The Story
[Season finale alert!]: This episode is part two of Archer’s two-part sixth-season finale. To read about what happened in part one, go here. Inside Dr. Kovacs’s left foot, the team (minus Krieger, Malory, and AJ) has one hour to laser the genius’s clot and then make it out of the tear duct before popping him like a bubble. Onboard, Archer and Lana are still grappling with their (im)mortality as AJ’s parents; offboard, Malory is still grappling with her granddaughter’s weight and the gravity of this last-chance mission. It’s unclear at first … but Krieger is off somewhere causing trouble, slash permanently ruining the mission or any chances at redemption.
The Highlight Reel
The gang is initially worried they’re in Krieger’s butt and not Dr. Kovacs’s body, so Archer does the only sensible thing and grabs the rubbing alcohol to make an Archer-ized cocktail. (I wish this episode were 57 minutes long.) It turns out the ship’s out of fruit-flavored drink powders and is in the doctor’s foot; it’s therefore imperative the sub finds a fast-track to the brain.
Lana: Your electrolytes can wait!
Archer: Well, you say that.
[+1 to Archer for thinking about their health, very meta considering the circumstances; +1 to Lana for keeping the mission on track.]
Instead of helping the mission, Agent Hawley and Malory complain about AJ, who is crying because she’s hungry:
Malory: She’s about to pop out of that onesie.
Hawley: She seems like a normal baby weight.
Malory: And everyone deserves a trophy just for showing up, and everyone’s Kickstarter has merit. Psh.
[+1 to Malory for being judgmental about Kickstarter; +1 to Hawley for standing up for AJ.]
Archer tries to bail on the mission after telling Slater to eat several penises, and, wow, time is flying! Dr. Kovacs’s lover (Carrie Brownstein) explains that it takes roughly one minute for the body to cycle blood to the brain. There are some doubts and Lana dubs her Jill Nye (which is perfect and she’ll be known as that from here on out).
Lana: That doesn’t sound right.
Jill: We could ask Wikipedia.
Archer: Good luck! I’ve got like negative one bars.
Jill: Or we could just ask me, the woman who graduated from Harvard medical school summa cum laude.
Archer: With a minor in Spanish bragging.
Jill: A.) That was latin.
Lana: He knows.
Jill: And B.), we just have to laser our way into one of these veins here.
Archer: Flurp. Wait, no, zurp!
[+Archer for doing spot-on drunk sound effects, and for giving us hand motions to match.]
Jill Nye also reveals that once they make it into the bloodstream, the 3-to-4 mph flow will feel feel like 10 g’s of force.
Archer: [It’ll feel like] … making the jump to hyperspace?!
Jill: If by hyperspace you’re referring to the film Star Wars and not visonic string theory, then…
Archer: There’s enough room in the world for science and miracles.
[+1 to Archer for pacifying the war between science and religion, what a guy. Very 2015.]
As the team preps for this insane portion of the mission, Cheryl starts teasing us with these sharp, tungsten knitting needles. All of a sudden, you get the feeling something is going to go wrong and someone is probably going to die a horrible tungsten death. But not before Slater hits on Jill Nye and tries to trash talk Archer.
Slater: He’s had the clap so many times, it’s more like applause.
[+1 to Slater, I guess.]
It’s not a finale unless Ray gets crippled/differently abled: Just as he’s slipping the sub into the bloodstream, Ray realizes that Lana probably thought he was being racist about his new hand, last episode. He claims he wasn’t mad because his hand was black, but because his hand was a robot hand. The whiplash wrecks him worse than it did Andrew Neiman:
Pam: Cheer up, buddy! Maybe Krieger can get you some black bionic legs.
Cheryl: Just like Jesse Owens! Who may or may not have been a robot. Although I might be thinking of The Jetsons maid. Wait, was she black?
[+1 to Pam and Cheryl for being supportive; +1 more to Cheryl for bringing up a really good question about the Jetsons.]
Cyril mans the ship and thinks about killing everybody, while Malory offers AJ a cocktail onion and everybody half-heartedly worries about Ray. (Actually, wait, what: Archer was worried Ray was going to kill himself! That was kind of selfless of him, right? Baby steps for humanity.) Most important: MICHAEL GRAY IS HERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
[+10 to Michael Gray and his FOMO for enriching this episode; +1 to Archer for his obsession.]
He’s stealing everybody’s oxygen, though, because now there are too many people on the sub.
MG: What do you want me to do? Transform into Captain Marvel and save the day?
Archer: I’d be happy if you could transform into Jackson Bostwick!
MG: [SLAP!]
Archer: Sorry. I guess I had that coming, huh?
Cheryl: Will you explain that to me later?
Pam: I was gonna ask you to.
[+1 to Michael Gray for THE SLAP.]
To make matters worse, macrophages engulf the sub and try to destroy it. Archer is tasked with saving the day WITH A LASER BACKPACK, while Jill Nye and Slater work on an escape plan.
Jill: We even have time to make love.
Slater: What?
Jill: Sex! Inside my lover’s own body. It would be the ultimate cuckold.
Slater: Ugh! No, lady, you’ve got problems! Plus, TV’s Michael Gray is staring right at us.
[+1 to Jill Nye for being a sexual being.]
[+1,000 to TV’s Michael Gray.]
Archer destroys the blood clot, but then a few things go wrong: The CIA’s technology can’t track the sub in Kovacs’s body, the ship can’t move while the airlock is purging (Archer makes it purge), and the clock starts ticking like crazy.
[-1,000 points to everyone!]
Mission unaccomplished! Hawley blacklists Malory and the gang, while Krieger destroy’s the doctor’s super computer so he could continue working on his shrinky dinks.
Archer: Why would you want to work for those Ivy League, white-shoed D.C. pricks? That’s not who we are! We’re the outsiders, the scrappy underdogs! We’re Delta House, the Dirty Dozen, the Rebel Alliance, the Commitments! We’re the Bad News frickin’ Bears!
Archer throws on his aviators and says he knows how they could make some money — in what could either be a tease to another season of Vice or something similarly unorthodox. [+1.]
The MVP
Overall, this was a pretty great season finale. Malory was on fire, Cheryl and Pam had their delinquent duo act down pat, Krieger was stupidly hilarious, Cyril and Ray were blessed caricatures of themselves, and Lana and Archer were the requisite, now-mature heroes we need. Aside from being a total boss WITH A LASER BACKPACK, Archer also had some great developmental moments: It seemed he genuinely cared about Ray’s injury (at first) — and how about that moment when he insisted Lana stay out of the face of danger, for both her and their daughter’s sake? The writers did a fabulous job this season not just at creating funny episodes, but also at morphing Archer’s character from that of a total selfish douche bag CIA superstar into a moderately responsible, still-crazy-but-ultimately-loving dad/boyfriend/hero. I don’t know about an MVP for this episode (probably TV’s Michael Gray), but for the season, let’s give it to our main man, the most amazing, dysfunctional hero in the world. Aww.
One more quick note: If you read these recaps this season, thanks for checking them out. It’s been a ton of fun, and although the future doesn’t look bright for these animated idiots, wherever they end up, there’s bound to be hysterical shenanigans, repartee, and pop-culture references. (Maybe even another AJ, a fully bionic Ray, and Tom Selleck?) Nine months till season seven, countdown begins now!
Extra Splooshes
- Surp and flurp, float and gloat.
- This was such an educational finale.
- “If that is shocking to you, then so be it.†Love this.
- There was a that’s-what-she-said joke in this episode.
- Could you imagine if the CIA did do a Kickstarter?
- “Uh, Alex, I think my buzzer’s broken.â€
- If you’re still really concerned about Woodhouse, don’t worry, apparently he’s around. But it was still a damn shame we didn’t see him this season.
- Thankfully nobody important died (Ray looked pretty dead at the end, but surely he’ll just be a full-on cyborg from here on out).
- Embolism is Archer’s fourth greatest fear, after aneurysm.
- Chekhov’s tungsten knitting needles didn’t work very well.
- Holy Snacrophages!