This Saturday, Starz’s rousing pirate drama Black Sails launches its third season.

Luckily for this flag-waving fan of the show, I got the chance to talk to creators and executive producers Robert Levine and Jonathan Steinberg. As always, I started with the most important question on my docket.

If you had a pirate name, what would you want it to be?

Steinberg: That’s a tough question, I don’t know.

Levine: Something involving a beard, I suppose. But all the beards are taken though.

Speaking of beards, Blackbeard (played by Ray Stevenson) is joining the show this season. We’ve seen a lot of adaptations of Blackbeard in TV or movies. What’s unique or different about your Blackbeard this year?

Steinberg: I think you want to do it in a way that doesn’t feel exactly like one would expect. He wasn’t going to come in and be this vicious bad guy that turns tables over. We wanted him to have an emotional context.

It started as a story about an old pirate, a pirate who was there before the end of the Golden Age. It felt like a Scorsese movie, like one of the guys from the old neighborhood who comes back and disapproves of what the next generation has done to his legacy.

It very quickly becomes a personal story about a relationship he left behind. There were all these connections to characters that we didn’t know existed yet, but explain a lot in terms of how he interacts with Captain Vane and Eleanor Guthrie. We’re hoping he’s a big scary presence but that he’s actually someone you care about quickly.

What’s different about promoting the show for the third season than the first or second?

Steinberg: The show is different than when we started. As with anything, I think you just get better at it. The show has become more of the show that we initially wanted it to be when we started. The first four episodes of season 3 are bigger than anything we’ve ever done on the show. The show is really becoming something that is pretty unusual and special in television at the moment, which is hard, due to how much is out there. We’re hoping people notice it. If you watch the first season, you will not expect what the third season is.

Black Sails is a prequel and adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. How do you strike the balance between history and the text?

Steinberg: I think what comes first is the show, and wanting to tell a story about the characters that we care about in a way that feels satisfying and true. There are things with history that we try to be faithful to, and there are things in the history that we feel comfortable taking liberties with.

In terms of the book, as we get into the show, the more we want to show how it will eventually lead to Treasure Island. With each season there is more and more connective tissue that starts to develop. We find ways for us to take things from the book, to redefine them and make them feel different and align with what you’ve seen in the show. Season 3 has a lot of that; things are coming to life in ways you might not have expected it to.

Levine: Ultimately, you want it to fit the book but also be surprising. That becomes the fun part; figuring out how to reach the book that feels connective. Then the book becomes something new, and the show provides insight and context that you didn’t necessarily have the first time you read it.

If you had to adapt another Robert Louis Stevenson novel, what would it be?

Steinberg: Oh man. I think he and I might be done for a little while. We’ve had a lot of Robert Louis Stevenson in our lives…that’s a good question. He has a very strange presence in the writer’s room. In some ways, his voice trumps everyone, and you have to find a way to make it work.

I’m imagining you guys throwing darts at a portrait of him in the writer’s room.

Steinberg: Yeah, we’ve had to occasionally shake the fist.

What other exciting things are happening this season?

Steinberg: There are actually two figures coming in. You don’t have to know a lot about pirates to know about Blackbeard. But there’s a massive figure in the history of Nassau and piracy in the Caribbean, whose name is Woodes Rogers. He was the governor who came into the Bahamas with the mission to end piracy. We wanted to introduce him as someone who’s the face of this British invasion that we’ve been threatening was coming since page 1 of the pilot. The British have always worked in the background in the show. Starting right off the bat this season they become a very real and menacing presence.

Who would you rather serve under: Captain Flint or Captain Vane?

Steinberg: Neither workplace seems like a comfortable environment to be perfectly honest with you.

How long could you last on their ships?

Levine: I’d say like a day.

Steinberg: If that.

Levine, Steinberg and Starz hopes viewers will last a lot longer, when season 3 of Starz’s Black Sails premieres at 9 p.m. on Saturday January 23.

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