In this week's episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, “Lost In Translation,” Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) takes center stage. But not just that -- the episode also depicts the first canon meeting of Uhura and her future captain, James T. Kirk (Paul Wesley)!
We've got an exclusive sneak peek of that first encounter, which you can watch right here:
This is the logline for the episode from Paramount+: "Uhura seems to be the only one who can hear a strange sound. When the noise triggers terrifying hallucinations, she enlists an unlikely assistant to help her track down the source." Obviously that unlikely assistant is Kirk himself, and while the two characters don't know it yet, this is, to quote Bogart from Casablanca, the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
When Did Kirk and Uhura First Appear Onscreen Together?
While Strange New Worlds has established that a young Uhura served under Captain Pike onboard the USS Enterprise, the character's first appearance was of course on Star Trek: The Original Series in 1966. Nichelle Nichols iconically originated the role, first appearing in the episode "The Corbomite Maneuver." That was the first regular episode of Season 1 to be produced, after the two pilot episodes. Confusingly, however, the episode was the tenth to be aired.
In the episode, which culminates in William Shatner's Kirk making friends with an alien, baby Clint Howard (!), Kirk and Uhura are clearly fellow officers who have already been working together for an unspecified amount of time, as has the rest of the main crew. Essentially we join the adventures of Kirk's Enterprise in media res, and this despite the fact that the pilot episode which first featured Kirk, "Where No Man Has Gone Before," was the third episode to air and features somewhat different costumes, sets, and crew members! (Uhura had not been cast yet, for example.)
Of course, the friendship between Kirk and the rest of his bridge crew, including Uhura, would become a centerpiece of Star Trek, and would extend into the movies as well as Nichols appeared in the first six OG Trek movies.
But We Have Seen Kirk and Uhura First Meet in the Movies, Right?
Well, yes... and no! That meeting occurred in the alternate reality known as the Kelvin timeline, or the Abramsverse (after director J.J. Abrams), which split off from the main continuity of the Star Trek universe in the 2009 film known simply as Star Trek.
It was there that Cadet Nyota Uhura (played by Zoe Saldana) first meets a drunken Jim Kirk (Chris Pine) in an Iowa bar. While Uhura in this week's Strange New Worlds thinks Kirk is hitting on her, the jury is out on whether or not he actually is. But in the 2009 film's first meeting between the two, Kirk absolutely is and she absolutely is not having it. A barfight results, and Kirk gets his butt kicked by a bunch of other cadets.
But since this was an alternate reality, that meeting is just one example of the many different ways events would play out for the crew of the USS Enterprise in the Abrams movies. Hopefully Strange New Worlds' Kirk won't get his butt kicked in “Lost In Translation” this week...
Why Is Kirk in So Much of Strange New Worlds?
This marks the third time that James T. Kirk has showed up on Strange New Worlds, though only the second time Paul Wesley has played the Kirk we know from The Original Series and the other William Shatner outings as the character.
His first appearance in Season 1's "A Quality of Mercy" depicted another alternate reality where Pike remained captain of the Enterprise into the time period of what would've been The Original Series, while Kirk became captain of the USS Farragut. Meanwhile, in the third episode of Season 2, "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow," another version of Kirk from yet a different alternate reality popped up, once again played by Wesley, though by the end of that episode we finally got a brief scene featuring the main timeline Kirk (where he first met Christina Chong's La'an Noonien-Singh). But now it looks like "Lost in Translation" will give us a full episode with the "main" canon Kirk.
This is a bit of a tricky proposition, since Kirk's relationship with Spock in particular is so iconic that the show's writers have to be careful not to throw the balance of Strange New Worlds off. But clearly as part of the Strange New World story, the team wants to depict the ramp-up to Kirk's taking command of the Enterprise. Based on images of a slightly different insignia badge on his uniform, rumor has it that Anson Mount's Captain Pike will become Fleet Captain this season, which we know must happen eventually as part of Pike's story. And that, of course, will eventually lead to Kirk becoming captain.
The big question is when will that happen. Now, with mainline Kirk meeting Uhura, that train has definitely left the station. Or starship, as the case may be.
