Jonathan Frakes discusses returning as Captain Riker in Star Trek: Picard, and NOT returning to direct The Orville season 3

Jonathan Frakes as Captain Riker in Star Trek: Picard

It isn’t just watchalongs that Jonathan Frakes is getting up to these days...he’s been spending a fair amount of time making the interview circuit, too. Week before last, he was a guest on GalaxyCon Live, and last week, he appeared in a video interview with Comicbook.com.

I told you about part of that interview yesterday, but there were a few more nuggets of info in there that you also might be interested in. Comicbook.com unhelpfully spread these out across several articles, so I’ll try and bring them back together. Please be warned, there are a couple spoilers coming, but I’ve tried to keep them as mild as possible.

It was a pretty big moment for fans to see Frakes back on the bridge of a starship in the finale of Star Trek: Picard. But what was Frakes’ experience of that like, 18 years after Star Trek: Nemesis? “That was a really different experience because I was alone," Frakes told Comicbook.com. "I was 'self-directing.' I was in a captain's chair. I had a spacesuit on. I had my beard trimmed, my Riker hair put back on, my bald spots covered up. It felt very familiar, and it was like a flashback.”

And he doesn’t think he’ll be the only of his Next Generation co-stars to get the chance to come back, either. According to Frakes, he does expect to be back to direct some of Picard season two, and, he said, “I also think it'd be a good bet that we'll [have] some other members of Next Gen because I think the 'Nepenthe' test went very well." Elaborating, he said that producers were trying to see if there was an “appetite” for more cameos. He acknowledged that he was pleased with how they worked him into the show. He said, “I’m glad we didn’t come back on the Titan, for instance, that we were found on another part [of the universe]. It’s 33 years or something. As Picard has changed, so has Riker and Troi and so has Seven.”

Star Treks: Discovery and Picard are not the only sci-fi adventure series that Frakes has directed in recent years. He’s also well-known for directing two episodes of the Trek-alike Seth MacFarlane series The Orville. The Orville completed season two last spring, and it will be still some time before we see season three on our screens. In the meantime, it’s moved from terrestrial broadcast on FOX to being streamed exclusively on Hulu. Season three will reportedly be longer and support more flexibility in production, and (according to Frakes in the Comicbook.com interview) will be directed entirely by MacFarlane and Jon Cassar. "I'm not involved with the third season," Frakes said. "They made a decision to have Seth [MacFarlane] and Jon Cassar, who's the producing director, direct all the episodes of the third season of that show, much to my chagrin, but that's the way it goes."

You can watch the entire 20-minute interview with Frakes on Comicbook.com, and of course you can catch up with Picard and Discovery, now streaming on CBS All Access.