Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Star Trek: Discovery and the trailers and teasers for Section 31.
On the eve of Section 31′s premiere, I thought we could take one final look ahead to Star Trek’s first-ever TV movie.
Section 31 took a long and difficult road to get to this point, with the initial announcement of a full spin-off series being met with, at best, a lacklustre reception from Trekkies and viewers of Star Trek: Discovery. That project then spent several years in development hell, before Michelle Yeoh’s Oscar- and Golden Globe-winning performance in Everything Everywhere All At Once seemed to resurrect Paramount’s interest in the project. Section 31 was adapted from the original full series pitch to a TV movie – and that film will premiere on Friday.
In 2019, when Section 31 was first announced, I gotta confess that I wasn’t really sold on the idea. There were issues with Mirror Georgiou as a character to say the least, coming before she got some desperately-needed development in Discovery’s third season. And this was only a few months after the announcement of Star Trek: Picard – the series that was about to bring back a fan-favourite character and also move Star Trek’s timeline forward for the first time in almost two decades.
Then, during Discovery’s second season, fans fell in love with Anson Mount’s portrayal of Captain Pike and Ethan Peck’s take on Spock. As I wrote a few years ago: if there was only room for one Discovery spin-off, it was obvious which one fans were clamouring for and which we weren’t. Strange New Worlds was announced in 2020, and seemed to be another factor in Section 31 failing to get off the ground in its original incarnation.
But Section 31 has been reborn, thanks in no small part to Michelle Yeoh. I don’t think it’s unfair or any kind of exaggeration to say that her status as an award-winner is a major factor – perhaps the ultimate factor – in resurrecting Section 31. Paramount’s executives saw her enthusiasm to return to the role and desperately wanted to be able to advertise the next Star Trek project as starring “Academy Award-winner Michelle Yeoh,” so Section 31 got a reprieve! The film is being directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi, who also directed several episodes of Star Trek: Discovery, including Such Sweet Sorrow and the series finale.
You will know, if you read my thoughts on the Section 31 trailers last month, that I’m sceptical about the film from a personal point of view. The “Star Trek does Suicide Squad” presentation turns me off, the depiction of Section 31 as a kind of haphazardly thrown together “gang of misfits” doesn’t seem to fit with what we’ve seen before, and Georgiou’s possible backsliding away from the more nuanced take on the character that we’d started to see in Discovery makes me fear the film will be regressive and/or repetitive. Those are my biggest points of concern on the eve of Section 31′s premiere.
But, as I also said last time, none of that will matter if Section 31 brings in new viewers – and I think it has a ton of potential to do just that. Michelle Yeoh’s star has risen, meaning her name alone is an automatic draw for a lot of people – many of whom may not have been inclined to check out Star Trek. If the Star Trek franchise is to survive, it can’t remain the sole preserve of people who enjoyed it in the ’90s… it has to expand its audience and bring in new viewers. A modern cinematic style, at least partially inspired by the comic book films that have been dominant at the box office over the last few years, and an Oscar-winning star in the lead role give Star Trek a chance to do that… a chance that the franchise arguably hasn’t had in a long time.
Whether I personally enjoy Section 31 or not kind of pales into insignificance compared to that! Expanding Star Trek’s fan community and general audience is the key to keeping the franchise on our screens when the current crop of shows run their course, and anything that bolsters Paramount’s position and Paramount+ is going to be helpful in that regard. So Section 31 may not be “my thing,” but it could be hugely important for Star Trek as a whole.
All that being said, I don’t want to pre-judge Section 31. I know how I feel about the trailers, and I have concerns about Georgiou’s potential backsliding in particular, but I will still do my best to judge the film on its own merit. I’m not going into the premiere wanting to have a bad experience so I can write up all manner of complaints and criticisms! I want to judge it fairly and give the writers and performers a chance to impress me. I’m crossing my fingers and hoping that, despite my first impressions, I’ll have a good time with Section 31.
So I hope I haven’t given you too negative an impression already! I will be reviewing Section 31 over the weekend, so please swing by the website and check out my review if you can. I promise to give the film a fair shake.
If Section 31 receives positive reviews and a lot of attention, driving new subscriptions to Paramount+ in the process, I hope it won’t be the only time Paramount greenlights this kind of TV movie. There are so many characters and stories in Star Trek that wouldn’t be able to carry a full series, but could be worth looking at in this kind of format. With new sets having been constructed for Discovery, Picard, Strange New Worlds, and Section 31, re-starting production using existing sets and costumes could even be a way to keep costs down, and the storytelling potential of these one-shot productions is off the charts. I really hope that Paramount’s executives are considering more ideas for one-off films and stories.
I’ve also talked before about the untapped potential of Short Treks for telling smaller standalone stories, and again I think Section 31′s success could highlight the possibilities of that format, potentially re-starting that series of mini-episodes. When we consider Section 31′s place in the history of the Star Trek franchise… maybe it’ll come to be seen as a bit of a turning-point, with Paramount seeing its success as a gateway to telling more stories outside of the main live-action shows. We can cross our fingers and hope, anyway!
So we’ve talked about Section 31′s potential, as well as its complicated route through development hell. But what about the film itself? What can we glean about its story, its characters, and the direction it might take?
Let’s start with Georgiou. I’d like to go into a bit more detail about my biggest concern about her characterisation based on what we’ve seen and read. The official character blurb released ahead of Section 31 says that Georgiou will have to “face the sins of her past,” which also seems to tie in with flashbacks to a young Empress Georgiou that are presumably set in the Mirror Universe.
By the time Georgiou left Discovery in the Season 3 two-parter Terra Firma, she’d finally grown as a character. She’d begun to realise how her time away from the Mirror Universe had impacted her, changing some of her attitudes to non-human races like the Kelpians, for example. She had been, for want of a better word, “softened” – with her one-dimensional Mirror Universe shell cracking to reveal a more nuanced, complex, and interesting character hiding inside. That was great – and as Georgiou stepped into the Guardian of Forever’s portal, I felt she was finally ready to take on the lead role in a spin-off project.
To be blunt, I saw absolutely none of that nuance or complexity in the trailers, and my worry is that the version of Georgiou we’ll get in Section 31 will have been regressed to that pre-Terra Firma presentation. As a result, she’ll be no more interesting than a typical Terran – worse, her arc of “learning to tolerate the Federation way of doing things” will feel incredibly repetitive. I hope I’m wrong – I truly, truly do. But “facing the sins of her past” was precisely what Terra Firma was all about – so why go back to that story?
I’m worried that a boring, one-dimensional Terran who loves nothing more than murder, torture, and rule-breaking will be a waste of an excellent performer in Michelle Yeoh, too. Yeoh was at her best playing the prime timeline version of the character in Discovery’s premiere; disciplining a rogue officer who she also viewed as a surrogate daughter. She was also at her best in Terra Firma, as Mirror Georgiou grew, changed, and began exhibiting those nuances and complexities that we talked about earlier. That’s where the character is most interesting, and either dragging her backwards to make her a “badass girlboss” or re-telling the basic plot points from Terra Firma will not, in my opinion, lead to an interesting or entertaining arc across Section 31.
However, if some of Georgiou’s Terra Firma growth can be retained, and she can be a more complex character somewhat akin to Captain Lorca in Discovery’s first season, then I think there’s potential. A hardball commander who pushes their team to the limit – but ultimately still cares about them in their own way and wants them to survive as well as succeed – would be fantastic to watch, and Michelle Yeoh can play a character like that exceptionally well. I really hope we’re going to get something like this instead of a regression or a repetitive arc.
Rachel Garrett is perhaps the only other character that I have an opinion of at this early stage. We’ve seen Garrett in The Next Generation, when she was in command of the Enterprise-C in the 2340s. For me, Garrett’s inclusion raises a few questions about the possible timing of Section 31: is the film going to be set around the time of Strange New Worlds and The Original Series… or will it be further along the timeline, perhaps somewhere in between The Undiscovered Country and The Next Generation? If it’s the former, that would make Rachel Garrett almost 100 years old by the time of Yesterday’s Enterprise… which seems like quite a stretch. I’ll be curious to see if this gets addressed – and yes, I know it’s a relatively minor point that only an obsessive Trekkie would care about!
From what we saw in the trailers, Garrett appears to be Starfleet’s sole representative on Georgiou’s mission. She could be the one arguing for following the rules as the rest of the gang of misfits are running around causing chaos – and there’s potential in a character like that if she’s handled well. I hope that Garrett won’t be sidelined or used as comic relief, and that we’ll actually get to learn a bit about her in her early years. Kacey Rohl, who will play Garrett, is someone I’m familiar with from her work on Hannibal a few years ago, and I think Paramount lucked out to get an actress of her quality for the role. As above with Michelle Yeoh… I hope that potential isn’t squandered.
The rest of the main characters pretty much feel like blank slates, though there are a couple of familiar races in the equation. First we have Melle, the first Deltan to be a main character since Ilia in The Motion Picture. While there’s the potential to perhaps learn more about this famously hyper-sexual race, or even make a connection to the aforementioned Ilia… part of me thinks Melle will be mostly used for off-colour jokes, with the sexuality of the Deltans ramped up to eleven and very little else being shown. Again, I hope I’m wrong about that – but it just feels like the direction Section 31 is gonna go.
Quasi, who is a Chameloid, could be a very useful addition to any team of spies. I like the idea of revisiting a race of shape-shifters that we haven’t seen since The Undiscovered Country, as there’s potential there. While I doubt we’ll get any kind of in-depth look at the Chameloids as a race, it’s at least interesting to see a shape-shifter in Star Trek who isn’t a member of the Dominion/Founders!
Fuzz – given the descriptor “the maniac” – is a total enigma. I suspect he’s going to be a Romulan, not a Vulcan as some have posited, simply based on the short description of him that Paramount released. However, this potentially complicates the timeline if Section 31 takes place before the events of Balance of Terror, in which humanity learned of the Romulans’ connection with the Vulcans. Whenever Section 31 is set, there’s also the question of why a Romulan would be working with Starfleet’s off-the-books spy division. Could Fuzz have a connection to Sybok’s emotional Vulcans from The Final Frontier? That’s another guess. Or, Vulcan ears notwithstanding, he could be a member of another race entirely – such as the “proto-Vulcans” from Who Watches The Watchers or the Halanan from Second Sight.
Then we come to Zeph – one of several mechanically-enhanced humanoids seen in the Section 31 trailers. Although technological augmentation used to be the preserve of the Borg, Star Trek has brought in characters like Lower Decks’ Sam Rutherford who have been – for want of a better term – “modified” using technology. Zeph seems to be in that category, and I’ll be curious to see if there’s a reason given for why he uses a mechanical suit. I can see him serving as the group’s “tank;” the character who can use brute force to stomp the baddies.
Alok Sahar appears to be the head of this Section 31 division – though, if we read between the lines, he may not be the head of the overall organisation in this era. Does that mean he works under Discovery’s Ash Tyler, who was installed as head of Section 31 at the end of Season 2? Will we hear any mention of Tyler or the rest of Section 31 at all? I doubt it – but you never know!
Regardless, any team needs a leader – though Sahar seems to be a pretty hands-off kind of leader, either unwilling to bring his team of misfits to heel or unable to do so. Perhaps that’s why he’ll have to turn to Georgiou? I’m speculating, of course. But it seems that Sahar will give us the best opportunity to learn more about Section 31 in this era, if nothing else.
One thing we don’t have a clear view of at this stage is the villain (or villains, plural) that Georgiou’s team may have to stop. I gotta confess that I’m a bit burned out on the whole “imminent existential threat to the entire Federation and/or the galaxy” premise after Picard and Discovery kind of did that to death. But, based on what we’ve heard from Paramount and seen in the trailers, it seems like it’ll be another high-stakes affair this time around. Section 31, as the Federation’s black ops division, is particularly well-suited to this kind of story… I just hope it won’t feel too repetitive coming after Star Trek’s recent output.
With a reference to Georgiou “confronting the sins of her past,” I wonder if the threat Section 31 is staring down could be connected to the Mirror Universe. I hope not, because as I’ve said on prior occasions, I’m not wild about the Mirror Universe as a setting – and especially not as the backbone that has to carry an entire film. Terrans are pretty boring and flat, and the Mirror Universe seems to trick even competent performers into hammy, over-acted, pantomime performances. If Section 31 does revisit the Terran Empire in a big way… I hope that won’t become a problem.
That aside, your guess is as good as mine. With several mechanically-augmented characters, could we see the Borg brought in… somehow? I’m not convinced of that, but when I think about potential Federation-ending threats, the Borg are one of the few factions that have always had that potential. With Georgiou’s trip to the far future, she may have insights on the Borg that could prove useful.
And speaking of Georgiou visiting the far future… will that be addressed in any way? Could Georgiou leave behind information or instructions within Section 31 that could help Starfleet in the future? Or could her time in the future have some bearing on the mission at hand? I think this will have to be handled delicately, so that Section 31 doesn’t lean too heavily on a series viewers may not have seen for its main plot points… but it would be nice to see Georgiou’s time in the 32nd Century at least mentioned in some capacity.
Alright then! Let’s wrap things up.
Section 31 will premiere in about 48 hours’ time, and I have already signed up for Paramount+ to ensure I can watch it as soon as it’s available. I want to say I’m cautiously optimistic… but truth be told, I’m not. I want to give Section 31 a chance to impress me – and I will do my utmost to give it that chance – but, as I said last time, if I’d seen trailers like these for a film in literally any other franchise, I wouldn’t be tuning in. Section 31 just… doesn’t seem like it’s gonna be my thing.
That being said, I will give Section 31 a fair shake, and I’ll try not to let my scepticism and pre-judgement of the film ruin the experience. New Star Trek on our screens is always gonna be a good thing, and with a more modern tone and an Oscar-winning lead actress, Section 31 has a ton of potential to show off Star Trek to untold numbers of new fans, many of whom will hopefully stick around and join the fan community. I hope they’ll find it to be a welcoming place!
Stay tuned over the weekend (or early into next week) because I will be writing up a full review of Section 31. I’m not sure if I’ll do one piece or two; I might split the review into a non-spoiler article and one containing story spoilers, if possible.
All that’s left to say is this: I hope you’re excited for Section 31, and when it arrives I hope you enjoy it.
Live long and prosper!
Star Trek: Section 31 will premiere on Paramount+ on the 24th of January 2025 in countries and territories where the platform is available. The Star Trek franchise – including Section 31, Discovery, and all other properties discussed above – is the copyright of Paramount Global. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Trekking with Dennis 