Michelle Yeoh’s New Star Trek Movie Is Bringing Back a Once-Used Alien
Michelle Yeoh's new standalone is full of deep cuts.
The next Star Trek movie — the standalone streaming film Section 31 — is full of Trekkie Easter eggs. Set in the 24th century, it features Michelle Yeoh’s time-traveling return from Discovery, in which she joins forces with a motley crew of secretive operatives to save the universe. At least two of these co-stars are also deep-cuts to Trek canon: future Enterprise captain Rachel Garrett (Kacey Rohl) and Quasi (Sam Richardson), a Chameloid, a shapeshifting species only seen in the film The Undiscovered Country. And now, in the newest full-blown trailer for Section 31, Trek has brought back a very famous alien race that previously had only been seen in one very famous episode.
Here’s why this Easter egg is surprising, and why the new trailer feels like a secret mission happening during some older Star Trek movies.
New Section 31 trailer
The newest trailer for Star Trek: Section 31 reveals much more about the basic plot than previous teases. Here, we see Philippa Georgiou running a kind of nightclub/space station, presumably in the early 24th century. Here, she’s recruited by Section 31 to stop some sort of galaxy-destroying threat that apparently originated in the Mirror Universe (which is where she’s originally from).
From there, the trailer teases an epic team-up that feels very much like Star Trek’s version of The Suicide Squad, complete with a stealth ship that seems to echo the designs of the Section 31 ships from Star Trek: Discovery. But right at the top of the trailer, when we’re told that somebody’s looking for Georgiou, we see an alien with a white/half-black face. And as fans know, we haven’t seen that kind of alien in a long time.
Return of the Cherons
The Cherons...survived?
Right at the start of the trailer, we see a new character — likely a minor player in the story— tell Georgiou that one of the customers wants to see her. This character is clearly black on one side of their face and white on the other. In the famous 1969 episode of The Original Series, “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” we met Bele (Frank Gorshin) and Lokai (Lou Antonio), two beings from the planet Cheron locked in a bitter racial struggle. Bele’s people openly discriminated against Lokai’s people because their faces are black on the left sides, while his are black on their right sides.
This somewhat on-the-nose metaphor for real-world racism later became one of the most famous episodes of TOS, simply because it typified a 1960s sci-fi story that tried to mock racism by pointing out its absurdity. The story came from Trek’s most famous producer, Gene L. Coon, who was credited for this story under the pen name “Lee Cronin,” while the actual teleplay was written by Oliver Crawford, who co-wrote a few other episodes of TOS including “The Galileo Seven” and “The Cloud Minders” — the latter of which came from a story outline from tribble-creator David Gerrold.
Canonically, “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” seemed to establish that Bele and Lokai were the last two members of the Charon species, destined to forever be at each other’s throats. And yet, with this cameo in Section 31, there seems to be hope that this species survived its horrible, and racist fate. Even in a dark and gritty Trek tale like Section 31, there seems to be some optimism for the future after all. When it comes to sticking hopeful themes into action-adventure stories, Star Trek, thankfully, just can’t help itself.
