Season Review: Solar Opposites Season Two

 

Overview:

Everyone’s favorite disaffected pop culture junkie aliens, the Solar Opposites, are back! Another year passes on Earth and Korvo, Terry, Yumyulack, and Jesse are still up to their incessant sci-fi shenanigans to help make life on this simple planet easier in whatever way possible. While the aliens vigilantly wait for their Pupa to evolve and terraform the planet, they better familiarize themselves with dinner parties, the dangerous responsibility of Big Dick Energy, weekend trips to Vegas, death itself, and many other customs that highlight how different they are from Earth, but also just how much the planet has rubbed off on them.

 

Our Take:

Stasis is something that many animated series thrive on. It’s the neverending option for permanence that allows so many animated series to survive for so long. It would be very easy for a show that’s as exaggerated as Solar Opposites to coast during its second season and get away with nothing changing and just embracing what worked best in season one. However, Solar Opposites is a series that’s so obsessed with the structure and archetypes of television that it inherently approaches the topic in an unconventional way. It’s compelling that despite Solar Opposites’ rampant silliness it still feels the need to adhere to a surprising sense of continuity and development through the characters and the series’ overarching narrative. 

Much of the joy in season one of Solar Opposites stems from the space-fish out of space-water dynamic that’s present as Korvo, Terry, and company continue to acclimate to Earth. Season two features a marginally more worldly version of these aliens now that they’ve been on Earth for another year, yet Solar Opposites still finds ways to threaten these extraterrestrials and bring out their wildest and most hilarious impulses. It’s easy to hate Earth when you don’t know it, but season two looks at how it can be even easier to hate Earth when you do know it.

Solar Opposites’ first season is an excellent introduction to the series that rivals Rick and Morty’s debut year. Season two plays with a much larger canvas and gets more experimental with chronology and story structure. The characters head to other parts of the world, like London and Brazil, and even meet other aliens that are stranded on the planet. This opens up a fascinating discussion on how aliens should act on Earth. This other set of extraterrestrials hide in the shadows and live a much more conventional life seen by “sitcom aliens.” This helps emphasize just how different Solar Opposites is and how it doesn’t even consider the sort of alien baggage that other similar series obsess over. 

Solar Opposites has had some time to establish its characters and now it’s interested in deeper dissections into them all, which results in some very satisfying and layered storytelling. The first season of Solar Opposites was no slouch in this department, but it’s encouraging to see how Earth’s influence on Korvo, Terry, and company now makes them outcasts to both humans and their own kind. It pushes them to work harder to figure out what they truly want and where they feel like they belong. A genuine debate breaks out on whether the abuse of their alien powers has helped humanity for the better or caused them more harm. All of this soul searching elegantly happens in conjunction with hilarious storytelling and sublime dialogue. 

Solar Opposites somehow cultivates an even greater sense of grandeur this season and simple frustrations like Korvo’s disdain over dinner parties can lead to him passing legislature to erect a destructive dinner party squashing police force that then develops into a Minority Report-esque scenario to detect dinner parties before they even happen. There were moments in season one where the mere fact that these characters are aliens with different methods to solve human problems was enough of a hook, but it’s even more interesting to see their limited knowledge of Earth allow them to exploit the system and erase the customs from the planet that don’t currently mesh with them. It allows every episode to be entertaining and develop in a heightened manner that would be impossible in any other animated series. Solar Opposites takes archetypal and traditional storylines and then explodes them in a wholly original way. What’s most important is that underneath all of the science fiction lunacy are very real insecurities and human problems that trigger these grandiose displays. 

This new season pushes a deeper level of serialization on a character development level and then the Pupa gets a fair amount of storylines and more treatment like an actual character. There’s even legitimate tension over what might come from all of the negative influences that have been exposed to the Pupa. Solar Opposites’ entire cast is so well defined that everything devolves into chaos whenever anyone is given a fraction of freedom. It’s astounding how quickly episodes devolve into utter mayhem and it’s why it’s so nice that Solar Opposites is back and that there’s more on the way. 

Solar Opposites operates with such frenetic pacing and enthusiasm that makes it as unpredictable and alien as the Shlorpians themselves. There’s such a manic nonsense-logic to episodes where characters can abuse the rules so much that they go into a “lesson withdrawal,” but then can just overcompensate with alien technology that artificially forces lessons upon them. It’s a bizarre way to build catharsis and a satisfying conclusion, but it oddly works for the series and feels incredibly on brand with the wild tone that it’s worked hard to establish.

Season two of Solar Opposites also brings back some of the best stories and characters from the first season, like the Red Goobler and of course, “The Wall.” This is far from a season that’s just interested in recycling its greatest hits and it approaches all of these old ideas from fresh angles that take them to different places. These instances remain few and far between and there are plenty of new and bold ideas that are introduced in these episodes. 

It’s fair to say that one of the most celebrated aspects of the first season of Solar Opposites is the material that takes place within Yumyulack’s wall of shrunken humans. It’s only natural that season two would continue to explore this rich material, but there’s of course the risky temptation to go too far and possibly wreck this brilliant idea. Season two of Solar Opposites definitely features more of this storyline than before, but it never reaches the point that it spoils this premise or induces groans when the series returns to this ecosystem. It also goes in a radically different direction where a Hannibal-level serial killer is loose in the environment and it tells a very moving story about destiny and second chances. Hopefully each season of Solar Opposites can apply an equally bold genre shift to the Wall proceedings. It’s tricky territory to navigate and Solar Opposites finds the right balance that actually allows this world to evolve and become even more fascinating. It remains one of Solar Opposites’ most powerful secret weapons.

Solar Opposites excels with its storytelling and character work, but it’s a force to be reckoned with purely on a comedic level. Season two of Solar Opposites becomes even more self-aware, like how Terry forms a compulsion to continually refer to the family as “The Solar Opposites” or the constant supply of jabs at Hulu. This hits an unprecedented breaking point where the climax of an incredible action sequence cuts to a live-action Post-It note that contains a request to ask Hulu for extra money so that they can go over budget for an epic battle, rather than actually show the carnage. One episode even has four simultaneous overlapping movie parodies where Yumyulack struggles to ground himself over “what kind of episode” he’s involved in as the plot and scope continue to change. 

In an age where there has never been more adult animated series to consume, Solar Opposites still stands out among the pack and justifies its existence. Its second season is just as smart and ambitious as the first, but these new episodes feel a little sillier and more scattered now that Solar Opposites arguably has less to prove and has established itself better. This isn’t a problem, but it does make these eight episodes incredibly easy to binge through in one or two sittings and will leave audiences wishing that there were more (at least a holiday special is arriving at the end of the year). Solar Opposites continues to refine its formula and whatever it does is bound to delight, whether its introspective character studies or glorious non-sequiturs about Succession cereal, Lake House time travel decides, and hell hounds that turn their victims into bottles of wine, 

The entire second season of ‘Solar Opposites’ will be available to stream March 26th, only on Hulu