Star Trek Picard: Every Easter Egg & Hidden Reference From 'Absolute Candor'

The episode closes out with that battle with Kar Kantar's antique Romulan Bird-of-Prey that Rios promised us in the second act. The Bird-of-Prey (BOP) first appeared in the TOS episode "Balance of Terror" (which introduced the Romulans) and showed up in "The Deadly Years" and the remastered version of "The Enterprise Incident".

An older, 22nd design of BOP appeared in Star Trek: Enterprise's "Minefield". In case you're confused, the Klingons later adopted the Bird-of-Prey name for a ship of their own design first appearing in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and showing up a ton in Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine.

Rios says the BOP, an old heap, has a primitive weapons targeting system, but the La Sirena can't outrun her. This requires the activation of Emmet, the Emergency Tactical Hologram, who does a lot more leaning on his console than firing. This actually raises the question why a hologram would even need to operate the tactical controls if he's basically part of the ship's computer, so maybe he is actually doing something here?

Emmet calls the ship that joins in to help the La Sirena "hideous". It's a new design, but the pilot is someone we all know and love: Annika Hansen aka Seven of Nine, Tertiary Adjunct of Unimatrix 01 aka just plain Seven. Seven's appearance is accompanied by a few notes of Jerry Goldsmith's Star Trek: Voyager theme on piano before she collapses to the floor and the episode cuts to black.

Now that's a cliffhanger.