Section 31 might have lit up last week to hit Paramount+ for… not exactly the exactly reasonsbut the latest Star Trek movie still has a few surprises up its spy sleeves. Perhaps one of the most 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 saved the main universe from a Mirror Universe invasion, and with the offer for Georgiou to sign again with the black operative 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 blunders into view, wearing a suit. Trek-y tech-faceplate and moaning exasperatedly at the damaged group formed in front of her.
Curtis plays “Control”, a name familiar to discovery fans as the identity of the infamous AI villain from the show’s second season. There, Control was a program used by Section 31 to make operational decisions that later went rogue, threatening the entire galaxy unless the discovery crew thrown into the distant future (with them along for the ride). Fortunately, Curtis doesn’t appear to be an evil AI, and Section 31 simply kept “Control” as the name for biological handlers—but the surprise came from Curtis himself appearing, rather than the utterance of Control as a title. And it all depends on Michelle Yeoh that she Everything, Everywhere, Everything at once co-star beamed in 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 presser for the film. “The idea of who can play the character of Control [lead to] ‘You know, it would be nice if it could be someone, 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 Trek-proximity—her older sister, Kelly Curtis, appeared in Deep Space Nine‘s first season as Sarda, a dabo girl at Quark’s bar being bullied by her Ferengi employer. But her own time in Star Trek was similarly short, with Curtis’s scene as Control over and done in a handful of hours. “She just showed up and came in, did all her stuff in less than two hours,” Kutzman continued. “Just laid it all out, gave us like, 16 different versions of every line, improved a bunch of stuff, made the stuff that was on the page… [she] came in like an absolute killer, killed it, walked out the door. We just stood there with our jaws on the floor, she was so amazing.”
Star Trek: Episode 31 now streaming on Paramount+.
Additional reporting by Cheryl Eddy.
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