Trama

In Star Trek: Section 31, Emperor Philippa Georgiou joins a secret division of Starfleet tasked with protecting the United Federation of Planets, and must face the sins of her past.

In the early 23rd century in the Mirror Universe, a teenage Philippa Georgiou returns home from a deadly contest to determine the next Emperor of the Terran Empire. She reveals to her family that she made friends with a teenage boy named San and they defeated the other young contestants together to become the last two standing. To confirm her place as emperor, Georgiou must cut all ties to her previous life by killing her family; they realize she has poisoned them. Officials from the empire arrive with San in tow, his village having been burned as punishment for his failure to kill his own family. Spared but forced into servitude, San is disgusted with Georgiou's actions and renounces their friendship.

In the early 24th century in the Prime Universe, Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) is the proprietress of a bar on the space station Baraam, under the name "Madame de Franc". Section 31 operative Alok Sahar (Omari Hardwick) convinces Georgiou to join his team, who are trying to prevent arms dealer Dada Noe (Joe Pingue) from selling a weapon to an unknown buyer aboard Baraam. Georgiou meets the team: Melle (Humberly Gonzalez), an irresistible Deltan; Quasi (Sam Richardson), a shapeshifting Chameloid; Zeph (Robert Kazinsky), the user of a mechanical exoskeleton; Rachel Garrett (Kacey Rohl), a no-nonsense Starfleet officer, and Fuzz (Sven Ruygrok), a microscopic nanokin who pilots a robotic Vulcan suit.

Georgiou greets Noe and immediately puts a phase pod on the case containing a weapon, bringing it out of phase with the physical world. Also wearing a phase pod, Georgiou easily takes the case, but a masked figure, also out of phase, barges in and demands the case. The team battle him, but he kills Melle and gains the upper hand when Georgiou gets her foot stuck while phasing. He takes the weapon, a small sphere, out of the case, and transports away. Georgiou recognizes the weapon as the Godsend, a weapon she had developed to ensure that if her enemies assassinated her, the device would destroy everything in its path, rendering their attempt to rule moot. When San presented it to her, he revealed that the scientists who made it took their own lives, and he also succumbed to the poison in front of her.

Alok reveals to Georgiou that he is from the 20th century, his family having been murdered during the Eugenics Wars by an Augment named Giri. Giri transformed Alok into an Augment as well, and he committed atrocities in her name before being put into suspended animation and eventually recruited by Section 31. Georgiou questions Noe in a Section 31 safe house, and he reveals that he is from the mirror universe, having stolen the Godsend from a weapons facility he was in charge of, and planned to sell it to Terran conquerors who were to come through a passageway opened by an ion storm in four hours. The group realized that the masked man must have been tipped off by one of the Section 31 team. The safe house is destroyed and Noe is killed, and the group finds that their ship has been sabotaged by the mole. With only four hours to regain communication with Control, the group split up.

When Zeph disappears, the group suspects him of being the mole, but they find him dead, with evidence implicating Garrett as the mole. Georgiou deduces that Fuzz infiltrated Zeph's exoskelton and forced him to sabotage the ship, then planted the evidence, all the while running his robot suit on autopilot. Fuzz admits it, and, along with Zeph's reanimated corpse, fights the other members of the team, incapacitating Quasi, Garrett and Alok. Alone with Georgiou, Fuzz asks her why she cares about saving the Prime Universe after killing her family and condemning San to slavery. Georgiou is shocked that he knows this, and he reveals that San (James Hiroyuki Liao), having faked his death, is the masked man who stole the Godsend, before beaming away.

The team reconvenes and commandeers an abandoned garbage scow to follow San. Using the ship's tractor beam as a weapon, they take out San's shields, and Georgiou and Alok beam over. Alok fights Fuzz's suit while the real Fuzz attacks Garrett and Quasi in the scow. San reveals to Georgiou that he intends to destroy the Prime Universe and create his own empire that will be ruled with "righteous mercy" in contrast to Georgiou's cruel dictatorship. Georgiou defiantly tells him there is no such thing as a benevolent dictator. They fight, and the Godsend is inadvertently activated.

On the scow, Garrett finds a talking doll with an unstable power source. She rigs the doll to explode, and has Quasi jettison the trash into space. On San's ship, Georgiou stops fighting San and tightly hugs him. San is unchanged by this, and, as the doll explodes, disabling San's ship, tries to stab Georgiou. She blocks the attack and San fatally stabs himself, dying in a heartbroken Georgiou's arms. The passageway to the Mirror Universe opens, and Alok and Georgiou decide to fly the Godsend into it, killing themselves in the process. Quasi is able to beam out at the last moment, saving their lives.

Three weeks later, the surviving members of the team reconvene on Baraam along with a duplicate of Fuzz's suit, this one piloted by his wife Wisp, who suspects that Fuzz survived the explosion and wants revenge. A hologram of Control (Jamie Lee Curtis), the director of Section 31, briefs the team on their next mission, on Turkana IV.