‘Star Trek: Picard’: Jeri Ryan And Michelle Hurd Discuss Seven And Raffi’s “Easy” Romantic Relationship

When it comes to romance on Star Trek, nothing is easy. Whether you’re dealing with alien planets, rogue anomalies, Borg invasions, or anything else, something always gets in the way of the characters having a smooth time in the romantic department. Unless, of course, you’re Star Trek: Picard‘s Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan) and Raffi (Michelle Hurd).

“These are easy characters to work together because we love each other,” Ryan told Decider on the burgeoning romance in Season 2 of the Paramount+ series. “I love working with Michelle, and we have such a good time together and we work so well together and we work in very similar styles. So it’s such an easy fit, and I’ve heard her say, it’s like a shorthand, there is no work like, ‘well here’s what our relationship maybe could be.’ We don’t have to do that because it’s so comfortable and it’s so easy, so it’s fun.”

Though fans might have suspected something was going on between the duo in the Season 1 finale of the series, the relationship was fleshed out significantly in the audio drama “No Man’s Land,” which was released on February 22 and stars Ryan and Hurd. When Season 2 of Picard picks up, there’s a time jump, and things are going down, for real.

“We’re plopped down into the middle of a relationship just in the trenches, we are just figuring it out and two really strong independent women, mature women, with fully realized lives, trying to save the galaxy, by the way while we’re doing this, how do you make this work?” Ryan continued. “And how much am I willing to make myself vulnerable and open to another person and accommodate this other life and a lot of respect, a lot of love? It’s a challenging thing with kind of big stakes for Season 2.”

Though a lot of the plot for Season 2 of Picard is shrouded in mystery, we know that things aren’t going to be easy for Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) and his new crew. There’s the return of the all-powerful Q (John DeLancie) to deal with, as well as what looks like time travel back to our time on Earth (or a close approximation). But through it all, Ryan and Hurd will continue to explore what Seven and Raffi mean to each other.

“When you find an artist that you work so well with, I think that’s also one of the reasons why the writers wrote what they did, is that they could see that there was something innately in us that we’re able to click and that we could flesh out,” Hurd noted. “It didn’t need us sitting down and like, ‘err, when was our first date?’ It’s really about, Michelle and Jeri have such a rich life history because we’re grown women, that we have a shorthand. We don’t need to flesh out those little things, we meet at the same place. So it was really easy to flesh out that relationship.”

You can check out how Seven and Raffi’s relationship develops when Star Trek: Picard returns for Season 2 on Paramount+, on Thursday, March 3.

Where to watch Star Trek: Picard