After the events of STID, Kirk shouldn't Kirk be all messed up? He was dead, he ought to have severe brain damage. They took too long getting him into that cryotube to be otherwise. Even if somehow Khan's magic blood also fixed his brain, what about his memories? He shouldn't even know his own name.
After the time it took to decontaminate the room in engineering, put a sheet over him, haul him to sick bay, decide to use the cryotube and then put him in it. Let's say that took only 20 minutes (surely longer tho). Still too long.
Perhaps 250 years from medicine has advanced far enough to fix brain damage? I don't know.... the fact that we can do more in medical science now then we could 20 years ago, who knows how far they have progressed by then. I sometimes don't understand how people find it weird they do certain things in shows set hundreds of years from now that we can't do today. We couldn't even friggin' fly just over a century ago. I have no doubt that 200+ years from now, fixing brain damage will be pretty easy.
^Absolutely. The thread title keeps reminding me so can I please just say this... [yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZL0sNxP_28[/yt] Thank you. Also, have we forgotten Spock's Brain? McCoy was able to connect a brainless yet living Spock to a machine that enabled him to walk around by remote control. Curing Kirk's brain damage would seem a cake-walk compared to that.
There are doctors now who believe reviving the body twenty four hours after death is just around the corner. With three hundred years of medical advances and a vial of magic blood, Kirk will be fine.
Maybe T'Pau could have performed a mind meld with him during Spock's pon farr to fix his neural pathways, while Uhura was fighting T'Pring to the death. Unfortunately, they are both dead now, so Kirk's fucked. What a destiny, after all that to end up homicidal, power-mad, despotic and insane, going around the galaxy to blow up stars to lure the Nexus. Their only hope is travel back in time in a Klingon ship to pick some T'Paus from the past. Unless he settles for a couple of Spocks. Uh-oh, here comes Star Trek: The Wrath of Nyota. Really. We can avoid all the headaches if they dig up B4's head from under San Francisco. They could ask him for the recipe to The Doctor's nanoprobe snake oil cure-all. If Khan's blood and Borg nanoprobes doesn't sound promising, I don't know what does. (Mixing in some of Walter Bishop's preparations?!)
I think T'Pau might have been one of the people getting beamed up from the cliff when they lost Amanda - hard to tell, though, because she'd have been a different actress than we have seen. But either way, we have no idea if she or T'Pring were among the 10,000 survivors Spock refers to shortly afterward.