I just watched “Section 31”
My first impulse is that it’s not the smartest thing coming or going.
The characters are written shallow and immature. That is, this thing reads as if a 20 something who hasn’t seen much wrote it.
There’s not a lot of meat on the bones here.
Olatunde Osunsanmi is a good Star Trek Director. He’s done Episodes of Discovery and Strange New Worlds.
Smarter ones.
He does a decent job of keeping things moving, it looks good.
The world-building is shallow and lackluster.
It bends over backwards to take Starfleet and the Federation off the hook for Section 31, without asking the next question.
The retrofitted Geogiou with more back story. The Terran Empire is broken and they break it worse and that’s fine. It long ago lost any value as social commentary anyway.
It goes from fight scene to fight scene - the characters don’t fight especially consistently within the natures of their characters, but we’re not supposed to notice that.
Look, I saw “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” I saw “Everything, Everywhere, All at Once” Michelle Yeoh can act. Throw her something other than an after-school-special bad-ass.
Hell, as a Georgiou who’s had too much character development to fit in the Empire, (Her last arc on Discovery) Yeoh had more, deeper, and more interesting stuff to do.
The rest of the cast is let down by generic characterization. None of them had much interesting to say about the characters, the game world, or what was actually happening.
This show was a “Meh” experience.
I have seen three episodes of “Skeleton Crew”, so far. It is, frankly, better written. It has more to say about its characters, its game world and what’s happening as we see the story unwind.
This one wanted to be “Star Trek’s Mission Impossible.”
It also wanted to be the pilot for a new show.
It doesn’t really make the cut, either way.
It didn’t sell me the next one.
Meh. C-. Its as good as any middling episode of Star Trek. But they spent too much money on it for that.
Was it studio and executive interference? Were they trying to use the feedback of focus groups as a cook book?
I don’t know. The production crew and cast got handed a dog of a script, and they did their best with it.
It asked no questions about the nature of S31, or the Federation, or how they relate to each other. It didn’t challenge anything about the game world or the characters. That sucked all the flavor out of it. It’s unsalted action pablum. Meh.