The mysterious disappearing Dr Gillian Taylor

[T'Cal]

I am Capt. T'Cal of Starfleet's Temporal Investigations Unit. The communicator became the cell phone and the phaser was fashioned into the Taser. These modern devices would've been delayed substantially if their Klingon precursors hadn't been reversed engineered by the CIA's Section 31 in the mid 1980s. Of course, you must tell no one about what I've just told you. Here, look at this pen in my hand and watch as I press this button....<flash>

Did you see that weather baloon??

 

[Christopher]

I am Capt. T'Cal of Starfleet's Temporal Investigations Unit. The communicator became the cell phone and the phaser was fashioned into the Taser.

Gee, that's a neat trick, considering that TVH was in 1986, the first mobile phone network was introduced in 1978, and the first Taser went on the market in 1974. Was there some additional time travel involved...?

 

[cultcross]

Did you see that weather baloon??

 

[ClayinCA]

I am Capt. T'Cal of Starfleet's Temporal Investigations Unit. The communicator became the cell phone and the phaser was fashioned into the Taser.

Gee, that's a neat trick, considering that TVH was in 1986, the first mobile phone network was introduced in 1978, and the first Taser went on the market in 1974. Was there some additional time travel involved...?

Maybe the captured Klingon devices enabled those already-existing technologies to be improved and updated more quickly than they otherwise would have been...?

I dunno, I'm just reaching....

 

[Nerys Myk]

Last time I was her she was in the company of a couple of hippy types. Maybe cult members or something.

 

[MarianLH]

I heard she settled down with Decker and started a family.


Marian

 

[ClayinCA]

she encountered Will Decker and traveled back in time to the 20th century to have a bunch of kids and a corny tv show.

I heard she settled down with Decker and started a family.

Zenophite, meet Marian. Marian, Zenophite.

 

[MarianLH]

He's on my ignore list.


Marian

 

[Peach Wookiee]

Oh! In the alternate universe, she was a case on Unsolved Mysteries!

 

[Solariabsg25]

And those Klingon weapons didn't even work anyway. Either Chekov was right, and the radiation on the carrier was interfering with them, or the weapons had simply run out of power. At any rate, 20th century military would probably not be able to do anything with them.

What? Even without power, the circuitry would still be intact and could be studied and reverse-engineered. Even if they couldn't make exact duplicates of those devices, simply studying 23rd-century alien electronics would lead to countless technological breakthroughs. Send a car back in time to Benjamin Franklin, and even if it didn't have gas or a battery, he could figure out the basic principles of the internal combustion engine by taking the thing apart.

Actually, in Greg Cox's Eugenics Wars novels, Gary Seven and Roberta Lincoln retrieved the Klingon devices before the military could study them.

Also depends on the attitude. The feds were already treating Chekov like "some kind of retard" playing with a toy ray-gun. As they never saw anything work, they probably just got dumped in an evidence box somewhere, and were never seen again.

Had Chekov actually stunned anyone, then those things, if recovered would've been whisked off to a secret government facility faster than you can say "Area 51"!

 

[Christopher]

^^A fair point.

 

[Timewalker]

And since the Enterprise crew returned to the same timeline they left, obviously that's exactly what happened.

Who said they returned to their correct timeline? All we saw was the Golden Gate Bridge-and that was there in Gillian's time.

This would explain why the rest of the Trek movies were so crappy.

 

[Gil T.Azell]

Was she not mentioned in 'Probe' as being on a science vessel somewhere?

 

[Christopher]

Was she not mentioned in 'Probe' as being on a science vessel somewhere?

There have been a few mentions of that in various works. Oddly, people seem to interpret the line in ST IV about the science vessel to mean that she was posted to a spaceship. That doesn't make any sense to me. How is an oceanographer from the 1980s remotely qualified to serve in space? And why send the world's only living humpback whale expert out into space rather than keeping her around to take care of the world's only living humpback whales? I think the "science vessel" mentioned in the movie was clearly intended to be a seagoing vessel assigned to study George and Gracie.

 

[Solariabsg25]

Was she not mentioned in 'Probe' as being on a science vessel somewhere?

There have been a few mentions of that in various works. Oddly, people seem to interpret the line in ST IV about the science vessel to mean that she was posted to a spaceship. That doesn't make any sense to me. How is an oceanographer from the 1980s remotely qualified to serve in space? And why send the world's only living humpback whale expert out into space rather than keeping her around to take care of the world's only living humpback whales? I think the "science vessel" mentioned in the movie was clearly intended to be a seagoing vessel assigned to study George and Gracie.

Though not canon, the FASA Star Trek RPG actually states that she is assigned to a seaborne science vessel (can't remember all the details but IIRC they had an adventure that dealt with Klingon agents trying to kidnap her so they could try to figure out what the whales had said to the probe).

In-universe though, I feel that explaination makes the most sense. As she says in the movie, who in their century knows about whales?

 

[cardinal biggles]

Did they ever actually say that all whales were extinct in the 23rd century, or just the humpbacks, which were specifically needed to respond to the probe? If the latter is the case, Gillian would still be needed to help educate the 23rd century cetacean experts.

 

[Peach Wookiee]

I think the movie implied that humpbacks were definitely extinct, not all whales.

 

[MeanJoePhaser]

"Maybe Dr Gillian Taylor isn't out there, Bones. Maybe she's in here. The human heart."