Lower Decks Season 4's Anomaly Storage Room Is A Treasure Trove Of Star Trek Easter Eggs
Given how often it happens, the makers of "Star Trek: Lower Decks" and "Star Trek: Picard" appear to abide by a strict mandate that every episode includes a certain number of references to older "Star Trek" shows. Several times, when said shows seem to be falling behind this presumed quota, the showrunners will include a scene in a literal warehouse that is stacked with objects, corpses, or other tchotchkes from throughout "Trek" history. This happened in the "Lower Decks" season 2 episode "Kayshon, His Eyes Open," which featured a menagerie of stuffed creatures and skeletal remains of various "Star Trek" characters, all just hanging out in the background. Fans may remember the enormous desiccated skeleton of Spock 2 as he appeared in the "Star Trek: The Animated Series" episode "The Infinite Vulcan," as well as a Gorn skeleton, the skeleton of Abraham Lincoln (perhaps rescued from the events of "The Savage Curtain"), a taxidermied M-113 creature, and portraits of a Bynar, Data's cat Spot, and a bust of Captain Picard.
Similarly, on "Star Trek: Picard," several characters infiltrated a Daystrom Institute black site which housed various top-secret Starfleet knickknacks and programs, including a hologram of Moriarty (Daniel Davis), an attack tribble, a reconstructed version of Data (Brent Spiner), the corpse of Admiral Kirk (salvaged from the events of "Star Trek: Generations"), and the corpse of Jean-Luc Picard (salvaged from the show's first season).
The latest episode of "Lower Decks," called "In the Cradle of Vexilon," features yet another Reference Warehouse. We officially have ourselves a trope.
Of course, hunting Easter eggs is one of the great pleasures of watching "Lower Decks," and the showrunners hid multiple fun items in the Cerritos' anomaly storage room. Gather your baskets, children. Let's hunt.
Keep your eyes peeled for Nomad, a lirpa, and a bat'leth
Classic "Star Trek" fans will instantly recognize Nomad, the rogue robot brought on board the USS Enterprise in the episode "The Changeling" from 1967. Nomad was a 21st-century Earth probe that drifted into deep space, had mysteriously evolved, and was now hellbent on destroying what it considered to be imperfections and "biological infestations," meaning humanoid populations all over the galaxy. Nomad spared the Enterprise from its destructive impulses, as it had mistaken Captain Kirk (William Shatner) for its inventor. Kirk ultimately dispatched of Nomad by pointing out its own flaws, forcing it to destroy itself. It seems that Nomad, deactivated, somehow made its way to the USS Cerritos over a century later.
Right next to Nomad was a lirpa, the bladed weapon that Kirk and Spock (Leonard Nimoy) used to fight one another in the episode "Amok Time." Lirpas are five-foot staffs with a moon-shaped blade on one end, and a heavy weight on the other. One might note that the heavy weight would make using the blade immensely difficult. There is also a quick shot of a "Next Generation"-era bat'leth, a perfectly common Klingon sword with four points and multiple handles. (You might remember that a bat'leth hung on the wall in Worf's quarters.)
There is a spider in the warehouse as well, stored in a glowing glass cylinder. When Rutherford (Eugene Cordero) reaches out to touch it, Tendi (Noël Wells) yells at him. It seems that the spider will "make his head fall off and skitter away." This is apparently not a "Star Trek" event, but a reference to John Carpenter's 1982 film "The Thing," a film wherein someone's head fell off — actually a shape-shifting alien — and became a spider-like creature before skittering away.
The Betazoid gift box, the Kataan probe, and Chula
The noisiest of the artifacts in the anomaly warehouse was the Betazoid gift box, a talking piece of packaging emblazoned with a humanoid face. The Betazoid gift box, as played by Armin Shimerman, first appeared in the "Star Trek: The Next Generation" episode "Haven" (November 30, 1987). It was used to announce special occasions and contained expensive jewels. It seems that the Betazoid box on the Cerritos had been locked up for some time, as it pleaded with Rutherford to go live in his quarters. It was explained, however, that the boxes aren't sentient, and only learn to speak by listening to others talk. When the box begins cussing, they merely note that the foulmouthed Dr. T'Ana had likely been there.
Up on the wall is an outside mysterious probe of some kind. It doesn't look like the Kataan probe as seen in the "Next Generation" episode "The Inner Light," but it seems to operate in the same way. When a beam from the probe hits the Betazoid gift box, it immediately screams that it lived an entire simulated life and that it misses its wife. This is what happened to Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) in "Inner Light." Perhaps the Kataan made several classes of probe.
Another big Easter egg that was actually used as a plot point was the Wadi Chula game as seen in the "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" episode "Move Along Home." The game trapped players in a pocket dimension and forced them to solve escape room puzzles. Before "In the Cradle of Vexilon" is over, someone will be trapped in that game.