SPOILER ALERT: This piece contains spoilers for Rooster Episode 6, titled “Cop Hawk.”

Things get complicated for a couple characters at the end of Rooster’s sixth episode.

While Steve Carrell’s Greg Russo tries to take things to the next level with Annie Mumolo’s Cristle and connects the dots of who her son is, Danielle Deadwyler’s Dylan Shepherd faces the return of Alan Ruck’s Dean Riggs, just as she is getting comfortable in her position as Interim Dean of Faculty.

“When we talk about a villain, why they want to put it on you?” Deadwyler said to her costar Phil Dunster in an interview ahead of the show’s launch.

Dunster, in turn, replied “I know, poor, misunderstood Archie.”

“That’s not it, man,” Deadwyler said in a British accent, demonstrating that Riggs should be the one on viewers’ radar. “And unrelenting, but this is a part of the whole old guard being on campus, and these being spaces of systems that have long lived. They are being broken the hell down by poetic, inquisitive, curious, open, expansive minds.”

Professor Shepherd has just hung some frames on her walls and set a red lily plant on her desk when John C. McGinley’s Walter Mann sidles up to the open door to her office followed by Riggs, who smokes a cigarette and puts it out in the soil of the plant.

“I do also feel like that’s a real strength of Bill and Matt’s, going to a place where I think that it’s quite unflinching, and Alan Ruck’s character is such a great example,” Dunster added. “There’s quite a few forays into the naughty in this. They go where others might not, but I think that you feel very safe with it, because they just are incredibly accomplished at what they do, and it’s not out of nowhere. It’s not totally in a vacuum. Hopefully, that’s what people are going to enjoy about the show, is that you can lean on the show a little more without — it doesn’t feel too fragile in some of the comedy.”

Riggs has a heart attack at the end of the third episode, and Dylan didn’t immediately move to help him because she thought it was just a coughing fit. Episode 5 saw Connie Britton’s Elizabeth Stoddard nod to Dylan’s position as Interim Dean of Faculty, expressing excitement at seeing a woman in such a role.

RELATED: ‘Rooster’ Stars Charly Clive And Steve Carell Unpack Working With Connie Britton In Episode 5: “I Can’t Imagine Anyone Else Playing That Part”

Greg also encouraged Dylan to make her space her own in the sixth episode in a moment that eagle-eyed viewers and listeners might take as hope yet, for their romance, because she gets excited about his electric bike, and Katie (Charly Clive) jokes that if Greg should find a woman who gets as excited about his new vehicle as he is, to never let her go. Dylan expresses interest in Greg from the first episode.

“She’s revealed herself in a way initially, with Greg. And she’s like, ‘Oh shit, I pulled my card. Let me put it back,’ and you can’t. He’s already memorized that you got an nine of diamond spades. But she’s shown her hand already, and so, you’re trying to temper how to be with somebody,” Deadwyler said. “And she works with his daughter. This is all too much, and she knows how her boss is, and she’s got judgment about Archie. It’s a space where she’s deeply, deeply lonely, and yet it is the place where she thrives, and she is probably most celebrated, but that personal part is … that’s everybody’s little kicker when you’re trying to figure yourself out now that you’ve been challenged.”

Only time will tell whether Greg — who has yet to define his relationship with Cristle, whom he learns is Tommy’s (Maximo Salas) mother at the end of episode six — will give Dylan another shot. And another showdown, like those in the second and third episode, between Dylan and Riggs does seem imminent.

New episodes of Rooster arrive on HBO and HBO Max at 7 p.m. ET/PT every Sunday.