20 Things You Didn't Know About Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)
11. The Ilia Probe Was Originally Named Tasha—A Name Gene Roddenberry Reused Later
In the October 10, 1977 draft of "In Thy Image" (back when the story was being developed under that title as a TV movie), when the V’ger probe first appears, “it resembles a ring, with a large pearl-like object on the top...it walks on three slender legs.”
“It looks like the pearl ring my Aunt Tasha got from her fourth husband,” remarks Chekov. The name sticks and the crew begins referring to the probe as Tasha. This continues when Illia is abducted and the probe returns using her form.
Although Chekov’s explanation was eventually dropped, the name remained all the way through the shooting script dated July 19, 1978, which indicates that V’ger’s probe makes a hiss that sounds like “Tschaa.” After it takes Ilia and returns using her form, Chekov remembers the sound the probe made, and decides to call it Tasha. The crew picks up on the name and so does the script. However, the name never ended up on screen, and by the time all the rewriting was complete, the probe was just called “Ilia” (with quotes) in the script. No reference to Tasha remains.
Not one to let a good name go to waste, however, Roddenberry named the chief of Security on Star Trek: The Next Generation Tasha Yar. This fits a pattern of reused names over the years in Roddenberry’s work. A character named “Questor” turns up in his unsold Police Story pilot from 1965 and then as the title character in his unsold “The Questor Tapes” pilot from 1974. “Tiberius” is the middle name of both James T. Kirk and William T. Rice from The Lieutenant, Roddenberry’s short-lived series from 1963-64.