[Editor's Note: This article contains spoilers for Star Trek: Picard, Season 3, Episode 2, "Disengage."]Star Trek: Picard has returned at warp nine with Season 3 delivering a new adventure for the beloved heroes from The Next Generation. Following last week's premiere episode, "Disengage" sees Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) come face to face with his own legacy in a way he never expected. After Picard and his former number one, Will Riker (Jonathan Frakes), board Beverly's ship, they're greeted by her son, Jack Crusher (Ed Speleers). Riker appears to clock the young man's connection to Picard right away, though the former admiral is extremely resistant to even admit the possibility. In the final moments of the episode, Riker takes matters into his own hands in the eleventh hour to wake Beverly and confirm that Jack is indeed Picard's child too.

The concept of Picard having a son is something that Riker certainly has strong feelings about as we learned back in Season 1 that he and Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis) lost their first child to a degenerative disease. Season 3, Episode 1 set up some angst for the Next Gen crew's beloved betazoid/human couple, with Riker taking the opportunity to join Picard on his rescue mission, telling his former captain that his wife and daughter will appreciate the time away from him.

Following this week's episode, "Disengage," Collider's own Maggie Lovitt sat down with Season 3 showrunner Terry Matalas to unpack the episode and explore all of the juicy drama that has befallen the former crew of the Enterprise-D. During their conversation, Lovitt circled back to that rough patch between Will and Deanna to get a better understanding of why Matalas and the Season 3 writers decided to re-introduce us to these characters during a difficult time in their relationship. When asked about the friction between these two, Matalas explained to Collider that it's in part so that Riker's family history can serve as a sort of framework for what's happening with Picard, saying "It was a reflection of what was going on with Picard. Picard finds a son, Riker lost his son. What would it be like for Riker to watch Picard, not necessarily reject his son, but certainly not go out of his way to connect to him?" Matalas also teased that Riker and Picard not seeing eye to eye on this has set them on a collision course, saying "that sort of culminates in this friction between the two of them in the third episode."

Marina Sirtis as Deanna Troi in Star Trek Picard Season 1 Episode 7 "Nepenthe"
Image via Paramount

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Star Trek: Picard Season 3 Will Make Us Fall in Love With Riker and Troi All Over Again

Once the Season 3 writers knew that they wanted to explore the friction between Picard and Riker through sons gained and lost, they began to examine how that would play into Riker's relationship with Deanna. When we caught up with these two in Season 1, they were still fresh off of the loss of their son; "That is the hardest thing any human could go through. It was losing a child... It's almost impossible for couples to remain together after that," Matalas explained. Because Deanna is half Betazoid, she has empathic abilities that allow her to feel the emotions of those around her as if they're her own—it also allows her to communicate telepathically with Riker. "Then we started to ask ourselves, what would that mean for Deanna who could feel everyone's grief, and how would they try and solve that? We look back at Season 1, and it was almost as if they were overcompensating for their grief. So we wondered if that's what was going on there." If Riker is worried that his grief for his son is so strong that he's hurting Deanna, it makes sense that he would want to give her some breathing room.

Don't worry though Imzadi fans, Matalas explained that exploring that grief and that tension is part of a full-circle journey for Riker and Troi. He continued, singing the praises of Sirtis and Frakes who've brought this on-and-off-again relationship to life for over 30 years. Season 3 of Picard will have us falling for this relationship once again, now with the lived-in experience of a lifetime of love and commitment. Matalas said:

"They're so wonderful, both Marina [Sirtis] and Jonathan, that we wanted to take a moment, understand who they are, get them back to how we fell in love with them to begin with, and then see them joke in the same way that Marina and Jonathan do, and fall in love with them all over again."

New episodes of Star Trek: Picard Season 3 arrive on Paramount+ every Thursday. Check out our conversation with Jonathan Frakes and LeVar Burton down below and don't miss our full post-mortem on "Disengage" with Matalas.