‘Genie in a Bottle’ is a recurring feature where each week a different bottle episode (an episode set entirely in one location, often designed to save money) from a comedy series is examined
“I know, I know. Nothing hurts like a scrape.â€
Frisky Dingo might have been Adult Swim’s craziest program that you never saw. Lasting a mere two seasons, the series was created by rapid dialogue extraordinaires Adam Reed and Matt Thompson, fresh off the heels of Sealab 2021’s cancelation. While a much broader program than Sealab, Frisky Dingo was also the stronger indication of the voice that Reed and Thompson would so strongly cultivate and would later be the backbone to FX’s more-successful Archer.
Frisky Dingo is a weird, wonderful animated series set in the hyperbolic world of superheroes and space aliens. Xander Crews and his Xtacles are a sublime takedown on the Bruce Wayne/Batman archetype, and the array of villains introduced in the series only get increasingly ridiculous. While Frisky Dingo was interested in a very particular niche, what’s even more amazing than the silly subject matter that they got into is watching Reed and Thompson’s ability as storytellers completely evolve into a new species.
Frisky Dingo is an incredibly funny show where nearly every line is a joke that’s being bazooka-ed in your face, but it’s also a deeply meticulously constructed series that at any moment feels like its camel’s back is going to shatter if another callback is placed on top of it. The show is seriously a feat in editing as almost every scene will connect into the next one with the following scene’s characters completing the first scene’s sentence. It’s a very hard feat to pull off, but one that becomes commonplace by the end of the series and would wind up deep into Archer’s DNA later down the road. This all culminates in Frisky Dingo feeling more like a hit of Adderall than an episodic television series. Every episode so seamlessly segues into the next one, overlapping and never relenting, that it’s surprisingly easy to watch entire seasons in one sitting. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a series that is so dense and callback-heavy, but it completely works.
Never to be short in ambition, the second season even takes the 180-est degree of turns that I’ve ever seen in a show, with it morphing into a documentary about Killface and Xander Crews running for president (a “reboot†of sorts that happened nearly ten years prior to Archer’s fifth season, the Archer Vice experiment). Clearly Frisky Dingo is a unique, unpredictable show in its own right, but it was still capable of rebelling against itself in certain creative ways. One of such ways was when the animated show opened themselves up to the bottle episode construct in their first season episode, “Emergency Room.â€
“Emergency Room†picks up from the literal cliffhanger that the previous episode goes out on, which sees intrepid reporter and Lois Lane approximate, Grace Ryan, plummeting down into vats full of radioactive, super-intelligent ants (don’t ask), with the rest of the cast getting caught in the wake of the Annihilatrix’s destruction (double don’t ask). This of course means we get to spend this particular episode in everyone’s favorite gatekeeper dungeon, an emergency room.
This is such a plot-heavy, continuity laden show, so to just take an episode to recover and catch their breath stands out like the sore and broken thumbs that are being mended in the very same emergency room that they’re stuck in. Frisky Dingo has always been a showcase of incredible dialogue that’s fired off at a hypnotic degree, but this episode more than any other really lets that get to be the focus over larger plot machinations and it’s pretty hard to argue with how much fun it is. Just seeing all of these people complaining and bickering as they try to collectively heal is probably the simplest episode Dingo has ever done but it’s just as much fun as the most plot-heavy installments.
There’s a real beauty to this episode just letting the minutiae breathe and milking the humor out of everyone’s exhausted facial expressions or the drip-drip-dripping of Killface’s chest wound mixing with the emergency room’s muzak (which doesn’t quit playing the entire time we’re there). The perfect silences that help punctuate the rapid dialogue are even more impactful than usual here. It even feels like the lonely, echoed halls of the building are amplifying the tension. The runtime is a meager eleven minutes, but watching each character stew and get further enraged with every passing second makes the most out of the episode’s short length. One of the best examples of this is when the grounded Killface ends up bumping into another lost soul stranded to the emergency room and because he’s had to twiddle his thumbs all episode instead of his usual world domination fare, he explodes at her in a truly amazing way: “Woman, I have a pipe in my lung!…Fatty!…I hope your baby’s born dead!†Each pregnant pause causes the rant to hit a new level. Sometimes slowing things down can cause the blow-ups to be even bigger in the end.
This sort of standard bottle episode exercise with everyone needing to wait for help as they’re stuck in the same situation is also one of the rare occasions where everyone is on equal ground. All of these characters are radically different, from hypochondriac aliens to narcissistic billionaires to struggling television reporters, but this bottle episode allows them to share a moment and be equal for once. It’s a rare experience but one that’s made possible due to the bottle’s nature of slowing things down here (even if the bottle is “cheated†out of in some superfluous ways). It’s no coincidence that by the end of the episode and by the time that everyone is free of this bottle, their social standings and power differences have never been more clear and irritated. In fact this detour ends up connecting to the larger story in an inspired way as well, with everyone’s health insurance snafu reigniting their rage towards Xander Crews.
Frisky Dingo is also a show that’s greatly interested in subverting the superhero mythos, with Awesome-X and Killface being some of the most unconventional takes on heroes and villains seen in some time. So many superhero films depict mass destruction and damage being done, but obviously don’t spend any time on the repercussions or the healing process. So in perfect fashion, here we’re given an entry that looks just at that. Rather than us cutting to everyone being bandaged up and ready to move on from last episode’s trauma, instead we deal with trying to remove piping from a torso, radiation poisoning, the status of Dora the Explorer Band-Aids, lamb-sized tumors, and proper health care coverage. It’s not the sort of entry that you’d expect to see, but it works just as well as any of the other ones. You don’t exactly get to dissect these characters any deeper or understand them any better like how a lot of bottle episodes work, but if anything, the bottle episode allows you to learn the dialogue better. As cheesy as it may sound, the dialogue and vocal patter of the show are so integral to it that they nearly feel like a character themselves, with “Emergency Room†being a great distillation of the series’ voice.
“Emergency Room†is hardly Frisky Dingo’s best episode, but it’s a welcome checkpoint in the show’s first season that allows it to recalibrate itself and attack the end of everything a whole lot stronger. It marks the beginning of a dangerously paced set of episodes that don’t let up and only cause this absurd show to get even crazier. As much as Adam Reed and Matt Thompson have been killing it over on Archer, the mind reels at what Xander, Killface, and the gang would be getting into in their tenth season now, or at the least, how many presidential campaigns they’d have burned through.
Terminating!