In the eighth episode of Star Trek Picard's second season, Guinan and Q come face to face,
and the Borg Queen builds up her new army – and there's also a big nod to an "Enterprise"
episode you may have forgotten about.
Seven's origins recalled
In Episode 8, "Mercy," Raffi and Seven of Nine are still trying to get a fix on the
Jurati Queen's location.
Following her trail leads to an alley where they find a man dead of an apparent attempted
assimilation.
Raffi and Seven of Nine conclude that the Jurati Queen is trying to create new Borg
soldiers in the 21st century but doesn't have the raw material to do so yet.
They manage to locate the man's cell phone, which is missing its battery.
Seven of Nine notes that the stabilizing metals of a lithium-ion power source like a cell
phone battery are just what the Jurati Queen needs.
After all, when the Borg assimilate their victims, they inject them with stabilizing
metals to help the body handle the invading Borg nanoprobes.
This reminds Seven of Nine of her own assimilation.
"I remember the smell.
I was six ... I can taste it, now."
This directly references the events seen during a flashback in the "Star Trek: Voyager" episode
"The Raven."
In that flashback, viewers see a young Seven Of Nine -- then called Annika Hansen -- when
she is first assimilated while on her parents' exploratory mission to learn about the Borg.
We see in that episode her parents are first taken by the Borg, while young Annika runs
to hide, although her actual assimilation is not shown on-screen.
To this day, it seems that the traumatic experience still has a deeply profound effect on her.
Our paths have yet to cross
In "Mercy" we get another direct reference to the previous unresolved history between
Guinan and Q first teased in the "Star Trek: The Next Generation" episode "Q Who."
That episode mentions a cold war between El-Aurians and Q, but here it becomes clear that this
period of conflict was not when Q met Guinan.
When Q comes to visit her while disguised as an FBI Agent, he seems surprised to see
her and even more confused when she doesn't recognize him.
This is the first meeting between Q and Guinan in more than 30 years on screen, and he makes
a remark that references their past connection.
"Right, it's the 21st century.
Our paths have yet to cross."
This at least gives Trekkies a time frame to work with, because all we knew about their
history before this was that their "dealings" together were more than 200 years before their
meeting in "Q Who," which is set in 2365.
Thanks to this new scene, fans can now narrow down their first canonical encounter to somewhere
between 2100 and 2165, given the way Q has phrased it here.
We still don't know quite what happened at that meeting, but perhaps we'll get more answers
as the season winds towards the finish line.
Good and new
The biggest Easter egg found in the latest meeting between Q and Guinan comes with the
revelation that the Q are dying.
Turmoil in the Q continuum is nothing new, and this scene appears to be a direct callback
to those events.
It all begins in the "Star Trek: Voyager" Season 2 episode "Death Wish," where a member
of the Q is discovered imprisoned in a comet for the crime of desiring to end his own life.
Bored with his unending existence, the second Q -- named Quinn -- wishes to cease to exist,
but the continuum fears that the loss of his life could create a catastrophic disruption.
"It would force the Q to deal with the unknown for the first time since the new era began.
They're afraid of me because they're afraid of the unknown."
However, Q himself is not afraid.
Despite the continuum's wishes, he rebels and assists in Quinn's suicide.
In the Season 3 episode "The Q and the Grey," Quinn's death causes ripple effects through
the continuum, resulting in a catastrophic Q civil war.
One side wants the stability and predictability of the old ways, while the other wants to
embrace change, individuality, and the unknowable.
Here, Q notes that his loss of powers leaves him with an uncertain future, saying he is
"on the threshold of the unknowable" and seemingly delighted to experience what is new and unknown,
despite his impending demise – a callback to his decision to help Quinn die in "Death
Wish."
"Infinite life, after all, has its drawbacks."
Vulcans on 1970s Earth
In "Mercy" we finally get a glimpse of a scene from an early trailer that features a pair
of Vulcans in the woods with a young human boy.
Here we learn that the scene takes place some decades earlier, perhaps as early as the 1970s,
when FBI Agent Wells was just a child.
While looking for his dog, the future agent Wells stumbles upon a pair of Vulcans engaged
in some form of monitoring Earth.
That Earth had been visited before by Vulcans for covert surveillance is not a new revelation,
as it is first mentioned in the "Enterprise" episode "Carbon Creek."
In that Season 2 episode of "Enterprise," we learn that science officer T'Pol's foremother
T'Mir was on a Vulcan ship that had been monitoring Earth in the 1950s.
T'Mir and a small team wind up trapped on Earth after crash landing in Carbon Creek,
Pennsylvania, and live undercover as humans until they are rescued, with T'Mir posing
as a young woman named Maggie.
T'Pol mentions in the episode that T'Mir's visit was her people's first contact with
humanity.
Now, we see that the Vulcans undertook further missions to observe human progress, just as
the Federation observes pre-warp societies.
Interestingly, the young boy's dog is named Maggie, which seems like another intentional
reference to a character from "Trek" past.
The Vulcan mind meld
When Agent Wells reveals his childhood encounter with aliens, we recognize them as a pair of
Vulcans, but the young human boy in the 20th-century sees only strange inhuman beings.
He tries to run, but the Vulcans follow him into the woods before performing an alien
ritual to erase his memory and preserve the secret of their meeting.
However, it must not have worked because Wells remembers everything about that evening, including
the alien's attack, which is how he interprets what Picard later identifies as a Vulcan mind
meld.
Wells describes the mind meld as a vicious assault, with a feeling like the alien's fingers
were pushing into his head.
Of course, that was not the case, and Picard describes more accurately what the Vulcan
had done by pressing his fingers gently onto the agent's face in the traditional form we've
seen in several "Star Trek" episodes before.
Picard's knowledge of the mind meld technique, as performed by Vulcans such as Spock, Tuvok,
and Soval, comes from the "Star Trek: The Next Generation" episode "Sarek," in which
Picard is the recipient of a mind meld demonstrated by Spock's father, Sarek.
"We shall always retain the best part of the other, inside us."
Borg taglines, revisited
First introduced in the "Star Trek: The Next Generation" second season episode "Q Who,"
the Borg's black-clad cyborg visage has become an iconic part of pop culture.
Their cube-like starships are as oddly distinctive as any spacecraft in science fiction, and
the two-part episode "The Best of Both Worlds" is a TV classic.
The Borg have several catchphrases and memorable lines associated with them.
Perhaps most famous is their chilling typical greeting line: "Resistance is futile."
"We are the Borg.
Lower your shields and surrender your ships."
This line is revisited here in "Mercy," but with a 21st-century twist, when the Jurati
Queen visits Adam Soong.
"I assume a lecture on the futility of resistance isn't going to be necessary."
Once Adam Soong has supplied her with what she needs -- an army of highly trained military
soldiers -- the two prepare for a mission.
In a sense, these mercenaries are Earth's first Borg drones, with the Jurati Queen injecting
them with Borg technology and changing them into her own willing army.
"Who's in the mood to add a little of their biological and technological distinctiveness
to our own?"
This echoes the early speech that the Borg give Picard as an ominous warning about their
intentions towards humanity.
For that is the Borg mission statement: to absorb other beings, cultures, and technology,
adding everything unique and distinctive about them to their collective whole.
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