Fans of The Venture Bros. know that Adult Swim’s pop-culture-savvy science and adventure epic turns 12 this year. Yet somehow, the show's new episodes—which started last night with a special titled "All This and Gargantua-2"—only mark the beginning of Season 6. And if you ask the show's co-creators, Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer, that special is really less season premiere than it is a long-deferred resolution.

“We came up with this story as the epic finale for Season 5," Publick says. “We’ve been wanting to get to Gargantua-2 for that long, and we kept hinting at it in Season 5. It’s probably been two or three years. How satisfying is it?”

“I don’t know if it’s satisfying," Hammer answers, "because it’s so outside of the Venture kitchen, which is where I place the entire world. But it is super satisfying to get this story out."

As everyone who’s come to love the Venture universe knows, whenever the series comes back, it does so with a bang. "All This and Gargantua-2” is the space epic you can’t believe The Venture Bros. hasn’t done yet. There’s love, death, multiple groups of plotting villains, huge action sequences that may or may not include light sabers, and everyone’s beloved Team Venture finally having an adventure on this space-station setpiece the show has teased since 2009. (Season 4’s “Handsome Ransom” is when Jonas Jr. first revealed he was building the thing.)

Without spoiling anything, many of the lingering storylines from recent Venture history are shot straight into space. Everything from where the Monarch goes next to what’s up with the Revenge Society is fair play.

“We wanted to lay the groundwork for a big, messed-up sixth season,” Publick says. “We also wanted to clear the decks of a lot of dangling plot threads from like three seasons before.” “This was a place to really start anew with everyone that was old," Hammer says. "We have a lot of movement, and sometimes it’s nice to take all the furniture, stack it up in a corner, and light a fire, which we do.”

“Right, then you run back and grab your favorite two pieces,” Publick says. “‘I didn’t mean to set that one on fire!’”

That metaphor gets at one of the challenges with a show like The Venture Bros: Over time its universe has sprawled in unexpected ways, yet each bit of that expansion is so endearing as to feel essential. For Publick and Hammer, coming up with plot ideas and writing for characters comes easy—the time-consuming part is deciding what to part with. Major shake-up episodes like “All This and Gargantua-2” are necessary so the team can address all of their priorities within an upcoming season. In fact, the team is still trying to wrap up the last few episodes of Season 6.

Hammer: “It’s not like we don’t have great ideas—we have too many. Sometimes we try to pack them all in, but more often we don’t get to. So we have this long-running lament…”

Publick: “And clearing things and starting anew then gives you a new problem—having too many directions to go in. Honing in on what we wanted to do is tricky.”

Hammer: “Because if there’s one thing we’re good at, it’s making a universe you can’t stop with. This thing can break off into so many pieces, be so many things. I don’t think we did it intentionally, but it is the most fruitful place to write. And if it’s not, Jackson and I can invent something to make it more fruitful. We’re idiots—we can probably lose everybody [character-wise] and move along without a hitch.”

Despite the surplus of story, what unfolds after “All This and Gargantua-2” is up in the air. Season 6 is definitely coming at some point, but you might not want to hold your breath: Season 5 similarly kicked off with a special (“A Very Venture Halloween”), but then nearly a year passed before the rest of the episodes aired. And while there remains work to be done, Hammer admits the duo continues planning beyond. “When you work on something, you have to deal with what you have going. But it’s impossible to write and not write for the future,” he says. “So if we do or don’t do a Season 7, we have a Season 7 in our heads.”

Ahead of Its Time, Adrift in Time ———————————

No matter how long the show runs, getting to this point is as out of this world as Gargantua-2. Television was a different planet in 2003, when the show started: The Sopranos and The Wire were in their infancies; Lost and Mad Men and the rest of the watershed series types came later. But The Venture Bros.—despite being an animated comedy—was already employing the staples of today's best television. The show is deeply layered, with long-arc plots and actions that have future consequences (reminder, set your DVRs). And from the start, the show was steeped in its own lore, with episodes referring to things that happened both the day before and years before. Essentially, Publick and Hammer wrote a show that was a decade ahead of its time.

Publick attributes this to what the duo was naturally interested in at the turn of the century: "more in love with HBO dramas than sitcoms." Hammer thinks growing up (both creators are in their 40s) with "the world’s worst TV"—"incredibly repetitive, awful, a meaningless advertisement," he calls it—helped set The Venture Bros.' on its current path. No matter the reason, the results put it plainly enough. *The Venture Bros. *is a show that's managed to remain unique this whole time, no matter if it's released one season or one episode at a time.

Publick: "I think it’s clear from how we write, we assume everyone just watched the other seasons 10 minutes ago. Then we just go, 'Here’s a bunch of inside baseball for you. Remember this guy from Season 3? He’s back.’ We rely on the fact that it’s really easy to get DVDs, iTunes, and stuff like that. We trust the audience to care enough or believe their friends when they’re told it’s awesome.”

__Hammer: __“TV is still going through a unique and beautiful change right now. You have, for the first time in history, these longform, episodic stories. And because they’re available in secondary markets and people can binge-watch them, they’re like watching a very long movie. So our style of writing, to constantly reference what comes before and what came 10 years ago, someone in the future who’s watching saw all that yesterday. It’s perfect for our specific style. A lot of shows do it now, but we were really in that weird pioneer ground of what is TV."