History WMG / StarTrekIVTheVoyageHome

Think about Earth, the capital of the Federation and Starfleet Headquarters got [=EMPed=] planetwide over a sustained period of time. ALL DATA would be lost. All backups would be fried. The entirety of human digital knowledge LOST. All Starfleet records LOST. The entirety of information stored for the President and the Federation Council, LOST. In addition we have seen how much every freaking thing in the future uses computers...in Star Trek II even the boseman's whistle had little lights on it. So after the Whale Probe Incident every...single...piece...of technology on Earth. From starships, to fusion reactors, to artificial hearts to your hand held communicator, every single piece would need a hard re-boot and an installation of the operating system. Never mind there would be NO back up copies on Earth anywhere. Sure there would be back ups on other major worlds, but Earth was the central hub of the Federation. All over the Federation secured systems would be waiting for verification code updates that would never come, shutting down vital systems across the Federation. No doubt when they tried to re-integrate data from the various other d-bases around the federation they would find ALL SORTS of data drift. It would take the Federation a decade to get back on it's informational feet.

* The official investigation would determine that the most likely scenario is that Gillian Taylor was DrivenToSuicide due to the loss of the thing she'd dedicated most of her adult life to, noting her lack of any support system as well as the fact that her car was found in proximity to a known suicide spot (the Golden Gate Bridge). They would conclude that the woman involved in the hospital escape was just someone who ''looked'' like Gillian, with the witness' memories potentially being affected by the coverage of Gillian's disappearance and security cameras of the era being too low-quality to prove otherwise; the trash collectors' accounts, meanwhile, would be dismissed as a hoax designed to capitalize on the well-publicized Taylor disappearance. But Internet sleuths would be skeptical, finding it hard to believe that this really was no more than a series of coincidences and noting that there's no proof Taylor is dead [[NeverFoundTheBody no one ever found a body]], and would continue trying to fit the pieces together.

As mentioned on the [[Trivia/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries TOS Trivia page]] under UnderminedByReality, this is the first time the "moneyless future" concept appears in Star Trek, and it doesn't seem to jibe with some episodes of the series that did depict the use of money. So when Kirk says that they don't have money in the future, what he means is that what they use wouldn't have any value or wouldn't be accessible in 1986. (Similar to what would happen if you took a modern credit card back 300 years.)

[[WMG: George and Gracie themselves are aliens, the Whale Probe is from their home planet and came to Earth because the crew went back in time and got them]].]]

Think about Earth, the capital of the Federation and Starfleet Headquarters got EMPed planetwide over a sustained period of time. ALL DATA would be lost. All backups would be fried. The entirety of human digital knowledge LOST. All Starfleet records LOST. The entirety of information stored for the President and the Federation Council, LOST. In addition we have seen how much every freaking thing in the future uses computers...in Star Trek II even the boseman's whistle had little lights on it. So after the Whale Probe Incident every...single...piece...of technology on Earth. From starships, to fusion reactors, to artificial hearts to your hand held communicator, every single piece would need a hard re-boot and an installation of the operating system. Never mind there would be NO back up copies on Earth anywhere. Sure there would be back ups on other major worlds, but Earth was the central hub of the Federation. All over the Federation secured systems would be waiting for verification code updates that would never come, shutting down vital systems across the Federation. No doubt when they tried to re-integrate data from the various other d-bases around the federation they would find ALL SORTS of data drift. It would take the Federation a decade to get back on it's informational feet.

...is a long and painful story. First, she was a proud housewife [[Series/SeventhHeaven named Annie, married to a preacher with seven children.]] When he was [[ActorAllusion outted as a massive creep however,]] she divorced him; by this point, all the children had left the nest. While exiting the courtroom, Annie fell through a temporal sinkhole and found herself ten years earlier, in the 1980s, de-aged to that point in time. Since she'd had her first few children in the '80s, the age-reversal recreated her pregnancy, basically cloning her first son. Viewing this new child as his own individual, she named him [[Franchise/ChildsPlay Andy. After a run-in with a killer Cabbage Patch doll, Annie was committed to an asylum.]] However, the asylum allowed her to work at the aquarium, and live a relatively normal life; she just couldn't have custody of her son. Figuring she'd failed all of her children, Annie--now living under the name Gillian--devoted herself to the whales. The 23rd Century offered the perfect escape from killer dolls, pedo husbands, and an unsympathetic society.

Or maybe he was just trying to stick Gillian with the check.

The USS Hood is another refitted constitution class ship just like the Enterprise, and is mentioned in the film as having been disabled by the Whale Probe. It stretches credulity for Starfleet to build a new ship of the same type if the line is being mothballed, but makes perfect sense to just re-christen the Hood to serve as Kirk’s ship for his last few months before retirement. It also explains why the ship is in such poor shape in ''Film/StarTrekVTheFinalFrontier'', as the ship is still being fixed after the Probe did a number on it. This theory makes perfect sense considering a brand new Excelsior class Enterprise B gets rolled out just months after the events of the Kitomer conference in ''Film/StarTrekVITheUndiscoveredCountry'' as seen in the opening of StarTrekGenerations.

The USS Hood is another refitted constitution class ship just like the Enterprise, and is mentioned in the film as having been disabled by the Whale Probe. It stretches credulity for Starfleet to build a new ship of the same type if the line is being mothballed, but makes perfect sense to just re-christen the Hood to serve as Kirk’s ship for his last few months before retirement. It also explains why the ship is in such poor shape in ''Film/StarTrekVTheFinalFrontier'', as the ship is still being fixed after the Probe did a number on it. This theory makes perfect sense considering a brand new Excelsior class Enterprise B gets rolled out just months after the events of the Kitomer conference in StarTrekVITheUndiscoveredCountry as seen in the opening of StarTrekGenerations.

The USS Hood is another refitted constitution class ship just like the Enterprise, and is mentioned in the film as having been disabled by the Whale Probe. It stretches credulity for Starfleet to build a new ship of the same type if the line is being mothballed, but makes perfect sense to just re-christen the Hood to serve as Kirk’s ship for his last few months before retirement. It also explains why the ship is in such poor shape in StarTrekVTheFinalFrontier, as the ship is still being fixed after the Probe did a number on it. This theory makes perfect sense considering a brand new Excelsior class Enterprise B gets rolled out just months after the events of the Kitomer conference in StarTrekVITheUndiscoveredCountry as seen in the opening of StarTrekGenerations.

...is because it was under construction during the previous two movies. In StarTrekIIITheSearchForSpock, it's mentioned that the TOS-Era Enterprise is 20 years old and is slated to be decommissioned. However, the Enterprise-A was already under construction as an upgraded model.