Star Trek: Section 31

At the center of Star Trek: Section 31 is Michelle Yeoh. Everything else within the first Trek film of the Paramount+ era orbits around her. The visuals, the camera work, the colors of the costumes, the inclusion of certain spaceships are all inspired by Emperor Philippa Georgiou Augustus Iaponius Centarius (or just Philippa for short), first introduced in Star Trek: Discovery.

“At the end of the day, each scene usually belongs to one particular character. In Section 31, 99 percent of those scenes belong to Michelle Yeoh’s character, Philippa Georgiou,” director Olatunde Osunsanmi, who also serves as writer and executive producer on the movie, tells Entertainment Weekly. “So then what you have is a movie that is visually inspired by who she is. She is unpredictable, she is dangerous, she is relentless, she also has discovered that she's kind and has the opportunity for redemption. Instead of a man on fire, you have a woman on fire and a visual design that is unpredictable for the first time in this modern era."

Osunsanmi has been involved with the project for years. He remembers working on Star Trek: Discovery ("Disco," for short) when Yeoh took a meeting with Alex Kurtzman, the producer/overlord of the Hollywood Trek empire. Their goal was to create a spinoff series, first announced in 2019, that centered around Philippa — not Captain Philippa Georgiou of the USS Shenzhou introduced in the Disco season 1 premiere, but Emperor Philippa Georgiou, an alternate version of the character from the Mirror Universe that rules the Terran Empire.



Osunsanmi planned to direct the pilot for this new series, penned by Craig Sweeny. "We actually prepped and had a concept meeting on the pilot of Section 31 while we were finishing and shooting the finale of Disco season 2," he mentions. "So we essentially had two parallel shows happening at the same time."

A few starts and stops, another alternate pilot script treatment from Sweeny, a COVID-19 pandemic, and two Hollywood strikes later, Star Trek: Section 31 now stands as a movie, to be released on Paramount+ next week. Osunsanmi credits the "relentlessness" of Kurtzman, Aaron Baiers (president of TV for Kurtzman's production company, Secret Hideout), and Yeoh herself for keeping it alive. "I can't believe that we actually are on the verge of releasing it to the world after all of that," he says.

Section 31 sees Philippa running a nightclub called the Baraam when she's recruited to join the film's titular squadron, a black-ops division of Starfleet. The other operatives feel representative of classic archetypes of spy and heist movies, but with a Star Trek twist.

Section 31, in the fictional universe of Star Trek, is an autonomous intelligence and defense organization that carries out covert operations for the United Federation of Planets. Created by Ira Steven Behr for the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Inquisition", the organization was intended to act as a counterbalance to the utopian portrayal of the Federation.

Section 31 settings and characters have appeared in dozens of episodes, novels and comics.  In 2019, CBS announced a new series was in development about Section 31, starring Michelle Yeoh. However, this has since been changed to a movie to be streamed on Paramount+.

Ira Steven Behr was inspired by a line of dialogue from Deep Space Nine episode "The Maquis" spoken by Commander Benjamin Sisko: "It's easy to be a saint in paradise." Behr said in the 1999 reference companion to the series, "Why is Earth a paradise in the twenty-fourth century? Well, maybe it's because there's someone watching over it and doing the nasty stuff that no one wants to think about."  He expressed an interest of exploring what life was really like for those living the fictional 24th century, saying "Is it this paradise, or are there, as Harold Pinter said, 'Weasels under the coffee table'."

The name, Section 31, is explained in the story as being taken from the fictional Starfleet Charter: Article 14, Section 31. The article, according to agents, allowed for extraordinary measures to be taken in times of extreme threat. Such measures included malicious sabotage of enemy installations and technology, biological warfare, and preemptive assassination.

According to Ronald D. Moore there was considerable debate on the origin of the organization, in particular on how the organization was formed and how long ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_31_(Star_Trek)