However, what wrapped around this doomsday plot to at least make it serviceable was the cast and the underlying story. The motley crew of Section 31’ers, including Rachel Garrett, whom Trekkies know as /Captain/ Rachel Garrett of the USS Enterprise-C, is on the team from Starfleet as their check-and-balance. Red Flag 1. The jokes and one-liners were a little bit much at times, but it kept the tone of the movie light, and playful sass is a trait Michelle Yeoh does well. The underlying story is how Philippa became emperor in the first place, which is how the film opens, with younger versions of her (Miku Martineau) and her partner-turn-right-hand San (James Huang) where you find that becoming Terran Emperor is a last-man standing competition, one where you have to kill your family and friends as well. She did, he didn’t. Later as adults she had her superweapon commissioned and delivered to her by San (James Hiroyuki Liao) and like the engineers who made it, he poisoned himself at her dismay. I won’t spoil the rest of the film, but all of that, given some predictable twists and turns, made for an enjoyable watch, but still not something I’d affix “Trek” to, even if there were a few tricorder scans, some machines to fix, and some starship combat.

And therein lies the rub that I continue to have with anything Kurtzman has more involvement in; He continues to demonstrate that he understands Trek from an action, science-fiction point of view, but not its core ethos, its inner light (lol) that makes the franchise unique from other action science-fiction shows. If you remove Star Trek from this film, it plays off as a generic science-fiction thriller. Borderlands, by comparison, felt like a similar movie shot-for-shot, action-for-action, but surprisingly, Borderlands managed to BE Borderlands, to FEEL Borderlands even if Kevin Hart doesn’t play a convincing Roland. This did not FEEL like Star Trek. Rachel Garrett felt like a last-minute addition to the movie almost as a way of Kurtzman saying “Aren’t we making a Star Trek thing here? Throw in someone they know!” Which, in the nitpick department, the movie takes place in 2324. Garrett meets her “fate” in 2344, twenty years later. This would mean that the Enterprise-B under Captain John Harriman, which came into service in 2293, would have been out. Jean-Luc Picard would be a cadet at the Academy at this time, Beverly Crusher (nee Howard) was born, and Boothby begins his career as groundkeeper of the Academy. In terms of Trek canon television, this period of time between the 2290s and the 2350s is basically untouched. I imagine the original vision for the S31 series was to explore more of this timeline, but failing that, this film was made, and while it tries to kind of backdoor pilot itself in the end, it’s just not something I want to watch. Which brings me to my final wiggle.

“Section 31” was something written into Deep Space Nine for a few episodes towards the end of its run as a means of showing Starfleet’s desperation to win a war, and give Dr. Bashir a real spy thriller to play outside of the holodeck. It was never fleshed out into anything more, and even within the show, it was very much implied that nobody knew Section 31 existed, even itself, and especially Starfleet or the Federation. It was a ultimate all-blind black ops team, and Discovery kind of turned it into this Navy Seal Team Six kind of mockery, complete with “Control” and frankly fucked it up. It felt super dumb to have a Starfleet person in on the team, because it acknowledges that Starfleet and the Federation have had Section 31, and it kind of retcons Sloan in DS9, unless Sloan wasn’t actually Section 31 and was merely a ruse. I like the concept of Section 31, but I like it when they’re completely off the grid. This film would have been made so much more interesting if Garrett were serving on an actual starship, and happened to run into them halfway in and they had to fumble all over themselves to cover up that they’re black ops, only for her to see through the ruse, but still help them anyway and then take that secret with her down with the Enterprise-C.

As usual, the RLM guys discuss a few angles I didn’t consider before, but thought it would be worth a bit more iteration.

Social Media and Influencers: When it comes to being a social media influencer on music, movies, and television, the bar is set impossibly and incontrovertibly low, and that is because in modern social norm, it’s rude to gatekeep. I don’t disagree, however what happens is now you have a bunch of Trek influencers in orbit around modern Trek who either have a very cursory understanding of Trek, or just like science fiction. Section 31 will certainly delight those people, and that is perfectly fine, but it will also dilute the brand for those of us who are harder Trek nerds and who desire the more nuanced and cerebral Trek, or what they colloquially call, your daddy’s Star Trek. I know every new Trek show suffers from having to prove itself to the last show’s enjoyers. TOS hardliners shit all over TNG until TNG’s third or fourth season. DS9 was roughly the same way until Worf joined. VOY struggled until they added sex appeal, aka Seven of Nine. But even so, hardcore Trekkies can still watch those early seasons and say, “This is Trek.” I cannot say the same thing about early DISCO, though I can say that of SNW season one, but that was because they piggybacked off DISCO season two.

If Kurtzman and Co. really rely on these mid-tier Trek fans for gauging their content, and I suspect they do, then at least have the dignity to give the reins of at least one show to someone interested in making harder Trek for the rest of us, and acknowledge you are indeed mid. Every nerd franchise has to have a Dave Filoni or Henry Cavill looking out for the core fanbase even if the goal should be to push them out of their comfort zone every once and awhile.