Review: Archer “Bel Panto: Part II”

Spoilers Below
In Bel Panto Part II “Archer and Lana go missing as a hostage situation gets out of control”.

This episode is really everything that the first episode promised it to be. As for last week where action took a backseat to character development and furthering the story, this week was the opposite. Plenty of action, tense scenes and hilarious jokes. I think if these episodes were viewed back to back without a week of waiting between them, they could combine to be a very entertaining hour of television. What this second Bel Panto episode lacked you could find in the first part and vice versa. I think the clowns ended up being pretty cool villains, despite having a weak motivation at the end of the day.

The episode wasn’t perfect though, because while everything did pay off in this episode, it didn’t happen right away. There was a bit more set up in this episode and the dominoes didn’t start falling until about half way through this episode. Before then there was a lot more talking and walking around. It was all jokes really, not even the same kind of character development we saw last week. Lana is angry at Archer because she is jealous of how he acts with Veronica Deane. Archer is notorious for it’s characters focusing on personal issues in dire situations and this is no different. It’s funny, but sometimes I wish they would focus more on the task at hand and leave the personal stuff to the side for a little while.

Overall, this was another good episode. I think the first Bel Panto episode did it’s job a bit better, but there are still plenty of laughs to be had here and I’m excited to see what comes next!