Update: Where You Been?

 It's been a fun ol' year to say the least and has resulted in a significant drop in content.

Always good to be honest and there it is.

So, what has happened?

Well, if we go back to March 2023 I was part of a team that set up a new chapter of the UK's Starfleet International (SFI) Region 20 called the USS Mercia. Growing a lot faster than expected, we became quite an active chapter in our first year with regular online and in person meets in the Midlands and out as far as Market Rasen and down to Stafford. 

With a membership that covers both the UK and into Europe the team have been working super hard to ensure we offer the best. Some of our membership have even been involved with SFI at the regional and international level through different auxiliary units such as Sciences, Medical and Tactical.

Personally I've also been running the regional magazine called The Runabout for the last two years, producing 8 editions containing news, reviews, fun articles and fiction from around the UK and Ireland. It's taken a lot of spare Trek time up but it's been amazingly rewarding resulting in the team winning two awards last year at the International Conference for Best Newsletter and also Best Cover - truly a fantastic accolade for a brilliant group who have worked tirelessly to produce a top quality read each quarter!

The USS Mercia also won the International Shakedown Chapter of the Year award at the same conference which was a monumental result and reflected the efforts the team had put in over 2023/24 to go from a new group to fully commissioned.

2024 saw the Mercia run an hour live broadcast in November raising £730 for Breast Cancer Now as well as being the host chapter for the SFI stand at Blackpool's Destination event in July. If you were there, hello! If you didn't find us or know we were there, I understand why!!!!!

While I  stepped back from The Runabout in November I decided to stand for the role of Regional Coordinator for Region 20 and was elected to the position on January 1st this year. It's an incredible opportunity and one I truly relish. Of course, lots of thoughts and ideas are spinning around at the moment and I will officially take on the role from March 1st this year. 

So this site might see a bit of an evolution. I'll still try and keep up with reviews and opinions but I'm also going to use it to document my journey as RC for Region 20 - who knows what's coming? Well, in fairness we know Destination is on the way in August and there will be a Regional Summit in May so there's two things I'll absolutely be covering!!!!

For now, I hope you're all good and well out there and I look forward to updating you all very, very soon.

LLAP

Clive

Into the Trek Universe: Section 31

 

Where to start on this one.

Firstly, it's not as bad as the slew of reviews have made fans believe. It's (and I've said this a few times today) not as great as it could have been but by no means is it absolutely horrific.

Originally planned as a full series, Section 31 was retooled into a 95 minute made-for-streaming movie following COVID-19, the writers' strike and also Michelle Yeoh winning an Oscar.

Major factors indeed which have led to the first Trek movie since Star Trek Beyond and the first to premiere outside of a cinema. The world has indeed changed since Beyond and this is definitely a sign of how Star Trek is attempting to fit into this new age and find, probably, a new audience.

Let's be honest, Star Trek fans aren't the youngsters they once were. The franchise is on the cusp of its 60th birthday and the recent Prodigy proved to be a bigger hit with the existing fanbase than attracting a new and younger audience. Kurtzman and co are about to try again with their young adult show, Academy but I fear the same result again.

But to Section 31 and to term it quickly, it's a fairly run of the mill action flick that is set in the Star Trek universe. Returning Michelle Yeoh as Terran Emperor Phillipa Georgiou, she is teamed with a group of Section 31 agents sent to track down a typically dangerous weapon.

As it turns out, Georgiou is more than familiar with the weapon, named Godsend, since she ordered its creation in the Mirror Universe. How inconvenient to run into it again during Star Trek's Lost Era.

Add in a bit of Georgiou backstory as to how she became Emperor and you have a fairly briskly paced and explosive hour and half to settle in for. But that's really about it. Section 31 is OK at best and disappointing at worst. It's not that its bland but something here just doesn't quite work. The movie is certainly an attempt to tell a story outside of the "norms" of Star Trek's Starfleet crew and starship combo but the nuances and subterfuge that made Section 31 so interesting in DS9 and Enterprise are long gone. Their activities are about as subtle as using a sledgehammer to open an envelope and we've diverged into areas of high tech and gunslinging rather than the shadowy manipulation and dealings that made Sloan such a great foil for the DS9 crew. Tailored more for the Fast and Furious audience, Section 31 is short and snappy with little to think about beyond the superficial action and pedestrian plot. Don't expect lengthy debates on the morality of the universe or one to ones that build on relationships because this is a very disposable cast.

Comprising of an Augment, a mech-suited soldier, a badly accented Irish robot piloted by a nano-being, a Chameloid and a Deltan, it's the perfect mismatch team accompanied by Starfleet observer Lt Rachel Garrett. The potential is great but just when you feel like it's getting going or there's another chance for Michelle Yeoh to perform some of her trademark martial arts work, someone drops an attempt at a joke or there's a humorous twist on a moment which just rips the heart out of the story and believability. In respect to the characters themselves there's very little if any form of development for them and Garrett's turn from "stick up her ass" scientist to embracing chaos is limited and rushed in seconds when it happens. 

None of the characters are dislikeable but none of them are particularly memorable either, maybe with the exception of Garrett because we know the name. Indeed, if it wasn't for the fact that fans will know she becomes the captain of the ill-fated USS Enterprise-C, you'd never know what era of the Trek franchise this is set in. Garrett could be interchanged for any other Starfleet officer from any era and the story would still work. It's a terrible use of what should be an enthralling experience to see this time period but there's generic rock planet, space station with bar and dark ship interiors which give no real feel to the setting. 

That's really the problem here. It's just OK. The effects are OK, the ships are OK, the script is meh and the use of the Godsend is another "weapon-o-mass-destruction" that is a path so heavily trodden it's turned into a ditch. A shame in a big way and I did wonder how this would have played out over a full series as I can't imagine they wrote the whole thing off and started again. Maybe the characters would have received more time to flex their wings and allow us to care more about them and that's perhaps another fail here in that for the first time we have a brand new set of characters (bar two at a stretch) who are brought in for 95 minutes and that's it. Every Star Trek movie before this has utilised an existing set of characters and built on the audience's knowledge of them. Section 31 has not been afforded that luxury which means that you're only really invested in Georgiou to any degree but then Michelle Yeoh isn't given the greatest script to work with.

The door is left open for a sequel as you would expect but I can't see it getting a green light. I'm not even sure if it justifies a rewatch for a considerable time if ever and that's not something I wanted to say. Kudos though to Kurtzman and al for their balls to try something different which has definitely been a hallmark of their journey from Discovery's first episode to this moment. Each show has been different, each iteration has offered a new perspective and stretched the Star Trek franchise in new ways that the Berman era of the '80's and '90's never really dared to. That's one thing to applaud as they've never shied away from being unique. But Section 31 just doesn't seem to fit in aside from a vehicle to bring Michelle Yeoh back and round of Georgiou's story  bit more neatly than it was in Discovery. Maybe reaching too far outside the original vision of Star Trek has now been proven to be a move too much and that this isn't what fans signed up for.

The counter problem to that is, TV and film have moved on a lot since 1966, 1987 and even 2009. Production is a machine turning out content at an alarming rate and Kurtzman's factory has produced more Star Trek variants since 2017 than were made between 1966 and 2005. That's a frightening amount of diversity if not equalling the number of episodes across those original four decades.

As a diversion until Strange New Worlds' third season drops later this year, this will make do but I suspect it will be some time before another of these one-off movie projects drops given the reception to this entry to the franchise. 

How did it got for you? Is this the worst Trek ever or a sign of the franchise stretching its wings that little bit further into the universe rather than just Starfleet?

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