Courtesy of a conversation with @chikabika I wanted to talk a little about the turbolift scene with Kirk and Uhura in Into Darkness. I love this scene because it's less than a minute long and we get so much character stuff for both of them really quickly communicated.
First thing, Uhura comes up to Kirk (after Pike's death) and asks him if he's ok. She calls him captain without any hint of the sarcasm she used in the last movie and seems genuinely worried about his well-being. Jim is a bit taken aback, like he isn't really sure why she's talking to him at all.
When she follows him into the turbolift he does open up:
KIRK: Actually, Scotty just quit. And your boyfriend's second-guessing me every chance he gets.
And then regrets his statement, walking it back immediately:
KIRK: I'm sorry, that was inappropriate.
She makes a face like "Well I don't disagree" and Kirk starts mumbling about how much he wants to touch Spock's bangs.
Eventually she actually engages
UHURA: It's not you.
and they start a little back and forth before this fantastic shot:
(Seriously are we not supposed to read this as a love triangle?? Although, the specific geometry of that triangle is a little complicated, as I'll get into.)
So here's some character information that we get in these few lines
Uhura has pretty much accepted Kirk as a captain and is invested in his well-being.
Jim is truly barely keeping it together. He absolutely should not be in command right now.
Jim is conscious of and worried about professionalism, but not super great at maintaining it, especially with people he knew before the Enterprise.
Uhura is boiling over with frustration in her relationship with Spock, so much so that she'll break her professional demeanor to blurt out to Jim that they're having issues.
So here is the horrifying possibility that is posited by this scene: I think Kirk is the closest thing Uhura has to a friend. She seeks him out, and engages with him about her relationship with Spock in a way that seems almost unintentional, like she just couldn't help it but she has no one else to talk to. The Uhura and Kirk relationship in AOS fascinates me, because they met first, before anyone else, and Uhura is the person who has witnessed Kirk's most dramatic change.
My personal headcanon for the AOS bridge crew is that after they saved Earth they were elevated to celebrity status both within Starfleet and in the Federation at large. I see their position on the Enterprise as largely a PR move by Starfleet to smooth over the loss of a whole damn planet, and I think this is why they're all packaged together. I would bet they are all incredibly, intensely lonely, especially Kirk, Spock and Uhura. Sulu has his husband, Scotty and Keesner have each other, and Chekov is young and seems more resilient than the others (based on him getting kicked out of a woman's room at the beginning of Beyond, he's able to form relationships with people outside of their group).
But Kirk, Spock and Uhura are trapped. Uhura and Spock are unhappy, but breaking up is terrifying when you don't know what's on the other side and when you're probably a straight-up celebrity couple in the Federation. Jim and Spock have, you know, their soulmate bullshit going on. And then Uhura and Kirk have this weird quasi-friendship where they have Spock in common. They're kind of antagonistic because if they aren't that means they might become real friends and actually talk about the things that are on their minds, which is a scary thought, because that road leads directly to dumping sessions late night in quarters. Which would inevitably eventually result in a single drunken kiss that they both instantly regret, then turn to each other and say "I'm in love with Spock"/"I think I'm gay"
Any way the obvious resolution to this impasse was for Carol to stay aboard and start "dating" Jim and then for them all to go on an anime-style amusement park date where they slowly swap partners and Spock ends up with Jim and Uhura ends up with Carol.
