Deep Space Nine Understood the Fantasy of Spies—and Their Reality

In just under a week, the next Star Trek project arrives in the form of Section 31, a streaming movie starring Michelle Yeoh diving into the titular black ops organization—one that, at least in all the footage we’ve seen so far, puts an emphasis on the glitz and glam of secret agent work. There’s action, there’s dazzling costumes, there’s even, perhaps most surprisingly in the context of it all, direct Federation oversight, like a co-worker with a stick up their ass who’s here to stop you from having fun.

It’s no wonder then that some Star Trek fans are concerned about just what Section 31 really thinks its namesake is—and perhaps even a few of its stars are concerned about that. “I’m terrified of how it’s going to be received, because it’s not the Trek people want. The Trek that people want, the Trek that we all want, is just 1,000 more episodes of TNG,” Rob Kazinsky, who plays the cybernetically enhanced Zeph in the film, recently told SFX Magazine. “Everyone’s always furious that they’re not getting more TNG, whilst at the same time, when TNG came out, everybody hated it. So this is going to come along and it’s not going to feel like any Trek that they’ve 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 shouldn’t be the example we turn to. To get a real perspective on Section 31’s role in Star Trek, and its paradoxical existence as the “necessary evil” that destroys its utopia, we need only look back at the show that gave it to us in the first place: Deep Space Nine. Crucially, in the set-up before that introduction, DS9 had whisked us and Dr. Julian Bashir, the character who takez on the thrust of its arc with Section 31, on another journey in “Our Man Bashir.” It’s a James Bond pastiche that put Bashir at the center of a glitzy, glamorous, and all-together kitschy love letter to classic spy-fi.

In “Our Man Bashir”, spycraft is sexy, elegant, and filled with action. Bashir gets to be the unabashed hero of his holosuite program—there’s gorgeous retro costumes, casinos and glamour, clear-cut villains with comically dastardly plots to take over the world. Even with Garak—an actual former spy, one that Bashir has always been obsessed with cracking the secrets of—tagging along in Bashir’s adventure to playfully remind him just how unlike actual spywork this all is, it’s an episode celebrating cinematic spycraft as we know and love it. Even with the dramatic quandaries that it plays 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 vindicates Bashir’s romanticized dream of what being a spy is entirely, even when he’s forced to save the actual day by losing at his fantasy.

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 thrusting the galaxy into chaos with the outbreak of the Dominion War. At this point, the show had already done much to penetrate the harsh reality of what Captain Sisko had once described early on in DS9‘s tenure of it being easy “to be a saint in paradise,” examining just how Starfleet and the Federation at large responded when confronted with interstellar conflict on an unprecedented scale. If “Our Man Bashir” had treated Garak’s side-jabs about the reality of spywork as a joke for Bashir to ignore, “Inquisition” makes them the thrust of its text: from the get-go, Section 31 is presented as an antithesis of everything Bashir and the rest of DS9‘s crew hold dear.

The work Agent Sloane does, even just to the extent of what he goes through just to try and recruit Bashir, is invasive and unglamorous. Sloane himself, the embodiment of Section 31 as we come to know it, is burdened with a sense of paranoia that cuts against anything we’d expect of a Starfleet official, black ops or otherwise. Bashir is not excited to discover Section 31 exists, but is downright horrified—and his immediate response, as is the rest of the crew’s, is to attempt to destroy it entirely, either through bringing it into the light or, as Sisko ultimately suggests to him at the end of the episode, to work on undermining it from within. Over the course of Section 31’s remaining appearances across DS9—the direct follow up to “Inquisition,” “Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges,” which sours Bashir and the show at large on Section 31 even further, and the trippier “Extreme Measures”—the argument Sloane presents of the organization as a necessary evil is never considered as a viable conclusion by either the show or our protagonists. If anything, Section 31 becomes as much as an antagonist in its appearance as the Dominion themselves are, an existential threat to the very moral fiber of Star Trek.

This is no more telling perhaps not in the follow up Section 31 episodes, but in the episode that aired 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 spycraft within the Federation, “In the Pale Moonlight” is about the very act of spycraft itself—the wetworks, the conspiracy, the subterfuge that is inherent to its grim reality. Again, this is nothing like the 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 one constantly shown to us as repugnant, not just for the acts taken along it, but for the moral decay that work acts upon Sisko and on Star Trek itself. The ultimate horror of “In the Pale Moonlight” isn’t that Sisko is accessory to an assassination that brings the Romulans into the war against the Dominion, guaranteeing the deaths of millions more as it wages on in the name of saving billions more from the Federation’s potential defeat. It’s that, as he grimly says to camera recording the personal log he knows he’s about to delete, he can live with the cost that has on his soul. The episode ends with the Romulans’ formal declaration of war on the Dominion, which is what Sisko wanted, but it never considers that this is a victory within the narrative: there is no good ending to the actual reality of espionage outside of a holoprogram’s fantasy.

Deep Space Nine might have thrown the bomb in the first place by giving us the existence of Section 31, but it understood the danger of wielding such a weapon in the first place—because it already laid out to its audience and to its characters alike that the fantasy of a top-secret spy organization in Star Trek‘s universe was nothing more than that, and that its reality was something far, far uglier to comprehend. If the Section 31 movie wants to avoid this fear of being seen as not being the Trek that people want, then it has to understand this too. Otherwise, unlike Sisko, it cannot learn to live with presenting an idle fantasy, and nothing more.

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