Star Trek: Discovery: Will it be a return to form and offer something more than just action?

In the age of peak TV, is there room for a blockbuster reboot of hoary old Star Trek?

At a time when android orgies set to Nine Inch Nails or parents pointlessly burning their own daughter alive are watercooler fare, the cheery optimism of the franchise Gene Roddenberry’s founded could seem tragically anachronistic.

That said, you don’t get to five decades as a ubiquitously recognisable entertainment brand - the big-budget Star Trek Beyond marked Trek’s golden jubilee last year – without having something robust to offer, and whether or not this persists will be put to the test next weekend with the arrival of Star Trek: Discovery.

The sixth live-action show under the Trek banner and the first since the quiet death of the tepidly-received Enterprise in 2005, Discovery is set a decade before the Shatner-and-Nimoy starring original.

Beyond that, details are vague: after a troubled development that saw legendary showrunner Bryan Fuller (Hannibal) sign up for a year only to jump ship over some creative differences, home network CBS is playing things fairly close to its chest.

Will it be a hardcore gift for fans who know what a gravimetric field displacement manifold is, or will it be a space action-adventure with a bit of bonus brand recognition, along the lines of the recent rebooted film trilogy?

What we do know is that Discovery is set at a time when the Federation’s usual cold war with the Klingons is scorching hot. Unusually for Trek, our main character isn’t a captain, but a first officer: The Walking Dead’s Sonequa Martin-Green is in the lead as Michael Burnham, a human raised as a Vulcan by – intriguingly – Spock’s dad Sarek.

How this happened and how Spock never thought to mention her across hundreds of hours of screen time will presumably be explained, as doubtless will be how Burnham makes her transition from working on the USSS Shenzhou, captained by Michelle Yeoh’s Phillipa Georgiou, to the USS Discovery, captained by Gabriel Lorca, played by our own Jason Isaacs. Rainn Wilson, beloved as Dwight Schrute in The Office US, will appear as Harry Mudd, a con-man character who, pleasingly, also faced off with Shatner and co. back in the day.

There’s not much else that’s been released about the plot, beyond casting information for the usual braces of medical, security and science officers and a few new aliens – Doug Jones, a contortionist and actor you’ll have seen as the fawn in Pan’s Labyrinth, is in full makeup as Lieutenant Saru, member of a new race called the Kelpiens (presumably not a seaweed-based species).

If you’ve been following Trek since your swaddling clothes – come on, there are more of you out there than admit it – there’s a lot that’s excitingly new here. The point of view of a non-captain with a ladder to climb, and the clear hint that the Shenzhou is destroyed at some point – the cast list bulges with Discovery crew members, and very few Shenzhou members – are both fresh, and there are huge opportunities offered by the kind of serialised storytelling that’s the norm now but that was pioneered in part by Deep Space Nine back in the Nineties.

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A bigger question is how the idealism patterned into Trek’s DNA will translate in an uncertain 2017.

Gene Roddenberry was always adamant that the future he conceived was one when conflict on planet Earth had been resolved – there were even several scenes across different programmes where time travellers are baffled by the future’s lack of need for a money-based economy. The 1960s show was a product of gee-whizz rocket age optimism, with the nationally and ethnically-balanced crew a hugely progressive statement that the turbulence of its time would lead to a brighter future.

Fifty years on, problems of racial division and national competition are obstinately persistent, only without the hopefulness that technology is going to make them all redundant. In one sign of progress, we’re promised a matter-of-fact depiction of a same-sex relationship on the show but, once again, the poor old Klingons are called on to carry some symbolic weight – except this time, rather than the Soviet Union, they’re standing in for something closer to home.

“The allegory is that we really started working on the show in earnest around the time the election was happening,” showrunner Aaron Harberts told Entertainment Weekly. “The Klingons are going to help us really look at certain sides of ourselves and our country. Isolationism is a big theme. Racial purity is a big theme. The Klingons are not the enemy, but they do have a different view on things. It raises big questions: Should we let people in? Do we want to change?... It’s been interesting to see how the times have become more of a mirror than we even thought they were going to be.”

Harberts’s statement predictably threw a Trump-supporting cat amongst the pigeons, and CBS rapidly denied the racially-prejudiced, war-like and philistine alien race was in any way akin to the president’s more deplorable supporters.

That said, reflecting the times it’s made in has long been a staple of Trek. We in the UK (via Netflix) will see who gets in the neck, and whether or not Star Trek: Discovery can stand out in a crowded TV marketplace, next Monday.