Deep Space Nine Understood the Fantasy of Spiesand Their Reality
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In just under a week, the nextStar Trek project arrives in the form ofSection 31, a streaming movie starring Michelle Yeoh diving into the titular black ops organizationone that, at least in all the footage weve seen so far, puts an emphasis on the glitz and glam of secret agent work. Theres action, theres dazzling costumes, theres even, perhaps most surprisingly in the context of it all, direct Federation oversight, like a co-worker with a stick up their ass whos here to stop you from having fun. Its no wonder then that some Star Trek fans are concerned about just whatSection 31 really thinks its namesake isand perhaps even a few of its stars are concerned about that. Im terrified of how its going to be received, because its not the Trekpeople want. TheTrekthat people want, theTrekthat we all want, is just 1,000 more episodes ofTNG, Rob Kazinsky, who plays the cybernetically enhanced Zeph in the film, recently told SFX Magazine. Everyones always furious that theyre not getting more TNG, whilst at the same time, whenTNGcame out, everybody hated it.So this is going to come along and its not going to feel like anyTrekthat theyve ever seen. Paramount But when it comes to theStar Trek that people wantespecially a Star Trek grappling with the idea of Section 31 as its primary focusperhaps The Next Generation shouldnt be the example we turn to. To get a real perspective on Section 31s role inStar Trek, and its paradoxical existence as the necessary evil that destroys its utopia, we need only look back at the show that gave it to us in the first place: Deep Space Nine. Crucially, in the set-up before that introduction, DS9 had whisked us and Dr. Julian Bashir, the character who takez on the thrust of its arc with Section 31, on another journey in Our Man Bashir. Its a James Bond pastiche that put Bashir at the center of a glitzy, glamorous, and all-together kitschy love letter to classic spy-fi. In Our Man Bashir, spycraft is sexy, elegant, and filled with action. Bashir gets to be the unabashed hero of his holosuite programtheres gorgeous retro costumes, casinos and glamour, clear-cut villains with comically dastardly plots to take over the world. Even with Garakan actual former spy, one that Bashir has always been obsessed with cracking the secrets oftagging along in Bashirs adventure to playfully remind him just how unlike actual spywork this all is, its an episode celebrating cinematic spycraft as we know and love it. Even with the dramatic quandaries that it plays with (its a classic Trek trope, the holodeck-gone-wrong scenario with a die in the game, die in real life element to boot), its an episode that almost vindicates Bashirs romanticized dream of what being a spy is entirely, even when hes forced to save the actual day by losing at his fantasy.Two seasons later, DS9 introduced Section 31 in its sixth season in Inquisition, when Bashir is targeted by the organization as a potential recruit at the height of its story arc thrusting the galaxy into chaos with the outbreak of the Dominion War. At this point, the show had already done much to penetrate the harsh reality of what Captain Sisko had once described early on in DS9s tenure of it being easy to be a saint in paradise, examining just how Starfleet and the Federation at large responded when confronted with interstellar conflict on an unprecedented scale. If Our Man Bashir had treated Garaks side-jabs about the reality of spywork as a joke for Bashir to ignore, Inquisition makes them the thrust of its text: from the get-go, Section 31 is presented as an antithesis of everything Bashir and the rest of DS9s crew hold dear. Paramount The work Agent Sloane does, even just to the extent of what he goes through just to try and recruit Bashir, is invasive and unglamorous. Sloane himself, the embodiment of Section 31 as we come to know it, is burdened with a sense of paranoia that cuts against anything wed expect of a Starfleet official, black ops or otherwise. Bashir is not excited to discover Section 31 exists, but is downright horrifiedand his immediate response, as is the rest of the crews, is to attempt to destroy it entirely, either through bringing it into the light or, as Sisko ultimately suggests to him at the end of the episode, to work on undermining it from within. Over the course of Section 31s remaining appearances across DS9the direct follow up to Inquisition, Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges, which sours Bashir and the show at large on Section 31 even further, and the trippier Extreme Measuresthe argument Sloane presents of the organization as a necessary evil is never considered as a viable conclusion by either the show or our protagonists. If anything, Section 31 becomes as much as an antagonist in its appearance as the Dominion themselves are, an existential threat to the very moral fiber of Star Trek. This is no more telling perhaps not in the follow up Section 31 episodes, but in the episode that aired directly after its introduction: the iconic In the Pale Moonlight, creating a killer one-two punch. If Inquisition introduced the idea of a formal apparatus to spycraft within the Federation, In the Pale Moonlight is about the very act of spycraft itselfthe wetworks, the conspiracy, the subterfuge that is inherent to its grim reality. Again, this is nothing like the romance DS9 had with the genre in Our Man Bashir, the road to hell Captain Sisko goes down with Garak in In the Pale Moonlight is one constantly shown to us as repugnant, not just for the acts taken along it, but for the moral decay that work acts upon Sisko and on Star Trek itself. The ultimate horror of In the Pale Moonlight isnt that Sisko is accessory to an assassination that brings the Romulans into the war against the Dominion, guaranteeing the deaths of millions more as it wages on in the name of saving billions more from the Federations potential defeat. Its that, as he grimly says to camera recording the personal log he knows hes about to delete, he can live with the cost that has on his soul. The episode ends with the Romulans formal declaration of war on the Dominion, which is what Sisko wanted, but it never considers that this is a victory within the narrative: there is no good ending to the actual reality of espionage outside of a holoprograms fantasy. Deep Space Nine might have thrown the bomb in the first place by giving us the existence of Section 31, but it understood the danger of wielding such a weapon in the first placebecause it already laid out to its audience and to its characters alike that the fantasy of a top-secret spy organization in Star Treks universe was nothing more than that, and that its reality was something far, far uglier to comprehend. If theSection 31 movie wants to avoid this fear of being seen as not being the Trek that people want, then it has to understand this too. Otherwise, unlike Sisko, it cannot learn to live with presenting an idle fantasy, and nothing more. Want more io9 news? 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