Star Trek: Section 31 is about the most dangerous idea in Trek canon

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. The spy who walked away from Omelas 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 Frontier, what does utopia need with a starship — I mean, an off-the-books CIA program? If the existence of your utopia depends on a bunch of secret, no-consequences war crimes, then it’s simply not a utopia. It’s Omelas. The debate over whether or not Section 31 betrays the fundamental ideals of Trek has raged since 1998, when the Deep Space Nine episode “Inquisition” established the concept, and it should! Section 31 is not just philosophically bad for Star Trek, but emotionally destructive to the audience, implying that Pike, Kirk, Spock, Picard, Janeway, and the rest owe their triumphant moral and diplomatic victories in some part to an unaccountable group committing atrocities in their name. And in a setting that prides itself on internal consistency, it’s a deceptive genre blend, with operatives often written by the rules of spy fantasy, not hard sci-fi. How does Agent Sloane’s ship have untraceable transporter systems he can use to kidnap Dr. Bashir and subject him to a mind-bending holodeck recruitment/coerced confession experience? It doesn’t need explaining; they’re super space spies. This is not to say that you can’t depict spycraft and undercover operations within the context of Star Trek. The ironic thing about Deep Space Nine introducing Section 31 to the canon is that the show also contains the most nuanced and devastating take on spycraft in Trek history. The irresistible romance of spies in space [Image: https://platform.polygon.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/4x10_Our_Man_Bashir_title_card.webp?quality=90&strip=all] There’s never been a Trek series so in love with the romantic fantasy of spycraft as Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. But it was also equally in love with the dramatic potential of the reality of spycraft: immoral drudgery that destroys the psyches of its practitioners, and mostly creates more problems than it solves in an escalating cycle of state-to-state paranoia. Among station doctor Julian Bashir’s most prominent pastimes was pretending to be Non-Copyright-Infringing James Bond on the holodeck. DS9 produced a sweep of episodes in which Bashir’s fascination with the glorified fictional spy is contrasted with his friend-crush (or more?) on the local tailor, Elim Garak, a slippery former expert operative for the Cardassian Empire whose cheerful charisma is matched only by the grimness of his past. Eventually, this quirk of personality is raised as one reason Section 31 made contact with Bashir, and, after his refusal to join up, embroiled him in a number of plots and schemes. But Deep Space Nine also committed to showing the Federation at war, not détente with the shifty alien empire du jour, and so committed to grappling much more granularly and dramatically with what circumstances could require upstanding Federation officers to compromise their utopian principles. And the apex of DS9’s take on spycraft and the Federation occurs in an episode that has nothing to do with Section 31 at all. ‘I will learn to live with it’ “In the Pale Moonlight” is so memorably associated with Avery Brooks’ Captain Sisko that all you have to do to find its iconic ending is Google “captain sisko speech.” It takes the form of a personal log entry that sums up the events of the episode: Via forgery, bribery, murder, and the coverup of all three — that is, via spycraft — Sisko has manipulated the Romulan Empire into joining the Dominion War against the Dominion. For the cost of two lives and his conscience, he may have almost single-handedly saved the Federation from being bloodily conquered by a supremacist imperial state. [Media: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuTjp-T3q6I] What disgusts him is that he’s not disgusted. The most terrible thing, the most enraging thing, the most unnerving thing the war has done to Captain Sisko so far — and it’s a long way from being over — is this erosion of his morality. In that moment, Sisko is a microcosm for the Federation. The tricky thing about depicting an established utopian society at war, especially an existentially necessary war, is that it implies that war itself can be a utopian act. The thing that makes “In the Pale Moonlight” one of the best Trek episodes to ever do it is how deftly and emphatically it says that the Dominion War is an existential threat to the Federation on two fronts: from the empire that wishes to dominate it, and through the act of war itself. The Federation is a system of principles, and if it abandons those principles it will cease to exist just as surely as if Dominion rule abolished them. For a forgery, a bribe, two murders, and a coverup, the Federation will survive, but it has destroyed itself to do so, and that is not a victory. Conceptually, this speech is the mirror opposite of Section 31, which says that extralegal, immoral acts are necessary for utopia to exist. Instead of undermining the diplomatic and moral victories of Trek’s great heroes, “In the Pale Moonlight” imbues them with a new urgency: This is why Starfleet’s vaunted, anticlimactic, occasionally myopic commitment to diplomacy matters. Because when a utopia sets aside its principles, even in the face of a true and complete existential threat, it ceases to be a utopia. [Image: Michelle Yeoh as Georgiou in Star Trek: Section 31, streaming on Paramount+, 2025. Photo Credit: Sophy Holland/Paramount+ https://platform.polygon.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/PASU-212_Dovercourt_DigitalOnly_SEC_GEORGIOU_2700x4000.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] All Star Trek: Section 31 really needs to do is clearly and emphatically establish Section 31 as counter to the principles of the Federation. Maybe the smartest thing to do would be to reveal that most of what Section 31 agents think about their organization — that it’s sanctioned by unidentified Federation higher-ups, that it’s been the secret key to the Federation’s survival for centuries, that it’s spooky and untouchable and you’ll never wipe it out completely — is self-perpetuating internal propaganda. Because either Section 31 is a betrayal of everything the Federation stands for, or the Federation isn’t utopian, there’s just no getting around it. If we are to think of Star Trek as anything more than a hollow and gilt-edged military fantasy, Starfleet’s victories can’t rest on a sanctioned and unaccountable black ops department. If Star Trek: Section 31 just wants to have its non-copyright-infringing James Bond fun with Michelle Yeoh, it’ll probably be very fun! It’s Michelle Yeoh! But will I be watching a Star Trek movie? I’m curious to find out. Star Trek: Section 31 premieres on Paramount Plus on Jan. 24.