Released: 26 November 1986
Synopsis: The crew of the Enterprise go back in time to 1980s Earth in order to locate humpback whales and return with them to their own time to save the planet.
From the perspective of depth psychology, here defined as being any psychology that deals with the unconscious, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home finishes the plot arc that began in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and continued on in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, which can be seen as a cautionary tale, as to the distress that can occur when a complex is not dealt with by the conscious ego, and to the healing that can happen when the unconscious material is finally acknowledged and accepted. It also harkens back to a theme from Star Trek: The Motion Picture, of the importance of the uniting of the opposites in order to be more whole. These topics were discussed more fully in my last three posts.
However, reviewing Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home in the year 2021, there is also a cultural complex point of view from which to interpret the story that frames the voyage of the crew of the former Enterprise home. At the beginning of the film, a Klingon ambassador has come before a council of the United Federation of Planets, asking them to extradite Admiral James Tiberius Kirk to the Klingon Empire as a renegade, a terrorist, and to charge him with the death of the lives of the Klingons who died when Kirk set the Enterprise to self-destruct and for the theft of the Klingon vessel that the crew of the Enterprise used to escape from the Genesis Planet. The President assures the Klingon ambassador that Kirk has been charged with nine violations of Starfleet regulations. The Klingon ambassador is enraged declaring “there will be no peace as long as Kirk lives.”
How reminiscent this is to current events if we put Kirk, as a Starfleet officer, in the role of a police officer, and the Klingon ambassador in the role of a Black Lives Matter activist. Seen through this lens, the words of the President to the Klingon ambassador at the beginning of the film seem patronizing and the punishment of Kirk as less than a slap on the wrist.
Original post created 6 May 2021
mydailysoultrek 