Jamie Lee Curtis Cameo from Section 31, Explained

This publication contains spoiler for “Star Trek: Section 31.”

The Renaissance of Jamie Lee Curtis continues. After winning an Oscar for his role in “Everything Everywhere at Once” and concluding the new “Halloween” trilogy, Curtis has used his renewed status in surprising and largely delightful ways. She’s back in the spotlight for her work on “The Last Showgirl” in 2024, but Curtis has also become a certifiable cameo queen. Her surprise appearance in Season 2 of “The Bear,” where she played Berzatto’s unstable matriarch Donna, won her an Emmy, and she also voiced a Cardi B and made up music video in 2023. Now, she’s back in an unannounced role again. – And this time, she’s making her “Star Trek” debut.

To catch Curtis in full exasperated space boss mode, you’ll need to tune in to “Star Trek: Section 31,” the first feature film of Gene Roddenberry’s upbeat, spacey Paramount+ era series. “Section 31” is definitely not the best Trek movie out there: it’s fun, but slight and derivative, and was originally intended to be a TV series, so it has the fast pacing of a story that was applied to a race. much shorter time. Still, the new film features a lot of interesting and crazy characters, and its final scene makes it clear that it’s meant to start a new story involving the Section 31 crew.

How do we know? Well, the hologram of Jamie Lee Curtis told us.

Curtis plays a character known only as “Control,” whose voice we hear during an early exposition montage before he finally appears at the end of the film in the form of a hologram message. Control is clearly a higher-up group in Section 31, the shadowy (and shady) intelligence group that operates outside the typical moral and legal boundaries of Starfleet and the United Federation of Planets. The group does the dirty work that Starfleet does too much by the book, and has offered an interesting and realistic wrinkle in Roddenberry’s utopian vision of the franchise’s core organization since they were first introduced in 1998.

We still don’t know much about Control, but it’s clear that she’s willing to sidestep deals and order assassinations, as she does after the film’s cold open, establishes Philippa Georgiou (Curtis’ “All at Once,” co-star Michelle ” Yeoh) as a dictatorial ruler. She also loves to deliver one-liners (“this dog bite,” she says of Philippa), and is too important, or incomplete, to appear in person to deliver mission details to the team. Most intriguing of all, He appears to have pieces of metal on the side of his face, which could indicate that he is a former Borg drone like Jeri Ryan’s Seven of Nine.

Judging by his brief, virtual appearances on “Section 31,” it’s clear that Curtis is keeping to himself and busy. Still, the end of the film seems quite deliberately open-ended, as it cuts to the credits just after Control assigns the team (including Philippa) a new mission involving the planet Turkana IV. Fans of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” may remember Turkana IV as a brutal, dystopian place where the Earthlings’ colonization attempts went drastically wrong. However, none of that is mentioned in “Section 31”, leaving fans to assume that we will finally get the end of this story, and that this first tear through space was just the beginning of a larger adventure in Section 31.

With that final tease in mind, it seems quite likely that Curtis will return for a Trek Future project, but it’s worth noting that as of mid-January 2024, no “section 31” projects have been announced yet, and he hasn’t commented on their role or their future within the franchise. Of course, a story focused on Section 31 has been in the works since the early days of “Star Trek: Discovery,” with the Trek team at Paramount clearly interested in the idea of ​​exploring the secret cell further. “Section 31” didn’t really do that, but it hints at the moral complexity of the hero-villain split in “Star Trek” in ways that would be interesting to explore in the future. While some of the team members are terrible people, others simply seem to be outcasts who found refuge outside the confines of the law. What space does Curtis’ control take up? We don’t know, but I hope time and a future Trek project will tell.

“Star Trek: Section 31” is now streaming on Paramount+.