Terry Matalas

When Terry Matalas first walked into Alex Kurtzman's company, the show about bringing Jean Luc Picard back was already spoken for, and he was politely told to go away, kid. He ended up running Star Trek Picard season three anyway, and on Dropping Names he tells Brent and Jonny how it came together in about eight weeks, why the character we know as Data was very nearly called Datum until somebody worked out that data is already plural, and what Brent said to him on the phone that changed his mind. Jonathan Frakes remembers being asked if he was ready for a lot more Riker and answering that he would need to lose thirty pounds first. Terry also explains the last shot of the poker game, where he asked the cast to stop acting and simply deal, ran the cameras and let the credits roll over the real thing. Mary Howard, the producer who hired him as a production assistant and became his first boss, sat in the room for part of this one, which makes his stories about Rick Berman, firing shoes with tassels and the last Star Trek that ever came in on budget land even harder.

There is a lot more here than the Enterprise D, though Brent has plenty to say about how much smaller it felt the second time around and about hitting Patrick Stewart with a car. Terry talks about running 12 Monkeys for four seasons on Syfy after writing a time travel spec called Splinter, meeting Aaron Stanford and most of his crew on Nikita, working on Terra Nova and MacGyver with Henry Winkler giving notes in the edit bay, and the day Brannon Braga's assistant job put him at a sushi lunch where Ron Moore pitched the entire Battlestar Galactica reboot to him before anyone had made it. He is currently finishing the Marvel series Vision Quest with Paul Bettany, James Spader, Todd Stashwick and Orla Brady, and he refuses to name the one actor in it he is most excited about. Also covered: Christopher Lloyd shaving his own eyebrows on day one, the life sized Darth Vader that would not fit in the basement, the DeLorean time machine parts in Terry's garage, and Brent's very short career in the Star Wars radio drama.

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