In just under a week, next time Star Trek project comes to form of Section 31a streaming movie starring Michelle Yeoh diving into the titular black ops organization—one that, at least from all the footage we’ve seen so far, emphasizes the glitz and glam of the secret agent’s work. There’s action, there’s dazzling costumesthere’s even, perhaps most surprisingly in the context of it all, direct Federation supervision, like a co-worker with a stick up their ass who’s here to stop you from having fun.

No wonder some Star Trek fans are worried about what Section 31 actually thought its name—and maybe even some of its stars worried about that. “I’m afraid of how it’s going to be received, because it’s not the one walking people want. the walking that people want, the walking that we all want, just 1,000 episodes to go TNG“Rob Kazinsky, who plays the cybernetically enhanced Zeph in the film, recently spoke SFX Magazine. “Everybody is always upset that they don’t get more TNGwhile at the same time, when TNG came out, everyone hated it. So it comes and it doesn’t look like anything walking that they have ever seen.”

But when it comes to Star Trek that people want—especially a Star Trek wrestled with the idea of ​​Section 31 as its main objective—perhaps The Next Generation should not be the example we turn to. To get a true perspective The role of Section 31 on Star Trekand its paradoxical existence as the “necessary evil” which will destroy his utopiawe just need to look back at the show that gave it to us in the first place: Deep Space Nine. Importantly, in the set-up before that introduction, DS9 brought us and Dr. Julian Bashir, the character who took the push of his arc in Section 31, on another journey in “Our Man Bashir.” it a James Bond pastiche which puts Bashir at the center of a glitzy, glamorous, and all-together kitschy love letter to classic spy-fi.

In “Our Man Bashir”, spycraft is sexy, elegant, and action-packed. Bashir becomes the unabashed hero of his holosuite program—there are beautiful retro costumes, casinos and glamour, vivid villains with ridiculous plans to take over the world. Even with Garak—a former actual spy, one whom Bashir had always admired for cracking secrets—tag along on Bashir’s adventure to have fun reminding him how different it was from being an actual spy, it an episode that celebrates cinematic spycraft as we know it and love it. Even with the weird conundrums it plays with (it’s a classic walking trope, the holodeck-gone-wrong scenario with a “die in the game, die in real life” element to boot), it’s an episode that almost proves Bashir’s romantic dream of what’s perfect spy, even though he was forced to rescue. the actual day by disappearing in his fantasy.

Two seasons later, DS9 introduced Section 31 in its sixth season in “Inquisition,” when Bashir was targeted by the organization as a potential recruit at the height of its story arc that drove the galaxy into chaos with the explosion of the Dominion War. At this point, the show has done a lot of digging into the harsh reality of what Captain Sisko is up to. once described earlier on DS9Owning it is easy​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​front. that measure. If “Our Man Bashir” treated Garak’s side-jabs about the reality of espionage as a joke that Bashir would ignore, “Inquisition” made them straight to the text: from the start, the Section 31 is presented as an antithesis to all Bashir and others DS9Loved by the crew.

The work that Agent Sloane did, even to the extent of what he went through just to try and recruit Bashir, was invasive and not surprising. Sloane herself, the embodiment of Section 31 as we know her, is overwhelmed by a sense of paranoia that cuts through anything we expect of a Starfleet officer, black ops or otherwise. Bashir is not excited to learn that Section 31 exists, but is very scared — and his immediate response, like the rest of the crew, is to try to destroy it completely, by bringing it to light or, as Sisko suggests at the end. him at the end of the episode, to work to destroy it from the inside. In the course of the remainder of Section 31 appear in full DS9—the direct follow-up to “Inquisition,” “Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges,” which saddens Bashir and the show as a whole in Section 31 though, and the trippier “Extreme Measures”—the argument that Sloane presented the organization as needed. evil is never considered a viable conclusion by either the show or our protagonists. If anything, Section 31 has become as antagonistic in its appearance as the Dominion itself, an existential threat to the very moral fiber of Star Trek.

It goes without saying perhaps not in the follow up episodes of Section 31, but in the episode that aired directly after its introduction: the iconic “In the Pale Moonlight”make a killer one-two punch. If “Inquisition” introduced the idea of ​​a formal spycraft apparatus within the Federation, “In the Pale Moonlight” is about the very act of spycraft itself—the wetworks, the conspiracy, the subterfuge inherent in the terrible truth. this. Again, it doesn’t sound like romance DS9 with the genre of “Our Man Bashir,” the road to hell that Captain Sisko went with Garak in “In the Pale Moonlight” one that has always been shown to us as an abomination, not only in the works it does, but for morale. decay that the work operates in Sisko and the Star Trek itself. The ultimate horror of “In the Pale Moonlight” isn’t that Sisko was an accessory to a murder that led the Romulans to war against the Dominion, guaranteeing the death of millions more while it paid off in the name of saving billions more. from the Potential defeat of the Federation. It is that, as he says fiercely to the camera recording the personal log that he knows he is about to erase, he will live at the cost of his soul. The episode ends with the Romulans formally declaring war on the Dominion, which is what Sisko wanted, but it doesn’t count as a victory within the narrative: there is no good ending in the actual reality of espionage except in the fantasy of the holoprogram. .

Deep Space Nine It may have dropped the bomb in the first place by giving us the existence of Section 31, but it understands the danger of using such a weapon in the first place—because it already reveals to the audience and its characters that one’s fantasy a top-secret spy organization in Star TrekThe universe is nothing more than that, and that its reality is something far, far more difficult to understand. If the Section 31 The film wants to avoid this fear of being seen as something that is not walking that people want, then it must also be understood. Otherwise, unlike Sisko, it will not learn to live with the presentation of an idle fantasy, and nothing more.

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