On Sunday night, viewers saw the first episode of a followup series, Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey, hosted by astrophysicist and science educator Neil deGrasse Tyson. It had been nearly 35 years since Carl Saganinspired a generation of scientists with 1980s 13-part series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. Immediately, one thing became clear: This is not your parents Cosmos.

The ideas and driving principles behind it are the same, but along with its new host, Cosmos has new urgency, and a new edge. Sagans Cosmos was awash with dream-like wonder, as personal as its title implied, colored by Sagans agnosticism. Tysons is different: informed by a generation of additional understanding and discovery and special effects too, its faster, brighter, and more explosive and more daring in its evangelism for science.

Sagans approach to science education was personal, almost intimately so. In contrast, Tyson has mastered the art of communicating his passion for ideas without exposing much about the man behind them. Tyson has gone to great lengths to avoid identifying with any specific ideological groups hes famous for saying that the only -ist he identifies as is scientist and hes long argued that science itself is fundamentally apolitical.

There comes a point, however, where the choice to present the universe through an evidence-based lens is itself a political act.

We live in an era where the very concept of truth is politicized; where policy-makers and voters and journalists stand in denial of demonstrable science in favor of magical thinking and faith; where science warped by dogma is given equal footing in classrooms and Congress; where teaching the controversy forces educators to lend false weight to bad science in the name of religion and tradition. And that has cost science the luxury of neutrality. In choosing to argue actively for science, without apologies or appeasement, Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey has thrown down a gauntlet.

But it might not be the gauntlet you expect.

Most of the controversy and criticism thats arisen around the first episode of A Space-Time Odyssey surrounds the choice of 16th-century philosopher Giordano Bruno as the first historical figure for the show to highlight. Bruno was a philosopher, not a hard scientist, and as Tyson points out, his theory of a heliocentric solar system and infinite cosmos was a lucky guess rather than the result of concrete evidence or research.

The value in Brunos tale and its relevance to Cosmos lies in what it says about science in a social and cultural context. In a recent interview with Space.com, Tyson emphasized that the shows historical profiles exist not only to highlight the discoveries of scientists, but also what comes when those [discoveries] encountered the social, political, cultural and religious mores of the day.

Brunos story, then, is less about a specific scientific discovery than the curiosity and willingness to challenge the reigning philosophy of the time that enables science. Its about the moral and human imperative to discovery, even in the face of opposition, and testament to the power of imagination as a catalyst for exploration. That Brunos view of the cosmos happened to be correct is incidental: what matters is that there, as elsewhere in his heretical philosophy, he dared to question rather than bow mindlessly to tradition.

It would have been easy to frame the segment as anti-religious, and its certainly been decried as such by some religious blogs, but that criticism is short-sighted and it misses a larger point.

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Explosive, Daring Cosmos Just Launched a New Crusade for Science