[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Star Trek: Section 31.]
What was once in development as a TV show packs quite a bit into a feature film. Star Trek: Section 31 brings Michelle Yeoh back in her Discovery role of Philippa Georgiou, working alongside, albeit reluctantly, the black ops unit.
Their mission: to stop whoever’s after a weapon that Georgiou created in her (Terran) universe, one that will wipe out quite a number of planets and beings. Along the way, the unit discovers it has a mole, loses members, and actually, by the end of the film, seems ready to continue working together. But for Georgiou, there’s a heartbreaking revelation: the man behind it all is her childhood love San (James Hiroyuki Liao), with whom she has a very complicated past.
Below, the cast — Yeoh, Omari Hardwick (Alok), Kacey Rohl (Rachel Garrett), Robert Kazinsky (Zeph), Liao, and Miku Martineau (young Georgiou) — executive producer Alex Kurtzman, executive producer and writer Craig Sweeny, and executive producer and director Olatunde Osunsanmi break down the major moments. (Watch the video above for more, including about that major cameo.)
Georgiou vs. San
“It was first love really,” Yeoh says of Georgiou and San. The two had to team up to survive competition to become the Terran’s emperor, during which “the love grew.” But there could only be one victor, and while Georgiou had been willing to kill her entire family, San was not.
“It’s deep,” Martineau says of that heartbreaking moment. “But every ruthless emperor has an origin story and they have an important moment in their journey. It’s a pivotal moment of a loss of innocence, and it’s heartbreaking. It’s heartbreaking to watch, but we see something that we’ve never seen before in Philippa Georgiou because we’ve never seen a glimpse of her when she was younger.”
To take on the younger version of that character, she watched Yeoh’s performances — on Discovery (“amazing”) as well as other projects and interviews, “just focusing on the way she speaks and the way she talks,” shares Martineau. “My confidence as an actor comes from preparation. And I was very lucky to have a few conversations with her on set and meet her, which was so, so lovely. And she just had words of inspiration and she’s such an inspiration to me.”
Michael Gibson/Paramount+
Georgiou became emperor, but rather than kill San, she burned his face, and he had to work for her. That moment, to Yeoh, shows that she didn’t full believe it when she told him no more to the two being together. Instead, her actions kept him by her side. “In her world, she’s one of the most lonely, tragic figures because you have no friends. Everybody is trying to kill you to take over to be the emperor,” Yeoh points out. That led to her creating that Godsend device.
“San stayed with her because he truly loved her and she felt for him. She loved him as well, but she couldn’t show him or show anybody because that would be a weakness and people would kill him, first of all,” she says. That was why she felt like it was a betrayal when he seemingly died by poisoning himself in front of her. (She later learned he’d faked his death.)
Yeoh shares that Georgiou’s time with the “loving” Discovery crew, especially Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) changed her. “They hugged her, and she’s like, ‘Oh my God, you parasites,’” she recalls with a laugh. “She learned very slowly, painfully, and she began to see and feel what was humanity.”
That all eventually led her to where we find her at the beginning of the Section 31 movie, at the Baraam night club. “She can still have fun [there],” points out Yeoh. “She wants to be in the thick of things. She doesn’t want to miss out — FOMO, a lot of FOMO. But she has a flare for fashion. Thank you, Gersha Phillips, because she a walking lethal machine. Everything she has around her can be turned into a weapon.”
But she gets pulled back into the action with the Section 31 team and eventually must face off against San again, when he’s trying to use the Godsend. “It was very tragic because you could see she’s desperately trying so hard to persuade him at the risk of her own life, at the risk of being killed and trying to hold him and show him it’s love, and love is the only thing that can last, and we can move forward together to change all the horrible things that we did,” says Yeoh.
Liao raves about working with his “hero,” Yeoh: “There are no words to describe in any language how amazing of a human being Michelle Yeoh is, how incredibly stratospheric gifted of an actor she is. What an amazing, generous, her spirit, her graciousness, her welcoming-ness. You would never know that she was famous by the way she treats people. She is what you think she is — beyond that, exponentially. I’d work with her every day if I could.”
From TV Show to Movie
Bringing the story back to Georgiou’s past and with San was part of the DNA of the project from the beginning, when it was originally going to be a TV show, reveals Kurtzman. “If you look at Season 3 of Discovery, Georgiou’s character is having memories of San, and we don’t quite know what it is that she’s remembering, but we had planted the seeds there and then through the many iterations of what this ended up becoming, decided, oh, this is a good way to pull back the story that we were hinting at [then],” he explains. “That was great because I think ultimately it anchored us in a really emotional story for her. And the paradigm of this movie really is a western, and in a western you have a story of a character who’s sinned in the past, and those sins come back to hunt them, and now they have to make up for them. And the character of San and what San represents is really that thing for her.”
For Sweeny, what excited him about writing this as a movie instead was being able to “go for broke. You didn’t have to hold anything back for Episode 5 or 7 or 9. You could do all the big moves that you wanted to do in the course of 90 minutes.”
Why Those Deaths
Among the characters who did not make it to the end were Melle (Humberly Gonzalez), taken out during the fight with the masked invader for the Godsend at Baraam; Zeph, when Fuzz, revealed to be the mole and working for San, took control of his suit; and San, when during their fight, Georgiou accidentally knocked his sword back into his neck.
“I was crushed,” Kazinsky says of his death. “You get this job, the job offer of your life. You’re like, ‘Oh, Star Trek, brilliant.’ You’re reading through the script and you’re going, ‘Please don’t die.’ I was so sad. But in Star Trek, no one’s ever dead. And we did add a little Easter egg in on the edit to tell the audience that Zeph ain’t dead.”
Kurtzman credits Sweeny with the “paradigm for the movie that was really kind of a murder mystery couched in a Western. And when you have a murder mystery, you need to have multiple characters who could be the murderer. And when you start looking at story from that prism, then you have to throw focus onto each character in a different way based on who they are as a character. And he did a great job with that.”
Jan Thijs/Paramount+
Osunsanmi agrees. “The death of a character is — it is odd to say, but it’s a special thing. You want to make sure that it’s worthy and memorable. And so you really work out all the different ways it can happen, and it all extends from the character and from the words, from the script, from Craig. And hopefully they sear in the memories of the audience’s minds afterwards.”
Opening up to Georgiou
What’s clear from the start is that no one on the Section 31 team wants to work together or trusts one another. But by the end of it, when they’re tasked by Control (Jamie Lee Curtis!) to do so, it feels like they’re happy to do so. So how much have their perspectives of Georgiou changed?
“She blew your mind,” Hardwick jokes to Rohl, who agrees with a laugh.
“Obviously at the beginning of the film, Rachel Garrett could not be more diametrically opposed to how Georgiou makes her way through the world,” she says. “Over the course of the film, the journey is fun that we get to tease apart sort of where they end up borrowing from each other in a way. By the end of the film, I really think that Georgiou is a liberatory presence to Rachel in many ways. She sort of unlocks the door and is like, ‘Why don’t you go through it, my friend,’ and Rachel trepidatiously, but willingly is beginning to cross that threshold.”
Hardwick sees Alok as “on a journey of forgiving her,” made easier by their similar pasts. “They both were battle scarred and started as teens and like, oh my God, look at everything we’ve been through. And so they meet at that place and even if he’s feigning not being who he is, she figures out pretty quickly who he is and he realizes that she’s all knowing. She’s pretty omniscient on a lot of things. And so he gives way. I think he stops playing a matador and becomes an equal bull who he’s okay with her running into his bull and I think they find love and forgiveness of each other in the midst of that.”
Alok reveals to Georgiou that he born on Earth in the 20th century and during the Eugenics War, an augment took his planet and home and slaughtered his family but took him in and turned him into another augment for her army. He did terrible things for a monster like Georgiou. While it comes across in that scene like he could simply be telling her that to get her to open up in return about what he needs to know for the mission, that’s down to the take that was used, Harwick reveals.
Jan Thijs/Paramount+
“If the take that I wanted to make the cut would’ve made the cut, you wouldn’t have thought that he used it as a means to an end. Now, I’m not as bright as the filmmaker, so they must have picked the right one,” he shares. “I know the take that would’ve made you feel completely opposite that he wasn’t doing anything with ulterior motive, but the take that they chose in terms of me watching it, I could see why you would say that. And so know there’s a deeper desire. Perhaps he does need her to be able to reveal some things so that he can do his mission because he is a man on a mission, which makes Alok cool. But Alok finds himself through her while trying to forgive her.”
Zeph died before he could get a chance to change his mind about Georgiou — though Kazinsky isn’t sure if he would have anyway. “Zeph never really cared about Georgiou,” he says. “He was never really interested in Georgiou and he wouldn’t have invested enough to have an opinion when he met her or afterwards. He just does what he wants to do and what Alok tells him to do. I think he liked Georgiou from the beginning because Georgiou is the epitome of no bulls**t.”
Garrett’s Future
Going into this movie, we know where Rohl’s character ends up, thanks to “Yesterday’s Enterprise” of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Due to the creation of an alternate timeline, she had to make the tough decision to sacrifice herself, returning to a situation (fighting the Romulans) that would most certainly mean her death (it did). We see Garrett in Section 31 learning to embrace chaos by the end of the movie.
“It’s an interesting journey that [Garrett now] finds herself in, particularly knowing where she ends up and how Tricia O’Neil played ‘Yesterday’s Enterprise’ obviously,” admits Rohl. “It’s a fascinating thing. She’s definitely embracing chaos. What’s cool for me is this feels like the beginning of her journey in some ways, and the outward facing chaos is certainly more buried when we get to ‘Yesterday’s Enterprise’ with her. But I think it’s there because that choice is chaotic. That sacrifice does involve some chaos. So I think what’s cool is if that’s the fully grown, mature, gorgeous palm tree, this is the little seed that we’ve planted that’s going to rumble for the rest of her days.”
What did you think of Section 31? Let us know in the comments section below.
Star Trek: Section 31, Streaming Now, Paramount+
