I absolutely loved this podcast. You all had great enthusiasm and wonderful observations. I especially enjoyed the thought that the Kirk-riding-his-motorcylce-across-the-Iowa-landscape scene was sensual. I’ve seen the movie (and the trailers in which the scene is featured) multiple times, and it never occurred to me quite what I liked about it. But you nailed it precisely. it is sensual. It does capture the very humidity of a summer morning in the midwest. Hardly what one expects in a Star Trek movie.
That said, I have to take exception with your caller’s views on Uhura, as well as your responses. No she’s not just a love interest for a Spock, as your caller alleged, and she’s even more important to this film than you guys seemed to suggest.
She’s absolutely pivotal to the plot here, in a way that few of the other characters are. If most of the drama in original ST involves the K-S-M triangle, this movie is all about the K-S-U triangle. In this movie, Uhura receives a bit of Shatner’s Kirk’s general dramatic functionality. I see her as the sort of “bridge” between Kirk and Spock. In the old series, Kirk was the middleman between the emotional Bones and the logical Spock. Here, Uhura’s scientific credentials and emotions are on greater display than her body, allowing her to be the bridge between Kirk and Spock. She’s the fulcrum of the Human/Vulcan, emotion/logic dichotomy in a way that was always Kirk’s in the original series. All the main beats of the movie pass through her.
If you really look at the plot points that lead up to Kirk’s ascension to the captaincy, it’s Uhura whose knowledge drives her somewhat unwillingly to Kirk’s side, while her heart and command loyalty keeps her standing by Spock. Indeed, the scene where she comforts Spock in the elevator after Vulcan was destroyed made me tear up. It’s not that she was making out with him. It’s not that she was his “squeeze”. Her wordless resopnse to Spock’s “I need everyone to continue performing admirably” isn’t one of disappointment that he doesn’t need her, specifically, to do something for him. It’s one of “we’re in this mess together and, you’re right, all of us performing admirably is the only way out.” Uhura, in other words, ain’t no pining Nurse Chapel. Sh’s a girl with serious game.
The way I look at the various characters is this. McCoy gets Kirk to the ship through medical chicanery. Fine. A lovely reversal of the Search for Spock dynamic. Scotty saves the ship by “ejecting the core”. What else do Starfleet engineers do in a crunch? Chekov mutilates the English language, shows off his navigational skills and his secondary transporter skills. Again, par for the course. But the entirety of the plot hinges on Uhura’s linguistic skills. No Klingon transmissions, no reason for Kirk to be involved in this thing at all. And then her status as a top-of-her-class officer on the ship allows her to be involved in every critical decision thereafter. I fully got the impression that she was the critical “swing vote” when Kirk took over from Spock. Her grudging, “You better know what you’re doing” carried with it the implicit threat that if he screwed up, she was gonna take him out herself.
To a very real extent, Uhura is also, interestingly, the audience’s avatar throughout the movie. It’s through her eyes that we understand the conflict between Spock and Kirk. When we’re meant to understand that Kirk is reckless, it’s because her face and words tell us so. When we need to understand Spock’s pain and his response to it, it’s through her empathy. When she hugs Spock, she’s doing precisely what we want to do as well. When she somewhat suspiciously supports Kirk, it’s again how we feel. We want to trust him, we want to believe in him, but we don’t absolutely know that we can. It is not an exaggeration to say that she’s the very soul of the Enterprise — in a way that was occasionally Nicholl’s dramatic space in the TV series.
And this alternate universe Uhura was a pleasing admixture of all the very best of what we knew of Uhura from the past, with none of the occasional incompetence — looking up Klingon in a paper dictionary, anyone? — that occasionally made the character feel superfluous. Then they gave the role to an actor who cared more about creating her own Uhura than in evoking the originating actor. Could you see shades of Nichelle Nicholls? Subtly, yes. But it wasn’t the full-throated, if enjoyable, homage that Urban was doing to Kelley.
So, no, she wasn’t under-utilized or one-dimensional here. That was Sulu and Chekov. That was even, surprisingly, McCoy. They’re mostly comic relief. But Uhura? This Enterprise was going precisely nowhere without Uhura. I’d even go so far as to say that she’s really the best thing about the movie, because Uhura’s the one character who was actually significantly better than what she had been in the past.
