Philippa Georgiou is back for Star Trek: Section 31, an original movie event starring Michelle Yeoh who reprises her role of Emperor Philippa Georgiou (a character she played in Star Trek: Discovery’s first season) who joins a secret division of Starfleet. Tasked with protecting the United Federation of Planets, she also must face the sins of her past alongside a rag-tag crew of specialists.
That crew includes Zeph (played by Robert Kazinsky) – a part-mechanoid cheeky charmer whose loyalties you’re never really sure of. We sat down with Kazinsky, to talk about how cool he looks in his mech suit, why he believes Section 31 needs to exist and just how important Star Trek is to him.
You said at New York Comic Con last year that as a Trek fan, you initially didn’t like the idea of Section 31 because Star Trek is set in a universe that has transcended beyond the need for a dark specialist operative but that this film actually switches that and shows the need to have both. Could you expand on that?
Well, the Federation is a utopian idea. That’s the appealing part of it; the idea that we’ve evolved past classes, racism, capitalism. That we’ve evolved to a place where none of this matters anymore, and we are great, and that’s all fantastic. And what a great utopian society.
However, that utopian society is surrounded by societies that don’t have the same moral purviews as we do. They don’t have the same moral imperatives. The Romulans don’t stand by that, the Klingons don’t live by that, the Dominions certainly don’t live by that. The Founders don’t live by that. There are so many antagonistic enemies out in our universe that would love to destroy the Federation way of life, and on those frontiers, a naive populous, which is essentially what the Federation would have become by that point, wouldn’t be able to combat the machinations of a Romulan Empire, which is incredibly good at those kinds of things.
So to keep that utopian society, to keep the Federation functioning, to keep that place where you can, as Sisko says, ‘be a saint in paradise’, you need somebody who understands what’s required to keep those people safe.
Now, where that gets interesting for me, and why I think Section 31 is such an interesting thing, is the whole NSA conversation. How much observation is too much? How much should we allow them into our lives? Section 31 should exist. It has to exist in order to combat those entities that would love to destroy the Federation. But when it starts combating the Federation itself, when it starts overstepping its remit to protect and instead tries to control the Federation. That’s when I think you end up with really interesting stories…
How does this movie then differentiate itself from the Star Trek movies or shows that we’ve seen before it?
It’s completely different. It’s not like any Star Trek you’ve ever seen. It’s a completely different flavor and a completely different taste. I like that because I was expecting it to be William Sadler black suits and kind of like a Manchurian Candidate, a dark twisty movie, and it’s just a fun fucking nightmare of people smashing into each other and breaking things up. I love that because it’s kind of Mission Impossible-esque.
It’s a combination of Mission Impossible, Guardians of the Galaxy and Suicide Squad all rolled into one in the Federation. I don’t think there is anything other than maybe Lower Decks that takes itself as tongue-in-cheek as we do, whilst at the same time, trying to have a moral message.
What makes Star Trek so great was there was never an episodic story, a season-long storyline. You can drop into any episode of any season, and you get an hour of a moral story, something you can learn from. Discovery has a season arc. Strangely New Worlds has fallen more into that kind of episodic, traditional Star Trek way of telling things and I think we’re in that same bracket as well. If we do 10 of these movies, hopefully you’ll be able to watch any one of them and get those same moral stories and things like that. I think it’s half something you’ve never seen before, but also trying to do what they did so well before.
How does Section 31 being a movie rather than a show make it better?
I don’t think it is better as a movie rather than a TV show. I think it should be a TV show. That’s the truth of it. The problem is, this originally was a TV show, and they condensed it into a movie. I think they’ve done an incredible job, because they had to deal with COVID and a writers’ strike, and then it wasn’t going to happen at all. Then Michelle won an Oscar, and everybody was like, ‘wow, she’s not going to want to do it’. The first thing she did was win an Oscar and go ‘we’re doing Section 31’ and-none of this would have happened without Michelle sitting there and doing that, and having the power to do that, and Paramount going ‘yes, Michelle, whatever you want!’.
But I think that the real strength of this show will be that if it ever turns into a TV show, we can do hour-long episodes with these kinds of antics, and I think that would be the most amazing thing in the world.
As a movie, it will work really well if we keep the cast together, and we do all these kinds of things. I think that’s fantastic. But my personal dream is I’ve always wanted to be on a Star Trek TV show like TNG. If I could get on a TNG, ahhhhh, like seven seasons of just joy. Yes, let’s go!
Would you like to see Zeph in The Next Generation?
I don’t know if I would want Zeph to be in TNG. That would really change the tone of the show. But if I could be in TNG… TNG is formative for me. It’s one of the most important shows, most important pieces of media, that’s ever existed for me. If I could be in TNG? Oh, come on, that would be a dream come true. But let’s have me in there, not me in the suit. I think that would not quite fit in, and I don’t know what would happen if Zeph ever met the Borg. That would be a whole….. are you one of us? You will be assimilated. Have you already been assimilated? I can’t quite tell haha!
Talking of that suit, how was it to wear it?
Just straight hell! It weighed about 50 pounds in the mornings, and about 65 pounds by the end of the day thanks to the sweat!
There was only one suit, and we shot for five months, and it never got washed. It has lots of working lights and batteries, which means I’m carrying around battery packs all day, which are quite hot and bulky and stick into your spine. It worked maybe 20% of the time haah.
However, having said all of that, it looked awesome. It’s awesome on screen, and I look really cool in it!
What do you think it is about Star Trek that has kept audiences hooked for generations?
I think we are living in a post-truth society at the minute. I think that truth is no longer a thing that you can hold on to. Truth has become whoever says something the loudest, or whoever says it first. News organisations are rushing to put out stories before they check them, just so that they can get ahead of Twitter, and that whole concept of a lie can run around the world before the truth has got its boots on. We don’t know who to trust. AI is out there creating images that are indistinguishable from reality.
The people that we’re relying on are Elon Musk to tell us what’s going on in the world, and who’s controlling politics on both sides of the Atlantic. We’re in a society where our systems have failed us. Capitalism is eating us alive, and global warming is about to kill us all.
Then you have Star Trek, which presents a world where we are past this point, where none of these things are true anymore, when none of it matters, where truth is king. As Picard says to Wesley Crusher in one of my favourite episodes (well, it’s a good episode): the first duty of every Starfleet Cadet is to the truth. Whether that is scientific truth, historical truth or personal truth. It is the guiding precept upon which the foundation is founded.
Now, if with all that’s going on in our world, you don’t feel comfort and hope in the idea that that can be true again, then you’re probably one of the people benefiting from the chaos right now.
I just think that Star Trek presents us with the idea of ‘this too shall pass’. One day we will be okay and that for me, especially as an autistic person who has anxiety disorders, I find Star Trek to be the most comforting, weighted blanket that I’ve ever put around myself.
Section 31 is out now on Paramount+