That Surprise Star Trek: Section 31 Cameo, Explained

This post contains spoilers for "Star Trek: Section 31."

The Jamie Lee Curtis Renaissance continues. After winning an Oscar for her role in "Everything Everywhere All At Once" and wrapping up the new "Halloween" trilogy, Curtis has used her renewed status in surprising and largely delightful ways. She's back in the spotlight for her work in "The Last Showgirl" in 2024, but Curtis has also become a certifiable cameo queen. Her surprise appearance in "The Bear" season 2, where she played unstable Berzatto matriarch Donna, won her an Emmy, and she also lent her voice to a Cardi B and Offset music video in 2023. Now, she's back in an unannounced role again — and this time, she's making her "Star Trek" debut.

To catch Curtis in full exasperated space boss mode, you'll need to tune into "Star Trek: Section 31," the first feature film of the Paramount+ era of Gene Roddenberry's optimistic, space-set series. "Section 31" definitely isn't the best Trek film out there — it's fun, but slight and derivative, and it was originally meant to be a TV series so it has the speedy pace of a story that was squished into a much shorter run time. Still, the new movie introduces a host of interesting, wacky characters, and its final scene makes it clear that it's meant to kick off a new storyline involving the Section 31 crew. 

How do we know? Well, Jamie Lee Curtis' hologram told us.

Curtis plays a character known only as "Control," whose voice we hear during an early exposition montage before she finally shows up at the end of the film in hologram message form. Control is clearly a higher-up in Section 31, the shadowy (and shady) intelligence group that operates outside the typical moral and legal boundaries of Starfleet and the United Federation of Planets. The group does the dirty work that Starfleet is too by-the-book to do, and has offered an interesting, realistic wrinkle in Roddenberry's utopic vision of the franchise's central organization since they were first introduced in 1998.

We don't know much about Control yet, but it's clear that she's willing to side-step treaties and order assassinations, as she does after the film's cold open establishes Philippa Georgiou (Curtis' "Everything Everywhere All At Once" co-star Michelle Yeoh) as a dictatorial ruler. She also loves delivering flair-filled phrases ("This dog bites," she says of Philippa), and is too important — or sketchy — to appear in person to deliver mission details to the team. Most intriguing of all, she seems to have pieces of metal on the side of her face, which could indicate she's a former Borg drone like Jeri Ryan's Seven of Nine.

Judging by her brief and virtual appearances in "Section 31," it's clear that Curtis is staying booked and busy. Still, the end of the film seems pretty deliberately open-ended, as it cuts to credits right after Control assigns the squad (Philippa included) a new mission involving the planet Turkana IV. Fans of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" may remember Turkana IV as a brutal and dystopian place where Earthlings' attempts to colonize went drastically wrong. None of that is mentioned in "Section 31," though, leaving fans to assume we'll get the tail end of this story eventually — and that this first romp through space was just the beginning of a larger Section 31 adventure.

With that final tease in mind, it seems pretty likely that Curtis will return for a future Trek project, but it's worth noting that as of mid-January 2024, no "Section 31" projects have been announced yet, and she hasn't commented on her role or her future within the franchise. Of course, a Section 31-centric story has been in the works since the earliest days of "Star Trek: Discovery," with the Trek team at Paramount clearly interested in the idea of exploring the secret cell more thoroughly. "Section 31" didn't really do that, but it hints at the moral complexity of the hero-villain divide in "Star Trek" in ways that would be interesting to explore in the future. While some of the team members are terrible people, others simply seem to be outcasts who found refuge outside the boundaries of the law. Which space does Curtis' Control occupy? We don't know, but hopefully time and a future Trek project will tell.

"Star Trek: Section 31" is now streaming on Paramount+.