The 14 Dumbest Things In Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

Since the 2009 Star Trek film Uhura has been depicted as a polyglot with an affinity for languages, but this wasn’t the case in the original series or the movies with that cast. She was, as they used to say, a “radioman”. Her expertise was demonstrated to be with communications equipment, not languages, so it makes sense that she wouldn’t necessarily know the Klingon language, especially with the Universal Translator handy.

In this film, she must communicate with some Klingons at a listening post and fool them into thinking the Enterprise is the freighter Ursva, doing so with the assist of eight of her shipmates, including Scotty and Chekov, and not employing the aforementioned Universal Translator (henceforth UT).

Well, sorta; on a screen she’s looking at the UT translating the Klingon into “Federation Standard” (aka English), but for some stupid reason the reverse isn’t true.

An off-camera and obviously dubbed line by Chekov claims “A Universal translator will be recognized!” as an excuse. So…is its translation less believable than a bunch of people paging through ancient textbooks fumbling for the right thing to say?

Okay, fine, maybe the UT has some tells that can be detected, but why not have it spit out a translation that you can check against the books?

Or, hey, given someone (presumably Valeris) altered the data banks to show they’d fired torpedoes, why not say that someone has sabotaged the universal translator and it only translates to pig latin?

That’d be less dumb than the scene we got.