The anvil of justice is planted firm, and fate who makes the sword does the forging in advance. The words of truth are simple. — Aeschylus
Starfleet — where fun goes to die. — Philippa Georgiou
Star Trek is one of my favorite TV series. All of 'em. There’s not a dud in the bunch. Whenever* (*this has never happened) people ask me if there are any Trek series I dislike, I sing:
I love every Star Trek that I see
From Deep Space Nine to Discov-ery
So: writing out my thoughts about
Star Trek: Section 31 is a little like reviewing chocolate cake: bring in on, and more portions, please. You have been warned. That said:
Our first glimpse of Philippa Georgiou (the always-magnificent Michelle Yeoh) in the Star Trek Universe was in the teaser of the first episode of
Star Trek: Discovery. The captain of the USS
Shenzhou, Georgiou walks (or treks?) across a desert form a visual symbol — the Starfleet delta — in the sand to see her and series protagonist Michael Burnham safely home. She is guru and mother-figure to Burnham, beloved by her crew, much-decorated and spoken of in the same breaths of admiration as Archer, April, and Pike. It’s one of my favorite openings to a
Star Trek series, which hints at most admirable traits of a Starfleet office: leader, mentor, helper, pathfinder, a beacon of hope and promise. By the time the opening credits rolled around, I was eager for more adventures of Captain Philippa Georgiou.
This is not that Philippa Georgiou.
This is Emperor Georgiou: the cruel, conniving, omnipotent dictator of the Terran Empire in
Trek‘s much-used (occasionally overused?) Mirror Universe, later brought into the
Discovery series as an uneasy ally to Burnham and Discovery, willing to do the dirty work a Starfleet officer wouldn’t. Making her the protagonist of a Trek movie is a risky venture. This is, after all, the Georgiou who destroyed planets, enslaved civilizations, and served up Saru for dinner. The writers of
Discovery gave her something of a redemption arc which continued as the series catapulted itself into the 32nd century, far beyond the historical scope of any other Trek show; she’s eventually sent backwards in time by the now humanoid Guardian of Forever, and that’s where we find her at the beginning of this movie, running a morally grey space station somewhere in between the end of the original Kirk’n’ Spock
Star Trek and
The Next Generation (the device of Philippa Georgiou being “temporally incompatible” with the 32nd century is mentioned, brushed past quickly and without much comment in
Section 31, which is vital to its effectiveness: the more you already know about Star Trek the better, but if you don’t care, it’s okay to just ignore it).
Georgiou’s recruited by Alok (Omari Hardwick), an agent of Section 31, the hush-hush dark ops section of Starfleet introduced in
Deep Space Nine. S31 balances on a slim narrative edge of “whoa, these guys betray everything that Starfleet stands fo!r” and “well,
somebody’s gotta do these dangerous clandestine assignments to preserve freedom.” The latter is definitely this movie’s take on the section, and Georgiou joins Alok’s motley crew of dodgy specialists to pull off a grand heist of a dangerous weapon.
Once the plot gets rolling, it’s a fairly rote heist-and-chase story, so the appeal here is the characters: mix’em all together into a
Mission: Impossible style exotic cocktail and let’em bubble. They’re introduced in an inventive highlight where Georgiou uses a Sherlock Scan to detect and identify them inside a crowded cantina. Joining Alok and Georgiou are Quasi (Sam Richardson). a shape-changing Chameloid (see: Iman in
Star Trek IV); Zeph (Robert Kazinsky), a cyborg dubbed a “Swiss Army Knife” by Georgiou; Melle (Humberly Gonzalez), an enticing Deltan (see: Persis Khambatta in
The Motion Picture), who make us obsessed with bald-headed woman all over again; Rachel Garrett (Kacey Rohl), straight-laced Starfleet officer and future
Enterprise captain (see: “Yesterday’s Enterprise”); and Fuzz (Sven Ruygrok), a Vulcan with startlingly obvious emotions (see: Eddie Murphy in
Meet Dave). Not everybody, of course, gets out alive.
This is unashamedly a darker
Star Trek (even Paramount+’s opening “starship makes a flyby in the shape of the Starfleet Delta” is accompanied by ominous music) and is specifically designed to eschew the Trek house look with new designs of space stations (Georgiou’s home base is a gorgeous intertwined spiral construction), non-Starfleet spaceships (although not until the second hour; the first several acts remain teasingly on the ground), and fabulous costumes, especially for the women, most specifically for Yeoh). There’s no real groundbreaking advances made here in cinematography, although it at least avoids the usual blue and orange color palette — by lighting the movie in golds and
dark blues. Still, the fight sequences are fun and you can usually tell what’s going on even in darkly lit scenes, although it seems a shame to waste the natural agile talent of Yeoh by chopping her fight scenes up into furiously edited second-long segments.
Yeoh is of course the stand-out here, having a grand time as always, with a performance just delightfully short of pure ham, always one step ahead of the rest of the galaxy. Your mileage may vary on how much you can forget or forgive her character’s backstory of killing trillions in the Mirror Universe, but a genocide or two aside, she’s just a delight. There are some nifty (CGI) special effects, an inventive battle sequence where Georgiou fights a phase-shifted mercenary through walls and floors, a whole lotta technobabble about a bio-superweapon that makes the Genesis Device look like a class-1 phaser...you know, the
little one. This galaxy-threatening weapon has, naturally, Star Trek’s usual Terrible Untold Past™, and there’s clever late-act shenanigans using the sci-fi physics of a garbage scow – Quark (the Richard Benjamin one, not the Ferengi one) never had it so good. And in the end, the universe is saved by Star Trek’s version of a Furby, a weapon given no absolutely Chekhov (
or Chekov) warning. Still, it’s all done with such a light touch it’s pretty forgivable.
So the big question is, of course: will you like it? Wellllll, I did, a lot. But as mentioned earlier on, I’m a sucker for just about everything set in the Star Trek Universe, and despite some creaky dialogue and clichéd plot coupons,
Section 31 was a lot of thrilling fun, and it’s a great vehicle for the always-delightful Michelle Yeoh to continue the story of one of Trek’s most interesting women.
But is it
Star Trek? There’s no boldly going, there’s no strange new worlds...but to me, the beauty and the truth of Trek is all contained in that goofy little third-season pendant Gene Roddenberry forced on Leonard Nimoy in order to sell trinkets through his mail-order store: the IDIC. Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations, amirite, folks? Trek shows need not,
should not always be Starfleet crews braving the far reaches of the universe searching for strangely lighted Paramount backlot worlds and oddly rubber-foreheaed aliens. Different genres of Star Trek — mysteries, thrillers, romances, comedies — give life to and enrich the past impressive nearly sixty years of mythos and legend. Section 31, like
Lower Decks and
Prodigy — two series I enjoyed immensely — is something
different. That’s always a breath of fresh air in this galaxy.
And if it features a star as charismatic as Michelle Yeoh playing one of the least likely heroes in the Star Trek Universe — well, that’s a brave new world as well.
Star Trek: Section 31 is directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi and written by Craig Sweeny. It runs on the Paramount+ streaming network beginning January 24.