Have any of the DS9 writers/producers said anything about Discovery's version of S31 (or Into Darkness', which is very much the blueprint for Disco's)? Is there a definitive answer about S31's original intent?
Personally, I loved the idea that Sloan was behind the whole thing, and everyone else was tricked into thinking there was much more of S31 than there really was. But of course ENT definitively canonized the idea that it's existed for 200 years (and the novelverse made them the masterminds of every questionable Starfleet decision ever)
I don't remember. It's been a long time, so I'll have to look it up. Ron Moore used to do Q&A's at time. I don't know if they still exist.
I have the DS9 Companion but I'm not home. I'll check that too when I get a chance. Unless someone beats me to it.
So I'm going to look to see what I find in the DS9 Companion now -- because I said I would -- and then wrap this all up in a tiny, little bow. One way or another. Let's see what they say...
Only quoting the relevant parts.
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Quoted from "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion" (2000), written by Terry J. Erdmann with Paula M. Block
Page 551-552:
"Section 31 grew out of grew out of a line of dialogue in 'The Maquis, Part II,'" Ira Steven Behr says, still intrigued by the subtext of the words he'd written in the second-season teleplay: "It's easy to be a saint in paradise."
"It came from my growing realization that we could do more with the
Star Trek franchise than we'd initially thought we could. It was the idea of culpability, the idea that we should avoid knocking the Federation and we should avoid knocking Starfleet, but we could knock
elements of them."
The theories behind Section 31 are diabolical. "Why
is Earth a paradise in the twenty-fourth century?" Behr asks. "Well, maybe it's because there's someone watching over it and doing the nasty stuff that no one wants to think about. Of course it's a very complicated issue," he adds. "Extremely complicated. And those kinds of covert operations are usually wrong!"
When Behr saw an opportunity to explore the dark side of paradise, he took it. The result was "Inquisition". Of course, as one would expect from the executive producer's creative mind, he found that opportunity in the most unlikely of places, in what Bradley Thompson calls "a cute little romp about dealing with the Department of Motor Vehicles on a Sunday."
That "cute little romp" was one of many story ideas purchased from freelancers over the years. In this one, "Bashir went to a planet to do something really nice, like saving the lives of everyone on the whole planet," Thompson says. "He parked his runabout in orbit, and when he finished doing this wonderful thing, he found out that his runabout had been towed and he had a parking ticket! So he had to go up against the bureaucracy. It was the ultimate genetically engineered human against the ultimate bureaucratic red tape."
"When Brad told me about that story, I said, 'That's Franz Kafka's
The Trial, with Bashir,'" comments David Weddle. "
The Trial has always been one of my favorite novels. Then we went to lunch with Ira and told him about it, and he immediately spun it into the concept that you see in the episode, with this secret organization in Starfleet that's interrogating Bashir through a holoprogram that he doesn't realize is a holoprogram. And that's where we started writing."
"Suddenly, it stopped being a romp and it became this nightmare," Thompson laughs.
"I wanted to do something with spies and Bashir in the real world, after doing it in the holosuite so much," Behr explains -- although, ironically, the story still wound up taking place in a holosuite.
"The idea of establishing a behind-the-scenes, shadowy organization was very much Ira's thing," notes Rene Echevarria, who provided input on the script, "But we have to thank Brad and David for the work they did with Sloan as the inquisitor. They did a lot of research and managed to put together a very compelling case for Bashir in fact
being what Sloan was saying he was. They found things that could be construed as suspicious in "Statistical Probabilities" and all the way back in "Hippocratic Oath".
[Post edited only to correct typos.]
) which is fair enough but at least he watched it first before passing judgement.
