When you think Star Trek, I know you think gut-busting laughter.
What’s that? No, you don’t?
Well, whether you’re aware of it or not, comedy has always been part of Star Trek. From the very first episodes of the show, the comedic goldmine that was the dynamic between Kirk, McCoy, and Spock was evident. Episodes routinely ended with light barbs traded between them. Not to mention the comically gifted James Doohan’s performance as Scotty. Sure, he beams people up, but he also cracks the audience up from time to time too.
As a Trekkie raised on The Next Generation, I always knew comedy was part of the formula, but I never imagined they’d make a comedic film until I finally got around to watching all the movies featuring the original cast.
Nowhere in the pantheon of Star Trek lore is the potential for comedy explored more effectively than in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. After the breakout success of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, where they tragically killed off the audience’s favourite character in Spock, and the serviceable adventure-driven sequel to that, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, where they heroically brought him back to life through the magic of the Genesis Planet, the franchise found itself at a crossroads. They had killed Spock due to Leonard Nimoy’s demands and then revived him by giving Nimoy the director’s chair for Star Trek III. Now they had to create a film that neither killed, nor revived Spock. What to do? What to do?
Enter the majestic humpback whale.
With Nimoy back at the helm as director, he suggested the franchise take a bit of a left turn and do a film without a big baddy type villain. What came from that seed of an idea was a story centred around an angry alien probe that comes to Earth looking for its old friend the humpback whale only to find them all extinct. This probe’s signal wreaks havoc on all electronic infrastructure. It renders starships derelict and whips up storms on Earth so strong, they threaten to blow away Starfleet headquarters.
Luckily, the intrepid crew of the Enterprise is on their way back to Earth to face the consequences of their illegal mission to resurrect Spock from the previous movie. You see, they’d accidentally destroyed the Enterprise and had to commandeer a Klingon Bird of Prey to make their way back. Fittingly renaming it the HMS Bounty.
On their way home, they receive a distress call from Earth describing the situation, Spock analyses the probe’s signal and immediately figures out it’s a humpback whale’s song. A song that cannot be answered because humankind killed all the humpback whales Obviously, the most logical thing to do is to go back in time and capture some whales who can answer the alien probe and avert Earth’s total destruction. I mean, isn’t that what you would do too?
This is where the genius of this movie really comes into play. Instead of having a story about the crew of the Enterprise battling some larger-than-life Shakespearian alien hell-bent on some kind of devious plan, we get a wonderfully silly fish-out-of-water story (no pun intended, since whales are mammals and not fish anyway). As luck would have it, Klingon ships can cloak and render themselves invisible, so they set her down in Golden Gate Park and proceed to wander around San Francisco looking for some whales they can bring back to the future with them. We know we’re firmly in comedy territory when Captain Kirk wryly notes to the crew, “Everybody remember where we parked.”
This use of 20th Century sets to tell the story about these 23rd Century characters is classic Star Trek. When Gene Roddenberry first pitched the show, he noted the ability to have alien worlds that resemble our own, and the added production bonus of being able to use existing sets on the Paramount lot rather than having to build new ones. There’s the episode where the Enterprise finds a mobster planet, or the one where they come across a Western planet, or even one of the absolute best episodes of the original series where Kirk and Spock have to chase a delirious Dr McCoy back in time through a portal called the Guardian of Forever. Of course, they find themselves on Earth in the 1960s, which just happens to be the Paramount backlot.
Sidebar: if you’re looking to get into Star Trek and don’t know where to start, this episode is a great place to begin. It’s called City on the Edge of Forever and it’s peak Trek.
The other amazingly smart thing about this premise is it does something that some of the movies in the Star Trek franchise have a hard time achieving. It gives the entire crew goals to pursue and meaningful contributions to make. In order to achieve their mission, everyone’s efforts have to come together.
Kirk and Spock go off in search of the whales.
Dr McCoy, Scotty, and Sulu are sent to find the materials needed to convert the Klingon ship’s cargo bay into a tank capable of housing two giant marine mammals.
Chekov and Uhura are paired up to find an energy source that can refuel their ship, which has been drained by the time travel.
At the core of Roddenberry’s idea of what Star Trek was to be, and indeed one of the tenets that has been the key its longevity and success, is the idea that in the future people from all walks of life will work together to solve problems. The idea that in the future, everyone will have the means to pursue whatever they're good at, and that will make them all experts in something. On Star Trek we got to see them all work together to pursue human exploration of the galaxy. It was quite a revolutionary thing to put on TV in the 1960s. It’s also part of what still resonates with me today. In a world that’s more fractured than ever, I love to believe that one day we’ll all be able to do great things together. Like steal humpback whales from the past.
Let the shenanigans ensue!
As has become a Star Trek running joke anytime a crew time travels back to the present, the crew immediately notices how backward people from their past (our present) are. Kirk describes the 20th Century to the crew as, “…an extremely primitive and paranoid culture.” He also gets nearly run over by a cab driver because they have crosswalks in the 23rd Century, which leads to the classic exchange:
This moment kicks off one of the best running jokes of the movie where Spock notices Kirk’s use of profanity and starts to employ it himself with no understanding of how to do so. Spock calls curse words, “colourful metaphors.” You see, since being reborn in Star Trek II: The Search for Spock, Spock regressed somewhat. Through his entire arc in the series, Spock was constantly trying to escape his human half. Now that he's been resurrected and retrained completely in a Vulcan way of thinking, he finds himself out of touch with his human side. By taking the character to this new place, Nimoy and the writers allow Spock to become like a naive child, seeing the world with fresh and innocent eyes. It only serves to sharpen the fish out of water core of the story in the film. It also reinforces one of the main functions of alien characters in Star Trek: to look at humanity with curiosity and to wonder why humans act the way they do.
On their search for whales, Kirk and Spock meet Doctor Gillian Taylor, a marine biologist at the Maritime Cetacean Institute. There, she looks after two humpbacks named George & Gracie. Ever the logical one, Spock decides to jump into the tank so he can mind meld with the whales.
Meanwhile Kirk convinces Dr Taylor to go to dinner with them so he can try and get more information about the whales. This works of course, because Kirk’s charm is known throughout the galaxy. Dr Taylor is also impressed by the fact that Spock knows Gracie is pregnant, a fact he found out during his mind meld. Dr Taylor has also been blindsided with the news that George and Gracie will be released back into the wild and she’s wondering if Kirk and Spock can help her protect them. This sounds like she’s an insane person, but the comedic tone of the scene allows us to go along with the story without questioning her belief in them.
While that’s going on, Chekov and Uhura find out that there are nuclear warships nearby, and that nuclear material can be used to fuel the Klingon ship for their return trip. This leads to a wonderful moment where Chekov, with a thick Russian accent in 1980’s San Francisco during the height of the Cold War, is wandering around the sidewalk asking anyone he can about where to find, “the nuclear wessels.”
Scotty, Sulu, and Dr McCoy also get up to their own shenanigans. Scotty needs a lightweight, yet tremendously strong material to build his whale tank. That brings them to a plexiglass factory where they can source the glass they need. However, with no money or anything else to barter with, they decide to give the owner, Dr Nichols, the formula for “transparent aluminum” which is a material that won’t be invented for some years.
There’s also an entire sequence of the movie that takes place at a hospital after Chekov is injured trying to retrieve the nuclear material. Nothing screams caper comedy like having our characters dress up as doctors to infiltrate a hospital. The comedic possibilities are everywhere! Being a doctor from the future, McCoy is of course disgusted with the state of 20th Century medicine. He gives a lady on kidney dialysis a pill that allows her to grow a new kidney. Kirk, McCoy, and Dr Taylor (now fully ensconced in the efforts of our brave time travelers) outwit the cops guarding Chekov’s room and escape back to the Klingon ship just in time to go save those whales.
At the end of the day, this movie is as Star Trek as any Star Trek can get. It holds a mirror up to our present through the lens of Gene Roddenberry's idyllic vision of the future. By taking those characters we know and love back to our today, the story is able to confront the ills of society simply by allowing the characters react to it. This film also speaks to the undeniable chemistry this cast has together. The idea of Star Trek has lasted, but the debt that idea owes to William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, George Takei, Nichelle Nichols, and Walter Koenig is colossal. Their ability to keep the sometimes very serious science fiction that is Star Trek light and accessible was a real key to its lasting success.
Another part of Star Trek that people sometimes forget about is the adventure aspect. Ironically, this film that brings the story straight home to 20th Century Earth is one of the great adventure plots of the original cast's movies. At the top of each Star Trek episode when Captain Kirk reads out the ship's mission, it's clear that the crew is in search of new life and new civilisations. As a way to battle the network's aversion to boring, cerebral science fiction part of Gene Roddenberry's original pitch was the idea that through this exploration of space, the crew would have many adventure stories along the way. In Star Trek IV, despite the fact that the only real bad guys are the whale hunters who only show up near the very end of the film, the movie clips along at brisk and entertaining pace due to this spirit of adventure. This part of the Star Trek DNA is why kids love it so much. While they may not grasp the importance of an idea like Star Trek, they love seeing heroes chase whales and pretend to be doctors.
I'll leave you with a bit of trivia. At the end of the movie when the crew stands in front of the Federation Council after returning to the future, it's the only time every core actor from the original series was on screen together. You have the crew that we all think of as the crew of the Enterprise, but sitting behind them are also Grace Lee Whitney who played Yeoman Rand and Majel Barrett who played Nurse Chappell. Since Whitney left the show after season 1 and Koenig as Chekov only joined for season 3, this is the one and only time all the characters were seen together on screen.
Star Trek IV will always be an outlier within the Star Trek franchise. It's a success that Patrick Stewart often noted during the development of many of the Next Generation films. While he definitely got some comedy written into those later movies, none really committed to the idea of a Star Trek comedy quite like The Voyage Home did. Among Star Trek movies, and among all movies, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is an underrated comedy.
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