Nichelle

I didn't really grow up on Star Trek The Original Series (TOS). I grew up on a mix of The Next Generation and Voyager. But I knew TOS sorta tangentially, through the lens of the films staring its cast. The Wrath of Khan and The Undiscovered Country are two of my earliest movie memories, and there's no doubt the nostalgia of that is at least part of the reason they're both in my top 10. It's worth noting that I have a similar nostalgia for Star Wars and The Last Starfighter, but neither of them are in my top 10. So nostalgia isn't the only reason; they're just fabulous movies regardless.

My point is that I did know who Lieutenant Nyota Uhura was very early on in my life, and the roll as exemplified by Nichelle Nichols did have a formative effect on my media consumption habits. But there was nothing particularly spectacular to me that a black woman was a commander aboard a revered interstellar starship. As far as I was aware, women and people of any color served at just about every rank in fictional military and scientific organizations and that's how it always had been.

It was many years before I fully appreciated the import with which Nichelle must have landed on the scene in that first episode of Star Trek in 1968. To have a main character in a show back then be a woman was rare enough, but with zero fanfare here was a black woman sitting on the bridge of the ship. She was a command officer too. Were there still issues with her portrayal throughout the series? Yeah. It was still the 60s, after all. But how incredible must that have been to be a black girl seeing her on TV for the first time? Just by being there Nichelle was breaking new ground.

Now me being a middle-class white dude this was hardly a revelatory moment for folks like me. Media was and is saturated by white dudes. But I can't help but think that I would likely be a far more narrow-minded person than I am now if I hadn't grown up immersed in a franchise that treated everyone, regardless of race or gender, like they were the same. Uhura has always been a fixture on the bridge of the Enterprise, contributing her unique skillset wherever it was needed. There's no easy way to articulate what that has meant to me and what it will hopefully continue to mean to my children, because you can bet your boots there's no way they're getting through life without watching a whack-ton of Trek.

So yeah, I'm sad that Nichelle is gone. But I honestly can't think of anything more she could have done to make the world a better place, so she's probably earned the rest. To paraphrase the bard (in a fashion which yes, I will be repeating for each of the remaining Trek cast as they die) she's not really dead as long as we remember her.