Note: This article contains spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
Now that a respectable time has passed since the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds finale, it feels like it’s finally time to start talking about the numerous notable moments spread throughout “Tomorrow’s Enterprise.” Few of those moments are more fascinating to me than the relationship tease that helps make Star Trek V: The Final Frontier make slightly more sense.
Let’s start with the Strange New Worlds of it all. That episode that sees Uhura travel one year into the future also suggests that, at some point in the future, Uhura and Scotty are in some kind of relationship. How serious it is seems to be up for some interpretation, but it’s clear that it was at least pretty passionate for however long it may have lasted. Because these events happen in the early days of Kirk’s command of the Enterprise (or some version of it) and because Scotty/Uhura isn’t really a thing in the TOS stories, we can reasonably assume that their relationship doesn’t really last all that long.
Except that’s not entirely true. In Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, there is a memorable scene that sees Uhura and Scotty share a tender, seemingly romantic moment when they have a little time alone together. The intimacy between the two is not only obvious but conveyed in such a way that suggests this is hardly the first time that the two have snuck away to caress and flirt with each other. If anything, they act like they’ve been doing this for years despite the fact that the show and previous movies never even hinted they were a thing. Yet, this seemingly on again, off again thing is never really mentioned again.
Now, there are a lot of weird things in Star Trek V, many of which are the result of William Shatner going more than a little mad with creative power and directing a story that, in its own ways, doesn’t shy away from the suggestion that Kirk may be something of a god himself. But the thing that makes Scotty/Uhura so fascinating are the unanswered questions surrounding it. Was this a case of Shatner (or the actors) having a little fun with the scene? Was there something between the two that people just didn’t pick up on? It’s a minor point that doesn’t really compare to the other oddities in the fifth Star Trek movie, but I’ll be damned if it hasn’t lingered on throughout the years.
However, Strange New Worlds seemingly suggests that Scotty and Uhura have had brief flings in the past that have either continued over the years or linger in the hearts and minds of the two strongly enough to occasionally spark those old feelings. In fact, Strange New Worlds producer Henry Alonso Myers recently confirmed that the team wanted to make the Scotty/Uhura relationship more than a one-off oddity.
“So there has always been a flirtation. It kind of came out more in the movies between the two of them: an implication that they had history, that they had something going on,” Myers tells TVLine. “What we were trying to do was just reach out and imagine a deeper version of the thing that didn’t get to make it on screen. On the original series, that was not a big concern of theirs. Scotty played probably more comically in that regard… We wanted to bring it to their current [versions]. She’s a real character with real stakes, real emotion, and we thought it would be nice to imply that the things that we had seen already had a purpose in the past.”
That’s… actually a pretty satisfying explanation. The idea that Scotty and Uhura have always had a little something going on in the background but that it was simply not something that defined either of them in the grand scheme of everything going on feels true enough to both characters and is a surprisingly mature way to address something that was perhaps never meant to make sense.
Now quick, someone ask Shatner if he has any memory of this moment or the reasoning behind it.
