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

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
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.

Speaker 2 (00:38):
I don't know that might work better acapella.

Speaker 1 (00:41):
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

(01:03):
talk about it with me. The one who does all
the fests with me, even though he claims to not
is HP.

Speaker 2 (01:08):
I love it. Not only do I love the fests,
fahim alone. I love Italian and so do you.

Speaker 1 (01:14):
Yes, oh, I should have sung that part now. Spock
hates Italian food because he says no the entire time.

Speaker 2 (01:21):
He does, but he never gets well, we'll talk about it,
but he never gets to eat Italian food.

Speaker 1 (01:25):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:42):
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.

Speaker 4 (02:00):
To attend time travel.

Speaker 3 (02:02):
So take us home. These are the voyages of the
crew of the starship Enterprise.

Speaker 1 (02:11):
Judging by the pollution content of the atmosphere, I believe
we have arrived at the latter half of the twentieth century.

Speaker 3 (02:17):
Start eight, nineteen eighty.

Speaker 1 (02:18):
Six, San Francisco.

Speaker 3 (02:20):
Our own world is waiting for us to save it.
They have twenty four hours.

Speaker 4 (02:23):
Everybody, remember where we burned break.

Speaker 3 (02:26):
Up to complete their mission.

Speaker 1 (02:28):
You look like a codet review.

Speaker 2 (02:29):
People deem into night to collect the photons and bemouts.

Speaker 3 (02:31):
I want you all to be very careful without being discovered.

Speaker 1 (02:35):
We have an intruder.

Speaker 3 (02:36):
All right, who are you? You're not exactly catching us
at our best.

Speaker 1 (02:39):
That much is certain.

Speaker 2 (02:40):
This is an extremely primitive and paranoid culture.

Speaker 1 (02:43):
What does it mean?

Speaker 3 (02:43):
Exact change? Many of their customs will that list take
us my surprise.

Speaker 1 (02:48):
We're ready for beam out. I transport our power us
down to minimum.

Speaker 2 (02:51):
Got to bring in one at a time.

Speaker 3 (02:53):
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.

Speaker 2 (03:01):
Can you hear me?

Speaker 1 (03:07):
I've lost quiet.

Speaker 3 (03:15):
I'm coming with you.

Speaker 2 (03:16):
You can next time. It's the twenty third central No.

Speaker 3 (03:21):
Sheil said, maximum, steady, hold on.

Speaker 2 (03:24):
Tight, Lassie, can I make breakaway? Speed?

Speaker 4 (03:28):
Give you.

Speaker 1 (03:30):
Eight?

Speaker 2 (03:35):
Woot nine Now.

Speaker 3 (03:40):
Star Trek four, the voyage.

Speaker 1 (03:42):
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

(04:05):
you say Rosenman?

Speaker 2 (04:07):
That sounds like a fake name from the movie Fletch,
doesn't it Rosenman?

Speaker 1 (04:12):
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

(04:34):
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

(04:55):
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

(05:16):
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

(05:37):
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

(05:58):
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

(06:18):
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

(06:39):
written for that movie, so they end up showing up here,
including the punt.

Speaker 2 (06:43):
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

(07:03):
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

(07:24):
a start Fleet uniform would have could have worked at all.

Speaker 1 (07:27):
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

(07:49):
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.

Speaker 2 (08:00):
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.

Speaker 1 (08:15):
Yeah, he ain't gonna take three scenes and play second
filled with Shatner.

Speaker 2 (08:20):
No, absolutely not.

Speaker 1 (08:22):
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

(08:42):
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.

Speaker 2 (08:56):
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.

(09:17):
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.

Speaker 1 (09:37):
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

(09:58):
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

(10:19):
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.

Speaker 2 (10:33):
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.

(10:54):
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

(11:17):
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

(11:37):
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.

Speaker 1 (11:51):
It's a great story. It's perfect Star Trek.

Speaker 2 (11:54):
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

(12:15):
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.

Speaker 1 (12:26):
Now our opening scene you mentioned that, we get the Probe,
which looks like a monster energy drink can.

Speaker 2 (12:34):
A cigar hurtling through space.

Speaker 1 (12:37):
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.

Speaker 2 (12:51):
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

(13:13):
that it can do. I love that part of it.

Speaker 1 (13:15):
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

(13:37):
Star Trek, should be noted. Also, she's she's an African American.
She is also Jordy Laforge's mom.

Speaker 2 (13:44):
I was reading that. So she appeared in the next generation.

Speaker 1 (13:48):
She's the queen and coming to America.

Speaker 2 (13:50):
Oh that's what the voice of course, of course the
interesting Eddie Murphy tie in there.

Speaker 1 (13:56):
Yeah, right, did he already do that? But no, he
hadn't coming to me.

Speaker 2 (14:00):
No, that was after a couple of years.

Speaker 1 (14:03):
Yeah, yeah, I was working in a movie theater that
played Coming to Him. I've seen it one million times.

Speaker 2 (14:08):
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

(14:31):
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.

Speaker 1 (14:44):
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

(15:04):
my show The Weekly Roundup that I've been watching I
heard it in Strange New Worlds lately. What were you
going to say?

Speaker 2 (15:12):
I was going to say, should I address you?

Speaker 1 (15:13):
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

(15:36):
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

(16:01):
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

(16:21):
got a copy of Cavalier magazine that had Weeds, the
short story that the Lonesome Death of Jordi Vero is
based on.

Speaker 2 (16:29):
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

(16:52):
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.

Speaker 1 (17:05):
It's a Delta badge.

Speaker 2 (17:07):
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.

Speaker 3 (17:22):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (17:23):
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.

Speaker 2 (17:36):
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.

Speaker 1 (17:47):
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.

Speaker 2 (17:55):
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.

Speaker 1 (18:03):
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.

Speaker 2 (18:13):
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.

Speaker 1 (18:28):
But we're not going to Earth. We're going to Vulcan.

Speaker 2 (18:30):
We're going back to Vulcan, baby. So it picks up.
What is it three months since the events of Star
Trek three.

Speaker 1 (18:36):
That's it, they've been there for three months. What's Maltz
been doing.

Speaker 2 (18:39):
I don't know. I was so thinking about that too.
One thing that's interesting though.

Speaker 1 (18:45):
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.

Speaker 2 (19:04):
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.

Speaker 1 (19:13):
Maybe he just should have been on the bridge and
so they could dispense with all of the I don't
understand Klingon jokes.

Speaker 2 (19:20):
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,

(19:44):
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.

Speaker 1 (20:05):
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

(20:25):
klingon bird of prey.

Speaker 2 (20:27):
Do you think they should just become mercenario.

Speaker 1 (20:29):
Because the crew of the HMS of Bounty will be
boarding ie pirates.

Speaker 2 (20:34):
That would have been a very different movie.

Speaker 1 (20:36):
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

(20:58):
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

(21:20):
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.

Speaker 2 (21:38):
Sounds like The Postman.

Speaker 1 (21:40):
Yeah, but like if that, if The Postman was really
good and you cared about any of the characters and
you enjoyed the visual.

Speaker 2 (21:50):
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.

Speaker 1 (21:57):
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,

(22:18):
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.

Speaker 2 (22:39):
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.

Speaker 1 (22:53):
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?

Speaker 2 (23:00):
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.

Speaker 1 (23:18):
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.

Speaker 2 (23:22):
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

(23:45):
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

(24:09):
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.

Speaker 1 (24:27):
He undoes all of the goodwill John Shuck stimulates in
just one scene in this movie.

Speaker 2 (24:33):
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.

Speaker 5 (24:46):
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.

Speaker 1 (25:03):
It's the best Klingon outfit with the tassels in the
front and the cape on the back.

Speaker 2 (25:09):
The tailoring is superb.

Speaker 1 (25:11):
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.

Speaker 2 (25:24):
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.

Speaker 1 (25:46):
As it's like Hans Gruber. He went to Cambridge.

Speaker 2 (25:50):
And but the other part of this that I really
is he's delivering this impassioned plea for Kirk in walks, Sarah.

Speaker 1 (26:00):
That character and all of Star Trek.

Speaker 2 (26:02):
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

(26:22):
little bit.

Speaker 1 (26:23):
H yes, it's time for a shock off.

Speaker 2 (26:28):
Okay, all right, I'll give it a try.

Speaker 1 (26:32):
We both love John Shuck. You love him too. Here
we go, Ready, hit me with something, hit me with
some shock.

Speaker 2 (26:38):
I might have to paraphrase some of this. Vulcans are
well known as the intellectual puppets of the Federation.

Speaker 1 (26:46):
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.

Speaker 2 (26:59):
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.

Speaker 1 (27:09):
We demand justice.

Speaker 2 (27:11):
Of course, I'll let you deliver the finest line that
Shuck delivers. And you know which one.

Speaker 1 (27:17):
I'm talking about, his final famous one. This will be
on peace as long as Kirk lives. And then bestrides.

Speaker 2 (27:25):
He his tassels, the tassels on his castles.

Speaker 1 (27:29):
And Cabe and John Shock and the best Klingon makeup,
the best Klingon beard, the best Klingon outfit, the best Klingon.

Speaker 2 (27:37):
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.

Speaker 1 (27:48):
He was on Enterprise, he was on Deep Space nine.

Speaker 2 (27:52):
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.

Speaker 1 (28:00):
But they could have done it on Picard.

Speaker 2 (28:02):
He's so he's just so.

Speaker 1 (28:04):
Oh you're saying, yes, he would have been old and
dead by that night seventy.

Speaker 2 (28:08):
Yeah, it would have to be the original series in
some way, But so we lost.

Speaker 1 (28:14):
You could get him on that, They could get him
on Strange New Worlds and just make him up to
look younger.

Speaker 2 (28:19):
Hey, anyone listening who's got a hand in producing Strange
New Worlds, look out for John Shuck. He's fantastic.

Speaker 1 (28:26):
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.

Speaker 2 (28:33):
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.

Speaker 3 (28:47):
I agree.

Speaker 1 (28:47):
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.

Speaker 2 (28:58):
With you, really interesting.

Speaker 1 (29:01):
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.

(29:23):
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.

Speaker 6 (29:37):
See.

Speaker 2 (29:37):
I think the real outlier in all of this is
clearly Star Trek five. The thing.

Speaker 1 (29:42):
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

(30:03):
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

(30:25):
just gone, hey, now we get to do what we want.

Speaker 2 (30:27):
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,

(30:48):
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.

Speaker 1 (31:07):
There was one death in this that was the death
of my appreciation for Spock, because they kept doing these
stupid idiom jokes throughout.

Speaker 2 (31:16):
I didn't mind any of that.

Speaker 1 (31:17):
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

(31:37):
thinks those jokes are funny.

Speaker 2 (31:39):
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

(32:00):
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

(32:22):
he returns to here and I think it's fabulous.

Speaker 1 (32:25):
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

(32:47):
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,

(33:08):
like I don't know, that just drives me up a
fucking wall.

Speaker 2 (33:11):
Yeah, I didn't really. I've write an.

Speaker 1 (33:12):
Example of that will be in Star Trek five. The
Life is not a dream, doctor McCoy.

Speaker 2 (33:18):
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.

Speaker 1 (33:29):
Of going away with it. I got shot in her
on the line, Oh.

Speaker 2 (33:33):
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

(33:54):
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.

Speaker 1 (34:11):
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

(34:33):
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.

Speaker 2 (34:45):
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

(35:07):
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

(35:29):
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.

Speaker 4 (35:43):
All of them.

Speaker 1 (35:44):
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

(36:05):
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

(36:25):
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.

Speaker 2 (36:35):
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,

(36:57):
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.

Speaker 1 (37:20):
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?

Speaker 2 (37:41):
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

(38:02):
all of those things here.

Speaker 1 (38:03):
And he has a director who can deal with him. Well.

Speaker 2 (38:05):
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

(38:27):
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

(38:49):
I don't think another director might have been able to.

Speaker 1 (38:51):
I heard that Shatner and Nimoy's ballooning salaries got taken
out of the budget for the Next Generation.

Speaker 7 (38:58):
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.

Speaker 1 (39:08):
They were taking money from this project.

Speaker 2 (39:11):
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.

Speaker 1 (39:33):
I think it's just those next generation pussies whining about shit.

Speaker 2 (39:38):
What else do they whine about besides the uniforms in
the first couple of seasons.

Speaker 1 (39:42):
God, they whine about everything. What do you do? I'm
talking about the fans, not the creator.

Speaker 2 (39:46):
All the fans. Yeah, the fans need no excuse to whine.
I mean myself included.

Speaker 1 (39:50):
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

(40:11):
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

(40:32):
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.

Speaker 2 (40:45):
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

(41:07):
I can't fault him for that. It raised awareness to
the problem. It's a little bit heavy handed at times.

Speaker 1 (41:12):
I'm not gonna lie, heavy handed, Are you crazy?

Speaker 2 (41:16):
In the movie?

Speaker 1 (41:16):
Yeah, how is it heavy hand?

Speaker 2 (41:18):
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.

Speaker 1 (41:34):
Right, That is very Star Trek friend.

Speaker 3 (41:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (41:38):
Well, but this is a series that once had Frank
Gorshen with black face white face and his bloody with
white face black face.

Speaker 2 (41:47):
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.

Speaker 3 (41:57):
Of the movie.

Speaker 1 (41:58):
Well, I don't remember that part.

Speaker 2 (42:00):
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.

Speaker 1 (42:05):
As far as problems with this movie, that's not the problem.

Speaker 2 (42:08):
No, I I well, then what are you leading up to?

Speaker 1 (42:10):
Then, I'm not leading up to anything. We'll get there, Okay,
this movie will lay it out for me.

Speaker 2 (42:17):
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.

Speaker 1 (42:30):
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.

Speaker 2 (42:37):
The thing is, I don't think Scotty's missing any meals
to take a look at him.

Speaker 1 (42:41):
I don't think, certainly doesn't. This is Scotty's finest moment
this movie. By the way, this is absolutely Yeah.

Speaker 2 (42:46):
Well it's the finest moment for a lot of the
ancillary crew.

Speaker 1 (42:49):
No, it's not. This is the finest moment for Scotty.
Everyone else is just doing their job.

Speaker 2 (42:53):
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.

Speaker 1 (43:05):
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.

(43:26):
He does.

Speaker 2 (43:26):
He has a funny scene with the interrogator on the ship.
It's a little bit who's on first?

Speaker 1 (43:32):
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?

Speaker 2 (43:42):
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.

Speaker 1 (43:53):
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

(44:14):
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.

Speaker 2 (44:25):
Is egregious because well, his egregious what is Scotty doing?

Speaker 1 (44:31):
Well, but that's he a guy the formula for transparent illuminum.
Do you know what they use transparent aluminum.

Speaker 2 (44:39):
For in modern day? I?

Speaker 1 (44:41):
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.

Speaker 2 (44:50):
Oh, because it only has to be an inch thick.

Speaker 1 (44:53):
Right, And he gave a guy in nineteen eighty six
that formula.

Speaker 2 (44:57):
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.

Speaker 1 (45:03):
We want to we are talking about time fucker use right?

Speaker 2 (45:05):
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

(45:29):
to see if they can devise a way to have
this thing.

Speaker 1 (45:33):
But plast trais company that has their own Vietnam era helicopter.

Speaker 2 (45:38):
No, it's not the same place. I Sulus somewhere else
for that.

Speaker 1 (45:42):
No, the name of the company is on the side
of the helicopter.

Speaker 3 (45:46):
Oh was it on there?

Speaker 2 (45:47):
I often wonder, like where does he pick up that?
It's odd?

Speaker 1 (45:51):
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.

Speaker 2 (46:03):
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.

Speaker 1 (46:14):
Well, he uses it later in the movie he does.

Speaker 2 (46:17):
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.

Speaker 1 (46:28):
This was nineteen eighty six. It was a different age.
Everyone was handing their helicopter keys to friends and strangers alike.

Speaker 2 (46:35):
It's like Sulu's doing the Jedi mind trick on this guy,
like you will, let me take your helicopter.

Speaker 1 (46:40):
I think if George de Kay uses that voice on anybody,
they're going to do exactly what he says.

Speaker 2 (46:45):
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

(47:06):
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

(47:30):
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.

(47:52):
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.

Speaker 1 (48:09):
Not only complex formulas, but like we're getting graphics like
it's showing us diagrams.

Speaker 2 (48:16):
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.

Speaker 1 (48:32):
This is the same computer that a second ago he
was talking into the mouse computer.

Speaker 2 (48:38):
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

(48:58):
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.

Speaker 8 (49:17):
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.

Speaker 2 (49:34):
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

(49:58):
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.

Speaker 1 (50:20):
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,

(50:41):
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.

Speaker 2 (50:52):
And it's played for laughs, but the reality is much
darker when you really follow the thread to.

Speaker 1 (50:58):
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,

(51:20):
JJ Abram.

Speaker 2 (51:22):
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.

(51:47):
They just kind of throw those concerns out the window
and say that I'm not gonna worry about it.

Speaker 1 (51:52):
I have a theory the reason Scottie is so cavalier
about Okay, let me back up.

Speaker 2 (51:59):
Yeah, if you read the.

Speaker 1 (52:00):
Novelization, that is the inventor of transparent illumit.

Speaker 2 (52:05):
Oh, so he knew that all along.

Speaker 1 (52:07):
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

(52:31):
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

(52:53):
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

(53:15):
entire crew. It's just that they're not talking about it,
because why would you.

Speaker 2 (53:19):
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.

Speaker 1 (53:43):
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?

Speaker 2 (53:50):
That's right? You know who cares? You're dead to me already.

Speaker 1 (53:53):
People of Earth. We're here for the whales. Give us
two whales and we'll be gone. Zip his z app.

Speaker 2 (54:00):
I don't think the prime directive would allow for that.

Speaker 1 (54:03):
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

(54:25):
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

(54:46):
Trek books and it knocked me on my ass. There
are so many.

Speaker 3 (54:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (54:52):
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.

Speaker 2 (55:09):
Archives, yeah, the archive dot org.

Speaker 1 (55:11):
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.

Speaker 2 (55:27):
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

(55:49):
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.

(56:11):
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.

Speaker 1 (56:25):
If it ain't on screen, it didn't happen.

Speaker 3 (56:26):
It's kind of the.

Speaker 2 (56:27):
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.

Speaker 1 (56:41):
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.

Speaker 2 (57:01):
Was there was a lot of this stuff.

Speaker 1 (57:04):
No more baby. Oh, I like Corus and that's a
good name.

Speaker 2 (57:08):
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.

Speaker 1 (57:19):
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.

Speaker 2 (57:30):
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.

(57:52):
And Sarah says to the Federation President says, why don't
we send out a planetary distress signal just while we
have time.

Speaker 1 (58:00):
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.

Speaker 2 (58:08):
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

(58:29):
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.

Speaker 1 (58:42):
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.

Speaker 2 (58:54):
Were they Star Trek theme?

Speaker 1 (58:56):
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.

Speaker 2 (59:16):
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,

(59:39):
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

(01:00:00):
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

(01:00:21):
fallom alone? Yeah, this is not untested.

Speaker 1 (01:00:23):
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?

Speaker 2 (01:00:42):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:00:43):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:00:50):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:00:58):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:01:05):
There's some fretting.

Speaker 1 (01:01:06):
I mean, spak has some calculations for time or again.

Speaker 2 (01:01:11):
It's not without risk that they all acknowledge, but they
have no choice.

Speaker 1 (01:01:15):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:01:31):
Is that right? That album was responsible.

Speaker 1 (01:01:33):
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,

(01:01:56):
nobody don't need whomb Yeah glubber for oil, Yeah exactly,
we really need Ambergree. Can we just synthesize a different
scent elsewhere?

Speaker 2 (01:02:05):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:02:19):
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

(01:02:39):
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

(01:03:03):
no longer of any use to these greedy fucks.

Speaker 2 (01:03:06):
That's sad.

Speaker 1 (01:03:07):
Takes the away. Kirk Spock, McCoy, Scottie Hurah.

Speaker 2 (01:03:12):
So back to fantasy.

Speaker 1 (01:03:14):
Lang Jack Maltz, how you doing.

Speaker 2 (01:03:18):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:03:27):
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,

(01:03:48):
and I couldn't find one thing that I wanted to
eat in that goddamn book, Like.

Speaker 2 (01:03:52):
How would you make goch Dean?

Speaker 1 (01:03:55):
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?

Speaker 2 (01:04:10):
No, I have not. I've never even seen a Star
Trek cookbook let alone red one.

Speaker 1 (01:04:14):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:04:29):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:04:47):
Going to jump over this fucking nightmar fuel.

Speaker 2 (01:04:50):
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

(01:05:12):
looks like like stone statuary that you would see in
an ancient civilization.

Speaker 1 (01:05:18):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:05:37):
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

(01:05:59):
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,

(01:06:21):
Like I it was just so weird, like the what
happened to the to them during the sling shot of
Time Trap.

Speaker 1 (01:06:28):
Thank god for klingon breaking thrusters, I guess.

Speaker 2 (01:06:32):
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.

(01:06:52):
They land in Golden Gate Park cloaked.

Speaker 1 (01:06:55):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:07:07):
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

(01:07:31):
very big leap of Maybe.

Speaker 1 (01:07:33):
It's only when it's in motion against a starfield is
when you're gonna see it.

Speaker 2 (01:07:39):
I guess, if we're being generous, let's say that for
the sake of this movie.

Speaker 1 (01:07:43):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:08:02):
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

(01:08:24):
out this problem and how to solve it.

Speaker 1 (01:08:26):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:08:37):
We're just along for the ride. I'll accept it.

Speaker 1 (01:08:39):
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.

(01:09:01):
Good line, that's a good line.

Speaker 2 (01:09:03):
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

(01:09:24):
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,

(01:09:46):
finding the whale, Checkov and Horror are going to figure
out because the dilithium crystals have the run out of power.

Speaker 1 (01:09:54):
It's a movie, HP or does it make it a
perfect period piece?

Speaker 2 (01:09:58):
There's nothing perfect about that set, Like if you bottle
electronic sound.

Speaker 1 (01:10:02):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:10:19):
It's a stretch, but I'll allow it. Motion objection sustained
fallom alone.

Speaker 1 (01:10:24):
Stock fleet regulations. That's outrageous.

Speaker 2 (01:10:27):
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

(01:10:49):
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

(01:11:09):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:11:21):
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

(01:11:42):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:11:53):
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.

(01:12:15):
This is really the height of the ancillary crew and
things they got to do in a movie.

Speaker 1 (01:12:21):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:12:30):
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?

Speaker 1 (01:12:46):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:13:01):
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

(01:13:23):
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

(01:13:46):
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

(01:14:08):
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

(01:14:29):
or feel like that creatively satisfied in doing. It's an
interesting perspective to take on.

Speaker 1 (01:14:36):
I mean, at least they got something to do finally.

Speaker 2 (01:14:39):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:14:48):
This is true, he had syndication money. Let's you know,
come on.

Speaker 2 (01:14:52):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:15:05):
But he showed up on Babylon five as Bester, that
fucking psionic cop. He was really good on.

Speaker 2 (01:15:11):
That, Walter Kaynig did. Yeah, okay, and some.

Speaker 1 (01:15:14):
Of those good show Babylon five, Who's with me? Who's lists?

Speaker 2 (01:15:19):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:15:38):
Sun, right, they sure do. Doesn't get anything really.

Speaker 2 (01:15:43):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:15:59):
That's all she had. There should have been a moment
where she went and got some clothes.

Speaker 2 (01:16:03):
How about that she's done Vulcan they could give her
any marr.

Speaker 1 (01:16:06):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:16:20):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:16:32):
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

(01:16:54):
be buried in it.

Speaker 2 (01:16:56):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:17:11):
Kind of in a piece of the action.

Speaker 2 (01:17:13):
Piece of the action, Right. I was going to say, he.

Speaker 1 (01:17:16):
Wears a nit cap in that one, which is really cool, right, Yeah,
looks like a dock worker.

Speaker 2 (01:17:21):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:17:32):
Now I contend that he could have just gone regular
and no one would have given him a second look.

Speaker 2 (01:17:38):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:17:54):
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

(01:18:14):
with the fucking broad acts in that.

Speaker 2 (01:18:16):
Ah, I didn't know that was the same guy.

Speaker 1 (01:18:18):
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,

(01:18:41):
like those are all crew members that they're talking to,
are like.

Speaker 3 (01:18:44):
Oh, I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:18:44):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:19:03):
Yeah, it's combed up.

Speaker 1 (01:19:04):
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.

Speaker 5 (01:19:13):
I b rate You.

Speaker 2 (01:19:14):
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

(01:19:35):
nerve pinch. So the guy like basically like passes out
and flops onto the radio, which shuts itself off. That's
a salt.

Speaker 1 (01:19:44):
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?

Speaker 2 (01:19:55):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:20:04):
Oh, come on, it's a great gag, And yeah it is.
I that was a dick.

Speaker 3 (01:20:08):
He was.

Speaker 2 (01:20:09):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:20:18):
When's the last time he rode the bus? You would
cheer too, I guess so radio.

Speaker 2 (01:20:23):
Oh no, I wouldn't. But that's like saying, well, if
you just shot the guy, would you applaud?

Speaker 3 (01:20:28):
No?

Speaker 2 (01:20:28):
I wouldn't applaud. I didn't want someone to be fucking injured.
Who cares who?

Speaker 1 (01:20:33):
I wouldn't want him shot. I'm not saying that you
would applaud if he nerve pinched him.

Speaker 2 (01:20:37):
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?

(01:20:58):
Is that was that on the sound you know?

Speaker 4 (01:21:00):
No?

Speaker 1 (01:21:01):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:21:13):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:21:30):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:21:38):
Too expensive.

Speaker 1 (01:21:40):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:21:46):
Now what he was doing? Will? I think right?

Speaker 1 (01:21:50):
I have to do Aliens right now with James Cameron,
which is basically just the Star Trek two soundtrack with
a few changes.

Speaker 2 (01:21:59):
That's good, it's fine, done done.

Speaker 3 (01:22:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:22:03):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:22:11):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:22:25):
We haven't even talked about the Cetacean Institute and the
other character in this movie.

Speaker 1 (01:22:31):
Did you go to the Cetacean Institute when you were
in San Francisco recently?

Speaker 2 (01:22:34):
HP, No, because I don't think it exists. I don't
think it's a real it does.

Speaker 1 (01:22:38):
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,

(01:22:59):
and then looked it up and yeah, it's the Monterey Aquarium,
which by the way, is a fantastic aquarium.

Speaker 2 (01:23:05):
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

(01:23:26):
the aquarium because that would have been fun. But like
Canary Row itself, was just a complete tourist trap.

Speaker 1 (01:23:30):
Oh yeah, it's a tiny little slice of Las Vegas,
right in the middle of California. I love it there.

Speaker 2 (01:23:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:23:37):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:23:51):
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

(01:24:11):
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?

Speaker 1 (01:24:19):
How much?

Speaker 2 (01:24:20):
Eight hundred dollars?

Speaker 1 (01:24:21):
Holy Lord?

Speaker 2 (01:24:23):
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

(01:24:44):
in Sasolido.

Speaker 1 (01:24:45):
Loved the enterprise.

Speaker 2 (01:24:46):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:25:07):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:25:20):
Yeah, So they head down there and they meet a
cetacean by biologist named Gillian played by who father.

Speaker 1 (01:25:30):
Alone Catherine Hicks, the first woman to be menaced by Chucky.

Speaker 2 (01:25:36):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:25:44):
Is talking about Seventh Heaven with fucking yes, Commander Decker.

Speaker 2 (01:25:49):
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.

(01:26:09):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:26:24):
Yeah. I also remember her from Peggy Sue Got There
in the.

Speaker 2 (01:26:27):
Same yes, another time travel movie.

Speaker 1 (01:26:30):
Yeah, exactly. So what's it with Catherine Nickson time travel
and kill her dolls?

Speaker 2 (01:26:35):
She's very natural here, though, you have to say, like,
she's believable as this whale biologist in nineteen eighty six
San Francisco.

Speaker 1 (01:26:43):
Oh yeah, no, she's great. She's very natural. That naturalism
will get her in trouble later.

Speaker 2 (01:26:48):
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

(01:27:10):
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

(01:27:31):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:27:47):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:28:09):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:28:23):
But luckily they don't get arrested. Like, what was Spock thinking?
Come back later, man, it was.

Speaker 2 (01:28:28):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:28:44):
Really, they're gonna get back on the bus, man, Oh.

Speaker 2 (01:28:46):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:29:01):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:29:19):
But he's evasive until he finally lets the cat out
of the bed.

Speaker 1 (01:29:22):
But that's real soon, man, that's like the next scene.

Speaker 2 (01:29:27):
She picks them up.

Speaker 1 (01:29:28):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:29:35):
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,

(01:29:58):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:30:08):
She can he's really charming here, Yeah, he is.

Speaker 2 (01:30:10):
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

(01:30:33):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:30:55):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:31:02):
Yeah, which would kill her because she's so close to
the whales and she loves being a cetacean biologist.

Speaker 1 (01:31:09):
She loves those whales so much that she has them
basically in a pickle barrel.

Speaker 2 (01:31:14):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:31:29):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:31:51):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:32:02):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:32:20):
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

(01:32:42):
these things have to breathe air?

Speaker 3 (01:32:44):
Well?

Speaker 1 (01:32:44):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:32:52):
Well, I hope they're pumping air into it. That's the
only thing that makes sense.

Speaker 1 (01:32:55):
Well, that's what happens.

Speaker 2 (01:32:59):
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

(01:33:20):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:33:30):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:33:42):
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,

(01:34:07):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:34:30):
So she goes by the way low power and transporter.
No thanks, I'll walk right.

Speaker 2 (01:34:38):
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,

(01:35:03):
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,

(01:35:25):
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

(01:35:46):
he's not making any sense.

Speaker 1 (01:35:48):
Don't give them your cereal number. Why, by the way, Pavel,
why do you have ID You were specifically told not to.

Speaker 2 (01:35:57):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:36:06):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:36:20):
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

(01:36:40):
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

(01:37:02):
them to try and rescue Checkov. So they go there
disguised as doctors.

Speaker 1 (01:37:06):
Second best scene in the movie.

Speaker 2 (01:37:08):
It is the second best, because the whole time McCoy
just keeps muttering about how this is the Spanish Inquisition and.

Speaker 1 (01:37:16):
Dealing with the medievalism.

Speaker 2 (01:37:18):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:37:35):
Kids, he's got no bedside, man, it's your problem, that's
what he says.

Speaker 2 (01:37:42):
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

(01:38:02):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:38:19):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:38:34):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:38:51):
You might pay, drilling holes in his head is not
the answer. The artery must be repaired.

Speaker 2 (01:38:58):
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?

Speaker 1 (01:39:15):
Do do do do?

Speaker 2 (01:39:17):
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

(01:39:39):
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,

(01:39:59):
I I don't know that that made me very hopeful
to watch that.

Speaker 1 (01:40:02):
As And we deserve a tongue lashing. Why because we're
a bunch of fucking apes stabbing each other with st.

Speaker 2 (01:40:12):
Yeah, oh you mean like like just mankind.

Speaker 1 (01:40:15):
From yeah, you know to McCoy and we need to
hear that better this strive.

Speaker 2 (01:40:21):
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

(01:40:44):
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

(01:41:06):
they've got a because the whales were released in the
dead of night to avoid a media circus.

Speaker 1 (01:41:12):
By the true villain of the movie, Bob.

Speaker 2 (01:41:15):
Bob, who gets slapped but good by.

Speaker 1 (01:41:18):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:41:33):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:41:48):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:42:02):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:42:24):
Now, we don't want to upset our Japanese overlords. So
it isn't the Japanese. It's some finish boat near Alaska.

Speaker 2 (01:42:33):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:42:41):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:42:56):
Book probably, but we need least they didn't completely demonize
the people on the whaling vessel.

Speaker 1 (01:43:04):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:43:12):
My point is it would have been easy to have
them like twirling their mustaches.

Speaker 1 (01:43:15):
All well, Snemo is not going to let anybody do that, right.

Speaker 2 (01:43:19):
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

(01:43:41):
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

(01:44:02):
I would probably have a heart attack, honestly faugh them
alone if that materialized right in front of me.

Speaker 1 (01:44:07):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:44:19):
It's a great like I for some reason, I remember.

Speaker 1 (01:44:21):
The show Grim Death under the Water screaming as the
ship is gently nudged beneath the waves.

Speaker 2 (01:44:32):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:44:52):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:45:08):
Oh right, I know the shot you're talking about.

Speaker 1 (01:45:09):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:45:17):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:45:30):
The whales hair there be whales.

Speaker 2 (01:45:34):
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

(01:45:58):
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,

(01:46:18):
don't throw yourself at this woman. It's unbecoming of you.
Your fucking captain, Kirk, your casanova? What are you talking about?

Speaker 1 (01:46:26):
Also, why didn't she say, what do you mean we
hunted them to extinction. I thought we were just helping repopulate.

Speaker 2 (01:46:38):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:46:58):
That is true. Okay, you're right, that's an issue. I
remove that. I take it back.

Speaker 2 (01:47:02):
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,

(01:47:23):
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

(01:47:46):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:48:04):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:48:22):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:48:35):
What a beautiful shot coming under that bridge. Come on, man,
give it up.

Speaker 2 (01:48:38):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:48:55):
Yeah, well, you brought up the back to the future
timeline situation earlier, so I figured i'd call out mister
Jason Lee.

Speaker 2 (01:49:02):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:49:15):
Who do it because she had nothing to do in
the entire Pace's right?

Speaker 2 (01:49:20):
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

(01:49:43):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:50:04):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:50:18):
Did you know Harv Bennett and Leonard Nimoy died.

Speaker 1 (01:50:20):
Two days apart? And what that means I don't.

Speaker 2 (01:50:23):
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

(01:50:44):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:51:03):
It's nice to think that there's an alien intelligence out
there coming to check up on you, you know.

Speaker 2 (01:51:09):
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

(01:51:31):
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

(01:51:51):
for probably everybody else watching it.

Speaker 1 (01:51:53):
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

(01:52:14):
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?

Speaker 2 (01:52:36):
Yeah, with the spock with the goatee.

Speaker 1 (01:52:37):
Sure do you know that there is a mirror universe
version of the Probe.

Speaker 2 (01:52:44):
I thought you said there was a We talked about
this with the motion.

Speaker 1 (01:52:48):
Picture, talked about there's a mirror that Seeker, that that's
the mirror version of Vegure, but there's.

Speaker 2 (01:52:54):
A mirror version of the Probe too.

Speaker 1 (01:52:56):
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

(01:53:19):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:53:35):
Are you being serious right now? That's a real story. Yeah,
I've never heard of that.

Speaker 1 (01:53:40):
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

(01:54:01):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:54:19):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:54:25):
Based on this. Yeah, it sounds really. In fact, there
are a bunch of Mirror Universe books too.

Speaker 3 (01:54:30):
Well.

Speaker 2 (01:54:31):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:54:50):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:55:00):
Yeah, but technically, what if stories actually happened but in
some weird dimension like alternate realities or alternate dimensions.

Speaker 1 (01:55:09):
So I'm guessing you didn't watch Discovery it.

Speaker 2 (01:55:12):
No, I did not.

Speaker 1 (01:55:13):
Discovery deals pretty heavy with the Mirror Unit.

Speaker 2 (01:55:16):
Oh okay.

Speaker 1 (01:55:17):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:55:33):
Well it was on for a while, wasn't it. Yeah,
it's hard to maintain a little bit.

Speaker 1 (01:55:38):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:55:46):
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.

(01:56:07):
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

(01:56:28):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:56:46):
Now this is a promotion.

Speaker 2 (01:56:47):
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

(01:57:10):
and it's the Enterprise again.

Speaker 1 (01:57:12):
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

(01:57:32):
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

(01:57:53):
fucking thing overnight.

Speaker 4 (01:57:55):
No.

Speaker 2 (01:57:55):
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

(01:58:15):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:58:30):
Yeah, No, The only logical explanation is that they were saying,
bring it in because we've already got another one built.

Speaker 2 (01:58:38):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:58:56):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:59:06):
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?

Speaker 1 (01:59:20):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:59:20):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:59:35):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:59:51):
A new again. Cost cutting measures all over the place.

Speaker 1 (01:59:54):
And that's it. Man, hooray, We're off to new adventures
to prove the enterprise. They're all together now, alltogether.

Speaker 3 (02:00:00):
Now.

Speaker 2 (02:00:01):
This was a I mean like or hate this movie.
I mean I don't know anyone who hates it, but
maybe people.

Speaker 1 (02:00:08):
They know some track people who hate this movie.

Speaker 2 (02:00:10):
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

(02:00:32):
and better things for the franchise.

Speaker 1 (02:00:34):
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

(02:00:57):
the Enterprise and Kirk and Spock and McCoy and to
creve of the Enterprise. That's it.

Speaker 2 (02:01:02):
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

(02:01:22):
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.

Speaker 3 (02:01:34):
And all that.

Speaker 2 (02:01:35):
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

(02:01:57):
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.

Speaker 1 (02:02:11):
That was a great Get a Light that was Robert Smigel.

Speaker 2 (02:02:14):
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.

Speaker 1 (02:02:24):
Too, that was Robert Smigel.

Speaker 2 (02:02:25):
That oh that who did the Revolving Restaurant.

Speaker 1 (02:02:28):
Then probably Robert Smigel.

Speaker 2 (02:02:30):
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?

Speaker 1 (02:02:47):
What happened to you that Jim Yoshimura in both the
original Belushi star Trek and then again with Dana Carvey, and.

Speaker 2 (02:02:56):
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.

Speaker 1 (02:03:04):
Jesus Christ. He's multi generational, multiple timelines.

Speaker 2 (02:03:09):
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?

Speaker 3 (02:03:18):
I like it.

Speaker 1 (02:03:19):
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

(02:03:41):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:03:53):
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

(02:04:15):
works on a lot of levels. I think it's hard
as firmly in the right place, and I think it worked.

Speaker 1 (02:04:20):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:04:31):
Ed, City on the Edge of Forever. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:04:33):
If you take away anything from tonight, ladies and gentlemen,
you should know that I realized that mistake.

Speaker 2 (02:04:39):
Well, kudos that you realized it and corrected it, as
opposed to like letting it sit and then kicking yourself after.

Speaker 1 (02:04:47):
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,

(02:05:12):
certainly mine, certainly yours. Why are they installing seat belts
in movie theaters this spring?

Speaker 6 (02:05:17):
This May?

Speaker 2 (02:05:18):
Was that in the trailer, No, that was on the poster.

Speaker 1 (02:05:20):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:05:42):
Oh this Oh I okay, yeah, it's the seat is
in Federation red. I do remember this.

Speaker 1 (02:05:49):
We saw that together and I said, that's the stupidest
thing I've ever seen.

Speaker 2 (02:05:54):
That sounds like something you'd said. It's terrible.

Speaker 1 (02:05:59):
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.

(02:06:19):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:06:37):
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.

Speaker 1 (02:06:55):
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.

(02:07:17):
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.

Speaker 6 (02:07:24):
HB.

Speaker 1 (02:07:25):
We're at the end of the show. Have you composed
the theme to the song that I sung earlier?

Speaker 2 (02:07:30):
No, have not gotten to that yet fallen alone.

Speaker 1 (02:07:32):
But well double dumbass on you. Here's Jane Weedland.

Speaker 2 (02:07:53):
And then and then you.

Speaker 4 (02:08:00):
But the estetist kist that.

Speaker 6 (02:08:11):
Think that life senta means PACTI banda sday hour sound
break down, life.

Speaker 4 (02:08:20):
Presenting many left unstop who under w the test? You

(02:08:42):
just make up the.

Speaker 6 (02:08:47):
Life sat job passing the stre Now was s B
babline sent days that's the lot. Sad it that time,

(02:09:20):
but gonna be than all stain, maybe mis tut that
past season.

Speaker 4 (02:09:30):
I sell him my now in thus thank y'all.

Speaker 6 (02:09:34):
Like sent many last prot.

Speaker 4 (02:09:38):
They talk that I sell him about the songs and
thank y'all like sent him really love men, Maybe less
s gol

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

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Star Trek Fest - Star Trek IV The Voyage Home (1986)