Picard's TOS Easter Egg Is A Dark Reminder Of Star Trek's Future

screenrant.com:

Star Trek: Picard's latest Easter egg — a nod to Captain Kirk's Enterprise adventures - does not age well. It's Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home all over again in Star Trek: Picard season 2, as Jean-Luc and a few lucky companions travel back in time to the unfamiliar surrounds of modern day Los Angeles. In order to fix a dystopian future created by an out-of-sorts Q, Team Picard slingshots to 2024 — long before the five-year mission of James T. Kirk's Enterprise. At this point in Star Trek history, mankind is taking its first tentative steps toward space exploration, and 2024 has been riddled with nods to the «Europa mission», which very likely plays a role in Q altering history.

And it's Q's interest in Europa that leads to Star Trek: Picard season 2's Jackson Roykirk Easter egg. In the final moments of episode 4 («Watcher»), Q turns up at Europa mission headquarters stalking Renee Picard — the great, great cousin of Jean-Luc — while rambling something pretentious about «playing the game» and «choking on fear.» The scene takes place at «Jackson Roykirk Plaza,» which also includes a bust of the titular cyberneticist alongside an inscription reading, "The Singularity will occur when machine intelligence is smarter than us. And frankly, I can't wait." That's the kind of statement that could come back to bite a guy.

Related: Star Trek: Picard Proves The Enduring Influence Of The Voyage Home

Jackson Roykirk features in Star Trek season 2's «The Changeling,» which sees Captain Kirk's Enterprise crew encounter a probe called Nomad, created by Dr. Roykirk in Star Trek's 2002. Designed as a "perfect thinking machine, capable of independent logic," the probe launched out into space seeking new life forms. Over 200 years later, the