9. Uhura's Klingon Impairment - Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
Paramount PicturesWhile they're not considered canon, the Star Trek books over the years have told us a huge amount about Uhura's abilities. In these books, Uhura is far more than a glorified phone operator - she's an expert in acoustics, linguistics, phonology, morphology, and, of course, communications technology. If it has to do with languages and communication, she's your woman. This is one of the things that the Abrams movies get
right about Uhura: she may be attracted to emotionally unavailable men - and really, who among us isn't? - but she's brilliant. Thus we can understand Nichelle Nichols' annoyance at the scene in Star Trek VI in which the
Enterprise must sneak into Klingon space and, in order to keep the Klingons from detecting the use of the Universal Translator, they must look through a bunch of old books to communicate with the Klingon border patrol. Nichols objected to the scene on the grounds that Uhura, having being a communications officers for
decades by this point, would know the language of the Federation's greatest enemies. She was flat out overruled by director Nicholas Meyer, who apparently felt the scene was needed for comedic effect. The scene indeed makes Uhura look like the epitome of incompetence, given that she doesn't even get what she's saying right. But are many other reasons why this scene makes us cringe. For one thing, we're meant to be amused by the fact that the crew are hurriedly searching for the right words in Klingon by looking through old books. Let's say that again:
old...books. In a culture where Kirk's "fondness for antiques" is considered an eccentricity, the idea that there are many dusty tomes detailing the Klingon language just sitting around somewhere on the ship is bad enough. (They'd presumably be in Uhura's quarters, since she'd be the only crew member with any
need for them.) But that someone would remember them, go get them, bring them
back to the Bridge, and then have to flip hurriedly through them to find the right words to say is patently ridiculous. Of course, in 1991, the scene seemed far less ridiculous to us than it does now, living in a culture where, if
we were forced to look up a set of phrases in Klingon on the fly, we could probably do it by pulling up the necessary info
on our phones. Also, by Uhura's time, there must be surely be a function that allows the Universal Translator to display the text of an alien language, or even to play back an audio version of it which a listener with a big honking earpiece in her ear could listen to and then repeat...Oh, wait, there
is, because we saw that very function in Star Trek: The Motion Picture
, when Starfleet intercepted a Klingon cruiser's transmission about V'Ger. Tsk.