Visually, the probe is strikingly simple. The main craft consists of a large dark-gray cylinder. Below, suspended by a bright beam of energy, is a small orb, which seems to be the ship's source of energy.
Beautifully minimalist? Not quite. In the aftermath, Earth's atmosphere was ionized, destroying the ozone layer, and torrential storms rained down across the planet, blocking out the sun and preventing agriculture.
Carol Marcus attempted to use a less powerful version of the Genesis Device to restore the Earth's atmosphere to its previous state; however, the Klingons chose to use the opportunity to invade Earth. In the mirror universe , Spock took the ISS Enterprise back in time to so as to retrieve some humpback whales who could then respond to the probe. When the two whales were brought back and deposited in Earth 's ocean, they interacted with the probe and were transformed into huge armored leviathans, traversing the tsunami-swept oceans, and destroying entire coastal cities.
Eventually Spock found a way to enter the probe and shut down its computer core; however, the damage caused by whale-beasts' rampage, as well as the probe's transmissions, left much of Earth's industrial capacity in ruins, a forewarning of the imminent collapse of the Terran Empire. Memory Beta, non-canon Star Trek Wiki. IDW Year Five. Blog Forum. Like Earth, Zadar IV had large oceans which were filled with aquatic life. The kid said that he used to watch a dolphin-like species play in the oceans from the beach.
These aquatic mammals were considered part of the crew of the starship and they communicated with their crewmates, offering navigational assistance. If the dolphin-like Cetaceans had been in communication with the whales for centuries and then stopped receiving transmissions, it would make sense for them to send a probe to check on their Cetacean friends. How does that explain the time gap if whales went extinct in the 21st century? In the non-canon novelized sequel to Star Trek IV entitled Star Trek: Probe , the crew of the Enterprise discovered more information about the whale probe.
With the help of the Romulans , the Enterprise crew established contact with the probe without their vessels being disabled. This allowed Spock to perform a mind-meld with the probe. They were a technologically advanced species, and they built the probe to explore the galaxy.
The probe was attempting to re-establish contact with the humpback whales after almost a century of silence. To this end, as Memory Alpha notes, the probe was capable of terraforming planets so they would be more appropriate for aquatic life. So, the geological disturbances created by the probe may have been a misguided attempt to terraform Earth. Sometimes fans come up with the most innovative theories all on their own. In the video above, Ryan explains his theory and offers some compelling evidence to back it up.
Ryan posits that millennia ago, some humpback whales left Earth to start their own journey through the galaxy. We built several versions of this monolithic probe that threatens the Earth. The main model we used was an eight foot long cylinder about two feet in diameter, and it had a hole at one end through which an antenna ball emerges on a shaft of light and sort of searches around.
Like a takeoff on that first shot in Star Wars. We also built some large antennas for close-ups, " as reported by Mann. American Cinematographer , October ed. In order to save as much financially as post-production opticals were concerned, Jeff Mann decided to have his new Whale Probe models, as much as possible, have self-illuminating capabilities.
Mann elaborated, " The Probe had a hole on the bottom that the ball jutted out from. Inside it, we put six halogen bulbs that emitted a general glow down onto the ball and out the hole.
Then, down the center we had a tube of plexiglass that was about two inches in diameter that attached to the ball.
Inside of that was a long tube lamp — like a refrigerator lamp — which was just screwed into a socket.
So the stage crew could do several light passes on the probe. The whale-colored probe did not quite work out on screen, and after several shoots, a decision was made to alter the color scheme of the model as was recalled by Don Dow; " We had to give it some texture.
After brainstorming it for a while, Ken Ralston came up with the idea of painting it shiny black and then backlighting it so there would be reflections coming off of it. We also ended up pock-marking the surface a little so that the backlighting would pick up some hills and valleys.
Then we shot it with fog filters which helped to give it an awesome, mysterious quality. It wasn't exciting, because it was blue, like a whale. Also, the antenna originally didn't move and it didn't have a light source in it, so we made the antenna move and added an interior light to the ball. For the antenna's beam of light, we added a hot shaft of light in the center and put a much milder glow around that. I think it was Ken Ralston who came up with the idea to paint the probe black and eliminate all the color from it so we could use light and reflections on it to create interest and mystery.
No matter what the original intent was, lighting the ball-shaped antenna presented its own set of additional problems, as ILM's Optical Supervisor Ralph Gordon recalled; " The spherical antenna underneath the probe was originally shot so that it was orange, which unfortunately made it look very much like a spinning basketball.
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