Hey uh I have no creative power in Star Trek anymore so this means nothing, but I 100% object to the head of the franchise Alex Kurtzman justifying a Space C.I.A. for the Federation to exist.
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The entire POINT of section 31 in DS9 was they were the bad guys, they were not grey actors they were 100% black hats and a rogue agency made up of bad actors.
I think it's telling that if I remember correctly, they are a foil to Dr. Bashir, the person who basically tries to help everyone no matter how short sighted it is.
This 1701%! Me, @michaelangie.bsky.social, and @trekranks.com discuss Section 31 in the latest TrekRanks podcast. Michael and me firmly come down on how S31 should NOT exist in Roddenberry's utopia.
💯 ! Or at the very least, that we should see Starfleet & the Federation doing their best to get rid of the organisation (& that its activities shouldn’t be presented as fun & cool). I love that our discussion was so well-timed thanks to Jim’s scheduling the topic!
It's not like Kurtzman Trek would *ever* have an episode where the Enterprise goes to a planet, finds out their utopia is powered by a child who is slowly tortured to death, and have Pike's response be "I will not have anything to do with you ever again".
See: Joss Whedon stories
Same deal in his stuff. We know the guy's a major problem, but he still manages to take on SHIELD through some pretty hefty concepts and arcs.
I think they don't see what we see. But they still have the storytelling gift.
It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of “why” Section 31 was introduced in the first place. In DS9, it was demonstrably a bad thing that ran counter to the ideals of the Federation. Kurtzman’s fascination with S31 illustrates why so many of his Star Trek series have felt so wrong.
The people licensed to make ST movies have no business anywhere near a script. The movies are written lazily, so far from Roddenberry's vision, with such pathetic excuses for plots that I think most of them shouldn't have been made.
War is lazy, stupid writing. show me how people love instead.
I was extremely concerned when I heard the idea of turning section 31 into a movie or series, because when the protagonist group is the group fighting against universal compassion, how is that going to fit with all the ideas of Trek?
My advice: FIRST permanently removing the FASCIST, Fraudulently “ELECTED” BASTARDS; & try to separate this Country from the RUSSIAN MAFIA APPOINTED CRIMINAL REPUBLICANS‼️
Agreed, especially since the whole narrative crux of including S31 on DS9 in the first place was to prove indeed, it was not needed for the Federation to exist.
Any takes on Special Circumstances in the Culture novels? Banks made them part of his libertarian socialist utopia, though I think they're not really the CIA in the way Kurtzman would describe.
SC is a million times worse in that they have zero public accountability (the culture isn’t huge on governance structures) and colossal amounts of power. But they feel bad about it? Sometimes? And are generally right?
I appreciate the way Banks toys with the idea at the very least. I still find Player of Games a pretty fascinating exploration of the idea of 'leftist regime change' and 'what is your moral obligation if you are the Federation and you live next to the Space Nazis'
man if only the Culture were actually the Federation, with, like, democratic institutions that weren't totally subverted by super-intelligences who more or less act on whim, but it's cool because they're generally good guys who are benevolent and rarely if ever become abusive.
Starfleet *has* a Space CIA - Starfleet Intelligence! That's actually OK to have imo (to keep tabs on both hostile and allied powers), because Starfleet Intelligence is *part of Starfleet*, and accountable to Starfleet, the Federation Council/President, and ultimately the voters. 1/
Section 31 is *none* of those things and as a result causes untold problems for everyone that have to get solved by acting morally and honestly in every subsequent series! The Founder Plague in DS9, the Augment Plague in Enterprise, CONTROL in Discovery, the Vengeance and Khan in Into Darkness, 2/
the Modified Founders in Picard (leading to the Borg nearly destroying Earth). The only Captain on-screen who hasn't been bitten in the ass by a Section 31 screwup is Prime Timeline Kirk, and Picard Season 3 made it clear that Section 31 was expeditiously working to resolve *that* oversight!
It REALLY irritated me that Picard S3 retconned DS9 by making it seem like Odo took matters into his own hands to cure the Great Link, when in reality Sisko, Kira and the Federation trusted him to do the right thing.
So basically he's asserting that for light to exist there has to be darkness. The problem is I'm pretty sure in Trek that darkness was the events leading up to the existence of the Federation. You know, the Global Thermonuclear War.
Isn't that literally the exact opposite of Star Trek? Wasn't the entire point of Star Trek, a product of the Cold War, that you did NOT have to compromise your moral values to bring about Utopia?
S31 is firmly established in Star Trek DS9. They exist. It's canon. They reappear in Enterprise meaning they've been extant for quite awhile. I object to Kurtzman taking credit for it. S31 is buried deep in the bowels of Starfleet and should be mentioned sparingly. If Romulans have the Tal'Shiar ...
...and the Cardassians have the Obsidian Order than Starfleet should also have a clandestine organization as well to keep pace. Again, I don't care if they exist, I think it's established they do, I just don't think a movie should've been made about it as a major plot point. Keep them mysterious...
I'll defend new Trek till my lungs collapse, but that's horse plop from Alex. The idea of the DS9 era going dark was powerful, but we desperately needed a live-action resolution where the utopia rose from the ashes and the conspirators were held to account, not whatever he's cooking.
Everyone not in the Federation absoultely has a CIA-type agency. The Klingons got ahold of information about Genesis. You need to be able to assess threats from closed off worlds. Most of all, sociopaths need constructive work.
Eh, it’s not too ambiguous IMO. We see 2 other members with Sloan the first time he tells Bashir about S31. Admiral Ross had direct knowledge of the organization. Morphogenic virus creation + administration to Odo required at the very least a few plants at Starfleet Medical
Exactly. They aren't a division of Starfleet or anything else, they're a *shadow cabal* a la the Illuminati or something. The moment Pike said "oh yeah, the black ops division!" in Disco, I knew an error had been made, but assumed it was a story-in-progress and we'd see what happened, but nope.
It started even earlier, ep 3 of Disco when Burnham and the other prisoners see the S31 guard wearing his half-black S31 badge. I have no doubt the powers at be were desperate to find something that could make Trek mainstream cool like Star Wars was.
Section 31 needed to be kept dark &mysterious, a device that could crop up in episodes occasionally to add mystery and intrigue when needed. The fact they tried to cobble together a TV show centred around it was debatable at best but the end result is a distillation of everything wrong with this era
I know Section 31's been a thing since DS9, but what drew me to working on Star Trek Prodigy was getting to tell stories in an optimistic world in which we moved past capitalism and greed. Not one that's propped up by backroom assassins.
You don’t need the back room assassins for sure. Now could we have seen Starfleet/the Federation re-evaluate things in the wake of the extended crises from 2367 (Wolf 359) to 2375 (Dominion War end) or 2379 (Shinzon’s fuckery) and decide that an overt military branch might be useful? Perhaps.
A scene that is burned into my brain in TNG's 'The Neutral Zone': Picard explaining to a 20th century capitalist freshly awoken from cryogenics (great setup) how mankind has evolved. "We've grown out of our infancy." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQQYbKT_rMg
'The Neutral Zone' is the perfect episode to get people to understand what's brilliant about Star Trek. The final scene sums it up best: "Our mission is to go forward. And it's just begun."
Two kinds of arrogance meeting head-on: The businessman assuming his money is still there, versus the Federation's pre-Borg "We're Better Than You, And We Know It!" complacency. No wonder Q felt the need to shake them up a bit.
(Seriously, though, the businessman assuming his money is still there and still valuable was precious. Did he, like, ignore a lot of the 20th Century? Wars, revolutions, and crashes happened quite a bit!)
Oh, cool - neither author invented the trope, but someone being ambassador to a more traditional-violent culture is also a part of the setting of Iain M. Banks "Excession" - which was published a bit later, in 96
I have to say I see overlaps between Section 31 and Special Circumstances. I don't see the need for it in Trek, but Banks did some very good things with the idea.
This is exactly why I love this episode so much. It's not just the Enterprise crew smugly lecturing those dinosaurs from the 20th century. The way Offenhouse so effortlessly calls Romulans' bluff—something future humans lost the capacity for—shows that there is something to be learned from the past.
I had a former hedge fund guy tell me that many finance bros secretly identify as Ferengi but it’s really just an easy way to justify capitalism as prime directive
This is why Section 31 is my least favorite concept in all of Trek. To the initial ideal that humanity will continue striving to better ourselves, Section 31 suggests, "No, actually people suck and always will. We will never improve."
fwiw back in DS9 days the kind of stuff people assumed were prior Section 31 commitments were shit like the conspiracy in Undiscovered Country - i.e. mostly rogue officers pretending to be Starfleet Intelligence; to some extent STO used to roll with that old school interpretation
And unlike, say, the Klingons (who were originally just bad guys but rehabilitated fairly early on with a culture of their own), bad guys who choose to be bad.
I had no issue with Section 31 in DS9 because the show made it clear they were evil AF. Them later trying to make them into a wannabe Suicide Squad (including a happy Vulcan robot piloted by an insect-sized alien who talks like a leprechaun) is where they went off the rails.
I will admit I thought they were kinda cool (their ships especially), but I still thought it was a push in the wrong direction, they simply became the covert ops arm of Starfleet. In DS9 they were buried soooo deep that virtually no one even knew they existed.
Yeah, in DS9 they were more a secret society than an actual organization. Giving them their own ships and uniforms and such doesn't make sense. Everybody we meet in DS9 that's affiliated with them has a cover identity and operates within Starfleet.
Prodigy shows how there can be conflict and debate about best practice, without trying to make a secret rogue agency relevant. Your work on it is appreciated
i guess it was inevitable that it would get infected with modern day cynicism. even on DS9, most characters didn't "accept" that something like S31 needed to exist. but i guess it's come around fully to "actually utopia is fake, it's a facade built on a mountain of corpses."
Well yeah, that’s always been a part of Trek. Utopias *are* fake, you’re never perfect and you have to be vigilant.
They’ll talk a good game in their post-scarcity worlds and ships but all the negative parts are still there, from hating Klingons to attempts to turn Data into a slave race.
yes, what's important is recognizing those flaws and saying "that's messed up!" and characters actively agitating to change things. rather than just saying "oh well, that's just our crummy reality" and shrugging about it.
It's like how the Jedi in Star Wars aren't allowed to be the good guys. Which then goes on to be the prevailing pop culture view of them and when people raised on that view get the reins they make it canon.
Also, importantly, DS9's portrayal of S31 was partly a CRITIQUE of Starfleet for not being utopian ENOUGH, from a show that wasn't afraid to do that, but usually did it thoughtfully and with moral clarity, which is a far cry from "of course the light needs the dark to balance it out, bro"
Another thing DS9 was surprisingly not afraid to do was deconstruct TNG's Klingons as actually basically as shitty as TOS's if not worse in some ways even though they were the babies of one of the guys on the writing team - and without the weird way early Disco went at it
He doesn’t get it. We’ve known that for a long time. I’m not sure if he even knows that Starfleet has a normal intelligence division or if he’s conflating it entirely with S31.
I mean, the concept of Section 31 was cool. In that it was a rogue element of Starfleet that couldn’t be 100% proven to exist and might have been one guy’s delusion.
Making it real in Kirk’s era was Eeh, but killing them off in a storyline worked.
So Chad- I have it on pretty good authority (folks in Secret Hideout) that Alex Kurtzman really hates anyone who speaks against him... Like when he fired the original writer of the Borg story they were working on pre-Picard series... Care to comment on working for him? Also, I respect ur bravery!
There’s a hundred replies pointing out that S31 were the ANTAGONISTS of the stories in which they were introduced, so instead I’ll focus on pointing out just how incredibly hacky it is to take the single thing that makes a particular property unique and say, “Weeeeeell, what if that wasn’t true?”
The one take on Section 31 I will accept is that it is a rot that has to be removed. If they're going to keep doing Section 31 it should turn out that it's not a continuous organization but a series of unrelated misguided paranoid groups that pop up from time to time only to be dismantled.
I hate it because in ds9 section 31 is very clearly the bad guys who are trying to corrupt people to their thinking. Also they aren’t really cia, they’re more like an off the books Illuminati type org that almost no one knows about
In ds9 it’s a lot more like an evil secret society in Star Fleet that is a stand in for American intelligence as a whole but must exist completely underground in universe to even survive the internal checks and balances
this is true, but a distinction without a lot of meaning. We know what the CIA is, we know who the director is, but not what they do, often many years after they do it. I'd invite you to read Legacy of Ashes or The Jakarta Method or The Devil's Chessboard for some examples of this.
It can’t exist inside the federation because it’s directly counter to its ideals. It’s a satire of the cia because our society allows it and needs it to function globally while to them it’s an evil boogy man
'i can't imagine a world in which consequences have been effective deterrents to corruption, and frankly i don't believe anyone else can either.' inspiring.
Kurtzman's take on S31 is bad and antithetical to the core ideals of Star Trek. So was Gene's sexism and Berman's bigotry. Trek has always aspired to ideals higher than the reality of its creators. It's the writers, directors, and cast who must help it realize such on screen.
The level of backlash Section 31 has incited from fans is pretty wild. Even the sites who normally tow the line for Paramount are speaking out against this film.
I tried watching it and just couldn't. I bailed within the first 20 minutes. It just made me uneasy & that's not why I watch Trek. #LLAP
The modern view of S31 is that it's "cool" and "badass," but DS9 was about asking questions: Should we and do we need it? What does it say about us that S31 exists? To quote my own review: "But those questions don’t get examined here, as moral contemplation has been swapped for action-adventure."
Not only do those questions not get asked but they're blatantly ignored. I just can't forgive Alex Kurtzman and his writers for this. It was ugly, stupid and utterly un-Star Trek like.
This is so spot on.
No matter what anyone says to him about what Star Trek "is" he just looks at you blankly and says that quote.
The man just doesn't get it and never will.
Fire him already.
We know how toxic the Obsidian Order is for Cardassians. We see Garak’s pain and isolation and his issues with his father. We know that a secret spy and assassin service is bad.
I mean, this does explain how they could miss the point of The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas so completely. The leadership genuinely cannot imagine a better world and sees no problem with that.
Kurtzman is saying that they're "taking the debate to a new place", but by that he seems to mean that he's just taking a side on the pro-S31 side. What he's saying is pretty much verbatim from "Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges", but it's something that the main character passionately argued against!
Worse, the argument he's making is essentially the same as the argument Admiral Leyton makes in "Paradise Lost". Even if you haven't seen the episode, I think you can tell from the title that the writers did not intend to promote his viewpoint!
Exactly: Their role as the "people working in the gray areas" wasn't something to embrace, it's something to villainize. And it was! THRICE! In DS9, ENT, and Into Darkness. Each time, they were the villains to root out, not the spunky fun team to embrace. It's such a shame.
It makes me feel like Kurtzman didn't watch DS9 or ENT and is basing everything he's thinking and doing with S31 on things he overheard from other people, because there's NO WAY he experienced these stories only to turn around and do this.
I say this as a defender of his up to this point. The man has plenty of administrative wins, but he needs to take a step back and re-evaluate his presumptions.
in DS9, S31 were certainly not the Good Guys, and this retcon that they are indeed the Good Guys is a step in the wrong direction for the ST universe. IMO I would take a S31 story if it was about corruption and unlikely friends/enemies made while unraveling the conspiracy. Whistleblower stuff
There was a ST:TNG episode that stands as a great inspiration for this sort of thing: the drumhead. What if that conspiracy brained lady ran S31 and a new recruit blows the whistle on them, then has to make unlikely friends to stay safe and finish their mission?
how dare this clown invoke DS9, which spends all its section 31 time saying "no, section 31 should not exist and it is an affront to the principles of the federation"
DS9 is a show that acknowledges the possibility and risk of things like section 31 being created in the pursuit if utopia, but always goes for "it'll be hard, but we should be aware of and ultimately dismantle things like this," not "oh well, it's the price we pay"
remember when the utopia that is earth got threatened during the dominion war, and even gentle restrictions and military presences on the planet were met with intense backlash? remember how the argument "well, we just have to grin and bear it and make sacrifices" was actually the naive position?
god, this guy sounds like he never even watched the ep where a dude with a stick up his ass gets on the case of Risans and is like "the federation needs toughening up" but gets hit with a "not at the expense of our happiness" by WORF of all people
the way this fool tells it, you'd think that Bashir ended up willingly working for Section 31 rather than actively working to sabotage them every time they tried to court him
I feel like the thing that keeps being missed about Section 31 is that they're an old, almost forgotten organization from the Federation's early days, and has outlived its usefulness, but it still keeps chugging along and actively needs to be stopped.
That was the whole point of Bashir's arc with them. They are not intrinsically tied to the Federation councils whims. They operate completely outside the law and most even in the highest echelons probably dont know about them. They are NOT the anti-heroes of Star Trek. They're a leftover mistake
"In order for this optimistic utopia (which to my knowledge the Federation never actually was) to exist, it must not actually be an optimistic utopia."
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https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/trekranks-podcast/id1234093904?i=1000684583215
Dude needs to read Omelas.
A utopia supported by torture & violence in the shadows, ISN'T A FUCKING UTOPIA.
THAT is the point DS9 made.
Kurtzman is a disgrace to the science fiction genre. LeGuin would be disgusted.
Same deal in his stuff. We know the guy's a major problem, but he still manages to take on SHIELD through some pretty hefty concepts and arcs.
I think they don't see what we see. But they still have the storytelling gift.
Section 31 was supposed to be the parallel to the Obsidian Order.
BOTH were portrayed as horrible things on DS9.
The entire reason it was created was to continue the deep question of "Who is a freedom fighter & who is a terrorist?" that DS9 brilliantly discussed.
War is lazy, stupid writing. show me how people love instead.
The message is always the same. Everyone isn't compassionate because they live in a utopia, they live in a utopia because everyone is compassionate.
Bashir fought Section 31 to end a secret genocide.
Picard & crew fought Admiral Dougherty who was participating in forced relocation in secret.
Kirk and crew defeated a secret conspiracy against the Starfleet/Klingon treaty.
Secret shadow governments are bad.
I’m glad you got to work on a Trek project that you enjoyed.
It was always ambiguous in DS9 whether Section 31 even existed or if it was *just* Sloan.
It certainly wasn't a given that they were a vital part of the Federation!
1) Use his obsolete financial experience as be ambassador to the Ferengi.
2) Fund the scientists who made Khan the Living War Crime.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Debtors%27_Planet
https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/Byr_Genar-Hofoen
They’ll talk a good game in their post-scarcity worlds and ships but all the negative parts are still there, from hating Klingons to attempts to turn Data into a slave race.
I think Kurtzman’s wrong here too but this is a fairly reversible position and not some sort of mortal Trek sin.
thank you
That darkness shouldn't come from Starfleet itself.
Making it real in Kirk’s era was Eeh, but killing them off in a storyline worked.
And then they just didn’t die.
It explains everything!
But I'm working now on something even cooler. :)
Let's not forget Iran Contra, and coups and attempted coups across the globe.
I tried watching it and just couldn't. I bailed within the first 20 minutes. It just made me uneasy & that's not why I watch Trek. #LLAP
Alex Kurtzman: "Yeah, but what if we made it cool and necessary?"
No matter what anyone says to him about what Star Trek "is" he just looks at you blankly and says that quote.
The man just doesn't get it and never will.
Fire him already.
Exactly. It was like the entire theme of his Garak's story arch. Shadow governments are horrifying and destructive.
And the show kept it ambiguous that he was possibly a lone loon and didn't actually have any institutional backing.