Yeah, as an enjoyer of both Lower Decks and Disco S4, I don't feel the need to diminish what those shows are doing to recognize what SNW is pulling off. I think Disco eventually figured out how to be a Trek show of its own sort, and I think LD has been until now uniquely the show that knew exactly what it was trying to be out of the gate. It doesn´t bother me that they all play with some of the same material in different tones and from different perspectives, except the unfortunate cases where Discovery has wandered headlong into tropes that LD had already taken the piss out of. I think the first episode is more successful at doing thematic things that S2 of Picard was trying to do, but I think the reasons it didn´t fully work in Picard are less interesting than the reasons it did in SNW, etc. SNW's production design is also massively benefiting from what worked and what didn't in the first two seasons of Disco. And hell, some small fraction of the intertextual weight of quintessential Trekness that the second episode was standing on could be attributed to less accomplished takes in Enterprise involving Hoshi.
But like, as a thing in itself, SNW is something else. The cast has chemistry, the dialogue is snappy, the effects are lavish, both episode scripts were tight and kept things simple but carefully thought out, and the production design is just insanely on-point from the slightly pointier Galileo to the tray of primary-colored liquids Chapel showed up with in the med bay. There´s humor, and the crew tend to like each other and have fun at their jobs, which means I'm more likely to have fun watching. (Which I know is a bit of a dig at live action modern Trek for me to say, but LD isn´t enough, I've been starved for it. Uhura and Chapel's exchange meeting each other while tranquing the Goan guy at the turbolift took three years of weight off my heart in ways only Tendi has in modern era Trek.)
I love the first episode's The Day the Earth Stood Still homage, and I think the episode very effectively solved a nagging problem about the optimism of Trek's future - "Is it really optimistic if we have to blow ourselves up first and then Vulcans fix it?" - by having Pike straight up address the camera in a speech dripping with double meaning and say "My fictional timeline is fixed, but yours, by which I mean you the viewer, your timeline, is not," and starting the series there gives the whole series some thematic ground to stand on. I don't know if the plan is to end every episode with a letter to Princess Celestia like these two did, but all the best episodes of all the best Trek shows have, so I'm not going to complain if it works out that way.
And if this show can keep delivering on the details, whether it's those colorful vials in sick bay or Pike choking on himself asking where Uhura sees herself in ten years, just fully delivering on the concepts and characters at a moment to moment level of resolution like this, it is going to be
the definitive Trek series I recommend to people by the end.
There were probably better ways to explain how they got a hold of some warp tech without trying to shoehorn the Discovery reference in there (like they could have just said a ship crashed and reversed engineered it) but it was okay. It just added uncessary extra steps.
They wanted to make it involve Pike, though. It gives it extra weight that it was not just "we" Starfleet responsible, but Pike's own unwitting actions. What I like is that they made that choice to give the situation some extra gravity, that what we're seeing is a consequence of something we viewers were around for and (theoretically) cheering on at the time, but they didn't milk it unnecessarily and overplay the fact that Pike was involved when it logically
could have been any Starfleet ship and he knows that too, it just happened to be our guy's.
