Episode 31 Jamie Lee Curtis Cameo Explained

This entry contains spoilers for “Star Trek: Episode 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 mostly delightful ways. She's back in the spotlight for her work on The Last Showgirl in 2024, but Curtis has also become a certified cameo queen. Her surprise appearance in “The Bear” season 2, where she played unstable Berzatto matriarch Donnawon an Emmy Award, and in 2023 she lent her voice to a music video for Cardi B and Offset. Now she's back in an unannounced role — and this time she'll be making her Star Trek debut.

To catch Curtis in full angsty space boss mode, you'll have to tune in to “Star Trek: Section 31,” the first feature film in the Paramount+ era of Gene Roddenberry's upbeat space-set series. “Section 31” is definitely not the best hiking movie — it's fun, but light and derivative, and was originally intended as a TV series so it has the fast pace of a story squeezed into a much shorter runtime. Still, the new movie introduces a lot of interesting, quirky characters, and its final scene makes it clear that it's meant to kick off a new storyline involving the Section 31 team.

How do we know that? 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 finally appearing at the end of the film in the form of a hologram message. Control is clearly higher in Section 31, a shadowy (and shadowy) 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 all too popular for, and has offered an interesting, realistic wrinkle to Roddenberry's utopian vision of the franchise's central organization since it was first introduced in 1998.

We don't know much about Control yet, but it's clear she's willing to break contracts and order murders, as she does after establishing Philip Giorgi (Curtis' Everything Everywhere All At Once co-star Michelle Yeoh) as a dictatorial ruler. She's also very fond of making catchphrases (“This dog bites,” she says of Philip), and she's too important or short-tempered to come in person to brief the team on the mission. Most intriguingly, she appears to have pieces of metal on the side of her face, which could indicate she's a former Borg drone like Jerry Ryan's Seven of Nine.

Judging by her brief and virtual appearances in “Section 31,” it's clear that Curtis remains busy. However, the film's ending feels rather deliberately open-ended, as it cuts right after Control assigns the team (including Philip) 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 at colonization went horribly wrong. However, none of this is mentioned in “Section 31,” leaving fans to assume that we'll eventually get to the end of that story — and that this first frolic in space was just the beginning of a bigger Chapter 31 adventure.

With this latest tease in mind, it seems quite likely that Curtis will return for the next Trek project, but it's worth noting that no “Section 31” projects have been announced as of mid-January 2024, and she hasn't commented. about her role or future within the franchise. A Chapter 31 oriented story, of course has been in the works since the early days of “Star Trek: Discovery,” when the Paramount Trek crew was clearly interested in the idea of ​​exploring the secret cell more closely. “Chapter 31” didn't quite do that, but it points to the moral complexity of Star Trek's hero-villain divide in ways that would be interesting to explore in the future. While some of the team members are terrible people, others just seem like outcasts who have found refuge outside the confines of the law. What place does the 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+.