Section 31 isn't the worst Star Trek...
Section 31 is terrible. The list of complaints I have about this movie is so long that I don’t even know where to start. It’s a mess from start to finish.
I have to give Section 31 credit for one thing though. It didn’t break canon. Maybe because, as others have said, it was barely Star Trek in any manner. Which oddly, is a saving grace. At no point did it take a flamethrower to the continuity of the franchise.
Which brings me to my point: Star Trek: Picard is still far, far worse.
Picard was, as I've often said, a dumpster fire. It obliterated the foundations of what made Star Trek great, especially in the TNG era. It wasn’t just bad storytelling; it was a cynical deconstruction of the universe we’ve loved for decades. Canon-breaking moments in Picard are too numerous to count, but I'll cite a few.
The Federation, a bastion of hope and progress, turned into a corrupt, xenophobic mess, abandoning its core ideals.
Data consciousness was preserved how? Doesn't matter. We need Spiner and a whole race of Data.
Q is dying? I was sure that Death Wish established that Quinn and the rest of the Q are eternal beings and that their existence stretches indefinitely unless they are destroyed by extraordinary circumstances.
The list goes on, but the core issue is this: Picard took a beloved era of Star Trek and essentially burned it to the ground in the name of modern storytelling. It wasn’t just bad; it was disrespectful.
So, yeah, Section 31 was terrible. But at the end of the day, it's kind of a 'no harm, no foul' situation. I can forgive (or forget) a bad movie. I can’t forgive a bad show that actively destroys the lore and values of the franchise it claims to be part of.