Lieutenant Uhura saw five memorable away missions in the original Star Trek series.
“Children of the Comet,” the second episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, shows Cadet Nyota Uhura (Celia Rose) on her first-ever “away mission.” (Purists note: The episode uses the the original series’ “landing party” terminology six times, and “away mission” only four.) What a momentous mission it turns out to be! As Spock (Ethan Peck) observes, Uhura becomes “the only person for the job” of communicating with M’hanit, the singing comet with what appears to be amazingly detailed knowledge of its own future.
Sending Uhura on an away mission right out of the gate was a smart choice for Strange New Worlds to make. Though Star Trek fans have never doubted the intelligence, resourcefulness, or bravery of Lieutenant Uhura, we’ve rarely seen the character put them to use as part of a landing party. At one point in the documentary film Woman in Motion, Nichelle Nichols is asked which Star Trek episodes were her favorites. She chuckles and says her favorites were any in which Uhura got to leave the bridge!
If my memory and some quick research serve, we saw Lieutenant Uhura make it to a planet’s surface only five times during the original series. On four of those five occasions, she served as a member of an official landing party. The fifth time, she went down unwillingly—but it was arguably her most famous “away mission” of all.
Let’s cut through the subspace chatter and review the history of Lieutenant Uhura and landing parties in the original Star Trek series.
“The City on the Edge of Forever” (season 1, episode 28)
It would be unfortunately easy to forget that Lieutenant Uhura is a member of the landing party who beams down to the planet on which the Enterprise crew discovers the Guardian of Forever. Nichelle Nichols has a paltry seven lines to deliver in this episode, and one is the stereotyped admission often assigned to the show’s female characters, “Captain, I’m frightened.” There’s no shame in being frightened, but why did the series rarely, if ever, have the men admit the same?
Still, Uhura is in the landing party that pursues a cordrazine-crazed Dr. McCoy to the planet surface. Her broken communication with the Enterprise in orbit confirms McCoy’s changes to the timeline. She wishes Kirk and Spock “happiness, at least” before they follow Bones back into the past. And once the time traveling trio has returned, she is able to confirm to Kirk, with relief, “The Enterprise is up there.”
Beyond her appearance in this episode, which consistently tops lists of the series’ best, Lieutenant Uhura revisits the planet of the Guardian of Forever in Sarah A. Hoyt and Rebecca Lickiss’s prize-winning short story, “If I Lose Thee…” in Strange New Worlds III (Pocket Books, 2000). In this delightful tale, Uhura uses the Guardian to complete a mission in Elizabethan England, and ends up becoming the famous and enigmatic “dark lady” in William Shakespeare’s love sonnets.