The Venture Bros. are back, though, for now, the return only lasted an hour. “All This and Gargantua-2,” a special mega-episode from the hit Adult Swim series, aired last night at midnight. With it, much will change in the familiar universe that writers Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer have spent more than a decade carefully crafting. What once appeared to be a simple comedy about an adventuring family, turned into a seasons-long saga with action, intrigue, familial drama, teen angst and, still, lots of laughs.
Without getting into spoilers, we can tell you that fictional lives have been dramatically altered over the course of the hour. There are characters that hardcore fans may miss, who return to the fold. Lives intertwine, for better or worse, inside a gorgeous space station filled with beautiful, and maybe a few sinister, people.
Paste caught up with The Venture Bros. writers Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer, who explained that the special essentially exists to connect the last batch of episodes (which aired in 2013) with the forthcoming sixth season.
“We had too damn much to say, and we had an idea for a huge, epic story that simultaneously wrapped up our entire fifth season, and fourth probably, and set the ground for all our big plans for Season Six,” says Publick.
Season Six has been on the writers’ minds for several years now. Publick notes that, even when they started work on the fifth season, they knew where the story was heading. The trick was getting them there. With the special, they do it in a way that’s more cinematic than what fans of the show might expect.
Take the music, for example. J.G. Thirlwell, the prolific, experimental musician (Foetus, Steroid Maximus and, this writer’s favorite, Flesh Volcano) who has been scoring the show since its first season, creates a big screen sound that’s alternately more subtle and more dramatic than we might have anticipated. “We did make a conscious effort to be a little more cinematic with the music,” says Publick. ”[Thirlwell’s] scoring a little more specifically than we would normally do in an episode.” As an aside, Publick notes that this score wouldn’t work as well for the new episodes in production. “It’s too film-y,” he says.
There is a lot of story involved in the special. The Ventures, Brock Sampson, The Monarchs and a myriad other characters are heavily featured here. It took some cuts to squeeze in all the major points into an hour slot. “I think we got in all the things that we wanted in this special, as far as actual mechanics,” says Hammer. “We didn’t get in how we wanted to handle those mechanics.”