“Star Trek IV” (1986, The One With The Whales) has extinct whales as humanity’s only macguffin hope for saving Earth from destruction. Do late 70s environmental groups bringing whaling into public consciousness bring context to a movie that’s 1. Time travel to steal whales, 2. ???, 3. Save Earth?

by nueoritic-parents

I ask this question as a devoted Trekkie, someone who had years of passionately defending the series as “philosophy with rubber aliens that should be taken seriously it’s about humanity it references Shakespeare goddammit” and still watched this movie and thought “Yeah, this seems weirder than normal.”