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!)