Warning: SPOILERS for Star Trek Picard Season 3 Finale – "The Last Generation"Star Trek: Picard season 3 showrunner Terry Matalas explains the origin of the final line of dialogue spoken by Admiral Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart): "I've come to believe that the stars have always been in my favor." Matalas wrote and directed Picard's spectacular season 3 finale, which closed out the saga of Star Trek: The Next Generation and set up his proposed spinoff, Star Trek: Legacy.
Screen Rant joined a roundtable interview with Matalas and asked about Picard's final line of dialogue in the finale's climactic poker game and the pressure to match Captain Picard's iconic last line in TNG's beloved series finale, "All Good Things…" – "Five card stud, nothing wild, and the sky's the limit". When asked how Matalas came up with "the stars have always been in my favor," here's how he replied:
Terry Matalas: I didn't. [Supervising Producer] Cindy Appel did. And it was tough. We sat in the room, and we thought, "Guys, we're never going to be 'All Good Things…'" But let's try. What's a great line? And Cindy got the closest with that line. "The stars have always been in my favor" is probably the closest for a line that we could get. I knew I was going to end in that shot and stay in that shot for the credits. And so it needed to be something. But yeah, that's all Cindy, that one.
