"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of Last Week: Rick and Morty, "Pickle Rick"

This is the ninth of 13 all-new blog posts that are being posted until this blog's final post in December 2017. Occasionally on Friday, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. The "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week hasn't been a weekly feature for a long time, but sometimes, I'll catch a really good piece of animated TV shortly after its original airdate, and I'll feel like devoting some paragraphs to it despite my lateness to the party. Hence the rare "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of Last Week. This is the 134th edition of "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week! Stream "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," my one-hour mix of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, right now.



The Monday after it premiered, I streamed on the Adult Swim site "Pickle Rick"--Rick and Morty's most violent episode so far, as well as the show's most damning indictment of Rick and his treatment of his family, as he mutates himself into a pickle/human hybrid as an excuse to avoid going along with Beth, Summer and Morty to see a family therapist (special guest voice Susan Sarandon)--but I wasn't able to write about "Pickle Rick" until now. I was busy resuming work on my prose novel manuscript and trying to finish marathoning Fargo's third season on FXNow right before FX deleted the entire season from FXNow.

Movie Pilot did such an astute review of "Pickle Rick" (it's entitled "'Pickle Rick' Proved Beyond a Squanch of a Doubt That Rick Is the Real Villain of Rick and Morty") that I'm not going to discuss and briefly summarize (instead of pointlessly recap scene-for-scene) "Pickle Rick" in a fashion similar to the Movie Pilot piece, which is the same kind of non-recappy approach I've done with previous Rick and Morty episodes. I'm just going to raise a couple of points I haven't seen in other reviews of "Pickle Rick."

Danny Trejo is an underrated voice actor. I had no idea Trejo voiced Jaguar, the racially ambiguous assassin Pickle Rick battles and then conspires with to get himself back home, until the end credits. I thought it was Clancy Brown the whole time. That's how effective Trejo is as a voice actor. Trejo really whitened up his voice in "Pickle Rick." He did an even better job as Enrique, Hank's not-too-bright co-worker, in my favorite later-season King of the Hill episode, "Lady and Gentrification," because he convincingly voiced a meek and non-confrontational character who's the complete opposite of all the ass-kickers he played in movies like Desperado, the Machete flicks and even A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas, an atypical Trejo movie where Elias Koteas, not Trejo, is the one who's doing all the on-screen carnage. Speaking of King of the Hill, I'm not so excited over the rumors about Mike Judge reuniting with the King of the Hill crew to make new episodes. It's just wrong for King of the Hill to resume without the late Brittany Murphy. If King of the Hill is going to come back to TV now, it ought to kill off Luanne, Murphy's character, off-screen. And no, not even a terrific and versatile voice actor like Pamela Adlon, who juggled several roles on King of the Hill, including Bobby, would be a satisfactory enough replacement for Murphy as Luanne.

Trejo is always weirdly guest-starring in TV show episodes that make me emotional for some reason. "Lady and Gentrification" is a rare King of the Hill episode that angers me because of the things Enrique, his daughter Inez and their family are forced to experience due to the gentrification of Arlen (caused by Peggy, of course), even though a certain quotable grievance of Enrique's is played for laughs ("They put salmon in the fish tacos, Hank!"). The unexpected friendship between Hank and Inez, whom Hank has been asked by Enrique to give a speech for at her quinceañera even though Hank barely knows her, causes "Lady and Gentrification" to also be oddly affecting. Hank is understandably uncomfortable about being around Inez at first because the thought of a middle-aged man spending extra time talking to a teenage girl is never not creepy, but the friendship becomes kind of affecting when you realize Hank, after years of struggling to understand Bobby ("That boy ain't right") and not exactly getting along with the niece-in-law whom he and Peggy have to look after, has finally met a kid whom he could actually get along with. Trejo's guest shot on Monk had the same effect on me as Hank's quasi-parental bond with a surprisingly non-sullen Inez did in "Lady and Gentrification": his hardened lifer character's gradual sympathy for both his cellmate Monk, whom he doesn't get along with at first, and Monk's search for the murderer of his wife Trudy in "Mr. Monk Goes to Jail" is oddly affecting too, and I wished Monk brought back Trejo's character for another episode. In the Monk series finale about the revelation of Trudy's killer, Monk should have sent Trejo to kill Craig T. Nelson.

In the case of "Pickle Rick," the episode's final scene before the end credits was what made me emotional, but not emotional as in somewhat moved, like when I saw "Lady and Gentrification" or "Mr. Monk Goes to Jail." The final scene in Beth's car made me frustrated, as in "Goddammit, Morty, be more aggressive about this shit that's been eating you up inside."

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Rick and Morty, "The Rickshank Rickdemption"

This is the fourth of 12 or 13 all-new blog posts that are being posted on a monthly basis until this blog's final post in December 2017. Occasionally on Friday, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. It's the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week. Stream "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," my one-hour mix of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, right now.



If the last few years saw the rise of the surprise album release--the likes of Beyoncé and Drake have rewritten the rules of the music industry by dropping albums right and left without any warning--then Adult Swim is apparently taking a cue from Queen Bey and Drizzy by trying to bring about the rise of the surprise TV show episode premiere. They did it before when, without much fanfare, they debuted on Instagram the complete "Rixty Minutes" episode of Rick and Morty a few days before its broadcast premiere.

This April Fools Day, Adult Swim did it again. Without posting some sort of press release or promotional tweet in advance, Adult Swim's staff pretended to do their annual April Fools prank (three of those past pranks were simply broadcasts of The Room), but they used the appearance of a prank as a Trojan horse to show all of "The Rickshank Rickdemption"--the Rick and Morty third-season premiere in which an incarcerated Rick comes up with a very sci-fi way to both outsmart an alien interrogator (special guest star Nathan Fillion) and escape from intergalactic prison--in a loop for only a few hours on both the network and its site. Well-played, Adult Swim, well-played.

Adult Swim hasn't even set a date yet for the unveiling of the rest of Rick and Morty's new season. So far, they've said the season will resume some time in the summer, so the most impatient of Rick and Morty fans, who have been waiting since October 2015 for new episodes from Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon, will just have to shut the fuck up like Jemaine Clement whenever he sings about moonmen and wait a little longer.

The April Fools loop was a nice little surprise stunt, but how does the episode--which I was lucky to stream in its entirety after returning home late from a party, right before Adult Swim deleted it from their site--fare as the return of an eagerly awaited animated show that hasn't been first-run in almost two years? "The Rickshank Rickdemption," which is credited to Rick and Morty staff writer Mike McMahan, is a much more focused and tautly written (as well as much more action-heavy) season premiere than last season's "A Rickle in Time," a season opener that Roiland and Harmon were reportedly unhappy with because, according to the duo in Rolling Stone, "We were so close to something amazing and we never really got there from a structural standpoint," and "It went off the deep end conceptually and got really over-complicated." The third-season premiere is satisfying and funny enough to get me to bring back this blog's "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week" feature after a long hiatus.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Archer, "Deadly Velvet: Part II"

Occasionally on Friday, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. It's the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week. Stream "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," my one-hour mix of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, right now.



So when Archer's seventh season opened with a dead Archer lying in the pool a la Sunset Boulevard, I was expecting the spy-turned-P.I.'s demise to turn out to be a fakeout. Then when Archer's deranged co-worker Krieger was later seen putting the finishing touches on his robot doubles of all the Figgis Agency employees, I suspected the Archerbot would be the corpse in that pool. "Deadly Velvet: Part II"--the conclusion of an ambitious season that took a few more chances storytelling-wise than even the similarly ambitious "Archer Vice" arc did and was largely successful--totally proved me wrong. I didn't expect Archer creator Adam Reed to go through with it and actually kill off the title character instead of placing the Archerbot in the pool and letting the real Archer go scot-free.

Reed's commitment to not scamming the audience (I'm relieved that he didn't go for the sucker's move of saying the body belonged to a clone or an imposter wearing Archer's face) is admirable. But we all know that in a spy-fi universe where mortally wounded men live on as cyborgs and Nazi scientists get married to sentient holograms, Archer's death won't hold, unless FX cancels the show. Right now, the low-rated Archer's future on FX looks kind of iffy because the network hasn't renewed it yet. But if FX does renew the show, our favorite immature P.I. with a weird love for Shazam! (the '70s TV show, not the app) will be back to pulling voicemail pranks and pestering Cyril in no time.

So killing off Archer like that is kind of pointless, especially in an increasingly repetitive year of TV that's been overloaded with character deaths and death fakeouts to keep shows from losing their buzz on social media, and if an eighth season does take place, his murder at the hands of femme fatale Veronica Deane would lose much of its impact because there's no way the show would go on without H. Jon Benjamin and with Malory and A.J. being the only Archers around. But Archer's death gives Jessica Walter's character more to do than just deliver her usual pithy insults--so she does care about her son, even though it never appears to be that way--and it results in Walter becoming the MVP of the finale. Walter also gets the finale's biggest laugh when her pop-culturally illiterate character--whose cluelessness about the obscure pop culture (or literary) references her son, Pam, Cheryl and Krieger are so fond of dropping on the regular appears to have been lifted from Walter's real-life cluelessness about such references--hears the term "Turing test" for the first time and wonders if the term comes from "Star War." And I especially like how Archer's sexual attraction to the 50-year-old movie star, which contains disgusting Freudian overtones, literally became the death of him. His infatuation with Veronica didn't just destroy his relationship with Lana. It also ended his life. The show's character designers (including Chi Duong, whose Archer character designs can be glimpsed on her Tumblr, which she named Mochi Baby) further added to the grossness of Archer's Freudian infatuation by interestingly making Veronica closely resemble Walter when she starred in Grand Prix.

http://lovemochibaby.tumblr.com/post/145357833983/this-is-a-drawing-i-did-for-one-of-our-billboard

The villains on Archer have ranged from forgettable to perfectly cast (like when Timothy Olyphant was the highlight of an Archer episode that some have viewed as homophobic or when Jon Hamm guest-starred in the role of Captain Murphy, an old character from Reed and Matt Thompson's Sealab 2021). Those characters have never really been the highlights of Archer, but thanks to both the season-long insurance scam that she orchestrated behind the scenes and the consequences of that scam, Veronica marks the first time that an Archer villain has been truly formidable and intriguing. Plus Reed and Thompson recruited a superb performer to voice Veronica and bring her to noirish life this season: Mary McDonald-Lewis. Her name won't mean much to viewers who pay very little attention to cartoon voice actors, but to us '80s kids who grew up watching G.I. Joe, she's like an old friend. McDonald-Lewis was the voice of G.I. Joe heroine Lady Jaye. So Archer was killed by Lady Jaye.

And maybe FX as well--if it goes all Red Wedding on us like ABC and Fox did this spring.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Archer, "The Figgis Agency"

Occasionally on Friday, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. It's the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week. Stream "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," my one-hour mix of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, right now.



Two seasons ago, Archer's season-long experiment as "Archer Vice" was a divisive one for fans of the animated spy spoof. The viewers who disliked the kinds of storytelling that resulted from Archer creator Adam Reed's decision to change the characters' jobs from spies to drug dealers found the fifth season to be aimless, while I enjoyed Reed's willingness to experiment that season and found the subsequent season, in which the perpetually immature Archer, new mom Lana, Malory and Ray returned to spying and worked as independent contractors for the CIA, to be the more aimless season.

But as Archer has gotten older, the show's animators have developed a knack for crafting satisfying action sequences that have gotten more impressive in scale and scope with each year. That's mostly why my favorite episode from Archer's sixth season is "The Kanes." Lana's visit to her parents' house in Berkeley presented a great balance of large-scale action (the episode's homage to the classic Bullitt car chase was second to the avalanche in "The Archer Sanction" as an impressive sixth-season set piece) and the smaller-scale kind of character-based comedy that's pulled off well by bottle episodes like "Vision Quest."

A lot of the rest of Archer's sixth season suffered from a lack of stakes. Sure, the addition of a baby to the relationship between Archer and Lana brought a bit of welcome depth to the character of Archer, but Reed seemed to be sleepwalking through the same kinds of espionage storylines he appeared to be getting bored with shortly before the "Archer Vice" revamp. Archer's new season seeks to rectify the lack of stakes by changing the show's backdrop again to Hollywood and putting the disgraced (and after the disastrous events in "Drastic Voyage," unemployed) spies to work as private investigators. The P.I. storylines will hopefully restore some stakes to the show and allow for the animators to continue to outdo themselves in the action department, and if "The Figgis Agency," Archer's seventh-season premiere, is any indication, Archer's new detective agency may just turn out to be a better creative shot in the arm for the show than the cocaine-slinging thing.

Technically, it's Cyril's detective agency, and Archer, Lana and Ray are his unlicensed gumshoes, applying their spying skills to investigative work. So far, Archer isn't exactly Michael Westen yet. In "The Figgis Agency," he gets badly bitten by a couple of attack dogs in a scene that made me wince and is straight out of The Boys from Brazil, the same movie that inspired Krieger's possible origins as a Hitler clone. He also falls down the same canyon twice and fails to notice that Cyril's client (Ona Grauer, a.k.a. Bionic Katya), a movie star who hired the titular agency to retrieve a disk that's in the hands of powerful L.A. sleazebag Alan Shapiro (Patton Oswalt, who seems to be channeling both the villainous Henry Gibson and Mark Rydell characters from The Long Goodbye), is actually an imposter. It's like if all the spy tips that pulled Michael out of countless jams as a P.I. during Burn Notice went wrong.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: The Venture Bros., "Red Means Stop"

Occasionally on Friday, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. The 130th edition of the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week happens to focus on the final episode of a show that will be back with new episodes someday, but when? Oh yeah, and stream "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," my one-hour mix of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, right now, or don't. Barely anybody has.



Somewhere, there's a crazy parallel universe where Clancy Brown is an international movie star, in addition to being a great character actor, and he--not Liam Neeson--starred as the retired CIA agent who tears apart Paris to rescue his kidnapped daughter in Taken. "Red Means Stop," the Venture Bros. sixth-season finale, presents a glimpse of that parallel universe during the moment when Brown gets to parody Neeson's famous "I don't have money, but what I do have are a very particular set of skills" speech from Taken. The episode makes me wish some creepy Akira kid with extra-sensory powers or someone like the Rufus Sewell character from Dark City could will that universe into existence.

The imposing Brown is best known for his villainous roles in Highlander (his guest shot in "Red Means Stop" makes it an interesting episode to be airing right after the Christopher Lambert subplot of "A Party for Tarzan") and on both the short-lived HBO cult favorite Carnivàle and Superman: The Animated Series. He was so perfect as the voice of Lex Luthor that whenever I flip open Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's All-Star Superman, it's Brown's voice I hear in my brain when I'm reading Luthor's dialogue, not Gene Hackman's, not Kevin Spacey's, not Michael Rosenbaum's and certainly not Jesse Eisenberg's.

Brown would have been terrific as Bryan Mills in Taken. He can convincingly shift between being intimidating to someone his character's about to kill and being kind to whoever's playing his wife or daughter (like on, for example, Fox's Sleepy Hollow, where he had a rare good guy role as Abbie and Jenny's deceased surrogate dad). So that makes Brown the perfect guest star to voice the cloaked Red Death, a terrifying-looking, Red Skull-style arch who strikes fear into the hearts of his victims atop a flying satanic horse one moment and is sweet to his wife (Cristin Milioti, voicing a character who's much closer to her Fargo housewife role this time, instead of a gangster's bratty teen daughter) or his preschooler daughter the next. In fact, that's where we first meet the Red Death: he's at the park, looking after his daughter Lila, who doesn't have any skin like her dad, while his sweater's hilariously tied around his neck.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: The Venture Bros., "A Party for Tarzan"

Occasionally on Friday, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. It's the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week. Stream "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," my one-hour mix of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, right now!



When The Venture Bros. pulled the in medias res trick--an overused storytelling device Rick and Morty, another equally great animated comedy from Team Venture's home network of Adult Swim, made fun of a few months ago--only 25 seconds into "A Party for Tarzan," I was worried. "No! Not you too, Astrobase Go," I thought to myself.

Fortunately, the episode's deployment of in medias res turned out to be a parody of Martin Scorsese's in medias res moments from the opening title sequences of GoodFellas and Casino (as well as Raging Bull). I almost forgot that Scorsese actually did this, decades before Morty Smith would lose his mind on the Purge planet, when an aspiring screenwriter on that planet pissed Morty off by starting his story at the point where it got interesting instead of where its timeframe actually began.

Set during a night when Gary, who doesn't enjoy the homicidal part of henching, reluctantly executes an arch in the Pine Barrens as dirty work and Dr. Mrs. the Monarch experiences some similar hesitation while Wide Wale gives her the chance to pull the trigger on the man she thinks is the supervillain-killing Blue Morpho, "A Party for Tarzan" ranks up there with Community's "Contemporary American Poultry" episode and Mr. Show's hilarious "Pallies" sketch as an entertaining Scorsese parody. "Pallies" was actually more of a parody of the Bill the Butcher-esque treatment commercial TV has subjected all of Scorsese's R-rated movies to than a parody of the director's signature filmmaking techniques, but it's still a great little sketch about the violence of GoodFellas.



"A Party for Tarzan," the penultimate episode of The Venture Bros.' sixth season, even has in common with "Pallies" the brief presence of Paul F. Tompkins. The Mr. Show alum reprises his role from earlier this season as the original Morpho, whose 1973 master plan of disguising himself as the then-closeted Billie Jean King and nakedly seducing Dr. Z (Jackson Publick) into relinquishing a priceless statuette known as the Jade Dragon (while somehow tucking in his dick like Buffalo Bill)--which is detailed in a flashback-within-a-flashback--is definitely something you would never have seen on The Green Hornet.

If you're going to give Patrick Warburton and Mike Sinterniklaas an entire episode off from voicing Brock and Dean, respectively, you better damn well make the episode worthwhile. The Scorsesean flashback gimmick Doc Hammer went with for the episode he scripted--perhaps to compensate for the lack of Warburton and Sinterniklaas--could have turned out to be annoying, like it would have probably been in the hands of some lesser writer whose go-to Scorsese references are limited to Raging Bull and GoodFellas. But luckily, the gimmick works. When Hammer's making fun of Scorsese's overreliance on "Gimme Shelter" instead of recreating Joe Pesci's most profane lines from GoodFellas and Casino, that's how you know "A Party for Tarzan" is a solid Scorsese spoof. The Stones and blues music soundalikes Venture Bros. composer J.G. Thirlwell came up with in place of too-pricey-to-clear Scorsese movie soundtrack cuts like "Gimme Shelter" or "Mannish Boy" are funnier than using the actual songs themselves.

Between the references to Scorsese's 1987 video for Michael Jackson's "Bad" during "It Happening One Night" and the homages to Scorsese's documentary narration-inspired style throughout "A Party for Tarzan," Publick and Hammer must have revisited much of Scorsese's work while looking for inspiration for the New York-based sixth season and planning the whole season out. Doing that must have given Publick and Hammer a renewed appreciation for the legendary New York director whose name is interestingly one of the most frequently misspelled, even by filmmakers who claim to be fans of his work.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: The Venture Bros., "It Happening One Night"

Occasionally on Friday, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. It's the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week. Stream "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," my one-hour mix of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, right now!



Brock might not think so, but The Venture Bros.' move to big, bad New York is the best thing to happen to the OSI's toughest agent, probably since the life-changing day he bought his first Zeppelin LP. "It Happening One Night" is the latest Venture Bros. episode to make abundantly clear that the Venture family bodyguard has been off his game ever since he rejoined Team Venture in New York.

Samson's clearly no match for the New York supervillains he's had to tussle with ever since the newly wealthy Dr. Venture went from being small potatoes to an antagonist everyone in the Guild of Calamitous Intent wants to arch (Brock's new fuckbuddy Warriana has had to save Brock twice), and now in "It Happening One Night," he thinks the ninja-themed family restaurant where Hank has his dinner date with Sirena Ong is an actual ninja hideout (the ninja restaurant is a real-life thing in Tribeca, by the way). So Brock roughs up the waiters, including Jared (Nathan Fillion), a.k.a. the Brown Widow, who's so badly in debt he makes flat-broke Peter Parker in Spider-Man 2 look like a Kardashian kid.

Ninja New York in Tribeca

The Venture Bros. version of Ninja New York

Earlier this season, Brock told Hank to Google one of his heroes, Steve McQueen. Maybe if Brock bothered to do the same kind of research online while trying to keep an eye on Hank during his night out with Wide Wale's daughter, he wouldn't have wound up looking kind of stupid after being told that the ninja stronghold he infiltrated--he and his temporary sidekick Rocco (Mark Gagliardi), the Ong family bodyguard Sirena so detests, even go through the trouble of knocking a couple of waiters out and donning their fake ninja garb--is merely a trendy sushi joint.

A lapse in judgment like that may make Brock look bad as a spy who was trained to always be aware of his surroundings, but it's a good creative move for the show, which clearly struggled over what to do with Brock a few seasons ago. I have a theory for why Venture Bros. creator Jackson Publick separated Brock from the Ventures for a while and replaced him with reformed pedophile Sgt. Hatred: he simply got bored with having Brock always save the day. That kind of thing makes for terrific action sequences, but it can also become boring in the middle of a comedy show that's primarily about mediocrity. Brock was becoming too perfect a human being, even though this Swedish murder machine will always somehow be a funny character, thanks to whatever the fuck Patrick Warburton brings to the page, as well as because of the brilliant thing Publick and Doc Hammer wanted to do with Brock from the start.

They wanted to take Race Bannon and make him both psychotic on the battlefield (go revisit "Victor. Echo. November." on Hulu if you've forgotten how psychotic Brock can really be) and a frequently bored-sounding blue-collar type who viewed the guarding of a narcissistic super-scientist like Dr. Venture as work that's beneath him, even though he likes Dean and Hank (and H.E.L.P.e.R. too). It's like how Benson hated being the butler to the Tates but was kind to Jessica, Corinne and Billy because they were the only Tates who weren't snooty or racist. A.V. Club contributor Kevin Johnson's weird assessment that Brock hates Dean and Hank (in a typo-ridden guest review the A.V. Club recently posted when its regular Venture Bros. reviewer was gone for a week) is a total misreading of Brock's relationship with them. The OSI agent's Benson-style attachment to these boys who so badly need someone like him to guide them through--and away from--the craziness Dr. Venture brought into their lives is an essential part of The Venture Bros. It brings some genuine warmth to the show but never crosses into sentimentality (someone in a Reddit forum about Johnson's review interestingly counteracted his misreading by astutely pointing out that whenever Brock gets frustrated with Dean or Hank, it brings to mind Louis C.K. whenever he talks about getting annoyed by his daughters).

Speaking of Benson, competence can become comedy kryptonite, so when Benson became too competent and sensible--and popular--to continue being around the craziness of the other characters on Soap, he was spun off into his own show. Publick and Hammer's way of keeping Brock's similar type of competence from becoming stale was not to give Brock his own show but to sideline Brock and give him a Craig-era-Bond-like identity crisis as a professional killer (like when he went off the grid and lived with the duo of Steve Summers and his boyfriend Sasquatch, the show's parody of The Six Million Dollar Man's Bigfoot storyline) or to bring him down to Earth and depower him a bit, like how Publick and Hammer are depowering him now in New York. I bet that's why Publick and Hammer reinstated him as the family's bodyguard: they finally figured out how to make Brock interesting again, and the soft reboot the show is experiencing in New York has a lot to do with that.

Brock's arc this season is basically "if 007 had to fight someone like MODOK, he would definitely lose, and if you put 007 in the bedroom with a woman like Warriana, he would definitely not be in charge in the bedroom like he's always written to be in the Bond movies." It's an enjoyable way to play around with the spy genre assassin character who's always good at everything and to mock the wish-fulfillment fantasy side of the Bond movies. The Swedish murder machine is at his most interesting when he gets knocked around a bit, whether in battle or in the bedroom, like in "Tanks for Nuthin'."

Dr. Mrs. the Monarch, the voice of reason in the Monarch household, is also being similarly depowered a bit, even though as a Guild member, she now has more power and authority than her husband. If she weren't so distracted by both the stress of being Councilwoman 1 and the marital discord that's developed due to her rise in power, she'd be her old smarter self again and she'd be better able to track down the supervillain-killing mystery man who's been creating a bloodbath within the Guild (but is doing so accidentally, of course). The Monarch uses that state of distractedness--and his wife's love of role-playing during sex--to trick her into getting tranqed and to lure her away from finding out he's been arching other Guild members as the Blue Morpho in order to have Dr. Venture all to himself again.

There have been some complaints in the past from Venture Bros. viewers about how often pedophilia has been used as humor on the show (speaking of which, I rewatched "Everybody Comes to Hank's" the other day because of this week's focus on Hank's love life and was surprised by how the revelation that Dermott Fictel was the product of a relationship between a Woody Allen-esque Dr. Venture and the underage president of his fan club was a rare reference to wrong-on-so-many-levels sex that wasn't totally played for laughs, and, man, Publick and Hammer were really sticking it to Allen in that scene too). But lately, ever since the tranq-addicted Pirate Captain's relapse, I feel like the constant tranqing of characters on the show has become a similarly tiresome gag. Dr. Mrs. the Monarch becomes the latest character to get tranqed--perhaps the repetition of the dart gags is intended to be a joke about how the Morpho and his son (and even the new villains this week) are the hackiest and least creative people when it comes to taking down their enemies--and this umpteenth tranqing sort of ruins the lovely sight of Dr. Mrs. the Monarch cosplaying as Daisy Mae from Li'l Abner and not even bothering to Deep South-ify her incongruous Harvey Fierstein accent.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: The Venture Bros., "Tanks for Nuthin'"

Occasionally on Friday, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. It's the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week. Stream "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," my one-hour mix of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, right now!



Venture Bros. creator Jackson Publick's statement that "this season, like Season Five, lacks a satisfactory finale, because we didn't write one" is an interesting lament because Publick does an outstanding job intertwining this season's storylines and building those storylines towards that unsatisfactory finale in his consistently funny script for "Tanks for Nuthin'." Sometimes I think maybe Publick is trolling his fans and he likes to dupe them into thinking the finale will be a letdown like "The Devil's Grip" was to a segment of the fans (newsflash: "The Devil's Grip" is actually better than those fans think).

Or maybe Publick's just being honest. I don't know. It's all a mystery--like whether or not Dr. Venture and the Monarch are actually a second pair of titular brothers.

The sexual mishaps that have led to Dr. Venture having a brother he doesn't know about (and possibly an additional child out there who was mentioned once in the second season and has never been mentioned again), the narcissism of the wealthy and the failure of a space age that promised us jetpacks and hasn't yet delivered aren't the only recurring themes on The Venture Bros. There's also the recurring idea that many of the second-in-commands or underlings in the Ventureverse are far more deserving to be running things than the idiots who somehow ended up with the keys to the car, whether that idiot is the Monarch or Dr. Venture.

This season, Dr. Mrs. the Monarch--the wifey who's always been too smart to be playing second fiddle to supervillains but is also too principled and levelheaded to be in the business of arching--gets to run things. The Sovereign's death has resulted in her trying to keep both the Guild of Calamitous Intent and the Council of 13 from falling apart, in addition to her new tasks as Councilwoman 1. But "Tanks for Nuthin'" implies that Dr. Mrs. the Monarch is turning into yet another idiot in power. She's apparently developed Lois Lane-itis in the eyes and ears and is unable to look more closely at the evidence of the Blue Morpho's return to recognize that the man in the Morpho's old mask is actually her husband, not Dr. Venture. But unlike the Monarch and Dr. Venture, that's not because she's a lifelong imbecile. It's because she's becoming distracted by both the marital problems that are being caused by her new job and the stress of that very job.

"Tanks for Nuthin'" follows Dr. Mrs. the Monarch (I know it'd be easier to simply call her Sheila, but Dr. Mrs. the Monarch is just a funny name to repeatedly say in its entirety) on a part of that job nobody would enjoy doing: informing the spouse of a Guild member that her husband's dead. Accidentally killed by Gary when he tossed him into a pit in Ventech Tower's under-construction lobby at the end of "Rapacity in Blue" last week, Haranguetan left behind a wife who also happens to be a supervillain: Battleaxe (Barbara Rosenblat from Orange Is the New Black), a Celtic warrior woman who, by day, runs an Irish pub full of costumed villains who drown their misery over the drudgery of arching in booze (one of those villains is Brick Frog, the loser in the frog costume whose whole deal is the throwing of bricks, and a great little touch during one of the pub scenes is the off-screen jukebox blasting some depressing Irish song). While investigating the whereabouts of Haranguetan's unseen killer, whom everyone assumes is the Morpho, Dr. Mrs. the Monarch has to go break the news of his demise to Battleaxe, who turns out to be inconsolable, even though she clearly bickered a lot with Haranguetan and "his breath was crap and he beat me."

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: The Venture Bros., "Rapacity in Blue"

Occasionally on Friday, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. It's the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week. Stream "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," my one-hour mix of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, right now!



Remember Melanie Hutsell? She's the SNL featured player-turned-regular who never really gelled on the show back in the '90s and whose sole highlight was a killer Jan Brady impression she brought over from her time as a cast member of The Real Live Brady Bunch, the '90s stage show that restaged Brady Bunch scripts word-for-word. Like with so many other sketch comics who failed to blow up on SNL, Studio 8H just wasn't the right venue for Hutsell. And then like another short-lived female SNL featured player, Casual star Michaela Watkins, Hutsell resurfaced on the Amazon show Transparent, where she stole one scene (while Watkins has managed to steal two whole Transparent episodes).

It's one of the most satisfying scenes during the largely downbeat second season of Transparent (created and showrun, by the way, by Jill Soloway, who happens to be another Real Live Brady Bunch alum), and the scene made me think, "Wow, this is the same lady whose dorky dance moves forever ruined Van Morrison's 'Moondance' in that unfunny SNL 'Moondance' sketch? She's funnier here." On Transparent, Hutsell plays a newly outed lesbian mom at the school attended by the kids of self-absorbed, perpetually unhappy Sarah Pfefferman (Amy Landecker). Hutsell's perceptive character bluntly tells Sarah the words that she, a Pfefferman as selfish as the other Pfeffermans, needed to hear this whole time: "Can I just, like, say something to you and just try to help you out a little bit maybe? Nobody cares about what you do. I mean, I know you think they care, but they don't. You know, people walking around at our school, they're mostly thinking about carpools and play dates and homework..."

The Venture Bros. has a few things in common with Transparent, like the gender fluidity of some of the Ventureverse characters and the way you sometimes root for Dean to get as far away from Dr. Venture as possible (which Brock temporarily did when he quit the OSI and moved out of the Venture Compound) in order to be his own man and live a normal life. It's similar to how you root for Rabbi Raquel (Kathryn Hahn) and Syd (Carrie Brownstein) to get as far away as possible from Josh (Jay Duplass), Sarah's younger brother, and Ali (Gaby Hoffmann), Sarah and Josh's little sister, respectively, because Rabbi Raquel and Syd are such decent, normal people who don't need to be made miserable by their respective lover's insufferable bullshit.

The animated show is also as sharp an exploration of narcissism as Transparent. A minor character in the Doc Hammer-scripted "Rapacity in Blue" experiences with the Monarch a moment just like the Hutsell/Landecker scene from Transparent. Manolo (Hal Lublin) is a Latino handyman who's involved with renovating the Monarch's childhood house. Though his dialogue has largely been unremarkable, "Your wife no home"-type shit, we get a hint that Manolo has a normal, well-adjusted (and apparently, '90s sitcom-watching) life outside the craziness of the Monarch's home when--after having to endure the Monarch's endless chattering about his indecision over suiting up as his deceased socialite dad's recently unearthed alter ego of the Blue Morpho--he basically tells the Monarch he's not the center of the universe in a kind-of-polite-but-not-really way that's unmistakably Hammer.

http://gothdean.tumblr.com/post/139800063907

"I don't really care about this" are words that immediately won me over onto Manolo's side, just like how "Nobody cares about what you do" made me take notice of Jan Brady again.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: The Venture Bros., "Faking Miracles"

Occasionally on Friday, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. It's the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week. Stream "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," my one-hour mix of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, right now!



In "Faking Miracles," the Monarch--the failed Venture Bros. supervillain who thinks he possesses an intellect equal to that of Phantom Limb, his wife's ex, or even Wide Wale, but he's hardly in their league and is also currently without both an army of henchmen and the floating cocoon he and his minions used to call home--reacts the way you'd expect a wanna-be supervillain to react to discovering his father was a superhero: not very well. His reaction is akin to a white supremacist finding out one of his parents was actually Jewish.

On the other hand, Gary is fascinated with both the Blue Morpho--who based his crimefighting persona on the tropical butterfly known as the morpho, just like how his son is a butterfly-themed arch--and the state-of-the-art-for-the-'60s cave the Morpho kept below the Monarch's childhood home in Newark (color design supervisor Liz Artinian and her color design crew nicely recapture the bold late '60s network TV colors of Batman and Star Trek in their color schemes for the Morpho's cave). Gary tries to get his boss to see that being the son of the Morpho is actually a cool thing, even though the Morpho appears to have been a second-tier superhero who was often drunk on the job in the '60s flashback that opens "Faking Miracles." In Scaramantula's lair on Spider-Skull Island, the Morpho and Kano, a future Team Venture member, are seen rescuing the kidnapped members of the original Team Venture roster, including Jonas Venture Sr., who dislikes the Morpho. His second-rate quality seemed to affect even his own merchandise: the comic book that was based on the Morpho's crimefighting career tanked after only six issues ("Not Kirby's best work," notes Gary, who probably isn't too fond of Jack Kirby's strange 2001: A Space Odyssey comic from the '70s either).

(Photo source: Liz Artinian)

Voiced by Paul F. Tompkins, whose mustache happens to resemble his character's stache, the Morpho is a hybrid of the '60s William Dozier versions of Batman and the Green Hornet. Hank's Adam West-style Batman Halloween mask established that the '60s Batman show exists in the Ventureverse, so that means the Morpho wasn't the Batman or Hornet of this universe and was instead the Monarch's socialite dad ripping off the lead characters from Batman and its much less comedic sister show (a Batman/Green Hornet crossover was Dozier's attempt to get Batman viewers to catch The Green Hornet). Dozier was, by the way, the Greg Berlanti of 1966, but while Berlanti has been able to build an empire out of his network TV adaptations of Green Arrow, The Flash and Supergirl, Dozier found success only with Batman. Based on an old radio drama that oddly took place in the same universe as The Lone Ranger's, The Green Hornet didn't become a popular TV show until a few years after its cancellation, when Bruce Lee's popularity renewed some interest in his role on the show as Kato, while Dozier's 1967 attempt to bring Dick Tracy back to TV failed to get past the pilot stage.

I'm looking forward to whatever Gary and the Monarch will be doing with all the equipment the Monarch's Dozier-style dad left behind. They're going to need to arm themselves with more than just the Monarch's tranq dart shooters now that Wide Wale followed up his act of ousting the Monarch from the position of arching Dr. Venture with the act of framing the Monarch for the violation of Guild of Calamitous Intent arching policy. In another nod to the '60s, "Faking Miracles" writer Jackson Publick has Wide Wale turning to none other than Dean Martin (Toby Huss), who had a cameo in "All This and Gargantua-2," to impersonate the Monarch and ruin this Level Six Guild member he finds to be a nuisance to the Guild, perhaps as retribution for the Monarch killing his brother Doug, a.k.a. Dr. Dugong, out of anger over the first time the Guild took away his arching rights to Dr. Venture.

In the Ventureverse, the Rat Packer never died and is known in the New York arching community as Copy-Cat, a supervillain whose superpower is similar to that of Jamie Madrox, a Marvel character who briefly caught my attention when writer Peter David relaunched him in 2004 as the star of Madrox, an inventive noir-style miniseries under the Marvel Knights imprint. Madrox reintroduced Jamie, a mutant who has the ability to create duplicates of himself, as a promiscuous and less-than-virtuous private eye who has trouble getting his dupes to cooperate with him, and the Marvel Knights mini led to David rebooting the X-Men spinoff X-Factor as a series about Jamie's detective agency (despite enjoying Madrox, I never got into X-Factor or any other post-1992 X-Men spinoff comic because like Deadpool says in his eponymous hit movie, these X-Men timelines can get so confusing). I love how Publick merged Madrox with Dino. I next want to see Peter Lawford drunkenly having trouble getting his adamantium claws to open another bottle of vodka.

Madrox (Photo source: Arion's Archaic Art)

At a party Wide Wale invited Dr. Mrs. the Monarch, the rest of the Council of 13 and a bunch of Manhattan socialites to attend, Wide Wale's requirement that none of the Guild members can bring their henchmen along with them is clearly intended to allow Copy-Cat to take down the Monarch, who's at his most vulnerable when Gary isn't there to protect him. Copy-Cat and his dupes trick Dr. Mrs. the Monarch into thinking her husband betrayed her and stood her up to illegally arch Dr. Venture in the middle of the party (when actually, the Monarch arrived at the party and was on his best behavior before Copy-Cat tranqed him). Dino appears to want the Monarch's wife all to himself. But she's immune to his charms, even though the show established that she and the Monarch have an open marriage.

At one point, Dr. Mrs. the Monarch tries to shoo Copy-Cat away by saying, "I'm not sure we need someone whose superpower seems to be bad pick-up lines." And I'm not sure we need marital discord as a storyline for the one couple on the show that soap opera viewers would refer to as the supercouple of the franchise, because I like how this one pair, aside from gay-for-super-science-but-not-gay-for-each-other roommates Billy Quizboy and Pete White, has managed to remain together amidst all the failure that surrounds them.

Dean Martin in "All This and Gargantua-2"

Dino, Dino, Dino, Dino, Dino, Dino, Dino, Dino and Dino in "Faking Miracles"

But then again, I don't tune in to The Venture Bros. to see relationships with no problems and stories with no stakes. Everyone on this show, except for Dr. Mrs. the Monarch, Triana Orpheus, Shoreleave and maybe Brock, is a huge fuck-up (as well as the kind of fuck-up who speaks like a recognizable human being, instead of like a Chuck Lorre-style joke machine), which is the thing that's kept me intrigued with The Venture Bros., in addition to all the funny references to things like CHiPs, Iggy Pop lyrics, Duran Duran and the LP version of Wu-Tang Forever. But while the Monarch's past mistakes as a Dr. Venture-obsessed arch continue to haunt him and are now affecting his wife's standing in the Council, as well as their marriage, it looks like things are moving up for Dr. Venture and his new Ventech employees Billy and Pete. They might be about to find some Apple-style success for a change, thanks to their discovery of an example of what Dr. Venture refers to as "the miracles": the not-quite-ready-to-be-unveiled-yet inventions J.J. kept stashed away in his company's inventory before his death.

Billy accidentally lets loose a bio-bot, a liquid metal entity composed of nanobots, in Ventech Tower. The bio-bot can be programmed to enhance the strength or brainpower of whatever human body it's injected into. But before Ventech can make gazillions off selling bio-bots to the public (or maybe exclusively to the military-industrial complex as a weapon?), Dr. Venture, Billy and Pete have to deal with a few bio-bot-related mishaps, like the ones that take place while they figure how to control the bio-bot, which seeped into Dean's body when he was in the shower.

I'm glad Publick spared us from seeing the orifice the sentient goo chose to climb into during Dean's shower. Hearing Dean's off-screen scream from the bathroom is unsettling enough already.

Unaware that the body the runaway bio-bot chose as its host belongs to Dean, Billy and Pete disrupt Brock's study session with Dean, who asked Brock to help him prepare for his SATs. They program the bio-bot to cause Dean to puke on Brock, gain enough superhuman strength to lift up a shocked Brock with one arm and speak in Babylonian, which causes Brock to think Dean needs an exorcist. All that's missing from this scene is Billy and Pete trying out on Dean that clever Innerspace tactic in which a shrunken Dennis Quaid uses his ship's tech to transform Martin Short's facial features into Robert Picardo's.

Despite the moments of body horror slapstick Dean experiences with the bio-bot inside him, the bio-bot miraculously provides Dean with enough brainpower to ace the SATs and get accepted to Stuyvesant University, his school of choice. His brother makes some progress too--with water-breathing Sirena (Cristin Milioti), that is. She ignores her dad Wide Wale's feud with Dr. Venture over his refusal to comply with the mob-connected Crusaders Action League's shakedown in "Hostile Makeover," and she agrees at the end of "Faking Miracles" to go out on a date with Hank, who's taken a job as a pizza delivery boy. Publick sets up a joke early on in "Faking Miracles" about the side effects of driving the GoPod, J.J.'s experimental floating car, and nicely has it pay off later when Hank drives the GoPod to deliver a pizza to Sirena. Of course Hank would pay no attention to the Pirate Captain's warning that the GoPod causes its drivers to become sterile.

Had the guest shots in "Faking Miracles" consisted only of Tompkins the podcast veteran as the Monarch's dad and Huss, the former King of the Hill regular who starred in a series of '90s MTV promos as Frank Sinatra, doing a decent impression of Sinatra's pal, "Faking Miracles" would still be a satisfying half-hour. But Milioti's first guest shot as Sirena elevates "Faking Miracles" to "Bot Seeks Bot" territory, if not "Victor. Echo. November." territory (2006's "Victor. Echo. November." remains my favorite Venture Bros. episode). Last season's Publick-scripted "Bot," a surprisingly tense Brock-and-Shoreleave-on-a-stakeout story, and the Doc Hammer-scripted "Victor" are both my favorite kind of Venture Bros. episode: they follow the characters around on a night out on the town that goes south late in the story, especially for Dr. Venture, but the spycraft or the mayhem isn't what makes either episode soar. The hilarious dialogue before the mayhem erupts--a huge chunk of the dialogue is delivered over restaurant tables, so at times, it feels like we're watching Diner, but with supervillains--is what makes them soar.

In "Faking Miracles," the kind of nighttime partying that energized the proceedings in "Bot" and "Victor" isn't so energetic because it's confined to the rather drab 18th birthday party Wide Wale throws for Sirena, and Dean and Hank's separate storylines aren't destined to become classics like their double-date storyline together in "Victor," but Milioti just steals both the Wide Wale and Hank storylines with the raspy, foul-mouthed Jersey Shore voice she came up with for the frequently irritable Sirena. She exclaims "Maron!" (maa-ROAN) at one point--Sopranos fans might remember that phrase, which is basically "Madonna!" or "Dammit!"--and in my favorite bit of Italian slang, she complains about how the thugs her dad has assigned to guard her are buttagots (it means "annoying idiot"). Milioti was a standout on Fargo this season as Betsy, Lou Solverson's dying wife, and after her charming voice work in "Faking Miracles," she's already a standout recurring guest star on this show too.

Oh yeah, and besides Milioti's guest shot, Donald Trump makes a mute appearance in the background at the party. This episode was made long before Trump started running for president and angering both progressives and conservatives alike. I'm tired of both reading about this buttagots and hearing him squawk like a race-baiting Oswald Cobblepot on the mayoral campaign trail, but his cameo in "Faking Miracles" makes a lot of sense. Of course he would hobnob with supervillains.

Is it me or is Wide Wale more likable as a Venture Bros. adversary than Phantom Limb or the Investors? The dichotomy of a ruthless gangster turning out to be a compassionate and understanding dad to his offspring is hardly new to the gangster genre, but it adds some flavor to Wide Wale as a Venture Bros. foe. He has a sweet little moment in "Faking Miracles" where he takes a break from trying to impress all the legitimate businessmen and notices a grumpy Sirena is uncomfortable at her own birthday party, so he tries to cheer her up with an order for some pizza (and he succeeds--but he's unaware that Sirena's attraction to Hank, which is bound to piss him off, also has a lot to do with her shift to a more content mood later that night). This moment already makes Wide Wale a better dad than his party guest Captain Combover, whose vomit-inducing desire to bang his own grown-up daughter and whose taste for women who are young enough to be his daughters are beautifully ridiculed by Robert Smigel in his uproarious Triumph's Election Special 2016 on Hulu.

If there's one thing I dislike about The Venture Bros.' sixth season as deeply as I dislike all things Trump, it's Publick's decision to leave Dr. Orpheus out of the Ventures' move to New York. Steven Rattazzi's bit part in "Faking Miracles" as Hank's Italian boss at the pizzeria makes me miss both Rattazzi's voice for Orpheus and his presence as an additional (and rather sane, in spite of all his melodramatically delivered incantations) member of the Venture household. Plus New York could use some help from Orpheus. The best person to deal with its problems with rats, bedbugs and pigs would definitely not be a Blue Morpho type. It would have to be a person who was trained in the black arts. Unlike the Monarch and Dr. Venture, they're no strangers to miracles.

Other memorable quotes:
* Scaramantula: "If you think you can just waltz in here and muscle in on my racket, you've got another thing coming! [Faints from being shot with a tranq dart by the Blue Morpho.]"
The Blue Morpho: "It's 'another think coming.' God!"

* "He shows up again in issue 36 when they team up to fight L. Ron Hubbard."

* Hank: "Aw, c'mon, Brock! Why not?"
Brock: "Because it's like cheating, Hank."
Hank: "But so is flying in an airplane or having a fake leg when you think about it, which I do."
Brock: "For the last time, no! You cannot have anabolic steroids!"

* Dr. Venture: "Let's toss this baby into production and call it a day!"
Pirate Captain: "Yeah, well, don't punch the clock just yet there, Doc. She's been known to cause sterility and heart murmurs in rhesus monkeys."

* Brock: "Aw jeez, Dean. Your essay reads like a suicide note."
Dean: "Everything I wrote was true."
Brock: "Yeah, but you gotta turn the gas down a notch, Sylvia Plath."

http://gothdean.tumblr.com/post/139357533252

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: The Venture Bros., "Maybe No Go"

Occasionally on Friday, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. It's the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week. Stream "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," my one-hour mix of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, right now!



"Maybe No Go" catches up with Venture Bros. side characters Billy Quizboy and Pete White--the former, by the way, was last seen constantly being annoyed by the company of Rose, who's both the hydrocephalic super-scientist's mom and a retired superheroine formerly known as Triple Threat, while he was dragged along with Rose and her current boyfriend Action Man to the Gargantua-2 space casino's opening gala--and pretends the ongoing rivalry between the trailer park roommates and Augustus St. Cloud is the subject of a Billy/Pete spinoff. I've said before that so many different shows could be spun off from The Venture Bros.' fully realized (and crowded) universe--I'm not holding out hope for a spinoff about the Order of the Triad because the not-exactly-prolific Jackson Publick isn't really all about that franchising life, but an Order of the Triad series would rock the most out of all possible Venture Bros. spinoffs--and the Doc Hammer-scripted "Maybe No Go" briefly runs with that idea many Venture Bros. viewers like myself have had in our heads about various spinoffs.

The episode presents snippets of the off-screen battles between Dr. Venture's college buddies and their roly-poly arch-frenemy--the snobby heir of the St. Cloud plastics fortune and a sore loser who never got over Billy beating him on the game show Quizboys--via a fake opening title sequence for the Riptide-esque action show Billy Quizboy and the Pink Pilgrim. Back when the late Stephen J. Cannell was the Shonda Rhimes of mid-'80s network TV and Cannell was able to dominate a whole night of programming with his independently made output, Riptide was a Cannell joint that aired back-to-back with the Cannell/Universal hit The A-Team on NBC's '80s Tuesday night schedule. The Magnum, P.I.-esque Riptide was such a disposable piece of Reagan-era fluff that all I can remember about it was that it featured boat chases and a constantly malfunctioning robot buddy. Billy Quizboy and the Pink Pilgrim also features beachside action sequences and a robot buddy. In this case, the robot sidekick is Robo-Bo, who was programmed by Billy and Pete to speak in the PlainTalk Fred-style voice of Jonas Venture Jr.'s J-Bots--I love how Fred is the only kind of robot voice the scientists on this show can get to work--and weirdly bear the face of Bo, as in Bo from The Dukes of Hazzard.

(Photo source: Uproxx)

And like Riptide (which was the type of '80s fantasy that would constantly make an earlier and much more grounded Cannell character like Jim Rockford roll his eyes), Billy and Pete's spinoff is on the bland side, although I'm tantalized by the clips of Augustus cosplaying as the Marvel supervillain Galactus and Billy appearing in the form of a giant lizard like in the old video game Rampage. The big joke about the fake Billy/Pete show is that those clips of Billy, Pete and Robo-Bo tangling with monsters all over the world and scoring babes are misleading, and if their fake show were an actual one, it would largely be just the three of them parked in front of their terminals and speed-typing inside the "Quizcave" (as seen while Augustus sics a Robosaurus on their trailer), which doesn't exactly scream out sexy times. Pete's instruction to "Set the ground at Z-pulse through the electrical, then run diagnostics on the echo. Configure the kickback waves to resonate at that frequency" is the type of hackneyed techno-gibberish I hope Bryan Fuller stays away from when he works on that upcoming CBS All Access Star Trek project I'm now excited about simply because it will be spearheaded by Fuller, the Trek alum who went on to make intriguing cult shows like Wonderfalls and Hannibal and has always dreamed of casting Angela Bassett as a captain and Rosario Dawson as her first officer, a pairing that, in Fuller's hands, would be like the greatest (non-DS9) Trek spinoff of all time.

Billy, Pete and Augustus (the pageboy-wigged billionaire is every single rich asshole you never liked when you were a kid and was forced by either your teacher, your mom or the kid's mom to hang out with) are basically grown men having pathetic-looking play dates that are arranged not by their parents but by themselves. Their battle over possessing the red ball prop from Duran Duran's classic 1983 video for "Is There Something I Should Know?," the song that provided this episode with its title, is amusingly low-stakes in comparison to Wide Wale's threats against Dr. Venture's new business empire and the Monarch nearly getting his ass shrunk by the laser eyes of a villainess named Redusa (Kate McKinnon) while he searches behind his wife's back for the Guild of Calamitous Intent member who secretly talked her into signing away to him the Monarch's arching rights to Dr. Venture (the Monarch doesn't know yet that the Guild member is Wide Wale). The Monarch wants to forever play a game of supervillain-vs.-super-scientist with Dr. Venture, but he's so far up his own ass that he's unaware that he's not very good at arching (he's so lousy at it that he didn't know his parents kept a gigantic supervillain's lair under his childhood home in Newark this whole time) and is nothing without his powerful Guild council chairwoman wife or his sometimes exasperated but eternally loyal henchman Gary.

The Venture Bros. follows in the footsteps of The Simpsons, My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and Bob's Burgers and becomes the latest animated show to parody Trainspotting's withdrawal sequence. (Photo source: Uproxx)

Like the tranquilizer-addicted Pirate Captain reminds Dr. Venture at one point in "Maybe No Go," you got to live in reality--a bit of advice that's ignored on this show by anybody who's not a pragmatic type like Brock or Dr. Mrs. the Monarch--and the tug-of-war between reality and fantasy is an old Venture Bros. theme "Maybe No Go" revisits in the Monarch's refusal to let go of arching Dr. Venture and Augustus' inability to move past the fact that dirt-poor Billy is smarter than him. Augustus let that disappointment consume him so much that he had the Quizboys set rebuilt in his mansion for a rematch with Billy in "What Color Is Your Cleansuit?" (and he got beaten again).

In "Maybe No Go," Augustus has another old set pointlessly rebuilt as part of his feud with Billy, and this time it's the set from the "Is There Something I Should Know?" video, whose graphics and scene transitions are perfectly recreated by the Titmouse animators during what has to be the visual and comedic highlight of this episode. The sequence is also the show's first Duran Duran-related sight gag since the enjoyable montage where Dr. Venture relived the racist "Hungry Like the Wolf" video while having a meltdown and running away from his responsibilities in the second-season premiere. Racist video aside, Duran Duran is a band that's impossible to dislike, and "Maybe No Go" will make you want to go YouTube or Spotify a bunch of their best songs afterward. "A View to a Kill" is my favorite Bond song. "Save a Prayer" is the type of stylish and non-cheesy slow jam that should have opened Spectre instead of the underwhelming "Writing's on the Wall," but only if Daniel Craig's Bond had been written as a tormented Catholic like Matt Murdock instead of as a tormented atheist. The Nile Rodgers era of Duran Duran is solid, but I'm more partial to the sounds of "Planet Earth" and "Girls on Film." I even like that single Duran Duran recorded with Justin Timberlake nearly a decade ago. Man, Augustus, get your disgusting sausage fingers off the Duran Duran memorabilia right now.

Augustus' maturity level is akin to the time when Hank thought he was Batman (currently, Hank thinks he's Steve McQueen). He takes the actual Henrietta Pussycat puppet from the set of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, one of many priceless collectibles he's been able to procure, and uses it as a shower mitt, just to piss off Billy. Augustus has always been obnoxious, but during that shower scene involving a beloved piece of our Mister Rogers-watching childhood, he crosses the line into "This motherfucker needs an ass-whupping from Brock."

Speaking of Brock, the OSI agent finds out in "Maybe No Go" about both Wide Wale's first plan of attack on Ventech and the gangster's connection to Dr. Doug Ong, a mad scientist who worked on finding "a cure for cancer in cuttlefish DNA" in the '80s and fused his DNA with that of a marine mammal known as a dugong (that's actually a Tagalog word, by the way, for "lady of the sea") to become Dr. Dugong. The mad scientist was killed by the Monarch when the Guild forced a disappointed Monarch to arch him a few seasons ago. Wide Wale is revealed to be Dugong's brother Chester, which could mean that he took over as Dr. Venture's arch just to get his revenge on the Monarch (and if Wide Wale wants the Monarch dead, will that lead to the Monarch having to turn to Team Venture for help?), but I was more surprised by the episode's revelation that Wide Wale has the Crusaders Action League in his pocket and is running the Crusaders' protection racket. So in Team Venture's New York, the Avengers work for the Kingpin, which is some depressing shit, but it's perfect for this show's skeptical, almost Iñarritu-esque view of superheroes. On this show, they're either corrupt, sexually dysfunctional or pedophilic.

With the help of Sgt. Hatred, who quit the OSI because of his unhappiness with being removed from Venture security detail and has taken a job as a Ventech Tower tour guide, Brock is able to foil a break-in by Wide Wale's henchmen. Dr. Venture is, of course, totally unaware of how much danger he's now in, especially after he refused to fork over protection money to the Crusaders, and he's now probably doing every night that old Louie De Palma ritual of stripping down to his underwear and rolling around for hours in piles of money that used to belong to his brother. But he does one good thing in "Maybe No Go," and that would have to be the moment when he agrees to follow a suggestion from Dean about forming a team to work on speculative engineering instead of rejecting Dean's suggestion and saying, "I'm the fucking boss of Ven-whatever. Only my ideas matter." It reminds me a bit of the interesting "bonding over super-science" moment shared by Dr. Venture and Dean while they attempted to fix the space station shield in "All This and Gargantua-2." These moments also illustrate how Dean is the kind of brilliant thinker Dr. Venture could be if he stopped coasting on his fame as both a scientist/adventurer's son and the inspiration for The Rusty Venture Show ("Brought to you by smoking!").

I don't know where this new, eight-episode season is headed as far as Wide Wale's scheming goes, but I'm enjoying what "Hostile Makeover" and "Maybe No Go" have done with the season so far. I hate Augustus, but his acquisition of Billy and Pete's company turns out to benefit Billy and Pete when he sells their company to Dr. Venture, who summons them to New York to have them work alongside him, presumably in the speculative engineering department, and that frees Billy and Pete from the boredom they were clearly experiencing while having to humor Augustus. When Jackson Publick discussed the character of Hank with The Mary Sue, he said that "he possesses a childlike wonder about everything, you know? He kinda thinks everything is cool, he has a can-do attitude, he's got a decent amount of confidence, but he doesn't express it in that asshole way that Dr. Venture or the Monarch do." In "Maybe No Go," Billy and Pete represent that kind of optimism as well--after they lose their company to Augustus, there's an unexpectedly moving moment where a despondent Pete questions the magic of Duran Duran's red ball, and Billy, who hasn't lost all hope, says, "Why would you doubt that?" (Doc Hammer's terrific delivery of this line is key to why the moment's unexpectedly moving)--but they're, of course, a bit more mature about that optimism than Hank. I'm curious about what big, bad New York will be like through Billy and Pete's eyes and how the duo will react to the changes that come with their new home. And as they try to make their way to this ordinary world, will they learn to survive?

Other memorable quotes:
* Dr. Mrs. the Monarch: "On the books, y-you're a Six. But that was when you had over 100 henchmen and a flying cocoon. So if I were to reassess, I'd go with Three, maybe Four."
Monarch: "Three or Four?! C'mon, Tantrum Rex is a Level Four! Tantrum Rex! He looks like the 'Not the mama, not the mama' baby dinosaur puppet."

http://gothdean.tumblr.com/post/138925169832

"Mousse? I didn't even know they made hair mousse anymore."

"Hey hey hey, check it out, I'm in Flock of Seagulls."

"Hey, look, look, I'm in the Exploited."

"Billy, remember Tool Academy?"

* "Without this ball, the New Romantics could never have happened. Duran Duran would be a jock-rock band."

* "Imagine: no Spandau Ballet to write 'If You Leave.'" Augustus, who thought the 1986 cult favorite Highlander came out in 1983 in "What Color Is Your Cleansuit?," makes another mistake and gets away with it. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to remember that OMD wrote and performed "If You Leave," not Spandau Ballet. Even though he gets dates, facts and lyrics wrong (he says, "Reflex is a lonely child," when it's actually "The reflex is an only child"), I love how Augustus appears to be obsessed with the works of Russell Mulcahy, who directed both the "Is There Something I Should Know?" video and Highlander.

* "If there's no New Romantics, stuff like nu rock would have happened way earlier. I mean, Linkin Park and System of a Down would have formed in the '80s. And that would have ruined future hip-hop, and with no good hip-hop, there's no RZA. And I lost my virginity to side A of Wu-Tang Forever. We had to do it! Just think of what your hair would look like."



* Manolo (Hal Lublin), the handyman Gary spoke Spanish to last week (and whose van is still badly dented from Warriana's chariot accident in a funny little bit of continuity): "Your wife no home, so I wait for you. You're not going to believe this!"
Monarch: "I knew you spoke fucking English!"

* Brock: "Buy you a beer?"
Sgt. Hatred: "Uh, still an alcoholic, but, uh… Aw, heck, I'll just go to an extra meeting."