The plot this time, which finds our crew in a Klingon vessel (the Enterprise having been blown, as you will remember if you were not traumatized into amnesia, to smithereens) heading earthward toward a court-martial, and with the "reborn" Spock back at his post, shows no decline in the ability to pose tantalizing questions and problems. A gigantic probe, looking something like a greasy railroad spike with an all-white soccer ball rotating in a shaft of light at its tip, is in a trajectory toward Earth, mysteriously incapacitating any starships in its path and sapping Earth's energy immediately upon entry into the atmosphere. Tantalizing questions so far: How does it do this? And why? What is it? And where from? And what does whatever it is want? One partial answer or mere clue: it has been transmitting an inscrutable message to the world's oceans, which our heroes, well back in the trail of the probe and thus still with full power at their disposal, manage to decode when filtered through the density of the oceans as the call of the humpback whale. Hmm. But this only gives us another problem: here in the 23rd Century there are no longer any humpback whales to talk to. And just a glimmer of a possible solution: to travel back in time ("We've done it before," as viewers of the TV series will attest) to the late 20th Century, say about 1986, and fetch a couple of specimens back to the future to respond to the probe. Not all the enumerated questions are to be answered satisfactorily or at all. But they are tantalizing all the same. And Greenpeace, among others, will be well satisfied without satisfactory answers. The movie is doing the proper duty of science fiction in revising our perspective to envisage the humpback whale as the hypothetical center of the universe; and, on top of its pertinence to contemporary ecological issues, its marginal comments on the foulness of the spoken language in our time and on the quality of public health care ("Don't leave him," the impassioned "Bones" McCoy pleads to his admiral on behalf of a shipmate about to be wheeled into surgery in present-day San Francisco, "in the hands of 20th-century medicine!") raise the social consciousness of the movie to the top ten percent or so of contemporary cinema -- although not, thankfully, all the way to the soapbox of the ninety-ninth percentile. William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Catherine Hicks; directed by Nimoy. (1986) — Duncan Shepherd
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