Seeking Star Trek’s soul — Section 31, Bomber Girl, and Constar: the Motion Picture

I come before you today to break a promise. When I started Fandom Underground a few years ago, I said that this series highlighting fan works would not compare these works to their professional counterpart or use the series as a diatribe on the state of modern media. I meant that when I said it, but the timing of Section 31’s release is too perfect and the film too pointless, torturous, and insulting to my intelligence for me to be able to keep that promise any longer. Shortly before the movie limped onto streaming, two fan works were released that are in every way its opposite. Bomber Girl and Constar: the Motion Picture are everything that Section 31 is not. Where one has the sleek but vapid production of Hollywood, the others are rough but earnest. Section 31 holds either apathy or derision for the legacy and philosophy of Star Trek, while the latter movies are remarkable productions made out of love, full of a sense of inspiration. Holding these films together, it’s impossible not to notice how different they are, and how this contrast should challenge our ideas of what makes a movie “good.”

I should take a moment and digest that statement a little more, especially as someone who’s written a several year long series defending the integrity of fan films. I talk at great length about their sincerity and charm, but an average audience member would be within their rights to cut to the chase and ask a simple question: yes, these things are made with the right attitude by people I personally respect, but that doesn’t address whether the films themselves are actually good movies. Are they? For some of them, unequivocally yes. Star Trek Continues, Justin Mane’s Crow, and Punisher Uprising are all successful filmmaking by traditional, formalistic metrics. Their writing, acting, directing, and shot composition all hold up and deserve recognition. They are made by professionals with professional quality delivery. Gene Roddenberry and DC Fontana are no longer with us, so every new Trek release is by definition a work of fan fiction. These projects are every bit as professional and legitimate as Section 31, but for the fact that they don’t have the CBS stamp on them. Nonetheless, that stamp keeps millions of viewers from watching these productions, while their attention is on a work that is strictly inferior.

Bomber Girl and Constar operate on a different level. Their creators have been making fan films for many years, but as unfunded side projects with their friends and families. They exist first and foremost for the joy of creation. Bomber Girl takes us on a trip through time, melding World War 2 era schmaltz, Twilight Zone mysteries, and throwing in high-flying fantasy with the horrors of war. It’s conceptually unbound, but operates with a core of optimism inspired by Trek and its history. One of the characters is a young Gene Roddenberry, ready to plant a seed that will germinate into optimism and decency for generations to come. Constar is the culmination of many years of work, seeing Vance Major find out if his son Royce is ready for command, with a universe of potential and danger in front of him. Both films are works of family and community, seeing members from around the country come together to offer their aid and tell their stories. Both films share cast and resources as well. America is suffering from a dearth of community. We are all disconnected from one another geographically and philosophically, adrift as corporate entities carve up every part of our better natures for profit. At the same time, these small groups are reaching out and finding each other, finding audiences, and finding purpose.

That community is part of the story and experience if you accept it. Royce Major has a starring role in Constar not because of his acting ability, but for the more important reason that he’s Vance Major’s son. When M. Night Shyamalan puts his daughter in the front of Trap with a budget of $30 million, it comes across as a cringy, sleazy way to get her some publicity. Vance isn’t working that way. He cast Royce so that the two of them could create memories together at a crucial time in both of their lives. Constar carries neither the budget nor the cynicism of Trap. Is it good? Is this story unfolding about a father spending time with his son creating memories that are captured on film for them and their descendants to look back on good? Yes, I think so.

Contrast this all against Section 31, a movie so empty of sincerity that I wonder how it was made at all. I don’t need to bother with the plot or particulars. There’s nothing there to really discuss. If you want my review in short: don’t bother. It’s an hour and forty minutes you could better spend doing basically anything else. What I want to do is take a moment and dig into why Section 31 fails at even a conceptual level. That is to say, the fact that this movie exists at all is a bad thing, and that’s regardless of its actual merits (such that there are) as a narrative. Section 31 was introduced late into season 6 of Deep Space 9, only appearing in 3 total episodes (arguably a few more because of the implications of their actions). When introduced, it was unclear whether they were a real division or a splinter faction of terrorists. They were meant as antagonists, but also to challenge the idealism of Star Fleet when pressed with the realities of navigating an existential threat. The things they did were short-sighted, genocidal, and actively harmful to the overall situation during the Dominion War. If you think they won the war, go watch the show again. They escalated the situation, made everything worse, and it was Odo’s compassion that saved a galaxy from scorching. While they offered some interesting critiques of the Federation, they were clearly in the wrong, both diegetically and not.

Over the years, Section 31 has spread across the franchise like an infectious disease. Everyone likes their rugged spy demeanor, so everyone uses them as a crutch for espionage stories, often missing a few important points. One, their aforementioned questionable methods and reasoning. Two, their oversaturation beggars the idea that they could remain hidden. The shadowy, nigh-legendary network of spies, who also feature heavily on every ship in the fleet, major events throughout the timeline, were an official branch of Star Fleet who nearly helped wipe out all sentient life in the galaxy during Discovery (oh but they agreed never to talk about it again so I guess that explains it?) Three, maybe most important, is that Star Fleet ALREADY HAS A SPY NETWORK. So many of these stories could, should, and would be better placed with agents of Star Fleet Intelligence. Oh but wait, that’s been irrevocably compromised by Romulans for unknown years because of Picard, right? Let’s handle that point another day.

Section 31’s violent, short-sighted, outright evil defense of the Federation once made the point that doing evil things is no justification for “being a good organization” especially when those things aren’t even effective. The Federation’s tactics aren’t only valuable because they are, or try to be, moral. It’s because acting in a truthful, forthright manner is how you can establish and maintain relationships with allies who don’t want to kill you. Or at least, that’s the philosophy Star Trek once wanted to care about. Now it’s dedicated to the sexy intrigue of spies and their OPENLY GENOCIDAL empress from the evil joke universe.

This is not a comprehensive review of Section 31, because you don’t need one. You knew it would be terrible the second it was announced. Everyone did. The excoriating reviews only add some specifics to the general fact that anyone with even the most minor interest in Star Trek already knows this is a terrible idea that could only ever be an insult to the ideals that Star Trek stands for. And honestly, those ideals do matter. Usually I scoff at people who owe their allegiance to billion dollar franchises, but Star Trek remains a cultural landmark for good, specific reasons. It gave people hope, led to real change within NASA, led to the recruitment of the first female astronauts, and has inspired countless individuals to pursue the sciences. It mattered because, for a while, its stories were imaginative and powerful. They brought good into the world, with their inquisitiveness, their philosophy, and their fundamental respect for the sanctity and curiosity of life. Now all that good will has been squandered on a dreary, pointless waste of resources. Nothing in Jose Cepeda’s work, whatever its rough edges, is as deliberately insulting as the Section 31 movie.

I don’t come to Fandom Underground out of hate. I love this work. It’s made me a better, more patient, more open, smarter person, even with the occasional stupid tangents. (Which does not include Spock’s brain. That episode is liquid hot fire. Bones supercharges his intelligence to perform a brain transplant but the effect is wearing off and he’s getting stupider by the second with a close friend under the knife? You telling me that isn’t the most inventive, captivating science fiction shit you’ve ever seen? That outdoes the mushroom drive by several orders of magnitude.)

Bomber Girl and Constar are works of love through and through. They’re tales of inspiration and decency that none of Section 31’s EIGHT executive producers could appreciate. All the ways they’re unconventional and unusual make them memorable. Human. Jose Cepeda and Vance Major believe in Star Fleet, not as iconography to mollify themselves and not as a product to distribute, but as an ideal to strive towards. Whatever faults they inherit from their low budgets, these movies make me feel something because they BELIEVE in something. Section 31 doesn’t believe in anything. The people behind Section 31 think that caring about ideals is for rubes and stooges. They see Star Trek as a way to make money. They don’t see the franchise at all.

If you go ahead and watch Bomber Girl at the link below, you’ll be able to tell in a few minutes that it doesn’t have the budget or technical sophistication of Section 31. But you know what? If you watch the whole thing, you might find that it has all the heart and soul that 31 left on the table too.

“Okay,” I hear you saying through the screen “you’re dodging the question: are these movies actually good? How can you look at the editing errors, the sound errors, the acting errors, and say you think these are good works of art.” What I’m trying to get across to all of you is that I’m not dodging the question, I’m explaining why it’s overly simplistic. Bomber Girl exists outside of the spectrum of good or bad that you would apply to most movies. Anything lacking in its technical delivery is less important than the emotional experience it conveys. No matter who you are or where you’re coming from, I can say with certainty that you’ve never seen anything like this, while Section 31 has all the dour, joyless energy of every sci-fi channel original movie from the early 2000s. No filmmaker has ever approached the craft this way, except Jose Cepeda himself. Emotionally speaking, I got more out of this narrative than years of clinical, professional, well funded garbage poured out of the moldering mouth of modern Hollywood. Even if it’s bad, a point I still don’t concede, it’s bad in a way that makes it art: an expression of human experience. Articulation of thought through form. Something memorable and unique, in a media landscape that sands off the edges of every property until no characteristics are left. Something that can make you believe humanity is worth preserving.

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