Section 31 Is Now the Lowest-Rated Star Trek Project on Rotten Tomatoes

When Star Trek: Section 31 beamed onto Paramount+ last week, it did so with a bit of a malfunction—and landed with an almighty thud. The first Star Trek movie (streaming or otherwise) in years was immediately scathed by many critics, and now fan reactions have been similarly unkind, warping Section 31 right into first place on the most unglamorous of lists.

As Forbes reports, Section 31 now holds the “honor” of being the worst-rated Star Trek project, TV series or film, on critical aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, both in terms of both a rating from critics and from user input. Here’s the full breakdown of both film and TV series ratings:

Star Trek Movie Rotten Tomatoes Ratings

• Star Trek: The Motion Picture: 52% critics, 42% audience
• Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan: 86% critics, 90% audience
• Star Trek III: The Search for Spock: 79% critics, 68% audience
• Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home: 81% critics, 81% audience
• Star Trek V: The Final Frontier: 23% critics, 25% audience
• Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country: 83% critics, 83% audience
• Star Trek: Generations: 47% critics, 57% audience
• Star Trek: First Contact: 93% critics, 89% audience
• Star Trek: Insurrection: 55% critics, 44% audience
• Star Trek: Nemesis: 38% critics, 49% audience
• Star Trek (2009): 94% critics, 91% audience
• Star Trek Into Darkness: 84% critics, 89% audience
• Star Trek Beyond: 86% critics, 80% audience
• Star Trek: Section 31: 20% critics, 17% audience

Star Trek TV Series Rotten Tomatoes Ratings

• Star Trek: 92% critics, N/A audience
• Star Trek: The Animated Series: 94% critics, 81% audience
• Star Trek: The Next Generation: 92% critics, 90% audience
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: 91% critics, 89% audience
• Star Trek: Voyager: 76% critics, 80% audience
• Star Trek: Discovery: 91% critics, 33% audience
• Star Trek: Lower Decks: 91% critics, 73% audience
• Star Trek: Picard: 89% critics, 57% audience
• Star Trek: Prodigy: 97% critics, 88% audience
• Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: 98% critics, 79% audience

Across the entire franchise, just one other entry comes even remotely close to Section 31 here in the form of the much-maligned Final Frontier (what does God need with an extra Secret Spock Sibling?), in terms of either critical reaction, audience reaction, or potential disparity between those two ratings. Of course, as always when discussing Rotten Tomatoes, there are several caveats to remember: the first is that Rotten Tomatoes ratings are not a test score, but an average percentage of how many people gave a film or show a positive critique, numerically valued or otherwise: Section 31 isn’t the equivalent of a 2/10, instead that merely one in five critics rated it positively.

It’s also important to acknowledge that it’s a flawed system, especially when contrasting historical data prior to its launch in 1998 with data collected for contemporary material. This is even more of a case when it comes to audience ratings which suffer from a similar lack of reliable historical data as well as the issue that, prior to multiple recent attempts at overhauling how they are verified and collated, they were infamously repeatedly manipulated as part of “review bombing” harassment campaigns by a myriad of third parties and grifters in the culture war. (Case in point, Star Trek: Discovery‘s overwhelming disparity between critical and audience scores on the above list, a show that repeatedly faced bad-faith and racist backlash over the course of its run.) For as important as the site has become in both the entertainment industry and, for better or worse, the way people discuss media online, taking anything particularly definitive, positive or negative, comes with the acknowledgement of its flaws.

All that said though, there probably is something to take from Section 31‘s largely negative reaction across both audiences and critics alike. Not only does it stand out within the oeuvre of Star Trek‘s current streaming era (regardless of what detractors of Discovery say about producer Alex Kurtzman’s shepherding of the franchise, by and large the majority of contemporary Star Trek has been received rather well), but it speaks to the long-simmering controversy of just what a Star Trek project that centers Section 31—a concept that was controversial from the moment it was introduced in Deep Space Nine—should look like. Going in, the movie had a high expectation to justify any potential glamorization of an infamously insidious group, one whose very existence was seen as tantamount to a wholesale rejection of Star Trek‘s broader utopian aims. Instead, it took an arguably even worse stance than that glamorization in simply doing nothing at all with the opportunity, saying little about either Section 31 as an entity or even really Star Trek more broadly.

Star Trek stands at a bit of a crossroads that its modern age hasn’t really seen in quite a while. The recent conclusions of Picard, Discovery, and Lower Decks—arguably the flagships that defined the franchise’s boom in the streaming era—as well as the uncertain future of Prodigy after its controversial uncoupling from Paramount+, leaves Trek in a strange place. Strange New Worlds, one of the most warmly received projects of this era now stands with just a handful of upcoming projects, and, as has been the case since Beyond‘s release, whatever the hell is going on with Star Trek movies remains so nebulous Captain Janeway could go look for coffee inside of it all. Trek needed Section 31 to prove that it could thrive in the streaming movie format as it navigates this moment of uncertainty—and the final frontier still could, but it would’ve been much better served if it hadn’t started with such a fundamental misfire of an idea.

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