This put up comprises spoilers for “Star Trek: Part 31.”
The Jamie Lee Curtis Renaissance continues. After profitable an Oscar for her position in “All the pieces In all places All At As soon as” and wrapping up the brand new “Halloween” trilogy, Curtis has used her renewed standing in stunning and largely pleasant methods. She’s again within the highlight for her work in “The Final Showgirl” in 2024, however Curtis has additionally grow to be a certifiable cameo queen. Her shock look in “The Bear” season 2, the place she performed unstable Berzatto matriarch Donna, received her an Emmy, and he or she additionally lent her voice to a Cardi B and Offset music video in 2023. Now, she’s again in an unannounced position once more — and this time, she’s making her “Star Trek” debut.
To catch Curtis in full exasperated area boss mode, you may have to tune into “Star Trek: Part 31,” the primary characteristic movie of the Paramount+ period of Gene Roddenberry’s optimistic, space-set sequence. “Part 31” undoubtedly is not the perfect Trek movie on the market — it is enjoyable, however slight and spinoff, and it was initially meant to be a TV sequence so it has the speedy tempo of a narrative that was squished right into a a lot shorter run time. Nonetheless, the brand new film introduces a bunch of attention-grabbing, wacky characters, and its last scene makes it clear that it is meant to kick off a brand new storyline involving the Part 31 crew.
How do we all know? Properly, Jamie Lee Curtis’ hologram informed us.
Who does Jamie Lee Curtis play in Star Trek: Part 31?
Curtis performs a personality identified solely as “Management,” whose voice we hear throughout an early exposition montage earlier than she lastly reveals up on the finish of the movie in hologram message kind. Management is clearly a higher-up in Part 31, the shadowy (and shady) intelligence group that operates outdoors the standard ethical and authorized boundaries of Starfleet and the United Federation of Planets. The group does the soiled work that Starfleet is just too by-the-book to do, and has provided an attention-grabbing, real looking wrinkle in Roddenberry’s utopic imaginative and prescient of the franchise’s central group since they had been first launched in 1998.
We do not know a lot about Management but, however it’s clear that she’s keen to side-step treaties and order assassinations, as she does after the movie’s chilly open establishes Philippa Georgiou (Curtis’ “All the pieces In all places All At As soon as” co-star Michelle Yeoh) as a dictatorial ruler. She additionally loves delivering flair-filled phrases (“This canine bites,” she says of Philippa), and is just too vital — or sketchy — to seem in particular person to ship mission particulars to the group. Most intriguing of all, she appears to have items of metallic on the aspect of her face, which might point out she’s a former Borg drone like Jeri Ryan’s Seven of 9.
What might be subsequent for Management and Part 31?
Judging by her temporary and digital appearances in “Part 31,” it is clear that Curtis is staying booked and busy. Nonetheless, the tip of the movie appears fairly intentionally open-ended, because it cuts to credit proper after Management assigns the squad (Philippa included) a brand new mission involving the planet Turkana IV. Followers of “Star Trek: The Subsequent Era” could bear in mind Turkana IV as a brutal and dystopian place the place Earthlings’ makes an attempt to colonize went drastically improper. None of that’s talked about in “Part 31,” although, leaving followers to imagine we’ll get the tail finish of this story ultimately — and that this primary romp by way of area was just the start of a bigger Part 31 journey.
With that last tease in thoughts, it appears fairly probably that Curtis will return for a future Trek undertaking, however it’s price noting that as of mid-January 2024, no “Part 31” tasks have been introduced but, and he or she hasn’t commented on her position or her future inside the franchise. After all, a Part 31-centric story has been within the works because the earliest days of “Star Trek: Discovery,” with the Trek group at Paramount clearly within the thought of exploring the key cell extra completely. “Part 31” did not actually try this, however it hints on the ethical complexity of the hero-villain divide in “Star Trek” in ways in which can be attention-grabbing to discover sooner or later. Whereas a few of the group members are horrible individuals, others merely appear to be outcasts who discovered refuge outdoors the boundaries of the legislation. Which area does Curtis’ Management occupy? We do not know, however hopefully time and a future Trek undertaking will inform.
“Star Trek: Part 31” is now streaming on Paramount+.
