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Episodes viewed: “Amok Time,” “Who Mourns for Adonais?”, “The Changeling,” “Mirror, Mirror,” “The Apple,” “The Doomsday Machine,” “Catspaw,” “I, Mudd”

Behold, the dawn of a new season! A program’s second stroll around the calendar is a risky venture. Smart show runners interpret a network’s decision to renew a series as a mandate to be awesome. But all too often the process of upping the budget and raising the stakes leads to a serious overstepping of boundaries; Friday Night Lights fans recoiled in horror when their favorite breezy small-town rubes chucked a corpse into a river. Trek had survived the first leg of its five-year mission – but what next?

Not a man to cower at the challenge, Gene Roddenberry instead took his beloved creation to Warp 9.

Meet Ensign Pavel Chekov, a chipper, boyish new recruit guaranteed to navigate Star Trek into the hearts of millions.

Season Two is where Trek really begins to gel as a work with a coherent vision. The abrupt shuffling of duties and uniforms mercifully over, our primary-colored peace envoys seize the chance to take root as fully formed, interconnected characters. This camaraderie acts as fuel for far weightier deeds than those that came before; in the grand drama of exploring strange new worlds, this is where the going gets bold.

It’s also where the series fully adopts the tics that would lodge it so ruthlessly in American nerd culture. In the first season, Kirk’s red-shirted comrades were mere window dressing, largely shielded from harm; in Season Deux, if you’re not an officer, a red shirt means your end is nigh. Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy’s “He’s dead, Jim” and “I’m a doctor, not a mechanic” are now veritable crowd-pleasers; Kirk still hasn’t said “Beam me up, Scotty” to Lt. Commander Montgomery Scott, but reportedly, that never actually happens.

Ever on point, Chekov deals with a heated situation.

Basically, the show now knows it’s totally sexy, and the time has arrived to strut its stuff. Plots generally cling to formula, but said formula is retrofitted with a sense of presence far removed from the chatter-heavy stories of yore. Only with the public’s hearty endorsement would Kirk dare battle Mr. Spock to the death (“Amok Time”) or have the stones to take on the Greek Pantheon (“Who Mourns for Adonais?”). And when I say that, I mean, literally, the Greek Pantheon. Turns out they were aliens all along.

Far headier than its B-movie title lets on, “The Doomsday Machine” brims with this new vigor. The USS Enterprise encounters the remains of a Federation vessel helmed by sole survivor Commodore Matthew Decker, who raves about a nomadic behemoth that devours solar systems for fuel. Normally, this would have played out as an epic showdown. Instead, the titular machine acts as a galactic Fortinbras, looming threateningly on the periphery while Kirk and Decker engage in a power struggle over our trusty ship.

The emptiness of space having created a gaping void in his soul, Chekov lets out some interstellar angst. Just kidding! That’s a mirror-universe Chekov, being tortured. Ha!

Beyond the plotting, the writers seriously amp up their willingness to indulge their every creative whim, no matter how arbitrary. The first-season episode “Mudd’s Women” gets a sequel in “I, Mudd,” in which the crew of the Enterprise stumble across their favorite babe smuggler, now king of a planet of female androids programmed to heed his command. As expected, the androids turn out to be evil, so the crew attempts to fry their logic circuits by staging the creepiest dance sequence on ’60s network television:

Given the chance to boogie, Chekov leaps upon it with gusto.

Most important of all, Trek is finally fun to watch. Many budding fans who worked backwards to “Space Seed” from The Wrath of Khan probably felt cheated when they found out that Kirk’s initial encounter with his most notorious nemesis was so talky. That’s because the Trek that would allow something as exciting as Wrath of Khan did not yet exist.

Granted, the show isn’t really pushing the envelope, nor would it ever – it’s still a crapshoot of stories about a starship encountering monsters in space. But it’s still a leap forward in terms of energy and self-assurance – the writers clearly had a number of crazy ideas they wanted to air out, but they weren’t given free rein while the network was still test-driving the series. But whereas the first season was Trek as an idea, the second season is the beginning of Trek as an institution – and I’m excited for what’s next.

Notable upcoming episodes: “Metamorphosis,” “The Trouble With Tribbles.”