Archer Season 4, Episode 4: Next On: Midnight Ron

My Archer-loathing wife and I went to a dinner on Friday last week, and got seated next to a nice couple who had been living in Uruguay. After a long series of informative stories about how spectacular the steaks are in Uruguay and what shit they are in the states, they mentioned that their old apartment in Montevideo overlooked the bay. So I got to ask them if they could see the wreck of the Graf Spee from their balcony.

Again my life is enriched by the Archer experience. Thanks, Krieger.

Tonight’s episode is named after an 80s road movie with Robert DeNiro and Charles Grodin, which was drolly funny and character driven and gets treated like a minor classic for some reason. Don’t get me wrong, good movie, but kind of a mid-level piece of work from everyone involved, including the fat ‘stache guy from Beverly Hills Cop. Wondering where we’re going with this.

Montreal, apparently. Tabernac? Ugh, more work for Google “sucks at idiom” Translate. And Ron’s in his suite at the Capt. Willard Hotel, doing his daily affirmation. OK, so we have our map (Montreal to NYC) and our deadline (curtain at the Met). It’s a road movie.

Around the office we go, a round robin of cackling joy as everyone opts to let Archer dangle. Archer’s clearly DeNiro, and I can tell because he just went all Goodfellas on that payphone. And crap, I’m wrong already. Looks like Ron is DeNiro.

Confession: Never seen C.H.U.D. What kind of 80s casualty am I? There’s also a lot of rotoscopy animation in this ep, and it’s starting to look a bit like Waking Life. Which I sat through in a friggin’ theater. And into the trunk with Archer, who shouldn’t be griping. That trunk’s bigger than my last apartment, and that bottle looks nearly full. Or it’s just brown glass. Hard to say.

“I gotta bitch of a headache and a bladder full of Bourbon!” And bad guys on your six in a sweet Lincoln. Nice shooting, bad defensive driving. Luckily Caddies are built to crash and Archer is unable to die. Road movies require these sorts of complications.

The butterfly effect speech? That’s improv. Do we have a bet? And I’m wrong again, Ron’s Grodin, all with the huge amount of cash.

And hitch-hiking and banter, and Krieger’s bloaty cousin with the semi full of beers, and pervert trucker kidnap! At least this gives us a chance to get Ron’s back story, which would place his age around 120 if this show took place in something other than a semi-porous temporal anomaly anchored in 1967.

Anyway, trucker biker pervert kidnap snuffy farmhouse juggalo ESCAPE! And it’s not a road movie without hopping a freight and forcing a moment to its crisis. And killing some Manson-looking hoboes.

It’s also not a road movie without a happy ending (said your mom), so Ron and Archer and the Great Red Shark are back in town and picking up their formal wear all Hangover style from Woodhouse. And Woodhouse is headed into a story arc this season, and we all know it.

So: Nice ep. Gave Ron some depth, which wasn’t crucial or anything but I’ll take it. And Wife laughed twice. Ahhhhhh. Good day.

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Posted by on February 6, 2013. Filed under Headline, Popcorn. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

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