Star Trek: The Next Generation famously ends with a poker game, and writer Ronald D. Moore explains the origin of that iconic and beloved moment. Moore and Brannon Braga co-wrote the Star Trek: The Next Generation series finale, "All Good Things...", which had the challenge of wrapping up TNG's historic 7-season run while also opening the door for the USS Enterprise-D crew's jump to feature films in Star Trek Generations. By all accounts, Moore and Braga succeeded in their task, and "All Good Things..." is considered a classic TV series finale, with the poker game as a fitting capstone to the voyages of Captain Jean-Luc Picard's (Patrick Stewart) Enterprise.
In the Star Trek oral history, "The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years" by Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross, Ronald D. Moore details how Star Trek: The Next Generation's finale poker game became the "signature of the show," and how it was an order by executive producer Rick Berman to leave the audience with a "warm, fuzzy feeling" that led to Moore and Braga closing out TNG with Captain Picard and his crew playing poker. Read Moore's quote below:
The poker game that ended the episode, and the series, has become the signature of the show. It was a great idea that brought the crew together in a social situation. It’s something we’ve always played through the years, and it seems like them at their best, sitting around, off the bridge, just interacting with each other. Rick Berman’s big note on the script was that he wanted the end of the series to have a sweet, nostalgic feel, and he wanted everybody to walk away with a warm fuzzy feeling. That was his dictum to us. We wanted it to be something sweet and sentimental and we wanted the whole family there together, and we did not want to do it on the bridge. We thought it was the most obvious thing to do. The bridge is kind of cold and it’s not very personal, and we wanted to do one last poker game and end it there with the whole family in a quiet, intimate setting.