This season of Archer has been pretty interesting. We started it with pirates, and now we’re ending it in space. I’d like to see you do that, live-action sitcoms!
Part one of “Space Race” sees the ISIS team recruited by Commander Drake (yep, that’s Breaking Bad‘s Bryan Cranston) to stop a mutiny aboard the Space Station Horizon. They are quickly rushed through astronaut training and shot into space, where they find out that it’s actually Drake and his buddies who are the mutineers. Surprise!
There are plenty of very off-color gags here. “Astronaut training sucks ass, literally. What’s with all the enemas?” Archer wonders aloud, before realizing that the half-dozen of them Krieger has subjected him to are not part of the pre-mission protocol. Lana gets violently ill, repeatedly, and we not only have to see her throw up but see Archer make Cyril swallow it. And then there’s naked Pam, whom Archer persuades to stow away on the shuttle just so he can have sex with her. Even for Archer, this is kind of a gross episode.
But there are other things that are funny without being slightly appalling, most of them involving Malory. For one, she’s so short that she can hardly see out of the helmet in her spacesuit. Once settled aboard the shuttle, she spends her time drinking isopropyl alcohol straight out of the bottle. And at episode’s end, with the bad guys talking about populating Mars, I just had to laugh at the idea of someone like Pam or as dumb as Cheryl/Carol being used to start a new gene pool. That’d be one messed-up new society.
Plot-wise, it’s hard to judge “Space Race, Part 1″ until we see “Part 2,” because a lot of this is obviously exposition. We’re only getting half the story. I can say that I saw the end of the episode coming, as I did the appearances of Pam and Cheryl/Carol, so maybe this was a more obvious episode than others. But if anything, it’s a welcome change from how downright depressing “Skin Game” was last week. It’s good to be back to the old hilarious, often inappropriate Archer.
Say it with me: “Danger zone!”
Clacked by Brittany Frederick 
on Mar 16, 2012 @ 01:47 EST5EDT
