Star Trek diehards have spent much of the past decade screaming into the void. The franchise’s ideological nemesis, Star Wars, has trampled all before it, Imperial Stormtrooper-style. JJ Abrams’s rebooted Trek films have meanwhile added to the insult, with their buccaneering dumbing down of Gene Roddenberry’s original vision of a shiny, optimistic future. It’s enough to make you pull off your pointy Vulcan ears in frustration – or yell "Abramssss!" until your face turns purple.

But, finally, respite is at hand. A new science fiction series has just beamed down which evokes the utopianism and intellectual ambition of the original Sixties Star Trek and its no-less iconic early Nineties follow-up, The Next Generation. Strange new worlds are explored. Knotty moral questions come under the microscope. Humanity is celebrated for rising above its present day squabbles and charting a bright, hopeful course for the stars.

This new series is not Star Trek: Discovery. The overblown latest official addition to the canon– freshly arrived on Netflix – is the embodiment of everything fans have come to loathe about "JJ Trek". It’s noisy, self-consciously bleak and hobbled by video game-level special effects. Some critics have praised Discovery’s dystopian grit – but those with a deeper appreciation of sci-fi may see it as a fundamental portrayal of Trek’s core values.