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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Benjamin Olson" data-source="post: 8675492" data-attributes="member: 6988941">To me the problem with Section 31, as a plot element, is that espionage plots in imagined universes are just intrinsically both a little lame and a minor violation of trust between author and audience.A lot of what makes espionage plots set in the real world compelling is that they play a game of recontextualizing our understanding of the world, and revealing a secret reality behind our actual reality and our assumptions about it. Espionage in an imagined universe is revealing the truth behind the lies the author told us and the assumptions they put in our head, which makes the reveals feel a lot cheaper and unearned. I won't try to tell people who say their dislike of Section 31 is because it betrays the optimism of the Federation or whatever that they are wrong, but I will put it to them that they might also partly just be put-off by the more basic aspect that "what we told you was one thing was all secretly something else" narratives in fictional universes intrinsically wear on the trust between author and audience. The fact that in something like Star Trek there is a panoply of authors means that issues of violating another author's vision also arise.Which is not to say espionage plots in an imagined universe can't be awesome, but just to say that they are not as intrinsically interesting as spy fiction set in some approximation of the real world, and can infringe on the trust that our authors are playing straight with us. The authors of Section 31 episodes I've seen don't seem to realize this. Nor, I think, does whoever thinks that a Section 31 show is a good idea (much less a good idea in a world that still hasn't given me my damned Captain Worf show!)</blockquote>

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