Tuesday 14 March 2017

Archer, Season 3 (2011)



Season 3 of this off-colour spy spoof starts with Sterling Archer on a South Pacific bender of booze, women and becoming a Pirate King, and ends when he and the rest of the ISIS agency take part in a spacefaring mission that turns Moonraker up to 11  There are plenty of over the top hi-jinks in between those book ends, of course, including Burt Reynolds, cyborgs, and the Yakuza.  Not all at the same time, alas, but the show has several more seasons to run, so we can hope.

I've discussed the crazy, messed-up nature of this show in my reviews of the previous seasons, so I won't go over that in detail again.  Instead I wanted to call out something I really like about show, which is that no matter how silly it is - and it can be very silly - it remains internally consistent within its own events.  So it's perfectly okay to have both functional cyborgs and ubiquitous cell phones while the USSR still exists and World War 1 veterans appear to be in their 70s, but once the show establishes something about a character, it sticks to it.  Stuff that seems like a throwaway gag when introduced will be retained and referenced later.  It has a low key but consistent attention to continuity that would shame most "serious" TV shows.  Stuff that happens in the show informs events later on, which adds a nice extra touch of interest when you're watching a bunch of episodes back to back, and it helps to make characters feel more rounded because when we learn things about them, those things stay relevant and true later on.

If you liked earlier seasons of Archer, I see no reason you wont have a great time with this one, too.




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