The Venture Bros. was about a decade ahead of the superhero curve and even Adult Swim’s resident Rick and Morty before it had a Rick and Morty. It’s been fascinating to see so many trends, both in pop culture and the television industry itself, come and go while The Venture Bros. has quietly trucked along.

This lengthy production schedule doesn’t exactly do the show favors, but it does cast the show against a fascinating backdrop that makes charting its evolution all the more interesting. Where other animated series might be tempted to dip into superhero fodder and alternate identity stories because they’re suddenly a part of the mainstream, The Venture Bros. has already been doing this for years and is hungry for more.

The show is ready to move to new territory and push itself to challenging new places that have more to do with the growth of the show’s characters and what they’re interested in versus what’s popular. Hell, The Venture Bros. would do an episode that’s entirely Eiger Sanction references and Devo lyrics if it could get away with it.

This new season feels like it cleans the slate in a lot of ways and reframes the questions that are actually important to this show and the Ventures. In that sense, this feels like a new Team Venture that is interested in evoking the magic of the old Team Venture.

One of the most rewarding things about this new season of the show is that it not only calls attention to many pieces of plot and characters from the series’ earliest seasons, but it also feels like a return to form tonally and thematically for the series, too (or maybe it’s just because it’s the first time that a new season has been longer than eight episodes in a long time).