…And with last night’s episode, Archer cements its place as one of the funniest TV shows on all time. Seriously, I don’t think there’s been a show on the boob tube since Arrested Development that’s been so consistently packed to the brim with non-stop jokes and plot development, while making the whole thing feel like a delightful breeze. Point being: we’re glad its back.
Sadly, the show is only back for a three episode mini-season – essentially a TV movie split into three parts. And, it’s way more plot heavy than usually, picking up directly after the climactic events of last season. The episode caught new viewers up to this pretty quickly, but basically super-spy Sterling Archer had his true love murdered in front of him by his arch enemy Barry (who is now a cyborg, a confusing plot point we’re going to ignore for the moment).
Archer deals with the events the only way he can: running away to a tropical island, growing a beard, and banging newlyweds on their honeymoon. Naturally, his mother – the head of ISIS, the semi-incompetent spy organization for hire at the center of of the show – isn’t having any of that. She sends a former ISIS agent named Rip Riley (voiced by Patrick Warburton) after him in a sea-plane, in order to bring Archer home. Things don’t go exactly as planned.
First, Archer hits Riley in the face with a broken bottle. Then, after capturing Riley mid-flight, Archer neglects to understand what an auto-pilot is, leading to the plane running out of fuel (turns out, the auto-pilot doesn’t know how to land itself at a refueling station). Crashing in the water, Archer achieves two personal records – breath holding, and number of sharks shot in the face – and then promptly gets the duo captured by pirates. And then Archer becomes the king of the pirates.
I honestly don’t think I stopped laughing for a minute at this episode, which shows off not just how well this show is written, but how brilliant H. Jon Benjamin is as a voice actor. His switching between Archer’s voice, and a 1930’s voice to make fun of Riley’s stupid seaplane was damn near brilliant, as was the rest of the work in the episode, from the rest of the cast, including David Cross as a translator for the pirates – see, I told you this show was basically Arrested Development with spies. Can’t wait for the next two eps.
BEST BITS:
- “And whatever my equivalent of sploosh is. Which I guess is just sploosh. With semen.”
- “If the five year old me knew that, he’d have a huge boner right now.
- “Pirate. Fortress.”
- Seriously, I could watch a solid half hour of Archer making fun of Riley in that 1930’s voice, but, “Hi. It’s the 1930s. Can we have our words and clothes and shitty airplanes back?” took the cake.
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