This Star Trek article contains spoilers for Section 31.
After an extremely long wait, which has seen it truncated from a spin-off show into a TV movie while Michelle Yeoh has gone and become an Oscar winner, Star Trek: Section 31 is finally here. We have reviewed it. We got the man who wrote a defense of “Sub Rosa” to review it. This article will not add anything to his assessment of its quality (or absolute lack thereof).
But whatever your opinion of Section 31’s execution, from the outset the film faced some pretty big hurdles in terms of its premise alone.
We’re not here to relitigate “The concept of Section 31 – good or bad?” again either (the answer is “depends if the story’s any good”), because that is not what Star Trek: Section 31 was ever actually about. What Section 31 is actually about is “What if we did The Dirty Dozen but Star Trek?”
The Dirty Dozen, for those who don’t know, is a 1967 movie about a top-secret wartime operation to recruit 12 of the US Army’s worst convicts to form a crack Nazi murder team. It’s a great premise, which is why it has been reused many times ever since.
We love seeing a bunch of bad people forced to do good things. And right now, TV and film are both particularly in love with that as a premise. But does the format work when Star Trek tries to do it?
Dozens of Dirty Dozens
When modern audiences think of the trope popularized by The Dirty Dozen, the first film that comes to mind probably isn’t actually the ’60s war movie, but DC’s Suicide Squad. First adapted by David Ayer, it was then realized again but better by James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad. Gunn loves this trope—after all, he also made three Guardians of the Galaxy movie, about a group of alien misfits who save the MCU time and again. After The Suicide Squad, he launched the spin-off series Peacemaker, and while John Cena is undeniably the star of that show, it took no time for him to form a morally questionable ensemble to perform deeds for a government that would like deniability.
Gunn now holds the keys to the entire DC cinematic universe, which he relaunched with the animated series Creature Commandos, which is about—you guessed it—a band of criminal misfits the government pressganged into doing morally dubious black ops missions.
And even though it no longer has Gunn, the MCU still has the upcoming Thunderbolts movie, where each of the Avengers’ morally shady equivalents are teamed up to do something deniable for the Director of the CIA.
The trope is popular for a few reasons, which will be ranked differently according to who’s in the driving seat, but the main ones are:
First, there is the common misconception that “good” characters are “boring.” The darker Batman is more interesting than Superman. Han Solo is more interesting than Luke. Everyone in your DnD party wants to play the Rogue, nobody wants to play the Templar. So if morally shady characters are more interesting, borderline actually evil characters must be even more interesting, right? It’s a marketing reason to turn the bad guys into the heroes as opposed to a narrative reason, and any story leaning on this first and foremost is not going to deliver the goods.
But there is another reason we return to these storylines time and again, and it’s because they conceal a critique of whatever setting you apply it to. What are the monstrous qualities your society condemns but ultimately needs? Who will you persecute until you have a use for them?
Marvel and DC superheroes are (for the most part) fine upstanding citizens who save lives, see the potential for good in their enemies, and resort to violence only as a last resort. Their dark, correctional-facility-recruited counterparts are an acknowledgement that sometimes you just need to kill someone, or that the status quo your heroes are defending will happily deploy the villains they’re fighting if it suits their own ends.
This brings us back to Section 31 and its cast of characters, including Yeoh’s genocidal maniac, a shapeshifter, a tiny little guy in a robot, a guy in a mech suit who’s a cover for transphobic jokes, and a woman who the film regards as disposable because she has sex sometimes. Oh, and Rachel Garrett, because you have to include something for the fans.
The appeal is clear—Star Trek, but without the stodgy Starfleet regulations. A wackier, zanier, more anarchic take on the Alpha Quadrant. But when Star Trek tries to do a Dirty Dozen (or Suicide Squad, if you prefer) it has some issues to overcome.
Rebels Without a Cause
The first problem is a big one. The Dirty Dozen trope is a critique of the society it takes place in—it shows which qualities the powers-that-be simultaneously condemn while exploiting where necessary. But Star Trek’s Federation is a utopia. It is the ultimate fair society, having disposed of all prejudice and inequality (with the exception of robots and holograms, naturally).
It is not an insurmountable challenge, though. Iain M Banks’s Culture novels are probably the closest literary equivalent to the level of utopia Star Trek promises, and having created the very definition of queer luxury space communism, Banks’s novels are almost entirely concerned with the people who won’t fit in. Its protagonists are mostly people (or sentient spaceships) who, when offered literally anything they want, and the chance to pursue any kind of life they please, decide that isn’t for them. And frequently those people find themselves being used by “Special Circumstances,” the arm of the Culture that, like Section 31, operates in the exceptions and loopholes of that utopia’s lofty principles.
But Banks has gone to great pains to define his utopia, how it works, and what its contradictions are. He points out, for example, that despite the Culture’s post-scarcity, post-finance society, it also has the biggest stockpiles of currency in the galaxy.
But the Federation’s utopian future is less clear. A lot like Ursula Le Guin’s Omelas (which Star Trek has merrily stolen from before), we are repeatedly told that this is the best of possible societies, having solved all the problems that plague the one we live in, but the franchise remains often frustratingly vague on the how. Hell, nobody even dared say the word “socialist” on screen until Strange New Worlds season 2’s “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.”
That vagueness makes specific and meaningful criticism difficult, but not impossible. The shows have come out gunning for the Federation’s ethical blind spots time and time again—and not just over the Prime Directive. Star Trek: The Next Generation’s “The Drumhead” has Picard point out the seeds of fascism sprouting up right in the heart of Starfleet. We have already pointed out how many episodes have shown the Federation lawfully exploiting or discriminating against artificial life. Deep Space Nine’s “Home Front” two-parter also showed just how quickly the Federation’s utopian Earth could fall to martial law and tyranny if given the right provocation. The Maquis storyline that played out across The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager showed that in the Federation’s pursuit of diplomacy and the greater good, smaller communities could frequently fall through the cracks.
And of course, there are the original Deep Space Nine episodes about Section 31 itself—not the cool black uniform-wearing badass version of Starfleet, but the entirely deniable organization within an organization, with no ships, no uniforms, and no paperwork. This Section 31 was just an unknown number of strategically placed people who were willing to do what the Federation’s ideals would not let it do, to protect the ideals the Federation stood for.
By showing that, and showing how Starfleet’s powers that be simultaneously distanced themselves from it while obstructing further attempts to investigate it, the show was able to ask questions about just how idyllic the Federation was without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Bashir’s (Third of a) Dozen
But perhaps the best parallel to Section 31’s Dirty Dozen outfit is not any other iteration of Starfleet’s dirty secret, but the characters introduced in the Deep Space Nine episode “Statistical Possibilities.” In it, we meet four individuals who have been illegally “genetically enhanced.” There are longer discussions to be had about Star Trek’s problematic use of genetic enhancement and eugenics as a stand-in for persecuted minorities, but here other things are going on. These are not Khanian supermen. They are, frankly, massively autistic-coded.
They are not shunned from society because they breach the Federation’s unimpeachable ideals around equality. Nor are they shunned because of a predilection for violence or deception. Their sin is far worse: They’re awkward. They don’t fit in. They are socially difficult. The Federation’s all-encompassing tolerance might take in Klingons, Androids and EMHs (to an extent), Changelings, and even the occasional Borg, but the line is drawn at people you might avoid at parties.
But, as is always the case in these stories, on a foggy Christmas Eve it turns out that having a red nose is super handy. As much as the Federation is happy to shun these characters, it is willing to benefit from their insights into the Dominion conflict. And when it does, we the audience learn about the Federation, how it works, and what it stands for.
So, returning to Section 31, what does it have to say about the Starfleet it is contrasting itself against? Or, to put it another way, what can this version of Section 31 do that regular Starfleet can’t?
Do you need someone to go undercover to carry out morally shady acts to chase down a weapon of mass destruction? Starfleet’s very own morality poster boy, Captain Picard, does this in “Gambit” (Parts 1 and 2). Okay, but maybe to get this WMD you need Section 31 to cross enemy lines, and for Starfleet to be able to disavow it should they be caught. You know, like Picard and his most upstanding officers did in “Chain of Command.” Hell, in “I, Borg” he’s willing to unleash a weapon of mass destruction on a genocidal scale. Just like Sisko drops a WMD on an inhabited world to lure out a Maquis operative in “For the Uniform”. And that’s not even touching the shit Sisko gets up to in “In the Pale Moonlight.”
Compared to this, and a laundry list of other activities including secret weapons programs, undercover work, rogue admirals, so many Prime Directive violations we cannot count them, and of course, murdering Tuvix, Evil Georgiou and her band of misfits in Section 31 barely even qualify as hijinks.
So if this Section 31 has no meaningful critique to make of Star Trek’s values or the Federation, and its characters don’t do anything that even Picard wouldn’t do, what is it for? Which brings us back to “Morally bad characters are more interesting than morally good characters.” To which the test is—is Star Trek: Section 31 more interesting than any other Star Trek you care to name?
Star Trek: Section 31 is streaming now on Paramount+.
The post Why Section 31 Fails as Star Trek’s Suicide Squad Movie appeared first on Den of Geek.
From https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/star-trek-section-31-suicide-squad/
