In less than a week, the next one Star Trek the project arrives in form of Article 31streaming film starring Michelle Yeoh as the lead who enters the titular black ops organization—one that, at least in all the footage we’ve seen so far, emphasizes the glitz and glitz of secret agent work. There is action, there are flashy costumesthere’s even, perhaps most surprisingly in the context of it all, direct Federation oversight, like an ass-kicking associate who’s here to stop you from having fun.
It is no wonder then that some Star Trek fans are worried about what Article 31 he really thinks it’s namesake – and maybe even a few of his co-stars are worried about it. “I’m terrified of how it’s going to be received, because that’s not what it is Trek people want. The Trek which people want Trek that we all want, there are only 1000 more episodes LPG” Rob Kazinsky, who plays the cybernetically enhanced Zeph in the film, said recently SFX magazine. “Everyone is always furious because they don’t get more LPGwhile at the same time, when LPG came out, everyone hated it. So this will happen and it won’t feel like anything Trek that they have ever seen.”
But when it comes to Star Trek which people want — especially a Star Trek grappling with the idea of Section 31 as its primary focus—perhaps The next generation should not be the example we turn to. To get the right perspective Role of Section 31 in Star Trekand its paradoxical existence as a “necessary evil” which destroys his utopiawe only need to look back at the show that gave it to us in the first place: Deep Space Nine. Crucially, in setting before that introduction, DS9 us and others Julian Bashir, the character who picks up the momentum of his Section 31 arc, is taken on another journey in “Our Man Bashir.” it is and James Bond mixture which put Bashir at the center of a glitzy, glamorous, and altogether kitschy love letter to classic spy fiction.
In “Our Man Bashir”, espionage is sexy, elegant and action-packed. Bashir becomes the unabashed hero of his holosuite program – there are gorgeous retro costumes, casinos and glamour, clear villains with comically dastardly plots to take over the world. Even with Garak — a real-life ex-spy, one whose secrets Bashir has always been obsessed with uncovering — included in Bashir’s adventure to playfully remind him how different this all is from actual spy work, it’s an episode that celebrates cinematic espionage as we know it and love it. Even with the dramatic conundrums it plays with (it’s a classic Trek trope, holodeck-gone-wrong scenario with a die-in-game, die-in-real-life element to boot), it’s an episode that almost lives up to Bashir’s romantic dream of what it’s like to be a spy in full, even as he’s forced to save the actual day losing in his fantasy.
Two seasons later, DS9 introduced Section 31 in its sixth season on “Inquisition,” when Bashir is targeted by the organization as a would-be recruit at the climax of his story that plunges the galaxy into chaos with an outbreak dominion war. At this point, the show has already done a lot to delve into the harsh reality of what Captain Sisko has been up to once early described in DS9It’s easy to “be a saint in heaven,” examining how Starfleet and the Federation as a whole responded when faced with an interstellar conflict of unprecedented proportions. If “Our Man Bashir” treated Garak’s asides about the reality of espionage as a joke that Bashir should ignore, “Inquisition” makes them the core of its text: from the outset, Section 31 is presented as the antithesis of all Bashir and the rest. DS9‘this crew is holding on dearly.
The work that Agent Sloane does, even just to the extent that he goes through just to try to recruit Bashir, is invasive and unglamorous. Sloane himself, the embodiment of Section 31 as we know it, is plagued by a sense of paranoia that goes against anything we’d expect from a Starfleet officer, black ops or anything else. Bashir isn’t thrilled to discover that Section 31 exists, but he’s completely horrified—and his immediate response, like the rest of the crew’s, is to try to destroy it completely, either by bringing it to light or, as Sisko eventually suggests, him at the end of the episode, to work on undermining from within. During the remaining appearances of Section 31 DS9—a direct follow-up to “Inquisition,” “Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges,” which further exasperates Bashir and the show as a whole about Section 31, and the trippner “Extreme Measures”—an argument Sloane presents about the organization as a necessary evil Neither the show nor our protagonists they never consider it a viable conclusion. If anything, Section 31 becomes as antagonistic in its appearance as the Dominions themselves, an existential threat to the very moral foundation Star Trek.
He doesn’t say this again, maybe not in the following episodes of Section 31, but in the episode that aired right after the introduction: cult “On the Pale Moonlight”creating a killer one-two punch. If “Inquisition” introduced the idea of a formal espionage apparatus within the Federation, “In the Pale Moonlight” is about the act of espionage itself – the dirty deeds, the conspiracy, the pretense inherent in its grim reality. Again, this is nothing like romance DS9 Along with the genre in “Our Man Bashir”, the road to hell that Captain Sisko takes with Garak in “In the Pale Moonlight” is constantly presented to us as disgusting, not only because of the actions taken along with it, but also because of the moral breakdowns that work has on Sisak and beyond Star Trek are. The ultimate horror of “In the Pale Moonlight” is not that Sisko is complicit in the assassination that brings the Romulans to war against the Dominion, guaranteeing the death of millions more while it lasts in the name of saving billions more from the potential defeat of the Federation. It’s about being able to live with the price on his soul, as he grimly tells the camera recording the personal diary he knows he’ll erase. The episode ends with the Romulans formally declaring war on the Dominion, which Sisko wanted, but never feels is a victory within the narrative: there is no good ending to the actual reality of espionage outside of the holoprogram fantasy.
Deep Space Nine he may have dropped the bomb by giving us the existence of Section 31 in the first place, but he understood the danger of handling such a weapon in the first place – because he had already laid out for his audience and his characters that the fantasy of a super-secret spy organization in Star TrekHis universe was nothing more than that, and that his reality was something far, far uglier to fathom. If it is Article 31 the film wants to avoid this fear of being seen as something it is not Trek if people want, then he must understand this. Otherwise, unlike Sisko, he cannot learn to live with the display of an empty fantasy, and nothing more.
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