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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William Shatner sits down with Brent Spiner and Jonathan Frakes on Dropping Names and opens with the moment he still cannot let go of, the time Neil deGrasse Tyson answered him on camera by putting a hand in his face and pushing, hard enough that Shatner went backwards. From there he gets into the kidney stone a Canadian gambling company called him about a week after it was removed, the doctor who handed it back over, the seventy five thousand dollars it fetched at auction and the Habitat for Humanity house in Louisiana that money helped build. There is also the fresh cigar in Cabo San Lucas that put him on the cover of Cigar Aficionado, a full body scan at half past seven that morning, and a cardiologist telling him that two more years of medical advances buys him another ten.

He goes back to the early days too, to live television in New York when he was the twenty three year old with theatre training who could hit a mark and knew his lines while a camera the size of a bookcase rolled into his face, to Queens with a wife and a baby and a subway ride into town, to Harold Clurman nearly firing him from a play until Julie Harris intervened, and to Judgment at Nuremberg, where he sat at the lawyers table watching Judy Garland, Burt Lancaster and Spencer Tracy work. He talks about Yul Brynner on The Brothers Karamazov, Lorne Greene and Bonanza killing his series For the People in the ratings, Christopher Plummer coming back as a Klingon, and Brent remembering the Stephen Hawking poker game on The Next Generation. Then it turns to what he is chasing now, a podcast with his daughter, a Brad Paisley album, a heavy metal record, and a long conversation about feeding artificial intelligence the whole of human writing and what happened the night it wrote him a poem and he started to cry.

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Leonard Maltin once walked Red Buttons over to say hello to Paramount's goodwill ambassador AC Lyles at Spago, and Red looked up and asked if he hadn't just been wondering whether AC was still alive. That is the register of this whole conversation, which finds Leonard and his daughter and podcast partner Jessie Maltin on Dropping Names with Brent Spiner and Jonathan Frakes, trading stories that only a man who reviewed films on Entertainment Tonight for thirty years and put his name on Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide could actually have. The centrepiece is the night Sammy Davis Jr. invited the Maltins up to Tower Road after a charity dinner, the gate swung open, a man at the door told them to let themselves in, and Leonard spent hours alone in Sammy's den studying the autographed photos, the Pac Man machine and the hole cut for the projection booth while the house stayed empty until nearly midnight.

There is also Katharine Hepburn in her Turtle Bay brownstone, talking freely about twenty seven years of never being seen in public with Spencer Tracy while an NBC publicist fumed off camera because nobody was discussing the television movie. Leonard describes being thirteen and finding Buster Keaton reading a newspaper in the back of a car near the Brooklyn Bridge on the Samuel Beckett shoot, getting a still signed and learning it was from Parlor Bedroom and Bath. He explains the strange on again off again decades with Burt Reynolds, who was convinced the bad reviews of Stroker Ace and Cannonball Run were personal, and Jessie remembers Matt Damon and Morgan Freeman shouting at Clint Eastwood through a junket door because he would not stop talking. Dale Evans came to Jessie's bat mitzvah in a wheelchair, Gloria Stuart came too, Fayard Nicholas taught her to dance, and the two of them close by talking about their new book, Family Movie Night, the first one credited to Maltin and Maltin.

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