Oscar Award winner, Michelle Yeoh, returns to the Star Trek Universe as Emperor Philippa Georgiou, an escapee from a “mirror universe” where she ruled as a tyrant. Michelle Yeoh bears little resemblance to the Georgiou we first met in the Terran Empire during Star Trek: Discovery. Michelle Yeoh’s present character, who runs a swanky bar, is recruited by the Federation to join a team of Section 31 secret agents for a black ops mission to stop the sale of a super weapon.
The Section 31 team is wacky: the leader (Omari Hardwick) is from the 20th Century, there’s a silly shapeshifter (Sam Richardson), a mechanical heavyweight (Robert Kazinsky), a sexy Deltan (Humberly Gonzalez), and a laughing Vulcan (Sven Ruygrok) who actually is not a Vulcan, but rather a microscopic organism in a tiny spaceship inside a Vulcan-shaped Golem body. The team also includes my favorite character, a Starfleet “observer,” a young woman named Rachel Garrett (Kacey Rohl), who Star Trek fans will recognize as the pre-Picard Captain of the Enterprise.
With a large cast and little plot, the 100 minute episode is stuffed with plenty of hand-to-hand combat. Michelle Yeoh excels at this kind of fighting, but the other cast members…are lacking. Even the most ardent Star Trek fans will find Section 31 mediocre. GRADE: C
In my humble opinion, STAR Trek, like STAR WARS, has seriously over-franchised itself.
Jerry, I agree with you. The recent STAR WARS and STAR TREK series–other than STRANGE NEW WORLDS–have been disappointing.
Yeah, we liked Yeoh as the nastier Georgiou in DISCOVERY, but this has gotten nothing but bad reviews.
Jeff, the reviews for SECTION 31 have uniformly been bad…including my own. Michelle Yeoh is wasted in this mess.
I stopped watching the TREK franchises after the TNG-era series and movies. As long as they’re hauling out the tired alternate-dimension theme, they should have added AI simulations of Shatner, Nimoy, and company as the evil twins of the Enterprise crew from the 1967 “Mirror, Mirror” episode. I might be tempted watch in that case. I’m glad Michelle Yeoh has finally gotten some recognition in the U.S., but her best showcases remain “Police Story 3” aka “Supercop” and her other old Hong Kong action flicks, which I bought eons ago on Laser Disc.
Fred, are those your articles I’m rereading in The Savage Sword of Conan?
Jeff, I plead guilty.
Fred, Michelle Yeoh was interviewed on STEPHEN COLBERT and she admitted she and Jackie Chan had fun filming those Hong Kong action movies!
Fred, I’ve started rereading the Conan comics in the big Omnibus editions — so far the first two color ones and the first Savage Sword. Enjoying the stories again, and also the articles. Good job.
I had Roy Thomas sign my bedraggled copy of Conan #1 — he said it was the worst copy of it he’d ever signed. I wish I’d thought to have him write that in the book.
This has been getting truly dreadful reviews, even from critics that had a soft spot for some of the NuTrek shows. I could smell the stink on this though from the day it was announced as a clunky sounding mix of “The Dirty Dozen” and “Mission Impossible” made all the worse by an egregious misreading of the Section 31 premise swiped from “Deep Space Nine.”
I was a huge Trek fan as a kid and teenager but fandom and most of the original cast movies killed my affection for the series. The better “Next Gen” episodes righted the franchise somewhat and “DS9” was even better but “Voyager” with its sexy Borg soured me on Trek once again. The two Abrams movies I saw were embarrassingly amateurish and I couldn’t bring myself to watch most of the NuTrek shows except the first season of “Strange New Worlds” and that struck me as nothing more than expensive fan fiction.
Part of loving something in one’s youth also means being willing to leave it in the past and simply enjoying the memories (something later generations of fans seem unable to unwrap their heads around). If the current Frankensteining of Star Trek, Star Wars and Dr. Who have taught us anything it’s that these shows are rooted in the era they were created in. They might be briefly resurrected by talented people but they all have a shelf life that accelerates once their corporate owners view them as nothing more than IP to be endlessly milked. I think it’s time to let Trek go the way of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers and just fade away.
Byron, you are right again. Series fatigue is a Real Thing and the attempts to recreate the excitement and thrills of watching the original STAR TREK series–or even NEXT GENERATION–have pretty much been flops. It’s hard to catch lightning in a bottle, let alone try to capture it again decades later with a different cast in a different era. As B. B. King said: “The Thrill is Gone.”
STAR WARS never did anything much for me…and I liked rather than loved ST. Yes, the Abrams films were as dire as anything Jedi.
So, I’m still willing to let a ST series play on…after all, NEXT GENERATION didn’t get watchable till after Gene Roddenberry died. Some new thought might be eventually injected. into some series or another…I still enjoy watching Yeoh perform. But won’t be joining PP for the purpose. (Irrelevance–we share a birthday, though she’s two years older than I. In the unlikely event that we ever grow mutually enamored, I somehow will not let that worry me.)
Todd, I’m sure you and Michelle Yeoh will become mutually enamored. It’s only a matter of time.
It just seems So Right…if she suddenly needs Some East Coast Guy, whose major recommendation is he never would’ve written the James Bond film she was in so poorly, as her life’s partner. Clearly, L need to be in the new series writing room….
Though I might need to type gooder.