It’s a TV show that touches on real, human issues, things like the nature of family and how our memories shape who we are.

It’s a show that promulgates a diverse and LGBTQ-friendly worldview.

It’s also a show that revels in penis jokes.

That balance of comedy and drama has kept Killjoys on the air for going on five seasons, brought it critical acclaim and the love of a devoted fan base.

The final season begins Friday on Space in Canada and Syfy in the U.S. with that balance very much intact.

In a studio in east-end Toronto, cast and members of the creative team gathered to talk about the season to come and what the series has meant to them.

“What I love about Killjoys is that it imagines the best of what our future could be,” said writer and producer Julian Doucet, referring to its inclusiveness and diversity.

“I would say since the very first time I picked up a Killjoys script, which was the pilot, I was just amazed at Michelle’s ability to nail humour, heart and stakes all at once,” added co-producer Beth Iley, referring to series creator Michelle Lovretta.

At that point Lovretta already had a cult-hit genre show under her belt: Lost Girl, which starred Anna Silk as a bisexual, supernatural being who fed on the energy of humans, and whose companions included a mix of humans, fairies and shape-shifters.

Both shows are examples of the kind of scrappy sci-fi or fantasy fare that Canadians seem to excel at making, the kind of shows that don’t necessarily get a lot of attention at awards time (well, unless they’re Orphan Black) but that inspire passion in their fans.

When Killjoys debuted in 2015, Toronto Star TV critic Tony Wong described it as “Boba Fett meets Dog the Bounty Hunter in space.”

It stars Canadian actor Aaron Ashmore and British actor Hannah John-Kamen as John and Dutch, intergalactic bounty hunters — the titular Killjoys. The two friends team up with John’s brother D’avin, played by Canadian Luke Macfarlane, and go on missions in a planetary system called the Quad.

Although it may have begun as what Wong called “a police procedural in space,” it has become much more over four seasons than just an action-adventure series — as fun as all the butt-kicking is that its heroes do. Bonds have formed between the various characters, the series has built its own complex universe and the stakes have been raised: for the characters, the people who make the show and the fans.

The idea of family, particularly the family you choose, ended up becoming a main theme, said showrunner Adam Barken.

“It’s always been for us a balancing act of (there’s) the need to save a large group of people, a city or whatever (but) how does that story play out through these three main characters and the people around them?” he said. “Because, in the end, I think an audience and certainly we as writers always come back to wanting to feel like what really matters here is this core group of people.”

That core takes on even more significance in Season 5.

Without giving too much away, the season opens with everyone in Old Town, the Killjoys’ main base of operations, out of sync with themselves since the villain known as the Lady has escaped into their world and is controlling their memories. As in any good sci-fi show, the future of humanity is at stake.

I won’t ruin the fun by telling you what the characters are all doing and with whom when we first meet them again, but if you saw the Season 4 finale you got a glimpse via Johnny, Dutch and D’avin.

“The fifth season is very much about: this is what we’re fighting for, our family,” said Doucet. When long-established relationships are sundered due to lack of memory “that’s the ultimate betrayal.”

Yet “what begins to happen,” Barken said, “is that even if you don’t remember things, who you are as a core person still comes through.”

Kelly McCormack noted that her character, Zeph, is still brilliant and still obsessed with science, “but what was really fun to play is that she doesn’t have the respect of anyone, or no one knows that she’s smart, so she’s just this wacky conspiracy theorist with no friends.”

Beyond keeping what’s innate about their characters in their post-Lady personas, the writer-actor synergy also extends to having aspects of the performers’ own personalities written into the script.

“There’s been two times where I’ve read the script and I’ve started crying because I’ve thought, how can I be so lucky for people to see me so clearly and to go, ‘Kelly will get this. Kelly wants to say this stuff. This is how Kelly thinks about the world,’ ” McCormack said.

“It’s a great privilege as an actor,” added Patrick Garrow, who plays Turin, a senior officer in the organization that governs the Killjoys. “They’re already writing for your particular sense of snarkiness, your particular sense of humour … it comes out of your mouth just like butter.”

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Ashmore, who’s as ready with a quip as his character Johnny, said it’s been amazing to get to be vulnerable as well as kick butt in his role.

“Just having a chance to express those things through your work and (have) people appreciate them, it feels really good and it feels like it allows you to then, in other projects, bring more of yourself to it.”

Even Alanna Bale, the young actress who has just joined the series playing the Lady, described it as “super special.”

She hadn’t even seen an episode before auditioning for the part — she doesn’t have cable TV — but she has caught up and become a huge fan, which she admitted she couldn’t say about every project she had worked on.

Chats with the cast were, like the show itself, a mix of the serious, the sentimental and the just plain fun.

Thom Allison, who plays Pree, owner of the beloved Royale bar, recalled finding out that his character was going to begin a romance with Gared, played by Gavin Fox. Gared had tried to steal the bar from Pree and Pree stabbed him in the hand.

“Michelle said, ‘I just saw the rushes. You guys have chemistry.’ I’m like, ‘Stabby guy?’ And cut to Season 3. She said, ‘We have an idea.’ I was like, OK. And luckily he was not an a--hole,” Allison said.

Allison compared getting scripts to “opening a present at Christmas time, every time … you suddenly read a line or an idea, and it makes me laugh out loud … and you can’t wait to say it and you hope it doesn’t get changed.”

Doucet said that writing the show has been a mix of building a story around the images that Lovretta comes up with, taking ideas from actual science, paying off previous storylines and making each other laugh.

“The words that always get used a lot are, ‘Is it joyful? Is it exciting? Is it sexy?’ And sexy … means 20 to 50 different things. So is this like action sexy, is it sexy sexy, is this like funny sexy. Like what sexy are we?” he said.

When they chatted with the media, in the midst of the Old Town set, the cast and crew were just over halfway through filming Season 5. The end still seemed far enough away that it hadn’t hit all of them yet.

“We all really care so much about our characters at this point,” said Macfarlane, adding they all hoped “to land the plane as good as possible.”

John-Kamen, who shot the Marvel movie Ant-Man and the Wasp before “coming home to Killjoys,” said it was “absolutely perfect to be able to say goodbye to the show and in the most amazing way with the people that I love.”

“You know, we see each other socially. We hug whenever we go in the trailer. So that’s a huge thing,” said Rob Stewart, who plays part villain, part good guy Khlyen. “And it’s not always the case (on a set). So that’s one thing that makes it just a joy.”

And that “Killjoys family” includes the fans, said Tamsen McDonough. She plays Lucy, the artificial intelligence that powers the team’s spaceship, and she engages regularly with the show’s viewers on Twitter.

“I think there’s that kind of yearning for a better world that we all share, that we all want to be loved and be part of something, so that sense of belonging,” added Sean Baek, who plays Killjoy Fancy Lee. “So I think it’s nice to share that with the fans as well as people who work on the show.”

Killjoys Season 5 premieres Friday, July 19, at 10 p.m. on Space