Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 Finale Redeems The Franchise's Most Baffling Romance

John Medland/Paramount+

There are a few moments in William Shatner's 1989 feature film "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier," which had such a troubled production that it almost killed the franchise, that are completely baffling. The film begins when the USS Enterprise — still being tinkered with and spruced up, not fully operational — is ordered to the planet Nimbus III to rescue a small retinue of diplomats that have been taken hostage. The ship only has a skeleton crew, led by a beleaguered Scotty (James Doohan). While he flusters around the bridge, concerned that the ship is not being repaired quickly enough, Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) stops to coo at him, stroke his face, and say a few comforting words. They speak intimately, warmly, as if they are a loving, long-married couple. 

This sequence is baffling because Scotty and Uhura never, not once in the franchise's (then) 23-year history, ever had any kind of romantic or sexual subplots. In fact, the two characters rarely interacted in any kind of meaningful way, usually only trading official information on the bridge. The fact that "Star Trek" should make it to its fifth movie, only to abruptly imply that Scotty and Uhura had a percolating romance, hit a lot of viewers sideways. People would have looked at the movie less askance if Kirk (William Shatner) and Spock (Leonard Nimoy) began openly making out. To make things even more strange, the pseudo-romance between Uhura and Scotty was dropped in "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country" and not even alluded to.

The latest episode of "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds," however, decided to add a little backstory that makes those scenes make a little more sense. On "Strange New Worlds," it's established that Scotty and Uhura had a brief relationship decades before the events of "Star Trek V."

Paramount

The Scotty/Uhura flirting constitutes a tiny romantic subplot in "Star Trek" that most Trekkies have chosen to ignore. This happens in "Star Trek" a lot. Many like to overlook the romance between Troi (Marina Sirtis) and Worf (Michael Dorn) on "Star Trek: The Next Generation," for instance, or the one between Chakotay (Robert Beltran) and Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan) on "Star Trek: Voyager." (Beltran actually has some regrets about the Chakotay-Seven romance.) And let's not forget the dumb romance between Spock (Zachary Quinto) and Uhura (Zoe Saldana) in the 2009 "Star Trek" movie.

Rather than ignore it, however, the makers of "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" decided to give the Scotty/Uhura subplot some canonical context. "Strange New Worlds" is set a few years prior to the events of the original "Star Trek" series, and it has spent the last few seasons getting that show's characters into place. Kirk (Paul Wesley) isn't quite yet the captain of the USS Enterprise, and we haven't yet met Dr. McCoy, Chekov, Yeoman Rand, or Sulu face-to-face, but multiple other familiar characters are already in place. Uhura is played by Celia Rose Gooding, and Scotty is played by Martin Quinn. 

The conceit of the Season 4 finale episode, "Tomorrow's Enterprise," is that the Enterprise encounters a colossal negative space wedgie that allows Uhura to talk to herself one year in the future. Uhura learns that, in the future timeline, Scotty has been killed, which is a tragedy for everyone on board. It hits Uhura especially hard, though, because it seems that she and Scotty had initiated a giddy romance just recently. Past Uhura and Future Uhura have to work together to piece together what happened with Scotty and what they might be able to do to prevent his death.

Paramount

Past Uhura is especially motivated to solve the time-spanning mystery as to save the boy she recently started dating, while Future Uhura debates the ethics of such a thing, knowing that it would alter her own timeline. Trekkies are probably okay with Future Uhura losing her timeline, though, because it would bring Scotty back and set up "Star Trek" as we know it.

With the actions of "Tomorrow's Enterprise" now a matter of public record, then, the flirtation in "Star Trek V" suddenly makes sense. It's possible that these two characters did have a brief fling back in their early days on the Enterprise, but then broke up under circumstances we don't yet know. They then decided to remain professional throughout the proceeding five-year mission, never flirting or being too familiar when working on the bridge together. By the time they got to the events of "Star Trek V," however, a few decades had passed, and they likely felt they no longer had to stand on propriety. They could finally let their hair down a little, so to speak. "Star Trek V" finally makes sense. We only had to wait until 2026 for the franchise to explain it to us. 

Of course, these kinds of narrative "patches" happen all the time in long-running sci-fi properties with well-recorded canonical histories. Think of the time Obi-Wan (Alec Guinness) referred to Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker's father as two different people in the first "Star Wars" movie, only for it to be revealed that they were one and the same in "The Empire Strikes Back." Obi-Wan had some 'splaining to do in "Return of the Jedi." But then, there are many "Star Wars" plot holes that still confuse fans.