Though the series is in its third season it was only just this week that I started watching Star Trek: Discovery.

My affiliation with Star Trek goes all the way back to the series’ original run in the mid to late 1960s, though as a child my understanding of the episodes at that time was quite spotty. By the mid 70s with syndication I became quite familiar with the series and a lifelong fan. To this day the words Star Trek always conjure the 60s television show before all other images.

I enjoyed The Next Generation seasons 3 thru 5 finding the first two a little dry and the having lost interest later as the stories became to fantastical and too often resolved by hand waving rather than character motivations. Deep Space Nine was amusing but not compelling to me. I switched off Voyager by the third episode and bounced of Enterprise’s pilot, so the announcement of a new series did not exactly excite me. With the added hurdle it required subscribing to yet another pay streaming service I simply never watched Star Trek: Discovery.

A subscription deal by way of one of my credit card companies along with the promise of a much larger library of Paramount films induced me to finally try the service and now I have watched the first three episode of Discovery.

I’m enjoying it.

The stories so far are much more character based with flawed and imperfect people propelling the plot by their motivations, mistakes, and misapprehensions rather than relying on ‘It’s science-fiction so we can do anything!’ plotting.

Don’t get me wrong, the science of the show is still far from rigorous, but the same can be said of the original series. I like it when an SF property works hard to get their science right but one can be entertained by compelling characters without the edge of hard SF.

I recognize that the series is at odds with what many consider cannon for the Federation Universe but again the original show, produced during the heyday of episodic television where every episode stood alone, never bent knee to the gods of continuity. So much so that modern younger fans watching the original episodes conclude that General Order 24 in A Taste of Armageddon  must be a bluff rather than that the beloved United Federation of Planets actually has a general order for the destruction of a civilization. Old Trek and new trek have never been fully compatible.

So, recognizing those points, I like the show and it’s take on the characters. I enjoy the concept of a central human character who was raised on Vulcan and whose identity is conflicted by being biological human of culturally Vulcan. It’s possible that the first three episodes have misled me and if that is the case there are other programs to occupy my time but for now I am a fan and it has become part of my unwind ritual before bedtime.

Star Trek: Discovery currently streams on CBS All Access soon to be rebranded as Paramount +.