Interview: Humberly González On Head-Shaving Worries And Melle’s Deltan Backstory In ‘Star Trek: Section 31’

Humberly González interview - Star Trek: Section 31 premiere - TrekMovie

Last week, TrekMovie spoke to members of the cast and crew of Star Trek: Section 31 at the premiere in New York City. One of the actors we spoke to was Humberly González, who plays a Deltan—a species first introduced in Star Trek: The Motion Picture—named Melle. [SPOILERS AHEAD]

So what did you know about Deltans before this? Were you familiar with Star Trek?

Not as much. As soon as I knew that I was a Deltan, because I didn’t know, I went back to the original [Star Trek: The Motion Picture] where we see Ilia, and I learned that it was Persis Khambatta, and she was Miss India, and she shaved her head for it. The commitment I honor… I could not do that, and I was scared. I was like, “What if they don’t want to book me because I won’t shave my head?” But they came back and said, “We have a great hair and makeup department. We got you.” So it’s kind of cool. I’m like, from one brown girl to another brown girl, the representation in Star Trek is huge.

Ilia (Persis Khambatta) from Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Melle (Humberly González) from Section 31

Ilia (Persis Khambatta) from Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Melle (Humberly González) from Section 31

Did you come up with any kind of backstory for how you ended up in Section 31?

I did. I thought that Melle was bored of the decorum rules of the Deltans and the other parts of the universe, and she thought that in Section 31 she could be allowed to be her full self and use her powers to its fullness, so that she didn’t have to be so demure and conservative, she could actually be, you know, her full self, and she doesn’t have to…

Take the oath of celibacy?

Yeah! I’m like, I don’t want an oath of celibacy. I want to be with Section 31 and have some fun.

There’s no celibacy in Section 31.

No, there’s not. So this is why Melle was like, those are my people. Let’s go!

Did you know when you were hired that things were not gonna go so well for Melle?

I did know. Did not care, because, as we know, in Star Trek fashion, no one’s ever really gone. So I was like, “But I still get to be at Deltan and in Star Trek? Let’s do this!”

Humberly González interview with TrekMovie at the Star Trek: Section 31 premiere

Humberly González at the NYC Section 31 premiere event (Photo: TrekMovie/Cleveland Oakes)

More Section 31

Read more Section 31 coverage from the last weeks:

There are more interviews to come from the premiere and from the junket as well as more analysis.


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She was fun. In fact, she was one of the only characters who was fun.

Yeah, those Deltan pheromones could come in handy during covert operations. That might have been fun. And of course we haven’t seen any Deltans to speak of in decades, though they’re presumably an important species in the Federation, which presented a good opportunity to do a little world building. So naturally, they killed her off.

That was exactly my reaction: why was SHE killed off? She was the only member of the team other than Quasi that I wanted to see more of.

I felt exactly the same. To think we had to stick with some of the others throughout this nightmare just makes this “experience” even worse.

Not having seen it … is it possible that they were afraid of charges like ENT got with their decontam gel scenes, letting a Deltan cut loose with the sexuality? Or just that they were checking off boxes for trek-related stuff and didn’t think beyond the surface? (it’s okay to click on both choices, but I’m thinking the latter is more likely.)

The lifespan of deltans in trekflicks is pretty short given Ilia in tmp and how jedda on regula 1 in twok might be deltan.

It’s truly a shame nobody in power would authorize a detailed warts and all account of how this movie came into being, like the making of exorcist 2 book, or even that piller insurrection one.

Good point (though Ilia and Decker were officially MIA). It was Vonda McIntyre who made the point that Jedda was Deltan in her novelization of TWOK iirc.

I kind of regard INSURRECTION like you do TFF: a missed opportunity that still really doesn’t qualify as a S31-level disaster, with some decent stretches that make it fairly watchable. I’d lay pretty good odds that Piller’s original “Heart of Darkness”-esque take on the story, vetoed by Patrick Stewart, was better than what we ended up with. But I never got around to reading his book, which rather bugged me when I attended his open memorial service in L.A. For my money he was the third savior of Star Trek, after Nick Meyer and Harve Bennett.

If all of INS functioned on the level of that midpoint scene with Stewart and Zerbe, it would be more highly regarded, that’s for sure. I sometimes just pop the blu in to catch that single scene.

Piller must have had some flexibility that other talented folks did not; there were some well-thought-of producers who came and went very quickly on TNG. Les Sheldon was somebody who only did a single script in s4, but I recently found out he was on WISEGUY and should have had the goods. Then again, some of the other WISEGUY creatives went on to run SEAQUEST agrou — well, right under the earth’s mantle with their nutso leadership, so maybe genre stuff is just daunting to certain kinds of talents.

That scene with Stewart and Zerbe was definitely a standout, though I couldn’t help noticing that it played out on a set which had been hastily redressed from “Voyager.” With the exception of TMP, TVH, and the Kelvin stuff, Paramount has always hedged its bets with the movies, which can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I think the secret sauce that allowed Piller to succeed where others had failed was the fact that he genuinely liked TNG as a viewer even in its mostly reviled first two seasons, and was willing to color within the lines that Roddenberry had established — just do it better. The stories improved, considerably; but more notable was the change in the characters, who went from being exemplars of Starfleet virtue to actual flawed and interesting people, all while keeping the show’s optimism and humanistic outlook. I know you consider DS9 to be the superior show quality-wise, and on a storytelling level I’d have to agree. But there’s a reason that TNG remains the most beloved.

I think my consternation over tng has to do with the selective flawing of characters. Bobw p1 has got Shelby acting like something out of Executive Suite by way of All About Eve, but nobody ever carps about unevolved vs better humans. But if that story came in as an outside submission I can easily see it getting rejected by p15 on the basis of not being true to how our characters have put aside petty jealousies and rivalries. That ‘you’re in my way’ line is only missing claws and cat hiss … but I still find the ep fun despite this.

I remember us all sitting around watching BOBW when it first aired and, when Shelby told Riker that “You’re in my way,” my mother exclaiming “What a b!tch!” Which did not seem not to square with the “evolved humans” trope, but then, that dictum was always selectively enforced, really applying only to members of the Enterprise crew itself. After two seasons of pablum most fans and critics found the conflict to be a breath of fresh air, myself included. That was the tightrope that at its best TNG always walked: depicting a humane, aspirational future where people were, nevertheless, still people.

I think it may have been in a TWOK script draft as well; maybe the studio folks said something like, ‘not with this again!’ given Bludhorn’s jibe to Eisner about ‘by you, bald is sexy.’

The Deltans appear in Picard Season 2.

Did they live?

LOL

Who cares? The movie sucked. Trekmovie move on and don’t give anymore airtime to this garbage which will hopefully be forgotten after ST: SNW comes back.

That’s a rather silly reaction, considering that the site is called TrekMovie. Yes, it’s a terrible film, but it is, by definition, a Trek movie. This is the first Trek movie in nine years, so it’s exactly what this website should be covering. If you don’t want to read the coverage, feel free not to.

As for “Who cares,” everyone responding to the articles does. You don’t, and that’s fine. So…. don’t read the articles.

Star Trek: The Final Nail In The Coffin.

Nah. Just The LATEST Nail!

I actually liked her and then they killed her 30 minutes in. I wish that Robot Vulcan with the bad Irish accent died first for being super annoying instead but of course he had to live

Who thought anything in this movie was a good idea? Just terrible all around.

Wish this Section31 ‘Movie’ was instead edited down to a 1-minute Extreme Short-Trek TikTok video with everyone disintegrating and it being an alternate universe that has no impact in the Prime Timeline. They all sacrifice themselves to kill off this alternate universe fantasy of the Secret Hideout-Kurtzman stealing from all the franchises including ‘Star Trek’.

So… She was supposed to be a regular on the series, but then the series was canceled and turned into a movie, and the character got killed off? Sound familiar?

Yep. Every character in TMP who wasn’t one of the TOS nine actors.

Imagine if Gene had still be around he be like ‘ya gotta shave it baby’ (standing there grinning with Fred Phillips holding the clippers and camera man ready to capture every distressed expression in close up)

Like nearly the entire cast, we knew nothing about her. She was one of the few who seemed to have some redeaming qualities, however, again, she was killed off in the first 30 minutes.

This movie is basically Mission: Impossible in space, but atleast in those moviews, they extend the movie to explain the motivation of characters.

I was really wanting to like this movie. Michelle Yeoh is amazing. She did an amazing job with the character, unfortunately, they made her into Hitler on steroids. At least on Disco, they spent all the time dealing with the emotional baggage to at least kinda, sorta, justify some redemption. In this movie, you have no reason to root for her. They do everything possible to make her out to be pure evil. So much more could have been done here. It is too bad it could not have been a series as originally planned. They would have had to time to flesh out characters and maybe justify what they were doing.

The TOS mirror universe made it clear it was a different universe with a different understanding of humanity, in Section 31, they basically turn it into our universe where Hitler won the war and it is now the 1000 year third Reich.

Why did it happen to be that the superweapon was to be delivered at the station Georgio happen to run? Was she really the intended buyer all along and used the Federation to get what she wanted? They could have even leaned into that idea and reveal, yes she was trying to obtain it when she found out it made it into our universe and she wanted it destroyed.

Also, this weapon can supposidly destroy whole quadrants. What happened when it went off? Did she just committ genocide again in the mirror universe by wiping out a whol quadrent in that universe? If so, what happens to the matching people in the prime universe?

So many questions unanswered. If we get a second, hopefully it will be better.

The old story about the scorpion using the turtle to cross a river applies here. When the scorpion stings the turtle half way across the river and they both die, the reason given by the scorpion is that it is in my nature, and I cannot change my nature. Perhaps the same is true for the Emporeress. It is in her nature to destroy and committ genocide. Make her the enemy in the next trek move, not a Federation ally. Have an Enterprise crew chase after her. UNfortunatrely she might have to die in the end, but as we know in Trek, noone ever really dies.

I think you gave this story more thought than TPTB! Maybe they just figured, go for the BATTLEFIELD EARTH ending and have the explosion go off where the bad guys live, who cares about collateral damage?

I’m thinking that since DEXTER is also under the Paramount umbrella (and, like Trek, something that keeps getting revived in one fashion or other, since they seem to somehow be even more terrified than any other studio about doing something new that doesn’t rely on existing IP), somebody high up figured that they could make Empress HiroHitler work as a protagonist the same way they did DEXTER … uh, wrong!

So far as I know, the scorpion story first turned up in movies in an Orson Welles movie that exists in two forms under different titles (both usually streaming on TCM.) I have been a total Welles nut for just about exactly 50 years now, but even so, still haven’t seen either version of this flick in its entirety, despite trying again and again. I don’t know if it is something in my nature that resists being a completionist, or just that the films are just that obscure (they are prime examples of zero-budget Welles, with the typical disastrous sound problems of his 50s era work in Europe.)

Never saw the Welles film, but I’d tentatively guess that the most famous telling of the scorpion story (which, not to be pedantic, concerns a frog, not a turtle) was in THE CRYING GAME, a great movie in its own right.

I always feel a little rankled when somebody poaches a story like that for reuse without offering up a superior context.

It seems to happen with Welles a lot (steal from the best, right?) … He supposedly wrote the part of Reed’s THE THIRD MAN where Harry, from atop the big Wheel, talks about the specks on the ground and how nobody would care if some of them stopped moving … how many times have other lesser minds riffed on that? And the one episode I watched of FAME completely poached from CITIZEN KANE’s Mr. Benstein with a near-verbatim retelling by an aged teacher about seeing a girl in the distance decades earlier, and how it remains in the teller’s mind as fresh now as then.

I remember feeling pretty outraged about that, as it dovetailed with an experience I had in broadcast school. Class was broken into two groups that would each write and produce a 20 minute report of the day’s news for review by some visiting important folks who might be thinking of hiring us. We worked very hard on ours, but honestly it wasn’t very good, given we only had 3 hours to do it … plus our anchor had a sustained laughing fit that went over about as well as Albert Brooks’ flop-sweat in BROADCAST NEWS a few years later.

Then the other group came on … and theirs was letter-perfect. With good reason, it was the same exact report they had done a month previously, just finessed and punched up with some further research. Nobody among the visitors or teachers seemed to care that the news was a month out of date — the main focus of their story was a tribute to the recently-deceased Jesse Owens, which should have been a pretty clear indicator that they weren’t doing the day’s news. That kind of self-plagiarism might be why I am always so quick to attack Horner’s film music too, because I really do see it as a form of cheating, one that seems to get rewarded time and again. I got really pissed and loudly called bullshit during the Jesse Owens regurgitation, which probably did not endear me to the visitors, but geezus, we were spending good money to attend this school and what was the lesson? Cheat your way to the top!

I checked, and the story was originally recorded in Russian (no surprise; they’re a rather cynical people) decades before Welles quoted it in his film. So its re-use on THE CRYING GAME was entirely kosher, and imo a brilliant exegesis of the film’s theme and it’s infamous gender reveal: yes, people only very rarely can change their natures, but what that nature may be (a beautiful woman; a hardened IRA terrorist) is not always what it appears to be at first glance.

yes, it is a frog, my bad. The point still holds. And to reemphasize my suggestion, it has to be the Enterprise that goes after her, not Disco. could be Pike or Kirk. better yet, make that the movie that tells how kirk takes over the Enterprise. perhaps as an epilogue, we can have Burnham crying, being held by Book over the death if evil-Georgio.

Unless the ratings are about a hundred times better than the critical and fan reaction — and Michelle Yeoh is willing to work for free — I don’t think a second one is in the cards.

She had a backstory? She was killed off so fast … What a waste.

She had a backstory?

They shaved it off along with her hair.

Given what little we saw of her, I thought she made a great Deltan.. she reminded me a lot of Ilia in the best way.

You know the real shame about this movie’s complete failure? It could have been a jumping-off point for a vital new era in Star Trek. With Nazism and an erosion of democracy taking hold in the United States at a dangerous pace since Jan. 20, we NEED Star Trek more than ever to become what it used to be, back in the ’60s and ’80s: a moral mirror held up to the ugliest aspects of society.

Well put, Dune. Another missed opportunity by the franchise (of many).

100
And it sounds like that’s what Kurtzman was saying in his interview the intent was, but like a poor marksman he … well, you know the rest

lol. Ok.

There was a time even recently that I would have considered ‘Nazism’ to be pretty strong language, thinking ‘soft fascism’ would perhaps be a more appropriate descriptor. But soft fascists don’t threaten to use military force to take over countries that don’t belong to them.

Not to get down in the dirt with the worst of them — well hell yeah, why not? — but soft fascists are probably soft ‘down there’ and need some jolt of sadism to get their joy buzzer sounding.

This country’s leadership is really resuming how it read a few years back, like one of those TOS eps where a nearly-omnipotent being turns out to be a spoiled bratty child.

I’m also often loathe to invoke Godwin’s Law but yeah…I keep getting reminded how back then a guy wrote a book that told everyone exactly what he wanted to do and then people were surprised. Now – we’ve got an FBI director candidate who wrote a book with an appendix of names he wanted to go after, we had Project 2025….and we’ll act shocked

How will the American public and our sacred institutions react when the show trials begin for those listed in that appendix? Just one more test to see if there is anything left worth salvaging, of which we’ve failed so many already.

“There was a fever over the land, a fever of disgrace, of indignity, of hunger. We had a democracy, yes, but it was torn by elements within. Above all there was fear, fear of today, fear of tomorrow, fear of our neighbors, and fear of ourselves. Only when you understand that can you understand what [Trump] meant to us, because he said to us:

‘Lift your heads. Be proud to be [American]. There are devils among us, communists, liberals, [immigrants, gays]. Once these devils will be destroyed your misery will be destroyed.’

It was the old, old story of the sacrificial lamb.

What about those of us who knew better, we who knew the words were lies and worse than lies? Why did we sit silent? Why did we take part? Because we loved our country. What difference does it make if a few political extremists lose their rights? What difference does it make if a few racial minorities lose their rights? It is only a passing phase. It is only a stage we are going through. It will be discarded sooner or later. [Trump] himself will be discarded — sooner or later. The country is in danger. We will march out of the shadows! We will go forward. FORWARD is the great password.”

– Judgement at Nuremberg, Ernst Janning monologue

A recipe for omelets at the end of the day is still just a recipe for omelets, however eloquent.

Once again, the people who make $700.00 an hour managed to convince the people who make $25.00 an hour that their issues are with the people who make $7.50 an hour. It’s never the truth, and it almost always seems to work.

Trelane was bratty, petulant, and completely self-absorbed, but he did have a child’s natural curiosity and a nose for hypocrisy. These people don’t even have that.

I didn’t love the movie. But it was diverting enough for one watch. I hate that they killed her so fast. Wanted to see a lot more of her being Deltan.

I assumed when she died that the rest of the movie was going to be at least partially about going back in time and undoing it. Nope. What a waste.