Review: Archer Vice: A Kiss While Dying

Spoilers Below

Now that the season premiere is out of the way (and an entirely new overarching storyline has been introduced) it’s time to see how it all pans out.

Last night’s episode began with the repossession of Archer’s penthouse apartment, which he never realized was rent-free care of ISIS. Malory was present to round up Sterling and Lana to give them the next mission.

By the way, was anyone else still expecting to hear a legit mission at this point? Force of habit, I suppose. Not that the past missions always had intentions one would call “legitimate” or “moral,” but at least a situation in which someone is saved, some event is prevented, or something is re-captured. Granted, the latter did happen, but not as part of the original plan. And not successfully.

Instead, the job de jour was to sell 20 kilos of the cocaine stockpile to a buyer in Miami. Krieger devised a way to secretly transport the snow (after originally thinking Malory was joking: “Sometimes it’s hard to tell with you!”) by making it into a body cast and placing it on Pam.

I initially felt bad for Pam as her ample sweat absorbed the coke and turned her into a panicky, blubbery, hot mess, but she soon adapted to the constant mega-high – and developed a habit that was as much addiction as it was obsession.

Ramon (from Season One’s “Honeypot” episode) revealed himself to be Malory’s contact, and hitmen Charles and Rudy (also from “Honeypot,” and voiced by Thomas Lennon and Ben Garant) were the buyers. However, when the [former] ISIS team arrived unarmed to the casual sale, the hitmen made off with the bucks and the blow.

During a later confrontation, Charles, Rudy, and Ramon all appeared to shoot each other dead, with Sterling taking the cash – which, upon returning home, was discovered to be counterfeit. Lana correctly surmised that the whole thing was a ruse pulled on the ex-ISIS agents.

And oh yeah: in Storyline B Cheryl/Carol was attempting to become a country music star, though Malory, Ray, and Krieger discovered (thanks to a plethora of hidden cameras that the Doctor already had installed) that she can only sing well when not being watched.

Overall, as always, this installment had some great running jokes, from intra-episode repeaters about Lana being judgey (Right?!) or Woodhouse being stuck in an empty pool, to inter-episode running gags like someone else drinking Cyril’s bottle of Glengoolie Blue, yet again.

Archer got in some good lines, like saying Pam’s newly-removed cast smelled “like a kennel…but for dogs that are poor.” Or gleefully recalling the villains of his past (Oh my god! I forgot about the space pirates!) And how since the government has wrongfully accused them of being an illegal spy organization (“Potato, potreason”) they’re now forced to transfer their skills to criminal activity, like: “The A-Team meets Scarface.” (Lana has a good “Hannibal Montana” pun too.)

And, as I expect will continue to be customary, there were a few more pregnancy jokes (“Sorry baby, sorry baby, sorry baby…”)

However, the biggest laughs definitely came from Pam being coked out and Archer & Ramon’s “muy complicaté” relationship. (Which would actually be “muy complicado.” I’ll clarify that this is according to Google, since I’m not going to feign being that smart.) The eventual kiss it led it up to was quite the surprise for anyone that didn’t, you know, read the episode’s title (“Archer Vice: A Kiss While Dying”) beforehand. Luckily, this dude didn’t.

Though this may not have lived up to the almost-masterpiece that was the season’s first episode, installment numero dos was nevertheless the complete opposite of a word Ray Gillette used on last night’s show: “unlaughable.”