And then a spin right.
With your ship in warp.
You can change the night.
But it's the calculus.
That really comes from Spock's brain.
They did the Time Warp again.
They did the Time Warp again.
The problem of course is that it's a way too easy time travel devise, just like the Time Turner. I will now make a brief list of when the ability to travel through time would have come in handy: every movie and every episode of every series. But this flaw goes much deeper than the Time Turner flaw in the Harry Potter series, because while the Time Turner was clearly a rare, if not one-of-a-kind devise, warp capable starships, which are all that's needed to activate Time Warp, are extremely common in the Star Trek universe. They are used by the Federation, Klingons, Borg, Romulans, Ferengi, Dominion, Cardassians, Xindi, and pretty much everybody else. The series Enterprise occasionally had episodes dealing with something called the Temporal Cold War, but logically if time travel was so simple in the Star Trek universe, the Temporal Cold War would have permeated every bit of the franchise.
It should be noted at this point that according to the Theory of Relativity, any wessel capable of traveling faster than the speed of light is also capable of traveling through time. However, it is at least implicitly clear that the warp engine operates in such a way that it ignores relativistic effects and is not capable of time travel unless it's in the plot.
Now, let's discuss the serious flaw in their plan. They needed a humpback whale to save the planet and could have gone to any time to get one. Humpbacks have been around for a long time, possibly as long as 10 million years ago; however, Spock sets course for 1986 when the human population of the world was 5 billion, they were capable of detecting their spaceship, and the whales they were hunting were facing extinction. He could have just as easily gone back before the invention of radar during World War II and eliminated their chance of electronic detection and with 4 to 6 billion less eyes on the planet the odds of being sighted would also be significantly reduced. Even better, they could have gone back to before the onset of large scale commercial whaling in the 1600s to make it easier to find a whale. Better still, had they chosen a date before Columbus set off the Age of Exploration, the chance of setting off any temporal paradoxes by being sighted while flying over the Pacific drops to almost zero.
Now, you might be thinking that if they had gone back much earlier than 1986 they couldn't have gotten the materials for the whale tank and that's true, but the tank wasn't really necessary. After all, beached whales can survive for several days and when they eventually die, it is from a combination of dehydration, starvation, and sun exposure none of which should be a significant problem in the cargo hold of a Klingon Bird of Prey in the hour or two it would take to fly to the sun and back.
As it turns out, their poor planing works in their favor as they need to find a nuclear wessel to get back to the future. (Doc Brown's Pro Tips: Always keep your plutonium in your time machine and watch out for Libyans.) They are able to find a nuclear wessel and everything else they need through the magic of product placement with the Yellow Book ad being both a solid comic moment and a great example how avoiding a generic non-realism through product placement can make a movie better.
Chekov is captured and injured during his hunt for a nuclear wessel. And thus, Chekov's stupidity leading to his capture, questioning, and near death becomes both alpha and omega to the Genesis plotline. Six, Chekov, all you had to do was count to six.
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