Sold!

What if she had actually drilled in

and found an Easter egg in there,

like a little decorated egg?

We could still do that.

Yeah, like a Cadbury egg coming out instead.

Oh, no.

That would be a yolk.

[snickering]

See what I did?

It's like joke but with a Y, and also eggs.

[film beeps]

I'm Michael Chabon, and I am the showrunner

for season one of Star Trek: Picard.

I'm Akiva Goldsman, and I am the executive producer

of that show, Star Trek: Picard, that he was talking about.

Today, we are here to talk about Easter eggs

that can be found in each and every episode

of Star Trek: Picard from this first season.

You know we're Jewish, right?

I feel like it's kinda anti-Semitic.

Yeah, why are they Easter? I think we can call them.

Passover eggs, yeah.

Passover eggs.

Or, no, Afikomans.

Done.

♪ Blue sky ♪

♪ Smiling at me ♪

Like an Afikoman.

Indeed.

An Easter egg, I think the primary thing that defines

an Easter egg is that it is hidden.

There's a difference between a shout-out or a callback,

things that are obvious and open and deliberate

and you're saying, oh here, remember this thing

where we're mentioning it now,

and it's a callback to that other thing.

I should have done this a long time ago.

You were always welcome.

Whereas an Easter egg tends to be something

that has been concealed on purpose

and will not be found or noticed by someone

who isn't looking for it.

Like.

An Easter egg or an Afikoman.

True.

An Easter egg is not required for the plot to continue.

Yes, right,

and that's a thing that, it's a treat.

An Easter egg is a surprise, and if you find it,

it makes you happy, but it is kinda irrelevant,

it's gratuitous.

Don't know if we're gonna get to cover

all of the Easter eggs because we will forget some.

We were also really drunk while making this show.

So we will forget even more.

And we're gonna try.

I mean, one thing's absolutely certain.

We put Easter eggs in.

We did.

And that was something we did for our own pleasure,

for the anticipated pleasure of the fans,

so there are Easter eggs.

We're gonna try to remember where we hid them,

and I think that's very classically Easter too.

There's, you'll go out a couple days later,

and you'll say, what's that smell?

Yeah, yeah.

[ethereal music]

I don't think we actually,

there are no Easter eggs in the credits.

There are no Easter eggs.

No, no.

[Interviewer] Okay.

Are there credits?

[chips tinking]

Call.

No.

Nah.

No.

There would be an Easter egg in the poker playing

if the five queens were a reference to Q.

Yes.

But they aren't.

Turns out they're not.

So, it's not an Easter egg,

but it could have been.

Could have been.

Some people thought it was.

We could pretend.

Yeah.

Maybe there are no Easter eggs in this show.

Is that gonna wreck this?

[laughing]

[ethereal music]

Yeah, that had a bunch of Easter eggs.

Those have Easter eggs.

There are a lot of Easter eggs in there.

That's a room of eggs.

It's like a basket.

That is a basket of eggs.

It's a basket of eggs.

It really is.

Not just we, the writers, but very much

the production designer and set

decorator and all of the people involved

in creating the set of the Starfleet archive

viewed that as an opportunity

to hide a bunch of Easter eggs.

[Akiva] A bunch.

The big obvious one that's easiest to see,

I think, is the banner.

Happy Picard Day.

The Happy Captain Picard Day

is a recreation of a prop that was created

for an episode of The Next Generation in which

the children onboard the Enterprise

celebrate Captain Picard Day, and it was recreated.

Ours is less shiny.

Is it, yeah?

It is, apparently some people criticized us for that.

Yeah, for not being shiny enough.

There is a scale model of the Star Gazer,

which is Picard's first command.

His first command, that is

the first ship he ever captained.

There's a Klingon Bat'leth.

I think there actually were more Klingon weapons,

but we could only really see that one.

There's Picard's collected Shakespeare

that we see in a number of episodes

that he keeps in his quarters and refers to,

which in a way is a multiple Easter egg

because in some ways, it's almost less of a reference

to Captain Picard than it is to the actor who portrays him,

Sir Patrick Stewart who is a noted and one of the

greatest Shakespearean actors of his generation.

One thing I remember is when Patrick walked on to that set

and it was one of the.

The first thing we had ready.

I think it was the first thing we shot.

So, it was a big day for him, first day back as Picard

and he walked into that archive

and it seemed like it meant a lot to him

and he just immediately gravitated toward certain things

that meant something personally to him,

things that he remembered,

but there were some other things in the archive that,

before you get to the painting,

there were super Easter eggs we never found.

Yes, that's right.

They're still buried.

We never, they never got shown on camera

but now I can't remember what they were, so I'm useless.

I've been saying that for an entire season.

[laughs]

Sorry, but maybe somebody can get in there

with a really, really deep freeze frame kind of thing

and do it kinda Blade Runner-style.

[electronic whirring]

[camera snapping]

God, there was some kind of certificate,

a framed sort of diploma certificate that was naming

Jean-Luc Picard something or other,

but I can't remember what it was now.

[elegant music]

Ah, you have a taste for the classics, I see.

Well, that's not really an Easter egg.

It's a little bit of an inside reference.

It had a couple of meanings for us.

The original name of Jurati's character was Sarton,

was named after a character in Asimov's The Caves of Steel

who was a roboticist and.

That would have been an Easter egg.

That would have been an Easter egg.

Yeah, but we broke it.

But we broke it, and the matzoh went in crumbs

on the ground. Exactly.

As we were writing that into the script,

Patrick then had the idea for the science fiction line,

which he thought would be sorta fun and inside,

but that's not really an Easter egg.

It's a kind of wink, wink, nudge, nudge,

which is a Monty Python reference Easter egg

about Patrick's own lack of affinity for science fiction

and how funny that would be coming out of Picard's mouth

in a science fiction show.

I never really cared for science fiction.

I guess I just didn't get it.

Although it rubbed some fans the wrong way.

Controversy ensued.

Yeah, for that to have really been an Easter egg,

we would have had it on the shelf behind,

in the background, and when Patrick,

when Picard was standing there, you would have seen I, Robot

and that would have made it an Easter egg,

but the moment we draw attention to it,

shine the light on it.

Yeah, no.

Then it's just an egg.

It's an egg.

[inquisitive music]

That's kind of an Easter egg. Easter egg.

It's an Easter egg,

and I remember in writing the script.

I know we had already decided that was gonna be the locations

and as I was writing it,

I wrote in the slug heading, Vasquez Rocks.

In the action line under it, I think I wrote,

why bother to hide it?

And then the fact that it gets

identified on screen that way,

ultimately it's a kind of multiple Easter egg

in the sense that not only has Vasquez Rocks

been used repeatedly within Star Trek,

in various Star Trek series to serve as alien planet,

but it's been used continuously in many other TV series,

but always as something else.

It's never got a chance to play itself before,

at least that I'm aware of, so it's sort of

a multiple reference not just to the fact that

it has a place in Star Trek history

but also to the place of Vasquez Rocks

sort of in TV history or movie history

that it's always somewhere else and never itself.

And additionally, it is the mother hen

of all Easter eggs of the season

in that it is the place. True, true.

Where Captain Kirk fought and defeated the Gorn,

and no episode passed through our greedy little Trekker,

Trekkie, still Trekkie to me, fingers,

without Michael and I trying and failing

[laughing]

to get a wink or a nod to the Gorn

into text and on the screen,

and we were defeated at every turn.

It's true. [chuckling]

Every turn.

There are a few little Gorn references slipped through

which we will get to, I guess, two I think ultimately.

I'm kind of challenge my paradigm.

Originally, the script called for,

and there was, a painting on black velvet, of a Gorn.

It's a Day-Glo Gorn.

By John Eaves, who is a storied legendary figure

in the history of Star Trek.

He's a production designer,

and he himself painted these paintings.

They're spectacular, he did two of them,

one of which. He, we, we.

I have and one of which he even now has,

but it was on the wall behind Soji and Narek.

If you look at the clip now, you look behind them,

you'll see this sort of hard to explain graphics moving

Romulan letters shifting across that screen behind them,

but hidden underneath that

is a black velvet painting of a Gorn.

Which is so Easter eggy that it's not even visible.

Exactly, that's one of the ones that you come out

a week later and you're like, what's that smell?

Akiva and I have known each other for a really long time

and I don't think until we started working on this series

did each of us discover that among the many things

we have in common is just a rabid love of the Gorn

and so we did try to squeeze Gorn in

everywhere we possibly could, short of actually

writing a Gorn into the series.

As Akiva says, most of them ended up

on the cutting room floor or just never even

made it onto the screen at all.

Seems wrong, dog Gorn it. It is, it's sad.

I don't know why there's all this Gorn hate out there.

You see what I did?

Dog Gorn it?

Oh, really? [giggles]

[ominous music]

It's clever.

Is it an egg?

You're meant to see it.

I think if you're meant to see something.

I mean, do you need to see that in order?

Mm, kind of.

[Akiva] Not really.

[Michael] It's right on the line.

It's right on the line.

[Michael] It's right on the line.

It's funny.

Yeah, thank you.

You're welcome.

I think one of the things we were trying to do

in creating the world of the Romulan-controlled,

severed Borg cube was to try to create a sense

that it's a workplace, that it's a place

people show up and they get credentialed to work there

and they have work rules and regulations

and they wear uniforms and they have badges

and this is a research facility

and just trying to think of ways to make it feel

more like a workspace and a facility

just short of having the OSHA regulations

tacked up on the wall.

That was a good way to do it.

I thought it was funny.

Engage.

Jean-Luc Picard, chief contact with the Q Continuum,

arbiter of succession for the Klingon Empire,

savior of Earth from Borg invasion.

The purpose of it is, oh this guy is storied, right,

and it works as, oh this guy is storied without specificity.

We could have said, famed destroyer of the Schlamappis and.

He's a big deal.

He's a big deal, and by adding in these specifics

rather than say, new specifics that we could have created,

that could have existed in the 10 years between

the last time we saw him on screen and now,

we gave a separate set of delights, hopefully,

or opportunities for criticism, to fans.

Yeah, I think so.

So maybe it's not an Afikoman,

but it's one of the other matzohs

on the plate with the Afikoman.

You know what it is?

It's like that, you know sometimes you get the egg

and you think it's gonna be solid chocolate,

but actually it's leaking a kind of semi-viscous sweet?

Oh yeah, the Cadbury eggs.

Yeah.

They should be a solid egg.

[electronic beeping]

Yeah, there you go.

[mimics fanfare]

One of the few references to the Gorn

to survive all the way onto the screen

in the first season of Star Trek: Picard

is a fleeting glimpse, as Rafi is viewing the data

that Jurati provided, and her eye gets caught

by this transmission from Freecloud.

This transmission has been encrypted.

There's a little encryption signature called Gorn Egg.

And why this is in fact, in my view,

an Easter egg within an Easter egg is that,

as we press deeper into the labyrinth that was Star Trek,

season one, there was a conspiracy against having the Gorn.

Right, exactly.

Appear in the show, so this Gorn egg

as a representation of the tip of the iceberg

of a conspiracy was also a fractal representation

of the conspiracy against the Gorn in our show.

Yes, the whole anti-Gorn, anti-Gorn sentiment.

The faction.

From the fact that someone would name

their encryption program Gorn Egg,

I think we can presume something that might,

at this point maybe should be considered canon

is that Gorn eggs must be really hard.

Hard, like.

[knocking] Hard to crack.

Oww.

It is not just an Easter egg, it's a Gorn egg.

Yeah, and it's, we've added to canon.

You're welcome.

Can Easter eggs be extra-scenario?

Can they be sound and music?

I guess they could.

[Akiva] They could, right?

I mean, you have the, skipping now back to

the question of the opening credits,

you have a little evocation right at the end

of the credit sequence, musically.

[Akiva] Of Inner Light. Of the Ressikan flute,

yeah, from the episode Inner Light.

So.

That's an Easter egg.

That's an Easter egg.

I lied.

There are Easter eggs

in the opening sequence. He is a liar.

He's terrible.

Engage.

[triumphant music]

[Akiva] The Next Gen theme is not an Easter egg.

No, right here I think it's more like

a deliberate evocation and saying to the audience,

not only is this an exciting, stirring moment but also,

maybe it's a borderline. Maybe it's an Easter egg.

Is it borderline?

[Akiva] It might be an Easter egg.

Borderline, maybe.

Yeah, yeah, maybe.

Yeah, it's right on the edge there.

Yeah, yeah, it's an Easter egg.

Jolan Tru.

Is that an Easter egg?

No, again I think that, the Romulan, Jolan Tru,

first we just hear it spoken and then

with the additional gesture,

that greeting Jolan Tru is, it's canon.

It's just simply, that's how Romulans greet each other.

This would not be an Easter egg.

Exactly.

There are a lot of Romulans in this season

and there are a lot of Romulans talking to each other.

We have, in canon, this idea of the Universal Translator,

but the Universal Translator, while it solves

so many storytelling problems and is

why it was invented in the first place, no doubt,

if your goal is to allow people to have conversations

that aren't understood by the people

who are standing right there,

then the Universal Translator's kinda counterproductive.

We tried to be careful to show that,

when characters were speaking Romulan, it was because

there were people present who didn't understand Romulan

and we were in a locations where there's seemingly

no Universal Translator in operation,

and therefore we were gonna need a Romulan language.

Now, we really wanted a real language

that was created by a linguist that had rules and grammar

and so we reached out to a guy named Trent Pehrson.

He was a big Star Trek fan, it turned out,

and he just really went for it,

and he did something so, I thought, so genius.

He took the canon notion that Romulans

are descended from Vulcans.

Essentially they are the offspring of a kind of

rogue contingent of Vulcans who left Vulcan

a really long time ago and became Romulans,

and he went back to Vulcan, the language that

has also been created in canon, and said,

well how might that language have changed and evolved?

If I followed the known rules of grammar,

the known linguistic rules of how languages

change over time, what might that language,

the Vulcan language, have become thousands of years later,

and so the Romulan language that we have on our show

is a true descendant of the Vulcan language

that we know about.

It just cements it really fully

with established continuity of Star Trek.

[electronic whirring]

[laughing]

The war didn't happen to us.

That's what everyone thinks.

No, 'cause Riker says later,

I'd recognize that head tilt anywhere.

I think it appears as an Easter egg first.

First, yes.

First, and anyone who doesn't know Data,

doesn't know that he did that, it'll just be like,

why is she doing that with her head?

When you shipped out for the Beta Quadrant

aboard the Ellison.

Yeah, that's an Easter egg, absolutely.

Harlan Ellison was not only a seminal

science fiction writer in his own right

and a significant influence on all of us who.

Absolutely.

In any way write or are fans of science fiction.

He also authored The City on the Edge of Forever,

which is certainly my favoritest Star Trek episode

from the original series.

He exists as someone whose name is write large

for folks who love Star Trek and Michael, you wrote him

in there because he had Polaroids of you, right?

Oh, there was that too, there was that too.

Yeah, we don't need to go into that.

I have them.

[laughing]

But I think, the only thing I would add to that is,

starship names have traditionally been

a fertile hiding place for Easter eggs

over the course of Star Trek,

and I forget now which series, there's some series

where a number of the starship names that you hear about

are places in Montana and it's because

somebody responsible for the show at that era

was from Montana, had some connection.

There's the Bozeman and there's some other names like that

so it's a fun thing to try and do.

Those great big Wallenberg-class transports.

It is an Easter egg.

More than say, naming a ship after Harlan Ellison,

the Wallenberg class, that's actually telling you something

a little more because Raoul Wallenberg

was a Swedish diplomat during the Second World War

who personally intervened using his power

as a diplomat, as a representative of the Swedish government

to save many hundreds, if not a couple thousand Jews

who would have otherwise been fallen victim

to the Nazi death machine, so by naming this class

of rescue ships that is designed to save people's lives

in large numbers from huge destruction,

Starfleet, presumably, was deliberately invoking

the memory of this righteous man and the work

that he did to help people who are in trouble,

so it actually has a storytelling element to it.

[Doctor] Where's your cortical node, buddy?

There's an episode where he gives up

his cortical implant to save Seven.

[Akiva] Yeah, I guess that's an Easter egg.

Or is that more just consistent?

Like if we'd said, oh, and here's your cortical implant,

all the fans of Voyager would have said,

pfft, he doesn't have a cortical.

That would have been wrong, but we could certainly

not have talked about any cortical implant.

So it's gotta be in there somewhere-ete.

It satisfies the criteria of meaning nothing

to people who don't know anything about the show.

In that sense, it's hidden in a way

because of that, because it.

Yeah, and it's additive for those who know.

I think it's an Easter egg.

Yeah, that's a matzoh.

Have some tranya.

Yeah, tranya's an Easter egg.

I think so.

Tranya.

Better still would have been

to have Clint Howard serving it.

Mmhmm.

That would have really been.

That is a reference to an episode from the original series

called The Corbomite Maneuver in which

a very young Clint Howard.

Very, very.

Like a little boy.

[Akiva] Pre-Gentle Ben Clint Howard.

He serves this, some kind of alcoholic beverage.

Yeah, he's drinking too.

Called tranya.

This is tranya.

I hope you relish it as much as I do.

And apparently, in reality the beverage

that they shot was grapefruit juice

and that Clint Howard hated the taste of grapefruit juice

and so it was a very painful scene for him.

It didn't start out as an Easter egg.

It started out as wanting to have the character of Bjayzl

be another member of the same species

that we saw in The Corbomite Maneuver,

but that involves so many imponderables involved,

casting a kid and using the voice of an adult

which is how they did Clint Howard,

and working with kids is tricky and time-consuming

and you have, your hours are really limited.

And then it iterated into a Caitian.

Remember? Oh, that's right.

Which was the feline species from the animated series.

Or maybe she was gonna be a Caitian first.

Yeah, unclear.

They sort of, yeah maybe, right,

and all we got left with after the infantile alien

or the sentient cat was basically Tang.

Yeah, Gothitron, yeah.

It would have been fun to be able to do either of those two.

There have been all too few evocations, in our opinion,

of the animated series.

Actually had some quite interesting, fun, well-written

episodes by real Star Trek writers who had written

great episodes of the original series and.

[Akiva] Voiced by the real cast.

Kirk to Enterprise.

It bears watching.

Yeah, consider it the fourth season

of the original series.

Now, I think it is.

It had a really shaky canonical status for a while,

but I think now.

We feel it's canon.

It would have been fun with the Caitian to allude to that

but you're getting into really complicated

character design. Full-on CG.

So, someday.

Season two.

Season two.

Or three.

Remember, nobody knows the way around

the Kaplan F17 Speed Freighter than the Red Bolian.

[yells]

We had the scripted element of holographic advertisements.

Freecloud in some ways has aspects of Switzerland

in terms of the banking regulations of Switzerland

and Switzerland's reputation for guarding the privacy

of the people who put their money there.

It's probably a little Amsterdam there, if you know

what I'm talking about. Yes, in terms of

enforcement of laws that,

where if you're not hurting anybody,

they're not gonna stop you, but they also have,

it's very mercantile, it's driven by profit

in a way that a lot of entities now that we see

that buy your information and use and sell your information

and use it to target ads to you,

and so we had this idea of ads that would be targeted

to each crew member on the ship as they were being read

and scanned and their histories were being identified

and then they were being shown ads

that would directly appeal to them

according to the algorithm.

I didn't get one?

For Rioses, they take readings of his ship,

they know if there's a reading that's a little off,

and they're suggesting, hey take it in,

and then we needed a little trademark character

and I just started thinking about

how you made trademark characters and how you often

will do a Jolly Green Giant or little cartoon characters

that represent something and I just thought,

well maybe I'll just do something like

a well known alien species from Star Trek,

the Bolians, and Bolians are blue.

They have blue skin and so then I thought,

well to make it a trademark, to make it sort of a thing

that people would go like, huh, that's funny,

that's paradoxical, make it the Red Bolian,

'cause there are no Red Bolians,

so that's how we got the Red Bolian.

I thought they should all just have porn,

was it seemed to me what that would.

I remember that conversation.

Everybody was scanned and had a different kind of porn.

It got really quiet in the writer's room

when he said that. I didn't know

Sam and Michael wouldn't do that,

and I don't know why not.

I mean, the guy.

Are we?

[laughing]

Still rolling.

[bleep]

[robotic speech]

That is for sure an Easter egg.

That's an Easter egg.

For sure.

In the shot, the establishing shot of Freecloud,

the street, there are a few in there.

There's the Quark Bar, and there's

Mr. Mot's hairstyling salon.

I already alluded to Mr. Mot before.

There might even be a couple others in there.

Oh, that's right, there's a big holographic.

That may literally just be stolen from episode 10

of season two of Discovery,

so is that an Easter egg or is that just pure theft?

Sure, it's an Easter egg.

We did it on purpose.

You can steal Easter eggs.

And then there's the conversation in the bar

about Rioses' fictional previous assignment.

Mr. Quark of Ferenginar was especially satisfied

with your handling of his trouble with the Breen.

Which also falls into the category of exposition,

so for somebody who hasn't been previously exposed to

Star Trek, or in this case Deep Space Nine,

then it's just oh, they gave him a good cover story.

A Temtibi Lagoon, if it's not too much bother.

That is full-on Easter egg.

That is as Easter egg-y as Easter eggs get.

Raffi tells Rioses.

Your personality needs to match your clothes.

You need to show a little panache.

You need a feather in your hat.

He's cool, he's collected, he doesn't get hot too often,

and she's trying to say, you're gonna have to be big.

You're gonna be wearing this orange hat and the feather

and the green coat and you have to use words like.

Salutations.

His typical drink order would be something very macho

and straight up and he thinks,

I gotta go completely in the other direction,

so trying to think of tropical drinks

and drinks with lots of layers in them

and swizzle sticks and umbrellas.

With two umbrellas.

Then trying to think, well what is the tropics

of Star Trek and then thinking of Risa the pleasure planet

that many crews have referred to

in their series of Star Trek

and went on Memory Alpha looking for named resorts

or named locales that we've heard about in canon

on that planet and Temtibi Lagoon has been referred to

and that just, Temtibi Lagoon,

who doesn't want to drink one of them?

That sounds yummy, doesn't it?

Well.

I mean, if you're into that sort of thing.

Pretty much anything with alcohol sounds yummy to me,

so I'm not sure.

And so presumably, that is a drink that has been named

after the place on the planet Risa, the resort planet

where it was first invented.

[electronic whirs]

Oh, that's an Easter egg. Yeah, the Sicarian.

It's crucial to the plot.

But not the precise nature of it, right.

Not where the tech was sourced.

We could have made up something.

We could have said, the Borg came up with this thing,

but yeah we went, and that's courtesy of Kirsten Beyer,

who is our comrade and fellow writer

and is our in-house resident expert on all things canon

and in particular, all things Voyager.

She's, I think, the planet's leading expert on Voyager.

When we were casting about for ways to get Soji and Picard

off that Borg cube and have them go somewhere else

really quickly without having to get back on a starship,

Kirsten was very handily able to provide us

not only with that technology, but with the means

by which it could be where we needed it

to be right at that moment.

[heavy breathing]

[Scanner] Probable age- 37 months.

Not really an Easter egg, is it?

Is it, it is.

Not Squidgy.

Squidgy, I mean, I've seen people have one

whether it's meant to be a Mugatu and it isn't.

It would have a horn if it were and that's a cool idea.

We were going in a different direction with Squidgy.

Squidgy was a road not taken.

Yes, Squidgy was a bomb but that's another story.

Yeah, Squidgy was meant to have a much bigger role

in the season, but he had some drug and alcohol problems

and he went into rehab.

We try not to say that on, remember?

Oh, oh my god,

but anyway, creative differences.

Yeah yeah, that's right.

But, [snickers] the Flotter lunchbox

is a series of storytelling issues where like,

okay we need her to have all of this girlhood stuff

that she's carrying around that was also evidence

of her having had a childhood, which she didn't.

So what would that be, and then the natural,

I think is a lunchbox, a plastic,

some kind of box or container that in itself

speaks of childhood, of pop culture realm

within the world of Star Trek that could be on a lunchbox.

In talking with our resident professor of Voyager,

Kirsten Beyer, she reminded me about

the Adventures of Flotter which is a holoprogram

that's watched by the character Naomi Wildman

on that show that's aimed at kids,

and so then that's where the idea came

to create a Flotter lunchbox and give it to Soji.

It's an Easter egg.

That's an Easter egg.

You're right.

It doesn't add anything.

[relaxing music]

We've had a little trouble

around here lately with the Kzinti.

The Kzinti, that is a

big ol' Easter egg. Yeah, that's an Easter egg.

So Michael and I are both fans of a science fiction writer

named Larry Niven, who has created a series of books

that are referred to as Known Space.

We are not only fans of his, but so too were the folks

who made the aforementioned animated series.

So what happened was, they reached out to him.

Ohh.

They tried to get him to write an episode

and he kept struggling with it, so he came back

and I think the name of the short story

it's based on is the Slaver Weapon.

He essentially ended up taking one of his short stories,

which existed in the Known Space world

that included a race of aliens called the Kzin,

which are giant, scary cats really.

So what happened was then, for one brief and shining moment,

Known Space and Star Trek intersected.

Which, if you're a Star Trek-science fiction nerd

in 1973. Oh my God.

I remember like, watching, I'm in the living room

watching the show and I'm like whoa, that said Larry Niven,

and then there's a Kzin on Star Trek.

It was just.

It's sort of when Superman and Spiderman

had that crossover, that big double.

Exactly, exactly, like those should not,

it shouldn't be but it is.

So there's always been some debate back and forth

about whether or not that's really canon or not

and are you really allowed to do it or not,

and Michael decided to take the proverbial cat by the horns.

So I reached out to Larry Niven,

which I tracked down an email for him

and I wrote him an email and explained

what massive fans both Akiva and I were and are of his work,

and then I inquired about, what was his feeling

about the Kzin without depicting them

or employing them in any kind of storytelling way,

would he object if we just made a passing reference to them

as a way of bringing deep pleasure and satisfaction

to the probably dozens of other people out there.

Yeah, maybe a score.

Yeah, maybe a score of people of other out there

who retain that pleasure that came from that moment

where those, the streams crossed,

and he said he'd, that would be great.

He'd be flattered or he'd be pleased or something so,

and this is not in any legal sense.

This is not in any copyright sense,

but in terms of what canon is,

if the animated series is canon,

then the Kzin are canon and the Kzin

and I think we are now, we've now

confirmed that with this reference.

Yes, yes and that cheering is those two dozen people.

You're welcome.

And John Van Sitters.

Yeah, that's right.

He actually just cramped.

Oh, okay. [giggling]

Are we safe here, Kestra?

I think it is.

That's an Easter egg.

So Kestra is a reference to Deanna Troi's sister who died.

Deanna Troi being Kestra's mother,

so Kestra's named after her deceased aunt.

Right.

We do a whole family tree thing here and very good at it.

Aww, don't cry, Deanna.

Mommy, please.

No, Kestra, we're gonna eat in just a few minutes.

In fact, similarly they have a son named Thad

and they presumably named him after.

Thaddeus Riker?

Thaddeus Riker.

Number One, though, is that?

That's an Easter egg.

We didn't even talk about,

what about Number One? What about Number One?

That's such an Easter egg.

Who said that, Number One?

Forget it, it's too late now.

That's right, we passed episode one.

Too bad, that was a good one.

[laughing]

We are Borg.

She was trying to destabilize the veridium tracker

already present in her system.

Oh, the veridium isotope.

Sure, that's an Easter egg, right?

I mean, it's canon, it doesn't matter if you know it.

It is a callback.

Here's the thing.

When you have a plot question or problem

or something you need a plot solution to,

if you're writing something set in the real world

then you like, well they pick up the phones

or they go on the Internet or they get in their car.

Whatever it is, you solve the problem

within the real world context of the show

that is set in the real world, but in Star Trek,

when you have certain kinds of plot problems,

you can't turn to the real world context very often,

but what you can turn to is canon.

So then when you're saying, well we want the Romulans

to have tracked Jurati in a way

that is long-range, very detectable,

how have other writers solved that problem before,

and again Kirsten came up with this thing

that she knew of from canon, the veridium tracker,

and, which I think is in the movie The Undiscovered Country.

It's funny, 'cause, but in that sense for example,

is transwarp an Easter egg?

Right, exactly.

Like I think more like another one

that you guys forgot is Daystrom.

[Michael] Yeah, the Daystrom.

[Akiva] The Daystrom Institute.

[Michael] Is that an Easter egg?

I think so, because you understand it's a name, right,

and it doesn't mean anything beyond a name

unless you've seen the original series.

Yeah, that's true.

But it doesn't change the story not knowing,

although it makes it deeper.

And there are a few subsequent references

to it over the years, too.

What was the question?

Uh, the iridium tracker?

Oh, the veridium.

Veridium tracker.

Veridium tracker.

That tracker, not an Easter egg.

Daystrom, an Easter egg, I think.

Okay, okay.

I'm the emergency engineering hologram.

I go by Ian.

For sure.

Don't you think that's an Easter egg?

I do, I do.

The idea there with the holograms on Rioses' ship

is that you get the ship, you buy a package if you want it.

You get this package installed of emergency holograms.

Like the doctor on Voyager, he's a medical hologram,

we're presuming there are more complete installations

where you might have an emergency engineering hologram,

an emergency technical hologram.

You install it and that default persona includes holograms

that have different accents.

So the engineering hologram, quite naturally.

Quite naturally.

Would have a Scottish accent.

What that really is, is an allusion

and I think an Easter egg to Mr. Scott.

Aye, the haggis is in the fire for sure.

And one could sort of even imagine that

Montgomery Scott, having been such a prominent engineer

and having lived for so long,

that it was sort of on purpose that they designed.

It's a tribute.

Yeah, it's a tribute,

a default setting. It's a tribute.

Let's give this engineering hologram a Scottish accent

in tribute to the most famous Starfleet engineer ever.

Right, like the emergency writing hologram

might have your beard.

Exactly, exactly.

[elegant music]

Surak and existentialism.

[snorts]

So yeah, that's an Easter egg.

We've already established by this point that

Rioses like to read philosophy,

that he likes to read existentialist philosophy,

so then in terms of when it came to write books

to be on the shelves in his quarters,

it seemed like a fun idea, like,

what if there, somebody had looked at

the philosophy of Surak, the greatest Vulcan philosopher,

the inventor of the entire Vulcan way of life

that centered around logic, and we looked at

his philosophy in the light of existentialism?

I don't know how much you can see if you freeze frame it

but the author of the book, the name that we see,

is actually one of the pseudonyms used by Soren Kierkegaard

for some of his psuedonymous work so it all kinda.

We had Wonder Boys up there, but the author

wanted so much money that we had to take.

Hey, I'm entitled.

It's just not okay.

It's not.

You know what, you've made enough.

[laughing]

Captain Marta Batanides.

You knew her?

Marta Batanides is the character who appears

in the episode Tapestry of Star Trek: The Next Generation,

which is an episode in which Q interferes in the timeline,

allows Picard to go back into his own past,

and we see Picard in his Starfleet Academy days

with his cronies, his two best friends

that he hangs around with, and one of them is a woman,

a young cadet soon to become a Starfleet officer

whose name is Marta Batanides.

You sure you're okay?

Yes, I'm fine.

Really, Marta, I'm fine.

It's an Easter egg. That's an Easter egg, right,

to say, so what we learn is that Marta Batanides

went on to be the captain of a starship

whose first officer is the Vandermeer who then became

Rioses' captain. Rioses' captain.

So she's kind of like Rioses' grandcaptain if you will.

She was a legend to the old man, my old man.

Captain Vandermeer.

That's an Easter egg.

Yeah, that's an Easter egg. 'Cause we could have used

any name or no name and we put that in there just to be fun

with the people who know, so yeah.

[magical music]

I found this, an old-school medical tricorder.

Easter egg?

No.

They didn't have to be old ones?

They could have been just up to date or.

I know.

Those are there as a way of characterizing Rioses' ship.

He doesn't have a brand new

emergency battery-operated medkit.

He has an old one.

I feel like it is a nice prop that sort of suggests

that the universe is deeper, that not everybody

has the newest thing, and I think it feels that way.

It feels a little lower tech.

[Michael] But maybe for a TNG fan, you see it,

[Akiva] you're like oh my God. Ooh!

I mean, and then combat.

Yeah, the combats in the box.

Yeah, in that, right.

Yeah, but they missed that.

Or, by the way, when he says, Riker, LaForge,

when he lists, are those Easter eggs?

True, yeah, are they?

As we're directly referencing TNG, I don't know.

It's a good question.

That's a good.

We don't know.

Yeah, you let us know.

Yeah, you tell us.

There are sources of legacy props out there,

both in the hands of collectors and to some degree

in the hands of Paramount Pictures.

Apparently here.

Yes.

So I don't remember if he found, our props guy Jeff,

if he found those, or if he made them, I don't remember,

but I know it was a fun thing for him to do.

I'm seeing if history plays out the same way now

if you've gone through the Guardian.

Gotta kill her.

I don't know.

Push it in front of that car.

She has such a good, oh, oh.

Oh, you broke it.

Oh, no.

You say break, I say missing.

Whoa ho ho, that happens.

Salt shaker.

Oh yeah.

[Raffi] We might run into, I don't know,

angry reptiloids out there.

Angry reptiloids?

Is that, I mean, are we talking about Gorn again?

Yeah, I guess.

Is that the only other surviving?

Yeah, sadly.

[guffawing]

If you could see our season of Picard.

Our view of it.

Just replete with Gorns.

Literally everywhere you turn, the Gorn.

The Gorn hegemony as a sort of umbrella

of all Picard seasons.

It was gonna be awesome,

and all that's left is.

Angry reptiloids.

A reference to angry reptiloids, yeah.

Why do they want us to be afraid of the Gorn, why?

Exactly.

That's the question we should be asking.

Who's that, it's a Ted Sturgeon story, right,

where they make the dolls to desensitize everybody

like aliens? Oh yeah, exactly exactly.

[hopeful music]

That's an Easter egg.

Vulcan martial art, sort of Vulcan tai chi martial art,

that's for sure an Easter egg

and there are some other, we skipped over,

there's some other Vulcan Easter eggs

on Commodore Oh's desk.

She's sitting behind her desk

and she has Vulcan sacred object on her desk.

She's got that shaky bell thing from Amok Time

that you can see on the shelf in the background.

This Vulcan martial art is part of a suite of references

of Vulcan Easter eggs.

Which will show you in the power hierarchy

where the Vulcans live in relation to the Gorn, right.

Oh, look, another Vulcan reference.

There's a proliferation of Vulcan ref,

a virtual cornucopia of Vulcan references,

but the one Gorn reference, one.

I know.

It's sad.

It's [bleep] up.

#Sad.

#Sad.

She raised that Ka'Athyra beautifully.

There's a lot of canon around Vulcan

and Vulcan practices and Surak.

If you're looking for something to make

an Easter egg out of, Klingon and Vulcan I'd say

are the two greatest sources of non-human Star Trek canon.

Yeah, the cultures have been articulated out.

Is Make it so an Easter egg?

It is, and it's not said by.

Him.

Him, so does that make it an Easter egg?

I think so. I'd like it.

I'd like it to be an Easter egg.

Let's deem it an Easter egg.

I think it is an Easter egg.

It's an Easter egg.

I think Make it so is an Easter egg.

Make it so's an Easter egg.

Yeah, if he said it, not so much.

Not so much.

But because she says it, yeah, I think so.

Make it so.

So there are eggs in the show basket that are tasty.

[rattling]

I think we got 'em all.

This is what that bum does, remember?

In City on the Edge of Forever, the scene they cut out

on WPIX channel 11 a lot.

[Michael] It's an accidental self-phasering, yeah.

[electric humming]

It's a scene that some people didn't see

'til they were older and saw the shows uncut.

Mmhmm, mmhmm.

[mimics phaser] That's the sound it makes.

I felt so bad for that guy.

I know, me too.

He was just trying to get some wine.

Easter eggs are fun to hide,

and hopefully they are fun to find,

and so I think we plan to keep hiding them

and may all your Afikomans be found.

May your grandpa give you a big silver dollar.

May your Star Trek dreams

be colorful and made of chocolate.

And hollow?

No, not hollow.

No.

For the egg is hollow,

and I have touched the sky. And I have touched the sky.

That was a good yolk.

Thank you.

Live long and prosper.

Thanks guys.

♪ Blue skies, smiling at me ♪