Section 31 might have lit up last week upon hitting Paramount+ for… not exactly the right reasons, but the latest Star Trek film still has a few surprises up its spy-gear sleeves. Perhaps one of the most out there of them all came thanks to a suggestion from Michelle Yeoh herself.
Section 31 concludes with the surviving members of the team meeting up on the Baraam station three weeks after they’ve saved the prime universe from a Mirror Universe invasion, and with the offer for Georgiou to once again sign up with the black ops organization as part of Alok’s group. After she accepts, they all watch an incoming transmission for their next mission… which is when Jamie Lee Curtis fizzles into view, wearing a suitably Trek-y tech-faceplate and sighing exasperatedly at the ramshackle group formed in front of her.
Curtis plays “Control,” a name familiar to Discovery fans as the identity of the infamous AI villain of the show’s second season. There, Control was a program used by Section 31 to make operational decisions that eventually went rogue, threatening the entire galaxy unless the Discovery crew flung into the far future (with them along for the ride). Thankfully, Curtis doesn’t seem to be an evil AI, and Section 31 simply kept “Control” as the name for biological handlers—but the surprise came from Curtis herself showing up, rather than the utterance of Control as a title. And it’s all down to Michelle Yeoh that her Everything, Everywhere, All at Once co-star beamed into the Star Trek galaxy.
“Michelle and Jamie Lee are dear friends, and just adore each other,” Star Trek executive producer Alex Kurtzman explained to io9 at a recent press junket for the film. “The idea of who gets to play the character of Control [lead to] ‘You know, it’d be nice if it could be somebody, a fun cameo…’ and Michelle suggested, ‘What about Jamie Lee?’. You’re talking about one of the greatest actors in the world, and the second we asked her she said ‘I would do anything for Michelle.’”
It’s actually not the first time Curtis has had a brush with Trek-adjacency—her older sister, Kelly Curtis, appeared in Deep Space Nine‘s first season as Sarda, a dabo girl at Quark’s bar being harassed by her Ferengi employer. But her own time in Star Trek was similarly brief, with Curtis’ scene as Control being over and done in a handful of hours. “She just showed up and came in, did all of her stuff in I think less than two hours,” Kutzman continued. “Just laid it all out, gave us like, 16 different versions of every line, improvs a bunch of stuff, did the stuff that was on the page… [she] came in like an absolute murderer, killed it, walked out the door. We were just standing there with our jaws on the ground, she was so amazing.”
Star Trek: Section 31 is now streaming on Paramount+.
Additional reporting by Cheryl Eddy.
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