Star Trek Section 31 Review: Yeoh Baby Yeoh Baby Yeoh!

Michelle Yeoh's Emperor Georgiou spin-off is all about her, despite the nominal team name

Though it may have the most advanced special effects in all of Star Trek, Section 31 feels like a throwback – one to the days when pilots that weren't picked up got repackaged as TV movies. With onscreen titles literally telling you where the act breaks are, and an ending that [vague spoilers] feels like a beginning, it plays more like more of a hypothetical first episode than a standalone feature film. Ostensibly, the goal here was to create more “limited event” airings to accompany regular season-long shows; purportedly, Michelle Yeoh winning the Best Actress Oscar upped her price tag and American opportunities to the point that Paramount couldn't tie her down to a long-term streaming commitment any more.

It's honestly weird to even call this movie Section 31, as it reveals almost nothing about the organization, revealed in Deep Space Nine to be Starfleet's Black Ops. It would make more sense to simply call it “Georgiou,” as it centers on Yeoh's character, though the name doesn't have the same recognition as “Picard.” It's essentially Creature Commandos/Suicide Squad in the Star Trek universe, but with only Georgiou getting flasbacks/backstory

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We're given the Stardate, but not the actual calendar date this takes place, so only the most devoted Trekkers will know without looking it up that this is set between Star Trek VI and the Next Generation era. The reason for this ties into Georgiou's roots in the first half of Discovery, set during the Strange New Worlds era – evidently, the Guardian of Forever sent her back from the future to her correct-ish time period, if not her original (Mirror) universe. (Sorry, folks, no cameo by Ethan Peck as Goatee Spock.) It also allows for some classic aliens we haven't seen in a while, though one is from a race that canonically ought to be extinct. I'm sure there's a loophole somewhere.

Given the timeline, then, we know full well that no doomsday weapon is going to wipe out the Federation, or start a war with the Romulans that isn't canonical. Then again, on some level you know that wouldn't happen anyway. The fun is in the how, not the what. And the one big advantage this has in not being a TV pilot is this: without anyone on the cast being marked as a series regular, anyone can die. Well, probably except Georgiou. They're not that stupid.

If Star Wars' major trope is the western-style cantina, Star Trek's equivalent is the Vegas-style nightclub. So naturally, this is where we find Georgiou making a new life for herself as club owner and possible madam (the brothel aspect is strongly implied, but a cop, and this viewer, would have a hard time proving the direct exchange of money for sex). When a Section 31 team attempts to capture her, she figures it out pretty quickly, but agrees to join in their mission for funsies anyway. The goal, initially at least, is to liberate a valuable luggage item from a cybernetically augmented mad scientist type, who conveniently happens to have a reservation at the club hotel.

I'll look up the names in a moment, but for clarity's sake the team are Eugenics Wars Hibernation Guy (Omari Hardwick), Starfleet Anime Chick (Kacey Rohl), Autistic Shapeshifter (Sam Richardson), Gears of War Dude as Bad Trans Metaphor (Robert Kazinsky), Angry Irish Microbe Piloting a Vulcan Body (Sven Ruygrok), and Irresistible Bald Lady (Humberly Gonzales). In the script's most irritating play for relevance, they all get constantly offended by micro-aggressions, like the microbe taking offense to any phrase that implies small is bad, and the Bad Trans Metaphor getting insulted if people imply that he and his mech suit are separate things. He has some sort of mech-suit dysphoria, which is the first of two trans metaphors in the show that might better have been served by hiring actual trans people. Maybe Trek is reeling from backlash to Adira and Grey on Discovery, but Adira and Grey were just an annoying couple, not because they were trans but because Discovery had a pathological inability to depict couples as anything but annoying.

Also, if you're all about fighting stereotypes, think for a moment about telling the South African actor playing a short tempered, violent character with too many kids to...do an Irish accent. Janey mack, as my Dublin readers might say.

[Takes a moment to look at Wikipedia] Okay, so the autistic shapeshifter named Quasi is meant to be the same species as Marta in Star Trek VI, and the Starfleet girl fond of anime hair and bisexual subtext is Rachel Garrett, who will one day captain the Enterprise-C? None of this was clear to me, and I am not an idiot about Trek lore. Bald lady Melle is obviously Deltan like Ilia in the first Trek movie, though. To be fair, you don't actually need to know any of this, and it's arguably more annoying to know that Garrett has plot armor.

Director Olatunde Osunsanmi (of many Discovery episodes) and writer Craig Sweeney (Elementary) may be a touch tone-deaf, but they aren't fools, so Michelle Yeoh gets two big martial-arts fight setpieces, one early on and one at the climax. Had this become a series, we can presume that one per episode might have been a mandate. In the middle, instead of that, there's a high-speed chase sequence that unfortunately feels and looks like the Star Tours motion simulator ride, in front of a screen, although it finishes well, which counts for a lot. All the digital renders look very nice, with particular attention to particulate matter; it’s just that during the big chase, the superimposing of foreground on background is noticeable. Georgiou's club looks like a giant weathered nautilus shell, with open spirals upon spirals, and would probably have crashed the CGI programs even a decade or so ago.

The story in this 100-minute TV movie is simpler than it seems, padded out with flashbacks to Georgiou's childhood that don't tell us a lot we couldn't fill in for ourselves, but give insta-background to, yeah, what's basically yet another Wrath of Khan riff, sorta like the way Nemesis retconned in a Picard clone with a grudge. Because the characters this time around are probably the most “alien” crew since Prodigy, it's not immediately as notable which playbook is in use. That said, Sweeney might have missed that the reason Wrath of Khan and First Contact worked so well is that there was already an actual backstory in canon, rather than one he made up as having always been there when it wasn't. Nemesis and Into Darkness, well...at least Section 31 handles the retcon aspect better than those two.

It's tough to count this as one of the official Star Trek movies given its TV feel, but if we must, it is the most solo star-driven one to date. As pretty as the visuals are, the rest of it's fairly thin, but the fact that it's all about Michelle Yeoh makes it work. There's a reason she won that Oscar, and she's not content to just rest on laurels.

An actual story about Section 31 will have to wait, though.

Section 31 begins streaming on Paramount+ starting Jan. 24th

Image credits: Jan Thijs/Paramount