32 Years Later, The Greatest Closing Line In Star Trek History Is Still A Top 5 Sci-Fi Ending

Published Sep 4, 2026, 1:30 PM EDT

Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020.

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Although the Star Trek franchise has plenty of great quotes, the closing line of The Next Generation stands out even in this crowded field. From McCoy’s inimitable one-liners in The Original Series to the many memorable lines uttered by Data throughout The Next Generation, the Star Trek franchise has never been short of quotable moments. On the contrary, “Live long and prosper” is up there with “May the force be with you” as one of the genre’s most enduringly popular lines.

While Data got many of The Next Generation’s best lines to himself, he wasn’t the one to utter The Next Generation’s best finale quote. Instead, that honor went to Patrick Stewart’s Picard. After the action of the series finale "All Good Things…" comes to a close, Stewart’s captain joins the crew of the Enterprise for a game of poker. What follows is one of the most fitting final lines in TV history, and one that surprisingly came from a member of the show’s cast rather than the writer’s room.

Picard deals the cards and states the rules, saying “Five card stud, nothing wild. And the sky's the limit.” It’s a perfectly fitting note for the Star Trek show to end on, even if the line isn’t as immediately arresting as many of Picard’s most profound The Next Generation quotes. After all, the sky truly is the limit for the Enterprise crew, who have been through a lifetime of adventures by the time the series finale takes place, and who still have innumerable offscreen adventures ahead of them after the episode ends and bid adieu to the beloved crew.

Picard’s Final Line Is The Perfect Ending To Star Trek: The Next Generation

What makes Picard’s final line such a fitting ending is its nod to the show’s true focus, the crew of the Enterprise. While the planets they visited and aliens they encountered were always intriguing, ultimately, it was the camaraderie, conflict, and human relationships between characters like Picard, Riker, Data, Deanna Troi, Worf, and the rest of the team that made the show great.

While later space opera shows like Prime Video’s The Expanse and the Battlestar Galactica reboot would offer a more expansive, immersive vision of the future, complete with more morally compromised main characters, Star Trek: The Next Generation was a pivotal stepping stone between the idealism of The Original Series and the complexity of those later hits. The Next Generation’s crew meant well and did their best, but they were also flawed and human, something the series never forgot.

Led by Picard, the Enterprise’s crew truly could do anything, but only if they worked together to overcome their individual shortcomings. In keeping with this spirit of collaboration, it is only fitting that Data’s actor Brent Spiner was, according to Stewart, the one who came up with Picard’s final line in the series finale. The resulting ending was so good that Picard’s series finale would reference the same scene when the spinoff ended decades later.

Next Generation Features Several Of Star Trek’s Best Quotes

Of course, Picard’s understated last line is far from the only great quote from The Next Generation. In season 2, episode 21, “Peak Performance,” Picard sympathizes with Data after he loses a game of Strategema to the Zakdorn strategist Sirna Kolrami and drops the all-time great quote “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness; that is life.”

Meanwhile, as early as season 1, episode 5, “The Last Outpost,” Riker noted that “Fear is the true enemy, the only enemy,” a line that still resonates with many fans to this day. This quote is often listed as one of the franchise’s best of all time, despite the fact that the episode it comes from is otherwise thoroughly disappointing. Thus, while The Next Generation’s final Picard line is uniquely fitting for the story of the series, it is far from the only great Star Trek quote to come from the iconic series.

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  Jean-Luc Picard

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  Commander William T. Riker