Star Trek Picard: Every Easter Egg & Hidden Reference From 'Maps And Legends'

8. F8 Of The Furious

Episode 2 opens with a flashback to April 5, 2385, 14 years before the events of Star Trek: Picard proper.

According to Alex Kurtzman's Star Trek: Picard podcast, this scene was added after the pilot was shot and broken into three episodes to expand the runtime. The scene itself is a callback to the recent Short Trek "Children of Mars" which showed the Synth attack on Mars from the point of view of two school kids, scored by Pater Gabriel's "Heroes" for some reason.

Both the short and this episode specifically mention it's First Contact Day, the day Vulcan made contact with Earth. This event was depicted in 1996's Star Trek: First Contact and the holiday itself celebrated in the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Homestead".

We're introduced to a Synth named F8 (get it?) and a number of other "plastic people" who look a lot like Data and the other Androids designed by Doctor Noonian Soong, seen throughout TNG. Their development in the Federation likely began after Data's death and B-4's failure, giving Bruce Maddox (see TNG's "The Measure of a Man" and "Data's Day") a subject to study in detail and reverse engineer.

The workers complain about having to work on First Contact Day like it's the Federation's Christmas, which is kind of odd given we saw children going to school on the day in "Children of Mars". One engineer even namechecks the "Una amino matrices", a reference to another Short Trek, "Q&A" in which Number One reveals she reprogrammed the food synthesizers to use the "Una glucose matrix", her own design apparently.