DEN OF GEEK: Final seasons are always so fascinating to me and Solar Opposites’ final season deals with the idea of removing the Solars’ sci-fi rays and other plot hacks to make matters a little more difficult for the characters. How did this idea come about and was it an attempt to challenge yourselves a little more creatively this year?
MIKE MCMAHAN: Yeah, it was a couple different things. Final seasons are very hard and what I’ve learned about them is every door that you close, you want to open up the offer of a new one that you could see going forward. The other thing is that we really wanted to be able to do stuff that we’ve been talking about or things that have been in the back of our heads. That accelerates a little bit of character growth. When you have a show that’s been around for 50 episodes, you can just assume that it’s going to go forever. Then, the second you find out that there’s an end date, it’s like, “Oh, we better start doing all this stuff and have our fun now while we can.”
Removing the Solars’ ability to spend however much money they want was a great way to get us to have the Solars doing things that they otherwise wouldn’t have been doing and forcing them into unexpected places. Having the replicants be try-hard smart kids was another great thing to dig into. As was seeing Terry kind of get a job, or Korvo getting used to the idea that he’s not the leader who barks missions anymore. There was all of that stuff, but then also this sort of meta commentary on it. We’re in a time in the industry where budgets are getting cut and you’re having to get creative. It was like, “All right, well, let’s cut the Solars’ budget and see how they deal with it.” What comedy can we get from that? For us, it was getting to do all the fun stuff and putting them into a place that they hadn’t been before, but also making fun of ourselves and the industry that we’re in. Everybody needs to be creative to get through those hurdles.
That makes a lot of sense. One of my favorite episodes from the season is “The Family Memories VHS Mix Tape,” which is such a densely packed and tightly edited episode that jumps between dozens of different events. Can you talk a little about that episode’s development and execution? On a plotting level alone, it’s very uniquely structured.
MM: You know, it’s funny because Josh and I right off the bat–That was an episode we came up with on one of the few days that we were all actually in person in the writers’ room. We were all sitting in a row with a whiteboard instead of over Zoom. And I remember–Josh and I grew up with VHS tapes that you had to like record over and over again because mom and dad weren’t buying new ones every time. And then mixing that with sketch comedy, but to also have meaning there and have it feel like a found artefact from the world with these edited problems within it; the imperfect editing and stuff like that. We immediately got really excited about it.
JOSH BYCEL: The other thing is that we only had 10 episodes this year, right? So we knew we weren’t going to be able to do a special–every year we’ve sort of done – outside of The Wall – these special stylistic episodes. “99 Ships” was one year. “AISHA’s Day Out” was another year. So we knew that we wanted to have one sort of very special one for this year, especially going into the last season. I think that we also wanted to focus on the Pupa, focus on AISHA, and give them a great vehicle for exploring and expanding their characters. And then, to be honest, we’ve had so many bits that we wanted to do over the years. And by the way, most of them made it in. This was also a chance for us to just do these bits that we always talked about and throw them in because it has this sketch sensibility with this great throughline. I think that was what was so much fun to use about that episode. It wasn’t easy though. It took work. It has to be refined and refined because sometimes, with these episodes that are almost like a clip show, you can do whatever you want. When you have that blank canvas sometimes you really have to rein it in.
