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

Back on the Artifact, Soji meets the Executive Director of the Borg Reclamation Project, Hugh. Hugh (aka Third of Five) first appeared in the standout Star Trek: The Next Generation season 5 episode "I, Borg" and later season 7's less good episode "Decent, Part II". Hugh's scars here are consistent with his Borg implants from those early episodes, he's even got a prosthetic eye where his holographic imaging system once was.

Hugh takes Soji to meet Ramdha (not Rhonda), an ex-Borg referred to as "disordered". It's revealed that all the "disordered" former drones aboard the Artifact are Romulans. Hugh says they're the only Romulans ever assimilated... as far as he knows. He's wrong though. We previously saw another Romulan X-B in the Voyager episode "Unity" and we saw a Romulan being assimilated (by Seven of Nine of all people) in the episode "Infinite Regress".

Ramdha was aboard the Romulan Imperial scout ship Shaenor when it was assimilated by the cube. We previously saw a Romulan scout ship in the TNG episode "The Defector". Something about the Shaenor or the 25 Romulans aboard it seem to have caused the sub matrix collapse that disabled the cube, further confirmation that the Artifact wasn't a victim of Janeway's battle with the Borg in Voyager's series finale. It's something more sinister and serialized storytelling-y.