Archer S10 E3/4 “The Leftovers/Dining with the Zarglorp”

The first two episodes made me worry that the characters were becoming broader and more generic – and I’ll come back to that – but for the second pair even the plots are pretty much off the peg. The Leftovers is a familiar weird-addiction episode with a whiff of Flowers for Algernon. Pretty much the sum of its parts. Parasites Lost plus Fry & the Slurm Factory (or substitute your favourite silly-addiction episode here). It’s, like, Eggs 101.

So the plot is as flimsy as ever, and as usual with this trope, it’s an opportunity for the characters to go bizarro. Shrinking nebbish Cyril becomes a swaggering alpha dudebro, cat-voiced wallflower Ray becomes… well, some sort of musical act, and Pam goes from sleeping through red alerts to becoming de facto captain in the space of a heartbeat. (Speaking of, does Pam remind anyone else of Killface when she’s in captain mode?) Unfortunately, its effects on Archer, Lana and Carol are disappointingly limited, and ultimately boil down to the characters all stating their feelings and intentions out loud. Having said that the first two episodes do a good job of showing and not telling, that trend dropped off quickly.

Benedict is pretty gross, but it’s kind of adorable how quickly Archer’s needy affinity for animals kicks in when that little six-armed armadillo mole rat facehugger, uh, literally hugs his face. (And the fact that it takes him hours to realise it’s a female is, well, hardly surprising. Turns out you can go to Space Camp and still miss the core concept.) Along the way we learn that Carol kind of wants to kill everyone on board, a trait she apparently shares with Malory, who now apparently lives in doorways and manages to spend the entire episode not doing any scanning, despite both being an AI and not eating any eggs. It’s a wearily familiar syndrome that mars many comedies based on petty bickering: early seasons use the characters’ foibles and hangups to make overblown arguments appear out of nowhere, which gives the show its character and unique voice… but by the later seasons, characters with irritating quirks have often been flattened into outright villains who doggedly antagonise everyone for no apparent reason besides kick-starting a new conflict for each episode (Pierce from Community and Selina from Veep spring to mind).

In Dining with the Zarglorp, the crew are stranded inside a giant space monster with an astronaut who’s the sole survivor of her crew and talks almost exclusively in tales of her own heroism. In other words, she’s plainly a serial killer. Space dementia is a trope we’ve seen in everything from Red Dwarf to Event Horizon to Ren & freakin’ Stimpy, so once again the plot is more or less on rails. Archer is a dick, Captain Killspree sacrifices herself, tears in rain etc, Archer is still a dick. Plot recap: done.

Archer’s regression into infancy continues undeterred, which is an ongoing let-down. Sterling has always been an asshole, but ultimately capable of putting himself in harm’s way for others – albeit with bad grace and usually as a last resort – and now it’s disappointing to see that character development happening in reverse. Any nuance that had developed over the years seems to be gone… and unfortunately, that doesn’t leave much, especially since this incarnation doesn’t really have snarling burns or obscure literary references to fall back on.

Which makes his relationship with Lana kind of icky for me. She’s always put up with him being a man-child, but there’s a point where it becomes faintly gross. (Yet another unfortunate point of comparison to Family Guy.) In one scene, we see Archer whining “Lana, he’s twisting my words” – the plainest appeal to mommy we’ve ever seen – and in the next scene they’re literally trying to fuck each other to death. It’s telling that with all the creepy oedipal backdrop the show’s spent years setting up, they’ve never found any particular payoff to this. Hell, the writers’ aversion to resolving Archer and Lana’s relationship is probably much to do with why we’ve had three non-canon coma seasons. The first episode had Archer telling the camera directly that he has sex dreams about his mother –not so much a joke as a character explaining the premise to a joke – yet now he’s having actual sex with his mother-substitute, the show can’t even muster up so much as a Danger Zone reference?

As for Lana… did Aisha piss the producers off or something? The voice of reason is always a thankless role, but it usually involves more than just being a sentient vagina for the boys to fight over. (Oh come now, that’s not fair. They did also mention that she gives blowjobs.) Not only does Lana want nothing more in the world than to have sex with Archer – whom she divorced for self-evident reasons – but we’ve also learned (via very clunky tell-don’t-show exposition) that she’s also sleeping with Cyril, a detail which seems to have no plot or character implications at all. And she can’t even work out what a Zarglorp is, which is just embarrassing. But hey, the important thing is that at any given moment, she’s definitely getting boned by one or other of the losers on this ship.

As ever, it’s always a worry that Archer may come to rely on its animation and plot to carry as much weight as the dialogue, and those are bad boughs to rest on. I hope Archer’s recovery next season will entail restoring the old characters, because their current flatness is dismaying. Never more so than when Ray protests “There’s more to me than my sexuality,” because come on Ray, in your current form, there isn’t much more.

Stray observations

• “Why do people rob banks, Cheryl?”
  “Uh, if I’m remembering this right, it’s because the action IS the juice?”
  Carol doesn’t get a lot of limelight in these episodes but I don’t think I’ve ever loved this character more, and I’d watch the hell out of Carol and Malory Do Deep Space. I’d prefer them as pirates, but I’ll take fashion designers.
• I was slightly disappointed that Zarglorp disproved my theory that Carol and Cheryl are two different characters – I was looking forward to a good rug-pull at the end (“But we have different names!” “Duh-hoy.” “Right?”).
• I wonder if we’ll get to see Pam’s finishing move later?