Deep Space Nine understood the spy fantasy and its reality

In a little less than a week, the next one Star Trek project arrives in the form of Section 31a streaming film that sees Michelle Yeoh diving into the titular black ops organization — one that, at least in all the footage we’ve seen so far, emphasizes the glitz and glam of the secret agent work. There is action, there are dazzling costumesThere is also, perhaps most surprisingly in the context of everything, the direct supervision of the Federation, like a colleague with a stick in his ass who is there to prevent you from having fun.

It is not surprising then that some Star Trek fans are worried about what Section 31 he really thinks his namesake is — and maybe even a few of his stars are worried about it. “I’m scared of how it’s going to be received, because it’s not Trek people want it. U Trek that people want, the Trek that we all want, it is only 1,000 episodes more than TNG,” Rob Kazinsky, who plays the cybernetically enhanced Zeph in the film, said recently. SFX Magazine. “Everyone is still furious that they don’t get any more TNGwhile at time, when TNG came out, everyone hated him. Then this comes and it doesn’t feel like any Trek that they have ever seen.”

But when it comes to the Star Trek that people want-especially a Star Trek grappling with the idea of ​​​​Section 31 as its primary focus-perhaps The Next Generation should not be the example we want. To get a real perspective The role of section 31 in Star Trekand its paradoxical existence as the “necessary evil” which destroy his utopiawe just have to look back at the show that gave us in the first place: Deep Space Nine. In particular, in the installation before that introduction, DS9 had taken us and Dr. Julian Bashir, the character who took the momentum of his arc with Section 31, on another journey in “Our Man Bashir.” Is it a James Bond pills which puts Bashir at the center of a glitzy, glamorous and kitschy love letter to classic spy-fi.

In “Our Man Bashir”, the spy is sexy, stylish and full of action. Bashir becomes the cheeky hero of his holosuite program – there are beautiful retro costumes, casino and glamor, clear villains with comical and disgusting plots to take over the world. Even with Garak – a real ex-spy, the one that Bashir has always been obsessed with uncovering the secrets of – tagging along on Bashir’s adventure to playfully remind himself how different he is from being a real spy, it’s an episode that celebrates atonement cinema as we know and love it. Even with the dramatic problems they play with (it’s a classic Trek trope, the holodeck-gone-wrong scenario with a “die in the game, die in real life” element to boot), it’s an episode that almost claims Bashir’s romanticized dream of being a spy entirely, even when he is forced to save. the actual day losing his fancy.

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 that plunges the galaxy into chaos with the outbreak of the Dominion War. At this point, the show had already done a lot to delve into the harsh reality of what Captain Sisko was up to once described earlier in DS9The mandate of his post is easy to “be a saint in paradise”, examining how Starfleet and the Federation in general have responded when confronted with interstellar conflict on an unprecedented scale. If “Our Man Bashir” had treated Garak’s side shots about the reality of spy work as a joke for Bashir to ignore, “Inquisition” makes him push his text: from the beginning, the Section 31 is presented as an antithesis of everything Bashir and the rest DS9the equipment crew holds dear.

The work that Agent Sloane does, even just to the extent of what he goes through just trying to recruit Bashir, is invasive and unglamorous. Sloane himself, the embodiment of Section 31 as we know it, is annoying with a sense of paranoia that cuts against everything we expect from a Starfleet officer, black operations or otherwise. Bashir is not thrilled to discover that Section 31 exists, but is frankly horrified – and his immediate response, like the rest of the crew, is to try to destroy it entirely, either by bringing it to light, or as Sisko ultimately suggests. he at the end of the episode, to work to undermine from the inside. In the course of the remaining appearances of Section 31 as a whole DS9– the direct follow-up to “Inquisition”, “Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges”, which sours Bashir and the show in general on Section 31 even more, and the trippier “Extreme Measures” – the argument Sloane presents of the organization as a necessary. evil is never considered a viable conclusion by the show or our protagonists. However, Section 31 becomes as antagonistic in its aspect as the Dominion itself, an existential threat to the very moral fiber of Star Trek.

This is no longer said perhaps not in the episodes of Section 31 following, but in the episode that is broadcast 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 spy on the Federation, “In the Pale Moonlight” is about the very act of espionage itself – the dampness, the conspiracy, the subterfuge that is inherent in its sad reality. Again, this is nothing like 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 always shown to us as repulsive, not only for the acts carried out with him , but for morale. decay that work acts on Sisko and on Star Trek himself The ultimate horror of “In the Pale Moonlight” is not that Sisko happened to an assassination that leads the Romulans to war against the Dominion, guaranteeing the death of millions more as the salary in the name of saving billions more since the war. The potential defeat of the Federation. It is that, as he says grimly to the camera that records the personal log that he knows is about to delete, he can live with the cost that he has on his soul. The episode ends with the formal declaration of war of the Romulans on the Dominion, which is what Sisko wanted, but he never considers this a victory in the narrative: there is no good ending to the real reality of the ‘spying out of the fantasy of a holoprogram. .

Deep Space Nine He could have launched the bomb in the first place, giving Section 31 the existence, but he understood the danger of wielding such a weapon in the first place, because he has already arranged for his audience and his characters that the fantasy of a top-secret spy organization in Star TrekThe universe was nothing more than this, and that its reality was something far, much more ugly to understand. If the Section 31 The film wants to avoid this fear of being seen as not being the Trek that people want, then he has to understand this too. Otherwise, unlike Sisko, he cannot learn to live with the presentation of an inactive fantasy, and nothing else.

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