Star Trek: 10 Best Uhura Moments

In the second season episode Who Mourns For Adonais?, Uhura is given an example to show how skilled she actually is. While The Original Series could sometimes be accused of leaving her sitting on the bridge for hours on end, this gave her a chance to expand on that.

The plot sees the god Adonais reveal himself to the crew of the Enterprise (via a giant green hand in space, in an iconic scene). He takes control of the ship, blocking communications between the ship and the landing party on his planet. With Spock in command, Uhura is tasked with re-opening communications.

One of the benefits of the early years of Star Trek was a reliance on physical props and solutions. Rather than begin to furious push buttons on the console, Uhura dons an engineering jumpsuit, gets down on her hands and knees, and manually hotwires the communication systems on the ship.

This goes a long way to showing off her wealth of knowledge - not simply in linguistics - but in the actual rigging of the ship. Were it not for her experience, there was a very real chance that the ship would be cut off from its captain forever. Just one of the many skills that Uhura brought to the Enterprise.