10 MORE Star Trek Moments You Never Knew Were Improvised
1. Wild Cards
"So, five card stud, nothing wild, and the sky's the limit," is famously the conclusion to All Good Things… As Patrick Stewart revealed in his memoir Making It So, that line wasn't devised by the writers. It was, in fact, an invention on the part of Brent Spiner. Cut (the deck), shuffle, then recombine some 30 years later, the entire game was now improvisation, still with poker, still with camera overhead, as another end approached.
No Laris, but they were all there. Before the last of The Last Generation (and that lecture on "Mugato meditation"), it was one final round at Guinan's for the old senior staff of "the fat one". As for the poker, Terry Matalas told a Zoom panel in April 2023 (via MovieWeb) that he "let [the actors] improvise for 45 minutes". The showrunner, and writer/director of the episode, continued:
I just rolled the cameras and let them play because I wanted the audience to really feel what it's like to hang out with these actors, and to really feel like the jokes and the smiles were genuine […] I wanted the audience to feel that for a few minutes before we said goodbye.
As for the finale's final wild card — Q — that was planned in advance but filmed impromptu on the day. "We only had 20 minutes to shoot the scene, so we literally got the man in that amazing outfit […] and we just banged it out," Matalas added on Zoom. As for any improv. that might come next, we're still waiting for them to make that up!