Star Trek: Section 31 Recap: Did Michelle Yeoh Kick Intergalactic Butt in Georgiou’s Return? (Plus, Grade It!)
Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh made an absolutely delicious villain as Star Trek: Discovery’s ruthless emperor Philippa Georgiou, so it’s fun to see her go bad again in the new Paramount+ spinoff movie Star Trek: Section 31. What kind of adventures did Georgiou get into this time? Let’s recap!
Section 31 opens with a flashback that explains how Georgiou rose to power — and became so damn heartless. A young Georgiou returns home to her family in the rural outer reaches of the Terran Empire after competing in a brutal two-year contest to select the next emperor. It’s down to her and one other contender, a guy named San she’s become friends with (even though friendship is forbidden), and only one test remains. Her family begins to cough and choke on the food she served them; yes, she poisoned them to prove she’s severed all ties with her old life. After they expire, a ship materializes, and the old emperor declares her the winner, while San is sentenced to be her slave. San tries to appeal to Georgiou’s kinder side — but she holds a white-hot sword blade against his face before raising it in the air in victory.
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In present day, Georgiou is snacking on eyeballs at a swanky nightclub she owns when she’s approached by Alok, a member of Starfleet’s secret-ops unit Section 31 played by Power’s Omari Hardwick. He invites her to partake in dulcet thistles, a euphoric drug he’s pushing, but she knows he’s Section 31 and demands to know what he’s doing there. He’s not alone, either: Also in the club are shapeshifter Quasi (Veep’s Sam Richardson); Zeph (Robert Kazinsky), who wears a mechanized body suit; a seductive Deltan named Melle (Humberly González); a giggly Vulcan named Fuzz (Sven Ruygrok) and… Lt. Rachel Garrett (Hannibal’s Kacey Rohl), of Next Generation fame.
Georgiou scoffs that Starfleet is “where fun goes to die,” but Alok tries to convince her to join their mission and get back in on the action “on a galactic scale.” She meets the team, and we learn that Fuzz is actually an android with a tiny mollusk-like creature inside controlling his movements. Garrett is the taskmaster who’s there to keep everyone in line… and Quasi is a little afraid of Georgiou, since her murderous reputation precedes her. Their mission, should Georgiou choose to accept it: Track down bioweapon designer Dada Noe and keep him from selling his destructive new super weapon to the Minosian high council. Alok lays out their plan, with Quasi shapeshifting as Georgiou and Fuzz’s mollusk floating inside Dada Noe’s body mod to take control. But Georgiou’s response? “Meh.”
She has a better idea: She welcomes Dada Noe to her club and escorts him to his suite, where she tosses a magnetic gadget onto his bioweapon carrying case. Georgiou presses a button on her belt, and now she and the case are both vibrating on a different wavelength, letting them pass through normal matter like ghosts. She makes off with the case — until a masked man enters the room on her wavelength, demanding the weapon. He and Georgiou fight for it, chasing each other through walls and duking it out on the nightclub’s main stage. The masked man disintegrates Melle with his phaser in the scuffle, and when Georgiou gets stuck inside a wall, mid-phase, he opens the case to reveal an ornate globe. Georgiou is shocked: “That’s impossible. I had that destroyed.” But the masked man transports away with the weapon… and Georgiou is left shaken by what she saw.
We flash back again to a young Georgiou as Terran emperor, with San bowing before her and presenting her with that same weapon. It’s so powerful, he says, the people who made it took their own lives after it was complete. He and Georgiou reminisce about the bond they once shared, but now, San declares, the beautiful girl he knew “has been murdered.” He collapses to the floor after taking the same poison she fed her family, telling her before he keels over dead, “No one wants to live in your world, Emperor. You are a monster!” Back in present day, Alok has Georgiou tied up in a safehouse and demands to know what that weapon is. But she needs to know more about him first, so he tells her he’s a human from 20th-century Earth who was in hibernation and then turned into a superpowered augment to fight in a war: “I did terrible things, all for a monster like you.”
Georgiou tells the Section 31 team about the weapon: It’s called the Godsend, and she had it built to end all threat of a rebellion against her. It can incinerate a quadrant full of planets in the blink of an eye, and she doesn’t know how it got here. She suspects Dada Noe is from the Terran Empire, and she and Alok interrogate him, getting him to admit he worked at a Terran weapons facility where the Godsend was stored. He stole it hoping to sell it, entering this universe through a passage that opened when two ion storms converged. The passage will open again in four hours, and the Terrans will come looking to find the weapon and use it to destroy everything. Who was the masked man, though? Dada Noe doesn’t know… and supposes it might be someone who has a connection to them. After a big explosion kills off Dada Noe, Alok realizes: They must have a mole.
The Section 31 team members all eye each other with suspicion, but they need to get to work, with just four hours until the Terrans arrive. Garrett found an old ship they can use to get off the planet, and Alok orders the others to set up an antenna to alert Starfleet. But someone ripped out all the wires on the antenna, and the old ship is missing a coil and won’t fly without it. While they work on fixing the antenna, Zeph goes missing. Did Zeph sabotage it? They search for him outside… and find him dead underneath a tree. Georgiou spots a brunette hair on his body suit. Does that mean Garrett is the culprit? She denies it, but then they find Zeph’s blood underneath her fingernails, too. Georgiou is ready to carve Garrett up when they get an alert about footage from Zeph’s body suit. It shows Zeph fighting someone we can’t see before dying — and Georgiou figures it out. The tiny mollusk Fuzz set the Vulcan android on autopilot and flew inside Zeph’s body suit and took control of it, killing him and planting evidence on Garrett. Fuzz is the mole!
Fuzz escapes in Zeph’s bodysuit and zips away on a high-speed platform, with Georgiou and Alok chasing right behind. Alok gets knocked off, with Quasi saving him by shapeshifting into a web and catching him, and Georgiou finally catches up to Fuzz… who hints that San is still alive?! Before she can find out more, he beams away to a ship where, indeed, he meets San, who now possesses the Godsend. (He built up an immunity to that poison, apparently.) In two hours, the Terran Empire will take over — unless Georgiou and Section 31 can stop them, that is. Alok reveals he took the coil from the ship in order to ferret out the mole, so he replaces it, and they get it up and running. It’s an old garbage scowl equipped with a tractor beam to collect debris, so that’s the closest thing they have to a weapon.
They approach San’s ship and use the tractor beam to drag his ship into a radiation field, disabling his shields. Georgiou and Alok beam aboard his ship, and she and San fight it out for control of the weapon: “This contest only ends when one of us is dead!” Alok and Fuzz fight, too, with the mollusk escaping in a tiny shuttle. The Godsend gets knocked over, activating its detonation sequence, and San claims he’ll use it to control an empire. But “there are no benevolent dictators, San,” Georgiou reminds him. “You taught me that.” She tries to reconnect with San on an emotional level, but he’s determined to fight to the death. Alok manages to deal a mortal blow to Fuzz, while Garrett rigs up an old toy to explode, taking the tiny mollusk’s ship out with it. San grabs a sword and nearly stabs Georgiou with it, but she fights back — and San is fatally stabbed in the throat. “This is not what I want,” she cries as he falls to the ground. “I still needed you,” he admits, calling her “my love” before dying in her arms.
With the passage to the Terran universe about to open, Georgiou activates the Godsend, rigging it up to go off in 60 seconds and aiming the ship directly at the passage. She’s ready to sacrifice herself to snuff out the Terrans, and Alok is prepared to join her — but Quasi beams them to safety just in time, with the Godsend’s explosion collapsing the passage. In a final epilogue weeks later, Alok and the Section 31 team try to convince Georgiou to join them full-time, and she concedes that “somebody’s got to keep things lively.” Oh, and Fuzz is back — but this time, controlled by the tiny mollusk’s wife, Wisp — and a Starfleet commander (played by Jamie Lee Curtis!) pops up in hologram form to give them their next assignment.
Did that quench your Trek thirst, Trekkies? And would you watch a Section 31 series? Give the movie a grade in our poll, and beam down to the comments to share your thoughts.
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