The Dragon Prince Creators Talk Season 5 and Entering The Show’s Empire Strikes Back Era

The Dragon Prince: The Mystery of Aaravos is back for its fifth season (and second with that subtitle), which debuted early over the San Diego Comic-Con weekend. As anyone who has seen the new season of the animated fantasy series can attest, The Dragon Prince is growing darker as it enters its final few seasons. With the time jump that occurred between The Dragon Prince‘s third and fourth seasons, the young cast of heroes — including King Ezran his brother, Prince Callum, who is now also the kingdom’s High Mage; and the Moonshadow Elf Rayla, who was once an elven assassin and is now the last of the Dragonguard — are older. Their responsibilities are great, and the threats and complications in their lives have grown more serious and more complex.

ComicBook.com had the opportunity to chat with The Dragon Prince creators Aaron Ehasz and Justin Richmond ahead of the surprise release of The Dragon Prince Season 5, touching on how the series is maturing in its second half. Here’s what they had to say:

Jamie Lovett, ComicBook.com: I’ve seen The Dragon Prince Season 5. It’s good. Finnegren, the Pirate villain, really stands out as a great new antagonist addition to the show.

Aaron Ehasz: Can you tell who Finnegren is based on a little bit? Have you seen the show Deadwood? He’s based on Al Swearengen, who is played by Ian McShane, who’s a wonderful villain. Very charismatic, very powerful, very persuasive in his way. A lot of Finnegren was leaning into that kind of archetype and maybe even a little bit as a parody. Even the name — Swearengen, and then Finnegren — and then that led to “Finnegren’s Wake,” but yeah, he’s a fun character and we had a lot of fun.

When you all sat down to make Season 5, what were some of the goals, ideas, and themes that you wanted to explore? What was on the big board, or whatever you use to brainstorm, when you set out?

AE: It’s always hard to answer questions like that. I mean, we did want to lean a little more into the primal thematic than we had in the original seasons, so we knew we wanted to have an ocean adventure and see Tidebound Elves and tidebound mages and nautical criminal types. 

Thematically, I think we were in a couple of different places. It just depended on the character. We wanted to see Ezran growing into a role of trying to assemble forces to face the challenge of being a king, but also as a global king who’s going out into Xadia and leveraging his relationships with Zim and Zubeia to get things done. We also wanted him to enjoy and have some fun with the fact that, and see that, he’s being asked to act like a grownup all the time and forgetting — in the scene where he and Soren chat about basically him not even being able to giggle at saying “duty” or whatever. That’s part of what this kid is facing. He’s not being allowed to be a child. He’s having to overthink everything.

We wanted to push on in the world of Callum and Rayla. Last season was seeing the wound and her return and how that hurt him and just seeing the first glimmers of them reconnecting by the end. This season we wanted to see them develop trust again, or realize they trust each other again, and start to rebuild their friendship and their trust. Hopefully. that’s something that people felt and that’s meaningful and that’s important because what happened between season three and season four was traumatic for Callum and hard for both of them, and it was something that hurt trust, and so focusing on that was the most important thing for those characters this season in terms of their relationship.

Viren, as you know, at the end of last season, he starts to slip back into himself. He uses dark magic one more time. Well, now it turns out that triggered the dark magic fevers and re-accessing all the emotional trauma and all the rationale behind why he did dark magic in the first place and all of that, and seeing him now grapple with, “Who was I? Who am I? Who should I be?” Having opportunities by the end of the season to decide, “Can I renew myself? Can I change who I am or am I committed to the path that I was on for all this time?” and for that choice to be a life or death choice. We really loved this arc with Viren and working with Jason [Simpson] on this arc. We wanted to see, especially, Viren’s vulnerability, which we saw all season.

We wanted to see Claudia have to really start to step up and take command of what was happening and why and be the leading force. We started to see glimmers of that in Season 4 when [Viren] can’t do the spell to release the homunculus and things like that. But it’s really in Season 5 where we start to see that, no, Viren is grappling with his self-identity.

If Claudia wants this to happen, she’s got to make it happen. She’s got to take the lead here, so we’re seeing Claudia grow in those ways, but we’re also seeing Claudia and Terry, their relationship and the way they support each other and the way he’s responding to some of the things she’s dealing with and grappling with.

Terry is a really interesting character to me. Introducing a new character partway through a series is often difficult because people get upset that they’re taking up time that could be spent on the original characters. Yet, Terry is really fascinating because he’s obviously very supportive of Claudia as a person, but it’s still ambiguous how on board he is with the actual plan that she’s trying to enact. It seems like he’s there for her, not necessarily whatever she’s trying to do. Can you talk a little bit about him?

AE: First of all, in terms of introducing new characters, we had the very positive experience during Avatar of introducing Toph in the middle of Season 2, I think literally halfway through the show. So we knew if we brought a character to life with nuance and subtlety, and we’re fortunate to have great performers, that people can fall in love with the new character and that that’s okay. You can do it. That’s how we felt about Terry. So the first comparison for Terry is Toph. The second Avatar comparison though is Uncle Iroh, which is to say part of, I think, what we see in Terry is he’s in love with Claudia and — not “but” — and Claudia is a complex, flawed person.

And Terry’s not a perfect person. Terry has a certain instinctive kindness and certain almost childlike wisdom aspects to him. But I think he sees something in Claudia even though she’s complicated, even though she’s flawed, that he loves and is in love with and he wants to be there for her and support her in a way that’s not unlike Iroh. I think you have to pick and choose the moments where you’re like, “Hold up. This is effed up.” A lot of the time you’re trying to be there for the person and support them and not enable the things that are wrong or the things that are bad, but support the person you love. So I don’t know, it’s complicated. We often have thought there’s something similar to Iroh. He sees something in her long term, he believes in her, he truly loves her and she loves him. They have something in each other that they need.

But in terms of, “What is dark magic? What does dark magic mean to him? Why does she do the things she does? Is he against dark magic?” At some point, is he going to be like, “Hey man, you got to quit.” I don’t know. We saw the line at the end of season four when she’s mean to Rayla and tricks her. That’s where Terry is like, “Hey, that maybe wasn’t right. I’ve seen you do a lot of weird stuff, but you just took that elf’s heart and you took advantage of it.” And she’s moved by it. It works. Claudia goes back and throws the coins to Rayla.

So there’s some traction here between them. There’s something in their relationship where he has plenty of influence. He can move her in certain directions and he’s certainly going to find opportunities to exert that influence. But we’ll have to watch everything play out. We’ll have to watch how she’s growing, how she’s changing, and see what Terry thinks of it and what kind of influence he chooses to, or tries to exert on her. He’s also such a respectful person in terms of he would never be controlling or bossy, but he might say, “Hey, this is what I see and this is how it makes me feel, and maybe I think you can be better than that.” Those are all interesting aspects of their relationship that I think we enjoy as we tell this story.

This season ends with some characters in some dark places. We’re about halfway through the season. Going into this, did you guys look at this as the Empire Strikes Back era of The Dragon Prince, so to speak? Was that on your mind that this should be the dark middle chapter? Where are you in terms of that overarching story?

Justin Richmond: Yeah, since the beginning, we’d always said that these seasons get progressively more mature and some of that means that we go to darker places and this is the first flexing of those muscles in terms of putting it into the show. That doesn’t mean that it’s grimdark and Warhammer-esque, but trying to go to emotionally different places with the characters, I think, was important. That being said, we still have two more to go, so there are definitely highs and lows in this season, and I think the peaks and valleys will continue as we head towards Season 7 and what we have planned there.

I think Empire‘s a good way to look at it in terms of the good guys won in the first three seasons, and now, well, what happens after that? The answer is, well, things are still pretty broken. Not everything is fixed just because they won one big fight. So getting a chance to actually explore that is really interesting.

What’s the trick to balancing those darker elements with the fact that these characters are still by and large children and you want to have some of that levity? The Ezran “duty” scene that came up earlier is a good example. Is there a trick to keeping that balance so it doesn’t veer one way or the other too much?

AE: Yes, it is a trick and it’s not easy. For example, we received some fair feedback that maybe we did a little too much of it in Season 4. I think to some degree this is a little bit of an answer, which is to say, hey, some of this is, these characters are kids and this is some of what they go through. This is fine. Even Corvus who’s like, “Guys, this is super immature” can’t resist.

So I don’t know. The answer is yes, it’s a balance. Yes, we’ve gotten feedback from Season 4 that we did a little too much of it, and we have intentionally tried to pull some of it back and find a clearer balance. We don’t want the show to be all dark. A lot of things are getting darker. I mean, the things that you’re seeing in Season 5, honestly, things coming in Season 6 and Season 7 are testing limits that Season 5 didn’t test, so it’s got a ways to go. Part of getting there is also trying to maintain some sense of humor and humanity in our characters. I think we’re seeing the balance shift a little more as the drama and stakes increase a bit. Hopefully.

Having worked on Avatar, a lot of fans assumed — rightly or wrongly — that the humor in that series was because it was a Nickelodeon cable show, and they believed there was something like a quota on kid-like jokes for shows there. But does the equation change, or the balance change, because you’re on a streaming series versus when you’re on a cable network like Nickelodeon?

AE: It can. The equation changes based on who the characters are and who the audience is. We know that our audience for The Dragon Prince, the vast majority comes from adult accounts, honestly. But we also know that there are millions of young people who watch too. So we’re aware that there’s a balance. That said, I don’t know how that will shift in Seasons 6 and 7. You can see things are getting darker and there are some chances that things like our rating could shift. We have other examples like the Harry Potter that we saw that get more mature over time, and that was okay because the audience grew up with that. And we know that some of our audience is growing up with the show as well.

So we know we want to tell the most epic, awesome, emotionally satisfying story we can for our characters, and we want the stakes to be real. And that sometimes real stakes, the cost of that is things that are hard for younger audiences to understand or grapple with. Some of that we’re going to see in Season 6 and Season 7, and it may be that Season 6 and Season 7 are not for younger audiences. So we’ll have to see when we get there.

The Dragon Prince: The Mystery of Aaravos Season 5 is streaming now on Netflix.