Star Trek

The final months of the Enterprise's five-year mission saw an increase in Uhura's sphere of authority. After all the men serving aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise on stardate 5483.8 (2269) succumbed to the hypnotic influence of the siren song of a society of desperate women that had made their home on the second planet in the Taurean system, Lieutenant Nyota Uhura — the senior lieutenant aboard the starship not affected by the Taureans' influence — had no choice other than to assume command. Uhura's quick thinking and unflagging leadership prevented the Taurean women from fatally draining the life forces of Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy, and Lieutenant Carver, and also helped the Taurean women — whose men were long dead because of the deadly properties of their adopted homeworld — to relocate to a less inimical planet. On stardate 7403.6, Uhura invoked Starfleet landing party regulations to overrule Lieutenant Commander Scott yet again, when the chief engineer tried to keep the landing party on a dangerous aboriginal planet in search of a temporarily missing Kirk, Spock, and an honorary Starfleet commander from the planet Pandro, Ari bn Bem.

On stardate 3183.3 (2269), Uhura, Lieutenant Sulu, and Dr. McCoy nearly froze to death in blizzard conditions created inside one of the Enterprise's recreation rooms, whose controls had been seized by a disembodied entity bent on performing a series of sometimes-deadly "practical jokes.? Not long afterward, on stardate 6770.3, Uhura was aged in reverse back into childhood, along with the rest of the Enterprise crew, as a consequence of the starship's accidental passage into a time-reversed antimatter universe. After the visiting Commodore Robert April brought the ship safely back home, a trip through the transporter, which retained all the crew members' original molecular pattern data, restored all the "children? aboard to their normal ages. Following the end of the Enterprise's historic five-year mission in 2269, Uhura received a promotion to the rank of lieutenant commander. She remained an integral part of the starship's bridge crew under Captain Willard Decker during the vessel's 18-month refit, and was running the bridge's busy communications station on stardate 7410.2 (2271) when Admiral James Kirk again assumed command during the V'Ger crisis. She remained an indispensable fixture on the Enterprise's bridge for the next 22 years, until she retired with the final rank of full commander on approximately stardate 9524.0 (2293).