The Star Trek: Section 31 movie desperately needed more space

Star Trek: Section 31 might be the weirdest Star Trek movie ever made. 

The film, which arrives to Paramount Plus on Jan. 24, was originally pitched as a television series showcasing Star Trek: Discovery’s Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh), former emperor of the (evil) Terran mirror universe, who became a space secret agent in the core Star Trek setting. But after the show was announced in 2019, production was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2023 writers and actors’ strikes, and even Yeoh’s own overdue meteoric rise and increasingly packed schedule after she earned the Best Actress Academy Award for Everything Everywhere All at Once. 

So the version of Section 31 hitting Paramount Plus is a movie, instead — and it’s packed with a TV series’ worth of ideas. Some of them are chewy and fascinating in a classic Trek way, while others are wildly outside the franchise’s norm. And in both cases, it’s a pity, because all these ideas could have used more room — or, perhaps, more space? — to breathe.

Star Trek: Discovery fans will remember Yeoh’s slippery Georgiou, the unrepentant conqueror-survivor of a much harsher universe, from the show’s first three seasons. But even they might need help remembering where exactly in her timey-wimey story Section 31 fits: The movie takes place between seasons 1 and 2 of Discovery, which came out more than half a decade ago. 

Section 31 tells the story of how Georgiou came to work with the titular group, Starfleet’s own barely sanctioned, extra-black black ops division: A team from that division recruits the most dangerous woman in the galaxy to recover an even more dangerous device. Georgiou is joined by a whole cadre of weirdos who don’t fit into Federation society in one way or another, but who work to safeguard its existence in secrecy, and with fewer regulations than most Starfleet officers. 

That hook feels like something out of Guardians of the Galaxy or The Suicide Squad, which is to say, it’s a very different setup than the plot of pretty much any Star Trek movie or show to date. Director Olatunde Osunsanmi and screenwriter Craig Sweeney try to make Section 31 different on purpose, and whether that works for a given Trek fan may depend on how well they’re able to take it as it is, not as what they expect from Trek. 

For example, they’ll need to accept that Section 31 is making no excuses and providing no explanations for the fan-controversial basic concept of Section 31. The movie is just here so Trek characters can have a rollicking adventure while defending the galaxy. Section 31 provides these characters with that assignment, but Section 31 (the movie) offers little insight about its organization or hierarchy. 

In pursuit of this sense of further frontiers, Sweeney — who produced and wrote for Elementary and penned the Star Trek: Discovery episode “Context is for Kings” — populates the movie with a mix of Star Trek ideas old and new. The Deltan species (longtime Trek fans may remember the bald Deltan lady in the rather excoriated Star Trek: The Motion Picture) returns in the form of agent Melle (Humberly González), while the team’s Starfleet minder is none other than a younger version of Rachel Garrett (played by Kacey Rohl), first female captain of the USS Enterprise, who appeared in one 1990 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. 

On the other hand, there’s Alok (Omari Hardwick), whose secret backstory is directly linked to an unjust systemic prejudice in the heart of Federation law, a rare black note in Trek’s utopia that recently formed the backbone of one of the best episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. And there’s Sven Ruygrok as Fuzz, a strangely emotive Vulcan who’s hiding a twist so wild, it feels like it’s from an entirely different genre of science fiction. In both cases, Section 31 only has time to glance off these characters’ secrets before the movie comes to a close. 

Alok’s secret origin as a man who fights illicitly to protect a society he can never be accepted into is a story I’d have loved to have seen explored in a full season. Fuzz, though… Well, OK. Frankly, I think Fuzz is a bridge too far for Star Trek. But if he was on a series, I’d at least stick around to see whether the writers could convince me otherwise. More time means more space to integrate him more naturally into Trek canon — or to place more weight on Sweeney making such a strange narrative addition. At the very least, a series would give fans time for the shock to wear off. 

By trying to make Star Trek: Section 31 everything regular Star Trek isn’t, Osunsanmi and Sweeney fulfill the show’s promise to boldly go where no one has gone before. But its one-and-done story concludes without the plot itself ending up anywhere particularly unexpected. This is certainly due in part to how it sits in the middle of its lead’s story — Georgiou has to be around to meet back up with Star Trek: Discovery’s main crew in its second season — and in part how the activity of Section 31 agents must remain secret to the wider galaxy. But the creators focus their ending on a pack of misfits coming together as a team, in an emotional payoff that’s undercut by the incompleteness of their personal arcs. 

It’s the weirdest Star Trek movie in tone, character lineup, and setting, and it doesn’t exactly work as a standalone Star Trek story. But in part, that’s due to how finite it is, and how limited it feels. As far as we know for the moment, there’s no Section 31 sequel movie or series spin-off coming. But I would watch one just to see where the hell it could go from here.