone for that, And I bet he would have pulled that off. However, the thing about the having him be the ufologist who discovers them and no one believes him. I agree.

I think that would have been a great movie as well, if that had been told entirely from that character's perspective, if he was just this human on earth and then one day the fucking Enterprise crew shows up and then they fill him in on what's going on. But that's not the movie they're going to make. That would be an Eddie Murphy movie, and that was the only movie he was gonna make. Really, Yeah, you can't. At that time, like you said, he was the biggest box office star in the world, so you can't.

Anytime you have him in a movie becomes an Eddie Murphy movie just by dint of the fact that he's in it. Yeah, he ain't gonna take three scenes and play second filled with Shatner. No, absolutely not. So before the movie goes into production, Michael Eisner and Jeff Katzenberg go on over to Walt Disney and take over Walt Disney. So they got a new producer here, or a new studio head who in fact wants the lighter, happier movie.

So that sort of seals that deal. Nicholas Meyer comes in, like I said, he does the big rewrite, and then it's just a fucking go. I mean that's there's no real hassle here, there's no nothing. They get to do location shooting. They don't question Nimoy on any of his choices for any of the actors involved.

There was one that doesn't count as controversy. But from what I understand, Shatner was supposed to direct this picture. Because Shatner and Nimoy had what I guess is called a favored nations clause in their contracts. Memoy had just directed Search for Spock, it was natural to assume that Shatner was going to be direct because he wanted to direct. He was going to direct the fourth one.

However, he was too busy with TJ. Hooker at the time. It seems silly even just saying those words, but fortunately for us the movie going public, Memoy directed this because this is we'll talk about it. But I just I love his direction here. I think he was perfect.

Well, I agree with you about the direction, but I do think that had Shatner directed the script that Nicholas Meyer wrote with these folk, I think it still could have been a very good movie. I think it would have been a little hammier, but I think it. I think I think that could have been a good film. And I do know that, as you said, and Shatner kind of held out here, and part of it was pissy because he isn't going to get to direct it, but part of it was he didn't appreciate the fact that they were going to go lighter with it with the tone of this film. He like the original.

For the original, studio heads thought that this should be much darker because Kirk had gone through so goddamned much and hadn't dealt with any of it yet, and thought that the character deserved that. And then they said, we'll give you twice what we gave you last time. And he said, I'm once again Captain Kirk, reporting for duty, Sir HB. What's the story here, Well, the. Story is an interesting one.

Actually, it's not the first time that they've gone back in time. But what happens is there's a probe, a mysterious probe. Now the shades of the motion picture, it's very much in line with that picture. There's a probe, an alien probe headed to Earth. That basically disables every ship in star Base and everything in its path, renders them completely without power, and it's headed to Earth.

No one knows why or where or how. They figure out that it gets to Earth and it starts all these cataclysmic changes, and they figure out Kirk and actually Spock is when it figures out that it's actually trying to signal humpback whales on the planet. We don't know why, we don't know what the message is. But because humpback whales have been hunted into extinction in the late twentieth century I believe, or twenty first century, there's no way for this probe to get the response that it needs. So Earth is imperiled.

It's up to the Enterprise, the Cat, the crew of the Enterprise on this stolen Klingon ship to go back in time, retrieve humpback whales and take them back to Earth in future time in order to stave off this apocalypse. It's a great story. It's perfect Star Trek. It works I as much as this is, like I said, shades of the motion picture. The story and what they do with the premise is forgive the pun.

It's light years better than the motion picture for a litany of reasons that I'm sure we'll talk about, but I love it. I think it's to the point it took me what thirty seconds to describe the events of the movie. That's literally the plot of the movie. Now the fun is getting into the details. But yeah, it's economical.

It moves. Now our opening scene you mentioned that, we get the Probe, which looks like a monster energy drink can. A cigar hurtling through space. A cylinder, and a sphere. This movie is all about geometry.

It's on the way. The first ship it encounters is the Saratoga, which is basically it's just the Reliant again. They just reuse the Reliant model, which is fine because starships have classes. Sure. By the way, I like the design of the alien pro because it's mysterious.

It doesn't really make it. It doesn't with any traditional logic for starships or spacecraft in the future. You don't know what it is, what the little ball that's kind of hovering in front of it does. It's scary to see it in the things that it can do. I love that part of it.

I do too. It's Vegre done right. It's where Vigre was just this amorphous thing, this cloudy nebula of nothingness. Here's an object, it's on its way. It's passing your ship and knocking out all the power.

Oh, but I wanted to point out the captain of that particular ship, the first female Federation starship captain to appear in any Star Trek, should be noted. Also, she's she's an African American. She is also Jordy Laforge's mom. I was reading that. So she appeared in the next generation.

She's the queen and coming to America. Oh that's what the voice of course, of course the interesting Eddie Murphy tie in there. Yeah, right, did he already do that? But no, he hadn't coming to me. No, that was after a couple of years.

Yeah, yeah, I was working in a movie theater that played Coming to Him. I've seen it one million times. I see this. You didn't ask me your usual question is HP, when did you see this? This is the first time you saw this movie?

Now that in fact, it wasn't Father Malone. I saw this in the theater. This was a big picture. I enjoyed Star Trek at the time, but I can't say that I was in any way a Trekker or obsessed with it. But this was a really popular movie, and this was a very This was a time when I was really starting to become a real moviegoer.

Eighty six was Predator, The Untouchables, this movie. So I was going to a lot of movies, So I saw this one in the theater as well, and saw Coming to America. I come to think I also saw that this movie in the theater. Obviously, I was fucking totally obsessed with Star Treker, So of course I was, and I loved it, and I saw a bunch of times, and then He's not get a whole bunch more. Bought the novelization.

Read the novelization revilizations right here. I've read it again this weekend. I just want to mention HP. I mentioned over on my show The Weekly Roundup that I've been watching I heard it in Strange New Worlds lately. What were you going to say?

I was going to say, should I address you? Was ensign Yeah, I'm not necessarily actually talking about my time on board a starship. I explained it pretty well in the thing. It's basically it's basically like D and D. Yeah, check, I will say that for one time I went to I was fourteen when I was on board the Farragut, and one of the guys in the group whose name who was nickname was Doc because his first two initials were d R, which I thought was fun and Doc I Doc was like early twenties.

He and I went to fucking Rhode Island to go to a Star Trek convention because Denise Crosby was going to be and so we went. And then afterwards we went to like a Farragut meeting and it was like nine clock and I had been dropped off to go to this at like seven am by my mom, and it was like nine o'clock and I was like, let me call home, and my mother was like, where the fuck are you and that it was some weird dude. Yeah, And that was the end of my time with the Farragut. But the convention was awesome, and I got that is where I got a copy of Cavalier magazine that had Weeds, the short story that the Lonesome Death of Jordi Vero is based on. Oh yeah, because King wrote for a lot of those skin mags.

That's right, by the way. This so for those maybe in the dark a little bit. I recommend you check out the Weekly Roundup where Father Malone covers strange New worlds. It'll explain a lot of what we just talked about. But for me, it makes a lot of sense the fact that you so, Father Malone had like a long wool sort of a pea coat that he wore in high school, and he had row of buttons up and down each lapel.

He used to have. One of the buttons was a Federation communicator, like the Delta badge. It's a Delta badge. Okay. Now I knew that he was a fan of Next Generation, of course, but it makes a lot more sense knowing this shadow history that he has with the Farragut's interesting.

We've known each other for going on forty years now almost, and I never knew this about you. Yeah. Well it's not something I like advertised I used to sure anyway, But I love it anyway, Yeah, I love it, Yeah, absolutely, Yeah. That was my start about that. Let's get back to this, Let's get into the story here, because oh man, it's.

Yeah, it's great. So we're talking about the Saratoga. The Female Captain is the first ship where we see the probe in action. It basically disables all of the electronics on the ship, but not all dead in the water. What do you mean, because they still have power, they still have their screens are still funny, they still have red lights, they still have life support.

Yeah, but that's we don't see. There might have been more to it than all the those things might have gone down after the fact. I assume they did. I assume all those people are not bad. Unfortunately.

Now there's shots in the movie with Free Saratoga for whoever's taken. You see at times you see the probe cross past like a star base, and you can see all of the lights on the starbas going winking out, one after the other. So you know that this thing is gonna just wreakavoc on Earth. It's headed straight for Earth. But we're not going to Earth.

We're going to Vulcan. We're going back to Vulcan, baby. So it picks up. What is it three months since the events of Star Trek three. That's it, they've been there for three months.

What's Maltz been doing. I don't know. I was so thinking about that too. One thing that's interesting though. If you don't know Maltz is the Klingon then ended up a prisoner on their ship at the end of the last one that they then took with them to Vulcan.

And now it's three months later there's still no word on Malts. I really wish three quarters of the way through this movie he just popped up on the ship and went, can I do something? I feel like I'm just I'm just here. Maybe I can, like swab the decks. What do you need me to do?

He was known as the thinking Klingon, so I'm sure they would have had him, and maybe he's he's an accountant somewhere. Maybe he just should have been on the bridge and so they could dispense with all of the I don't understand Klingon jokes. Yeah that is a little weird. But they do figure out enough about the ship to feel confident to take it back to Earth to face their charges because they're they've got there, They've they've all what is it? How many charges?

Do they have? Nine violations of Starfleet regulations? So the crew has to go back with Kirk and face the charges. So they're getting ready to leave Vulcan. Meanwhile, Spock is still not fully recovered from the events of Star Trek three.

He's sorry. He's fully logical, but he's having trouble with surfacing the emotions that he does have. But his training has been exclusively in the Holkin ways and not really dealing with his human side. Well, two things. The crew all decides as a unit that they're going to go back and face those charges.

And I would say, as the fully capable crew of the Starship Enterprise, that it's time for them to get aboard that ship and just go fucking off around the galaxy. See us Starfleet try and catch us in a cloaked klingon bird of prey. Do you think they should just become mercenario. Because the crew of the HMS of Bounty will be boarding ie pirates. That would have been a very different movie.

Actually, Okay, I'm going to branch out here nerdy wise and just make a recommendation. If anyone is a comic book reader and you've read any of the Star Trek comics, I highly encourage you to check out a series out there right now called Star Trek The Last Starship where they resurrect Kirk. The Borg resurrects Kirk and it takes place ten thousand years after the current Star Trek. It takes place basically in the Discovery Universe, after the Burn, when all the fucking all the ship's warp cores are no longer working and the Federation is shattered. So it's like it's the first post apocalyptic Star Trek story, but not without zombies or anything.

And basically Kirk is tasked on his new ship, the Omega, with letting the world know that or letting the galaxy know that the Federation still exists. He's basically like supposed to be this torch bearer going to all these dark parts of the galaxy to let him know that we still exist and you can still join the Federation. We can do this again together. It's pretty fucking great. Sounds like The Postman.

Yeah, but like if that, if The Postman was really good and you cared about any of the characters and you enjoyed the visual. That's fair. That's fair. I'm going to check it out. I too, am a Not only do I love Trek, but I love comics, So I'll check that out.

So we get to Spunk in his his suit p duper uh sat Machine attack Good good call, where he's got rapid fire, three computers yelling questions at him, and he's answering very efficiently and economically until it asks him how he feels. And I got to tell you, HP, if my computer asked me how I felt, I'd probably pause as well and wonder what happened and where I was, because a second ago I was answering questions about electrons and who the who the main philosopher on Vulcan was at the start, And now it wants to know how I'm doing. I know that you need to know that, and. It does flummox him though, And that's we get to see Jane Wyatt. We're returning as his mother, and she kind of tries to comfort him and say, you are a human, part human you, your feelings will surface, Let's let it happen.

Then, should be the bridge for the song that I composed at the beginning. It should be how do you feel? How do you do? Yeah? By the way we've gotten this far, we didn't mention one of my favorite parts in all the Star Trek movies, TV shows, books, comics, whatever.

We kind of skipped over this part. And I want to give credit where credit is due, Father Malone, because chronologically, it happens before we see Oh. I thought we meet the crew first and then we go to the Earth. But you're right, this is the best part of the movie. This is yeah, this is in the running.

I'm always one for hyperbole, I say very often to my own annoyance. Oh, this is my favorite thing. This may be my favorite in the whole movie. It's the movie starts before after we see the probe introduced. The movie starts with this hearing at Starfleet.

John Schuck, who we previously discussed as part of the Night Mister Walters Taxi podcast. You go listen to that if you'd like. He is playing a Klingon ambassador and he's pleading his case before the Council for the arrest and extradition of Kirk for crimes related to everything that happened in Part three, the destruction of the Klingon crew, the Genesis Device, all of it. And I just I words can't express how much I adore John Shuck in this. Now we will get to star Trek six eventually, but there's an actor in that named Christopher Plumber, who also plays a Klingon who has a penchant for oration and for sort of Shakespeare.

He undoes all of the goodwill John Shuck stimulates in just one scene in this movie. That John Shuck shows you how this is how you do classical oration, because it's almost as if he's like a lawyer up there. I thought he was a lawyer at first. I didn't realize he was the Ambassador because. He's demanding justice and he's gesticulating and we demand it's so good he's His part in the scene is maybe three minutes of screen time, but boy does John Shuck make the very most out of that pre minutes.

It's the best Klingon outfit with the tassels in the front and the cape on the back. The tailoring is superb. It's exquisite. It's one of the best outfits in all of Star Trek. It's clear that was constructed for the Ambassador, that particular outfit.

It's not just one of the Klingon warrior outfits that they've been reusing since the motion picture. Well, it's nice because we've kind of gotten used to this idea that the Klingons are a warlike race of aliens, and here we have it's almost like this Klingon went to Harvard to learn for law school, so he has he's Klingon, but he's very like I said, very classical in his approach to speaking. As it's like Hans Gruber. He went to Cambridge. And but the other part of this that I really is he's delivering this impassioned plea for Kirk in walks, Sarah.

That character and all of Star Trek. I love, I just I love this is. It's my favorite Klingon and my favorite Vulcan. Next Spock, of course, and Sarah is pleading for the other side of things. He's there representing Kirk and Spock and the crew to kind of plead their case because they're still on Vulcan, and the two of them start to verbally spar a little bit.

H yes, it's time for a shock off. Okay, all right, I'll give it a try. We both love John Shuck. You love him too. Here we go, Ready, hit me with something, hit me with some shock.

I might have to paraphrase some of this. Vulcans are well known as the intellectual puppets of the Federation. I'm gonna continue. I'm going to do his next line. We deny nothing.

We have the right to preserve our race. Going okay, okay, listeners, I want you to let us know who won the Shock off. I already know Father Alone's gonna win because he's a better mimic than I. But I'm gonna sally forth here starfree Starfleet regulations. That's outrageous.

I don't ever follow up. We demand justice. Of course, I'll let you deliver the finest line that Shuck delivers. And you know which one. I'm talking about, his final famous one.

This will be on peace as long as Kirk lives. And then bestrides. He his tassels, the tassels on his castles. And Cabe and John Shock and the best Klingon makeup, the best Klingon beard, the best Klingon outfit, the best Klingon. He's fantastic.

I wish he was in more of these episodes. I know, I'm pretty sure he came back not as this character, but he's done other stuff for Star Trek TV shows and what have you. He was on Enterprise, he was on Deep Space nine. I could I would have loved if they brought this character. I mean, I guess you can't do it on Next Generation because he would be old or dead by that point.

But they could have done it on Picard. He's so he's just so. Oh you're saying, yes, he would have been old and dead by that night seventy. Yeah, it would have to be the original series in some way, But so we lost. You could get him on that, They could get him on Strange New Worlds and just make him up to look younger.

Hey, anyone listening who's got a hand in producing Strange New Worlds, look out for John Shuck. He's fantastic. Is there an animated thing he could do? That'd be awesome? All the problems, Let's get this character his own series, shall we.

Let's do something John Shuck deserves. So that whole scene happens, and then we cut back to Vulcan. I couldn't let us proceed Father alone without calling out one of the finest scenes in all of Star Trek movie. I agree. Do you know that there are there's a contingent of fans who don't like any of the twenty third century stuff and only prefer the nineteen eighty six stuff, And I say, you're crazy.

I just wanted to stay here in the twenty third century, to be honest. With you, really interesting. Yeah, I'm of the mind that Star Trek four, as much as I love it, should not have been in this order. It should have been Star Trek six. The Undiscovered Country should be here, because that really does deal with the end of the story.

This is just a coda to what happened with the Genesis Device and Kirk and the Klingons and his son and that whole thing. That story wraps up an Undiscovered Country. So if it had been a real trilogy, then Undiscovered Country could have been here, and then the follow up would be and then they saved the world with whales and it's a good time, and aren't we happy We're back to Star Trek. See. I think the real outlier in all of this is clearly Star Trek five.

The thing. Yeah, it doesn't deserve to be anything. It's just that it's this movie. It what it is. It's Voyage Home mixed.

No, it's actually motion picture mixed with Wrath of Khn. In fact, it's the same story that Harve Bennett initially pitched, which was this renegade who is causing a revolution and he's going from planet to planet and they have to go out and deal with him, and then they find out it's Marcus. It's David Marcus as the revolutionary and he's being pumpeted by Kahn. But we'll get to that when we get to start Tart five. Obviously, I'm just saying I like this movie, but I don't think it if you want to serialize these things, as they clearly did, then they should have dealt with the story and not just gone, hey, now we get to do what we want.

Sure, still think that this is a good sort of respite from all of the heaviness of the first three movies. As you alluded to earlier, there's a lot going on there. In fact, I know one of Nimoy's stipulations for this picture would be that nobody dies, right, because I think in every single one of the movies up till now, we have a lot of character deaths. So I think it was refreshing at the time, and it's still refreshing to see this movie and the format changes from the first, especially given that we're doing this fest Father Malone. I'm looking at this in a very different light, and I really appreciate the change into.

There was one death in this that was the death of my appreciation for Spock, because they kept doing these stupid idiom jokes throughout. I didn't mind any of that. I hate idiom jokes with Spock where he doesn't understand the phrase those are the worst. Spock is an educated and eloquent man and is half human and would understand the phrase I couldn't fill your shoes. Sure, but well, let me ask those aren't funny.

I don't know who thinks those jokes are funny. Well, but let me ask you this. Then this is probably a good segue into something that I wanted to get into. We haven't gotten into the meat of the story yet, but I'm just curious. What did you think of Nimoy's overall performances Spock?

And because I can tell you I thought he's an absolute highlight for me. And given the fact that he had to divide himself between directing and acting in this, which I've never had to do, but I understand that a lot of actors find it very challenging. This may be this is I think one of his best performances as Spock, because you get all of logic. There's an aloof quality to him that I think we lost a little bit along the way that he returns to here and I think it's fabulous. Well, I think it's difficult for me to say.

Listen, I'm not knocking Lenard Nimoy in any way. I think he's great no matter what he's doing. I'm just saying the characterization of Spock here for me is a skew because the Spock that we get at the beginning is not really even Spock, and he's relearning who his friends are and such. It's just an odd thing to kind of get used to. Once he gets to nineteen eighty six, he leans back into the Spock that we've known and loved from the television series, and then, yes, I think it's great from then on.

But the early portions with Spock, and like the scene with McCoy that I'm referencing, the sort of he's still not used to humans and human interaction, like I don't know, that just drives me up a fucking wall. Yeah, I didn't really. I've write an. Example of that will be in Star Trek five. The Life is not a dream, doctor McCoy.

Yeah, I don't. We'll get to five when we get to it, and we'll get out of it when we get out of it, because we're going to get through that maybe the shortest episode of the fest that we have fathom alone. But anyway, we're getting away ahead. Of going away with it. I got shot in her on the line, Oh.

No, what have I gotten into? So so yeah, anyway, I adore him in this, and I adore his direction. Actually, as I'm watching this, I have so much respect for him as the way the shots are composed, everything looks great. One thing that he does that I think I didn't pick up on until I watched this time is that rarely does he ever have the focus of the action in the middle of the screen. It's always slightly to the right or slightly to the left.

It's there's always something interesting in the way the shot is composed with Nie moy And I think he's he is and remains very underrated as a director. What do you think, Oh, absolutely, I mean he's I think he was a photographer first and foremost. Yes, and so he's used to making interesting compositions and he's not an action director necessarily. But I do understand what you're meaning. If there's any business going on in the frame, it does tend to be left or right of center.

And that's how he composes all of his shots, and more often than not, he's favoring the actors, and I think you get better performances out of everybody. And it's obviously Nie Moy's influence here where the script actually gives everyone something to do for fucking one, Yeah, this. May be one of the best scripts for that reason. I know it's not everybody's favorite Star Trek movie, but it's certainly the one. Like, Okay, for me, the best Star Trek movie is Star Trek two.

I think we agree on that. But for me, this might be my favorite just because of the way that it allows all of the allows the crew of the Enterprise to have more to do, to interact with each other, and they're they're in San Francisco in eighty six, and there's a lot of fish out of water stuff that they're dealing with. But they're all very funny, they're all very charming, and it really it points to the fact of the missed opportunities going back to the original series where these actors had nothing to do for one reason or another. I think we kind of know one of the big reasons why they had nothing to do. But that's again, that's Knee Moy's influence to your point, that makes all of this possible.

And that's why I have I look at this movie maybe the fondest out of. All of them. I learned more about every single character from this series from these movies in this one movie than in the entirety of everything that came before it. I didn't know Suelhu was born in San Francisco. I didn't know Pavel Chekhov was longing to be an admir.

I didn't know James T. Kirk was from Iowa. Actually I did at that point, but you know what I'm saying, it wasn't sort of popularized, and I got to say about that. We'll get there, obviously, But when James Kirk says, no, I'm from Iowa, that's just a setup for a punchline. But the fact that he said it grounded Star Trek for me in a way that is immeasurable.

For some reason, hearing him say I'm from Iowa made it all the more real. I don't know what that phenomenon was, but it really hit home that James Kirk is just some guy from a state a few states over from us. Well, it makes him feel less like this swashbuckling Captain that we've seen. I'm not sure Shatner has ever been funnier or more charming in a movie than he is in This movie. Is less about the naval battles, the fighting, the monoamano.

This is again, this is really a fish out of water type of picture for the most part, and it allows Shato to bring those his comedic tendencies to the four And I just think he's terrific in this in a way that I don't think he I mean, he's really good in two obviously, and he's had moments in all of them, but I think as a whole this might be my favorite of his Star Trek movie performance. Yes, absolutely, But this is the first movie where we've had the characters kind of hang out. Everything has been plot up up until this point, and everyone's been doing very serious things and saying very important things to one another. And this is the first time we can have Jim Kirk fucking joke around and say, don't you have any goddamn feelings?

He's great. I mean, say all you want about Shatner's hammy tendencies, you're not wrong, or anyone who says that they're not wrong. But if he turns on the charm. He can turn on the charm and be very funny and very engaging what he wants to be, And he's all of those things here. And he has a director who can deal with him.

Well. I think that's to his benefit that they have a history together, and I'm sure Nimoy is not going to tolerate any of Shatner's bullshit. So here's a guy who can actually stand up to Shatner in his demands, because I'm sure with all the other pictures, I'm sure he had demands on how much, how many lines. I've heard that he had lines taken away from other actors because he didn't have enough of his own, which I think is the root of some of the animosity that he had with the other cast members over time. But here we have Nimoy who has who came up just like Shatner on the original series, and he can be the one to, if not tamp down those tendencies, at least deal with him and assuage him in a way that I don't think another director might have been able to.

I heard that Shatner and Nimoy's ballooning salaries got taken out of the budget for the Next Generation. I heard that too, but I don't know if that's true, because I don't know if Paramount's television division and film division would do that, Like do they cross pollinate like that they can just reach into another like wing of their corporations. They were taking money from this project. I could see a bean counter somewhere saying, look, this is getting this Budgets getting way out of hand. If this something isn't done to curtail this, then we're gonna have to get the money from somewhere.

I guess we're gonna have to take it from this show. That may not be anything. I don't know that for a fact, but it's believable to me on a very micro level, I could see someone having that thought process. I think it's just those next generation pussies whining about shit. What else do they whine about besides the uniforms in the first couple of seasons.

God, they whine about everything. What do you do? I'm talking about the fans, not the creator. All the fans. Yeah, the fans need no excuse to whine.

I mean myself included. Oh yeah, this is a I've read an article about the about how political these movies were not necessarily that they were in any way reflecting. They were reflecting politics more than and espousing. So that when Ronnie Reagan takes the White House and America is ready to deal with the Soviet Union, we get Star Trek two. And then in the middle of the decade, when things are a little uncertain and weird like, we get Star Trek three, where comes back.

It's a little less jinguistic, but a little more Star Trek. And then finally we go full blown Star Trek at the end of the decade, when everyone had become a liberal, when the environment needed saving. Do you remember the environmental fervor at the end of the nineteen eighties, the Captain Planet years, the Earth Day must be celebrated on television. Let's all drive our cars to the latest Earth Day celebration and eat off of styrofoam plates while we do it. Yeah, I remember that clearly, Earth Day being like a big deal, and that was I mean, not that it's the same thing, but there were a lot of benefits.

We had hands across America. Obviously that was a big one, and activism was in and I think Neimo, I think had some involvement in Save the Whales, which obviously colored the what he wanted to do with part four, and I can't fault him for that. It raised awareness to the problem. It's a little bit heavy handed at times. I'm not gonna lie, heavy handed, Are you crazy?

In the movie? Yeah, how is it heavy hand? Because at one point, because they showed the footage of whaling, No, I'm saying heavy handed in that At one point, Shatner as Kirk actually says, isn't it ironic that when we killed these whales we were killing our own future? That's fucking heavy handed. Right, That is very Star Trek friend.

Yeah. Well, but this is a series that once had Frank Gorshen with black face white face and his bloody with white face black face. No. But my point is you the message was there without having to be spelled out in bold type. You didn't have He didn't have to say that line that always irked to me that part.

Of the movie. Well, I don't remember that part. You don't remember that's when after he and I'm just saying, you know the one I'm talking about. But anyway, but. As far as problems with this movie, that's not the problem.

No, I I well, then what are you leading up to? Then, I'm not leading up to anything. We'll get there, Okay, this movie will lay it out for me. We will. So the crew leave Vulcan to accept Oh, by the way, charges, so they have to take this Vulcan ship, which they had to restock the food processors because they were giving me a sour stomach.

Oh, you've just decided that, Scotty, you had a Sara stomach. So none of us get go, thanks pal. My point of this is. The thing is, I don't think Scotty's missing any meals to take a look at him. I don't think, certainly doesn't.

This is Scotty's finest moment this movie. By the way, this is absolutely Yeah. Well it's the finest moment for a lot of the ancillary crew. No, it's not. This is the finest moment for Scotty.

Everyone else is just doing their job. What specifically are you calling out his finest moment, the whole arc of his character or something specific character. Yeah, but I think this is one of Chekhov's finest moments. I think he's really funny in this. No, this is Chekhov's moment, So we have nothing to compare it to the only other thing he's done is gotten a worm in his ears.

It's horrify and finest. He fucking trips himself and falls off of an aircraft car. He does. He has a funny scene with the interrogator on the ship. It's a little bit who's on first?

Hey, which one of the crew is Russian? Let's send him to the military base. What a good idea, everybody? Doesn't that make logical sense to U? SBach?

Absolutely captain some really big holes, like I can't wait till we get to that scene because there's some there's something I want to bring up on this, but I don't want to get ahead of ourselves here. So but yeah, is it. The fact that Chekhov leaves all of his equipment there? Yeah? Yes, is it that by any chance he you know, let's talk about the flagrant this.

By the way, the Federation has a temporal Directive and temporal police because of James Kirk, because of all of his fuck ups through time, and what we're seeing here is the most egregious time paradox fuck a ruse you will ever see. Everyone is fucking everything up here, but his. Is egregious because well, his egregious what is Scotty doing? Well, but that's he a guy the formula for transparent illuminum. Do you know what they use transparent aluminum.

For in modern day? I? No, no, no, there is now a transparent illuminum. Yeah, that's like a ten years ago they made that. But actual transparent aluminum in the show is used for the portholes on the ships.

Oh, because it only has to be an inch thick. Right, And he gave a guy in nineteen eighty six that formula. Well, I have some problems with that scene as it's laid out, because well, I mean, do we want to get into this now or do. We want to we are talking about time fucker use right? Okay?

All right? So okay, So then to back up a little bit, they have to they've made this plan. They're going to have to find these whales. They want to retro fit the cargo bay of the Klingon ship to hold make it a large aquarium essentially, and they need to make these transparent aluminum walls. So they send McCoy and Scottie to a manufacturing plant in San Francisco to see if they can devise a way to have this thing.

But plast trais company that has their own Vietnam era helicopter. No, it's not the same place. I Sulus somewhere else for that. No, the name of the company is on the side of the helicopter. Oh was it on there?

I often wonder, like where does he pick up that? It's odd? Right there? He's like, let's go to this plastics company. Hey, they got a helicopter.

Let me go check that out. Well, gentlemen, I don't understand what that means, birds and snows. What are you talking about. The weird thing about that is that he it's unclear, like Sulu's just gonna buddy up with this guy who flies a huie so that he can take it for god knows what purpose. That seems odd too.

Well, he uses it later in the movie he does. But what I'm saying is like, this guy's just gonna let him take this huie because he knows a little bit about how to fly one. Like, get the fuck out of here. This is a helicopter. Helicopter.

This was nineteen eighty six. It was a different age. Everyone was handing their helicopter keys to friends and strangers alike. It's like Sulu's doing the Jedi mind trick on this guy, like you will, let me take your helicopter. I think if George de Kay uses that voice on anybody, they're going to do exactly what he says.

Yeah, very deep, rich voice. So they're in this plant and Scottie offers the formula for transparent aluminum to this guy. They even say at one point they kind of buddy. They go off to the side and say, McCoy says, well, you realize we might be causing a paradox with this guy. We might be changing history.

And Scotty makes a joke and says, well, how do we know he didn't invent the stuff? So they that's enough to do they develop it. But so, yes, that that that's egregious. But what I think is odd is he the guy has like a Macintosh computer, not a mac a Macintosh people of a certain age will remember these little cube like personal computers. By my thought is, or my my dissonance in the scene is, how is this software?

This is an advanced material that's never been developed, It won't be developed for probably another one hundred years or something. Let's just say one hundred years. How is it possible that the software can even comprehend the complex formula that Scotty is hunting and pecking with two fingers on this keyboard it does. That didn't make any sense to me, because it's it. There's probably parts of that formula that haven't even been discovered on the plane it yet.

So how the heck is it going to be able to spit out this formula? Father Malone, I ask you, it should have just like blue screen. That's what should have happened. Not only complex formulas, but like we're getting graphics like it's showing us diagrams. That he's It's the same It's the same computer that they use in Revenge of the Nerds.

Remember when Anthony Edwards makes a little graphic of a boy nerd and a girl nerd and they go, they like, but he does this with a couple of click and he clacks of his fingers on the keyboard. It's the same thing. This is the same computer that a second ago he was talking into the mouse computer. Which is a great moment. And what I love about that is that you kind of think, well, this is just going to be a bust for them, because Scotty can't even comprehend an old computer.

But then he oh, a keyboard, how quaint did he cracks his knuckles and there you go, transparent aluminum. So I do have I love this movie, clearly, but but I do have problems with some of the ins and outs of it, and that's one of them. But so that's bad enough. You're right, they're changing history by introducing this material, you know, decades, if not hundreds of years before it's actual development. But on top of that, but.

What I think is almost at least on a par with it is Chekhov has taken into custody because he had to board a nuclear naval vessel to extract protons to recharge the di lithium crystals in it sound like such a nerd in the Klingon ship. He's taken into custody, he's being interrogated, they've taken his communicator, they've taken his starfleet credentials, and in a bid to escape, he threatens to shoot them with a phaser, which won't work because of the radiation interference, and he throws it at the guy and runs off. But what doesn't really get called out is now this guy has essentially alien technology in his hands. He's got a phaser, and he's got a communicator and the credentials whatever. But I mean, hey, the phaser is not like disabled.

He can figure out how to use the thing. But then what do they do that? Do they reverse engineer it and make these horrible weapons of war? And now the whole of history is devastated. That's exactly what's going to happen.

Are you crazy? Remember when in a piece of the action, mccoin's like, it might be a problem. I loved my exactly communicator and they're like, are you spocks like we That's the basis of our entire all of our technology is in that thing. Yes, and that was a civilization that we're using Tommy guns, and we were terrified that they becoming. For a piece of our action here in nineteen eighty six, they give it to this guy.

It's just one of many egregious time traveling moments. And it's played for laughs, but the reality is much darker when you really follow the thread to. Its conclusion and by away there is no in Star Trek time travel is a straight line. There are no branching timelines in Star Trek. There are other dimensions.

There's a mirror dimension, but you don't create a new timeline when you go back in time. I'm just saying, fuck you, JJ Abram. Yeah, well, I think to me still the best explanation of branching timelines and what can happen is from Back to the Future too. I mean, Doc Brown lays it all out on his chalkboard, what Marty's up to and how he created this alternate timeline, and it skews off of the main branch. They just in this, they just didn't care in the service to a fun, rollicking adventure.

They just kind of throw those concerns out the window and say that I'm not gonna worry about it. I have a theory the reason Scottie is so cavalier about Okay, let me back up. Yeah, if you read the. Novelization, that is the inventor of transparent illumit. Oh, so he knew that all along.

He eventually comes up with that formula and popularizes it, and then eventually it gets made Okay in the novelization, by the way, because of that, because they give us that information. See McCoy says we're fucking up here, and Scotty jokes, but then he says he is the inventor of transparent illuminum, and who's to say that we weren't supposed to give it to him? And that's interesting. Maybe they the enterprise coming back to the time is how we got transparent aluminum to begin with. Okay, so that's an interesting concept from the novelization, but it doesn't it doesn't count because it's not in the fucking movie.

It's instead them shrugging it off, like, ah, we're fucking with the timeline. Here's the thing, perhaps Scotty has in his mind, it's nineteen eighty six. I'm going to give this guy the transparent aluminum formula. In about a decade or so, this is all going to be gone because there's going to be a huge war and most of humanity is going to get wiped out. So I think any problem that we create here isn't really going to matter within a decade.

And that might be the attitude of the entire crew. It's just that they're not talking about it, because why would you. I'm imagining them bring this is such a light, rollicking, fun movie, and to bring that up like this, None of this matters because all the people that you're seeing on the street crossing the street and driving this bus and this punk on the bus. They're going to be dead inside of seventeen eighteen years tops. So we're just could why even worry about the temporal concerns here the dangers, because.

It's not going to matter. Fucking fly in with the bird of prey. We're in full view of everyone. What are you going to do about it? Nothing?

That's right? You know who cares? You're dead to me already. People of Earth. We're here for the whales.

Give us two whales and we'll be gone. Zip his z app. I don't think the prime directive would allow for that. Neither does the temporal fucking directive. Man, And they've broken so many more of those regulations entire.

There's an entire books of the Temporal Police. The point I was going to make way earlier when I completely lost my train of thought because you hit me with the ensign from the Farragut sure bit is that when I started watching Strange New Worlds, I went back and I looked at all of the different series because I felt I was very deficient in my Star Trek knowledge. I thought like there were huge gaps, and as it turns out, does there weren't any. I've seen all of the different series, right. Nevertheless, the feeling persisted that I was deficient in some way.

And then I went and looked the list of Star Trek books and it knocked me on my ass. There are so many. Yeah. When I stopped reading the novels was around nineteen ninety two there, and I had read them all by then. I thought like, well, I'm on top of this.

Oh no, so many varied and just and by the way, everybody, if you go to the Internet, the Internet Archives, the Internet. Archives, yeah, the archive dot org. Yeah, I'm gonna put a link in the show notes to the Star Trek page because there are there's like eight thousand or so articles and books and movies and stuff you can watch all Star Trek. There's pretty fucking amazing. So yeah, the insane amount of novels is just staggering.

I remember, and this was before ninety two. I remember going to the mall as a kid and going to the bookstore and the Star Trek books. You could see them in the sci fi section, like taking up at least one whole row, if not more. They all had the same They were like almost like dime store paperbacks for lack of a better term. They weren't actual dime store paperbacks, but they were very disposable books of varying quality.

Some were pretty decent, others were terrible. But it was the This was the kind of a book that you would get it like the airport if you wanted something quick and easy to read on your flight or whatever. A million I just dozen I tried reading some of these books, and like I said, some like you get through. Some were just terrible and really bad. But to your point, there were just were so many, and I don't know that any of them are considered canon at this point.

I don't think they really were, because they were just so unmanaged. If it ain't on screen, it didn't happen. It's kind of the. Way I look at it. Even because Star Wars had a pretty good run of paperback books.

To remember, there was a Han Solo's Revenge Han Solo at stars end these it was the same thing. It's just instead of Star Trek you had Star Wars. There were way more than that, because you remember there was Air to the Empire and the whole the whole thron series of books and that whole and Luke Skywalker and Mara Jade and their kids. It was that whole thing. And then Lucas came in and said, I'm gonna do these prequels and they said, well, wait, there's all this other stuff.

Anyone, I don't care you're talking about. Was there was a lot of this stuff. No more baby. Oh, I like Corus and that's a good name. So yeah it was.

There was so much lore and so many books. And then the comic books came in and that was the whole thing. So yeah, there was a lot to consume. Where were we I think we're just talking about. Oh, that's pretty much all I need to say about time travel, the fact that sure soon Armageddon will put an end to all of their misdeeds exactly.

So the enter the I keep saying, the Enterprise, there's no easy way to say. The Enterprise bounty, the HMS bounty for from now on is what I'm talking about. The bounty is on its way back to Earth, and Earth is now it's cataclysmic. There's the oceans are being raised up, the atmosphere is getting ionized, and things are bad. And Sarah says to the Federation President says, why don't we send out a planetary distress signal just while we have time.

Hey, why didn't we do this earlier? Everybody? Why it seems wasn't there a planet wide evacuation as soon as we realized that this unstoppable probe had entered our solar system. Because they knew it was coming and what the repercussions were. Because all of these ships are sending the stress signals that they have no power, they're trying to deploy a solar sale to At one point, by the way, I'm sure you noticed this, Father Lam, Of course you did.

They're in sort of central command of Starfleet as all of this is transpiring, and there's all these U screens of other ships sending the stress signals. At one point you see on one of the screens a female commander giving her a stress signal. Is none other than Jane Weedland from the Go Gos. Oh. Yeah, she's a huge, huge, huge Star Trek Van Jane Weedland.

I love me some Jane Waveland. She had that band frosted where the st were capitalized and the rest was lowercase because of Star Trek. Were they Star Trek theme? No, not at all, but that was her solo band and I'm going to put at the end of this episode. I'm gonna put her track Empty and Meaningless, one of my favorite songs of all time, Little Jane Weedland and yees.

So she's in this and she's also in Star Trek six. She's in Star Trek six. What is she in Star Trek's just someone on the bridge or something. Oh okay, I didn't notice her in that. When we get to that, if to check it out.

So they send out this distress signal, which the bounty picks up, and they're all fretting about it, and they pick up the signal. They listen to the signal of the probe is sending out. It's this screeching signal that seems to be directed to the oceans. So Kirk actually brilliantly says, well, can we hear what that sounds like? As if we were underwater accounting for all these factors, And they played back and lo and behold, it sounds an awful lot like whale song.

So Spock has a brainstorm. He goes off figures out that it's a humpback whale call. But he feared there's no way for this thing to respond because the humpback whales are now extinct, so it's a Kobashi Maru of situations here. There's no way they can possibly defeat this thing unless Kirk makes the bold choice to attempt time travel by sling shotting around the sun, which I think they've done that before. Have they not fallom alone?

Yeah, this is not untested. They did it back on the series, right, but they did it in kind of as an accident. They weren't like, hey, let's go time traveling everybody. It's a little cavalier how much they're ready to go do it, and knowing that they can do it, and which leads me to think, like, why isn't every why aren't the Klingons doing this? Yeah?

You know what I mean, like ship after ship, just keep going until you get back there and fucking fix everything and make the Klingon empire everywhere. It is a little interesting, how well, I mean, I guess what are you gonna do? I mean, the very survival of the Earth is at stake. I'm not saying they shouldn't attempt it. I'm just saying the way they talk about it is like, yeah, hey, let's just go do that time travel thing now.

There's some fretting. I mean, spak has some calculations for time or again. It's not without risk that they all acknowledge, but they have no choice. You know those whale songs that you mentioned, You know that they were a big part in ending most of whaling in the civilized countries during the nineteen seventies. That album that came out, that Songs of the Humpback Whale by Roger Paine.

Is that right? That album was responsible. It turned the tide of public opinion about what whales are and their level of consciousness once people heard them singing beautifully to one another that hey, maybe we shouldn't just be wantonly killing them for no reason. Because at that point, anything you were getting from whales was no lock could be easily substituted with another product. You know, nobody don't need whomb Yeah glubber for oil, Yeah exactly, we really need Ambergree.

Can we just synthesize a different scent elsewhere? I think whaling still does go on to a much smaller degree, but I think like in places that it's not regulated, it still has happened Japan, but it obviously, as I know, they're not being hunted into extinction anymore. A good No. None of the humpback whales in the when this movie were made were on the endangered list and they no longer are. I mean that doesn't mean anything really, like they're not well, let's say they're not what they were before we started slaughtering them wholesale.

But yes, and the nations that do still are still out there murdering them are are slowly the tide is turning against them as well because their product that they're bringing in is too contaminated with pollution. Yeah, ironic that Yeah, I don't really have words for that. It like it's like ya, no more whaling, oh, because they're so poisoned that they're no longer of any use to these greedy fucks. That's sad. Takes the away.

Kirk Spock, McCoy, Scottie Hurah. So back to fantasy. Lang Jack Maltz, how you doing. I'm just having here. Everybody like that should it should be the name of a deli.

Maltz is Deli, home of the giant Reuben Malts. We should get a Maltz cookbook going. Have you read any of the Star Trek cookbooks? No, I'm not boy, I wanted to make a dish to have while we were recording today. So this morning I went through the very first Star Trek cookbook, the one that came out basically when the series was going on or the early seventies, and I couldn't find one thing that I wanted to eat in that goddamn book, Like.

How would you make goch Dean? That was so it was so early that they don't have goch they basically have that's so well known. Yeah, No, that wasn't until next generation. Gosh, that was that Heart of Glory or whatever the fuck are That was a riker episode, whether that we discovered what gos what? No, I have not.

I've never even seen a Star Trek cookbook let alone red one. There is a recipe for onion pie that is attributed to the Klingons. It's not exactly what they would have made on Klingon Prime, but it's as close as we could get on Earth. Onions and cheese baked into a pie actually sounds pretty. Good because I've always thought, in the back of my mind, fought them alone cheese and onion.

The A G S E A N D O N I O N s oh no, oh no, anyway, so they do their slingshot thing, and much to their surprise, they I actually, by the way, this sequence is. Going to jump over this fucking nightmar fuel. It's very nightmarish because it all it's make the slingshot approach and they're making their slingshot and all of a sudden, it becomes this weird cloud dreamscape where heads early CG versions of their heads, like you see a horror's head morph into Scotty's head, morphing into Chekhov's head. But it looks like like stone statuary that you would see in an ancient civilization. And there's the way voice this is Kirk's point of view because we focus in on him, So this is what's going on in Kirk's mind.

He's traveling through time. He's seeing his fellow crew members as weird amorphous statues morphing one into another while while we're hearing snatches of dialogue. From the future from stuff that hasn't happened in the movie yet, and then and ending with his head kind of pushing into the main main view. And then there's a shot of almost like altered states, like this human figure that doesn't have any real definition falling through the air, splashing in a pool and you're seeing whales floating around and it's all very weird. And then all of a sudden, they they kind of fade into the shot of the bridge.

Everybody's fallen like a sleep. We don't know how long they've been out for how long? Like Soo kind of like opens his eyes as if he's waking up from a colonoscopy or something like, oh, the breaking thrusters have fired, Captain, Like I it was just so weird, like the what happened to the to them during the sling shot of Time Trap. Thank god for klingon breaking thrusters, I guess. Seriously so, but they make it the best they can approximate that they've they've reached their target of the late twentieth century.

They've zeroed in on the Bay area of San Francisco as being the likely spot. I think she picks up whale Song or her picks up whale Song on the computer, and they set off for San Francisco. They land in Golden Gate Park cloaked. Yeah, which is a great idea because I'm sure no one's going to go to Golden Gate Park and play soccer or fucking throw a football around or a frisbee or a hacky sack or fucking I'm just going out for a run. I'm gonna lay out my blanket here.

Ooh bong. And that we've established in Star Trek three that cloaking is not an absolute If you look at it in just the right way, you can it's like the Predator kind of you can see behind it, like the magnification effect of this cloaking device. So it's not as if it's perfectly invisible either, right, So it's a very big leap of Maybe. It's only when it's in motion against a starfield is when you're gonna see it. I guess, if we're being generous, let's say that for the sake of this movie.

Look, it's a really stupid idea. We get it. It's a joke, and this is a lighter hearted one. We don't really give a shit about things. But hey man, this is also Star Trek, and they shouldn't be doing this.

They shouldn't be parking that fucking gigantic spaceship where everyone one can accidentally run into it. This requires probably the most suspension of this belief that you're going to find in a Star Trek movie, because this isn't the future we're talking about exclusively. This is now. They've come down to our environs, So you're going to have to just accept that for inexplicably, Golden Gate Park has abandoned for the next several days while they figure out this problem and how to solve it. It's like, do you want an alien world that obviously looks like a sound stage or do you want complete and total, like break with reality here and everything looks really good.

We're just along for the ride. I'll accept it. I've been to that park where they filmed the ship landing and they get off the bounty. It's in Balboa Park in Los Angeles, just outside Paramount Studios. I had been there, didn't realize that they had filmed it there.

There's another location that I've also been to that I had no idea while I was there too. So here we are welcome to San Francisco. Don't forget where we parked. Good line, that's a good line. It is.

There's some real gems here and it's not I don't think it's a coincidence that this is probably where Nicholas Meyer picked up the script writing ease they landed on there. There, the humor is much more. It's just funnier. It's more casual, They have more to do. It's a hangout.

Like you said, I love hanging out with these characters. So they make their way into San Francisco to the sounds of this very Roboto drum machine soundtrack music which I hate, which immediately dates the movie in the way that it really mostly is pretty pretty not dated in that they break out into teams, right, So Kirk and Spock are going to tackle the whale, finding the whale, Checkov and Horror are going to figure out because the dilithium crystals have the run out of power. It's a movie, HP or does it make it a perfect period piece? There's nothing perfect about that set, Like if you bottle electronic sound. What I'm saying is like if you were making a movie with characters now and they traveled back to the nineteen seventies, and you wanted to portray the nineteen seventies, so you do it with the cheesiest music from the nineteen seventies at that moment to evoke the nineteen seventies, Right, isn't that a possibility here.

I know it's not. It's a stretch, but I'll allow it. Motion objection sustained fallom alone. Stock fleet regulations. That's outrageous.

That's outrageous. So they horror. So they need to recharge the diad lithium crystals on the ship or they're going to decloak and all bets are off. So they figure they're going to go to naval vessel that still runs on nuclear energy and they can steal some protons. This is all tech speak.

They're going to basically go to the ship and grab some stuff that can recharge the lithium crystals. That's Ahura and Chekhov's job. Zulu, McCoy and Scotty are going to try and figure out how to retrofit the cargo bay for the whales to get the materials and so on and so forth. So now they've all broken out into their own little jobs, which is also a nice opportunity to see them outside, not only away from the main three, but kind of doing their own thing in isolation, which is awesome. It is awesome, and retroactively, it makes me angry that they didn't bother to do anything like this in the previous movies.

It would not be that hard just to give these characters a little thing to do here and there, a line here and there, instead of just the main focus. The fact that they kept introducing characters in these movies and giving them a lot to do is absolutely bonkers. I don't need to know Kirk's son, who gives us a shit. I want to know about Pavel Chekhov he wants to be an admiral. Well, thank goodness they, at least for this particular movie, they our wishes are granted Father Malone to see them bounce off each other and be funny and be interesting in a way that we haven't seen before, and we're not going to see.

Sadly, we're not going to see much of going forward Start Trek six things, we get a little more of that, but not to this degree. This is really the height of the ancillary crew and things they got to do in a movie. Were you with me at the Star Trek convention I went to in Boston around the time of this movie to see Walter Kanig speak. No I You and I went to a convention where James Doohan was speaking, but we didn't stay for his part. I think we poked our heads into the conference room that he was speaking in.

But that was it. We didn't stay for it. I didn't see the one with Walter Kannig. What did he have to say? Oh, I just it was the moment I realized that Chekhov had been given nothing to do for four movies, because he was like, yeah, well no, they just keep injuring me, but hey, I'll take it.

It was like that. I felt like, oh man, and I feel really bad because I like him and I like Chekhov. There's a series I think I mentioned this to you. There is a series of videos on YouTube. It's like the Foundation organization.

There's some organization devoted to recording actors and creatives in the industry and just in their field with particular movies and television shows they made. And Walter Kanig has a has a video that I watched fairly recently where if you want to kind of get his side of why they didn't like Shatner, where the friction lied. I mean, he's very diplomatic, I have to say, but it is illuminating. Nonetheless, the easy answer is that they just they recognize that he would take lines and scenes away from them. He didn't want the focus.

Shatner didn't want the focus to be off of him, So these got The rest of the cast kind of got shuffled off to the background to a certainty. But it's important to realize that these are actors, these are people. It's easy to watch these movies and not even give them a second thought. But this is their career. This is all they had.

So it's one thing for us to talk about it who got to do what? But it's another thing to imagine you've done a TV show for three years out of your life or whatever, two or three years out of your career, and that becomes not only is that you're defining role, but it's not even a role that you can really be that proud of or feel like that creatively satisfied in doing. It's an interesting perspective to take on. I mean, at least they got something to do finally. Look, well, here's the thing.

Some actors work their whole lives and they never get one scintilla of the notoriety that say, Walter Kinnig got. This is true, he had syndication money. Let's you know, come on. Sure, and the conventions I think is very lucrative. I don't know that these original actors are doing much of that these days, but nevertheless, it's not as if they didn't profit to some degree.

But I'm talking about the creative satisfaction. But he showed up on Babylon five as Bester, that fucking psionic cop. He was really good on. That, Walter Kaynig did. Yeah, okay, and some.

Of those good show Babylon five, Who's with me? Who's lists? A lot of these actors, like I know, James Dewan was on Next Generation at some point they cross pollinated across these are shows, and that's great, but I can't help feeling a little bad for these the other crew of the Enterprise for how shitty they were treated, clearly, but not here. This is the this is when they really get their moments in the. Sun, right, they sure do.

Doesn't get anything really. For some reason, she's the only like Kirk says before they leave the ship, leave your Federation credentials here civilian clothes only. But inexplicably, o'hura is still wearing her Starfleet uniform with a little flat that comes down the red thing. That's all she had. There should have been a moment where she went and got some clothes.

How about that she's done Vulcan they could give her any marr. Yeah, and by the way, the Vulcans couldn't just lend them a ship. Sarah didn't have a ship for them. We're gonna have to fucking figure out how to this goddamn kling on ship home. Like Sarah could be like, no, you can take mine, just I'll give you a ride.

Let's go, guys. And Spock is still in his Vulcan Initiate robe though, this white robe, and he even says like, I'm sorry, I couldn't find my uniform. So now we got him walking around San Francisco looking like some kind of. Weird hippie like someone in San Francisco. Yeah, I know that's fine.

By the way, that was the smartest thing Leonard Nimoy did was make sure that even because he's going to be directing and starring in the movie and that's gonna be tough, so at least he gave himself the most comfortable outfit in the world. I want that Vulcan robe, that terry cloth deliciousness. Oh I want to be buried in it. Yeah, and he is also smart enough to because Kirk says, Look, it's a safe bet that none of these people have seen an extraterrestur before. So Spock rips off a strip from his cozy terry cloth robe and wraps it around.

He does the same thing. Kind of in a piece of the action. Piece of the action, Right. I was going to say, he. Wears a nit cap in that one, which is really cool, right, Yeah, looks like a dock worker.

Yeah, I love the watchcap. Look, so he has this this bandana wrapped around his ears so that you can't see You can neither see the points of his ears nor his weird eyebrows. Now I contend that he could have just gone regular and no one would have given him a second look. Well, yeah, especially when they have this stereotypical punk on the bus who looks way weirder of the time, then you know that people are going to be focused on that weirdo with the mohawk more so than the guy with the odd haircut in ears. A word about that.

Kirk Thatcher, one of the producers on the film playing the punk, played him eventually again on Picard, which was fun. That was the only good part of those that Picard series, as far as I can tell. Also in the Marvel Werewolf by Night TV movie directed by Michael Jacchino, he's the giant Scottish hunter with the fucking broad acts in that. Ah, I didn't know that was the same guy. Yeah, man, cool, love Kirk Thatacher.

When I was rereading and apparently it was his They needed a punk and he was like, I'll do it. And it should be noted that Penny Pension was going on a lot. Halfway through the making of this movie. They started Paramount started closing up the check book and locking it real tight. So people were filling in.

Like when the nuclear vessels scene, like those are all crew members that they're talking to, are like. Oh, I don't know. Maybe in Salsilito, like that's member of the crew. So I don't know what was I saying. So you talk about Kirk Thatcher the punk, So Kirk Thatcher says, Hey, I'll play the punk character and I will convince you I will shave my head into a mohawk in order to do it.

And then I was rewatching the movie yesterday. He's got a faux hawk. Yeah, it's combed up. It's just combed up. And sprayed.

That's that's him on the radio too. By the way, he co wrote that song, the I hate You song. I b rate You. Yeah, So in this scene, got a lot of got a lot of laughs of the time in the theater where they're Kirk and Spuck around this bus and there's a punk with the bloombox playing this song, and Kirk's like, did he turn that damn noise down? And the punk like flips him off and turns the radio up even louder, and Spock takes it upon himself to give him a nerve pinch.

So the guy like basically like passes out and flops onto the radio, which shuts itself off. That's a salt. I mean, I don't everyone on the bus applots. They have no idea what happened? Did he knock him?

Did he murder him? Just then did like they can't see, did he just start stabbing him in the neck and now he's dead? Like music, they're just a plodding And yeah, it seems like I said, I got a big laugh in the theater at the time. Oh, come on, it's a great gag, And yeah it is. I that was a dick.

He was. But to your point, they don't know what happened to that guy. He could have like strangled him in some way. They weren't paying attention to that. A little odd.

When's the last time he rode the bus? You would cheer too, I guess so radio. Oh no, I wouldn't. But that's like saying, well, if you just shot the guy, would you applaud? No?

I wouldn't applaud. I didn't want someone to be fucking injured. Who cares who? I wouldn't want him shot. I'm not saying that you would applaud if he nerve pinched him.

Yeah, but I don't know. As a nineteen eighty six person, I don't know what a nerve pinch is. The guy like his eyes like roll up in his head and he falls down. It looks pretty. It looks like at a coronary event.

Anyway, I hate hate you you great stuff? Is that was that on the sound you know? No? Should have been definitely was not on that soundtrack. What do you think of the soundtrack?

What do you think of these themes? D Hey, we're having a good time. Yeah, this was not my favorite. It's fine, it's fine. This wasn't my favorite.

This doesn't have the vision of a Star Trek two like or Jerry Goldsmith type of score. It's fine, it's I don't know, it wasn't. I didn't find it all that memorable, but. I think it's entirely appropriate for this film. They don't need the grand fanfare here.

James Horner, who priced himself out, like I said, it's fine. Too expensive. James Horner got his big break with Star Trek two, and then by Star Trek four. He's like, I'm sorry, fellas, I have real work to do. Now what he was doing?

Will? I think right? I have to do Aliens right now with James Cameron, which is basically just the Star Trek two soundtrack with a few changes. That's good, it's fine, done done. Yeah.

I mean, like I said, it doesn't distinguish itself in any real way, but it didn't take me out of the movie. It works well. Nothing better. I think it's fine. It's pleasant enough.

And what are you gonna do when your composer bails? You get Leonard Rosenbern. I love the name missus Candygram So. We haven't even talked about the Cetacean Institute and the other character in this movie. Did you go to the Cetacean Institute when you were in San Francisco recently?

HP, No, because I don't think it exists. I don't think it's a real it does. If you go to Monterey, it's the Monterey Aquarium, which is where I went to it on Cannery Row, went in, did the whole thing, went out back, saw that fucking that pool, the open ocean area in the back. Had no idea where I was. Only afterwards was watching the movie.

I went, God, that looks a lot like that fucking aquarium, and then looked it up and yeah, it's the Monterey Aquarium, which by the way, is a fantastic aquarium. So I wish I knew about that, because I, as father Malone said, I did take a trip, me and my family. We drove actually down the pch started in San Francisco, went all the way down through Monterey and ended up eventually in La Two things one we did. We stopped at Canary Row. We went to Monterey, the biggest ripoff you'd ever seen.

I wish I knew about the aquarium because that would have been fun. But like Canary Row itself, was just a complete tourist trap. Oh yeah, it's a tiny little slice of Las Vegas, right in the middle of California. I love it there. Yeah.

Here's my tip, by the way, for anyone who likes to go to thrift stores as I do, We'll go to rich areas. Yes, I got a first edition of Dance macab by Stephen King, perfect condition for a dollar. Related to that I used to. There used to be a used bookstore in Hyannas that I would go to when I was down in the Cape. Father alone.

I went to this used bookstore Prianiss be a fairly upscale area. I found a collection of artwork by Ray Pettibone. Oh, most people will know he did the artwork for a lot of sst artists Black Flag. All of the Black Flag albums had his artwork. I got a book there for twelve dollars, this collection of his artwork.

Do you know how much it's worth? How much? Eight hundred dollars? Holy Lord? So what Father Malone is saying is true.

Check out thrift stores, check out used bookstores. Check out any of these places where people might get rid of their what they consider to be there to try us because you never know what you're going to find. The second thing I was going to mention is on this trip we stopped in Sasolito. Actually we spent part of the day in Sasolido. Loved the enterprise.

No, we just stuck to the downtown area kind of like the right along the seaside there is gorgeous But no to short story long, I did not make it to the Cetacean Institute, but the Kirk Spock have to hit there because there are two whales that were raised in captivity there named George and Gracie. And my other favorite bit in the movie is Spock determining through logic how he will determine where they can find whales, and Kirk just seeing George and Gracie at the Cetacean Institute on a bus, He's like, oh, I think we can go there. Yeah, So they head down there and they meet a cetacean by biologist named Gillian played by who father. Alone Catherine Hicks, the first woman to be menaced by Chucky.

That is true, but what I knew her, actually what I came to know her from later. And another bit of weird sort of cross casting. Is talking about Seventh Heaven with fucking yes, Commander Decker. Yeah she was. It was a very successful syndicated show named Seventh Heaven where Stephen Collins from People Eagerly Eared listeners will remember him, as you said, Commander Decker from the first Star Trek movie.

He played a pastor and she was his wife and they had a little family. Jessica Biel. This was her first big role. I think she had been on the show for a few years. But yeah, so Catherine Hicks is the essentially without really being Kirk's love interest, ends up kind of being his love interest the weird way.

Yeah. I also remember her from Peggy Sue Got There in the. Same yes, another time travel movie. Yeah, exactly. So what's it with Catherine Nickson time travel and kill her dolls?

She's very natural here, though, you have to say, like, she's believable as this whale biologist in nineteen eighty six San Francisco. Oh yeah, no, she's great. She's very natural. That naturalism will get her in trouble later. Yeah, oh yeah, Okay, now you've got me intrigued.

So she's giving a tour of the aquarium or whatever the instant and this is where Kirk and Spock kind of pick up on the plan for George and Gracie. They're set to be released out of captivity, and this is a dangerous thing because Jillian loves these whales and she's afraid they're gonna be hunted into extension or sorry, she's afraid they're going to be killed, just like the other whales that are out in the wild. But we have a great moment where they're going through this tour and Spock kind of slips away from the tour group and as Kirk is watching one of those like aquarium view areas where it's like it's down below where you can see underneath the aquarium water, Spock has dove in and he's mind melding with Gracie and everybody's like, what the hell is going on here?

And it's actually you can see that it's actually Leonard Nimoy down there with this fake whale. Leonard nimo is a diver. He learned to dive for some production he was involved with, So yeah, that's definitely him, and that's this is my favorite moment of James T. Kirk in this movie. His reaction to seeing Spocket, Oh my god, what is he doing that?

Is so funny to me. That would be Kirk's reaction, like he's so exasperated at that moment. Yeah, he because he notices it before the rest of the tour group, not because Gillian's back is to the tank, so she doesn't even see what's happening. And that's when she notices. She basically kicks Kirk and the Spock out of the out of the tour.

But luckily they don't get arrested. Like, what was Spock thinking? Come back later, man, it was. Funny, but he does mind meld. He later tells Kirk that he was successful in communicating their intentions to the whale, and they start walking back to I mean, Sasilito isn't that close to San Francisco.

Really, they're gonna get back on the bus, man, Oh. They're gonna get back on the bus and go back. Okay. So, but Jillian happens to see them walking out of town or whatever, and she just I think she just wants to know what the deal is because they're just odd. Spock is dressed in a weird hippie fashion and who knows what's up with the current.

At this point, she has only asked Captain Kirk who he is once it will continue at nauseum through the rest of the movie, so she needs to keep that ball going right. So are you for somebody who has a photographic memory? She can never remember that. He answers her over and over again. But he's evasive until he finally lets the cat out of the bed.

But that's real soon, man, that's like the next scene. She picks them up. In her her as one does when you throw somebody out for trespassing and jumping into the tank, you want to give him a ride. It's a little unbelievable that she would pick up these two men and she's just this one lady in the truck, but something tells her that they're harmless. And I just think she's so curious about the story behind these guys because they're so weird looking.

She ends up essentially dropping off Spock in the middle of the Golden Gate Park, doesn't really understand what he's going to do there, and her and Kirk go out to dinner as Kirk is basically putting the moves on her, turning on the charm so that. She can he's really charming here, Yeah, he is. He's fantastic They have a scene where they go to an Italian restaurant and they order food and she's firing. Kirk learns that they're going to be released tomorrow, that the whales are going to be released tomorrow, which he has all these balls in the air. They have to figure out how to fix the di lithium crystals, they got to retrofit the cargo bay.

All this stuff's happening and he's freaking out. But in the midst of this conversation, he finally admits to her that he is an officer in Starfleet and he's been sent back in time. He tells her it's to repopulate this one. The smartest thing he does is not tell her that I'm trying to avert the destruction of the earth by bringing these whales back. Are we have to bring them there because we fucking hunted them to death.

That's going to have happened within twenty or thirty years. Yeah, which would kill her because she's so close to the whales and she loves being a cetacean biologist. She loves those whales so much that she has them basically in a pickle barrel. The word captivity is thrown around a lot, and I don't think people understand what that really means. That means that these whales were taken from their natural habitat and put into a tank, a false environment for which to live.

Yeah, if anything, this character should be trying to free those whales from captivity. Yeah, seriously, So whales are fifty feet long. Do you realize the amount of space they need just to swim around and breathe? For Christ's ach, Well, what I think is odd is well, they don't bree I mean they're mantles. They breathe from the air, and.

They breathe from the air. But what just to skip ahead for a minute, so they spoiler alert, they figure out they get the panels of transparent aluminium built, and they put them in the cargo hold transport. They get whatever the equivalent is. People always say that like that, that they made transparent illuminum. He doesn't make transparent illuminum, he said.

He looks at it, and he says, it's gonna take me years to figure that out. Oh I see, I see, okay, And then they just buy plexilaa. They buy the six or they don't buy it. They get the six inch plexiglass. Yeah, so they loaded up with the help of Sulu piloting this mysterious Huey that he's talked his way into flying.

But anyway, they transport the whales and the water up to the cargo hold. But like, like, how much air could there possibly be in this giant fish tank that they've created. Have they really thought through the fact that these things have to breathe air? Well? I mean, if they just left a layer of oxygen at the top where they could surface and grab the air from there, and they're pumping air into it.

Well, I hope they're pumping air into it. That's the only thing that makes sense. Well, that's what happens. So the cats out of the bag finally, Yeah, that now she's convinced. Well, no, before we even get to that.

So now kirk So, Scotty and McCoy have figured out how to get the plexiglass from this guy, that's not a problem. Clearly, Sulu has figured out how to get a helicopter for the job. Now we're dealing with Ahura and Chekhov. We haven't talked about that. They make their way somehow onto this nuclear naval vessel and they put it advice right up against.

This scenario calls for these troops to be so inempt that they effectively a Russian national to sneak aboard and get to the reactor on an aircraft carrier. It doesn't make it that part. This is really where we're talking about a movie about time travel. And this is the scene that strains the most credulity for me, is that Ohura and Chekhov are walking. I mean, they're creeping around, but nevertheless they're walking around a commissioned naval vessels in our military uniform.

It's so it's so far fetched, it's ridiculous. But they hold this device up to the reactor to gather the protons. It takes a while, they finally manage it. Now they're going to transport back to the bounty, but because of the depleted power source, they can only transport one person at a time. So Chekhov says, wher, you go with the protons, I'll go next.

So she goes by the way low power and transporter. No thanks, I'll walk right. So she transports over with no issue, but Scotty loses contact with Chekhov because of the interference of the nuclear reactor that's right there and in the meantime that they've discovered this foreign presence in the ship, the naval officers are like, oh my god, there's somebody in the ship. Let's find them. They converge on Chekhov, they essentially capture him, and they interrogate him.

And what I think is actually good makes sense in this is that they're very thrown by the fact that Chekhov has a Russian accent. And now this is really we hadn't the Cold War is still in its waning, but the Cold War is still on at this full swing man as far as we knew, right, So that makes a lot of sense that they would be so dubious and nervous of about a Russian national in the middle of a top secret naval vessel. So they have a back and forth. It's a little bit like it's funny, it's like who's on first, kind of because Chekhov doesn't understand what they're getting at, and they're like, this guy seems like there's something wrong with him because he's not making any sense. Don't give them your cereal number.

Why, by the way, Pavel, why do you have ID You were specifically told not to. He was told to leave it on the ship, but he didn't, so he manages to get away and he runs. It's a little bit Keystone coppi ish, it seems like the. Most runs and trips himself and falls off the fucking aircraft. Garry, what's happening here?

They couldn't conceive of anything else. Couldn't have somebody hit him in the head, or maybe he had radiation poisoning. I don't know. It's really awful when you think about it. He falls off of this the deck of this ship, onto the concrete deck below and really messes up his head.

I think he's got like severe brain damage. So Hora eventually picks up over the radio that he's being raced to emergency surgery at Mercy Hospital and he's not expected to make it. So this prompts McCoy to say, let me go because and I really like this about McCoy. This is one of my favorite McCoy sort of scenes, is he goes with Kirk and Gillian, who has now been told the whole truth of what's happening. She goes with them to try and rescue Checkov.

So they go there disguised as doctors. Second best scene in the movie. It is the second best, because the whole time McCoy just keeps muttering about how this is the Spanish Inquisition and. Dealing with the medievalism. Like every it's so barbaric.

At one point, one of my a nice funny moment here is he's walking down the hall and there's a woman, an old woman there moaning, and he kind of goes over to her and very much like McCoy's like, what's wrong with you? And she says, oh, my. Kids, he's got no bedside, man, it's your problem, that's what he says. She says it's dialysis, kiddy dialysis, and he's just like, oh my god, this is the Spanish Inquisition. So he reaches into this fellas and he's carrying it, just pulls out this random pill and says, here, take this, and if you're still call me in the morning.

It's like this joke, and as he's walking away, the camera follows, but you see the woman without missing a beat, putting the pill into her mouth, and that's it, and then you kind of forget about her and he goes off. They find Chekhov in the room in the emergency room, and the doctors there are like prepping the drill like voom voom voom. So it looks awful. And by the way, that's how you relieve pressure on the brain when it's swelling, when there's an edema. You have to you gotta got to let the pressure out somehow.

So it is ridiculously barbaric to anyone from the twenty third century, I'm sure, but it's the best we could do. Yeah, it's this isn't a fantasy. This is how you do this. And but for me, this scene gave me almost like the most hope for the future, because what happens is McCoy goes in and he basically begs the guy like, you don't cut into his brain. That's not how you fix the problem.

You might pay, drilling holes in his head is not the answer. The artery must be repaired. So Kirk hustles at the real doctors into a closet and phases the lock shut so they can't get out. And there's this awesome device that seems like so realistic to me. They put this device on Chekhov's head and they just sit there going all right, come on, wake up, and you hear this thing?

Do do do do? And this thing, whatever it is, repair the artery and his brain, fix them. Who I'm watching this as a what thirteen year old kid, and I'm saying to myself, man, the future is going to be so great for medical science, Like this is here you had modern day at the time, they're going to cut into this guy's head. That's the only thing they know how to do. But man, in the future, they can just fix the problem.

That's great. I mean, this is what g This is Gene Roddenberry's dream of what Star Trek was supposed to represent is the future is a is not to be feared, but to be lusted after and appreciated and looked forward to. Right, So, I I don't know that that made me very hopeful to watch that. As And we deserve a tongue lashing. Why because we're a bunch of fucking apes stabbing each other with st.

Yeah, oh you mean like like just mankind. From yeah, you know to McCoy and we need to hear that better this strive. So they fix check off. Now they've got to escape out of the hospital again. It's another Keystone Cops situation where the cops are like boop and there are always like five steps behind patient was a girl.

One mistake, yeah, because they went in with Jillian on the gurney saying she's got those awful whatever. But smartly what they do is they get into the elevator and as on their elevator, they're like Scotty Beamas over and the cops are on the first floor waiting for the elevator open up, and they're gone because they got transported back to the bouncy and that's the really the missing the last missing piece before or they can try to retrieve the whales. There's a long way to get there. It's fun, but now they've got a because the whales were released in the dead of night to avoid a media circus. By the true villain of the movie, Bob.

Bob, who gets slapped but good by. Jillian, and yeah by Jillian and by Catherine Catherine reel. Yeah for real, she really slapped that guy, and he really walked off the set and didn't come back, and his other scene didn't get filmed, and then he sued the production in one. I didn't know that PostScript, but if you watch that scene when she says you son of a pitch and she slaps him, he gives her the dirtiest look as she storms off. It's interesting to n.

Because it's supposed to be acting. Yeah, you can't just haul off and fucking slap your co star. I was feeling it at that moment. Really, next, let's can we go? Can we do one more?

Mike Herrick feeling very feisty as well. All of a sudden, Yeah, it's the. Kind of thing that would not fly nowadays, no matter who you are, they would have to like get your consent before they do that. But nevertheless, now they realized that the whales we ought to see, they've got to get a bearing on them. They have the radio frequency from Jillian they find them, but unfortunately there's already a whaling vessel that's getting a beat on them.

Now, we don't want to upset our Japanese overlords. So it isn't the Japanese. It's some finish boat near Alaska. It seems that was a little far fetched to me. It's like, all of a sudden, they're in like they made it to these like waters way far away from California.

Yeah, so a mile or so off of Sure, it's territorial waters. It comes international waters, but the protected three hundred off the coast of Alaska. You can't whale there. So yeah, somebody should have cracked a. Book probably, but we need least they didn't completely demonize the people on the whaling vessel.

I mean, what do you mean those people are pricks? They should be demonized. They should have blasted them. That would have been a better fucking outcome. My point is it would have been easy to have them like twirling their mustaches.

All well, Snemo is not going to let anybody do that, right. So, and this also got a great reaction in the theater. Is they get there just in time. They've sent a harpoon that the whaling vessel got a beat on them. A harpoon goes out and then it bounces off of something invisible.

Hey, it's the chip de Cloaks right in front of this whaling vessel. And we've talked at length about how much we love the design of the klingon bird of Prey with those arms that look like a body builder like flexing. That's the shot, that's the money shot here, because this ship is kind of hanging in the sky right in the path of this whaling ship, which completely turns tail with fear. I mean, I think I would probably have a heart attack, honestly faugh them alone if that materialized right in front of me. T minus ten thousand.

I think the Klingon ships should have just lowered, slowly pushed that whaling ship under the water, beamed up the whales, flown away. It's a great like I for some reason, I remember. The show Grim Death under the Water screaming as the ship is gently nudged beneath the waves. I remembered the shot of the Klingon ship hovering over the whaling vessel like with much more like, with very thick matt lines, not looking that realistic when I saw it, but in rewatching it, I don't know. If I was watching like a remastered version of your movie, it looked fantastic, much better than I remembered.

There's only one shot that I can call out with that Klingon ship where it's completely Matteline Arama, which is when they're approaching Earth for the first time. It's just a traveling box around the ship. Oh right, I know the shot you're talking about. Sure, A lot most of the effects are great, including the actual big money shot of the movie, which is the Golden gate Bridge shot. Yeah, no, totally.

So they beam, they beam the whales aboard, and they're gonna make their another jump around the sun to try and save the future. The whales hair there be whales. And that's maybe the most cringey scene for me of the whole movie is Kirk takes Jillian down to the cargo holds to see quote unquote her whales. And while they're watching the hell your whales, right, But Kirk starts throwing out these really cheeseball lines he quotes like, he's like, they say the sea is cold, but it contains the hottest blood of all whales. Weep not she knows the poem, and it's just like that's when he throws out that line about can you it's ironic that we killed these whales and we killed our planet's future or whatever he says.

It's like, come on, we don't hit this over the head with the message of this movie. And by the way, Kirk, don't throw yourself at this woman. It's unbecoming of you. Your fucking captain, Kirk, your casanova? What are you talking about?

Also, why didn't she say, what do you mean we hunted them to extinction. I thought we were just helping repopulate. Wait a second man, she picked up on Spock's turn of a phrase when he was coming out of the whale tank. He said, Remember she says she has a photographic memory, because Spock said, if we assume the whales are us ours to do with as we please, and we know better than the ones who caused their extinction. That is true.

Okay, you're right, that's an issue. I remove that. I take it back. Yeah, objection overruled Fathom alone, damn it. So yeah, so we get so well.

And here's the thing. A lot is made of how dangerous time travel is. But not only do they successfully do it once, they successfully do it a second time, like it's nothing. Get him back, get him back, Like how do they Not only do they make it back perfect, they make it back at the exact moment that they left starf that they left that because at that moment, the Starfleet headquarters is kind of overtaken by the climate cataclysm. There's windows breaking and all this stuff happening.

And that's when Sarah goes look and he sees the Klingon ship, which, by the way, I'm not sure that Starfleet would be expecting Kirk to come back in a cling on bird of prey. Why aren't those people going, what the fuck is open now? The Klingons are. I imagine anyone who was outside at that moment. Oh, now we're really fucked.

What the hell it's a Klingon invasion. That's what this actually is exactly that the people in Starfleet knew Kirk had that ship. I mean, the Klingon ambassador says. So he's like, they stolen a Klingon butter prey. Sure, but the civilians that are out and about are like, what the hell there's a Klingon.

Now things weren't bad enough, so they the ship. Fortunately the ship is buoyant because it crashes in the bay. What a beautiful shot coming under that bridge. Come on, man, give it up. It is and but the problem is that they have to abandon ship, but the car they can't.

The cargo hold where the whales are has to be manually opened. Like they ain't got no power, they got no power. Set it back to the future. Yeah, well, you brought up the back to the future timeline situation earlier, so I figured i'd call out mister Jason Lee. How So Of course, Kirk, being the manly man that he is, he elects to dive down and manually open the hatch, which he does, successfully releasing the whales.

Who do it because she had nothing to do in the entire Pace's right? Or are youve been sitting around this whole movie? Why didn't you do something? Make your stuff useful? So the whales are released and fortunately somehow this now here's the thing in the movie.

This was interesting when I read the trivia bid on this, Like apparently Harf Bennett when the probe quote unquote speaks, Harve Bennett wanted subtitles to explain what it is that the probe was saying, and I think it was trying to say where are you? I can't find something like that. But it was Leondard Nimoy who wisely said, no, that'll kill all the mystery. We don't know why the hell this probe is here, what it wants, or what it wants to communicate? Why ruin that mystery for the moviegoers.

This is the end of the relationship for Leonard Nemar and Harve Bennett, because Harve Bennett suggested that to the studio, and the studio hadn't really gone one way or the other, and we're just trusting Nemoi. And then it became a conversation. Did you know Harv Bennett and Leonard Nimoy died. Two days apart? And what that means I don't.

Know, but it's certainly a piece of trivia. Certainly is it's weird anyway, Fortunately we don't find out, Thank god, man, we don't. Memoy is right like it's a mystery. Let it be a mystery. There's so few of them available to audiences.

And who did we need to know what was said? I mean, come on, Oh, but it's actually a very beautiful message when you think about it, that these innocent creatures are actually helping to save the planet that has been so cruel to others of its specie. So the probe and the whales apparently successfully communicate what it is. It's nice to think that there's an alien intelligence out there coming to check up on you, you know. Sure, because that's the thing.

Earlier, Spock makes the point that whales have been around for millions of years before man mankind, if you will, So who knows where this intelligence came from, where this probe originated? For all we know, whales might have been an alien dropped on the planet some five million years ago. We don't know. The mystery of the probe, what it is, where it came from, and what it wants is central to the effectiveness of this plot in my opinion, because if you had this thing subtitled and you actually gave a real voice to this thing, it would have ruined it for me and for probably everybody else watching it. Well, two things, It is a probe from a group of alien life forms, and they did not seed the galaxy with their kind, but they are periodically in charge of checking up on the known other types of their species.

But read to get there, I don't know. I don't know that story. I'm just telling you where the probe came from. It came from this particular race that likes to check up on their things. There's a book called Probe where Kirk and a Romulan ambassador or something have to go to the neutral zone.

It's really it's not really very good. But HP, are you familiar with the concept of the mirror universe? Yeah, with the spock with the goatee. Sure do you know that there is a mirror universe version of the Probe. I thought you said there was a We talked about this with the motion.

Picture, talked about there's a mirror that Seeker, that that's the mirror version of Vegure, but there's. A mirror version of the Probe too. The Traveler yes, and then Captain Spock, Captain Spock of the Terran ship the Enterprise, travels back to nineteen eighty six, gathers to humpback whales, brings them forward in time, lets them communicate with the Probe. Then, after hearing what the humpback Whales have to say, armors them and gives them like high tech weaponry, and then the whales wage war against the Terran Empire from both coasts, just destroying everything that they can get close to. Are you being serious right now?

That's a real story. Yeah, I've never heard of that. Isn't that awesome? I've always thought of that as a possibility. It's like we see Smock mind meld with George or Gracie, one of the Gracie, I guess, and he says, like they're amenable, they don't like the way they're being treated, and they will help us.

But we because of the mystery of it, well, they could be like they could say we're the last ones because they hunted us all and killed us. Let us tell you what they have been doing to us for centuries in this probe going you're right, well, why don't you come with us? We're going to continue to drain their ocean and fuck up their worlds. Was that a book? Was that a comic or as a comic book?

Okay, it was? It called Mirror Universe. It was a whole series. Based on this. Yeah, it sounds really.

In fact, there are a bunch of Mirror Universe books too. Well. I knew that they went back to the Mirror Universe for some of those paperback books that I talked about earlier, but I the idea that they're going to all these old it seems like what you're saying is they've got they've gone to these old plots, but they're giving it a twist by making them take place. It's like a what if for Star Trek essentially. Yeah, but it's not a what if because it's actually happening, because it is the Mirror Universe.

So the events that we've seen are happening there, but with this weirdo twist to them. Yeah, but technically, what if stories actually happened but in some weird dimension like alternate realities or alternate dimensions. So I'm guessing you didn't watch Discovery it. No, I did not. Discovery deals pretty heavy with the Mirror Unit.

Oh okay. In fact, one of the characters in the like the first season of the show, who's like a real big hero on the show, ends up like being a fucking a mirror universe escapee who's trying to take over ours. It's pretty great, and then the series fell into a pile of shit. Well it was on for a while, wasn't it. Yeah, it's hard to maintain a little bit.

One good season with Pike and the Spock and for a second James Kirk. But that was an alternate version of them. Anyway, it doesn't matter. No worries. So they save the planet.

The whales don't tell how cruelly they've been treated, Fortunately for Earth. The probe reconfigures itself, pulls that weird floating ball in to itself, and then goes away again. I love the mystery of this vessel or creature or whatever the hell it is. And now they get back to the business of dealing with these charges being leveled against Kirk and his crew. This is kind of the PostScript of the movie, of the epilogue.

If they stand, they accept the charges, and all charges except for one, which I think was it in subordination or failure to follow a direct order something like that, all charges except that are dismissed, and that one is leveled solely at Kirk, and his punishment is they're going to bust him down from admiral to captain, which is really not a punishment because this is what he's been bristling against for three movies. Now this is a promotion. It really they're giving him what he wanted anyway, so it's like, sure, you know, I'll take it. So then they're on a shuttle craft. He and the crew are debating where they're going to be stationed with ship this or that, the Excelsior, where they're going to go.

And then over it's another one of these loving space doc sequences, and there you see they're coming up over one ship and it's the Enterprise again. There is the ship there might love like a woman that's from Futurama. It's the Enterprise seventeen oh one, a nowhere we've got the we've got the new numers, we've got the letters, we've got the here's the thing, did they not did the admiral on purpose just like not tell them that we're going to decommission the Enterprise because we've got a whole new one for you. Did he like that out of the room and just keep talking and you mean part three? You mean yeah, part three where he's like, no, you return to Space doc for immediate decommission of the Enterprise.

And he didn't follow it up with because we have a whole new Enterprise. Well, you would think maybe, but he's they didn't make that fucking thing overnight. No. Well, two things. One, he's pretty definitive where he says the Enterprise is time has passed.

So that's the only thing that leads me to believe that at the time they had no intent of recommissioning or commissioning a new Enterprise. Number two is the Enterprise was effectively destroyed three months prior the end of Star Trek three. Right, we know that timeline is pretty solid. So you're telling me in three months they built a whole fucking ship that's ready for a shakedown cruise. It's crazy.

Yeah, No, The only logical explanation is that they were saying, bring it in because we've already got another one built. Well, because it would have to take way more than three months. I agree, that makes the most that's Akham's razor. That's the simplest explanation. But the problem is he was so definitive the admiral in saying, like, the Enterprise is done, It's time has passed.

The Excelsior is now the new shit in the starfleet. I'm a little surprised they didn't give us some crazy new model at the end. I mean, they didn't have any money to build a new Enterprise and give us a new design or anything. But a little shocked. Well do you think here we just talked about the fact that this movie and then the next generation we're kind of produced one after the other, essentially, right, because next Gen premiered in eighty seven, right?

Yeah? Is it possible that maybe they considered a new model ship, but then they said, well, what are we going to do for next Gen? That's going to be a new version of the Enterprise. We can't have them use that, So maybe they stick with the old one. I don't know.

Oh, I'm sure they just said, we've got an enterprise. We've got a beautiful model. We didn't have it for an entire movie. We can just use that one again, thank you. Do you remember the shots that we reused from Star Trek three all through this movie of the Klingon bird of Prey flying?

Okay, yeah, we're not spending any money on. A new again. Cost cutting measures all over the place. And that's it. Man, hooray, We're off to new adventures to prove the enterprise.

They're all together now, alltogether. Now. This was a I mean like or hate this movie. I mean I don't know anyone who hates it, but maybe people. They know some track people who hate this movie.

Well that's fair. What I was going to say was I can understand people who are very die hard maybe thinking this wasn't in line with like a Star Trek two. But one thing you can't argue is that this was a very big movie for the franchise. This was a super popular movie. This did bafo box office.

This is kind of this could have been a sign of bigger and better things for the franchise. It's a really good Star Trek movie for casual Star Trek viewers. Sure, you don't need to know anything that it's all set up at the beginning, like as to where everyone is and what their place is, and you don't need to go too indempth into any of it. And they basically give it to you with the fucking ambassadors, well even sequence. But all you need to know is the Enterprise and Kirk and Spock and McCoy and to creve of the Enterprise.

That's it. I'm sure they were very confident in the notion that even if you're not a diehard Trek fan, a Trekker, treky, whatever you want to call it, they had been in the pop culture for so long now that even if you didn't know the even if you didn't watch the series itself, you know who Captain Kirk is. You know who mister Spock is. You might call him doctor Spock and not realize the faux pa, but you know who these characters are. You kind of might know Ahura and check Off Sulu.

And all that. So I don't I think, yes, the casual sort of fan could probably really get into this, but you don't really even have to be a casual fan of the show. I think it's in the pop culture air. It's in the zeitgeist. So I don't know anyone who didn't know in some way or shape or form about Kirk.

Captain Kirk beat me up, Scottie. Who hasn't heard someone say that who wasn't a Trek fan. So, and by the way, way this movie was what led to Shatner's performance on SNL with with Khan with the Revolving Restaurant where Dana Carvey played Cohn, of course, and. That was a great Get a Light that was Robert Smigel. Yes, it's a classic, no question.

But the same episode he also did Get a Life. That was that that awesome where they talked about the mirror universe in that one. Too, that was Robert Smigel. That oh that who did the Revolving Restaurant. Then probably Robert Smigel.

Probably Smigle. But though I mean that is a one two punch of Trek skits that is as good as anything else that I've ever seen on the Salad Bar. Oh my god, Sulu, turn around, turn around? What happened to you that Jim Yoshimura in both the original Belushi star Trek and then again with Dana Carvey, and. He also well, he didn't.

Chris Pine. He did a Star Trek skit, and I'm pretty sure he also was in that one too. Jesus Christ. He's multi generational, multiple timelines. It's insane.

But anyway, personally, I've already said, even though Wrath of Khan is the best Star Trek movie, this is probably my favorite. What do you think, Father Maloone? I like it. I like it just fine. I think it's a nice frosty sorbet and a mouse bouche of a Star Trek movie.

It's not too challenging, it has some funny moments, it has some fun there's some good sci fi stuff in it. There's a fucking kling On Ambassador. It's worth the price of admission, honestly, But I don't rate it as high as everyone else does, just because I like them in space in the twenty third century, exploring strange new worlds and seeking out new life forms and new civilizations. I like that kind of thing from this show called Star Trek. Sure, sure, no, and there's and again.

But I think it was pretty genius in that it did bring in people who didn't have to be like diehard fans of the show or the other movies. It's very savvy to do that. And also it encapsulated Leonard Nimoy's conservation ideals, save the whales, all that stuff. So I think it works on a lot of levels. I think it's hard as firmly in the right place, and I think it worked.

I think more than anything, I need to let the listeners know that earlier I said that Spock was wearing a stocking cap and a piece of the action, and that's incorrect. He wore the stocking cap in City on the. Ed, City on the Edge of Forever. Yeah. If you take away anything from tonight, ladies and gentlemen, you should know that I realized that mistake.

Well, kudos that you realized it and corrected it, as opposed to like letting it sit and then kicking yourself after. The I think that's Star Trek four, The Voyage Home, The Voage Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown, My goodness, I liked it. I liked it. That's about all I got to say about it. Shout out to Paul Waller, what's going on, man?

He listens to all this fantastic Hello yeah HB saying hi there. Next up is everyone's favorite Star Trek film, certainly mine, certainly yours. Why are they installing seat belts in movie theaters this spring? This May? Was that in the trailer, No, that was on the poster.

That was on the teaser poster, and the teaser poster featured a movie theater seat floating in space with a seat belt over it. Now you're acting like you've never seen it before, but you and I saw it in the fucking that Northgate Mall theater out in the parking lot that twin. It was a General Cinemas five poster. Oh this Oh I okay, yeah, it's the seat is in Federation red. I do remember this.

We saw that together and I said, that's the stupidest thing I've ever seen. That sounds like something you'd said. It's terrible. Anyway, there's a there's the preview for next our next episode. We're gonna be talking about Star Trek five, the Final Frontier.

Oh my god, it's it is something. There's you know what. Having now read shat Nors out of the behind the scenes of that movie, I'm a little more lenient on it. I haven't sat down to watch it beginning to end yet, that's going to occur very soon after some more strange New world maybe yeah, but that's gonna be our next episode. Until then, where can people find you?

And they're looking for you? Mister hp On Vulcan. I co host The Night Mister Walters, a taxi podcast with you. Father Alone or otherwise known as Midnight Viewings. Fatherm Alone, and I host the Noise Junkies music podcast.

Last, but not least, I have a band campsite hpmusicplace dot bandcamp dot com. As for me, you're listening to it, Hey, what's up's going on there? Patreon folk who are hearing this at least a month in advance. Thank you for all your support. That is greatly appreciated, and thank you all for listening.

Actually I should point out that I say this a lot, I guess, but last month was our most downloaded month ever. It was insanely popular. Thank you everyone for doing that. Please keep sharing it and liking it and giving it a bunch of four stars and reviewing it and telling all your friends about it. Totally appreciated.

HB. We're at the end of the show. Have you composed the theme to the song that I sung earlier? No, have not gotten to that yet fallen alone. But well double dumbass on you.

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