as small as a world and as large as alone, UHURA: Contact broken, sir. KIRK: Re-establish....

2:21am July 27, 2015

UHURA: Contact broken, sir.

KIRK: Re-establish.

UHURA: I’m sorry, sir.

KIRK: I’m not interested in your excuses, Lieutenant. Re-establish contact with that transmitter.

UHURA: I’m afraid that’s impossible at the moment, Captain. They stopped broadcasting immediately. They do not acknowledge my contact signal.

KIRK: Keep trying to raise them..

UHURA: Yes, sir.

Can I say I absolutely love the steeliness in Uhura’s voice and body when she stands up to Kirk’s arrogant demanding belittling attitude?

It’s little moments like this that keep me coming back to Star Trek, and particularly the original series. There’s all these tiny things that people miss, that are really cool.

(Such as the line Uhura ad libbed when Sulu (while intoxicated by some kind of thing that was never fully explained in The Naked Time) grabbed her and called her a “fair maiden” – she said “Sorry, neither” and pushed away as hard as she could. Apparently they could get away with leaving stuff like that in if it was ad libbed, but not if it was in the script.)

Oh if it’s not obvious, Uhura has always been my favorite character in the original Star Trek or any Star Trek for that matter, ever since I was a little kid. I used to study languages because of her, I thought I wanted to be a communications officer like her and that a communications officer would have to be good at foreign languages. Unfortunately I sucked (and continue to suck) at most aspects of foreign languages, but it didn’t stop me from trying over and over again to learn them. Unfortunately my abilities with languages were and remain too uneven to achieve fluency in anything but English, although I have the ability to read some amount of languages I’ve never even seen before, because of my ability to make connections between word roots and things like that. But again, not enough for fluency – I have a couple of amazing language skills in a couple of isolated areas, but mostly a lot of terrible ones. I would not be able to do her job for so many different reasons, but there was a time I sure wanted to.

Oh and these screenshots are from Operation: Annihilate (season 1 episode 30). And I still totally love her standing up to him when he’s being a jerk. I notice she always pushes back. I also notice that even in scenes and entire episodes where she has no lines, she’s always there in the background, acting as much as she can, reacting to everything around her, refusing to just be stuck in a corner even if that’s what the script would rather her do. And I love it.

When I had a Star Trek poster in my room, I made sure it had her on it. I didn’t care who else was on it. I’ve recently ordered myself an Uhura figurine to stick next to my Fiona (from Shrek) figurine as characters I really, really like and look up to. Sometimes little objects like that are more meaningful than they look, even if they were created as toys or merchandise for someone to make money off of fans.