In “Conspiracy,” we see Dr. Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden) break the Hippocratic oath and shoot an alien, like she did at the top of “Picard” season 3. The episode begins with Picard responding to an urgent message for his eyes only, just as he did with Beverly’s distress call this season. He takes his ship off course (in this case, it’s the Enterprise instead of the Titan) and goes to meet another old friend in a remote location.
When Picard beams down to the planet for his rendezvous with Captain Keel (Jonathan Farwell), the influence of “Conspiracy” can be seen not only in the storyline, but in the lighting, as the characters’ faces are bathed in red and black. We’ve seen similar shading all throughout “Picard” season 3 (see above). Clearly, someone in the shadows at Paramount+ never got the memo that the bridge of a starship is supposed to be “a clean, well-lit place,” as Ernest Hemingway would say.
The “Picard” episode “Imposter” differs from “Conspiracy” in the nature of the aliens that have infiltrated Starfleet. In “Conspiracy,” they’re parasitic lifeforms, later retconned offscreen as cousins of the Trill symbionts in a series of “Deep Space Nine” novels. The Changelings, like the Trill, were a major part of the “Deep Space Nine” TV series, being represented by two of the main characters, Odo (René Auberjonois) and Dax (Terry Farrell), respectively.
Whereas Captain Shaw (Todd Stashwick) dumbs the Changelings down as “goo-people, walking, talking clay-dough,” the parasites in “Conspiracy” are organisms that crawl inside a host body and live there, with an appendage protruding from a gill in back of the host’s neck. This makes it easier to identify them than the new and improved Changelings, who are now able to pass blood tests and evade detection better than before.