This is interesting because, in season 1, Raffi was constantly falling off the wagon and indulging in booze even when she (and others) knew she had a problem. Picard even brought a bottle of wine for her to drink in “Maps and Legends.” Famously, most booze served aboard Federation starships is “synthehol” that can’t get you drunk, which could help explain why Raffi going back to Starfleet in season 2 has made her seem a lot happier. Interestingly, in this same scene, Rios talks about how the cigar he’s holding in this scene is “real,” implying that whatever he smoked in “The Star Gazer” (and all of last season?) were fake cigars, which, hopefully, are not bad for you.
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.
