re: Star Trek: TOS Watchers - S2 - Return to Tomorrow *Page 14*

quote:

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Uhura speaks Swahili and English, and Nomad wipes her memory clean so that she can't talk at all.

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I think it is understood that "wiped clean" wasn't exactly absolute. She had her higher order functions scrambled a bit and required retraining to recover their use. However, I do not believe it is canon that she started over from scratch there from a memory standpoint.

It was to differentiate between a mental "death" and a "physical" death - the first (Uhura) of which nomad couldn't fix and the second (Scotty) which he could. He said there was no damage to Uhura - had he "damaged" her, he could have fixed it.

At least that is the way I've always interpreted it. As she had known Swahili longer, she recovered that before English - makes sense.