Star Trek: Section 31 Spinoff Conversations Still Happening but May Not Debut for a While

It seems that plans to launch Michelle Yeoh’s Section 31-based Star Trek: Discovery spinoff are on hold. Yeoh, who played Philippa Georgiou on Discovery, got a grand sendoff in the show’s third season. Those episodes seemed to be setting up the in-development spinoff series, and Paramount+ programming chief Julie McNamara and Star Trek head producer Alex Kurtzman tell Variety that there are still “conversations” about the series ongoing. However, fans shouldn’t expect to see it any time soon. This decision relates to their steady pacing of the franchise’s expansion. With five shows already in production and more announced projects in development behind the scenes, the studio doesn’t want to overextend.

“We’re very careful about curating the pacing — the number of shows at any given time — and what those shows are, so that we make sure that it’s always exciting when there’s a new track show coming out,” says McNamara. “Whether there’s a show that comes up that feels additive and we should add that into the mix, or waiting for attrition of another Trek show, we feel good about where we are.”

McNamara says the plan is to have one Star Trek show on Paramount+ per quarter. She also alluded to one of the current series possibly “aging out” naturally as “perhaps an older lead is only committed to a certain number of seasons and therefore we move on from that.” That seems to be a subtle reference to Star Trek: Picard, which stars 80-year-old Patrick Stewart. Stewart has noted in the past that he believes the show will run for three seasons, with one already complete and the second now in production.

After her final episode on Star Trek: Discovery, Yeoh appeared on The Ready Room to hint that her absence from the Star Trek universe may not be for long. “It wasn’t always planned this way,” Yeoh said. “It came [to] a point where it was necessary if we were to go on more journeys with Emperor Georgiou that some things have to happen.

“It’s never going to be goodbye. Not if I have a hand in that. But at that moment, it was really tough. Knowing that I won’t be seeing my new family for a while, I mean, we will always be in touch with each other. But it is more difficult because I related on so many levels with the different characters we played and the actors who gave some of the most amazing performances and brought all these characters that were on paper to life and our writers were just brilliant. They painted the canvas and allowed us to step into these new worlds with characters that have so much background and complexities. In my 30 years of being in the business, Georgiou has been so fulfilling as an actor that it’s been awesome, and so for that reason alone, I’m never going away!”

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