Much to my own surprise, I’m a complete sucker for this budding Spock/Chapel romance. I just want these two beautiful people to be happy together, damn it! We all know it’s doomed, unfortunately, and I hope that whatever inevitably destroys it doesn’t turn out to be too painful for the characters involved. Spock and Chapel are obviously not engaged in a romantic relationship in TOS, most obviously in Amok Time when such a pairing would have rendered the entire story trivial.
Someone mentioned in a previous thread that Spock’s Pon Farr (seven years before Amok Time) is closing in. I was skeptical in that thread that they would choose to touch on it then, but the events of this episode do make that seem quite a bit more likely, if (again) increasingly difficult to square with Amok Time.
I’m holding out hope for Spock/Chapel. I actually think SNW subtly branched away from the Prime timeline some time ago, so the future for these characters is not yet written!
The Temporal Cold War has made ripples in the timeline. The Romulan time traveler in “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” strongly hinted that history was at least a little bit different than it had been, with the date of the Eugenics War as case in point. I think the writers are freeing themselves up to make minor changes to canon. I don’t think it’s a branching timeline, though, it’s still Prime. Just a little bit different, like Gabriel Bell being replaced by Captain Sisco.
It’s sci-fi – if the producers feel strongly enough to make a blank slate, they can always retcon or shall I say future-con, and have SNW branch out a different timeline.
But there is nothing in the series so far that suggests SNW has diverged. Unless you count the visual aspects, I suppose, although that means Disco is also an alt-timeline.