It’s been fun seeing so much of Kirk this season, but does that mean he’s now a regular? I don’t see how he could take a position on the Enterprise for years yet, so would that imply he just keeps coincidentally visiting all the time? Starts to strain plausibility after a while.
Uhura, Chapel, and M’Benga were supporting characters in TOS at best, and were horribly underutilized the first time around. Spock was a main, but one main out of three doesn’t feel like much. Kirk makes it two of three mains.
I think the main problem with Kirk, though, is that he kind of distracts from the regulars. Making him a once-a-season character, like Q in TNG, would probably work better than his three appearances during this one season.
I’d go beyond that even.
SNW is kind of a fork of TOS, not just a prequel … what were to have happened if the first pilot were picked up. And in that sense, the Spock we’re getting, up until now at least, isn’t just a prequel but a kind of continuation/interpretation of The Cage. Additionally, from The Menagerie, we know Spock had a relationship with Pike … so it’s window of time with an established existence and Spock within it, and, importantly, no real need to depict exactly how and when it transitions into the TOS era … as it’s its own period and can just be.
Kirk is not part of this time, and is very much the center of the TOS period. Adding him is necessarily an act prequel inference that is looking forward toward TOS.
And yea, Uhura, Chapel and M’Benga are different stories. Though I will say I’m not entirely happy that Uhura is in the show for the same reasons, except that in her case she’s not nearly the central character Kirk is in TOS and so basically operates as an independent character.
But we’ve also never really seen the details of how a ship transitions from one captain and crew to a new one. This is an opportunity to depict how Starfleet ensures continuity of command and crew cohesion when something happens to one of their captains.
I like seeing that there’s a system of mentoring and intership collaboration in place so that when there’s a sudden shakeup in the crew roster it’s not an unforeseen calamity but just another eventually they all trained for. Presumably this is happening all across the fleet, and it could well be that Kirk is doing this with several other ships as well as part of his command track.
It only seems strange because we know he’s destined to take Pike’s chair. He doesn’t know that. He’s just learning and absorbing all he can about how different crews function.