ONTD

What now?

The season-two finale of USA's Suits ended with Pearson agreeing to a merger with another law firm, Harvey (Gabriel Macht) firing Mike (Patrick J. Adams), and Rachel (Meghan Markle) finding out about Mike's lack of a Harvard law degree, prompting the
duo to have angry sex in the file room. With all these threads left untied, what should we expect from season three?

Creator and executive producer Aaron Korsh talks to The Hollywood Reporter about all the big moments in the closer, what to expect in the new season and if familiar faces will be back.

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The Hollywood Reporter: The merger goes through, which causes
tension between various associates at the firm, and many of the
relationships are broken by the end of the finale. Where is Pearson at
now?

Aaron Korsh: We try to think of the consequences of
the actions people have taken. At the end of the season, they're
entering into a merger with another company. The action the firm has
taken will have consequences, both positive and negative. It's like
entering into a relationship with someone else, you're going to have
good points, bad points, you're going to have to work through things.
That will happen in season three. The person who made that decision,
Jessica (Gina Torres), will have to deal with the
consequences, just from a merger perspective: the power dynamics, power
sharing. In order to achieve that merger, she did some heavy-handed and
under-handed things between Mike and Harvey. She'll have to deal with
the consequences of how she treated Mike and Harvey.

THR: Though Harvey made a bet with Darby, he could have
skipped out entirely. When Harvey welcomed his new boss into the fold,
it was certainly a pivotal moment for all involved.

Korsh: In that moment, he's going to honor his bet.
Jessica might have cheated or she might not have cheated, but I'm going
to honor my agreement. He also feels bad about the fact that he didn't
mean for Scottie (Abigail Spencer) to get fired, and so
he takes the high road to save her job, and also Darby puts it in
Harvey's court about what he's going to decide with Scottie. In terms of
the merger, you can think you will accept something and are you really
going to accept it? It's going to come up again and again. Harvey's
accepted it at the moment, but that doesn't mean he's going to
permanently accept it.

THR: Mike and Rachel have sex -- but not under the circumstances that either of them envisioned.

Korsh: She ends up finding out Mike's secret, but
they end up having sex anyway. Now does that mean that she'll just
accept that he's flawed and not have any struggle with that? Rachel's
accepted it in the moment, but it doesn't mean she'll permanently accept
it.

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THR: Obviously, this is another wrinkle in their relationship
and will probably be a big problem now that Rachel is another person at
the firm -- in addition to Jessica and Harvey -- who knows Mike's deal.

Korsh: The reason we wanted to get them together was
because there was enough of the will they, won't they. Let's move on
one way or another. We were afraid to do it, though, because once you do
it, it reduces a certain tension that you've had on the show, and how
do you handle it moving forward? For me, it had to be the way that it
went. It wasn't going to be a soft [moment]. When the writers first
pitched to me the idea, they put up a card that said, "Mike and Rachel
tenderly bang." It was going to be a gentle love scene between the two
of them and then afterwards, he was going to tell him about the truth. I
thought no, he has to tell her the truth and it leads to a heated
fight. I said "change that card to Mike and Rachel angrily bang." It's a
culmination of everything that's happened. He's alone, he's lost
everything. The consequences now are a) she knows and what is she going
to do about that and b) Harvey told Mike not to tell her and he did. In
the cold light of day, what is she going to do? He has everything she
wants and didn't earn it.

THR: I didn't think about it like that, but it's a good point that Mike represents the position Rachel has wanted.

Korsh: And didn't earn. If you think back to the
conversation they had on the roof about his interview with Harvey, he
left out the fact that he hadn't gone into law school. He left out
particular details.

THR: Harvey's working relationship with Jessica changed
dramatically in the finale. What kind of journey will they have to go
through to get back to where they were at the start of the series?

Korsh: A long one. Their relationship has been
mentor-mentee. For most of season one, it was pretty rock-solid. In
season two, their relationship is strained and stressed a little bit
more after she discovers what he did with Mike -- and other things --
but it's still good. Eventually, in any relationship the mentee is going
to want to move on from the mentor -- not dissimilar from a
parent-child dynamic. That, to some degree, happened in the last six
episodes, and they're going to have to do some healing. Her goal was to
show Harvey that he isn't ready yet to be the leader, but I also believe
Jessica was going to do the merger and put his name on the door, but he
didn't want it that way. From her perspective, it's a question of "what
the f--- is wrong with you?" From his perspective, they've fended off
all these attacks, and now you want to jump into bed with these people?
They both have a leg to stand on and they don't back down, and it
fractures their relationship. The question is, did Jessica go too far
and snap their bond or not. We'll find that out in the course of season
three.

THR: Harvey and Scottie's past is also explored further, and
he's left with a choice of whether to send her back to the U.K. or keep
her close in New York. What does this new wrinkle mean for Harvey's
romantic life?

Korsh: I'm not going to answer what decision Harvey
makes when Darby asks whether she should be sent back to London or in
New York, but I will say that we will answer that. If I were a viewer, I
would suspect that we haven't seen the last of Scottie. No matter what
decisions he makes, the impact of Scottie's emergence, we'll try to use
that to explore Harvey more. Through Scottie, we learn more about the
impact Harvey's mother had on Harvey's view toward women. Harvey
believes that Scottie wouldn't cheat on him, but rather that she made
him into the man who cheated on women -- and that's the last thing in
the world he'd want to be.

THR: Is Harvey in love with Scottie?

Korsh: If he was ready to say he loved her, he would
have said it by the elevators, so I think in that moment, he was not
ready to say he loved her. But he hinted, when he stands up for her to
Darby, there's a shift. He could have said nothing, he didn't throw her
under the bus, so there's a shift in his attitude toward her. That opens
up the door for Darby saying, "Listen, do you want to be around her? If
you want to be around her, what's that going to do to you?" Is he open
to being around her and in love with her? It forces him to re-evaluate
that question.

THR: Now that Mike is no longer Harvey's associate, what is
that going to look like? What does that mean for them in season three?

Korsh: When you have a fractured relationship, can
you heal it or is it permanently broken? If Mike were 100 percent wrong
in doing what he did, there would be no chance to heal, and if Harvey
were 100 percent wrong in how he treated Mike, there'd be no chance to
heal their relationship. They're going to have to find a way to come
together, and that's going to take a while. That's their challenge going
into season three.

THR: How long will it take for Harvey and Mike to be on the same page again?

Korsh: Most fans want Mike and Rachel to get
together as soon as possible and most fans want to know about the can
opener in the same episode we are introduced. Most fans don't ever want
Mike and Harvey on opposite sides or Harvey and Jessica to be fighting
the way they are, but the truth is they don't really want that. They
want to want that. Scratching an itch is very satisfying, but if you
never put the itch there in the first place, you never get to scratch
it. Harvey and Mike having a schism is an itch. I won't tell you when
it's over. We're going to continue to provide itches and we're going to
scratch them. [Laughs]

THR: Will the Donna (Sarah Rafferty) and Harvey saga continue in season three?

Korsh: We intend to shine more light on Harvey and
Donna's, for lack of a better word, relationship. We intend to explore
their relationship more in a similar oblique way that we did in season
two. We want to further our knowledge and understanding of their
feelings toward each other and their history together without
necessarily tackling it head-on.

THR: Is there an endgame with them?

Korsh: I don't think in those terms. I don't have
it. The whole emergence of any feelings between them has emerged over
time. I don't know where things are going to end. Part of why I'm so
cagey is I don't know, and I want people to watch it.

THR: On a lighter note, the Downton Abbey jokes were a nice touch.

Korsh: If I had one regret in the season-one finale, it didn't have as many light moments as I would have liked. Putting in Nigel (Adam Godley) with Louis (Rick Hoffman), we thought added some fun, with them arguing over beer and the Downton Abbey stuff.

THR: The Louis vs. Nigel moments were also fun to watch. Louis being Louis, he always finds a way to screw it up in the end.

Korsh: These are two grown men who argue about who goes to fancier mud places. [Laughs]
When Louis betrays him, he's betraying him because he honestly believes
Nigel is going to betray him. They're destined by their nature, and
when he doesn't, it's heartbreaking.

THR: Will we see Katrina Bennett (Amanda Schull) returning in season three?

Korsh: Here and there.

THR: What about Rachel's father?

Korsh: We would like to see Wendell Pierce in the new season. He doesn't play a major role in the new season, but we would like to see him again.

THR: What should we look out for in the third season?

Korsh: We're still concocting it, but we're going to
try to further the growth of all of our characters and their
relationships, while attempting to remain true to who the characters
are. For example, Harvey has accepted the merger, but is he really going
to accept it? Mike is becoming more like Harvey as the series
progresses, but he's still Mike. A lot of fallout from the finale; new
characters to enter the fray; more light to be shined on the
Donna-Harvey relationship in the past, present; and perhaps old foes to
come back, old friends to come back; and the struggle for power at
Pearson ... is never over. Hopefully we'll have some new big surprises
that people don't see coming.

Suits will return for a third season later this year.