I've been wanting to watch this show and this might be a good one to do that
It is technically episodic, but it's not. Unless you're pretty deep in star trek (there are references to Enterprise in this episode) I'd recommend watching season 1 first to get a feeling for the characters.
It's not long and it's a great ride. If you really want to skip season 1, though, this is the episode to start with. The first two are basically led with "last time on star trek snw".
A friend of mine watched the episode in isolation, being familiar with classical Star Trek and having only a vague idea of what happened in/since Discovery. He got quite confused about where and how the episode fits on the timeline. Anyway, if the events took place in New York (à la The City on the Edge of Forever) or San Francisco (à la The Voyage Home and others) this episode wouldn't really be noteworthy: just a side quest of a character attempting to fix the timeline and learn to accept themselves in the process.
When they first landed in the alley, I said out loud, "That looks a lot like Toronto" and then... Dundas Square, Harbourfront, Jump, Queens Quay. As someone who used to travel between Toronto and Montreal a few times a month, the 'side quest' to Vermont was the most unbelievable part of the whole thing.
It looked like a pretty generic alley to me 😜
[spoiler ahead] I'm not sure what was the least believable. Bribing border guards with money earned by playing chess in the park (after splurging on a really nice hotel downtown) was definitely unbelievable, and it would have been so easy to go around it. First of all, Pelia's place didn't have to be in Vermont, but even if it had to, the episode revolves around this fictional Lake Ontario bridge that "symbolized international cooperation, the world getting smaller, humanity working together". They could just extend that to say there was no hard border any more (à la Schengen).