10 Star Trek Undercover Operations That Went Wrong
8. Shenanigans On The Voyage Home
While the one with the whales isn't an official undercover mission, everyone knows the first rule of time travel is to blend in and avoid polluting the timeline at all costs...
A probe arrives at Earth to communicate with whales (for...reasons) despite their having become extinct. But the destructive probe shows no sign of moving along without an answer.
Cue Kirk and co. deciding that the easiest way to solve this problem is to travel back in time and pick up a couple of whales. As if it's just a case of popping to Aldi for milk.
Jump (through a terrifying tunnel of heads) to San Francisco, 1986, and Kirk gives his crew clear instructions to be careful and, essentially, not to draw attention to themselves.
What follows is a comedy of errors that should be shown at the Academy to warn cadets how not to 'blend in' when time travelling.
Spock takes it upon himself to nerve pinch a punk in front of a bus full of people, and about ten minutes later, he's swimming with whales, much to the astonishment of several spectators. Then, Kirk decides to tell the nice lady from the past all about his job as a spaceman.
Meanwhile, Uhura and Chekov ask every passer-by in sight where the nuclear wessles are, much to the bemusement of an unimpressed cop, and their eventual infiltration mission leads to the capture of Chekov.
Scotty hands over a formula from the future for transparent aluminium to a random manager in a plexiglass factory. McCoy cures a woman in hospital with a pill that clearly hasn't been invented yet. And that's not to mention the communicator and phaser that were left behind in the chaos.
We guess this means Sulu gets the gold star for this mission?
The icing on the cake is 20th century Doctor Gillian Taylor hitching a ride back to the future with them. But maybe it's balanced out by Rios' extraordinary decision to stay in the 21st century in Star Trek: Picard. Who knows how it works.