Star Trek Picard: Every Easter Egg & Hidden Reference From 'The End Is The Beginning'

We finally made it to the end of the pilot after its piecemeal release over the past three weeks. We also made it to space for the inevitable dropping of Picard's second most famous catchphrase (err catch-word).

Aptly titled "The End is the Beginning", the episode contains references from across the Star Trek Universe's past and current CBS All Acess-era. This includes a big reference that's probably the closest the franchise has come to a fourth wall break. We also get yet another alien forehead explanation.

Pour yourself a glass of Chateau Picard, pack your vape with snakeleaf, and let's go through the episode scene by scene to find all the stuff you may have missed. Or if you're a Star Trek fan, all the stuff you spotted, but need a pat on the back for catching.

Engage!

"The End is the Beginning" starts with another flashback to 2385, this time just after the Mars attack we saw in "Maps and Legends" and the Short Trek "Children of Mars".

Picard and Raffi Musiker meet at Starfleet Headquarters as an air car lands and makes a distinctly Jetsons sound. Admiral Picard and Lieutenant Commander Musiker are wearing some sweet new (old) duds. We actually got a glimpse of these uniforms in last week's flashback, but this is the first time we're able to see the post-Star Trek Nemesis/pre-Star Trek: Picard Starfleet duty uniform in detail. Aside from briefly appearing last week, they're prominently featured in the recent Star Trek: Picard Countdown comics which take place not long before this scene.

Raffi mentions that the supernova threatens billions of Romulans in the Beta Quadrant. This is the first time the location of the Romulan Empire is specifically stated to be located in the Beta Quadrant as established by Geoffrey Mandel's superb reference book, Star Trek: Star Charts.

Patrick Stewart has been appropriately de-aged using CGI. And since he was among the first actors to ever be de-aged in a movie (see X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine), we can really see how the technology has improved.

Technology that has apparently not improved, however, is PADD technology. Both Picard and Raffi hold gigantic tablets that are somehow larger and chunkier than the PADDs that showed up in Star Trek: The Next Generation. PADD stands for Personal Access Display Device and were omnipresent in Trek's 24th century; characters would have stacks of PADDs on their desk, just like all those stacks of iPads we have today.