By Joshua Tyler
| Updated
Star Trek: Section 31 is now available to stream, and the consensus seems to be that it is extremely bad. If you’re a Star Trek fan, that might worry you, but I have good news.
Despite its title, Star Trek: Section 31 is not part of Star Trek at all. It’s actually part of an entirely different on-screen universe.
First, a little background. The movie is billed as a spinoff focused on a character played by Michelle Yeoh on Star Trek: Discovery. Star Trek: Section 31 was only greenlit after Yeoh won Best Actress at the Academy Awards for her performance in the mutliverse movie Everything Everywhere All At Once.
It’s safe to say that the film was largely made because Paramount wanted to associate its brand with an Oscar-winning actress. It’s a common practice.
What fans didn’t realize while they were making it is that they also wanted to turn her Oscar-winning movie Everything Everywhere All At Once into a movie franchise. And that’s where Star Trek: Section 31 comes in because it’s actually a sequel to Michelle Yeoh’s award-winning alternate universe hopping movie, not a Star Trek movie.
Star Trek: Section 31 Is Actually Part Of Another Franchise
Though the movie has the words “Star Trek” in its title, nothing in the film connects to Star Trek. None of the production design looks like Trek, the ships don’t look like Trek, and very little of the vernacular or technology or world-building bears any resemblance to any form of Star Trek we’ve seen before.
Section 31 ambles along like a poorly written, generic heist movie until the film’s final moments, when its true origin is revealed with the appearance of Jamie Lee Curtis. Curtis co-starred opposite Yeoh in Everything Everywhere All At Once. At the end of Section 31, she’s revealed to be the secret head of Section 31, Michelle Yeoh’s boss and the orchestrator of everything.
Her interaction with Yeoh’s character plays out more like a scene from Everything Everywhere All At Once than it does Star Trek, and that’s because it is.
Or at least I choose to believe it is.
Everything Everywhere All At Once is a movie about infinite alternate universes. By generally having nothing to do with Star Trek and everything to do with that movie, Section 31 cements itself as taking place in the Everything Everywhere All At Once multiverse, not in the Star Trek universe.
Michelle Yeoh’s Philippa Georgiou character is just another multiple-universe version of her Everything Everywhere character. Jamie Lee Curtis is one of the few constants that the character has with her as she flips through that movie’s multiverse. So, of course, she’s here too.
It’s Already A Spinoff Of Non-Canon Material
Adding more fuel to this theory is the fact that Section 31 is ostensibly a spinoff from Star Trek: Discovery, and Star Trek: Discovery is also not part of Star Trek. Or at least, not part of the prime Star Trek timeline.
In the show’s series finale, Star Trek: Lower Decks retconned Discovery to take place in an alternate universe. Now we know that the universe is the same one Everything Everywhere All At Once takes place in, and it has nothing to do with Star Trek.
Let me have my delusion. After suffering through Section 31, it’s the only way I’ll ever be able to enjoy Star Trek again.
