Solar Opposites is back on Hulu with a very fun season five; there’s also a new Halloween special coming later this year, as well as an in-the-works sixth season. io9 got a chance to speak with executive producers Mike McMahan (Star Trek: Lower Decks), Josh Bycel, and Sydney Ryan about the animated sci-fi series’ new batch of episodes, with a few hints of what’s on the way.
Cheryl Eddy, io9: The season premiere wraps up the dangling threads of season four and sees the characters going back to Earth. Did you ever consider having them travel the galaxy more, or do you see the show’s humor more intrinsically tied into their Earth lives?
Mike McMahan: I would love for them to do that. I just think that there’s so many funny stories to tell on Earth, and you see that that alien planet they’re on pretty much becomes a parallel to Earth anyway, pretty quickly. So we have talked about, “What if Earth was their home, and they could travel in the galaxy, we could get more stories out of that”—that’s something we’re actively kind of rolling around as like, “I think we could do stories like that, it would be really cool.”
io9: Terry and Korvo got married in the Valentine’s Day special and their status as husbands is a big theme in season five. And we see their relationship isn’t just, “You’re the only other age-appropriate alien around, we should be together”—there’s more to it than that. How would you describe the glue that’s keeping them together?
McMahan: I think you don’t get to choose who you love. You know what I mean? The same thing that drives you nuts about somebody can sometimes be what you love about them, and you have to roll the dice and hope that it doesn’t flip back to you hating them, in a way. I think that everything that you could say is annoying about Korvo is incredibly endearing and sexy to Terry. There’s something really fun and romantic about your partner driving you nuts, but at the end of the day, you love them so much that you can’t help but be game for their chaos … I think both of these characters are very lovable and they do really care about each other. And I think they slowly came to realize, as we were kind of free to write it more and more, that they have feelings for each other that were more than just being on a mission together. A little workplace romance!
Josh Bycel: I also think they’re a couple that thrives in chaos, which is what we’re constantly putting around them. [Chaos] doesn’t break them apart. It actually strengthens their bond.
io9: Episode six, “The Sci-Fi Rollerblades,” at one point turns into a full-on Looney Tunes/classic cartoon homage. What was the creative process behind that particular episode like?
McMahan: We’re always trying to push and find ways to explore animation in this show. A big part of this show is that Solar is for people who love TV in all different ways. That’s why we like doing holiday specials. That’s why we like doing weddings. That’s why we like mixing sitcom with long serialized dramas. Solar Opposites is just like a love letter to TV, to loving sitting on your couch, kind of. So oftentimes we’ll talk about [how] we are a cartoon. We don’t always have to be a big cinematic thing or a sitcom. What are ways we can even push how cartoony we are, and play with the form? We’re all big fans of Looney Tunes and Chuck Jones. We worked with our directing and design team to be like, “Can we, for half of an episode, just become a Looney Tunes?” We even had a special orchestra, because the orchestra becomes the sound effects in an episode like that. We really, really were trying to be thoughtful, and do a dirty sort of Looney Tunes you can never see in a Looney Tunes, while also celebrating and clearly loving what we were parodying or pastiche-ing or homaging, whatever you want to call it. I love that episode. It’s really fun.
io9: The Wall returns this season but it’s no longer the Wall–it’s the Yard, styled more as a Western. What was your favorite part about how the dynamics changed this season?
McMahan: It was really fun. We kind of focus on these two new characters, played by Clancy Brown and Charlotte Nicdao, and I’m a huge fan of both of them. Both amazing voice actors—I mean, Clancy Brown held Andy Dufresne off the edge of the prison roof in Shawshank Redemption! I’ve loved Clancy Brown since I was a kid. And we love playing with genre on the Wall, so doing a big Western—it still feels ridiculous because they’re only a jelly bean and a half tall. Getting to play with that in the backyard was awesome. And the way we set it up for season six, because we’re writing season six right now, the way that backyard story resolves at the end of the season sets up maybe our craziest Wall story in season six that kind of brings it all back to where we started, in a really cool way.
Bycel: It’s like Silverado meets The Last of Us meets Chinatown. I loved it because it was a great chance for us to, [after being] in the Wall for so many seasons, to expand the world, literally and metaphorically and emotionally and all that stuff. And once again, we tasked our artists and designers with creating another new world outside of the other worlds they’ve already created. And they really crushed it.
io9: Last month at San Diego Comic-Con you said that the Halloween episode will be a sequel to the earlier Halloween episode. What else can you tease about it?
Sydney Ryan: The Halloween special is a direct sequel, but it also plays on The Santa Clause, the Tim Allen movie from the ‘90s. We even say it in the episode—that’s my favorite line in the episode, where we say, “This is just like The Santa Clause” or something.
McMahan: Yeah, we kind of steal or crib the structural problem of The Santa Claus and apply it to people in a Halloween situation. It’s very fun.
Solar Opposites season five is now streaming on Hulu.
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