Star Trek -- Humpback Whales

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

An alien probe of great power has entered Earth orbit, focusing its unintelligible transmissions not to the people of Earth, but to the life in its oceans; specifically humpback whales, a species that's been extinct for centuries. Every starship that attempts to approach the probe is rendered powerless and all attempts at communication with it fail. The probe's activities heighten the cloud cover around the planet, blocking out the sun, bringing about a sustained global flood. Upon identifying the species that the probe is attempting to communicate with, Admiral Kirk and his officers use their captured Klingon Bird of Prey to visit Earth's past, locate some humpback whales and transport them back to the 23rd century in the hope that they provide the alien probe with whatever response it requires to relax its grip on Earth.

Doctor Gillian Taylor, assitant director of the Cetacean Institute hosts a tour of their museum and a presentation on whales. This tour builds up to showcasing the museum's main attraction, a massive sea water tank keeping a pair of humpback whales, George and Gracie. As far as Kirk is concerned this is as good as mission accomplished; Mister Spock thinks he should ask the whales how they feel about their plan first!

[holyspiritfilling]

By far the best Star Trek movie... the only one that came close to the original TV series themes

[ricaard]

This is the Hell one of my all time favourite movies!

[SmokeyMcb]

"To hunt a species to extinction is not logical."

Quoted by Spock in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

[zippityzop]

"to hunt the tribbles to extinction is not logical" Spock on the great Tribble hunt

[tedthesailor]

Great chemistry between Spoch and Kirk...

[arthouston]

By the end of this movie, I was in love with her.

[donaldjackson]

This is my favorite out of one through five

[ericbarash]

Siskel and Ebert gave this film a thumbs up.

[JamesL]

Interestingly since this movie was made whale population has bloomed worldwide because of conservation efforts and now whales have almost returned to their original population size prior to mass scale commercialised whaling. Goes to show how far we've come in a way.

[kenaldri]

I've watched this so many times and never until now realized Kirk is looking for Spock at 4:17, wondering where he is.

[philipd]

Everything I know about whales I learnt from this movie. 🐳

[PODSMPSG]

Spock in the Whale Tank was hilarious. Hahahahahahahaha. LMFAO.

[gerryconwayvoice]

The audio volume on this is amazingly LOW. I'm at full volume and I can barely hear it.

[bobcole]

Chilly Catherine Hicks in a thin sweater. Perfect.

[rexringtail]

Ironically the confederate Navy's commerce raiders basically destroyed the largest whaling fleet in the world and probably saved the whales until modern conversation could begin

[Sigma]

For those who don’t know, this was filmed on location at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Very cool place to visit. The killer whales displayed on the ceiling are still there.

[victoria]

The aquarium scene is the Monterey bay aquarium in Monterey California I recognize the entrance and the part where the whales are swimming, it hasn’t changed much since the movie was filmed. It amazes me how they used cgi back then to make the aquarium look like it was in San Francisco the reality is that is not is located about 2 hours south of San Francisco.

[MrVodkashows]

My favorite thing about this scene is she stumps Spock! That's not easy to do!

[philosophera]

Great exchange at the end .. especially refereeing back to exaggerating

[marktabla]

3:02 love this but the only thing that's puzzled me about this movie's premise is whether you'd need 7 or 2 specimens for a sufficiently large gene pool to have a successful species reset. As God told Noah; "Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female." - but then again, the human race started with just Adam and Eve, so I didn't know.