Section 31 Ret

This publication contains Spoilers For “Star Trek: Section 31”.

There is a trend between television and cinema fans, or among consumers of any type of pop culture, in reality, to put aside the representations of the past defining them as “of their time” or as something that “could not be do today. ” It is one of the most insidious habits that we have as spectators and, usually, it is completely incorrect. Marginalized people have been fighting to be accurately represented on the screen since visual media exist. The situation comedy of the 70s, led by fans, “all in the family” was considered a poison for networks before becoming a success, lesbian readers already were. Fed up with the sad gay love stories of the 50sAnd the famous Racist film of Disney “Song of the South” was controversial even before its launch in 1946.

It is easy to fall into the trap of assuming that the story was somehow more one -dimensional, hateful or backward by default of what it is today, and that trap can lead us to give credit to who is not exactly due. Case in question: When I was a teenager, I thought that the episode of Season 3 of “Star Trek: The Original Series”, “Let that Be Your Last Battlefield”, which is related to the new “Star Trek” movie, ” Section 31 “, in an unexpected way (more about this later), it was a really good Racism metaphor. Of course, its visual representation of the social constructions of the race (people with half white faces, half black fighting against people with almost indistinguishable faces half black, half white) was a bit hard, but I found that the central point of Gene Roddenberry message, about the power of intolerance to destroy society, important. Surely it was when he first came out, right?

Not quite. The original “Star Trek” series was infinitely innovative in almost all the senses, even in its representations of racial diversity. After all, it was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who convinced Nichelle Nichols not to leave the program between seasons. But despite my mistaken epiphany of eighth grade that this shameless episode could change hearts and minds, “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” has always been considered obvious and too simplified, if not completely offensive, for some. After all, he came to light in 1969, when the black Americans had been leading the movement for civil rights for years. At that time, the United States did not need checkered facial paint to know what was wrong. The episode also revolves around several false equivalences that serve for conversations of “both parties” about racism, with the Enterprise team, more holy than you and apparently free of intolerance, considering the Liberator of Slaves Lokai (Lou Antonio) a Man of “extreme views” simply as the old oppressor Bele (Frank Gorshin).

The episode is, frankly an ideological disaster. The novelist J. Neil Schulman wrote in his book “Silver profile” that Harlan Ellison, who wrote one of the best episodes of “Star Trek” of all time, “hated that episode.” In the 1995 book by John Tullock and Henry Jenkins “Science fiction audience” The authors list “Let that Be Your Last Battlefield” as one of the few episodes of coughs that “are often considered among the worst moments of the series”, representative of the “most generic elements” of the franchise and “that show their ideology”. in its crudest form. “The bicolor makeup of the central characters has even been compared to BlackFace. The racial allegory in the center of the episode was so clumsy and imperfect that the central species of the episode, the Cherons, never reappeared on the screen after 1969.

Until now.

Let’s leave a clear thing immediately: the new movie “Star Trek: Section 31”, the first feature film of “Star Trek” of the Paramount+era, does not “solve racism” or try to do it. This striking, dumb and fast pace is inspired both in Guy Ritchie’s films, “Ocean’s Eleven” and DC Comics and in the Optimistic and Honical Badge series of Roddenberry. There is no great metaphor or a broader panorama. However, it does include Cheron’s first character that fans have seen in more than 50 years (with the exception of a bottom joke that flashes and you will lose it in “Star Trek: Lower Decks”). His name is virgil and are clearly a diva that steals scenes.

Virgil appears just at the moment when the spectators will begin to realize that “section 31” is much more camp than they expected and that it has a sense of humor, extravagance and ease that fans staunch of “trek” will worship or ( Maybe more likely) hate. The character appears in a scene at the beginning of the film, when we see what the Mirror Universe version of the “Star Trek: Discovery”, Philippa Georgiou has been doing, in the years elapsed since the movie prologue showed it killing his family and mutilating her. love. Actor Augusto Bitter, whose previous credits include the movie “White Muscle Daddy”, the horror series “Ezra” and the short film “Chicho”, plays Virgil.

We do not learn practically anything about Virgil in this film, but somehow they manage to cause a strong impression. The title of his work is never revealed, but it is clear that they work as a kind of bar presenter, a right -handed right of Philippa, whose makeup and costumes in this scene reveal that we must now see it as a bad style. Not a tyrannical ruler. We immediately encode Virgil as a kind of eccentric lacke Talent for drama.

Virgil is dressed in shiny and jewelry, but they are still clearly a Cheron, a fact that is never addressed, and may not be much at this time and in this area of ​​the galaxy. It is a refreshing contrast with the episode of the original series, in which Dr. McCoy of Deforest Kelley declares that the Cerons are an inexplicable mutation and says in a quite revealing way that if he had his biological abilities, it would be one of the most powerful specimens that exist. The involvement here, of course, is that Cherons can never reach their maximum potential as a white male human would do due to their physical difference at the superficial level.

Because relatively inconsequential that it is the presence of the character in the scheme of things, it is nice to see Cheron’s native in “section 31” released from the limitations of a fairly binary and basic metaphor of half a century old. Instead, Virgil receives the gift of being fair. Some personliving his best life in a bar of bad death and seeing a good time doing it. The era “Trek” of Paramount+ has not been perfect, but has done a great job by rehabilitating some of the species that appear in previous “Star Trek” programs that received the worst part during their first contact missions. The Cherron were among the least considered; Despite their poetically tragic conclusion of “cough”, spectators are told very little about them, apart from their hatred for those who do not coincide with their appearance.

Now we know that the forgotten species is composed of something more than the sum of its conflicts, and perhaps that additional layer offers a little redemption for an original episode of the original series. After all, if they can be evil and original bounces with a twisted sense of humor, the Cherron can be anything. Simply, you know, not if everyone is condemned to kill each other for a painfully orderly lesson on tolerance.

“Star Trek: Section 31” is now transmitted in Paramount+.