Nuhura!

You heard me, as in new Uhura. Actor and singer Celia Rose Gooding is playing a younger version of Uhura on Strange New Worlds, which, if you're a big huge nerd like myself is exciting news. If you're not, you'll have to take my word for it. 

Nuhura!

In a sci-fi arms race between Trek
and Wars, I suppose we all win.

Also a powder, because this whole thing is going to be Star Trek this and phasers that and if that's not your cuppa, you'll want to bail out now. Anyway, Strange New Worlds is like the ninth or tenth Star Trek show, and the fifth one in the last couple of years and I'm simultaneously stoked--do people still say stoked?--and also trepidatious. Trepidatious because holy shit, at some point enough is going to be enough and even big huge nerds like myself are going to say there're are too many Star Trek shows, but until that day comes, stoked. 

She also often got the short skirt, because 
Gene Roddenberry was kind of a creep.

So SNW (acronym!), if you're not in the know, is a prequel to the original show and a spin-off of Discovery which introduced Anson Mount playing Captain Pike and Ethan Peck as Spock. It's set on the Enterprise pre-Captain Kirk, so they could have gotten away with a bunch of new characters, but instead they are throwing in some younger versions of the original crew including Nurse Chapel, Doctor M'Benga (the Enterprise had two doctors, Bones was just the most famous one), and Cadet Uhura which I think is especially awesome because the character often got such short shrift on the old show.

Given the ship's endless supply of
no-name crew, couldn't they have
mind-wiped one of them instead?

Such a big deal was made about how progressive it was to have a Black woman on the original Star Trek--and it was legitimately a big deal--but at the same time she was basically a secretary and Kirk routinely shouted at her. Because the 1960's. Like, there are episodes in which she just doesn't appear in, with no explanation as to where a senior member of the crew is, and one time a sentient robot probe erased her memory. She had to be re-educated, loosing her entire personality and was essentially a new person from that point forward, but then she was just back at her desk the next week like nothing happened.

She didn't fare much better in the movies. In Star Trek III, they leave her back on Earth while the menfolk go and search for Spock, and in part VI, she's seen fumbling with a bunch of Klingon-English dictionaries as though part of her job wouldn't include being fluent in the language of the Federation's greatest foe. See? Short Shrift, made all the more frustrating given the character's (and actor Nichelle Nichols's) likability. 

Nerds at sci-fi conventions know more Klingon
then the ship's communications officer whose
actual job it is to speak Klingon. I mean, c'mon.

Get it? Sounds like oral sensitivity? 
Thanks for keeping it classy screenwriters
Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman.

Some of this was kind of made up for with Zoe Saldana's take on the character in the J. J. Abrams movies where she gets more to do, but at the same time she often got relegated to the role of Spock's girlfriend and target of Kirk's groping (no, really). And the less said about her aural sensitivity line, the better. No, you know what? Let's talk about that. In the reboot movie she complains to Spock that she should have gotten a better assignment since she's demonstrated her "aural sensitivity." 

Yup, they gave her a blow job joke. Lucky for us 2021 isn't 2009, and with the new Star Trek shows making way more of an effort to not be so gross and misogynistic, I'm hopeful that Celia Rose Gooding's Cadet Uhura will get better treatment than her predecessors. Of course, Alex "Blow Job Joke" Kurtman is also the show runner, so who can say?

Hey, here's a fun fact that speaks to how much the writers cared about the character:
Nyota Uhura didn't get her official, canonical first name until two thousand nine.
It took them forty three years to even bother to name the character.