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As longterm fans know, nothing is really impossible in the Star Trek universe. The crew find themselves forced to burst into song for a musical episode? Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has done it. Time gets rewritten multiple times in one story? That can be done without even breaking a sweat. A character has their brain stolen and gets remote controlled to go find it? Sure, that happened too. Here’s something truly mind bending, however: Star Trek: The Next Generation’s captain Jean-Luc Picard might have known that he was a fictional character all along, and was researching the actor who played him.

This odd factoid was discovered by fan Jörg Hillebrand, the man behind Star Trek Observations, a Facebook page that looks into the true minutiae of all things Trek. Hillebrand noticed that, throughout Star Trek: The Next Generation’s run, there’s a book on display in Captain Picard’s Ready Room — and so he decided to try to find out which books they were, only to discover that it’s actually two books: The Globe Illustrated Shakespeare- The Complete Works in the first season of the show, and then The Annotated Shakespeare Vol. 1 for the next six seasons.

Here’s where things get weird. Set designers varied which pages the books were opened to for different episodes, to give the impression that Picard was studying the books and not simply keeping them around for the clout. And for four episodes in the show’s run — ‘Qpid,’ ‘Silicon Avatar,’ ‘True Q,’ and ‘Descent, Part I’ — The Annotated Shakespeare Vol. 1 is opened on one particularly interesting spread.

Let’s take a closer look at the spread in question.

Look at the image on the far left, and at the caption of that image.

Yes, that’s Patrick Stewart, the actor who plays Jean-Luc Picard, on display as Patrick Stewart, in the Ready Room as seen by Jean-Luc Picard, as played by Patrick Stewart. Reality is… bending…!

So, does this count as confirmation of a Star Trek multiverse that includes our reality, and that it’s something that Captain Picard was looking into? Well, not exactly; more likely, it was a joke played on Stewart by the set decorators on the show, who were fairly confident that it wouldn’t be noticed by regular viewers to the show… especially on the low-resolution televisions of the era. It’s only with hi-definition television and upscaled versions of the show that the truth has been revealed.

But if any Star Trek writers out there want to bring the casts of the shows face to face with their fictional counterparts for an episode and use the Patrick Stewart of it all as evidence that it’s been happening for a long time… we wouldn’t be opposed to that, either. You hear me, Strange New Worlds staff?

Star Trek: The Next Generation is available to stream on Paramount+.

Space may be the final frontier, but there's no end to Popverse's love of the Star Trek universe. Hop aboard the starship Enterprise with our Star Trek watch order, explore strange new worlds with our upcoming Star Trek TV shows and movies list, seek out the new life of the franchise, and boldly go where no Star Trek film has ever gone before - with Quentin Tarantino?