Back at San Diego Comic-Con, Paramount revealed our first look at the long-awaited Michelle Yeoh Star Trek: Discovery spinoff, Section 31. From the long road of a TV show in the earliest days of Trek‘s streaming expansion to now a streaming-exclusive movie headlined by an Oscar-winning actress, the footage was bound to make a splash either way.
Paramount didn’t feature a more extensive trailer for Section 31 at New York Comic Con during its Star Trek Universe panel that paints a clearer picture of just how Yeoh’s Discovery character—the former Emperor of the Terran Empire in the Mirror Universe turned kind of good, Phillipa Georgiou—finds herself wrapped up in a very interesting time for a very interesting pocket of Starfleet in the secret police division, Section 31. Instead, it offered a release date of January 24, 2025, and a snazzy new poster, which you can see below.
The first trailer features a surprising bit of glitz and glamour for a movie that is about an organization with a controversial and grim history in Star Trek lore, the black ops division operating in shadow to compromise its own morals for the sake of safeguarding the lofty ones held by the Federation at large. In the film, Georgiou acts as a bit of a chaos agent to the otherwise more self-serious espionage at play, particularly since she’s also got a ragtag team behind her.
Of those fresh faces, the big draw will be a new face playing a familiar one: Kacey Rohl as a young Rachel Garrett, the captain of the Enterprise-C introduced in the TNG episode “Yesterday’s Enterprise.” That not gives legacy Trek fans a bit of canonical intrigue, it also firmly places Section 31 at a point in time that’s not only wild to get Georgiou in (even as she’s pinged about from the time of classic Star Trek all the way to Discovery‘s far future in the 31st century), but one the franchise has rarely explored in detail, a nascent era between the events of the original series and The Next Generation.
We’ll see just what threats to the Federation necessitate bringing Section 31 in—and bringing a wild card like Georgiou in, too—when Star Trek: Section 31 hits Paramount+ on Friday, January 31, 2025.
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