Review: Archer ‘The Honeymooners’ – Thorough Is Good

Although Archer‘s long-term narrative arcs tend to pay off in hilarious and meaningful ways, my favorite episodes are still the self-contained adventures. Tonight’s ‘The Honeymooners’ can’t quite reach that peak – in many ways, it feels like a throwback episode,putting Archer and Lana alone on a mission for the first time in awhile, and putting the Archer/Lana/Cyril triangle front and center while ISIS spectacularly fails another mission. It’s definitely a funny episode, but at times, it shadows past episodes a little too closely.

The presence of North Koreans in town to buy uranium brings Lana and Archer to the Tuntmore Hotel for surveillance – the most boring job ever, in Archer’s opinion. It feels like it’s been awhile since it’s strictly been Archer and Lana on a mission, so it was fun to see Archer frustrate Lana in a million different ways as she desperately tried to keep the mission together. At the same time, it’s how familiar it feels: Lana doesn’t know whether to trust her brain (Cyril) or her heart (Archer), instead letting the two eliminate themselves with their own behavior. There’s nothing really new here, unless you count Lana’s “huge decision”, which isn’t really a decision at all, really, just Lana being indecisive as usual.

I do wish there was a little more of Lana kicking ass – the episode went out of its way to point out how much Archer saves her life, and her only real moment of power is when she disarms a North Korean and goes ape shit with his gun, putting holes in everything and anything in the hotel room. She can’t even take the normal ass-beating characters regularly endure: one hard kick to the wall, and she’s on the ground, grabbing her breasts and whimpering. It’s all lifted up by the hilarious dialogue, but it was still a little weird to see Lana lose her toughness in service of the plot.

Outside the Tuntmore, Cheryl, Cyril, and Pam team up to share a night of voyeurism across the street from the Tuntmore. Again, more familiar material: Cheryl’s into pain and weird drugs, Cyril has no confidence in his relationship, and Pam eats and shits. Like the Archer/Lana material, there are enough new jokes and bits thrown in to keep it entertaining, but the old material isn’t really being tweaked to find new angles to the humor, hitting the same notes previous episodes have done in better ways (particularly with Cheryl – her character has become too random this season, more along the lines of her character in the first few episodes than what they developed her into the past two seasons).

I sound like I’m ragging on the episode, though: it’s still funny as shit, and the reveal at the end that the uranium was just for Kreiger was a great capper. There were just times I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’ve seen this material many, many times before, and ‘The Honeymooners’ wasn’t really looking to add any new angles to it.

Grade: B+

Other thoughts/observations:

– Kreiger is having sex with a radioactive pig. There isn’t much else to say about that.

– Archer, wondering where Lana went: “I think she’s gone rogue!”

– Malory gets embarrassed when Trudy Beekman has to pay for her meal, so she takes Archer’s bonus as payment – sometimes, there are detriments to having your mother as your boss.

– Apparently Cyril likes to have sex with calculators, or at least fleshy, talking ones.

– after two bottles of Glengoolie Blue, Archer just needs a quick ‘power blackout’.

– Pam enjoys some ribs, and some chocolate elk. She also bangs a gyro in Cyril’s office to complete the food trifecta.