Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home | Examining the 1980s

Star Trek 4 Kirk and Spock
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The much-loved Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home has a view of the 1980s that looks quite different through 2025 eyes.


Time travel was nothing new in Star Trek by the time The Voyage Home was released. The 1960s TV series gave us classic tales such as ‘City on the Edge of Forever’ or ‘Tomorrow is Yesterday’, which saw Captain Kirk and his crew flung back in time. Even Star Trek: The Animated Series during the early 1970s got in on the act with an erstwhile sequel, ‘Yesteryear’, where Spock travels through the Guardian of Forever instead of Dr McCoy.

Perhaps the key difference with Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home was just how contemporary a place Kirk and co are placed in during Leonard Nimoy’s film. Where those 1960s episodes put them in a 1930s America or even a militaristic 1960s, The Voyage Home is gleefully rooted in the mid-1980s, now we have the benefit of several decades’ distance. Everything from the fashions to the score to the ā€œcolourful metaphorsā€ scream an era that has since been through the retro cycle phase in the last decade. Of all the Star Trek films, The Voyage Home is the most tethered to when it was released.

Granted, Nichols Meyerā€™s 1991 film Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country gives it a run for its money in this regard, given the Cold War allegory in place, but Meyersā€™ script contributions here to the ‘second act’ of Nimoy’s film lean toward numerous facets of American life and culture that Star Trek finds a way to explore. All within the broader, core idea of environmental protectionism that is central to the story. By splitting the crew into three or four distinct camps, each with a specific task to accomplish, Meyer manages to cover numerous bases.

Kirk and Spock do San Francisco in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Credit: Paramount Pictures.

Before we explore these, the mechanism of Kirk and the crew’s time travel is worth looking at, given how distinctly unique and strange it is.

Following the slingshot manoeuvre, the crew are flung into a place beyond space and time; a surrealist vision of giant, Zardoz-style representations of the crew’s face floating in clouds, interspersed with whale song, images of George and Gracie, and snippets of dialogue from the story to come. Itā€™s suggesting the bird of prey has broken through into a dimension where time is not linear. This strongly recalls Meyer’s 1978 film Time After Time, adapting the Karl Alexander novel in which HG Wells pursues Jack the Ripper to disco-era San Francisco in his time machine. Yes, really.

Read more: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home | How the 1986 sequel took the series back to its roots

That story too sees Wells punch through a dimensional layer into something altogether more metaphysical, before he is plunged back into reality in a different time and space. Meyer is clearly drawn to such a representation.

Back to Star Trek IV, though. Immediately, on arrival, as Kirk breaks his crew off into teams to solve issues such as building a whale tank and finding nuclear fission to help recrystallise dilithium (engine power, basically), The Voyage Home is keen to throw shade on the modern human. Spock describes the 1980s obsession with nuclear power as a ā€œdubious flirtationā€, while Kirk considers late 20th century San Francisco to be “an extremely primitive and paranoid culture.” Spock is forced to disguise his ears, ostensibly given humans have never seen an alien before, but it serves as a potent reminder of human intolerance and fear of the ‘other’ in American culture.

The film then goes out of its way to highlight how primitive our culture is.

The Klingon ‘HMS Bounty’ lands in a park as we watch two garbage men late at night talking about one of them battling with their wife over something as prosaic as buying a toaster oven – an immediate reminder that we have regressed into a capitalist dominated world. As these strange future folk wonder bustling San Francisco to Leonard Rosenman’s jazzy, supremely 80s soundtrack, Kirk almost gets run over by a car as the driver heckles him, calling him a dumb ass. “Double dumb ass on you!” Kirk replies as Bones quips: “It’s a miracle these people ever got out of the 20th century.”

Perhaps the most iconic moment is on the bus, as a punk (arguably a good five or ten years past his time) refuses to turn down his ghetto blaster and flips Kirk the bird when asked. Spock then Vulcan neck pinches the guy unconscious and stops the music ā€“ all to applause from the other passengers.

Kirk Thatcher, who played the punk, was so embedded in Star Trek popular culture that he returned as the same character 35 years later in the second season of Star Trek: Picard, thrown into a similar moment with Seven of Nine and Raffi.

As with anything nostalgic, it all just looks a bit desperate, but it serves as a reminder of just how much The Voyage Home resonated and continues to do so. The scene amplifies how much Kirk looks down on the period, glancing back at 20th century humanity with an enlightened future disdain, even while Spock notices he is blending in by using profanity. “That’s simply the way they talk here.” Kirk claims. “Nobody pays any attention to you if you don’t swear every other word. You’ll find it in all the literature of the period.”

Meyer gets in a jibe about salacious author Harold Robbins and ‘The Giants’ here, but his point is clear – by 1986, we’re seeing a distinct decline in social mores and respectability, driven in no small part by human avarice.

Money becomes a powerful driving force in the commentary here. Kirk has to pawn the glasses Bones gave him for his birthday in The Wrath Of Khan to give them means; Spock puzzles about the need for ‘exact change’ to get on a bus, when a driver shuns them. Scotty and McCoy play on the greed of manufacturing owner Professor Nichols, in a very comical scene where Scotty pretends to be a visiting Scottish academic (indeed he’s looked at as a crazy man for talking into his mouse at the computer, which in our age of technology looks a lot less weird), and to get the whale tank they need by gifting him the formula for ā€œtransparent aluminiumā€, a future technology. Bones claims he will be “rich beyond the dreams of avariceā€. All as Scotty blithely writes off the problem of changing history: “How do we know he didn’t invent the thing?!”

You can sense just how playful The Voyage Home is by casting aside concerns about temporal mechanics or altering the timeline, ideas that future Star Trek shows would take very seriously in places, for the sake of a rollicking good adventure.

This is Meyer to a tee – less concerned about adhering to established conventions and happier with using Star Trek as a framework on which to hang ideas and make points. In highlighting 20th century characters obsessing about money and gain, he draws a direct line between the social fabric of the era and Nimoy’s growing concerns about environmental destruction.

In this world, humans just don’t care. They hunt, they kill, they consume. Hence why the character of Dr Gillian Taylor, played by Catherine Hicks, stands out so acutely.

Taylor is a marine biologist at the Cetecean Institute, a beautiful and passionate scientist who is fierce about the protection of whales in a climate where they are being hunted across the globe by whalers, in danger of extinction. She works hard to convince tourists they are warm-blooded mammals, lacking predatory instincts, as a way of humanising them.

Taylor gives a speech that feels more than a little like polemic Nimoy was desperate to include in the script: “Virtually gone is the blue whale, the largest creature ever to inhabit the Earth. Despite all attempts at banning whaling, there are still countries and pirates currently engaged in the slaughter of these inoffensive creatures. Where the humpback whale once numbered in the hundreds of thousands, today there are less than ten thousand specimens alive and those that are taken are no longer fully grown. In addition, many of the females are killed, while still bearing unborn calves.”

As I document in my recent book Lost Federations: The Unmade History of Star Trek, Taylor was originally written as a UFO-obsessed university boffin designed as a vehicle for Eddie Murphy to star. This would have been at the very height of his 1980s fame, following Beverly Hills Cop and Trading Places and such like… and no doubt would have heightened popular cultural interest in the fourth movie. Murphy was a Star Trek fan and was keen but ultimately, it failed to work out and it now rests as one of Star Trek’s many fascinating ‘what if?’ story and in this sense casting moments.

Back to Taylor, and in many ways she is a hyper-real character for 1986. She stands out amongst the limited people our Starfleet officers encounter. She is rather earnest and on the verge of irritating in her conviction, but she is moral and highly sensitive to George and Gracie’s needs. She also very quickly attunes to the fact they are unusual, though it’s a bit of a giveaway, as Spock swims with whales and Kirk jokes that “cack in the 60s he was part of the free speech movement at Berkeley. I think he had a little too much LDS.”

These are obviously counterculture jokes which connect back to the era Star Trek was born into, an era during the 1960s it routinely commented on and reflected.

As the 1980s rolls around, as Kirk and company bathe in a level of nostalgia, undertaking their ‘voyage home’, the focus of that commentary changes. Capitalism rules. Avarice reigns. And though the end of the Cold War beckons, East/West paranoia still pervades the American firmament, as the Russian born Chekov learns when he is captured by the military while sneaking into a nuclear submarine (named the Enterprise, of course) to steal fission material to help power the Bird of Prey. The scene is played for comedy, perhaps to underscore thawing anxieties about the Russian threat, but the FBI agents who try and make sense of Chekov are clearly suspicious.

Meyer’s script packs in all of these allusions to the major flashpoints of the 20th century to date (even Sulu meeting a helicopter pilot, in a veiled wink to Vietnam) as a further means of contextualising just how clearly Star Trek, celebrating 30 years of life, is rooted in the past as it continues to move forward. And as The Voyage Home reaches a conclusion, that nostalgia will manifest in more than one way…

You can find A J. on social media, including links to his Patreon and books, via Linktr.ee here.

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