Star Trek thread of going to familiar places and beyond

[killamajig]

Section 31 is like Boba Fett, better left mysterious and nebulous.


Even as a child, I believe I understood that the reason Boba Fett was both cool and intimidating was because the only known fact about him was that he was a bounty hunter with a mysterious past. So, just like Boba the more they explain Section 31 the less interested I am.

But sometimes you get writers that are fans and understand these characters. Unfortunately they want to be the ones that create the background for these things. Then you hope you don't get a Dragon Age The Veilguard situation where they're self-inserting ideologies so it's canon. "I'm the one that made it lame and gay. Teee Heee Heee!! Now let's have a pillow fight, girls!"

[Tucker's Law]

the section 31 stuff thematically was a nice extension beyong bashirs Bond obsession, going further into what realpolitik and espionage is about than his interactions with garak who represented 'real' tradecraft and pragmatism vs the naive hollywood espionage ideas bashir had.

Also - at least in the beginning - it was very unclear to what extent section 31 was a real thing that was actually even a starfleet operation, vs just some dude doing shit of his own volition.

This was also kind of my take on it after the Bashir episodes (which I loved btw, I thought the concept for storytelling was great!), that s31 was very likely not even sanctioned by anyone in starfleet and instead a small rogue operation, just maybe a handful or even just a couple of guys (who probably were starfleet intelligence-adjacent) that thought they could recruit Julian into their more "proactive" cause.

[benji]

Section 31 as shown in DS9 wasn't odd, you had a literal attempted coup on Earth earlier in the show, Star Trek VI is a plot about hardliners in Starfleet, even TOS/TNG showed members of Starfleet organized or not who wanted it to take out threats they perceived, etc.

Section 31 was not only a permanent major feature, that everyone is aware of and has their own distinct combadges and the show treats as important heroes is odd. But Kurtzman has quite made clear he thinks Section 31 type entities is the only way any kind of society can exist.

I think in the case of Enterprise that like many thinks they were trying to show it as a precursor to what we came to know, a halfway point between our current Earth intelligence agencies and what Starfleet would have, but they failed to really think about it and execute it how it should be. Similar to how they did the Ferengi or Borg or a bunch of other stuff. This is an overall problem with Enterprise, one of execution, versus outright contempt for Trek like Discovery.