Star Trek and History (7 page)

Similarly, Lt. Uhura is absent from most of
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
(1984). She participates in the crew's rebellious attempt to rescue Spock but, in doing so, she vanishes from most of the movie. Acting in cahoots with the rest of the crew, Uhura commandeers a transporter, locking an adventure-hungry technician in a closet at phaser point with the memorable line, “Be careful what you wish for.” She then beams Kirk, McCoy, Sulu, and Scotty aboard the
Enterprise
, agreeing to meet them later. The movie's central adventure proceeds with only the male cast members and the female Vulcan, Saavik. In the film's final scenes, Uhura reappears on Vulcan.

While the motion pictures were being produced, the character of Lt. Uhura also developed through
Star Trek
novels. Beginning in 1967, Paramount allowed publishing houses, including first Bantam Books and later Ballantine Books, to develop novels based on the
Star Trek
original series and the animated series. The novels sometimes developed plots and characters in ways different from canonical
Star Trek.
In particular,
Uhura's Song
(1985) by Janet Kagan, part of the
Star Trek
book series developed by Pocket Books after 1979, explored Uhura's complexity, giving her a central role in the book's action. When a planet of feline aliens suffers from a fatal AIDS-like illness, Uhura's close friendship with one of them provides the key to helping them. The friends bond over their shared love of music, communicated thanks to Uhura's fluency in the alien language. The character traits suggested in Kagan's novel shaped depictions of the character in later novels and films.
19

The fourth motion picture,
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
(1986), showed some of that development: Lt. Uhura finally exhibited more complex skills. When the
Enterprise
crew approaches Earth, Uhura picks up “multiphasic communications, overlapping; it's almost a gibberish.” Among the signals, she detects the distress call outlining the threat: an alien probe unwittingly disabling starships and damaging the planet with transmissions directed into Earth's oceans. Uhura modifies the transmissions, revealing how they would sound underwater: whale songs. Although the character remains underused throughout the whale's rescue, Uhura does accompany Chekov on a mission to steal nuclear materials from the twentieth-century aircraft carrier USS
Enterprise.

The development of Uhura as a supporting character was not a linear progression toward a fully rationalized role, however. Although ideas from the
Star Trek
tie-in novels appeared in
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
(1989), the overall portrayal of Lt. Uhura was mixed. In this movie, viewers saw the first on-screen suggestions of a romantic relationship between Uhura and chief engineer Montgomery Scott. When Uhura joins Scotty on the bridge as he repairs the
Enterprise-A
, she delivers his dinner with an intimate caress of his cheek. But the relationship was not developed in the movie, and there was only one other subsequent hint of their romance. Uhura's leadership opportunities were also spotty. Uhura answers Starfleet's calls and reassembles the crew from shore leave to rescue the hostages taken on Nimbus III. But a subsequent scene contains an odd mix of Uhura's talents and sexuality. As a distraction, once on the planet, Uhura acts as a siren, singing from a ridgetop while performing a fan dance. Uhura is the center of the action, although in an entirely physical, sexualized context. In the aftermath, Uhura is once again out of the action as the male leads engage in a firefight. Throughout the film, the character's portrayal continues this mix of skills and weakness. Although Uhura pilots one of the shuttlecraft to the surface during the hostage rescue attempt, she also falls under the spell of Sybok, the empathic Vulcan Svengali hijacking the
Enterprise.
By the film's conclusion, the character is once again in the background, out of the action.

As the real-life United States confronted the Cold War's end—and the Soviet Union's demise—the
Star Trek
crew faced the end of the Klingon Empire in
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
(1991). Uhura's supporting role continued to be limited, although with flashes of more developed talents. When the crew gets called into a classified briefing about the Klingons' plight, Uhura offers a hint of how her offscreen responsibilities had grown, complaining, “This had better be good. I'm supposed to be chairing a seminar at the Academy.” But for the rest of the film, other than a comical scene in which the crew pores through thick texts to communicate in Klingon, Uhura is relegated to the sidelines once again. The fullest development of the character would come when the franchise was revived in 2009.

When J.J. Abrams's film reinvigorated
Star Trek
in 2009, Lt. Uhura (as portrayed by Zoe Saldana) took on the traits suggested in the novelizations and motion pictures. Although inspired by the original
Star Trek
series, rather than remaining in the background (or on the
Enterprise
) opening and closing communications, Lt. Uhura in the 2009 film serves as a central character, appearing throughout the film, participating in key plot developments, and facilitating the emotional development of the other main characters. After her introduction in the bar, Lt. Uhura's physical attractiveness initially seems to be a central trait. As Kirk hides out under the bed of Uhura's amorous Orion roommate in her Starfleet Academy dorm room, Uhura unknowingly begins to undress in front of him. But the scene ultimately serves not only to highlight Uhura's body but also to reveal that she had just detected an anomalous transmission from a Klingon prison planet. That transmission would prove to be essential to unraveling the mystery at the center of the film's plot. Uhura appears as a dedicated and talented officer, spending extra time at her post, ultimately to the benefit of all on board the
Enterprise.

The reenvisioned Uhura portrayed by Saldana reflects a more well-rounded characterization, exhibiting attitude and spunk as well as intelligence and dedication. During Kirk's underhanded attempt to override the doomed Kobayashi Maru simulation (a “no-win” scenario intended to teach cadets to manage fear in the face of defeat, which Kirk reprograms in order to win), Uhura rolls her eyes at Kirk's brashness. Sarcasm creeps into her voice as she answers his request to be called “Captain.” Moreover, later in the film, when a distress signal from the planet Vulcan requires that all cadets be assigned immediately to starships for emergency service, Uhura disputes her initial assignment vigorously. Assertive and direct, she marches over to Spock, demanding an explanation, “Was I not one of your top students? And, did I not, on multiple occasions, demonstrate
exceptional
oral sensitivity? And, I quote, ‘an unparalleled ability to identify sonic anomalies in subspace transmission tests'?” In answer to Spock's assertion that her starship assignment to the USS
Farragut
was “an attempt to avoid the appearance of favoritism,” Uhura declares, “No, I am assigned to the
Enterprise.
” Spock quickly acquiesces.

The viewer later learns that Uhura was not only one of Spock's top students but is also engaged in a romantic relationship with him. This unexpected revelation upended
Star Trek
fans' expectations that Spock would be emotionally aloof and isolated from the other crew members while Kirk's character would have love interests (and sexual conquests). More important, however, it offered the strongest evidence of just how much the Uhura character had developed. The depiction of Lt. Uhura in the 2009 film demonstrated that a powerful female character could be depicted with a love interest without reducing her to being “just” the love interest—something that
Trek
fans and feminist scholars had suggested, as recently as the late 1990s, might not be possible.

In her feminist analysis of space and science fiction,
NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America
(1997), scholar Constance Penley analyzed the fan fiction practice of “slash fiction” as a way of creating a “safe space” for women's interests in the
Star Trek
universe. In such erotic stories, the traditionally heterosexual male leads, in this case Kirk and Spock, are rewritten as homosexual lovers. Because the heterosexual relationships in the original series between, for instance, Captain Kirk and the love-interest-of-the-week relied on flat, underdeveloped, overly sexualized, and often objectified female characters, Penley argues, slash writers, who were overwhelmingly women, created new stories more pleasing to their own interests by drawing out the homoromantic relationship between the leads. Rather than creating original female characters, Penley argued, slash fiction writers eliminated male-female relationships to remove the heterosexual tension that otherwise dominated the series, leaving more room to explore the issues that slash writers found interesting.
20

And yet, with Lt. Uhura in 2009,
Star Trek
finally included a fully realized female character who could be in a romantic relationship without being overshadowed, defined, or otherwise reduced by it. In fact, Uhura acts as the emotional lead in the couple. When Spock retreats from the bridge to the turbolift after the planet Vulcan has been destroyed, killing almost all Vulcans (including Spock's mother), Uhura follows him and, after the turbolift doors close, embraces him. As he stands impassively (he is a Vulcan, after all), she cradles his head in her hands and whispers over and over, “I'm sorry.” She tries to draw him out, asking, “What do you need from me?” When he answers, in typical Vulcan fashion, “I need everyone to continue performing admirably,” she tips her head and nods, understanding his limits. Uhura's departing kiss reveals Spock's willingness to be intimate.

Rather than overwhelming the female character, the romantic relationship enhances the depiction of Lt. Uhura. It is only during an intimate moment between the couple, as Spock prepares to transport off the
Enterprise
for a risky rescue mission, that the audience hears Uhura's first name, Nyota, spoken for the first time. During that scene, Lt. Uhura's flat catchphrase from the 1960s, “Hailing frequencies open,” becomes a deeper promise to Spock, “I'll be monitoring your frequency.” A passionate kiss ends their good-byes. As Uhura leaves the transport room, the other male characters exchange looks: Spock's relationship with the tall, beautiful, and intelligent officer has raised his standing in their eyes.

Throughout the rest of the film's denouement, Uhura is present on the bridge, acting as the ship's communications officer, having been elevated to that position at the beginning of the film because of her extraordinary language skills, including the ability to distinguish Romulan from Vulcan. In the 2009 film, not only has the character of Lt. Uhura been allowed to develop as a professional, making real contributions to the starship's command team through hard-won expertise and language skills, but she is also presented as a three-dimensional female character, one permitted to exhibit the greater range befitting a woman with romantic interests, strong opinions, and emotional depth.

Lt. Uhura represents an essential part of the mixed-sex, racially integrated, international space crew depicted in the
Star Trek
franchise, a depiction that was not only innovative at the time but that also helped to change history. When Whoopi Goldberg saw Nichelle Nichols on the first
Star Trek
series, she was delighted to see an African American face depicted in the future. When Gene Roddenberry began work on
Next Generation
, Goldberg requested a role on the show (and was cast as Guinan) in tribute to Nichols's path-breaking role. Moreover, the astronaut corps recruited by NASA in the late 1970s owed at least part of its racial and gender diversity to Nichols and her fame as Lt. Uhura. The evolution of the Uhura character both reflected—and spurred—historical changes for women and people of color in postwar America.

Notes

1.
See Daniel Leonard Bernardi,
Star Trek and History: Raceing toward a White Future
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998); and De Witt Douglas Kilgore,
Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).

2.
Bernardi,
Star Trek and History
, 40–42, 80; interview with Nichelle Nichols by the author, National Air and Space Museum, Washington, DC, May 24, 2011 (hereinafter “Nichols interview, May 24, 2011”).

3.
Nichols interview, May 24, 2011.

4.
Although race definitions vary around the world, in the United States, the distinction between “white” and “nonwhite” had real consequences for people's lives. See Thomas F. Gossett,
Race: The History of an Idea in America
, Race and American Culture series, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); F. James Davis,
Who Is Black? One Nation
'
s Definition
, 10th anniversary ed. (State College: Penn State University Press, 2001). Women in Motion Public Relations, “Profile: Nichelle Nichols,” 1977, 2, Nichelle Nichols biographical file, 001594, NASA Historical Reference Collection, NASA Headquarters History Office, Washington, DC (hereinafter Nichols bio file, NASA HQ).

5.
Bernardi,
Star Trek and History
, 80.

6.
Alice Jackson, “Nichelle Nichols (Lt. Uhura) Wants to Make Science of Star Trek Reality,”
Sun-Herald
, June 4, 1977, n.p., Nichols bio file, NASA HQ.