10 great episodes from Archer's underrated later seasons

As Archer gears up for its final mission, let's dig into the best installments from the show's second half—coma dreams, talking parrots, and all

By William Hughes  |  August 28, 2023 | 3:00pm
TV Lists Archer
10 great episodes from Archer's underrated later seasons
Images: FX Graphic: The A.V. Club

Way back in the distant and hazy days of 2009, was there anyone who could have believed that Adam Reed’s Archer would still be a going concern fully 14 years down the line? Sure, the first season of Archer is a fine cut of TV—with one stand-out perfect episode, and a bunch of good ones, as it slowly picks up steam for its even better second and third season on the air. But we’re still talking about an animated FX comedy from the guys who brought us funny but brief Adult Swim shows like Sealab 2021 and Frisky Dingo. Longevity wasn’t automatically in the cards.

And yet, Archer has persisted—and mutated and evolved and regressed and progressed and more—over its last decade-plus on TV. And while the period that we’re now forced to think of as the “second half” of Archer, from 2017’s season eight onward, has certainly been stranger and less widely celebrated than the seven seasons that came before it, dismissing so much work from so many great writers and animators—and what is, arguably, still the finest comedy voice cast working in animation today—would be a degree of idiocy worthy of Sterling Archer at his (oh so frequently proffered) worst.

And so, as Archer prepares to release the premiere of its 14th and final season on August 30, we’re dipping back into the show’s second (and third and fourth) lives to highlight 10 episodes from its back half that demonstrate why Archer has survived for so long—coma dreams, evil cyborgs, and volcano deaths be damned.

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The “coma seasons” are, for good or ill, the defining feature of the second half of Archer. Having basically run through every comedic spy plot he could think of—and having grasped, pretty early on, that Archer is a show where the characters matter infinitely more than the plot—series creator and head writer Adam Reed decided to say “screw it,” had his resident superspy get shot by a crazy lady in the show’s seventh-season finale, and dropped the whole crew into three seasons of genre-pastiching adventures taking place entirely in Sterling Archer’s head. The results, ultimately, were mixed. But the highs were fascinating.Take, for instance, “No Good Deed,” the episode that introduces viewers both to the whole “coma dream” concept and the noir-themed “Dreamland” season it kicked off with. Fitting the source material, it’s a more muted, less joke-filled affair: Archer is now a war veteran with PTSD, whose P.I. partner Woodhouse has just been found murdered (the show’s way of handling the death of voice actor George Coe head-on).But “No Good Deed” is also genuinely beautiful, as the show’s animation team—which has only gotten better, consistently, across 14 seasons on the air—fills the season-eight premiere with beautiful shadows and art-deco flourishes. And, more importantly, it makes a strong case that the coma seasons could work: The voice cast, anchored by the genius of H. Jon Benjamin as a slightly sadder, not especially wiser Archer, all nail the new versions of the characters, without sacrificing those elements that made them such wonderfully drawn assholes in the first place. Settings and realities might change, “No Good Deed” argues, but Archer could survive.

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It’s a natural trend for any show entering its later years to put more focus on its side characters (because at some point, you’ve probably said as much about Sterling Archer’s life-defining Oedipal issues as you’re going to manage). Archer has had some huge successes with this technique, most notably with the transition of Amber Nash’s Pam Poovey, originally a character whose whole joke was “What if an HR lady was terrible at it,” into the show’s beautiful, boisterous beating heart. “Ladyfingers,” Dreamland’s fourth episode, has a lot of great Poovey material, as the character (reimagined as a cheerfully corrupt police detective) tags along, hot dogs akimbo, on a fake ransom scheme that Archer finds himself sucked into. But the episode actually saves a lot of its energy for Archer’s hardest-to-use character: mad scientist Krieger, normally a very “a little goes a long way” kind of guy. In Dreamland, it turns out, Krieger is not a cloned super-genius who may or may not be one of the Boys From Brazil; instead, he’s Aaron Leibowitz, a Jewish scientist who spent years defrauding the Nazis before killing a bunch of them with a crew of robot dogs. It’s a surprisingly heroic turn for the show’s most morally ambiguous character, complete with an indulgence in one of Dreamland’s strangest stylistic choices: a focus on surprisingly graphic violence that would eventually go way over the top, but which here is shocking and effective. It’s also an episode where Eugene Mirman gleefully asks “Did you know it’s forbidden?” on the topic of incest, so it’s not like the show’s not still bringing the darkest imaginable jokes to the table here, either.

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Of the three Archer coma seasons, season nine’s Danger Island—which reimagined the show as a high-flying island jungle adventure—is pretty unambiguously the best. It’s not hard to see why, either: The season foregrounds the Pam-Archer relationship, maybe the show’s only true friendship, positing the pair as the Chewie and Han Solo of all this idol-stealing, Nazi-battling action. (Turning Krieger into a wisecracking talking parrot named Crackers didn’t hurt either; actor Lucky Yates is a good bird.)“Strange Doings In The Taboo Groves” (named, like all the Danger Island episodes, after chapters in Herman Melville’s A Romance Of The South Seas) puts that relationship in the foreground by dropping the duo into that old adventure serial standby: quicksand. The ensuing conversation between Pam and Archer exposes that rare, beautiful emotion that this show occasionally deploys as a curative for its inherently caustic nature. Benjamin and Nash have great chemistry as always; Benjamin, especially, has made an art across a decade-and-a-half of finding the tiny hints of lovely vulnerability beneath Sterling Archer’s shithead exterior, without ever sacrificing the banter and laughter as the two viciously, lovingly blame each other for all the problems in their lives.

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If you need an argument that old age didn’t automatically slow Archer down, you could do a lot worse than the show’s 100th episode, which is a) a certified action spectacular that sees Archer and some friendly cannibals kick the crap out of the Nazis, b) one of the show’s purest explorations of its joyful obsession with language (courtesy of a returning David Cross as put-upon island translator Noah, who can’t even begin to fathom how to explain “training montage” to a group of people who’ve never seen a movie), and c) an episode that lets Judy Greer’s Cheryl/Carol Tunt ascend to full-on cackling mad goddess glory. (Greer is, in many ways, the show’s secret weapon as the years have gone on: There is almost no scene that cannot be improved by tossing some of Cheryl’s joyful hysteria into the mix.) “Comparative Wickedness” is ideal Archer, in other words: a fast-paced, joke-filled race to the finish, featuring a great guest star turn from Cross, a version of Chris Parnell’s Cyril who is basically a Wolfenstein boss, and the sight of Jessica Walter’s Malory Archer gunning down Nazis in abundance. Plus: Pam finally gets to eat a guy! 100 episodes in, what’s not to love?

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Archer has always had a complicated relationship with guest stars, who tend, by the nature of their casting, to deform an episode around themselves. Some of these big names can ably hang with the show’s hyper-fast, frenetic pace—Bryan Cranston, Anthony Bourdain, and J.K. Simmons all had killer turns—while others (apologies to Jamie Lee Curtis), uh, not so much.Few have fit in better, though, than ’ Matt Berry, who appears in this episode of the show’s admittedly lackluster space season, “Archer: 1999,” as Mr. Deadly, a walking, talking doomsday device. It’s a premise so fun the show just kind of stole it from John Carpenter, as the crew tries to talk the ambulatory bomb into the joys of staying alive—especially Lana: 1999 has its defects, but it does at least regularly give the show’s ostensible female lead a lot more to do than she got in either Dreamland or Danger Island.With a script from Mark Ganek, one of a team of writers who came in on season 10 as Reed started transitioning out of his sole screenwriter duties, “Mr. Deadly” fills the space around Berry’s walking bomb with jokes and fun character notes, including Pam’s newfound “Spaghetti Vacation” obsession. (Also, Pam is a rock monster now, because space.) And Berry’s just having a blast not going full Laszlo Cravensworth for once, but instead modulating his tone to play a polite, detached explosive device who would just really like to explode now, please.

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The final episode of “Archer: 1999" is also the show’s final writing credit for Adam Reed, who wrote (either solo or with an occasional co-writer) 105 of Archer’s first 110 episodes. Archer, like any TV show, is a massively collaborative effort, but it’s hard to deny that those aspects of the series that are truly great—its love of mixing high-brow references and low-brow jokes, its aggressively damaged characters, its appreciation for a really good dick gag—are a result of Reed’s love and care for these weirdos, and the material he spent a decade feeding them. The truth is, though, that Reed’s final turn at the writing desk isn’t so much notable for its space-based plot—even though the crew’s attempt to put Archer on trial after he starts losing his mind are filled with a lot of typically Archer joys, as the show revels, once again, in throwing its eight main characters in a room together and setting them at each other’s comedic throats.No, the big deal here is that this is the episode where Sterling Archer finally wakes up, after flashing through a montage of his previous life set to Queen Sarah Saturday’s “Robert Deniro” (hence the episode title). The following scene—with its heartbreaking signs of the toll Archer’s three-year absence has taken on his mother—is a triumph for Benjamin, Jessica Walter, and Reed alike, full of sad, funny notes and incredible warmth from Walter’s ever-phenomenal performance. That it ends on an uncomfortable joke about the pair’s Oedipal relationship is a pretty perfect capstone on Reed’s tenure on the show: dark, hilarious, and always just a touch sweeter than you might expect.

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Serialized storytelling has never been Archer’s strong suit: The show loves a gag too much to really commit to full-time emotional stakes. But the first installment of the show’s first post-coma season takes a stab at showing what a version of that show might have looked like, as Archer adjusts to a reality where pretty much every single person has become a better person because of his three-year absence from their lives. Written, again, by Ganek, “The Orpheus Gambit” isn’t perfect—this is one of those Jamie Lee episodes we alluded to earlier—but it is a fascinating look at an alternate form the show could take if it really felt like it. The heart of it all, unsurprisingly, is Pam, who’s probably the happiest out of anyone to see Archer up and running (well, cane-assisted walking) again, but who’s also the one to deliver some hard truths about how the world has moved on without him.

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Archer is always a good joke machine: The show can dole out one-liners, “phrasing” jokes, and obscure historical references basically as a matter of course at this point. Episodes like “The Double Date” excel, though, by steering into the dysfunctions of these well-worn characters—in this case, by forcing Lana into a double date with her new husband (Stephen Tobolowsky’s awful but affable Robert), her old boyfriend Archer, and his unsuspecting date, neuroscientist Gabrielle (Nicole Byer, wonderful in a potentially thankless role). With the rest of the cast steadily finding themselves crammed into the ongoing date/spy mission, “Double Date” reaps huge wins by steadily turning up the pressure, as Archer hurls ever more chaos at the people around him (and Lana finds out Robert has had 11 dogs die on him and has more in common with Malory than she might have liked). It’s a strong reminder that Archer can service its comedy side and its emotional intelligence at the same time—and that it can reap some of its biggest laughs when it forces them to collide.

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As we’ve alluded to a few times in this piece, Aisha Tyler’s Lana Kane is generally the trickiest Archer regular to handle well. Because she’s typically positioned as a foil to Archer himself, who’s suicidally reckless to a fault, Lana often finds herself in the dull comedy position of being the “Hey, don’t do that” lady. (It’ll be interesting to see how the show handles that tendency in season 14, which sees Lana ascend to being everybody’s actual boss.) “Photo Op,” though, takes the smart move of giving Lana a couple of straight people herself, in the form of Pamela Adlon’s Sandra and Anniwaa Buachie’s Neva, who’ve hired the Agency to transport an endangered gorilla being threatened by poachers. The resulting episode lets the riotously funny Tyler actually cut loose, while Archer spends most of his time bonding with the ape in question, an Archer staple. (Oh, and Krieger makes a Skynet-style climate control system for the office, and Carol/Cheryl has an intern. Never let it be said that this show won’t throw some comedy spaghetti at the wall!)The clear winner, though, is Tyler, who gets to be the foolhardy, pissed-off, and reckless one for once, culminating in a hilarious ending that sees Africa punch right back at her after a whole half hour of hate. It’s a reminder that, even 12 seasons in, these characters still have commendable life to them when the writers (in this case, Asha Michelle Wilson) figure out how to unleash it.

 
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