Why Michelle Yeoh's Philippa Georgiou Is Star Trek's Most Dangerous Starfleet Member

"Star Trek: Discovery" debuted on CBS All Access (now Paramount+) on September 24, 2017, marking "Star Trek's" return to TV after a 12-year hiatus. The new series, unlike the previous Treks, was going to be a serialized show, and, strikingly, it wasn't going to center on a starship captain. Instead, "Discovery" was to be about Commander Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green), a human woman who had been raised in Vulcan. Specifically, she had been raised as the heretofore unrevealed adopted sister of Spock. "Discovery" is set about a decade prior to the events of the original "Star Trek" series.

Commander Burnham begins the series as the first officer aboard a Starfleet vessel called the USS Shenzhou, serving under Captain Philippa Georgiou, played by Michelle Yeoh. Casting Yeoh on a "Star Trek" series was something of a coup, and many Trekkies assumed that she couldn't possibly be affordable enough to keep on the series. As many predicted, Captain Georgiou was killed early in the series, slain in hand-to-hand combat with a Klingon warrior named T'Kuvma (Chris Obi). 

But that wasn't the end for Michelle Yeoh. By the 11th episode of the series, called "The Wolf Inside," the action had finally shifted to the USS Discovery. Thanks to an interdimensional experiment gone wrong, the Discovery found itself in the notorious Mirror Universe, essentially the "Star Trek" Universe's evil twin. In the Mirror Universe, Commander Burnham discovers that Philippa Georgiou has risen to the rank of Empress of the evil Earth empire, and that Empress Georgiou is a vicious, mass-murdering, cannibalistic tyrant. Trekkies will later learn that she also has a collection of doomsday devices. As "Star Trek" villains go, Empress Georgiou may be the most villainous.

Georgiou is eventually dragged back into the non-Mirror universe, and would go on to appear in 22 episodes of "Discovery," all told. The character is outwardly evil, and it's a wonder why the crew of the USS Discovery kept her around at all. Her advice is always to take the course of action that led to the most death, and she takes a near-sexual glee in knowing that others would die. And, yes, she's a cannibal. Early in "Discovery," she makes a meal of Lieutenant Saru (Doug Jones) and even attempts to feed some to Commander Burnham. Later, in the movie "Star Trek: Section 31," she is introduced enjoying a highball with an eyeball. She loves eating other people. 

Curiously, Empress Georgiou came to be something of an admired figure on the USS Discovery. She even became sympathetic, briefly, when she went back to her home universe in the two-part episode "Terra Firma." She found that she loves the power and the sadism that her title provides, but that living on the Discovery gave her a new, more humble sense of purpose. Either way, the crew of the Discovery was weirdly forgiving of the war tyrant's crimes. Discovery, it should be noted, is a gigantically violent show overall, and the characters commit murder more frequently than on any of the previous "Star Trek" shows, so maybe they were ready to have a tyrant lead them. 

Philippa Georgiou is so manipulative and clever that she can elicit sympathy from the forgiving members of Starfleet, even after they knew about the untold people she had killed in various world-culling conquests. She is a murderous villain who has, by dint of her being played by Michelle Yeoh, projected sympathy. How insidious.

At the end of her arc on "Star Trek: Discovery," after she has made the aforementioned sojourn back to her home dimension, Empress Georgiou found a new job ... with Starfleet. It seems that Starfleet has a secret-ops division of CIA-like super-spooks called Section 31. Many Trekkies dislike Section 31 because if you need secret covert military murderers to maintain your futuristic utopia, well then it's not a utopia, is it? But it seems that Section 31 is ideal for a murder-minded tyrant like Philippa Georgiou. Although she is technically not allowed to commit murder while a Section 31 agent, it's very insidious that a cannibal dictator is allowed to operate under the auspices of Starfleet rather than languish in a penal colony somewhere. 

Philippa Georgiou's Section 31 career was meant to be explored in a TV series called "Star Trek: Section 31," but some fat-trimming at Paramount caused the project to mutate into a TV movie, which aired on Paramount+ in January of 2025. The plot of the movie involved Georgiou and a ragtag band of misfits teaming up to stop the use of a doomsday device called the Godsend. The Godsend device was actually something Georgiou had commissioned for herself back when she was Empress of the Mirror Universe, so she has a working knowledge of its operation. Georgiou implies that she has built many such devices. 

It's clear that someone over at Paramount — likely "Star Trek" head honcho Alex Kurtzman — very much loves the idea of Empress Georgiou, feeling that Space Stalin was a great addition to the franchise. The problem, though, is that she never becomes "good," per se. She just moves from being 100% evil to being maybe 98% evil. And Starfleet approves. That's damn dangerous, dude.