Deep Space Nine Understands The Spy’s Dream—And Its Reality
In less than a week, the next one Star Trek the project comes in the form of Section 31streaming film featuring Michelle Yeoh diving into a black ops organization—that, at least out of all the footage we’ve seen so far, underscores the glitz and glamor of a secret agent’s job. There’s action, there’s flashy costumes, there’s even, perhaps most surprising of all, the direct direction of the Federation, like a co-worker with a stick up his ass who’s come to stop you from having fun.
It is not surprising that others Star Trek What are the fans worried about? Section 31 it thinks it really is—and maybe a few of its stars are worried about that. “I am afraid of how it will be received, because it is not A journey people want. I A journey that people want, the A journey all we want is 1,000 more episodes TNG,” Rob Kazinsky, who plays the cyber-enhanced Zeph in the film, recently told SFX Magazine. “Everyone is always angry that they don’t get more TNGand at the same time, when TNG he came out, everyone hated him. So this will come and it won’t be heard A journey they have ever seen.”
But when it comes to Star Trek what people want—especially a Star Trek dealing with the idea of Section 31 as its main focus—perhaps The Next Generation it should not be the model we turn to. For a real perspective on the role of Section 31 Star Trekand its paradoxical existence as a “necessary evil” that destroys its status, we only need to look back at the show that gave it to us in the first place: Deep Space Nine. Importantly, in setting before that introduction, DS9 He dismissed us and Dr. Julian Bashir, a character who takes his journey through Chapter 31, on another journey in “Our Man Bashir.” It is a James Bond a pastiche that places Bashir at the center of a glossy, charming, and all-encompassing love letter to a classic spy.
In “Our Man Bashir”, espionage is captivating, beautiful, and action-packed. Bashir becomes an unabashed hero in his holosuite program—there are beautiful retro clothes, casinos and glamour, evil people with evil plans to rule the world. Even Garak—a former real spy, who Bashir is always busy with revealing his secrets—tags along on Bashir’s journey to playfully remind him how unlike real espionage this is, an episode celebrating cinematic espionage as we know it again. i like it. Even the amazing odds he plays with (classic A journey trope, a holodeck-gone-scenario gone wrong with a “die in the game, die in real life” aspect to boot), an episode that almost confirms Bashir’s romantic fantasy of what it’s like to be a full-fledged spy, even as he’s forced to save. a real day by losing his fantasy.
After two months, DS9 introduced Chapter 31 in its sixth season’s “Inquisition,” in which Bashir is targeted by the organization as a potential recruit at the height of its story that plunges the galaxy into chaos with the outbreak of the Empire War. At this point, the show had already done a lot to get into the harsh reality of what Captain Sisko had explained earlier in the game. DS9A time when it’s easy to “become a saint in paradise,” it examines how Starfleet and the Federation at large respond when faced with interstellar conflict on an unprecedented scale. If “Our Bashir” treated Garak’s side-jabs about the reality of intelligence work as a joke for Bashir to ignore, “The Inquisition” makes them the centerpiece of its script: from then on, Section 31 is presented as a counterpoint to all Bashir and more DS9The team held up well.
The work that Agent Sloane does, even more than what he goes through just to try to recruit Bashir, is offensive and unglamorous. Sloane himself, the epitome of Section 31 as we know it, is burdened with a sense of confusion that cuts across anything we would expect from a Starfleet officer, black ops or otherwise. Bashir isn’t happy to find out that Section 31 exists, but he’s terrified—and his immediate response, like the rest of the crew, is to try to destroy it completely, either by bringing it to light or, as Sisko finally suggests. with him at the end of the episode, to work to undermine us from within. During the rest of the appearance of Section 31 on the other side DS9—a direct follow-up to “Inquisition,” “Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges,” bitter Bashir and the show in general in Section 31 even more, and the trippier “Extreme Measures”—the argument that Sloane presents the organization as necessary. evil is not considered a viable end either for the game or our characters. If anything, Section 31 becomes as antagonistic in its appearance as the Dominion itself is, an existential threat to all moral power. Star Trek.
This tells us perhaps not in the follow-up episodes of Episode 31, but in the episode that aired directly after its launch: the episode “In the Pale Moonlight”, creates a one-two killer. If “The Inquisition” introduced the concept of legal espionage within the Federation, “In the Pale Moonlight” is about the act of espionage itself – the wetworks, the conspiracies, the intrigues that accompany its painful reality. Again, this is not at all romantic DS9 had a type in “Our Man Bashir,” the road to hell that Captain Sisko goes down with Garak in “In the Pale Moonlight” is shown to us as disgusting, not only in actions taken, but in behavior. decay that work is working on Sisko and so on Star Trek itself. The biggest horror of “In the Pale Moonlight” is not that Sisko is part of the killing that brings the Romulans into the war against the Dominion, ensuring the death of millions more as he leads in the name of saving billions more The possible defeat of the Federation. That, as he says wistfully on camera recording a personal log that he knows he will delete, he can live with the cost to his soul. The episode ends with the Romulans’ official declaration of war on the Dominion, which is what Sisko wanted, but he never considered this a victory within the narrative: there is no good conclusion to the true reality of espionage without the fiction of the holoprogram. .
Deep Space Nine may have dropped the bomb in the first place by giving us the existence of Section 31, but it understood the danger of using such a weapon in the first place—because it had already been imposed on its audience and its characters alike that the dream of a top secret spy agency in Star TrekThe universe was nothing but that, and its reality was something far away, too difficult to understand. If i Section 31 the film seeks to avoid this fear of being seen as something it is not A journey what people want, so you should understand this too. Otherwise, unlike Sisko, it will not be able to learn to live and present an empty myth, and nothing else.
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