Over the years, Super Mario fans have left more than their fair share of Yoshi mounts rotting in the bottomless pits of the Mushroom Kingdom while playing through the games in Nintendo’s long-running Super Mario Bros franchise. But in the second episode of the second season of Star Trek: Picard, “Penance,” which was released for streaming on Paramount+ on Thursday, March 10th, 2022, it was revealed it isn’t just us schmos back on 21st Century Earth who had Yoshi blood on our hands. In the parallel timeline created by Q (John de Lancie) in the second season of Picard, the totalitarian Confederation version of Jean-Luc Picard (Sir Patrick Stewart) himself has the distinctive dinosaur’s skull on display in his despicable trophy room!
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The scene took place during the episode’s cold open, shortly after Picard awoke at Château Picard in the parallel timeline. After being greeted by Q, Picard is introduced to the history of his alternate-reality counterpart. This malignant version of Picard keeps a trophy room filled with weapons, trinkets, and other mementos of those alien races and individual warriors he has conquered. In this new timeline, Picard is a humans’ first military general.
The centerpiece of this collection is a handful of skulls displayed on carefully labeled pedestals so that the parallel version of Picard can remember his great victories. And Q uses the skulls to help the main timeline Picard understand what his parallel counterpart has accomplished, leading to “cameos” by several familiar Trek characters: there’s the skull of Klingon Martok, played by J.G. Hertzler in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Cardassian Gul Dukat, played by Marc Alaimo in DS9, and Vulcan Sarek, father of Science Officer Spock and Captain Michael Burnham, played by Mark Lenard in Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and in several of the original series Star Trek movies.
But behind these identified skulls and unremarked by Q are several additional trophies. These include a Borg skull and a skull recognizable as belonging to a Ferengi. Could it be Grand Nagus Zek, played by Wallace Shawn on DS9, or perhaps even the succeeding Grand Nagus, Rom, played on DS9 by Max Grodénchik?
Star Trek Celebrates Super Mario Day
Paramount+
The fact that the episode aired on March 10th might be considered an additional Super Mario Bros joke, and that’s because the date’s abbreviated appearance, “MAR 10,” has earned it the moniker “Mario Day” on social media. Picard’s Yoshi allusion wasn’t the only tip of the hat Star Trek made to Mario Day. The Star Trek Daily 2022 Day-to-Day Calendar even commemorated the occasion with an image that calls to mind the distinctive flag which awaits players after each Super Mario level.
While it’s always nice to grab a 1-Up to survive, say, the explosion of the Stargazer in Picard Season 2, episode one, “The Star Gazer,” it’s a bummer when you get a new guy but end up in the Darkest Timeline!
Can Picard and his crew remedy whatever Q did back in 2024 to create this Strange New World in which the Starfleet Admiral has found himself? New episodes of Picard are available for streaming on Paramount+ on Thursdays.
