If You Could Rewrite "The Original Series" . . .

We need to cut the miniskirts some slack or we're liable to start calling out TNG for cultural appropriation for using mandarin collars on the uniforms.

 

But she will run into encrypted communications, something that happened a few times in TOS.

Here is a possible story idea. Uhura discovers that some people's communications are encrypted, but she finds a way out of that. She finds out who is talking to who, and that leads her to discover who are the most important people in that society.

Another thing I would like is seeing more of the ship's crew. The first season did a little bit of that, but we saw less of them in the second season and even less in the third season. What were all those 400+ crewpeople doing?

 

No more females screaming while the men are brave. No more female crew members telling the captain they are scared.
More serialized stories.
One of my pet peeves, A Private Little War. A great story ruined by a terrible Mugato costume and horrible wigs.

 

That's why you have a cryptography division. You don;t have your radioman do it,

That's not a story. That's a situation. As Gene R. would say, "Where's the action? How are our people involved?"

 

Uhura isn't chained to her station. She can be officer of the watch and she can take charge of the cryptography division. The issue is more that she was rarely allowed to do anything more than be the radioman despite the possibilities.

 

Intercepting and deciphering the communications of someone who doesn't want you to have their information, and having the background knowledge to put it into context to figure out what it really means, is really a different discipline that what Uhura was shown doing.

 

I think this is true. Hoshi and Uhura have very different skill sets. Uhura is primarily an officer while Hoshi is primarily a specialist linguist. NuUhura is a mixture of the two. I don't mind Uhura being primarily a command officer but then let her be a command officer.

 

In my mind Uhura's background was more in the technical fields than in linguistics. That's why you saw her doing things like repairing her console or taking over the navigator's station. That would also explain the red uniform - her normal duties were more related to engineering than command.

 

I had friends who worked intelligence/crypto in the Navy, and they never manned a switchboard or did radio stuff.

 

The closest I can find to this is on page 156-57 of the hardcover version: "She [Whitney] was dressed in here William Ware Theiss-designed outfit, a short skirt that emphasized her legs and a tunic that emphasized her bosom. Grace Lee and Gene both welcomed the attention she received."

There's nothing about her explicitly advocating the miniskirt over the pants from the pilot episodes in the Solow/Justman book, unless there's material about Whitney that isn't listed in the index.

 

I agree that the mini-skirts are a part of the TOS 'legend'.
To make the situation more palatable to our modern way of thinking it would have been good to see women having the pants option - having some female extras wearing pants on occasion in most episodes.
Like everyone had the option of not wearing the skant in TNG (Thank goodness).

 

Yeah I confess, I always viewed her as a technician but in the one episode where she does technical work, she says she hasn't done it since the academy and I can't recall any other occasions where she helped anybody else on engineering tasks, despite opportunities. So canon-wise, she should probably have remained in yellow as a command officer.

 

http://www.shawcomputing.net/racerx/trek_stuff/alt-uniform.jpg

 

We also have to consider 23rd century computers probably change the way cryptography works . With quantum cryptography requiring a computer and being very difficult to crack. Cryptography is probably one nerd and a coffee machine.

 

Sulu and Chekov sit at a desk all day, Kirk spends a lot of his day sitting, plus with the shortness of the skirt he'd have far greater ease of movement without worrying about his trousers tearing when engaged in Kirk-Fu.

 

That's not restricted only to McCoy, although it's much more pronounced with McCoy. There are many other examples of crew members basically being insubordinate to Spock. A theme running through the whole series is that Spock must be repeatedly challenged on his perceived lack of humanity and compassion. I don't know whether that was intentional or just something that many writers latched on to and exploited.

 

Yeah, I didn't myself, but there are some who do run radio equipment (heavily computerized now, I'm sure). The thing with the crypto community is it has to be sealed off from the rest of the navy because everyone who enters their space has to have a security clearance. So they do have their own radio, IT, electronics, maintenance and admin types (me), as well as linguists and analysts and EW specialists. Even though they all wear the same CT mark on the uniform, their training is almost completely different and they aren't interchangeable.

I certainly wouldn't object to that. FWIW, communications or signals was historically very much a part of the "command" side of a navy. In the WW1/WW2 Royal Navy, signalmen and telegraphists were the most elite of seamen, and signals was one of the specialties of executive officers (what the US would call line officers) along with gunnery, navigation etc. In the US Navy, a ship's Communications Officer was a mid-pack department head; not on the level of gunnery or engineering maybe, but nothing to sneeze at (Communications eventually became part Ops, and now I think part of Combat Systems). LCdr Bruce McCandless was Communications Officer in USS San Francisco when he succeeded to command in battle and earned the Medal of Honor.

How or why communications ends up in red in TOS is anybody's guess. It might be that green is flight and weapons control, blue is science (including medical science) and red is "everything else." Communications, propulsion, security, transporters, historians, lawyers etc. don't seem to line up naturally otherwise. Of course, when TMP expanded the divisions, Uhura got yellow, the same as Sulu. But whatever color she wore, it would certainly have been welcome to see her in charge on the bridge at some point.

 

Taking as granted the fact that Nichelle really did look better in red than in gold-colored avocado, and moving on to try to posit an in-universe explanation, I would guess that communications involved electronics, maybe duotronics, certainly subspace technology, and so technical stuff. Uhura was certainly trained to repair and modify her own console under the hood, even though she hadn't needed to do it in years ("Who Mourns for Adonais?").

Why lawyers in red, too? Well, the law is very technical. (No seriously, it should have been gold-colored avocado or arguably blue; historians should have been blue for sure.)

The kitchen sink is plumbing though, and we know Scotty knows all about that, so, yeah, the catch-all is red....

Interesting aside: security in Franz Joseph's TOS tech manual is in the command section (gold, with the star).

 

There's usually a handy engineering person nearby who can do it for her, and an auxiliary backup she can use until the primary is fixed.

 

Quite true.