It was well established in TOS that Spock was a virtual encyclopedia of scientific, historical, and cultural information, who essentially remembered every fact he had ever learned. After his katra was put back in in STIII, did he still remember all of this stuff, or did he need to be reeducated on everything? I was always under the impression that he still retained all of his memories, but he brain required serious "defragging" for lack of a better term. What does everybody else think?
I've always assumed there was a lot that was lost in the transfer, that the re-education process seen in TVH helped him recover/reconstruct/"defrag" much of what he'd previously known, but that there were still some gaps in his personal memories. However, nothing aside from TVH has ever suggested Spock had trouble remembering anything from before his death. In TFF he remembered Sybok perfectly well, and in ST '09 he had detailed memories of Kirk's younger days (though he did seem to be a bit confused about the timing of Kirk's captaincy at first) and even remembered the "I have been and always shall be your friend" line which he uttered shortly before his death. So the implication would seem to be that he recovered essentially all his memories in time.
Yeah, I think that opening scene in TVH clearly establishes that Spock has regained all his intellectual faculties and knowledge; he just breezes through that quiz until he gets to "How do you feel?" Besides, if McCoy can restore all of Uhura's knowledge in about a week, after Nomad wiped her mind clean in "The Changeling," how hard can it be to reeducate a Vulcan?
I explain that away by assuming Spock didn't know precisely what year it was until he started the mind-meld with Kirk.
I assumed that Spocks complete memory was intact, along with his intellectual capabilities and personality. I think the problem was that they had become compressed inside his mind. Therefore the Vulcans gave Spock all these tests in order to bring everything back to the surface. I suppose it's kind of like using WinRAR to unzip a load of compressed files.
Well we assume that Mccoy had most of spocks memory but it could be possible that some memories were retained with spock even though his body pretty much regenerated on Genisis, but all jumbled.
I'm not sure what you're saying. Considering that he was a child when he was found on Genesis, it doesn't seem accurate to say that his body regenerated; more like a new "clone" body was formed from some remaining, viable cells and grew from infancy at an accelerated pace. (This was not very well explained in the film. The whole thing is magical nonsense anyway.) So it's unlikely that he had the same brain with the same memories stored in it.
Out of curiosity, if you were to write a novelisation of TSFS how would you explain it? I'm impressed with how you have explained (the usually left, annoyingly vague) things in your novels.
Ohh, I don't know, I'd have to think about that one. And you know, Vonda McIntyre's novelization probably explained it a lot better than the movie did. She was pretty good at concocting more plausible explanations for the stuff in the movies that didn't make sense.