Uhura's memory wipe

Dilbertesque

 

Or jump ahead and snag "The Teacher"

 

For fun, here’s some of the evolution of this scene.

The scene was originally written to feature a character named Yeoman Barbara Watson. In the outline dated March 15, 1967, she’s on the bridge because she’s delivering a message to Uhura. This excuse was changed in the first draft script (May 1, 1967) to delivering coffee to the crew of the bridge. In broad terms, the scene as written in the outline and the first draft is similar to the one in the filmed version except that Watson is whistling and Nomad (Altair in the first draft) erases her thinking processes/units. In both early versions, Sulu comments that the alien machine must have burned out her mind in the same way that it previously burned out the translator computer.

D.C. Fontana didn’t like the reason in the first draft as to why Watson was on the bridge. In a May 3, 1967 memo to Gene Coon, she wrote, “Yeoman Watson should be on the bridge on business, collecting some report tapes or papers or something. This car-hop service writers keep putting in for the yeomen is ridiculous.”

Roddenberry preferred that the scene not use Yeoman Watson at all. He specifically said this about it in a May 8, 1967 memo to Gene Coon: “Can we use Nurse Christine Chapel instead of Barbara in the whistling sequence? Would prefer a continuing character here if we can find a way to avoid her brain being washed clear of all intelligence.”

Fontana, who was tasked to write the next draft of the script, changed the whistling character to Uhura, but Justman had a problem with the scene. From his June 1, 1967 memo to Gene Coon he said, “I find it awkward for Uhura to be whistling because she is happy in Scenes 41 and 42. This is odd behavior for anyone in a situation such as we have developed. After all, the little machine has demonstrated to her that it has enormous destructive capabilities.”

And finally, good or bad, the June 29, 1967 shooting script finds Uhura singing instead of whistling.

 

Keeping it a one-shot character who had their brain erased would've made a lot more sense. I can understand Roddenberry wanting it to be one of the show's recurring players, though. If you're paying for them, you might as well use them. But having the brain erasure thing be so easily undone killed the drama of it.

But HELL YES to D.C. Fontana for protesting the cliched use of Yeomen just delivering coffee to the men on the bridge!

 

...Especially considering that "Roddenberry's own" pilot episode had the main character pointing out that it was pretty damn unusual to have a woman in said job. Delivering scalding hot coffee is a job for wholesome lads who don't easily faint from the alluring aroma!

Timo Saloniemi

 

They dealt in big ideas in Star Trek. The idea that such an enormous thing could happen to a regular, that it wasn't magically undone, and dealt with in a real world way, added a lot of imaginative punch to the episode. They took on big jobs, and accomplished them. Anything far fetched could be justified by the unimaginably advanced methods they had.
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It seems to have been a surface layer of memory that was wiped. Anything learned early on was retained. Maybe their teaching was incredibly effective, or maybe backup memories gradually came back bit by bit. Or a combination of both.
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Episodes don't exist in their own separate realities. No one did wacky things with fictional reality like that back then. They only dealt with straightforward, consistent storytelling. That was the intent anyway... They fully intended that Uhura would be back and functional the next episode. We are supposed to be amazed at this. We are supposed to be in a constant state of amazement about what can be done centuries from now, not say "That's not possible!!!"

 

Yes it is weird to think she is missing from Turnabout Intruder the final episode isn't it? She isn't even in All Our Yesterdays either so unless you decide to use one of the BBC's weird orderings in which The Savage Curtain is the last episode, you're totally Uhuraless at the end of your viewings either way!!!
JB

 

It's interesting to see this in stardate order. I've worked on a project assigning Gregorian calendar dates to stardates (which I won't take the time to explain here, just take it as assumed for the sake of argument. I'll only point out that in this scheme, the Gregorian dates are the current time on Earth, though days can run for different speeds where the Enterprise is due to relativity effects.)

'The Changling" is set on stardate 3541, which I'll call 04 October 2268. The next episode is "Wolf in the Fold" on stardate 3614 25 days later, and Uhura is not present. No doubt her re-education was still in progress. Though the next episode in stardate 3619 "Obsession," almost two days later, where Uhura is on duty handling simple radio operator duties. The next episode is "The Apple" stardate 3715 (08 December 2268) and Uhura is nowhere to be found. The next episode is "Journey to Babel" stardate 3842 (20 January 2269) nearly four months after her encounter with Nomad. And here we do see her running through some pretty technical tasks while trying to figure out what would be learned was an Orion ship. It's still more a couple months later in "Bread and Circuses" stardate 4040 (28 March 2269) where we hear Uhura really talking about anything that matters to her personally, her evidently Christian faith. The next time we spend much time with Uhura is "The Slaver Weapon" stardate 4187 (16 May 2269) and she has a lot to say in this story. So from early October to the following mid-May is about 7 1/2 months. And bear in mind that given the closeness of "Wolf in the Fold" and "Obsession," we can assume that more time is passing for the Enterprise than on Earth, so this could have been a longer period for the crew, maybe eight months or more.

I rather like to think that Nomad's erasure of Uhura's mind was really a matter of disabling her ability to access memories, rather than wiping them out entirely. Her earliest language skills in Swahili are the easiest to recover, and then they focus on restoring her training in technical skills, first in speaking English and then moving through her college courses, to the point to where she can be put back on the job at least on a training basis to handle at least the simpler tasks within the month. These are the easiest parts of her mind to restore as they have all the training materials present, and in going through those lessons, they're reconnecting her ability to recall those things. But her personal life is much more difficult to restore. She's gone for months at a time, perhaps suggesting light duty on the bridge and spending a lot of time going through her personal effects trying to jog memories of her past. I can imagine Nurse Chapel spending a lot of time with her trying to bring up old memories like she later would do with the Ilia probe when trying to establish connections with that. Or possibly Uhura even went on leave for a while to spend time coping with this at some starbase or maybe arranged to spend some leave time with an old friend or family come from Earth. Perhaps by the following spring she was able to behave more or less like her old self, but inside she always wondered about her own youth and her personal thoughts that she never bothered to write down. Perhaps the restoration required something to jog those memories and without any artifact of them, she was never able to recover it all. Stuff like this really makes her a more interesting character in my opinion. This is the sort of thing that would probably effect her for the rest of her life, at least deep down.

--Alex

 

Don't forget we need to squeeze Mirror, Mirror into the timeline, and Uhura needs to be at the top of her game for that episode. I usually put it before JTB. YMMV.

 

There are a handful of episodes without stardates. Someday I'll take up this stardate project again, and slot those in where they fit based on contextual clues in those episodes. There are long stretches of several months at a time with no episodes in them, and other places where there are multiple episodes in a day, some of which can be accounted for by time dilation, and others could be accounted for by assuming Kirk is a wee bit dyslexic with numbers and sometimes transposes numerals. But I haven't taken the time to make any strong claims about those.

Maybe something I can do during this long world-wide shutdown we're doing right now.

--Alex

 

So, now you got me thinking about a window for "Mirror, Mirror" to fit in. My initial thoughts are that Dr. McCoy "spilled acid there a year ago" and he would seem to have come aboard in September 2266, in the week or so between WNMHGB and "Mudd's Women." Which places an earliest date for "Mirror, Mirror" in September 2267 (a year after he came aboard assuming he spilled that acid on day one) in the stardate 2400 area--well before "The Changling" ever happens. This happens to be a several month stretch where no actual episodes happen, so it'd be easy to fit in there.

Part of why I like my stardate formula is that it puts the end of the series in agreement with the line in Voyager where we get an explicit date of 2270 for the end of the five-year mission. I have the last episode as "All Our Yesterdays" on stardate 5943 (07 December 2270) which fits the bill nicely. So "Mirror, Mirror" could have taken place at any point between stardate 2400 and, let's say, 5920. Lots of room to slot that in and not interfere with Uhura's Nomad-recovery.

--Alex

 

I confuse the stardate situation even further by identifying several episodes to occur before the stardate given in the log based on the future knowledge of the events or other content. Such as in The Man Trap:

At that time in the episode, Kirk had no idea that the men were seeing different Nancy Craters, so, this log entry must have been added to the "mission report" after the events. This convenience allows me to move some episodes back in time a little and fit them in stardate gaps if needed.

Even when two episodes overlap (as with The Corbomite Maneuver and The Man Trap), I assume Kirk is recording the previous mission report in an offscreen moment during the middle of the next mission event. After all, we see Kirk working from his desk in his quarters. Working on what? Probably on his most previous mission report(s) while they are still fresh in his brain. YMMV .

 

This is a brilliant justification that never occurred to me. I'll definitely be applying this idea to my own timeline project.

Thanks!

--Alex

 

Here's my repost of my Stardate rules:

 

Personally, I think the fact that we get (IIRC) one scene of Uhura's recovery where it's stated that she'll be restored to normal and back on duty inside of a week means that it was more or less magically undone. After all, it's not like the show ever referred to Uhura ever having any other difficulties with the aftereffects of Nomad's mind probe. In the grand scheme of things, it might as well have never even happened.

Do you happen to have your Chronology online anywhere, @Albertese? I'd be very interested in seeing it.

 

How droll! Of course, you are entirely correct. In a world of mid-century syndicated television production, everything has to reset so the networks can air reruns in any sequence they want to. However, I prefer to arrange an elaborate head canon where the characters are impacted by their experiences. I prefer a world of Consequence. And it makes the episodes much richer to imagine these characters dealing with the previous episodes still. Watch "This Side of Paradise" where Spock is enjoying the company of a former suitor and realize that this is less than a month since his divorce of T'Pring in "Amok Time." How much of his behavior was just the spores?

But YMMV of course.

Not as yet. It's definitely a work in progress at this stage, though if I ever do finish it I intend to release it as an alternative to the Okuda chronology. I'll probably do it here on TrekBBS. This thread is certainly making me want to dust that stuff off, though.

@Henoch I like those stardate rules. The only big difference I have in mine is that a stardate is an eight hour shift on Earth, since Earth is where the HQ is. It's a standard timekeeping units which all ship's use in synchronicity, so that even with running slower or faster according to a given ship's current time dilation, ships are able to easily coordinate actions and schedules. So there are three stardates per calendar day and 1000 stardates equals something over eleven months. So nearly a year but not quite. But the experience of how long a stardate is while crewing a ship will change from day to day thanks to relativistic effects.

--Alex

 

Sounds interesting! So if I'm understanding you correctly, it sounds like you're creating your own episode order based on evolving characterizations, rather than going by airdate, production order, or Stardate order?

I'm trying to do something similarly characterization-based in my Star Trek Timeline, but I'm trying to work the characterization in around the episodes' production order. For instance, in my headcanon, Dr. McCoy requested Vulcan specialist Dr. M'Benga after he was caught woefully unprepared for Ambassador Sarek's medical emergency in "Journey to Babel," and M'Benga arrived aboard just in time to treat Spock's critical injury in "A Private Little War." It seemed like a natural conclusion when I realized that those episodes occurred right after each other in the second season. Like you, I view mine as a sort of supplement or alternative to the Okuda timeline.

Maybe I'll start up a regular thread here on the BBS where I can discuss the various questions that come up on my timeline. I'm always up for interesting ideas that I can incorporate.

 

It's always interesting to view another ordering of episodes I believe as just following them in the same order time and time again is just boring!
JB

 

Well, not quite. Stardate order is the main factor, though where there's room for flexibly characterization is definitely a factor.

--Alex

 

I gave up on Stardate order pretty quickly when I saw that "Amok Time" took place on Stardate 3372.7 and the next episode that came up in Stardate order was "This Side of Paradise" on Stardate 3417.3. Since both of those episodes depend upon "Why is Spock acting so emotional?" as story hooks, I decided it was best to keep them as far apart as possible. And since the precise numbers were fairly arbitrary, I thought it was kind of silly to have them determine the episode order.