‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Team on Building Uhura & Kirk’s Trust
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Where No One Has Gone Before
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[These interviews were conducted prior to the SAG-AFTRA strike authorization.]
[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 Episode 6 “Lost in Translation.”]
Welcome to the Enterprise (and your future), James T. Kirk (Paul Wesley). He comes on board during a crisis on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and not only meets Spock (Ethan Peck) but also gains the trust of Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding).
To briefly recap: Uhura ends up having to face her past losses and grief regarding her family, and she opens up to Kirk — after a bit of a rocky start, that is. (Her reaction when Kirk, whom Wesley called a “cowboy goofball,” approaches her at the bar? “Not another thing. Away from me today, sir,” Gooding summed up, adding “That that was so real.”)
It was easier for Uhura to talk to Kirk because he doesn’t know her like everyone else does and isn’t her superior officer. “She doesn’t have the foresight that audiences have to know who this big shot guy is. She doesn’t feel like he’s pulling this information out of her. It feels like he’s offering her a table to sit at and just dump her stuff on and rifle through, and it’s important to have somebody like that,” Gooding explained to TV Insider of what she felt was a “very intentional” choice to have Uhura confide in Kirk. “Paul Wesley as Kirk in that episode really was a point of joy for her, a point of levity for her, somebody who really kept her from falling all the way off the deep end. … And you can’t help but fall for that Kirk charm.”
But while Star Trek fans know the history for those characters, that’s not yet part of their dynamic, meaning it can’t be part of that scene. “At first I thought that was going to be difficult, but it actually was a bit easier for me than I think it would’ve been if I played that knowledge,” Gooding shared. “In that moment, Uhura was so cerebral and so in her own brain space that I think it wouldn’t have made sense for her to shrink when it comes to him. So not having to use that knowledge was actually a bit of an aid because I could really just play someone who is going through their own thing mentally and knows this guy’s reputation for being a bit of a playboy and not really having to care if that’s true or not.”
Wesley also enjoyed playing the early days of Kirk and Uhura’s “iconic relationship.” “I just love that literally the beginning of the relationship is her punching him in the face, and then it sort of evolves into this beautiful friendship and there’s trust,” he said. “As an actor, you always want to play arcs. You always want to build, you always want to grow into things. You don’t want to just be flat. And I think that’s such a smart choice on the writers’ part to create this beautiful arc for the two characters to build trust within one another because when you watch the original series, Uhura and Kirk are all about communication and trust.”
Michael Gibson/Paramount+
According to executive producer Henry Alonso Myers, this episode allowed them to both deepen Uhura’s past and “show a surprising and more thoughtful connection between the two of them that would’ve led to their future. … We wanted to show how Kirk has an ability to see the strength that’s at the heart of someone, and this is ultimately going to lead to where they’re going to be in the future. Most importantly, Uhura had a very real emotional story that we wanted to bring out both about her family and also about her history with Hemmer [Bruce Horak].”
Speaking of Hemmer, through what Uhura experiences in the episode, she sees him nod at her on the bridge after her plan is executed and works. “She needed [that nod] bad,” Gooding agreed. “In my actor brain, Hemmer was always Hemmer, but he was also her father and her mother and her brother, all the people that she had lost in her life, who she feels as though the weight of her grief was the thing that was holding her back. To get that nod on the bridge [saying], ‘You can carry us with you and still get what you needed done,’ was so necessary for her.”
By the end of the episode, Uhura can once again look at photos of her family, but does that mean the weight of that grief is lifted off her shoulders? It’s “now in her own hands. I think that weight still weighs the same. It looks the same. It is the same, but now it is something that she can face on her own terms as opposed to it being a thing that jump scares her,” according to Gooding. “She has control and understanding of how her grief looks within her and where it shows up and how she can move it and manipulate it to work for her as opposed to working against her as an obstacle.”
Another relationship in its early stages (at least in this timeline) is that between La’an (Christina Chong) and Kirk, after they had quite the (romantic) adventure together in an alternate timeline only she remembers. “They’re both in situations where they are able to explore their relationship in this timeline, and I think he was the same person back then and she is the same person, just different circumstances,” Chong shared. “Because of the circumstances they go through on the ship as well, it allows them to deepen that connection further. But what comes from that, we don’t know.”
On the part of Kirk, who does bring up the drink she owes him, right now, La’an is just “a beautiful woman who, for whatever reason, called him, and he’s like, ‘Great, let’s hang out,'” Wesley admitted. “I hate to be so kind of surface about it, but I do think the things that made him attracted to her in the alternate timeline are the same things that exist in the prime timeline. I think there’s a similarity in the two timelines and that’s what makes it all the more heartbreaking for her because he’s still the same guy.”
There’s still time to explore all of these relationships (and others) for Kirk; Wesley will be back in Season 2, but he couldn’t say anything beyond that. “What’s cool about him visiting the Enterprise is that he is becoming emotionally attached to the people [there], and I would like to think that that’s what sort of leads him to eventually take over,” the actor suggested. “Somehow his relationships with Uhura, La’an, Spock, and obviously Pike [Anson Mount], too, make him the right [person to do that], which I’m sure won’t come for a very long time, especially not on Paramount+. Right now it’s Strange New Worlds, but I think we can’t help but talk about the future because it’s such a huge part of the canon.”
So far, we’ve seen three different versions of Kirk: the one who will become captain as well as two in alternate timelines, in the future and past. That last one included a death scene. “My mom texted me after like, ‘Wait, he died?’ I was like, ‘Mom, no, it’s an alt timeline.’ She’s like, ‘What?'” Wesley laughed. “I had to explain to her.”
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Thursdays, Paramount+
