3 out of 5

Director: Leonard Nimoy

After the heavier business of parts 2 and 3 (moving past the polarizing Motion Picture), handed the director reigns once more, Nimoy purposefully set out to make a villain-less, quest-based environmental film.  It’s incredibly light on the sci-fi beyond its general time travel premise, but it also doesn’t waste a lot of time with fish-out-of-water humor (ugh no pun intended), keeping the plot moving, making the characters madly likeable, and running along to an enjoyable two hours.  Yes, ‘save the whales’ is a wee bit timely, but ‘Voyage Home’ is a lot of fun and does stay true to the ongoing storyline and themes that’d been established. So dang, girl, the crew of the Enterprise done blowed their Enterprise up and now have to fly a Klingon ship home.  We get clever coverage of the what’s what leading to this via a meeting of political minds back near Earthland where they review footage of the Genesis incident and Kirk and team’s behaviors (i.e. clips from ‘Spock’… glad they have random cameras hanging around in space) and yes, a trial must be had.  En route to face the tune, our group runs into a massive space probe which is frying the world with a strange signal… a signal which can only be responded to by something that no longer exists.  Solution?  Duh, time travel.  What makes this work is how easily these answers come, and how readily we proceed through what follows.  Paradoxes and other such tropes be damned, it can be brushed off with a wink.  And these guys ARE human, just from a different time, so we don’t need to milk the “what’s up with San Francisco” routine more than for a good couplea’ yuks.  The thrills come from the logistics of trying to gather what’s needed – even the usual ‘how do we get home’ cliche is quickly resolved, again leading to the fun of gathering resources and not bothersome deus ex machinas.  So STIV turns into exactly what Nimoy wanted and exactly what the series needed – a nice break midway through that’s by no means a step backward.  Definitely the most accessible of the series, and well executed – direction, writing, score – despite being purposefully light-hearted.