After five seasons, Solar Opposites has established a devoted fan base—and sailed through recasting a major role, something that could’ve been messy but ended up actually feeling like an improvement. But sticking around so long brings its own challenges: you have to keep the characters and story fresh, but also acknowledge that the show’s got its own history to draw on. Solar Opposites aims for both and nails it nearly every time.
Across 11 episodes, season five leans into its greatest asset: its four aliens. They share a fascination with Earth culture but frequently, hilariously misinterpret its nuances. When they first left Shlorp, their home planet, they were just a mission team tasked with creating a new home using the Pupa, a worm-like creature designed to evolve and develop terraforming capabilities. But the group—Dan Stevens as team leader Korvo; Thomas Middleditch as Real Housewives superfan Terry; Sean Giambrone as bounty hunter Yumyulack; and Mary Mack as heartbreaker Jessie—is now the ultimate found family, with two dads, two teens, and a baby who’s now more like a babbling toddler. “Parents” Korvo and Terry even got married earlier this year as part of Solar Opposites‘ Valentine’s Day special episode.
Despite this increasingly solid unit at its core, Solar Opposites has lost none of its goofball, often highly random sense of humor. After opening on a butthole joke, season five picks up with the group in their temporary new home—a very bland planet where anything “extra” is frowned upon, which creates an increasingly perilous situation because the Solar Opposites are 100% extra at all times. Once they’re back on Earth, with a new robot frenemy for the Pupa in tow, they can be as extra as they want—with sci-fi enhancements they love to deploy despite the inevitable disastrous results.
One example from the new season: Terry and Korvo go on their honeymoon and become accustomed to all the perks showered upon newlyweds. When they realize it’s a limited-time entitlement, Korvo figures out how to alter Earth’s orbit to extend the number of days in a week—of course never stopping to think how that will affect anyone else besides the happy couple. It’s a standout plot in a season that’s full of them, including a bonkers riff on Edge of Tomorrow involving hardware stores, pudding, and Mouse Trap—and an episode in which Korvo gets into an extended fight that becomes a lovingly rendered homage to the wacky violence of Looney Tunes cartoons.
Amid all the over-the-top hijinks, punny t-shirts, meta humor, gross-out jokes, unexpected references, extended explorations of FOMO, and sci-fi gadgets (one in particular digs into the Shlorpians’ past and finds a potential new antagonist), Solar Opposites also finds time in its rapid-fire pacing to check in with its two recurring sub-stories.
The more successful of these is the Wall, following the tiny humans (transformed by alien shrink ray) living in Jessie and Yumyulack’s bedroom wall. But the population has migrated outdoors, and the Wall has become the Back Yard—a frontier-like environment that allows Solar Opposites to explore a Wild West setting. This storyline is fraught with high-stakes drama (beloved characters can actually die!), and you can’t help but be enraptured as the miniature people struggle in a world made incredibly dangerous by their size—and the fact that the pressures of survival can turn regular folks into ruthless back-stabbers. It’s also just cool as hell to see what Solar Opposites‘ writers and artists come up with for this teeny world: the perils of invading squirrels and overturned bottles of hand sanitizer; the vast desert of an abandoned sandbox; the prospect of living inside a basketball or a raccoon skull.
That the Wall—er, the Yard—is directly tied to the Shlorpians (even though the action’s now outside the house, the grass is full of their sloppy junk) makes the drama even more exciting; at one point, we even see the Pupa peering on, gobbling popcorn.
More tenuously linked is Solar Opposites‘ other side plot: the Silver Cops saga starring Glen, the neighbor Korvo and Terry shot into space and mostly forgot about. This season’s storyline takes a lot from Starship Troopers and Avatar and other military sci-fi tales—maybe too much. While guest voice Kieran Culkin is a fun addition to the cast, the Silver Cops stuff can fall flat simply because it’s so far removed from Terry, Korvo, and company, and because it feels familiar in a way that the rest of the show rarely ever does.
Solar Opposites season five is now streaming on Hulu; a special Halloween episode will arrive later this year, and a sixth season is also on the way.
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