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

Star Trek IV
Share this Article:

Directed by Leonard Nimoy, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home went back in time to the 1980s, but also took the franchise back to its 1960s, larger-than-life roots.


You can read the title of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home in two ways. It ostensibly refers to the crew of the late USS Enterprise attempting to reach Earth after their stop on Vulcan to bring Spock back from the dead. It also concerns the broader idea of Star Trek ‘coming home’. That is, returning to its roots in the 1960s.

Twenty years had passed since the beginning of The Original Series by the point Leonard Nimoy, in his second film as director, gave us The Voyage Home in 1986. Star Trek was by now cemented in the cultural firmament. The Search For Spock (1984) had restored the franchise’s soul, rowing back on Nicholas Meyer’s attempt in The Wrath Of Khan to instil consequences to James T Kirk’s personal rebirth and the transformation of the series. He too steered Star Trek back to Gene Roddenberry’s naval tradition.

The Voyage Home provides us with the first true rip-roaring, big-screen Star Trek adventure. The Wrath Of Khan had mined WWII cinema and Biblical allegory to tell an epic good versus evil tale. The Search For Spock was a pulpy action adventure riven with mournful impetus, death and the collapse of an Eden. The Voyage Home is the Enterprise crew becoming 60s era superheroes, larger than life figures who embark on a journey not just across space but time. If the comic-book leanings were uncertain, take the fact the crew spin around the sun, Superman-style, to travel back in time.

House of cards

Nimoy’s key drive with The Voyage Home was an environmentalist message, one holding extra potency at the end of the Cold War and the era of rampant corporate capitalism:

ā€œI was in touch with [author] Edward O Wilson,ā€ Nimoy told American Cinematographer in 1986. ā€œIn his book Biophilia, he tells us we could be losing as many as ten thousand species off this planet per year ā€“ many of them having gone unrecorded. We won’t even have known what they were and they will be gone. He touches on the concept of a keystone species. If you set up a house of cards you may be able to pull away one card successfully … and another card successfully. But at some point you are going to get a card that is a keystone card. When that one is pulled away, the whole thing will collapse.

ā€œThe same might be true of species: a planetary imbalance might be caused by the destruction or loss of just one. Our tendency is to say, “Here’s this pressure group pestering us—but things aren’t really bad yet. Let’s pay attention to the things we really have to.” But when the ozone question or the species question or whatever gets really bad, we’ll turn to scientists and say, “Okay, here’s the money, God damn it. Fix it!” They, at some point, may have to.ā€

The Voyage Home was released the same year as the Chernobyl disaster, which Nicholas Meyer’s return as director in 1991ā€™s The Undiscovered Country (Meyer did some scriptwriting work on The Voyage Home ā€“ more on that later) also explored. But the timing meant Nimoyā€™s film dovetailed with he and producer Harve Bennett’s warning that weā€™re sundering our natural resources.

The plot might seem loopy. The crew go back 300 years to save a pair of humpback whales, George and Gracie, from extinction, so they can converse with an alien probe which only speaks in whale song before it unwittingly destroys 23rd century Earth. But thereā€™s a simplistic elegance behind the narrative here. The Enterprise crew are voyaging home, to the past, to rescue humanity in the modern day. The film is a warning from history.

George and Gracie grace the screen in Star Trek IV: The Undiscovered Country. Credit: Paramount Pictures.

Past and future

I’m going to divide my look at The Voyage Home into three distinct sections. The future, the past, and the future again, as the structure of the film breaks down into three acts. The first act concerns the crew of the Enterprise, the ship having been destroyed in The Search For Spock, on Vulcan with Commander Kruge’s stolen Klingon bird of prey, which via graffiti they rename the HMS Bounty. A reference to arguably the most famous maritime mutiny in history, Fletcher Christian’s uprising against tyrannical Captain Bligh in the late 1780s, best known from the classic 1962 film adaptation starring Marlon Brando and Trevor Howard.

Itā€™s a pointed but adequate allusion to the circumstances of Kirk and company. Kirk, in effect, is Christian, with Starfleet the more general Bligh, he having mutinied against orders to rescue and save Spock. “Because the needs of the one… outweigh the needs of the many” Kirk voiced at the end of the previous film to a confused Spock, turning his famous Vulcan proverb inside out. The Voyage Home works to rebalance the scales, of course. Travelling back in time, risking their lives when the rest of Starfleet are imperilled, is the ultimate expression of working for “the needs of the many”. Kirk can’t remain Fletcher Christian forever and we have to be reminded that Starfleet isn’t truly Bligh. Weā€™ll return to this in act three.

Spock, however, still doesnā€™t understand why his crew mates came back for him. Nimoy works to explore how Spock’s rebirth is, initially, at the cost of his more pronounced human personality. Having his factory settings restored by the ‘kat’ra’, in essence, has wiped the human traits he nurtured over many years of contact with them since The Motion Picture.

Read more: Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan | A spoiler-y look at a question of fate

In an amusing interaction with the Vulcan computer, where Spock answers complex scientific questions, he is flummoxed by the deceptively simple “how do you feel?”. It takes the arrival of his human mother, Amanda Grayson (played once again by grand dame of cinema Jane Wyatt, reprising her role from The Original Series episode ‘Journey To Babel’ after 20 years), to help him understand the meaning.

She makes the point about the kat’ra ritual: “The retraining of your mind has been in the Vulcan way, so you may not understand feelings,” but stresses that his human genetics will mean they naturally surface. Spock nonetheless considers staying with his crew a logical act of factual reportage rather than loyalty, or emotion, understanding his testimony to Starfleet will be of importance.

Amanda explains the import, however, of what Kirk and the others did: “They have sacrificed their futures because they believed that the good of the one… you… was more important to them.” This is easily a scene lesser films might have excised for running time, but Nimoy understands how crucial Amanda imparting this message to Spock is, given the human ‘illogic’ he will encounter once they return to the 20th century.

Interestingly, as an aside, the Vulcan computer asks him: “What was the principle historical event on the planet Earth in the year 1987?” Spock gets the answer right, but we don’t hear it or see it on the screen. This references, of course, the time period the crew will later travel back to, but while saving George and Gracie is key to the future, they do not apparently coincide with any significant historical event while in the past. To The Voyage Home, 1987 was the future, so the writers arenā€™t referencing anything specific they know of. So what did happen in 1987 of such import in the Star Trek universe? The Iran-Contra affair? Ronald Reagan’s “tear down this wall!” speech? Wrestlemania III? We may never know.

Kirk and Spock in the 1980s. Credit: Paramount Pictures.

Probing questions

Perhaps we can simply infer that 1987 formed part of a late 20th century rush to capitalism that served as a turning point in Earth’s natural history. The extinction of humpback whales directly results in the strange Probe, which arrives at Earth in the 23rd century after seemingly thousands of years, creating the kind of environmental and ecological problems we see ravaging Starfleet Headquarters and San Francisco. Violent storms, intense winds, loss of atmospheric temperature, complete electrical failure. Even the cloud cover begins to block out the Sun, a natural power even Starfleet cannot replicate. With the entire fleet knocked out by the Probe’s signals and proximity, the Federation President (a grandfatherly David Huddleston) is at a loss to solve the issue. As Spock’s father Ambassador Sarek comments: “It is difficult to answer when one does not understand the question.”

This lack of awareness of what the Probe is trying to communicate mirrors Spock’s own inability to answer a simple question. The Probe ultimately isnā€™t hostile – it simply wants to say hello to an ancient oceanic creature with a much longer lineage on Earth than man. Spock, equally, holds his crew no ill-will. Both simply approach their positions from logic. Naturally, Starfleet respond with emotion, the President intoning a grave message to anyone listening about the Probe vaporising oceans. “Save your energy. Save yourselves.” It could almost be a public information broadcast from later in the 21st century, as sober government officials warn societies of their perilous climate-facing position. If there is a villain in The Voyage Home, it is humanity’s ignorance and indifference.

Read more: Star Trek revisited | The Search For Spock

Nonetheless, Kirk matches Spock’s logic with the swagger he has rediscovered since The Wrath Of Khan, swiftly deciding to take the Bounty back to the late 20th century to find whales that can respond to the Probe. McCoy becomes the voice of reason, well within his anxious character, as he cites all the reasons why a slingshot around the sun to achieve time warp is an absurd idea. This is, however, pure Star Trek spectacle. The sequence in which the Klingon bird of prey makes its time warp, replete with shaking camera, glowing red light, exploding consoles and Sulu counting upwards to maximum warp, is wonderfully executed. It has no basis in science but, in a film with the brio of The Voyage Home, it doesn’t matter.

“Angels and ministers of grace, defend us,” declares Bones soberly as the plan goes ahead, quoting Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Here, we begin to see the fingerprints of Nicholas Meyer’s written contribution to a film that, by placing Star Trek’s heroes in a contemporary setting, finds numerous ways to reflect on the past and a possible future. It will be, in more ways than one, their voyage home.


Join us next week for the second part of our Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home retrospective.

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

ā€”

Thank you for visiting! If youā€™d like to support our attempts to make a non-clickbaity movie website:

Follow Film Stories on Twitter here, and on Facebook here.

Buy our Film Stories and Film Junior print magazines here.

Become a Patron here.

Share this Article:

More like this