Key Takeaways
- The Star Trek: Section 31 movie features Michelle Yeoh as Phillipa Georgiou.
- Plot involves characters dealing with their past sins.
- Georgiou leaves nightclub life to tackle a mysterious new threat, showcases Section 31’s darker side.
The premiere of the Star Trek: Section 31 movie is just over a month away. To get fans even more hyped, Paramount+ released a new official trailer this week that reveals a bit more about the first official Star Trek movie in eight years.
Section 31 features Oscar-winner Michelle Yeoh reprising her Star Trek: Discovery character, Phillipa Georgiou. Georgiou and her ragtag crew of Section 31 operatives are tasked with the dirty work that Starfleet Intelligence can’t or won’t handle. The film is set in the “lost generation” of the Trekverse — the years between Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: The Next Generation.
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The studio has dropped some details about Georgiou’s crew, but other than that, details about the plot have been scarce. The new trailer gives fans a bit more information about the threat Georgiou’s team is tasked with handling and teases some interesting callbacks to established Star Trek lore.
Georgiou Living the Quiet Life?
The trailer starts with a shot of an elaborate space station called The Baraam. With lounge music playing, a nightclub scene appears. As a singer croons and the camera pans around a hip bar filled with a wide variety of alien lifeforms, one of them tells Georgiou that a patron wants to speak with her.
When Alok Sahar (Omari Hardwick) sits down across from her, Georgiou demands, “What are you doing on my space station?”
His answer is basically a variation on the classic “make you an offer you can’t refuse.”
This scene confirms that after Georgiou went through the Guardian of Forever’s portal and ended up wherever she did, she settled down into a relatively quiet life as a nightclub owner. Of course, running an intergalactic bar on a space station isn’t the quietest of lives. On Deep Space Nine, Quark proved that bar owners often have lucrative side hustles that involve barely legal or illegal activities. And knowing Georgiou, she’s definitely got some side action going on, even if she has “settled down” to run a legitimate business.
Back in Action
Of course, Georgiou can’t resist the opportunity to get back into the action, and when Sahar tells her “we’re facing a threat unlike anything Starfleet’s ever seen,” she quickly abandons her swanky establishment to join the team.
The mysterious threat is still unclear. One brief moment in the trailer shows what appears to be an army of humanoids beaming onto a planet. They’re dressed in distinctive red and gold uniforms, holding phase rifles. The uniforms suggest they could be from the Terran Empire, which would make sense given that promos for the movie have heavily focused on the theme of Georgiou atoning for her past sins. This also fits with shots from the previous teaser trailer that showed a younger Georgiou fighting her way to the top of the Terran Empire.
The Mission
The rest of the trailer includes a lot of butt kicking, cool space fights, and snappy one-liners about bending the rules, sticking together, and surviving. It also puts a spotlight on the issue some fans have always had with Section 31 — why does a utopia need a Black Ops division?
In between action scenes, flash the words, “To protect the light, they fight in shadow.”
This has long been the answer the franchise has given for the existence of Section 31. Maintaining peace and order throughout the galaxy is never as easy as it seems, and it’s rarely maintained through diplomacy alone. To keep the utopian veneer of the Federation from cracking, people have to operate behind the scenes, bend the rules, and take care of the people and organizations who just want to see the world burn.
No one likes to admit this is the way things have to be, but it is. And Star Trek has frequently examined how Section 31 can be a force for bad instead of good. But it seems like Star Trek: Section 31 is ready to show fans how the Black Ops organization really does protect the Trekverse’s utopian future.
- Release Date
- September 24, 2017
- Creator
- Bryan Fuller, Alex Kurtzman
- Streaming Service(s)
- Paramount+ , Paramount+ with Showtime , fuboTV , Spectrum
- Franchise(s)
- Star Trek
- Where To Watch
- Paramount Plus