Last night, CBS finally took the wraps off its oft-delayed new show, Star Trek: Discovery. The two-part debut ("The Vulcan Hello" and "Battle at the Binary Stars") gave fans the first new TV Trek since Star Trek: Enterprise ceased subspace transmission in 2005. And they were ready for it—last night's premiere set a single-day record for new signups for CBS' All Access streaming service. Those who ponied up for an account got both parts of the debut; those who didn't only got the first episode, which aired on broadcast like something from the 1990s.

Is it worth the money? Was it worth the wait? WIRED writers Adam Rogers and Brendan Nystedt, two life-long Trek fans, boldly agreed to discuss the newest venture. Shields up! Red alert! Spoilers ahead!

Adam Rogers: All right, Brendan. My mind to your mind; my thoughts to your thoughts. How are we feeling? On the one hand, I am glad to have some Star Trek to watch, and while I got all aflutter watching a Klingon armada get #disruptive on the United Federation of Planets, some part of my brain was definitely spinning on the story problems and possible solutions I wrote about last week. Like, it spent two hours on the kind of character deployment and story set-up that Deep Space Nine could've knocked out in a single cold open. And this definitely wasn’t explore-strange-new-worlds-seek-out-new-life Trek. This was dark Starfleet at war, with a captain who meets her Kobayashi Maru and a promising officer who ends up sentenced to life in the stockade for mutiny.

Hey, relatedly, there is no piece of culture I can embrace wholly where Michelle Yeoh dies an ignominious death. I didn’t like it in Sunshine and I don’t like it here. She was in Heroic Trio, for pete’s sake. She coulda taken that Klingon.

Brendan Nystedt: I saw it coming from a lightyear away but still, ouch. What I didn’t see coming was that they’d also kill the Klingon cult leader, T’Kuvma.

Overall, even with my quibbles over the first two episodes, I’m still holding off judging it entirely. I think the two-parter backstory was an intriguing way to open this new show but it also worries me that the CBS All Access "first taste is free" thing means we don’t have a sense of what the bulk of the story will involve because the network is putting a lot of window dressing in the episodes people can watch for free. Maybe fans who didn’t like the introduction would learn to love where it pivots to next.

Was the opening dark? Yeah, it was. I appreciated that Michael Burnham wanted to get out there and check out the OUO (object of unknown origin) and that they bring up the balance between exploration and war. I think that darkness is something this time period can exploit more since we’re firmly in the "cowboy diplomacy" days of Kirk.

Even with my Star Trek brain fully engaged (heh), I was surprised that the drama worked on me. When Burnham disables the captain with a perfectly-executed Vulcan Nerve Pinch, I was stunned. When that Klingon ship took out the USS Europa while de-cloaking, I recoiled. As much as I was scrutinizing the uniforms and the Klingon makeup, the show worked for me on a basic level.

Rogers: Yes, yes. Me too.

But be honest. If the set up for this show was that it is set 100 years after Voyager rather than a decade before TOS, would it be any different? In what sense is this a prequel? The Klingons do not look like Klingons we have seen. The instrumentation on the ships is new. The uniforms are new. The pew-pew of the phasers and photon torpedoes are new. The Federation starships don’t look anything like the ships of the era—were no Constitution-class starships deployed at that point? Why don’t the Bussard collectors have the light-up pinwheel spinny effect? Why don’t the warp nacelles have to be as far from the crewed parts of the ships? What are these Star Wars communications holograms doing here?