Uhura's memory wipe

When Nomad erased Uhura's mind did it wipe out every memory she ever had? If so, is the Uhura we see from this point onwards even the same person? How did she continue to function as an adult and as a Starfleet officer? Why did it have to be a female crew member who got picked on? Bastard synthetic son of a dustbuster.

 

I’m glad Curly wasn’t examined by Nomad....

 

I have to guess it turned to be more of a case of temporary amnesia, a really bad cast to be sure... but she got better. She never seemed to be appreciably affected (or different) afterwards.

 

Nor Scotty after being dead for a while. I guess Nomad had significant capabilities in manipulating life, but very little in the way of vocabulary to describe those in terms that, say, McCoy would agree with.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Honestly, Uhura's instant recovery doesn't really stand up to close examination. Best not to think about it too hard.

 

Of course, it is my belief that in any long running television series that is highly episodic and is not serialized or have story arcs, almost every single episode happens in an alternate universe of its own. The producers of the series would select tens or hundreds of interesting events to depict from among hundreds, thousand, and millions of alernate universes where the main characters are together in the same situation.

Thus it would be quite possible that not a single other episode is a sequel to "The Changling". So everytime that Uhura appeared and seemed to be unaffected by her experience, she might have been an alternate universe Uhura who had never met Nomad and was never affected by Nomad. Thus we might never have seen Uhura after Nomad worked on her meory except in a scene or two later during "The Changeling".

 

What!? No. That was never anyone's intention. Just accept that there are some occasional inconsistencies.

 

Nomad "absorbed" her memories of singing and music, and apparently all of her communication skills, too. I suspect all her other long term memories were mostly intact. Her re-education seemed to focus around her relearning to talk and read; i.e. communication skills.

 

In my view, Nomad was simply wrong. He assumed he wiped her memory, but his scan only suppressed it temporarily. Like when Jaeger assumed that Trelane's interior decor reflected a 900 year time lag. It didn't; Trelane moves his planet around at warp speed. Characters make mistakes, their declarations of fact look like continuity errors but really aren't.

 

Yep - Uhura seemed to speak Swahili quite well when Chapel was trying to teach her English... I have to suspect it wasn't a complete wipe.

 

That is an excellent point!

 

Scotty did interrupt Nomad during the scan (with bad result for Scotty to boot).

 

I like to think that all of Uhura's memories and experiences gradually came back to her not long after the business with Nomad was concluded and she was able to return to duty feeling like she just had one hell of a bender* for a few days.

*Not the Futurama Bender.

 

In my mind Nomad didn't wipe out Uhura's memories, it just blocked them for a bit. Once the proper connections were made, her synapses re-fired and she got all of her old memories back. I know that's not what was said or implied by the episode, but that's the only way it makes any sense to me.

Besides, if she could really be re-trained for all of her duties in just a couple of weeks, then Starfleet Academy seems like an awfully big waste of time.

 

Nomad being wrong about stuff is sort of central to the episode. And part of it being wrong is that it does one thing and says another, a symptom of it being a merger of two disparate machines. It getting Uhura's amnesia wrong is only to be expected, and a trivial rationalization for how Uhura regains her memories.

Interior decor? Trelane's castle was 900 year old all right!

The decor should not have been a factor; Jaeger would have already spotted the stuffed space alien and all, dismissing it as fundamentally anachronistic.

Indeed, Spock's ignorance of the World Wars is a frequent source of amusement among his human colleagues.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Long term memories are chemically encoded and are accessed through chemically transmitted bio-electrical activity. From what we saw, Nomad must have hived off Uhura's memories. Chapel is a talented bio-medical researcher. When the initial re-education process demonstrated that stimulation helped re-forge existing links, she no doubt developed more intense therapies using Uhura's last transporter records, cranial stimulation, and stem cell therapy using phages to pass the blood brain barrier (assuming that transporters can't do the job).

 

I’d like to borrow Nomad for an hour so he could wipe my bosses’ memory clean. Then I could retrain him....”I am now your King. You are my lowly, worthless servant. You will grovel at my feet.”

 

Neither of us was a staff writer on Star Trek or any other television series in that era. So none of us has any personal knowledge of the intentions of any television writers of that era. We can only deduce their intentions from what they wrote.

Maverick was made from 1957 to 1962. My thread "Some Maverick Chronology"

https://moviechat.org/tt0050037/Maverick/5c943dd3be89fc07f659a340/Some-Maverick-Chronology

Shows that Maverick episodes do not always happen in chronological order.

My thread "The Travelling Salesman Problem"

https://moviechat.org/tt0050037/Maverick/5ca5301fe31e89655fc51074/The-Traveling-Salesman-Problem

Asks whether the Mavericks could travel to all the places in the west (and some outside the west) that they traveled to in various episodes during a span of years short enough for their appearance to not age much more than it did.

As I say: "But if all the Maverick episodes happen one after another in the same alternate universe there might not be enough time for each Maverick to travel his total travel distance while aging few enough years to be consistent with his appearance in the show."

So either the producers and head writers of Maverick indended for each and every episodes, except for a few which were clearly sequels to others, to be a standalone story, something which might happen to one of the brothers and thus does happen to him in one alternate universe out of millions, or else they intended that all the episodes happen one after another in one single alternate universe, but failed to actually create a series in which the episodes actually do happen one after the other in the same alternate universe.

And it seems to me that it doesn't matter what type of show the creators intended to be, it only matters what type of series they succeeded in creating. Since it seems impossible for all episodes to happen one after the other in one single alternate universes, it seems to me that we should consider Maverick to happen in many different alternate universes.

In my post "Chronology of Tales of Wells Fargo"

https://moviechat.org/tt0050066/Tal...376a618be4/Chronology-of-Tales-of-Wells-Fargo

I demonstrate that Tales of Wells Fargo (1957-1962) episodes were not broadcast in fictional chronological order if events happen when they were possible in real history. Some episodes happen years or decades earlier than episodes from previous seasons.

Stories of the Century (1954-55) is a similar series, except that all of the outlaws railroad detective Matt Clark fought were famous outlaws.

in my post:

https://moviechat.org/tt0046647/Sto...6a618c8b/Chronology-of-Stories-of-the-Century

I note that detective Matt Clark's crime fighting career seems to span six decades, and that he seems to hop years or decades forward or backwards in time between episodes.

Have Gun- Will Travel (1957-1963) was one of the best shows of its era. I read somewhere that there is some inconsistency in its chronology, that Custer's Last Stand (June 25, 1876) was mentioned in one episode and that Custer was mentioned as alive in a later episode. If so, that would indicate that episodes do not necessarily happen in the order that they were filmed or broadcast.

So some television shows in the 1950s and 1960s did not didn't always make or broadcast their episodes in the order of their fictional dates, but instead sometimes jumped forward or backwards in time between episodes. If the creators of TOS came from backgrounds in making television shows in the 1950s and 1960s, they might either be fine with making episodes out of their fictional order, or else want to make episodes in fictional order but be really bad at doing so.

So one common assumption that many people make about Star Trek in general, and TOS in particular, that episodes were made and/or broadcast, in fictional order, is rather suspect, since there are examples of television shows where episodes were made and/or broadcast out of fictional order.

And it seems to me that the assumptions that the creators of TOS intended all the episodes to happen in some order in the same alternate universe, and the assumption that the creators of TOS succeeded in making a series where it is possible for all of the episodes to happen in some order in the same alternate universes, are also quite suspect.

There is considerable evidence that the creators Star Trek in general, and TOS in particular, failed to create a fictional universe where the episodes all happen in the same alternate universe, whether or not they intended and tried to do so. In my opinion, it is impossible for all TOS episodes to happen in the same alternate universe, and therefore any desire or intention that the creators may have had to that effect is irrelevant.

 

You must've been watching a different version of TOS than I did.

Gosh, if only people connected with the show had given some interviews over the decades, so we had some idea of what their intentions were! Or perhaps written some books about their time working on the show. Something, anything to give us poor, ignorant souls in 2020 some idea as to what their intentions might possibly have been. It's such a loss to history that there exists no documentation at all on the creation of Star Trek.

 

Maybe they put Uhura through the transporter and it restored her memories like every other time that they lost something and couldn't cure because it held a molecular print of their pattern from another time?
JB