Wednesday, January 29, 2025

What the Hell, Star Trek?

There was never going to be a good way to tell a story where Section 31 are the heroes, but it didn't need to reach this abysmal degree of atrociousness

For all the excellent ideas to come out of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, it had some… less excellent ones. The Klingon episodes were tedious, the Ferengi episodes were cringeworthy, and the Trill episodes only had one topic to be about. The series had a bizarre obsession with fetishizing manual agriculture, an incongruous skepticism of the capabilities of galactic medicine, and a willful inability to trust the Federation's sincerity. Deep Space Nine turned the Federation's enlightened optimism into a veneer that concealed ruthless pragmatism, effectively dragging Earth into the same muddy playing field of Romulus or Cardassia. Although I'm typically in favor of questioning claims to exceptionalism, the version of Earth presented there was hardly one that would have founded something like the Federation. And Deep Space Nine's fundamentally cynical view of humans found concrete form in the worst creation of the series: the clandestine operations agency of the Federation government known as Section 31.

The rationale for introducing Section 31 to the Star Trek setting was that, if future Earth is able to thrive as a peaceful, prosperous utopia, it's only because it has spies and assassins scattered everywhere, discreetly doing the thankless work of keeping humans safe. In other words, series showrunner Ira Steven Behr either refused or failed to imagine a perfectly happy society that was capable of sustaining itself without doing a bit of evil under the table. It has often been said, by the most radically traditionalist fans, that Deep Space Nine contradicted the whole philosophy of Star Trek. They're only partially right. Such defiance of canonical ethos didn't happen because the series eschewed the Planet of the Week format, or because it gave a voice to protagonists outside of Federation authority, or because it refrained from giving every problem a simple, high-tech solution. Deep Space Nine broke away from the core assumptions of Star Trek because its humans aren't the focal point of view by default, and they don't provide the show's moral center. These humans play dirty. Sometimes they're downright nasty. Winning the Dominion War via biological weapon plus attempted genocide left humans in a morally unstable position that subsequent shows haven't dared to acknowledge.

A few years later, in the revived Battlestar Galactica, captain William Adama said this wonderful line: "It's not enough to survive. One has to be worthy of surviving." That is the test of moral fortitude that the humankind of Star Trek fails by having a Section 31. The very thing that made Star Trek stand out from other works of space opera was its trust in reasoned argument and the fundamental goodwill of every sapient being. This was a gust of fresh air in a science fiction ecosystem where conflicts tended to be resolved by who had the biggest pew-pew. Giving humans a Section 31 undermines the message of any episode that tries to present as reprehensible the cruelty and treachery of the Romulan Tal Shiar or the Cardassian Obsidian Order.

And none of these are the reasons why the new Star Trek: Section 31 movie is a horrendous mistake.

Again, Section 31 was always a bad idea, but that has nothing to do with why this movie doesn't work. The movie doesn't work because the dialogues are lazy, the characterizations are one-note, the pacing is erratic, the set design is boringly generic, the fight choreography is impossible to follow, the performances (save for the always exquisite Michelle Yeoh) are either dialed down to utterly forgettable or dialed up to utterly irritating, the villain's plan contradicts his own goals, the heroes' solution is to repeat the villain's plan, and the direction is too obviously desperate to add some energy to an insipid nothingburger by inserting gratuitous camera movements that can't disguise how mediocre the whole production is. Think of any of the thousand ingredients necessary for making a movie (casting, lighting, scriptwriting, editing, color grading), and every one of them fails catastrophically.

Section 31 starts with a prologue showing us former Empress Philippa Georgiou's backstory. We learn that the evil Terran Empire of the Mirror Universe elects its ruler via survival contest. We see young Philippa return to her home village, exhausted after countless rounds of brutal fighting, tasked now with severing her personal attachments, which she succeeds at by giving her family a painful, slow death by infodump. So she wins the throne, plus her closest competitor as a slave. I'm no expert on dictatorial practices, but I suspect that keeping in your palace the person who almost got the throne is tantamount to asking to be poisoned, stabbed, and defenestrated several times before breakfast. Add to this the fact that she and her runner-up were in love, and that she effortlessly went full tyrant on him the nanosecond she was declared Empress, and you have a fertile ground for drama that the rest of the movie proceeds to casually throw in the trash.

The actual thing that has the temerity of passing for a plot in Section 31 is the quest to intercept a superweapon that someone wants to sell to someone. We're told that the eponymous secret agency is given this mission because the sale is going to happen outside Federation territory (it just so happens to be former Empress Georgiou's bar/disco/love hotel, because when an unrepentant despotic genocidal cannibal from another universe is set loose in ours, the thing she chooses to do with her life is create jobs). After extended infodumps that matter not one bit, because they're about describing a hypothetical convoluted heist plan that has just been frustrated, the aforementioned superweapon, which turns out to be a conveniently portable item designed to look and spin like the illegitimate child of a d20 and a Hellraiser puzzle box, is tossed around like a hot potato between Georgiou and a mysterious new enemy until it's time for the next infodump.

Also, time for a reveal: the superweapon was built in the Mirror Universe, by orders from Geourgiou herself. She explains that it's capable of killing an entire quadrant of the galaxy, and somehow it never occurs to the team of expertly trained defenders of the Federation that they might want to alert the galaxy about the faction that intended to buy such an item. Instead, the entire second act is derailed by what should have been minor subplots: rooting out a traitor in the team, getting clues from a body camera, repairing a damaged ship—these tasks consume too much precious runtime, detracting from the tension that the movie should want to maintain about, you know, stopping a superweapon that can kill a whole quadrant of the galaxy.

Not that the villain intends to do anything remotely comprehensible with the weapon. To end quadrillions of lives as preparation for a campaign of conquest is to inflict scorched earth on yourself. This plan makes so little sense that it's perversely fitting that the heroes fly into battle on a garbage transport ship and improvise, as their only available attack, a load of garbage timed to explode.

That's right: the resolution of this movie comes via literal dumpster fire.

The aesthetic, the tone and the metaphors of this movie seem calculated to maximize the viewers' angry revulsion. The story is a textbook MacGuffin chase like every other MacGuffin chase you've watched. The main characters don't have personalities but post-it notes: the movie stars Walking Tragic Past, Only Sensible One, Barely Repressed Chaotic Neutral, All Points Went To Armor Class, Galaxy's Most Punchable Face, and Blatant Eye Candy. In fact, let's talk for a minute about the Deltan in the room, because the very fact that they chose to have a Deltan in this movie illustrates the instrumental way its characters are treated. In Star Trek, Deltans are an alien species whose entire deal is being irresistibly hot. The franchise has never known what to do with the Deltans except point and ogle, which means they're not allowed to be people in a story, only talking decoration. So of course, this time as every time, as soon as the Deltan does her one trick, she's quickly out of the movie. And it goes likewise with the rest of the cast, who have all the inner life of a call menu.

To conclude the list of questionable choices that went into this production, Section 31 doesn't tell us anything about Section 31. This was the best opportunity to explore the ethical complications inherent to resorting to dirty tactics in the service of a nominally righteous civilization. It also could have given us a more nuanced portrait of Philippa Georgiou as an exiled tyrant with a whole galaxy's worth of skeletons in her closet. But Section 31 has no interest in the complex questions. And if anything defines the essence of a Star Trek story, it's the willingness to jump deep into the complex questions and live with the complex answers. What we get instead is a movie incapable of realizing that a secret police is by definition the opposite of cool, and that a cannibal mass murderer is a terrible choice of hero, and its too-hard attempts to make that disastrous combination work are just embarrassing to watch.


Nerd Coefficient: 3/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.