I’m not too dissimilar from you, but expected cameos. Even Kirk in the S1 finale worked for me, because it was mostly about Pike but also a bit meta about the differences between him and Kirk. Continuity is great after all.

My point is that there’s a line beyond which the show leans prequel, and S2 has crossed that line IMO.

Which is fine, if that’s what people want, which I suspect is the case. I also suspect a TOS reboot would go down well and the execs are fully aware of this. But, is this really good for Trek or even good Trek? When was the last time we had new trek that wasn’t a prequel or driven by nostalgia? Lower Decks? I’m not a Discovery fan, but it surely tried, as did Picard S1 I’d say. Otherwise you might have to go all the way back to DS9. Thing is we’re as far from DS9 now as it was from TOS. SNW was something fresh, a true example of Trek being back on track by retaining the core but doing something new. The more it leans prequel, for me, the more I begin to feel all of nu-Trek is a missed opportunity and not worthy of celebration, which honestly saddens me (apart from lower decks, now my definitely fav new Trek!)

I would have it run until Kirk takes over as captain. Then jump forward to just after The Motion Picture.

This not only gives them about a decade of time before TWOK that’s barely been touched by the screen canon, they can do a design revamp to freshen the series up using TMP as a starting point, and they handle the fact that with a series per year the actors are going to quickly age ahead of their characters.

Cheers! I had hoped we'd get a main cast focused finale and was triggered to have Scotty turn up so prominently. So that's 4(?) out of 10 episodes in S2 with a major TOS appearance? (5 out of the last 11 counting the finale of S1) It was a "maybe they won't cross the line for me ... oh ok they've crossed the line" moment.

Interestingly, in the ready room for this episode, there's Kurtzman talking about bringing in Scotty, and he speaks about bringing in the TOS characters as something they were always going to do over time. I'd be curious to know how publicly that was stated because I missed it and if it were known from the top I certainly wouldn't have been so excited for the show. Especially given, as I remember anyway, back at the end of Discovery S1 when Pike and the enterprise first showed up, there was some blow back that Discovery was going to devolve so quickly into TOS prequel nostalgia and not remain its own thing (that Discovery was a TOS prequel might not have sat well with many Trek fans at the time either though I don't recall). The show assured us that it'll still stay Discovery and that the enterprise was just a cameo of sorts, and then we got Pike, who everyone loved and Discovery, to its credit, remained its own thing even with Spock turning up (and had maybe its best or at least most interesting or bold season??).

Unless everyone but me knew SNW was going to be a TOS prequel, it feels like the needle has moved since then into a more ready acceptance of prequel/reboot material ... which, if true, is not great TBH.

As for making peace with it ... yea, I'll still watch SNW and probably enjoy a lot of it. What's been lost for me, if the prequel feeling continues, is that I'll never "love" SNW, and it will ultimately be "ok" for me, and new-Trek's legacy will, for me, have lost its shining light and fall back to mediocrity, unfortunately.

If someone came to me and said they don't watch Trek anymore because it's gotten stale since the 90s (which has happened), now, I would say fair enough, but at the beginning of S2 I would have said (and did say) "have you watched SNW?"

Looking forward to Lower Decks though!

Cheers for the sympathies!!! (sorry for the rant!)