Olatune Osunsanmi's new TV movie "Star Trek: Section 31" was originally intended to be a full-blown TV series and a proper spinoff to "Star Trek: Discovery." The show was to follow Michelle Yeoh as the villainous Empress Philippa Georgiou, a bloodthirsty tyrant from another dimension, as she was recruited into a super-secret black-ops organization embedded deeply inside Starfleet. Although the Empress had murdered untold millions of people and regularly ate the flesh of her enemies, she was presented as somewhat sympathetic, having undergone a very mild personal redemption.

Starfleet understood Georgiou was morally bankrupt, but it required her brand of bankruptcy to commit acts of covert terrorism to keep the Federation's utopia maintained. Plans for a "Section 31" TV series stretch back as far as at least 2019. By 2023, however, the "Star Trek" franchise had entered a state of widespread contraction, with most of the property's then-ongoing shows being canceled one after the other.