There’s a new chief in Doc Season 2, with Felicity Huffman joining the cast as Dr. Joan Ridley, and TV Insider has an exclusive first look at her in character.

The Fox medical drama returns on Tuesday, September 23, for its 22-episode second season, and we are debuting the key art for the show, featuring both Molly Parker (Dr. Amy Parker) solo and with Huffman, Omar Metwally (Dr. Michael Hamda), Jon Ecker (Dr. Jake Heller), and Amirah Vann (Dr. Gina Walker). Check out the full versions below.

Plus, read on for scoop from co-showrunner Hank Steinberg on Season 2, which picks up a day and a half, two days after the finale, from Amy’s complicated love triangle with Michael and Jake to the character of Joan Ridley to where Amy stands when it comes to continuing to get her memories back after the accident that took eight years of them from her.

The complicated love triangle — last we left them, like Jake had witnessed that moment that Amy and Michael shared in his office. Does she know he did yet?

Hank Steinberg: You can be sure there will be a reckoning.

Where does the new season find like those relationships? Because as much as Amy may want to let Michael go, that’s easier said than done. But she did develop genuine feelings for Jake again.

Yes. I think this is a real legitimate triangle. Amy shared a lifetime of building a life together and a family with one man, and yet there’s something very elemental and chemical and kind of pure in her connection with Jake to the point that it’s so evident something between them kind of no matter when in their life points they meet. They met the first time in the wake of Amy’s grief and trying to build back her life, and the second time, they’ve met when Amy’s back in time, and even in that mode, she feels something for him, it’s clear there’s something there. It’s also, of course, new and fresh, which, anyone who’s been married for 20 years can attest to the fact that that could be enticing. There’s that natural tension between an older, deeper love and something that’s newer and hungrier and it feels chemical and elemental.

Felicity Huffman’s coming in as Dr. Joan Ridley to fill in as Chief, and she has history with Amy. Why has she come to the hospital?

There’s a series of events in the premiere episode of Season 2, which give way to Michael offering this job to Joan. It’s a fun confluence of different extenuating circumstances that lead to something that feels a little bit like fate, but also we discover that Joan has arrived on this day potentially with her eye on that job.

What kind of doctor is she? If you’re looking at say, who Amy was before the accident and who Amy is after the accident when it comes to bedside manner, how she handles the staff, what can you say about Joan?

Joan is a tough, old-school feminist, big believer in female empowerment and self-made and a really interesting, eccentric personality. She is double boarded in internal medicine and surgery and has traveled the world doing Doctors With Borders type of medicine, so she’s been all over the world, she’s extremely adventurous and sure of herself. She’s tough and exacting on the other doctors in a similar way to how Amy is, but she’s smoother with how she does it. So she’s a bit more carrot-and-stick, whereas Amy was kind of all stick. Amy learned and watched Joan, but she sort of took the stick part and didn’t take much of the carrot part in terms of how she worked with her staff.

How much had Joan and Amy been in touch over the years?

They were quite close, but always with that sort of Pygmalion undertone of one was the mentor and one was the protégé. And then over 20 something years how that evolves where the student starts to become as strong and gifted as the teacher, there could become frictions in that chemistry when that happens. But there’s a deep respect. Joan really believes in Amy and cares about her, and in some ways, Amy’s rise and success is tied to Joan’s own legacy, and so it’s a very interesting, intertwined, complex relationship.

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What is that dynamic like now when we see them in Season 2? Because this is an Amy who has been changing especially over recent years, not just with the accident, but also with her loss before that. 

Well, the fun part of the dynamic is that for Amy is that it keeps her quite off balance and it can feel different on any given day. One day, it feels like Joan’s her biggest supporter. Another day, it feels like Joan’s tough love and trying to either whip Amy back into shape to be the doctor that she was, or to make sure that Amy doesn’t make mistakes. It can feel suffocating. She also begins to become aware of the role that Joan had in some of her personal decisions in the past that make things a bit messy. So it’s pretty delicious.

Does that play into this life-changing secret that Joan has that Amy can’t remember?

Yes. She has little memory hits that are teasing her that Joan was a part of a big decision that Amy made. Joan’s very interwoven into Amy’s past, present, and future.

Speaking of these memories, I’m debuting the key art and the taglines read, “Remember who you were meant to be” and “Every memory reshapes the present.” How is Amy doing when it comes to recovering her memories this season?

She’s getting tantalizing hits of, sometimes it might be a whole moment or conversation, but many times, it’s just one moment of one piece of dialogue from a character in a certain moment without a lot of context. Other times, it’s just fragments of objects or things that tease her as to where was this, and it leaves her with a mystery that she has to uncover by asking other people or figuring out what was that location, going back there and trying to see if more memories come out. It’s going to push her to do more aggressive memory recovery treatments with Gina, all of which have potential physical side effects, and as much as it’s jostling the brain to get more memories, it can also mess up the brain and create lots of interesting side effects that would be obstacle for her both personally and professionally.

It’s a really fun tension because she’s desperate to get her memories back to know who she was, to become the doctor who she was, even if she doesn’t go back to the same difficult bedside manner, but she wants to have the knowledge that she had. She’d like to remember Danny, she’d like to remember her relationship with Jake, so she can cohere that and she cohere herself, but the more she chases the memories, the more potentially damaging side effects there are from the treatment, so she’s in a really interesting conundrum.

Doc, Season 2 Premiere, Tuesday, September 23, 9/8c, Fox