Star Trek: Section 31 is firing on all cylinders

Paramount Plus’ new Star Trek film is the sound of scene chewing in space, which is to say, it’s pretty damn fun.

As the very first nontheatrical Star Trek feature (one that’s debuting almost a decade after Star Trek Beyond), Star Trek: Section 31 seems like the sort of project that could have easily felt too “made for TV” to tell a satisfying story that does its characters justice. But Section 31 is firing on just about all of its cylinders, and even though Discovery is behind us at this point, the movie charts an exciting new course for Star Trek’s potential future.

Michelle Yeoh was an icon long before Star Trek: Discovery, but her performance as Captain Philippa Georgiou was part of what reenergized her career and put her on track to win a much-deserved Oscar in 2023. Though Discovery changed after Yeoh’s exit in season 3, there was hope that Georgiou’s story might continue on when news first broke about CBS being interested in another spinoff series with her as its centerpiece. Because of delays related to the covid-19 pandemic, Paramount Plus’ Star Trek: Section 31 from director Olatunde Osunsanmi was reworked into a movie rather than a show — a move that gelled with Discovery executive producer Alex Kurtzman’s optimistic vision for further explorations into this era of the franchise.

You don’t really need to have seen Discovery to dive into Section 31. But it definitely helps to know a bit about how, after the original Philippa Georgiou’s death in season 1, her alternate-universe counterpart took her place and brought an entirely different kind of energy to the USS Discovery. While the Prime universe’s Georgiou was a compassionate leader who believed in the United Federation of Planets and Starfleet’s mission to peacefully explore the galaxy, her Mirror universe double was a ruthless tyrant who embodied the fascism of the Terran Empire.

By the end of Discovery’s first season, it was clear that Emperor Georgiou was turning a new leaf and sticking around to become part of Section 31, a covert team of operatives tasked with missions that run counter to Starfleet’s professed beliefs. Georgiou and the rest of Section 31 frequently returned in Discovery’s subsequent seasons as morally dubious allies / foils to the show’s heroes. But Star Trek: Section 31 explains how exactly Georgiou was convinced to join Starfleet’s clandestine team of lethal space spies.

Most of Section 31 takes place in Georgiou’s present, where she has become the owner of a seedy nightclub (which is also a spaceship) parked somewhere beyond Starfleet’s jurisdiction. But the movie opens in the past when young Georgiou (Miku Martineau) was one of the many Terran children locked in a battle royale meant to decide who would become the Empire’s next leader.

Other than her fellow contestant San (James Hiroyuki Liao / James Huang in flashbacks), no one understands the pain that defined Georgiou’s adolescence. And while adult Georgiou has come a long way since her days of ruling the Terran Empire with an iron fist, she is still haunted by her memories of San and the things she did in her quest for power. Digging a bit deeper into Georgiou’s backstory is one of the ways Section 31 sets itself up to work as both a continuation of threads from Discovery and a jumping-off point for this era of Star Trek. It gives you a taste of the darkness that made her such a compelling Discovery villain and the internal turmoil that lent itself to her eventual antihero turn. But it also helps you understand why Section 31 agent Alok (Omari Hardwick) comes looking to recruit Georgiou to his team for a top-secret mission that could use her special skills.

For all of the thorny philosophical questions about Starfleet and Star Trek’s core ideals that Section 31 (the organization) raises, there is a comedic lightheartedness to the film’s presentation of Alok’s team. Like Georgiou, Shapeshifter Quasi (Sam Richardson), ersatz Vulcan Fuzz (Sven Ruygrok), and telepath Melle (Humberly González) each have unique talents and iffy principles that make them perfect for doing Starfleet’s off-the-books dirty work. But the goofy way they clash with exoskeleton pilot Zeph (Robert Kazinsky) and human Starfleet officer Rachel Garrett (Kacey Rohl) often makes this iteration of Section 31 feel more like a Guardians-style group of ragtag misfits than an elite squad of wetworks soldiers.

That energy serves Section 31 fairly well as it lays out the high-stakes heist Alok needs Georgiou’s expertise to pull off. There’s a bioweapons engineer who has cooked up something so dangerous that Starfleet (unofficially) sees killing him as an acceptable measure if it means Section 31 can secure his creation. But the movie’s tendency to err on the comedic side makes it feel a little awkward in moments when it tries to get serious about Georgiou’s personal demons and what Section 31’s existence really says about Star Trek’s framing of the Federation as a utopian society.

Image: Jan Thijs / Paramount Plus

Yeoh is clearly having a ball chewing every bit of scenery she can get her hands on as Section 31 plucks Georgiou out of her club — a place that looks like a glitzy fusion between The Fifth Element’s Fhloston Paradise and Star Wars’ Galactic Senate — and drops her into the proverbial deep end. At times, the movie’s blend of humor and flashy action sequences that result in a few Section 31 members’ deaths makes it seem like Paramount wants this to play like Star Trek’s answer to Warner Bros.’ Suicide Squad franchise.

It’s a fun vibe that gives the entire cast a chance to ham things up, but whenever Section 31 slows down to zoom in on Georgiou’s inner turmoil, you can sense how much more substance there could have been to these characters if they were fleshed out over the course of a series.

To its credit, Star Trek: Section 31 doesn’t entirely feel like a movie cobbled together from scrapped TV show ideas. It works as a standalone story and leaves its surviving characters with a new status quo that feels primed for more exploration in future projects. With so many newer Star Trek shows having recently been canceled, it’s easy to imagine Paramount looking at its Section 31 feature as an experiment to see how interested viewers might be in seeing Georgiou mix it up from week to week.

This trial run feels like a success because of the way Star Trek: Section 31 leaves you wanting more, and while a full-on follow-up series might not be in the cards, it could very well be the beginning of a new era of streaming surprisingly fun Star Trek features.

Star Trek: Section 31 hits Paramount Plus on January 24th.