This is an excellent point. The humor in STIV works for the same reason the humor in Back to the Future and Time After Time works: Because the time travelers are out of their natural elements and have an ignorance of the way things work in the time they've traveled to. The crew is back to their own time period in STV, so unfortunately the humor fell back on slapstick rather than the character based banter that worked so well in the Gene Coon era of TOS and in TWOK and TSFS. (All of the humor in TMP is very restrained and dry and not especially in character for anyone. That may have been Gene Roddenberry's preference, but for most of the runtime, it makes that movie feel like watching paint dry.) STVI brought back some of the character based humor, which I think works much better for Trek.
Thanks!
STVI definitely finds a way to make character-based humor work, without the clunky "fish out of water" element that just couldn't exist, especially with Chekov and Sulu. A lot of it works, or certainly holds up better than TVH and only because STVI does a better job to relate the characters' universe to the humor, rather than hinge everything on 1986isms or forcing "he's the navigator on a starship but can't get back to the pickup location despite communicator and map and tricorder and everything else he's got".
And personally, I'm fine with the scene in STVI where Uhura can't speak Klingon and the bridge crew is frantically trying to look up the right phrases in a pile of books. I've long thought of Uhura as being more of a technician than a Hoshi Sato-style super-linguist (notice how often she does things like rewiring her station or cleaning up garbled messages rather than translating languages), so I'm fine with her not knowing every single Klingon dialect. And the two Klingons at that listening station seem to be speaking some obscure archaic regional dialect ("Whither are you bound?"), so IMO, it's fine that it flummoxes Uhura a bit. Just imagine that she knows 70 of the 76 known Klingon languages and this is the one that's always stumped her.
Excellent points, all. TOS does show her as technician and is the only one capable in "Who mourns for Adonis". The uniform color definitely matches the division.
If anything, and this is hypothetical and only because we've - on (surprisingly) rare occasion - seen discontinuity with the color (e.g. Lt Masters in "The Alternative Factor" wearing blue despite being an engineer/operations expert), but what division color might linguistics be? Why not red since historians, e.g. McGivers, also wore red?
Operations encompasses many types, and communication can be just a different form of engineering and has multiple facets within (e.g. application of the structure, and the formation of the structure itself). As Engineering is also accorded red and has the same badge insignia symbol (the whirlygig), it fits that Uhura would be the same rank, and I'd never noticed the whirlygig before. It's brilliant.
Though McGivers' insignia looks like hers might be sufficiently different, but it's hard to fully differentiate with the available photos I'd seen, but hers is more a hexagonal affair with a dot in the middle whereas Uhura and Scotty have more a spiral affair. It's impressive how much subtle detail went into the TOS costuming with the insignia, arm braids, each ship or ship division (e.g. the Antares merchant marine freighter where the logo looks like the backside of a cat tipping over...), etc.
Plus, the scene is funny, and funny will make you forgive a lot.
True
, even before you won me over with your definition above
it was a funny scene, but now it works even better.
-worthy, very just driven by and self-impressed by their high concepts and I'm not just not impressed by them, some fine moments but really not much overall.
