Not as good as an episode, but still funny. I'm looking forward to hopefully wrapping up the Barry saga of Archer next week.
Going back to season 2 I think. There was a scene of her lighting a dumpster on fire and looking all gushy.
I don't get why Katya is pursuing a vendetta against ISIS. I mean, the ISIS crew have done horribly shitty things to a lot of people but not to Katya specifically. I mean, there's the whole cyborg thing but she's never seemed overly bothered by it.
My guess is that she's trying to destroy ISIS to get rid of Mallory and leave Archer in the clear to be away from her influence for once in his life. Then she'll either lobby him to join the KGB so they can be together or she's just doing him a solid because he's always been nice to her.
She might, but she still seemed fond of Archer even when she was using ISIS to help get Barry down from the space station so that sounds unlikely. And she's also the new head of the KGB so, I dunno. Anything is possible, I could very well just be overthinking this, but it looked odd given Katya's history. Had it been just Barry in that helicopter I wouldn't have raised an eyebrow.
For a show that revels in callbacks this episode was oddly disconnected. It was basically Skytanic II and none of the characters mentioned it. Also I have a hard time believing that you could get Archer anywhere near eggplants after breaking into Mallory's desk, in her sinkless office.
That's my point though. This isn't a show that will drop a word like aubergine to describe the color of a vibrator and not at least have Archer's eyes widen when in a later episode he has to even be in the same room with them.
I did think it was a bit of a weak episode compared to some of the last few but oh well. Archer's hierarchy of "gay" jobs seemed to scrape the speedbump a bit in terms of the usual obnoxious/wrong:funny ratio for the show.
Well apparently it is. Also, this is a weird complaint. People don't develop phobias of vegetables by seeing a gross thing one time that's the same color as that vegetable. If Archer had reacted in some way based on that, it wouldn't have been funny. It wouldn't have even made sense. It would have made everyone go "huh?" and then look it up and go "that's dumb."
Gotta go with BST on that one, the show makes a fetish out of obscure references and calls back things from any episode (or different shows.) That's actually why I figured they were using aubergines.
I'm sure it was, but there's a difference between a callback that fans will go "oh, heh" to and a forced, unfunny joke with no grounding in either reality or the characters. I mean, would you have found it either funny or interesting if he'd had some kind of goofball reaction to seeing the color purple? Should he freak out every time he sees any purple object?
An actual eggplant is unusually evocative of an aubergine marital aid. And again, there's not just callbacks, there are out-and-out obscurantist obscure references all over the place. This season opened with “Thomas Elphinstone Hambledurgers with Manning Coleslaw." Anyone who notices and looks up bizarre Archer references and callbacks isn't going to think that one was even a bit obscure.
Ok, so he should only have seizure when he goes to a grocery store? Come to think of it, there's your answer. He's had like two and a half years worth of seeing eggplants--not a rare occurrence!--so he should be pretty well desensitized to them by now. It's not obscurity that's the problem, it's that doing that wouldn't have been funny and wouldn't have made sense. If that had happened and I'd looked it up, I wouldn't have been annoyed because it was too obscure a callback, I would have been annoyed because there'd be no payoff because it's stupid.
Some Archer jokes and references aren't particularly funny; the Hambledurger's certainly marginal, "Johnny Banks called" requires like a wikisearch for the hypothetical punchline. This is also more of a callback than anything, and Archer loves slavish continuity, stuff like "Dicky" still being tattooed on Archer's back from a one-off joke in season 2. While wikiing that I found that Archer and Dicky Woodhouse played Russian roulette with the same group of gamblers Mallory Archer did in season 1. It's that kind of show. Re funniness YMMV.
I'm firmly in the camp of "He probably should've had a brief vietnam like flashback where his eyes got wide, then he shook it off, and then we never spoke of it again."
Adam Reed's characters are all about developing weird phobias based on singular yet horrifying events. So yeah an episode in which that word is used and Mallory again drums up a false threat to get something she wants and both go with no mention at all? Not at all normal for a show that ran with the "core concept" joke for nearly a whole season.
Well I liked the episode anyway. It's fun to hear Anthony let loose, although I do have to wonder what the head chef at a restaurant was doing around a specific wine glass for that long. I also kind of wonder why the show didn't do an extra-obvious, extremely on-the-nose cross-promotional nod at that point to Justified, but maybe I'm the only person that would laugh at that And Katja is clearly not into this whole thing Barry's got going on, so I kind of suspect that there's something more to come out of this whole "her being the head of the KGB" thing in general and this episode in particular.
How's it hanging, Grimace? This one got me pretty much from start to finish. They're really playing off the whole "ISIS are the bad guys" thing this season, aren't they?
Malory certainly is. I loved the exchange that went something like... "MUST you do that this very instant?" "What? But you told us to do it 'this very instant.'" "And when did I say that?" "...Last Tuesday?" Also, "I'm a hologram!"
Is the grimace thing that he's got purple bruises, or...? I can't tell if the internet glomming onto the line is just because Pam's being evil or because there's an excellent Grimace reference I missed.
