Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 Kicks Off With A Beautiful Tribute To A Trek Legend

This post contains spoilers for the season 2 premiere of "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds."

For over half a century, Gene Roddenberry's "Star Trek" has been a series that's helped us understand the present day by looking — with a beating heart and an unwavering eye for progressivism — to the future. Plenty of "Trek" characters have been groundbreaking, from gender-switching crew member Jadzia Dax (Terry Farrell) to blind engineer Geordi La Forge (LeVar Burton), but the franchise's first crew is its most revolutionary, thanks to Lieutenant Nyota Uhura (Nichelle Nichols). In 1966, Uhura manned the Starship Enterprise as its communications officer — a Black woman in a leadership role aboard a multiracial crew at a time when segregation was still very much alive in parts of the country.

With television in its early days, the sci-fi series was one of the first shows to prove that television wasn't just for selling ad space and keeping audiences entertained. Nichols played Uhura as confident, stylish, and sophisticated: she was a qualified woman whose place on the Enterprise was never a question. She inspired countless Black women — from Whoopi Goldberg to future NASA astronauts — who had never seen themselves on TV to such a degree before. She also broke barriers with what's often remembered as the first interracial kiss ever televised. When Nichols considered leaving the series, it was Martin Luther King Jr. himself who convinced her to stay.

These days, with hundreds of shows at our fingertips at any given moment, it's hard to imagine one TV character changing the world. That's exactly what Nichelle Nichols did, though, and her contributions to the series are one of the great legacies of "Star Trek," even decades later. It should come as no surprise, then, that the only "Trek" show that's ever truly managed to capture the spirit of the original series, "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds," featured an homage to the late actor in its season 2 premiere.

Nichols passed away in July 2022, after "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" had already wrapped its first season. In this week's premiere episode, the show unfolds as it normally would (albeit with a more emotive Spock than usual), but it ends with a written note that instantly made tears spring into my eyes. It said: "For Nichelle who was first through the door and showed us the stars. Hailing frequencies forever open ..."

This in-memoriam message is at once simple and beautiful. The language of "Star Trek" — a world in which space is the final frontier and humankind's destiny is tied to the wonders of space — always lends itself beautifully to conversations about the mysteries of life and death. There's something remarkable about the fact that we can look to the stars and think of the chain of people whose lives were changed by someone like Nichols, from actors to astronauts and beyond. I also love the non-defined "us" in the statement, because the actor didn't just show little Black girls what the future could and should look like — she showed everyone.

Nichelle Nichols' legacy lives on in countless ways, but one of the best is with Celia Rose Gooding's version of Uhura. "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" is an instantly-great series that still feels like it's in its early days, so Gooding still has plenty of time to shine as a younger, shyer version of Uhura. She's already extremely endearing, though, as a humble but integral (and genius!) part of the crew who's fresh out of the Academy and still finding her footing in the role of cadet. As with Nichols' Uhura, you get the sense that Gooding's character could easily save the Enterprise from pretty much any situation, but she doesn't want to show off, so sometimes she lets other people think they're doing something special.

It's that knowing twinkle in Nichols' eyes that I think of when I think of Uhura. "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" is right; she saw the stars, and brought a vision of them back to us. And like a classic "Star Trek" twist, her vision turned out not to be an idealized future, but a defining, inspiring present moment.

New episodes from season 2 of "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" stream Thursdays on Paramount+.