I expected to enjoy Showtime’s series Odyssey 5, and I do — but perhaps not in quite the way I expected. This is a series about people and high-tech; but the series seems to be more about the people than about the high-tech.

In the pilot, six people are aboard a shuttle, in 2008, deploying a “black-ops” satellite, when something strange happens: the earth explodes. Five of those aboard the shuttle are rescued by a peregrinating alien who has witnessed a number of these planetary destructions over the past few centuries; he offers to send their minds back into their bodies of five years earlier, to give them a chance to do the necessary detective work and save the world.

Naturally, each of the characters in the shuttle ends up trying to satisfy his or her own particular agenda while saving the world. A knowledge of the future should ensure this, but the presence of these future minds in the past already seems to have made significant changes; for instance, Kurt Mendel (Sebastian Roché) intended to get rich on the unexpected ending of a football game — but apparently the large bet he made caused that ending to change, and he lost all his money. Newscaster Sarah is obsessed with saving her young son from the cancer that killed him — but the doctors can’t find any sign of the cancer, and her obsession seems as likely to destroy her marriage as the death of her son did in her previous life. Chuck Taggart (Peter Weller) is screwing up his family life something fierce, and his son Neil (Christopher Gorham) — who co-piloted for him on that shuttle mission — is acting way too old for his high-school classmates’ tastes.

And, of course, they with the other shuttle survivor (Tamara Craig Thomas) must track down the secret of the nanotechnology called “Leviathan” and the role that the “Bright Sky” secret satellite program may have played in the destruction of earth. And are there X-Files aliens floating around here somewhere?

Friday evenings at 10 p.m. on Showtime. The program is usually only about 45 minutes long, and is followed by Jeremiah, a series about a world in which all the grups died a decade earlier.