Corrected entry: Nothing in space could communicate with whales in the ocean without radios. It wouldn't matter if it was generating the loudest sound in the universe, or had the most sensitive mike and most powerful amplifier - sound can't travel through a vacuum. The probe couldn't "hear" the whales, and the whales couldn't hear the probe.
Corrected entry: Kirk tells Gillian he can't pay for the meal at the restaurant because they don't use money in the 23rd century. However, in Star Trek III, McCoy tells the captain of the alien ship, "Price you name. Money I got."
Correction: They don't use money in the Federation, but that doesn't mean that other alien cultures don't use currency for illegal activities.
Corrected entry: When the Marines are chasing Chekov aboard the aircraft carrier, the sign "Escape Route" and an arrow can be seen stenciled in paint on the wall.
Correction: This is just a marking so sailors have visual clues on the best evacuation route in an emergency.
Corrected entry: When Spock analyzes the call of the probe and compares it in a phylum search, he's presumably interfacing with the Federation memory bank as mentioned in Sulu's pre-launch status. However, the alien probe was disrupting all power and communications in the vicinity of Earth. It's extremely unlikely the ship could've interfaced with the Federation memory bank at the time of that search. (00:24:55)
Correction: There's no reason to assume the Federation memory bank is centralized on Earth, or not networked throughout several member worlds. The original series episode "The Lights of Zetar," for example, showed a Federation central library facility on a planet called Memory Alpha (which is where the Star Trek wiki gets its name).
Corrected entry: In the second last scene when the bird of prey crash lands under the Golden Gate bridge, Kirk orders Spock to blow the hatch so the crew can escape. The camera is pointing up inside the ship to the outside of the ship and you can see the top of an industrial shed. (01:40:10)
Correction: Watching this scene carefully, there is no evidence of an industrial shed, or anything else. You see the top of the ship, and the hatch closely behind Spock. When he blows the hatch, you just see white, but no significant details to make out what could be outside.
Corrected entry: When the 'Bounty' materializes above the whaling ship, the close-up of the captain and navigator frantically turning the ship around reveal that only the captain has his hands on the wheel; the navigator is flapping his hands in the air rather than helping turn the wheel of the whaling ship.
Correction: The navigator is freaking out, seeing a giant space ship materialize in front of him. He's obviously not thinking straight, thinking he's turning the wheel. If something like that happened to an ordinary person, they probably wouldn't know what they were doing either.
Corrected entry: In the scene where Scotty beams up the whales and water to the ship, you can see the water completely fills the compartment from top to bottom so the whales would have had no air layer to breathe.
Correction: We don't actually know the internal structure of the tank, nor can we see it in the movie. The top of the glass is not automatically the top of the tank/water surface; in other words, the height of the tank may be higher than what we can see from the outside. The water surface may go higher than the glass we are able to see, and therefore, have air up there.
Corrected entry: In the scenes where Kirk's communicator goes off (like during dinner with the scientist lady) to simply inform him that Chekhov is about to beam to the ship, this completely goes against his first orders given before they landed that communicators should only be used in case of emergencies.
Correction: Uhura and Chekov were about to infiltrate a United States vessel in order to steal nuclear particles. Sounds like an emergency to me.
Corrected entry: Dr. McCoy advises Scotty about giving the manufacturer the formula for the transparent aluminum for fear that it would alter history. Yet he himself gives the elderly woman in the hospital the pill that grows her a new kidney, hence future medical technology in the hands of 20th century physicians, something doctors and others would definitely be studying after the woman's miraculous recovery.
Correction: Why would it alter history? Unexplained 'miracles' happen in medicine often enough. And its not out of character for Bones to put his Hippocratic Oath above the Prime Directive.
Corrected entry: At the Start of the Final scene of the film, when the crew are approaching the new Enterprise-A in the inspection pod, Kirk is correctly wearing a Captain's Rank Pin on his tunic, however, his tunic still has the gold braiding of an Admiral. (01:52:50)
Correction: Kirk probabaly hasn't had enough time to fully update his uniform.
Corrected entry: Reactor rooms are sealed spaces. No marine with a dog would be able to patrol it, especially without a radiation suit.
Correction: The room is a *restricted* space, if it were sealed how would they use anything inside of it? And you would not need a radiation suit to enter a reactor room, the reactor itself is radiation shielded so that it doesn't leak.
Corrected entry: Why bother traveling back to 1986 to get a whale? Why not travel back to the year 500, with no hostile people around. After all; they claim that the whales have been around for 10000 years or so... It can't be the need for nuclear fuel, because Scotty discovers the problem with the Klingon dilithium crystals AFTER the crew has travelled back in time. Only after discovering the problem does the crew decide to collect high-energy photons from a nuclear reactor. At the time they were deciding to go back in time, they had no idea there was going to be a problem with the crystals. Hence, the logical decision at the time would have been to go back to the distant past where the risk to the time continuum would have been minimal.
Correction: Time travel is imprecise, especially the "sling-shot" technique they used (compared to other methods in other films). They could not aim for a specific year, and Kirk does ask what year it is. Probably they were just trying to get to a time when Hump-Back whales were still around and weren't thinking about what time period they were going to end up in. From the filmmakers' standpoint, it would have been easier to have them go to "present" time, rather than farther back. Plus the crew needs not only a whale, but also the technology and materials to build the 'fishtank' inside the Bounty. Hence they would travel to a time where such materials had already been invented.
Corrected entry: In every movie Klingon cloaking shields show a visible distortion in the background, like heat waves coming off a pavement. When the whale specialist comes looking for Kirk in the park, she bumps into a perfectly invisible (as in no distortion) Klingon bird-of-prey.
Correction: They're only distorted when moving.
Corrected entry: When Kirk and his crew stand before the Federation President, they are there to answer for the charges against them in the previous film. Other than trying to get a ship to Genesis, McCoy should not be included in the hearing since he had no way of knowing that Kirk would break him out of jail, steal the Enterprise, then escape to Genesis.
Correction: Just like you said, they broke him out of jail. At that point he was a fugitive. And he went along with the plan, making him an accomplice.
Corrected entry: Given the distance the probe must have traveled before it reached the Neutral Zone it would had to have encountered starships long before encountering Saratoga, so why didn't Starfleet know about the probe before Saratoga was neutralized?
Correction: Several reasons. The Klingons are enemies with Starfleet. About ready to go to war thanks to Kirk, so they're not likely to report anything to Starfleet about a dangerous probe coming their way. Also, you never know the path it traveled & what/if any federation ships came into contact with it. And, the ones that did would have lost power & not been able to communicate to Starfleet. Starfleet only regained power after the probe was satisfied that they were able to communicate with the whales.
Corrected entry: The computer screens that Spock is testing himself on are already responding with "correct" before he answers the questions.
Correction: There is no part during the questioning in which the computer answers correct before he answers the question. They do a segue where they show the computer asking questions & saying correct quickly. This is to show that Spock is being asked a lot of questions & getting them all correct, until they get to the final question "how do you feel?" It's shot that way intentionally to fast forward through all the questions he's asked & show how much he knows.
Corrected entry: Kirk conveniently has the broken pair of reading glasses with him that he sells to the antiques dealer in 1986. The glasses were damaged at the end of "Wrath of Khan" which means he would have no further use for them, but for some reason he would have had to have them on him during the events of "Search For Spock" for them to be stranded with him on Vulcan, just as he and the crew were at the beginning of the movie.
Corrected entry: When the Bounty takes off from Vulcan and flies away, no shadow is visible despite the fact that it is a very sunny day. (00:16:20)
Correction: This is incorrect. Vulcan has multiple suns, so there would be minimal shadows cast.
Corrected entry: When Spock and Kirk theories over who the probes signal might be meant for, Spock say "The President did say it was directed at earths oceans", the president never said that, he only said it was vaporizing the oceans, he never mention it being directed anywhere.
Correction: If it's vaporising the oceans, it's hardly an unreasonable assumption that it's aimed at them. If it was having negative effects across the world, affecting everywhere, the President would hardly have singled out the oceans to comment on.
Corrected entry: In the scene where the commander of the navy ship is on the phone, first he is told that nobody knows why they are having a power drain. Then suddenly he makes a call and says that there is an intruder. There is no way he or anyone else could have suddenly known there was an intruder, because nobody had physically seen or detected Chekov and Uhura yet. And there is no "modern" technology that could drain power from the reactor so there was no reason to equate the power drain to an intruder alert.
Correction: When he is informed about the power drain the phone rings. He speaks with someone that calls him Chief, apparently one with higher rank, and tells him that they are tracking the drain too and asks about an opinion of what it is. Then the scene cuts to Uhura and Chekov who try to communicate with Scotty, and after the scene goes back to the Navy and Commander Rogerson who says "Confirmed, roger that" and he makes the phone call about the intruders. Apparently on the phone they pick the transmission of Uhura and Chekov or identify exactly where the power drain was and informed the commander on duty.
Correction: This assumes that the probe, which does not appear to be a 'mechanical' device, uses a communications technology that we are familiar with, and there's no reason to assume that it does. It's a fictional, alien probe, which is likely using a fictional, alien technology to communicate with the whales.
wizard_of_gore ★
You're describing fantasy fiction and not science fiction. The whales are not equipped with alien technology to send and receive, so it doesn't matter what technology the probe contains The movie makes a point of "playing" the sounds of whales and the sounds of the probe. Sounds, by definition, are vibrations of a medium - there is no medium here to carry the vibrations, and even if there were, they would have to be so powerful as to cause worldwide, catastrophic shock waves in order to reach.
ReRyRo
Star Trek does often dabble in fantasy under the guise of "too advanced for our puny minds." The probe's signal is not itself a sound but some kind of energy (or something) that can inexplicably drain power from starships, cause giant hurricanes, and produce a sound when it hits a medium. The probe presumably has sensors that can detect the effects of a whale call and extrapolate/ "hear" it much the way the Enterprise bridge screen can "see" across vast distances using sensor data.
TonyPH