Star Trek: Picard Season 2 Episode 6
It’s hard to believe that Star Trek: Picard season 2 has passed its halfway point. The series is now set to start answering all of its biggest mysteries. In the process, “Two of One” is both a nail-biter and a break for the crew. Everyone’s undercover at a party in 2024, but they’re also all trying to keep anyone from messing with Jean-Luc’s ancestor Renée Picard (Penelope Mitchell). Of all the contemporary Star Trek episodes post-2017, “Two of One,” may have the fewest verbal and visual Easter eggs and canonical references to the bigger franchise. And yet, there are a few huge moments that connect it to the bigger tapestry of Star Trek. Here are five of the biggest Easter eggs and deep cuts in Picard’s “Two of One.”
Raffi Narrowly Avoids Falling off the Wagon
This moment is very subtle, and if you miss it, it’s because it’s a reference to the events of Picard season 1 and Raffi’s backstory. From her introduction in “Maps and Legends,” Raffi was established as someone who struggles with substance abuse. Throughout that season, we see Raffi drinking booze a lot, and at one point, she even reprogrammed the replicator to prevent herself from ordering any alcohol. In “Two of One,” Raffi eyes a bottle of bourbon after a bartender asks her what she wants to drink. She replies, “club soda, please.”
OV-165 Shuttle
When Jean-Luc gives Renée a pep talk about fear, he asks her to describe a model of a spaceship hanging above them. Renée tells him it’s the “OV-165 Shuttle…I call her Spike because she has these kickass aerospike engines that use less fuel.” The OV-165 Shuttle appeared in every episode of the prequel series Star Trek: Enterprise as part of the opening credits montage. Back then, all we knew about that ship is that it came sometime after our contemporary knowledge of spaceflight and sometime before Zefram Cochrane’s flight of the Phoenix in First Contact. Because the shuttle has the designation “OV-165,” previous apocrypha has suggested that this ship was an outgrowth of NASA’s space shuttle program in which all of those ships were also given the prefix “OV” for “orbiter vehicle.” It seems unlikely we’ll see Renée fly this exact ship in Picard season 2, but then again, we don’t actually know if the X-1 Shango has some kind of dropship or not.
Nomad Probe Behind Jean-Luc
In the same scene, while the two Picards chat, there’s another huge deep-cut, this time, to The Original Series. Sitting just behind Jean-Luc, we see a model from the original incarnation of the space probe Nomad. This is the second time this season of Picard has referenced this probe, the first time being in episode 4, “Watcher” when Q and Renée were sitting at the Jackson Roykirk Plaza. In the TOS episode “The Changeling,” we learned the Nomad probe was launched from Earth in the year 2002. After it merged with an alien intelligence called Tan Ru, Nomad became a kind of amoral Star Trek version of a Dalek. But, before that, it was just an innocent space probe. The model behind Picard seems to match the design Spock found in the library computers of the Enterprise in “The Changeling.” Nomad also appears in the Enterprise episode “Dead Stop,” which reveals that Travis has a model in his quarters. Clearly, in the Trek timeline, this was a very popular space probe in the early 2000s. Visually, what Jean-Luc does in this scene is the opposite of what Kirk does in “City.” In that classic episode, Spock and Kirk prevent Bones from saving Edith, which then restores their timeline. Because the visual language is so similar, it seems possible that Picard is remixing this idea. Kirk and Spock had to go back in time because their future didn’t exist. In Harlan Ellison’s original teleplay, this timeline change went so far as to include an alternate starship in orbit of the planet, crewed by savage pirates. And, in the 2014 IDW comic book adaptation of Ellison, that alternate timeline was finally depicted. Interestingly, in Picard season 2, episode 3, “Assimilation,” when Rios materializes in mid-air, he falls near a deli with the sign reading “Tipton Bros. Deli.” This references writers Scott Tipton and David Tipton, who wrote the comic book adaptation of “City on the Edge of Forever.”
Tallinn’s Servo References Gary Seven
At the end of the episode, when Tallinn is scanning Picard’s brain, she’s waving around a device vaguely reminiscent of a sonic screwdriver from Doctor Who. But, this isn’t a Who reference. Instead, it’s a callback to the TOS episode “Assignment: Earth” in which fellow “Class 1 Supervisor” Gary Seven uses a similar device.
