REVIEW: ARCHER “Fugue and Riffs”

Spoilers Below

Archer is chilling undercover as Bob from Bob’s Burgers with Louise and the kids when a bunch of Russians   According to Malory, Sterling has been flipping burgers for a few months now thinking he is actually Bob, but really he doesn’t remember a god damn thing. To help cool off after thwarting a Russian attack, Sterling decides to go to the local spa where Lana and his mother try to do something to jog his memory or at least get him to come back to ISIS so that he can be safe away from the Russian hit squad.  Krieger wants ISIS to slowly bring Sterling’s memory back versus the other way because it could cause him to go nuts.

After a failed attempt at hitting Lana, she and Archer go back to the spa where they come into a shootout with the KGB. Weirdly enough, Archer’s memory is starting to come back as he is remembering shades of his knowledge of guns and hand-to-hand combat. None of this can come to use however as KGB is spraying gun fire and all of the guns shoot blanks leaving them with nothing but Molotov cocktails from the bar! Thankfully, after a while Lana just has enough with Archer’s forgetfulness and smashes a frying pan in the back of his head of which restores his memory and helps them get out of a jam.

So, how did this all go down to begin with? Well, Malory got hitched to the top Cadillac dealer in the area and Sterling wasn’t for it, so he stole the limo and ended up in an accident. Hence, Archer lost his memory, but was there a greater mind behind Sterling being at Bob’s??  Well, if you remember the finale we’ve got a red-track suited evil son of a bitch up in a space station staring down at Earth.

Yep, its an all new season of Archer and  guarantee NO ONE thought about how this cross over was going to happen the way it did..  Most people thought we were going to see an overweight Bob guest-starring on Archer but instead we get the whole family, but with the only other voice being Linda That said,  if I were going to wish for one of the Bob’s crew other then Jon Benjamin, it’d be John Roberts as Linda because I really enjoyed the Bobs Burgers-esque banter going on between Sterling dressed as Bob and his ‘wife’. That said, the rest of the episode was somewhat standard fare with ISIS going to try and save Sterling from a crazy situation that his whiny/over-protective mother doesn’t want him to be in.  My other issue was the amnesia premise, as I think we’ve seen a ton of shows where the ending is a *bonk on the head that apparently awakens the senses and gets whatever character was in an amnesiac state into a normal one. That said, I thought the ending was rather clever as it helped prepare us for what should be a pretty great season of Archer. Oh yea, and am I the only one who is going to have nightmares about the Belcher kids tonight??

(8.0 out of 10)