Kirk & Uhura brotp: addendum
May. 7th, 2026 12:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anghraineApropos of my other brotp post, a couple of additional details I love about the Kirk-Uhura friendship that I forgot before!
1— There are two different occasions in TOS where Kirk not only accepts the strong possibility of death, loss, and failure with grace, and not only takes personal responsibility ("I don't believe in no-win scenarios" whomst), but sets aside a moment to record posthumous commendations for particularly exemplary crew members during the crisis, in hopes that even in death those people will be honored. In both cases, he especially singles out Spock as extra special (news at eleven. But in fact, there are only two people, including Spock, whom Kirk mentions in both sets of commendations. You'd think from the fandom's obsession with "the triumvirate" that McCoy would be the other person on both lists, but he's actually only on one of them. The second person Kirk singles out for praise both times is Uhura.
2— So, when J and I were first marathoning TOS, I didn't know much about Nichelle Nichols outside of ST, but I became increasingly convinced that, like William Shatner, she must have been forged by the stage in some meaningful way. (Spoiler: she was.)
Although their performances are very different in many ways, of course, there seemed some marked similarities in how both inhabit their characters. They both have a kind of "always on" intense stage presence, where even if they're on the sidelines or background without really speaking or having much to do, they are still fully present in their roles; both perform like they're always potentially being seen whether or not they're 100% sure the camera is on them. Both of them do particularly heavy lifting in defining their characters through this kind of intensity of presence (sometimes rather against the grain of the writing or of other agendas at work) but also via very precisely calibrated performances when the writing isn't absolutely godawful/vacuous. TOS is so vibrant and expressionist that I think the precision in the okay-to-great episodes (most of them!) is often overlooked or even denied, but it's all over much of the show IMO; you can especially see it in Nichols' and Shatner's nearly surgical comic timing, but hardly only there.
So both Nichols and Shatner are actors who can be just standing or sitting in a chair, barely speaking or not speaking at all, barely moving and fairly understated, and yet their command of the stage is so effective that it's hard to tear your eyes from them. It's like the visual acting version of the voice that's so good you'd listen to them read the phonebook. I ended up being like, "wow, I'm pretty sure I could just watch Nichelle Nichols or William Shatner sit in a chair for ten minutes straight, those are some hella stage chops."
But there is also a lot of physicality involved, both in small details like how both play their characters as disciplined, highly-strung people who primarily reveal their anxiety through their hands, and just in a kind of intensity of physical presence and movement that's compounded when they're interacting (not uncommon!). They get visually framed together a lot in a very different way from Kirk and Spock—but like with K&S, I think the visual language works to reinforce the depiction of them as fundamentally aligned and in rapport (narratively this can be done separately, like Kirk's scheming shenanigans in his message in "A Piece of the Action" immediately clicking for Uhura as she smiles, while Scotty takes longer to figure it out). The staging retains a bit of platonic distance between Kirk and Uhura, either by placing them at different levels of the screen (as often happens with McCoy as well) or by how they stand in relation to each other—their affection feels platonic long before it's spelled out that it is—but still evokes a close, mutually stabilizing, fairly tactile relationship with deep affection beneath the professionalism that often manifests in physically reaching out in a crisis. Or at least trying to.
There are a lot of examples of this careful visual linking and it's more vivid in action rather than stills, but two that come to mind are Kirk and Uhura shifting from anxiety to relief/smugness in "The Corbomite Maneuver" (RIP to my brotp in matching outfits, it's the Luke and Leia twin ponchos of TOS to me) and Kirk rushing over to her when she's hit by the local effect in "The Immunity Syndrome":
3— My brotp's further adventures in bisexuality & coffee addiction:
This is the moment when Janice Rand manages to keep the coffee going by heating it with her phaser; Bones is like "huh. cool I guess" and meanwhile, Kirk and Uhura are just 🤩🤩🤩
1— There are two different occasions in TOS where Kirk not only accepts the strong possibility of death, loss, and failure with grace, and not only takes personal responsibility ("I don't believe in no-win scenarios" whomst), but sets aside a moment to record posthumous commendations for particularly exemplary crew members during the crisis, in hopes that even in death those people will be honored. In both cases, he especially singles out Spock as extra special (news at eleven. But in fact, there are only two people, including Spock, whom Kirk mentions in both sets of commendations. You'd think from the fandom's obsession with "the triumvirate" that McCoy would be the other person on both lists, but he's actually only on one of them. The second person Kirk singles out for praise both times is Uhura.
2— So, when J and I were first marathoning TOS, I didn't know much about Nichelle Nichols outside of ST, but I became increasingly convinced that, like William Shatner, she must have been forged by the stage in some meaningful way. (Spoiler: she was.)
Although their performances are very different in many ways, of course, there seemed some marked similarities in how both inhabit their characters. They both have a kind of "always on" intense stage presence, where even if they're on the sidelines or background without really speaking or having much to do, they are still fully present in their roles; both perform like they're always potentially being seen whether or not they're 100% sure the camera is on them. Both of them do particularly heavy lifting in defining their characters through this kind of intensity of presence (sometimes rather against the grain of the writing or of other agendas at work) but also via very precisely calibrated performances when the writing isn't absolutely godawful/vacuous. TOS is so vibrant and expressionist that I think the precision in the okay-to-great episodes (most of them!) is often overlooked or even denied, but it's all over much of the show IMO; you can especially see it in Nichols' and Shatner's nearly surgical comic timing, but hardly only there.
So both Nichols and Shatner are actors who can be just standing or sitting in a chair, barely speaking or not speaking at all, barely moving and fairly understated, and yet their command of the stage is so effective that it's hard to tear your eyes from them. It's like the visual acting version of the voice that's so good you'd listen to them read the phonebook. I ended up being like, "wow, I'm pretty sure I could just watch Nichelle Nichols or William Shatner sit in a chair for ten minutes straight, those are some hella stage chops."
But there is also a lot of physicality involved, both in small details like how both play their characters as disciplined, highly-strung people who primarily reveal their anxiety through their hands, and just in a kind of intensity of physical presence and movement that's compounded when they're interacting (not uncommon!). They get visually framed together a lot in a very different way from Kirk and Spock—but like with K&S, I think the visual language works to reinforce the depiction of them as fundamentally aligned and in rapport (narratively this can be done separately, like Kirk's scheming shenanigans in his message in "A Piece of the Action" immediately clicking for Uhura as she smiles, while Scotty takes longer to figure it out). The staging retains a bit of platonic distance between Kirk and Uhura, either by placing them at different levels of the screen (as often happens with McCoy as well) or by how they stand in relation to each other—their affection feels platonic long before it's spelled out that it is—but still evokes a close, mutually stabilizing, fairly tactile relationship with deep affection beneath the professionalism that often manifests in physically reaching out in a crisis. Or at least trying to.
There are a lot of examples of this careful visual linking and it's more vivid in action rather than stills, but two that come to mind are Kirk and Uhura shifting from anxiety to relief/smugness in "The Corbomite Maneuver" (RIP to my brotp in matching outfits, it's the Luke and Leia twin ponchos of TOS to me) and Kirk rushing over to her when she's hit by the local effect in "The Immunity Syndrome":
3— My brotp's further adventures in bisexuality & coffee addiction:
This is the moment when Janice Rand manages to keep the coffee going by heating it with her phaser; Bones is like "huh. cool I guess" and meanwhile, Kirk and Uhura are just 🤩🤩🤩