I finally watched Discovery recently, holding true to my boycott of CBS’s bundle until I could just pay for a season, and I was surprised at how good it is. Not just the turbocharged CGI, but they seemed to capture That Old Trek Magic, invoking Federation principles while hardly seeming corny at all. And plenty of plot holes to keep alive the old tradition of pointing and laughing…I mean, “spore drive”??? spore drive???? But still, somehow it all worked. I even got used to bald Klingons, after a while.

I remember my main criticism of Enterprise was that it was too timid about exploring the hardship and grittiness of the Federation’s early years. The story about the long-haul low-warp cargo haulers was what I was looking for, back when things weren’t so effortless for the Federation. But mostly it seemed to be just an arbitrary 50%, ships were 50% slower, weapons 50% less powerful, and somehow all the same civilizations were all at the same 50% level of development.

Looks like Discovery has found a decade or so between Enterprise and TOS/the Kelvin split that it can mine, and it’s producing gold.

Maybe too, times have changed. Abrams wanted his universe to be dark, born in tragedy, struggling to survive. But that describes our present reality a little too well, and I admit, I enjoyed escaping into Discovery’s universe for a while. So much so I watched the series twice back to back. We could use some of that old time Star Trek idealism.