Trivia / Star Trek S2 E3 "The Changeling"

• Contractual Immortality:
  • The crew finds a powerful computer machine called Nomad that believes itself to be perfect, though it mistakenly thinks Captain Kirk is its "Creator". At one point, Nomad erases all of Uhura's memories, prompting Scotty to intervene. Nomad zaps him, and Bones confirms He's Dead, Jim! Of course, we know that Scotty will survive not only because he is a regular cast member, but also because Nomad left his body completely intact; meanwhile, when Nomad kills the Red Shirts it simply vaporizes them. Kirk uses Nomad's belief that he is its Creator to get Nomad to "repair" Scotty, who is left none the worse for wear (at least physically). Scotty later gets one back on Nomad by being the one to beam the probe out into deep space for its self-destruction.
  • Although she did not die, Uhura's erased memories make an interesting version of this trope. We would expect Nomad to restore her memory, but it is either unwilling or unable to do so. Thus Uhura has to be re-educated completely from scratch, which would in reality take years and effectively write her out of any future episodes. Yet she is able to relearn everything by the end of the episode! The only way to avoid a Plot Hole is to assume that Nomad actually masked or repressed the memories, not erase them as it claimed — one more strike against its arrogant perceived perfection. This is further demonstrated by Uhura's intuitive grasp of Kiswahili that Nomad was unable to remove; either that, or they had a backup of Uhura's memories stored away somewhere (but it's simpler that she still had them the whole time).
• Deleted Scene: In the original script, Nomad says that he had not completely erased Uhura's memory, just her language.
• Recycled Script: The idea behind this episode was inspired by The Outer Limits (1963) episode "The Probe", which featured an alien automated probe which headed for Earth after apparently encountering one of our deep space exploration devices. In both cases, the probe nearly kills everyone because of its imperative to sterilize.
• Science Marches On: Kirk shows Nomad a map of Earth's solar system with nine planets. This was before the upgrade of Ceres, the downgrade of Pluto and the discovery of Eris.
• Wag the Director: Nichelle Nichols got into a dispute with director Marc Daniels over the filming of this episode. As it had already been established that Uhura's first language was Swahili, Nichols believed that, after her mind was erased, Uhura would revert to her first language. However, as Nichols herself did not speak Swahili, Daniels wanted Uhura to just speak English. Nichols refused to, telling Daniels, "Nichelle Nichols doesn't speak Swahili, but Uhura does!" Gene Roddenberry was eventually brought in to settle the dispute, and he sided with Nichols. A linguist specializing in Swahili was then brought in to write the few lines of Swahili that are spoken in the episode.

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