Star Trek: Section 31, Paramount Plus’ first foray into feature-length Star Trek movies, has to do one, and only one, thing to succeed. The Michelle Yeoh-starring Star Trek: Discovery spinoff follows Philippa Georgiou, former emperor from a morally inverse parallel universe, in her work with Starfleet’s infamous Section 31, a centuries-old space CIA that operates without the knowledge or consent of the Federation’s leaders.

On the whole, I don’t need a lot from Section 31. I am a Star Trek fan who will always allow the series room to fail a little bit. It’s healthy to give your faves leeway to be aggressively mid on occasion.

But I must draw the line here, no further. Section 31 needs to explain how the very idea of Section 31 doesn’t break the entire concept of Star Trek from top to bottom.

First introduced in the later seasons of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and revisited in prequel show Star Trek: Enterprise and the early, prequel seasons of Star Trek: Discovery, Section 31 purports to have been founded and sanctioned by the original Starfleet charter, a nice touch of space-Masonic paranoia.

What is Section 31? Simply, it’s an off-the-books spy organization that may or may not have gone rogue in its mission to safeguard the existence of the Federation, while also keeping its activities totally secret from the Federation. Whether or not Starfleet higher-ups are unaware of Section 31, or simply look the other way, is a matter of some mystery and also evolution over time. According to Section 31 operatives, however, without their secret assassinations, illegal scientific research, and other black-books operations, the Federation would have fallen centuries ago. (Although we’re exclusively told this by Section 31 agents, a fertile facet of potential internal propaganda for Trek writers to exploit, should they choose.)

The Federation, we understand, is a utopia. Egalitarian, diverse, cruelty-free, post-scarcity — all the buzzwords. But to paraphrase Captain Kirk in The Final........

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