Black Sails returns for a third season this Saturday, bringing with it another exciting season of pirate intrigue and action.

I sat down with executive producers Jon Steinberg and Robert Levine to discuss the introductions of Woodes Rogers and Blackbeard, Jack Rackham’s rise to power and a huge storm sequence that will be a part of Seaosn 3.

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As much as Blackbeard was a character that we knew in the beginning had to be in the story eventually, so was Woodes Rogers. This was always a story about how eventually England was going to come back and stake its claim and try and clean up Nassau. What everything was angling toward as we started Season 2, and it’s said as we ended Season 2... For all of this infighting, when the British Navy shows up, they’re not going to care whose crew you’re on. We wanted to own that and start from there with a new palette and new relationships. When you begin this season, you’re in a universe where there’s a strange triumvirate running Nassau with Rackham and Vane and Flint having arrived at this compact where they’ve put their differences asides to try and protect Nassau against the British Empire. For us, it’s fun. It’s new relationship, it’s new dynamics, it’s new tensions.We both liked the feeling of having to catch up a little bit, rather than being told everything, you start living in that world and you’ll figure it out.But you really have to design those moments and those things you drop into. They become really fun. The Rackham one obviously is really fun. Disorient the audience, and then ease them into starting to figure out why that makes sense; you start to see where their story is going. Finding Rackham in a place where he’s suddenly one of the three [in charge], that’s going to be interesting because he’s always had this tension in his life about being the younger brother, the misunderstood one. He’s got a little Rodney Dangerfield to him. That informs everything that happens to him over the course of the season and particularly when Edward Teach [Blackbeard] shows up, who’s the gangster from the old neighborhood who is back and doesn't like what he finds and that’s all typified by the fact that “Jack Rackham is now a guy I have to talk to do business?” It becomes really fun.Yeah. They each start in their own story and I think those stories each have their own momentum and emotional stakes and you’re in each of them. At a certain point, those stories crash together and you realize that these two massive figures have never shared a frame and when they do, it’s explosive. It feels like these two freight trains that had been heading at each other this whole time and you just didn’t realize it. And when you’ve got Toby and Ray sitting across from each other, inhabiting these larger than life characters, it’s electric. You have to fight the temptation to write too much. Just let it be. Them staring at each other is almost a scene into itself. It’s a challenge to manipulate all those points of view so that you’re not losing anyone and so that you’re not being not true to anyone, that no one just becomes a plot device, because there’s no room for them to have feelings or a point of view. But that’s the goal always, is everyone has a point of view and everyone has a reaction. Everybody is reacting in a way that shouldn’t feel false.I always like to brag, basically [Laughs], about once we made the choice to do it, kind of wanting to deliver on the experience and that meant “Okay you’re on a ship, you’re in the middle of a storm that can kind do anything to the ship that it wants. What are the different points of view that you want to experience that through?” We manage to do that in a great way and do everything you can think of and through points of view of people we care about. You get to experience it from the deck, with the captain, who is making the choice of going into it and how to get out. You’re up there with Billy Bones, who is trying to manipulate the sails and experiencing weather in its most intense form. You’re also below decks with Long John Silver, dealing with flooding and water. It all required, even the one below decks required, a massive amount of production and stunts to achieve it.Construction and engineering to create sets that could do all this stuff. It was a huge undertaking between visual effects and production about how it was all going to be handed off. There are corners you can cut. You can convince yourself that it can be broad daylight in a storm and it probably is at some point, but I think part of the commitment when we jumped into this with two feet was to avoid these things. Every time we got to an off ramp where it felt like things would be a lot easier if we just got rid of the construction cranes and were willing to tolerate sunlight…. You just fight through it. I think the result feels worth it. It’s an experience. For most of it, those actors are not acting. That’s Toby Stephens being really mad that he’s in sitting in Day 18 of being bombarded by water and hot air.Water, air, and gravity because we wanted the ship to have the worst experience it could possibly have, so there was a set built that allowed us to tilt at a really extreme angle. It’s not just Star Trek, where you’re pretending that things are rattling. They’re falling and struggling against it. Water is pouring on them at the same time.We end Season 2 at this moment where Bonnie has had this very intense experience struggling with her sexuality and trying to understand what she is to Rackham and what she is to Max and what feels true to her. We wanted to start Season 3 with them all having to grapple with that - with Rackham still being a partner to her and a best friend and an alter ego to her but not sleeping in the same bed or being the same house and having to deal with all of the stuff that comes along with that. While at the same time he is as powerful and influential and as rich as he has ever been. Toby Schmitz, Clara Paget and Jessica Parker Kennedy couldn’t be more fun to write for. It’s this great, weird little messed up family that they’ve got. We just don’t ever want to stop. Everything develops and gets to a point where you think “that’s the end of their story” but it’s like it can’t be - it’s so much fun.Right. There’s a little C-3P0 and R2-D2 going on. There’s all kinds of stuff all thrown into it, and as far as I’m concerned, that will continue for the length of the show. It’s just a relationship you don’t ever want to stop being in the middle of.

Black Sails: Season 3 premieres Saturday, January 23rd on Starz.Eric Goldman is Executive Editor of IGN TV. You can follow him on Twitter at @TheEricGoldman , IGN at ericgoldman-ign and Facebook at Facebook.com/TheEricGoldman