Hulu’s acclaimed sci-fi comedy is keeping its innovative twists coming withThe Solar Opposites Halloween Special Part 2: The Hunt for Brown October, a rare holiday special sequel. Co-created by Justin Roiland and showrunner Mike McMahan, the show has bridged the gap between its seasons beginning with season 2 with varying holiday specials, starting with Christmas and following it up with Halloween and Valentine’s Day. The latter special proved to be one of the most impactful for the show as it saw Terry and Korvo finally get married, withSolar Oppositesseason 5showing them as a happy married couple.
The Solar Opposites Halloween Special Part 2: The Hunt for Brown Octobercontinues Terry and Korvo’s happy marriage by seeing the duo look to get their family into a prestigious country club, with the caveat that they can’t celebrate the titular holiday to be accepted by the club’s board. Unfortunately for the family, a witch appears and curses the group for Korvo having killed The Great Pumpkin in the previous Halloween special, requiring the family to embrace the holiday and become its new Great Spirit. While they task the Pupa with getting rid of the witch, they find themselves transforming into Halloween-type creatures.
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Dan Stevens and Thomas Middleditch return to lead the ensembleSolar Opposites Halloween Special Part 2: The Hunt for Brown Octobercastas Korvo and Terry alongside Mary Mack as Jesse, Sean Giambrone as Yumyulack and Sagan McMahan as the Pupa, alongside Ashley Adler,Star Trek: Lower Decksvet Eric Bauza, Peyton Crim andManifestalum DazMann Still. Penned by Emmy nominee Sean O’Connor in his second episode and directed by show veteran Marisa Livingston, the new Halloween special shows the creative team keeping the bar high and laying some interesting groundwork for future specials.
Ahead of its premiere,Screen Rantinterviewed creator/showrunner/executive producer Mike McMahan and EP Josh Bycel to discussThe Solar Opposites Halloween Special Part 2: The Hunt for Brown October, why they didn’t have the special set up stories for the next season, the various Star Trek Easter eggs they included in the special, and an update on what to expect from season 6.
A Holiday Special Sequel Was Both A Funny & Unique Idea For The Duo
“…a direct sequel to a holiday special is something we don’t think we’ve ever seen before.”
Screen Rant: So, I know whenwe spoke last forSolar Oppositesseason 5, you mentioned that there was going to be a new special. How did you land on it being a sequel rather than finding a new holiday?
Mike McMahan: We landed on the sequel, because the first one was really, really hard to come up with the premise, because it was like a big bag of Halloween candy, “What are we going to do?” And it was almost like, because Solar Opposites is so ridiculous, there were so many options. And then, when we were doing Halloween Part 2, it was just inherently funny to both me and Josh that a direct sequel to a holiday special is something we don’t think we’ve ever seen before. It’s sort of ridiculous, but because we have the powers of Hulu, it’s going to live right next to the original episode, there’s just something very funny for us about continuing where we left off in the sequel timeline. It’s a very Star Trek kind of mentality of it.
Josh Bycel: But also, Mike, it wasn’t even a direct sequel, there was a Valentine’s Day sequel in between the two specials.
Mike McMahan: Yeah, no, I mean it felt just weird enough for us to do it that I really liked, and it worked out great. I’m really happy we did it.
The War Between Halloween & Thanksgiving Felt Like A Natural Story To Tell
“…it was very easy to characterize Thanksgiving as an underdog in the eyes of The Spirit of Thanksgiving.”
I also love that it’s not only a sequel, but it’s a war between Halloween and Thanksgiving, without necessarily spoiling how the war comes up. I’d love to hear how, again, you landed on that specific idea for where this story went.
Mike McMahan: Well, it was because when we were talking about the holidays of this part of the year stack up that, naturally, Thanksgiving is getting less and less important, and Christmas and Halloween on either side are getting pumped up. Part of it is like there’s precedence for this. We bring up Plow Monday as being this kind of holiday that used to be more widespread, and it kind of slowly just got eaten away by Thanksgiving and now, because politics have gotten so toxic and horrible, and your weird uncle has gotten even worse over the last eight years that nobody likes Thanksgiving.
It’s like, “We like the food, but do we like the racism? Do we like the cultural appropriation? Do we like the colonizing?” And then, you add the uncle on top of it, and it was very easy to characterize Thanksgiving as an underdog in the eyes of The Spirit of Thanksgiving.
Josh Bycel: Yeah, and also, Halloween and Christmas are so commercialized now to the nth degree, and Thanksgiving you can’t really commercialize, it’s not built for commercialization. Like, people are already starting to do Halloween in August, people are already starting to do Christmas now, but nobody starts doing Thanksgiving until the Monday before Thanksgiving.
Mike McMahan: And then the second Thanksgiving’s over, Black Friday starts, and nobody’s even thinking about Thanksgiving, and that’s eating into Thanksgiving from the other side too. So, Thanksgiving is under attack, and that’s not us. We didn’t invent that, that’s just the way it is, so it felt pretty right to us.
You guys are right, people are talking about Christmas now. I literally, on the news this morning, heard them talking about Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas,” and I was like, “Don’t you put that song on. You’re two months away. Go away.”
Mike McMahan: [Chuckles] I know, I do love when we get to play Christmas music. I’m such a psycho — Josh, I don’t know if you know this about me — the second Thanksgiving is coming, I start playing Christmas music in our house at all times. The family wants to kill me. I’m playing it in the car, I’m playing it in the house, I’m playing it while I work. I’ve got my favorite Christmas albums. I’m a weirdo about Christmas music, because I miss the snow. There’s no f—-ng holidays [in Los Angeles].
Josh Bycel: Well, next year we’ll do a sequel to our Christmas special that we did four years ago.
Mike McMahan: God, I would love that.
Josh Bycel: But right now, we’re talking about our Halloween. And then also, we love the idea of like, “Hey, these specials, sometimes, we love the idea of incorporating more than one holiday, right?” So this is a Halloween/surprise Thanksgiving special.
Mike McMahan: Yeah, it’s like a little Nightmare Before Christmas-y, right? Except Halloween is the underdog in it instead of the super creepy like, “Oh, there’s skeletons, barfing up bugs and stuff.” [Laughs] But yeah, competing holidays, we’re feeling it here at Solar Opposites.
The Halloween Special Part 2 “Doesn’t Set Up F—-ng S–t” For Season 6
“…we just want to have fun and live in that world where they’re married and we’re doing that kind of fun stuff…”
I remember when we talked forthe Valentine’s Day Special, as well, one thing you guys have always tried to do with these specials is sort of incorporate a plot that’s going to become important for the next season. Obviously, it was them getting married on Valentine’s Day, and with Christmas, it was them going back to their normal forms. What can you tell me about how the Halloween special sort of sets up season 6?
Mike McMahan: It really doesn’t set up f—-ng s–t is what I would say, but it does have a tone that fits into the post-Valentine’s Day [storytelling]. Korvo’s tone of who he is, he’s been softening, like putting your foot in a tub of water, for years now. He was so pointy and angry at the beginning of the series, and everything after the Valentine’s Day Special, he’s funny, and he’s grouchy, but he’s not quite so mean. And I like how the Halloween episode ends, and you still feel that going into this season.
He still doesn’t like spooky stuff, you know what I mean? But unlike the Valentine’s Day Special, where they get married, and it really changes the name of the game — that was a big important thing, and we probably won’t do that again for quite some while. Now, we just want to have fun and live in that world where they’re married, and we’re doing that kind of fun stuff. We’re going to explore that for a while.
The Duo Wanted To Balance Which Aliens They Included In The Country Club
“…there’s some aliens that are the capital A, “Aliens”, that you think of when you think of aliens…”
So, looking at the fact that they’re trying to get into this fancy country club, I love that you have an alien-specific wing of this place. I’d love to hear how you landed on who or what aliens appear there, because you have original creations, and then you have some popular ones.
Mike McMahan: For us, there’s some aliens that are the capital A, “Aliens”, that you think of when you think of aliens, right? And you’ll see, actually, in season 6, we kind of pull this card again that the Solar-Opposites have gotten used to there being other culturally known aliens that they either like or don’t like. And remember, there was a season or two ago, they were like, “We’re not like Alf. We don’t eat cats.” You know what I mean? They’re getting to know this stuff a little bit. So, tell me, in the cut you watched, who were the two aliens they encountered in the dining hall?
The Xenomorph and the Star Trek general.
Mike McMahan: General Chang, the villain from Star Trek VI. So, for us, it was like, “The xenomorph is an iconic alien.” You can tell from their silhouette who that is. There are so many Alien movies, they just had a new one that was great. And then, we didn’t want to pair that xenomorph with somebody that was an equal kind of one-for-one.
So, for me, because I’m such a Trekkie, it was like, “There’s one classic alien who always gets paired with the xenomorph, so instead, let’s subvert that and be like, ‘It’s the xenomorph and General Chang from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.'” Who’s a Klingon before they really made the TNG Klingon faces. It’s really funny that you may say the Alien from Alien, but then you have to say General Chang from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. It’s long enough to feel ridiculous to me.
It is a great bit. So, did you guys kick around any other ideas for what other aliens might appear?
Josh Bycel: We kicked around a bunch of ideas. To be honest, in this litigious world we live in now, where lots of different studios own lots of different things, there were just some that we couldn’t even do. We can’t even mention them to you, or we will get f—-ng sued.
Mike McMahan: Yeah, there’s like five or six — there’s the Mars Attacks aliens. I love E.T., but I don’t want to see E.T. drinking a cocktail and being mean. You know what I mean? He’s too cute. There’s the aliens that are so unrelatable that they’ve never been rebooted, like the Critters, you know what I mean? The Critter Ball aliens. I grew up loving Critters, and now I’m like, “Where’s the Critter cultural awareness anymore?” The Gremlins are kind of still around, but they’re not — Gremlins aren’t really aliens, though.
Josh Bycel: Gremlins are not aliens.
Mike McMahan: Ancient creatures from Asia. Then there’s The Thing. But I think, when it came down to it, you wanted two villains that were easily identifiable, and then the irony being that they’re country club douchebags that are talking down to the Solars. So I like who we picked. I thought they were fun, and I just like Star Trek stuff, so anytime I can sneak that s–t in there, I get really happy. [Laughs]
Didyour time onLower Deckskind of make that easy for you to be like, “Hey, can I borrow this character real quick?”
Mike McMahan: Oh man, we didn’t even ask. [Laughs] It made it easy, because I was like, “These guys will just think it’s funny.” They let me play with the IP with Lower Decks. I’ve snuck a couple little Star Trek kind of parody things in there. And I love Star Trek VI. I just took my son to a screening of it with the director over in Santa Monica, and I’m like, “This movie holds up from when I saw it in theaters when I was a kid.”
Josh Bycel: I mean, the ultimate bad guy in season 5 is an homage to a Star Trek character, right?
Mike McMahan: Yeah, he’s the President of the Federation from Star Trek VI. He’s like a visual nod to it. So yeah, you’ll see there’s little Star Trek nods all throughout Solar Opposites if you dig through it. This is just a more blatant one.
Solar OppositesSeason 6 May Be “Our Best Season” & Brings Closure To Some Arcs
“…you just don’t want to have sweater threads forever, right?”
So, I want to look ahead really quickly.Solar Oppositesseason 6 is already confirmed. I’d love to hear how far along you guys are in the writing and maybe production of it.
Mike McMahan: Writing is done. It’s hilarious, it’s maybe our best season. It has a little bit more serialization for the Solars that year. Terry gets a new job — which makes me laugh every time we’re working on it — that’s partway through the season. And then, The Wall story is awesome.
We kind of bring The Wall back to threads that we built out first season, and you see The Duke come back at the end of season 5 and a lot of it has to do with the fallout of that happening, of Terry accidentally bringing him back. So, The Wall is f—-ng awesome. And there’s a whole new genre that we’re exploring in The Wall, and we’re bringing all of our favorites back for that. There’s fewer Silvercops in season 6, but what you get is f—-ng great.
Josh Bycel: And we sort of bring it all back to the beginning of Silvercops, as well.
Mike McMahan: Yeah, you’ll feel like a lot of bills being paid in season 6 in a really cool way. A lot of loops get closed in a really satisfying way, and then entirely new ideas start.
Josh Bycel: Yeah, the end of The Wall in season 6 opens us up to seasons of craziness afterwards.
Mike McMahan: Feature films of craziness! [Chuckles]
Thank you for saying it opens it up, because I’m hearing loops closing, and I’m like, “No, don’t end.”
Mike McMahan: Oh yeah, you just don’t want to have sweater threads forever, right? You want to feel like something’s fully done, and then be like, “There’s a Terminator 2,” you know what I mean? So, we just wanted to give people resolutions on stuff they’ve always wanted to see, and stop toying with them, but open it up then to being like, “Ooh, what’s this?” So, it’s really fun, we had a blast this season.
AboutThe Solar Opposites Halloween Special Part 2: The Hunt for Brown October
Spooky stuff is afoot when the SPIRIT OF HALLOWEEN starts to take over Korvo’s life. “Solar Opposites” centers around a team of four aliens who are evenly split on whether Earth is awful or awesome. Korvo (Dan Stevens) and Yumyulack (Sean Giambrone) only see the pollution, crass consumerism, and human frailty while Terry (Thomas Middleditch) and Jesse (Mary Mack) love TV, junk food and fun stuff. On season 5 of “Solar Opposites,” now that the alien mission partners Terry and Korvo are married, the whole Solar Opposites team are focused on family values.
Stay tuned for our otherSolar Opposites Halloween Special Part 2: The Hunt for Brown Octoberinterviews with:
The Solar Opposites Halloween Special Part 2: The Hunt for Brown Octoberis now streaming on Hulu.
Solar Opposites
Cast
Solar Opposites is a Hulu adult animation series that centers on a family of aliens. After moving to America, they bicker about whether the country is better than their home planet. The series was created by Mike McMahan and Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland, with characters voiced by Thomas Middleditch, Sean Giambrone, and Mary Mack.
