TNG's "All Good Things..." was arguably as good as it was going to be

How do you make a good thing better? Well, if you're Brent Spiner, it's not by adding technobabble in place of character-driven scenes. That's what Spiner is alleging happened to the original script to Star Trek: The Next Generation's final episode, "All Good Things..." According to Spiner, who played Data in the franchise, the series finale was supposed to be more.

The franchise star claims that there were character-driven scenes that featured his character Data, as well as Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) and Geordi La Forge (LeVar Burton) in scenes so good that Spiner got very excited to film them.

According to the book "The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years" by Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross (via ScreenRant), Spiner reveals that the episode had a much richer set of scenes going on, but that Michael Piller, an executive producer on the show, hated it, and cut it, saying;

"Brent Spiner: The first draft that Ron and Brannon wrote was extraordinary. It would have easily have been thought of as the greatest Star Trek episode of all time. Michael came in and added a few thousand words of technobabble to it and took out some of the character scenes, which he is not keen on. There were moments when I read the first draft that my heart jumped into my throat, because I was so excited. There were some wonderful moments between Picard, Geordi, and Data. Nonetheless, it’s still a very good episode."

It's hard to know if the version of the episode Spiner saw would have been better than what fans actually got. What fans got was pretty good and is heralded as not only an all time classic for the Next Generation franchise but an all-time great episode for the Star Trek franchise as a whole.

Trying to top something so beloved is not an easy thing to do, and it's very likely that fans would not agree with Spiner.