Matt and Sean talk about the new Paramount Plus… (cough)… film: SECTION 31. Is this really Star Trek?
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And we’re also taking a look at the world at the time of original broadcast. So we have been watching the original series. We have been, we have already gotten through enterprise, discovery, what’s available of strange new worlds and into the original series and for our discovery rewatch, we had stopped partway.
Because the series takes a bold leap forward in time. So as we got into this opportunity to see section 31, we dropped it in here because in my thinking it was about discovery. It was connected to that. Little did I know that my thinking was faulty. Well, before we get into that, who are we and who am I? I’m Sean Ferrell.
I’m a writer. I write some sci fi, I write some stuff for kids. And with me as always is my brother, Matt. He is that Matt behind Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives. And Matt, how are you this fine day? I’m doing well. How about yourself? I’m doing okay.
It’s rather cold. We’ve talked about weather and people have said, why are you talking about the weather? I’m going to talk about the weather. It’s cold. It’s cold. So I’m sitting here in a cold little basement and I’ve got a little space heater behind me and guess what? That space heater is not on because when it’s on, it makes noise and when it makes noise, this microphone picks it up.
So I’m sitting here talking about Star Trek, freezing my buns off for you good people. On now to our conversation about just that. First comments, but as for now, we always like to take a look at your comments from the previous episode before we jump into the new one. So Matt, what have you found in the mailbag for us this week?
Some good ones. Uh, from Friday’s Child, we have Kindred’s Girl who wrote, Oh my gosh, I just started the episode and had to comment on the costumes for these folks. They are distractingly bad. The clearly polyester colored strips of fake fur and the weird blonde Polytails? On their helmets. What is going on?
And the very serious music accompanying it just adds to the weirdness. Then replied to their own comment saying, It’s like all they had to make the costumes were the scraps left over from other shows to which Happy Flappy Farm responded. Those fur pieces were terrible. I couldn’t stop looking at them in horror.
I thought the same thing. I didn’t bring it up when we talked about it, but when I was watching, I was like, wow, these costumes are really goofy and weird looking and like, what’s up with the ponytail things? It’s like I didn’t understand any of the choices that were being made there, but I just kind of let it wash over me.
Yeah. Then we had Dan Sims who wrote, Nevermore did I wish the B plot was the main story. This one was a rough one. At least there is a great podcast to watch after a horrible episode. Thank you. Thank you.
Yes.
To which Happy Flappy Farm wrote, Amen to that. And finally, uh, Mark Loveless. Uh, wrong answers only for the plot of section 31.
And I haven’t read this yet, Sean. So I’m reading it for the first time. So you and I can enjoy this together, bask in the glow of it. Yes. So thank you, Mark. Uh, in Borg society, there were, there are a few individuals that simply do not take 100 percent well to their not nanoprobe implants rather than destroy them and recycle their parts.
They are relegated to section 31, which is the lower decks inside the Borg cube. I just like the concept right there. Full stop. I could stop reading right there. Love it. I want to watch that show. So do I. Yeah. I want to write that show. Poor Nine of Nine. Uh, they handle things like cyborg waste disposal and mechanical repairs and the humor is hilarious to other Borg only.
They’re running, their running gags involved trying to torture the regular Borg by doing things like leaving fecal surprises for them to slip on and fall, drawing various alien genitalia on their foreheads and putting t shirts on them that say things like, we love ass (imulation)
and ask me about my other implant. Somehow section 31 the movie ended up with a fairly poor score on Rotten Tomatoes. Mark, Mark, Mark, Mark, Mark, Mark, Mark. I would watch that show. I would watch that show. I would write that show. I would, I would love that show. Yes. If only that’s what we had. Yep. So that noise you hear in the background and that flashing red light on the screen, yes, it’s the read alert.
It’s time for Matt to tackle the Wikipedia description. And guess what, Matt? There was no Wikipedia description that was anywhere near the appropriate length. So I did what any red blooded American would do. I went to a chat bot and I said, Hey, give me a hundred words on this. Oh no. Good luck. Oh, no. Okay, Sean.
Oh, boy. The film Star Trek Section 31 follows Emperor, Emperor Philippa Georgiou as she joins a clandestine division of Starfleet. In the present day, Georgiou is approached by Alok to track down Dada Noe, a bioweapon designer. The team discovers a destructive weapon called the Godsend, which can incinerate an entire quadrant of planets.
They suspect a mole among them and discover Fuzz, a tiny mollusk like creature, is the mole. Fuzz escapes with the Godsend, and Georgiou rigs it to explode, collapsing the passenger what? That’s actually, okay. That’s actually wrong. But collapsing the passage to the mirror universe and preventing the Terran Empire’s invasion.
She joins Section 31 permanently. Section 31 screenplay by Craig Sweeny story by Bo Yeon Kim and Erika Lippoldt, directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi, who is a director we have seen in Discovery, and we’ve also seen him in Strange New Worlds and the film stars Michelle Yeoh, Omari Hardwick, Sam Richardson, Robert Kazinsky, Kacey Rohl, Sven Ruygrok, James Hiroyuki Liao, Humberly Gonzalez, and Joe Pingue.
The main cast we have is, of course, Yeoh is Philippa Georgiou. We also have characters Alok, Quasi, Zeph, Rachel Garrett, Fuzz, and a cameo, unexpectedly, by one Jamie Lee Curtis. We’ll talk about that more later on. This originally released January 24th, 2025. And even though that is just a scant few weeks ago, it seems like ages.
We’re living through an era where time seems to be both moving too fast and too slow at the same time. Welcome to the 21st century. What was the world like for you, Matt? Well, let’s revisit that. Yes, that’s right. You were singing along to DTMF by Bad Bunny, as well as 34 million other people who streamed that song to number one on this day in history.
Matt, take it away. I’m gonna close my eyes for a minute. Do you know why, folks? That’s right, because when I close my eyes, I can’t tell the difference between Bad Bunny and my brother Matt.
And at the box office, we’re trying to compare apples to apples. So when we’re talking about the TV show, we will talk about not only movies that are out there as a point of interest, but we also talk about television shows in comparison to the TV program that we’re watching. This is calling itself a film.
It’s called, it has a rating. It is a PG 13 film. So we won’t be talking about TV programs. That’s also helpful because is effectively a streaming program. And it’s a little hard to parse how exactly to compare it to other things. So in the movies, the number one film at the time that this was released is a little film called flight risk.
Matt quickly, what do you think about flight risk? What do you know about Flight Risk? I don’t know anything about Flight Risk. Its tagline is, Y’all need a pilot? Oh boy. That’s right. It stars Mark Wahlberg, directed by Mel Gibson. It is the story of a pilot who transports an air marshal accompanying a fugitive to trial.
As they cross the Alaskan wilderness, tensions soar and trust is tested as not everyone on board is who they seem. It’s every movie you’ve ever seen. Yeah. It sounds like if you had to speculate, Matt, at this time of the year, January, well known for its big box office smashes. How much money do you think that this film made?
If you had to speculate, Matt, given the time of year, knowing the January is a big box office month, how much money do you think this movie made at number one? Probably a few million at most 12, 12 million. Okay. Number one for the week beating Mufasa, the Lion King, which had 8 million, One of Them Days, which had 8 million, Sonic the Hedgehog 3, which had 5 million, grossing a total of 228 million.
It’s been in the theaters for a while, but that does nothing compared to the number five film of the week with a little weekend gross of 4. 2 million. Yes, Moana 2, which is At 452 million since its release late last year. And in the news on this day in history, January 24th, 2025, it is a respite from the original series news.
We’ve been talking about it for a while. We’ve been watching as Vietnam has been escalating. We’ve been watching president Johnson getting closer and closer to announcing that he will not run for reelection. We are seeing the Democrats try and figure out how to challenge Johnson, because not all Democrats were happy with Vietnam, and we’ve seen civil rights stories popping up here and there.
We’ve seen lots of things about the Soviet Union and the ongoing Cold War, and we’ve talked about how those things Have affected the writing and, uh, characterization of characters in the original series, a lot of cold war motifs, a lot of proxy war motifs, a lot of things about human rights and civil rights.
Well, here we are in a totally different era Matt. January 24th 2025. We have headlines about Trump, pardoning people who were convicted of the January 6th uprising. We see stories about Trump’s nominees for cabinet positions who are going to face contentious debates. We see stories about Hamas back in public view after having as a result of a more than a year long response to Hamas attacks in Israel in October, October 7th, a couple of years ago, the year long conflict that is continued there between Hamas and Israel brings Hamas back into the headlines as a major player in international politics. And we also see a major story about Mexico’s preparations to respond to what they know will be a lot of deportees out of the United States as Trump’s plan to get illegal migration out of the public mind by taking the Illegal immigrants out of the United States and where will they go?
Well, Mexico will be one major destination. On now to our conversation about this made for TV film effectively that has a rating as if it was made for theaters. It’s kind of standing in two worlds, and that theme of standing in two worlds is going to come up more and more as we talk about this. I mentioned at the top of the episode that my thinking was, well, this is about characters from Discovery, and we’ve talked about most of Discovery because we talked up to the point where there was the jump off into the future, and it never occurred to me, Matt, that in talking about this film, we would be talking about what they call the lost years.
Are you aware of what I mean by that terminology? Within production and within the fandom, the terminology of the lost years are the years between the original series and Star Trek Next Generation. This story takes place in that gap. It does. It does. A series I had to effectively, in my research, spoil what’s We haven’t visited in discovery and I haven’t watched these episodes of discovery.
Our plan has been to watch things in star date order. So the last half of star Trek discovery will be something we watch after we watch next generation, deep space nine and Voyager. That has been our plan. I had to go into Wikipedia and read a lot of spoiler stuff for myself in order to figure out how does Georgiou end up here.
I won’t get into the details of what it is that happens, in case any of our listeners and viewers also haven’t watched those and would like to visit it when we get there in approximately eight years, I believe. But time travel shenanigans continue, and so what we end up with is Georgiou is in that gap, it is a realm of years that I believe we’re beginning to see Paramount’s really be interested in diving into as a gap to fill with possible storylines that would build a deeper bridge in the same way that they’re trying to do with, let’s say, strange new worlds and discovery between enterprise and the original series. So the film is set in the lost era between the original series and next generation. And I want to start this conversation by asking you, I don’t want to ask like overall impression. I want to start more granular than that. I wanted to ask you about what was here that you liked, what was here that made you say.
Oh, this is, like, this is what I’m holding on to for this, for this story that really stands out as a positive. I can start if you’d prefer. I was gonna say, give me a second, Sean, cause I’m gonna have to hunt for it. You go first.
I found myself thinking, I like the fact that everybody here wanted to be a part of Star Trek. I liked Michelle Yeoh, her interest in playing this character. She apparently the history of this is that before they had even started making discovery, she liked the character of Georgiou so much she pitched to Alan Kurtzman the idea of doing a spinoff about Georgiou and through a series of attempts to get that going through negotiations behind the scenes between producers, production companies and paramount CBS, all of those things before the series had even been filmed and then seeing how it was responded to.
And moving forward in time through the pandemic and a writer’s strike and an actor’s strike all had various impacts on the attempts to do what she had premised. I like the fact that she likes this character enough to have pitched that. I like the fact that an actress of her caliber wants to be a part of Star Trek.
I like Sam Richardson as a comedian and as an actor, I think he’s very charming and I think he’s a lot of fun to watch and I, I, I enjoy his performances. I like this director in other things. I like the fact that these people want to be a part of Star Trek. So intention is what I like here. What originally was going to happen was a spinoff series.
The series was effectively being structured and then you had the writer strike, you had the actor strike, and then you had what I feel like is for some reason, a decision, maybe a contract was expiring. I know that Alan Kurtzman had a five year contract. To work with, to be involved in Star Trek. Maybe this hit a, was starting to hit a, a wall in that contract because my impression of this movie is it feels so rushed as to be incomprehensible.
At one point it was described as mission impossible, like in its endeavor. I don’t think it’s that smart. I felt like I was watching a Star Trek wrapper put around Fast and Furious mushed together with Suicide Squad. And the results for me look like what this has to be. This was a TV show pilot. This feels like a TV show pilot.
Absurdly, it doesn’t feel like a good TV show pilot. It feels like it was meant to be something, a jumping off point to something bigger, something more restrained, something more consistent, and then it was quickly rushed and retooled to turn it into something movie like, which apparently meant doing what Osunsanmi, the director, was quoted as saying that he pushed the crew harder than he would do when directing an episode of television because the whole project was over within a few months rather than the extended marathon schedule of a series of television. He said, quote, we got to push everything to the extreme, emotion, performances, action, you name it.
He was also able to break down the entire script and map out how he wanted to tie everything together by the end. He chose to reconsider his creative visual approach so that it would be new and fresh rather than approaching the film in the same way that he had episodes of Discovery. He noted that Kurtzman wanted each Star Trek project to have its own flavor.
So it was expected, production was expected to take six weeks and it took one week longer than that. So effectively seven weeks. I completely see the pushed everything up to the extreme, because I don’t know about you, I felt like everything was simultaneously, nothing was happening and it was happening really, really fast.
It was a rush. It felt like everything was constantly rushing and I found myself thinking like, but nothing’s happening. Nothing is going on. And I really, really scratched my head throughout the entire thing. So, I hated this movie. Yeah. At the end of it. I’m not gonna, I will say, I had fun. There were moments of this, I had fun.
There was fun to be had. It wasn’t just a dumpster fire, but I did not like it. When it was all over, my wife watched it with me. She said, that was kind of a fun romp, was how she described it. But again, she didn’t think it was like some fantastic Star Trek show or anything like that. She was just like, that was kind of a fun romp.
There’s some fun moments in there, some good humor and stuff like that. And I, I agree. I think there was. Uh, but to me, this feels like a TV show, like it felt like it was a pilot, like a two part pilot. They just filmed as a movie and said, good day, especially with how it ends. I mean, the way it ends. It ends, it ends like a pilot would end, like, and we’re going to go watch more adventures with these characters.
And in my head, I’m thinking, no, we’re not never see these people again. To me, that’s the biggest travesty of this is they did have some interesting characters. They did have some, they had interesting kind of like ground to cover if it was a show, but since it wasn’t it, it’s trying to wear too many hats.
And I agree with you, nothing, nothing really happened. It was like, it was almost like somebody watched hateful eight. Or Reservoir Dogs, where it’s the characters you’re watching, the machinations of them all stuck in a room and trying to figure out who’s screwing who over. When you, when you come up with a movie like that, that’s your focus.
Super hyper focused. And you can make it stylized and catchy and fun. And they were trying to do that for like half of this. And then the other half, like you said, Fast and the Furious, it like felt like it was trying to do Ocean’s 11, where it was like, here’s your ragtag group of folks that are going to do something impossible.
That’s crazy. And then it was this like record scratch, hard right turn into no, it’s, it’s hateful late and reservoir dogs. It’s like, wait, wait, wait, wait, what’s happening here? We were setting up for some big, fast adventure through the space. And now they’re stuck on a planet trying to figure out which one of them is screwing the others over.
And it was like, It made no sense. It was two things that did not belong together. And then the third thing I didn’t understand was it was a character piece about Georgiou. Yeah. And for me, that’s the one I was like, why didn’t they focus on that? Because the first 10 minutes was that flashback to her as a child, like a teenager, killing her family, becoming emperor.
And I was like, wow, that opening, I was like, this is going to be cool. Yeah, this is gonna be cool and they didn’t pay anything off on that like the heart that they set up the heart of the Character like the person that you’re supposed to be like, I like this character, but wow, she is Like screwed up.
She’s an awful person How is she gonna become find redemption and that should have been the storyline screw Hateful Eight screw reservoir dogs screw oceans 11 screw All the other stuff it should have been about her And her alone. Section 31 could have been part of this thing of like directly from that flashback, you have her running this bar and then you have her like sizing people up.
Like, I think I’m being cornered here and her kind of turn the table in section 31, section 31 saying, we need your help on something and forcing her hand. Like it would have all been from her perspective, all her storyline the entire time. And you would have gotten rid of this other nonsense and it would have way more focus.
Or you say, screw all of that, let’s just make a Oceans 11. Like here’s a group that’s doing something impossible. But the fact that they were trying to do too many things at once, and I think they were, they missed because they had Michelle Yeoh, they should have focused on her. They should have made this all about her.
And just focus on that stuff. I don’t know about you, Sean, but my least favorite thing where I knew, like I told you, that, that 10 minute flashback made me go, wow, this could be really cool. Uh, the title cards and the exposition sequences. Were jarring so bad like they were they were like the the the intro the intro Oh my god, I that’s when it was like the record scratch.
Oh shit. This is not gonna be good This is gonna be a train wreck and every time those tail cards came up The one that got me the most Sean was near the end where it said three of your earth weeks later Yeah. Like who is talking to us? Like who is talking to pushing, pushing the audience out of it saying like, this is you as an, as an earth person.
Like it makes no sense. Yeah. It’s like you never, you never established that this story is being told by another, who’s the narrator to be able to say it was just, it kept saying transmission. Transmission number one. Transmission number two. Like, like, what are we watching? Like, you’re trying to, you’re trying to encapsulate this in a message.
But this, but this is where it drives me nuts. It’s like, you could have excised all of that and it wouldn’t have changed a damn thing. It’s like, so it was all, it was there for no reason. On top of icing. Yeah. It was a little tiny wedding cake on top of a wedding cake. To keep piling on here. Alex Kurtzman good riddance my opinion.
Um, there’s a lot of crap that he brought. He did good things, but then there’s a lot of crap he brought. And so for me, I’m like good riddance. This felt like the last vestige of his imprint to me. Um, and one of the things I find so funny is in Star Trek Discovery. I commented on this while we were watching the show.
Somebody on the set who does the practical effects. Figured out how to do those plumes of fire and said, this is the best thing ever. It creates a kineticism and it looks really cool because you have the shaky camera, the closeups and you have the of like the, in the fuzzy in the background, but then anytime the shot is a wide shot and everything’s in focus, it’s just, it’s like who would build things on a bridge that would just spew fire like that.
It makes no sense. It’s like having a bunch of hibachi grills behind the actors on the set. So. That was in this in full effect, same thing, and I was just like, wow, this feels like such a bad TV movie. It doesn’t feel like a movie. It felt like a TV show. So for me, production quality I thought was substandard for what you’re calling a movie.
And then. The Alex Kurtzman of his imprint on this was, I think, a big detractor and the fact they just tried to take a TV show pilot and turn it into a movie without substantial rewrites was a travesty. And the fact that Michelle Yeoh just kind of hang there when they had a great story around her, they could have told and didn’t, um, they tried.
It’s still shoehorned in there, but it’s like all the other stuff they should have gotten rid of and just focused on her. And it would have been way more compelling. And you could have had a very kind of heartfelt tugging the heartstrings, crying a little bit with the final fight between her and her former lover.
It’s like, it could have been this wonderful, this incredible like story, but because of the way they broke it all up, it just completely undercut everything they could have done. So yeah, I think this movie was awful. Yeah, it was. I completely agree. It was awful. It’s got a 21 based on 24 critic reviews on rotten tomato and the popcorn meter is slightly higher.
It’s a 25 from audiences. But yeah, I mean a 25 as your saving grace and everybody involved with it said they would do more depending on how well this did. Like they were out there, like, like we hope it does well because we’ll do more of these. And I hope that like you said, if the Kurtzman era is over, I hope that this character is not judged by this movie, because that would be, you’d be missing the boat to get Michelle Yeoh back and do something else with this. Because I think you, you hit the nail on the head, hateful eight, like all these different movies smooshed together in a giant mashed potato ball. And we’re told like this is one story and it couldn’t be what they were trying to do was what Andor got away with but Andor only got away with it because the Star Wars Andor series effectively made three movies as a miniseries.
So you end up with multiple episodes, put them together and you’ve got one little movie and then you’ve got a heist movie and then you’ve got a prison break movie and it’s brilliant. It’s the best star Wars program I have watched to date and I loved everything about it. Diego Luna, like, like it’s that the parallels are very uncanny, like incredibly well recognized movie actor doing incredible work in a franchise that’s built around this old sci fi universe and making it new and making it fresh and to pull all that back. As you said, you could make it a Reservoir Dogs. You could have had the entire movie be we’re all trapped on this planet trying to survive. And one of us is a mole.
Somebody here can’t be trusted and is sending out a signal to their allies to come here and if they come here, we’re all dead. But if we can figure out who the mole is, maybe we can figure a way off the planet. That could have been a movie. And it could have been really compelling because then you could have had Georgiou playing with her whole like, I was an empress.
I should be eight steps ahead. If you’re not going to go that route, the route you described of like her character piece, her relationship to her former lover, I couldn’t help it. And regular viewers of this channel are going to recognize that Sean is going to put on his rewriter hat. You start with the back piece of her relationship with her lover, her having murdered an entire family to become Empress.
And she goes through all the things and then she’s approached in this now future where she is running this casino in space. I didn’t hate that as a setup. I didn’t hate that as a starting point, her being a Jabba the Hutt. Cool. Like she’s going to do that. She’s going to build her little fiefdom because it’s kind of like scratching the itch of being in charge.
She’s approached by section 31. She’s brought into a job. The job she’s brought into makes her cross paths with the mirror. The, the prime universe version of her former lover. She crosses paths with the prime universe version of the guy that she killed all those years ago. And she has had time to bury her relationship with him deep inside of herself.
And now she’s got to do a job in which she has to steal something from him and she’s got guilt and it keeps screwing up the job. And everybody in section 31 is like, what is wrong with you? Like, what are you doing here? You’re not doing what we’re supposed to be doing. She’s lending him assistance. She’s like doing things because she’s trying to alleviate this old, old guilt.
And only toward the end of the story does she realize that the thing he’s been working on, that the reason section 31 is after him is because he’s building this weapon of mass destruction, which is similar to the weapon that he helped build in the mirror universe, she doesn’t realize until too late.
This is what he’s been working on. He is making this thing. There’s no invasion coming in from the Terran universe. There’s no story about like having to blow up the bridge, the connective line between those two. It is just a story about her realizing that she can’t alleviate her guilt here by doing something nice for somebody she killed in another time and another place and her need to recognize this man is not the man she was in love with and she is not the woman she used to be.
It has to be a story of her coming to terms with not only is he not who he was in the other universe, I’m no longer the person I was not because I am literally a different person, but because I have chosen to be a different person. Having that as the character arc in this would have made it work, would have cared about that.
Yeah. Instead, you are left with a film that makes you grasp at the things that are fun for the moment. It had a brilliant chase sequence on those floating platforms that were zooming through some kind of underground mining operation. I thought that that sequence was a lot of fun. It was a little chaotic and hard to see what was actually happening, but it was bad filmmaking.
But the logic of like what that kind of combat would be like when somebody finally gets pushed off of one of those platforms, I, I liked all of that sequence. I think that given more time and better writing, some of these characters could have been more fun to watch. But for the most part, I found myself thinking like they’re all effectively just actors in front of a camera.
I didn’t get a sense of characterization from really anybody except for Alok. The character who set up is like, I used to be under the augments and was a lieutenant to one of those warlords. And I’ve been dealing with that guilt ever since him I liked. Me too. Him effectively being almost like a, like a dark captain America sort of person.
Like he’s been augmented in some way that he’s got these abilities and he’s got this longevity. I thought like, that’s kind of cool. Like setting that kind of character into the star Trek universe was kind of neat. Then you had the Borg looking guy that I was just like, It would have been more interesting if he had literally formerly been a Borg, like having him be reminded me of Sean, the next generation pilot episode when they show the old, uh, when the Q’s shows the, it looks like one of the, the bailiffs in the courtroom, they could have leaned into that basically saying he’s using old equipment from that period and just made him look like that and it would have been really kind of cool. But yeah, it was like, what the hell is this? Like, I have a feeling that they, I have a feeling that at some point there was going to be something I, I would not be surprised if at some point there was like, he is a, he is a rescued Borg.
He is a Borg that’s been severed from the collective. And then for the purposes of this, it kept getting watered down and watered down and watered down until he is just this cyborg instead of being Borg. And it made no sense because then it’s like, you’re dealing with a world that’s supposed to be between the original series and next generation.
If they’re trying to avoid mentioning the Borg before the Borg would have been incorporated into the universe. Okay, I get why you’re avoiding saying that, but you can’t make a guy look like this and not raise those questions. And he was such a non character. He had nothing about him that was interesting.
Or like he was supposed to be played as like the dumb muscle, but I was like that he was funny. He was good comic relief. He was funny, but yeah, he was a non character. It was like, you didn’t care about him when he died. You were like, Oh, well, I guess he’s dead. And then 1 thing I do want to call it as. I was gonna say, one thing I do want to call out is good.
I don’t know what you thought about the fight scene on, in the casino where she had that device that put the thing out of phase. And she was, that entire fight sequence was incredible of like, they’re fighting out of phase, which means nobody can help her. Yeah. And then once she goes back into phase, then everybody can help her as like, but then anybody else can get their hands on that thing.
So it was like, it was this great, like cat and mouse game between putting things in phase and out of phase and doing all that kind of stuff. That was to me, brilliant. I had so much fun with that, that sequence again, another one of those moments where I was like, Oh, this movie could be a lot of fun. This is going to go places.
It’s cool. And then it’s like, Nope. That’s like, yeah, here’s a 10 minute sequence and we’re done. We’re going to go create something really boring. Yeah, I, I found myself like they create a Delta character, a Deltan who ends up getting killed right out of the gate. And so it’s like we spent more time getting to know her than we get to know the Starfleet officer at the beginning.
But then the Starfleet officer is the one who lingers and there’s nothing about that character that made any sense. You’re an agent of chaos. That’s why you’re here in section 31. Embrace the chaos. Like none of that was motivational. None of that was like, Oh, that’s the speech that gets this character to jump into gear.
Like that doesn’t make any sense. And the robot body that looks like a Vulcan. And the little guys run inside of like, okay, so you build a robot body to effectively in prison, a creature, and like, you build that robot to look Vulcan, but it’s not going to act Vulcan. Like why make it anything? Why make it look like anything?
Why does it need a robot body? If it has a robot body as a kind of like, we’re keeping it under control. Why can it fly out of the robot by ultimately don’t try not trying because I’m not trying because here’s what I’m trying to get to by having all of that in place and saying all of that, as soon as they introduced that character and we’re like, well, here’s what he actually is.
And he speaks with a weird little Irish brogue. Yeah. Okay. As soon as they introduce that character in my mind, I’m like, Oh, so he eventually will take over the cyborg man, do something bad and kill people using the cyborg man, framing the cyborg man to make it like you could see the dots that they were laying out for themselves from the very beginning because they had the silly exposition moment of like, let’s all stand around in a circle, introduce ourselves, and then everybody strikes a superhero pose and talks about themselves.
Sam Richardson, I felt like was completely wasted. He had no character. I couldn’t tell what they were saying his big component in this was supposed to be. Was he supposed to be like, he’s kind of a genius. He’s kind of a three dimensional chess mastermind. When did he do anything that was of that vein?
Yep. Not a once. I didn’t see anything that made me think like, Oh, there’s his three dimensional chess aspect. He seemed to just be nervous. And a shape shifter. They didn’t really use the shape shifting very much. They relied on the nervousness and didn’t even demonstrate what his core competency was supposed to be.
He’s kind of a genius. And he’s sitting there flying a ship that he’s never flown before. That’s supposed to be the big takeaway. Excuse me. We’ve seen that in practically every episode of Star Trek, somebody jumps onto an alien ship and goes, well, I’m not super familiar with these controls, but I bet this takes us to warp and then it’s, it’s something we’ve seen so many times.
We’ve seen Spock do it. We’ve seen Scotty do it. We see Captain Kirk do it. We see Geordi do it. We see Data do it almost like at will. And then we’re supposed to be impressed by a guy whose key point seems to be that he read some sort of self self help motivational book. And he seems to be talking to himself.
Like he’s trying to gear himself up to be the person he wants to be. And I’m like, this is not, this is not a character. This is. It just didn’t give him anything to do. And I said before, I like him. I liked, you can see all of the actors trying to do things with these things. And that’s why we’re not giving enough core.
That’s why I brought up oceans 11. It’s like these characters, if you’d made this more of a stylized action film where you’re not necessarily in a room, in a circle, telling each other their stories, but you still have that moment of like, you know, like, you know, freeze frame on the person. Like, why are they here?
And give the quick assessment as to why they’re there. You can still do stuff like that. Have fun with it. Make that part of the style of the entire thing you’re watching, but they didn’t even do that. So for me, I agree with you. It’s like, these characters are very one dimensional. It’s. They’re cut from the cloth of everything we’ve seen before it feels like it was a conference room where they had index cards of Like Star Trek like us like a Star Trek Mad Libs of like yeah plug and play.
Let’s put this in a different order Yeah, there’s our story and it’s like but yeah name a planet it makes no sense a neuroses and a gender and it was just like Yeah. Like, okay, we’ll have like a couple of people from, you know, these, like, we’ve never done anything with a changeling really. We’ve never done anything with a full cyborg.
We’ve never done anything like you don’t need to, you don’t need to, like I would have, I had problems. Yeah, I don’t know about you, but let’s talk about section 31 itself. My understanding of section 31 is, it’s part of Starfleet. Yes. Am I wrong? No. Then why do they talk about themselves as not being part of Starfleet?
Because they, guess what? You are part of Starfleet. Section 31 is part of Starfleet. And they’re talking about this, here’s somebody from Starfleet to keep tabs on us. What do you mean? You’re all part of Starfleet. I was like getting so frustrated with that. I was like, has nobody who, who wrote this movie.
Had nobody ever watched anything which starred section 31 in any of the shows ever because I’d be willing to bet yes. I just I was shocked at that that it’s like you all are part of Starfleet And yes, you’re working in the gray area and on the fringes, but you’re part of Starfleet so stop saying you’re not and stop acting like she’s your keeper because That what I would have, I would have preferred to go back to like the whole exposition introduction of characters.
I would have preferred this if they, if they were going to do the character study that I pitched earlier in this conversation. Yeah. You could still have some ocean 11s in it by having, let’s say. Uh, the augmented human shows up at the, at the space station where she’s running the casino. Don’t make it about like sneaking in, don’t make it about getting her, make it just like he approaches her and they know each other and he’s like, we need you for a job.
And she’s like, I told you I would only work for you under certain circumstances. And he’s like, these are those circumstances. And he’s like, you get to pick the team. We’ll work with whoever you want. And then he lays out a dossier in front of her and she selects people based on like, I like this person because of this, I like this person because of this and I need this person because of this.
So she picks the people and then the adventure starts. You could still have somebody be a mole. So now it’s questioning her ability to, uh, did I, have I made too many mistakes? Have I lost my edge? Am I no longer able to read people the way I want to? And you could have, as soon as she is in touch with the target, which is the prime version of her mirror universe boyfriend.
As soon as she meets him, she turns to the guy who brought her in and it’s just like, how dare you do this? I shared details about that guy in my past with you on a personal level, not a professional one. You’ve blurred a line. I no longer trust you. You could have had that be The through line, building tension between the group.
These should all be people she’s known at some point in the past and has pulled them in because she believes she can trust them. And then she starts not trusting them and it bleeds into the rest of the group. And then she has to kind of reassert, like, who do I trust and why do I trust? You could have done all of those things and made a more compelling story.
I agree with you. It feels like they didn’t know what section 31 was. And I mentioned at the beginning that we would talk about Jamie Lee Curtis and this, oh boy, did that stick out like a weird, like we just made a movie together and it won a bunch of awards. So let’s throw you in here. Cause won’t that be fun?
Cause we’re friends. Yeah. And it was just the most awkward. It was one of those things I went back to after Chris Cornell made an album with Timbaland, Trent Reznor said, have you ever had a friend do something that’s so embarrassing you feel embarrassed?
I found myself thinking about that quote. And I was just like, Oh my God, Jamie Lee Curtis, it just comes across as she’d read the lines once gave them two or three takes and that was it. And she’s wearing, it looks like seven of nine stuff on her head. And it’s just like, like, what are they saying? And what are they presenting?
And why is this here? And so clearly a join the adventures next time. And at that moment. Yeah. It was scenes like that that I felt Michelle Yeoh’s performance drop. There were certain scenes where it was like, holy cow, is she phoning it in right now? You could tell when she cared about the material and you could tell when she didn’t.
I was just like, those scenes were just like, but we’re having fun anyway. Yuck, yuck, yuck. And like, no, the characters on the screen shouldn’t be having more fun than the character than the people sitting in the audience.
No, that should never happen and it definitely happened right there at that end. It did.
So viewers, listeners, uh, please accept our apologies for subjecting you to this one. We really do apologize, but it also, I don’t know. There is a certain aspect to kind of like something like this that you watch and then you pick it apart. There’s a kind of joy in that. So did you join us in the joy of that?
Let us know in the comments. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s, uh, we look forward to hearing what you have to think about this. And what you thought about our conversation and as always, next time, we’ll be jumping back into the main flow of the timeline that we’re following, which is who mourns for Adonis from the original series, season two, please jump to the comments, wrong answers only what do you think that one is going to be about? And Matt, before we leave, anything you’d like to share with our viewers and listeners about what you have coming up on your main channel? I have a bunch of videos coming up on, I know people are getting batteried out, but there’s a couple more videos about batteries coming up, which I’m sorry about assault and battery, Sean, but there’s another one that I find really interesting.
It’s going to be coming up pretty soon on why we’re reopening old nuclear power plants, like three mile Island, which, you know, Sean, oh boy, you and I have a, a little bit of a history with that one. Cause our, we used to see it every time we visited our grandmother. So, yes, um, that, that video, I think is gonna be really interesting.
As for me, if you’re interested in finding out more about my books, please check out seanferrell. com or you can go to wherever it is you buy your books, which includes everything from Amazon down to your local bookstore or public library. My books are available everywhere and I hope you’ll be interested in checking them out.
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It allows you to throw coins at our heads. We appreciate the welts. And then we get down to the heavy, heavy business of talking about badly going where no man has gone before. Thank you so much, everybody for taking the time to watch or listen. We’ll talk to you next time.