Source : the age
In the opening scenes of Star Trek: Section 31, we’re treated to orbiting pleasure palaces, space gangsters and a mystery that will span two universes. We’re so far from the gleaming walls, recessed lighting and carpet of the USS Enterprise you could be forgiven for wondering if we’re still in the same galaxy.
But this is Star Trek, just not as you know it. Section 31 breaks all the rules: the first Star Trek made-for-streaming movie, the first to step entirely away from the conventional neat uniforms and aye-aye-sir Starfleet and the first to feature a villainess – Michelle Yeoh’s complex Philippa Georgiou – as a heroine.
Michelle Yeoh as Philippa Georgiou in Star Trek: Section 31Credit: Jan Thijs / Paramount+
“I was given a concept to work with and definitely if you understand the universe at all, there are going to be questions,” says the film’s screenwriter Craig Sweeny. “For me, one of the things that was important was that Starfleet does have a voice in this story.
“I don’t see the movie as flouting anything about Star Trek, that’s certainly not what we’re saying,” Sweeny adds. “I happen to love [Star Wars, Episode 8] The Last Jedi. And you could argue that that movie really interrogated the principles of the Star Wars universe.”
For background: fans first met Yeoh’s Philippa Georgiou as captain of the USS Shenzhou in Star Trek: Discovery. She is later revealed to be an escapee from the Mirror Universe, a kind of anti-reality where all the good stuff is bad. In the Mirror Universe, Georgiou had been the emperor of the Terran Empire.
Star Trek: Section 31 picks up the story some decades after Georgiou was last seen, putting the film in the unexplored story wilderness between the original series movies, and the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation. At this point, Georgiou owns the Baraam, a space station nightclub outside Federation space.
Michelle Yeoh as Philippa Georgiou and Joe Pingue as Dada Noe in Star Trek: Section 31.Credit: Jan Thijs / Paramount+
The film was originally developed as a television series, a “very sprawling, serialised espionage story set in a brand new corner of the galaxy called the Inari Veil and had its own themes that are somewhat separate from the movie”.
But then Yeoh, an accomplished actress, turned into a high-wattage star. Her performance as struggling laundromat owner Evelyn Quan Wang in Everything Everywhere All at Once won her a Golden Globe, an Oscar, and a workload that has kept her on the move, including two Wicked films, an Avatar film and the new Blade Runner TV series, Blade Runner 2099.
Yeoh was willing, but her schedule was tight, forcing the Section 31 series to be retooled as a film. “There is a bloody ton of repurposing and using the ideas [from the series],” Sweeny says. “We had all kinds of wonderful high-concept sci-fi ideas and it was set in a capitalist corner of the galaxy.”
Instead, the film “became much more about Michelle’s past in a more direct way, and I think that was the appropriate choice for the movie”, Sweeny adds. “But you’re taking a lot of those characters and repurposing them for a much shorter and more compressed experience.”
Tricia O’Neil’s Captain Rachel Garrett gets a reboot in Star Trek: Section 31.Credit: Paramount Television
The film also features a team of agents, working for the Federation’s “black ops” agency, Section 31: strategic mastermind Alok (Omari Hardwick), shape-shifting Quasi (Sam Richardson), Zeph (Robert Kazinsky), who wears a mechanical exoskeleton, the “irresistibly magnetic” Melle (Humberly Gonzalez), and Fuzz (Sven Ruygrok), who has some anger issues.
But one character stands out from the group because of her place in established Star Trek canon: Rachel Garrett (Kacey Rohl), who is a young security operative here, but will in the years to come rise to the rank of captain and take command of the USS Enterprise, NCC-1701-C, which audiences met in the Next Generation episode “Yesterday’s Enterprise”.
Like Kirstie Alley’s Lieutenant Saavik in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, the character of Rachel Garrett – then played by actress Tricia O’Neil – was an immediate hit with fans. Captain Garrett famously led her USS Enterprise into battle against the Romulans to save a Klingon colony, in a turning point in the history of the fictional Federation.
“She stood out to me in the same way she stood out to you and stood out to a lot of people,” Sweeny says. “Her death is so meaningful at the end of that episode, and it is those moments where people die in Star Trek, these characters [who embody] this idea of common values and goals and sacrifice for the greater good, it just really hits home. And Rachel always embodied that for me.
Michelle Yeoh as Philippa Georgiou in Star Trek: Discovery.Credit: Ben Mark Holzberg / Paramount+
“When I knew I wanted to pursue having a Starfleet voice on the team, she was a natural [choice] because that was always a character that I had dog-eared, [who] I want to know more about,” Sweeny says.
“It’s a complete fandom thing,” Sweeny adds. “I just wanted to see more of her. And … to everybody’s credit, nobody pushed back on that. From the moment I pitched it, people were like, yes, of course. And we were close enough timeline-wise where we could just shift things a little bit to accommodate the timeline that we needed to accommodate.”
In the meantime, Sweeny is working on Watson, a reboot of the Sherlock Holmes story focused on his ever-reliable sidekick, Dr Watson. In some respects, the two projects open up the same questions about canon: how much can you change a thing before it stops being that thing.
“The idea of gender flipping Watson, when Lucy Liu played that character in Elementary [which Sweeny produced], really rubbed a lot of people the wrong way,” he says. “It took some time for people to accept her, and she’s among the great Watsons of history. People love that character, and rightfully.
“The boundaries of the sandbox are perhaps a little bit less rigidly defined, but they’re there,” Sweeny adds. “You just don’t want to flout what’s important to people, [so you develop] an instinctual set of boundaries.
“Both fictional worlds provide you with a way of seeing the world around you, and each provides a system for parsing the things that happen to you in life,” Sweeny says. “They make a kind of promise that if you apply those principles, your life will be improved. And I think that’s immensely appealing.”
Star Trek: Section 31 streams on Paramount+ from January 24.
