Hmmm, I wouldn't think that it is correct behavior; I would think that *any* ndarray arising from pickling would have its .base attribute set to None.  If not, then who is really the one that owns the data? 

It was my understanding that .base should hold a reference to another ndarray that the data is really coming from, or it's None.  It certainly shouldn't be some random string, should it?

And yes, it is causing a problem for me, which is why I noticed it.  In my application, ndarrays can come from various sources, pickling being one of them.  Later in the app, I was wanting to resize the array, which you cannot do if the data is not really owned by that array...I had explicit check for myarray.base==None, which it is not when I get the ndarray from a pickle.