Star Trek: Discovery connected itself to Picard with one simple plot-device

"Pictured: Sonequa Martin-Green as Burnham of the Parmount+ series STAR TREK: DISCOVERY. Photo: Michael Gibson©Paramount+ 2021, All Rights Reserved.
"Pictured: Sonequa Martin-Green as Burnham of the Parmount+ series STAR TREK: DISCOVERY. Photo: Michael Gibson©Paramount+ 2021, All Rights Reserved.

Star Trek’s Discovery and Picard are now linked thanks to one plot point.

Star Trek: Discovery is airing their fourth season currently, exploring the mysteries of the 32nd century. Yet, even when the show was set in the 23rd century, as a precursor to Star Trek: The Original Series, the show was set some time away from the events of Star Trek’s The Next Generation or Picard.

Now that Discovery is 900+ years into the future, the show is even further away from the timeline occurrence of Picard. Yet, the two shows are somehow linked through technology; despite being set so far apart from one another.

It seems a bit odd at first glance, but when you realize that we don’t know, as an audience, what happened between the events of Picard and the third and fourth season’s of Discovery, it’s very possible it will all end up making sense in the long run.

Or it won’t.

(Spoilers below)

Discover used a piece of tech introduced in Picard despite the huge gap in time

It should be outdated technology at this point, but apparently, the body printing technology that was used to make Jean-Luc Picard an android at the end of the first season of Discovery was not just introduced again into Discovery but was actually used.

As explained in Discovery’s second episode of season four, the same technology that gave Jean-Luc his synthetic body was actually a failure, with the Enterprise’s most famous captain being one of the only successful host bodies created by the technology.

That is until Discovery decided to use it to bring back Gray Tal, who was killed off in the third season episode, “Forget Me Not”. Now, thanks to a combination of Tal’s Trill connections and the apparently disregarded technology from Picard, the series has now brought back Tal as a corporeal being.

Now whether the process holds for good or not is probably going to be explored to some degree, the fact that the show has even tied itself to Picard in such a major way is interesting. How Picard includes this into their future seasons will be interesting as well.