Hi folks! Welcome the to our weekly recap of Archer’s third season, on the Multiversity Summer TV Binge 2021. This week’s episode is named “Heart of Archness: Part II” and here, Archer is loving the pirate live… except that he is doing everything wrong. Let’s dive right in.
1. “Come work for ISIS, we offer: Exploitation, sex and embezzlement”
While the main action occurs on Pirate Island, a couple of things are worth mentioning back at the office. First, we see Cheryl/Carol with her hair all messed up and visibly angry, and that’s because Malory won’t let her go to her home because there needs to be someone on the office.
Meanwhile, Pan wants everyone to get wasted and she convinces Cyril, who ends up messing with ISIS’ bank accounts, is harassed by, and has sex with Pam, to which Malory responds with disgust, but not surprise.
And that’s a regular day on the office, Malory is an awful boss, the accountant is bad at administrating the money, the HR chief sexually harasses someone and the secretary is held there against her will.
2. PIRATE KING, WHOOOO
Meanwhile, Archer is Pirate King and he has some new policies, he has a ton of sex, he created a Karaoke night and intramural Lacrosse, but there’s a low morale problem, and besides all of Archer’s assholery, he hasn’t paid them, so they are understandably angry.
3. Incipient Mutiny
The morale problem explodes when a Pirate named Bucky calls for melawan raja, meaning a fighting challenge for the crown, but the wimpy Bucky won’t fight, instead he sends his girlfriend, a hulking male giant.
But Archer has no problems winning the fight… mainly because he shot his challenger’s knee, and technically there’s not a rule against that, which makes the pirates angry, add to that the fact that Rip Riley escapes from his imprisonment and attempts to communicate with Malory.
Riley, Noah and Archer end up trapped in the communications tower when the mutiny begins, and when they tried to escape they ended up trapped again, now in the fortress’ prison; thankfully Lana and Ray are coming to save them… right?
4. Idioms and Ethics
One of the best parts of these episodes are the cultural “shock” between Archer, a “cosmopolitan” man, and the Pirates. First, it is seen with the running joke of the idioms, Archer uses a ton of them and for Noah, it is impossible to translate those metaphors and analogies. Which makes Archer (and us, as an audience) think about how much we rely on idioms in our day-to-day.
Another conflict is the fact that Archer believes the pirates to be like the stereotypical pirates of the Victorian era: savage people with no rules; but on the contrary. They are educated and bilingual, they are “eschewing traditional gender roles” and they have rules, a lot of rules in fact, they even gave him orientation materials to learn how to be pirate king.
And finally, Archer has always been characterized for having an… ambiguous morality, and here it is contrasted with the equally ambiguous ethics of the pirates. On one side, they are pirates, they literally dedicate their lives to committing crimes, but when they attack a fishing boat, Archer refuses to take anything from a “small business owner”, thus leaving the pirates without a booty. They have rules and Archer either doesn’t know them or doesn’t care about them, an offense to the Pirates.
5. Lana messes the operation
Remember when I said that Lana was going to save the day? Well, all the way to the island, on the luxurious boat they bought, Lana berates Ray on how she is NOT in love with Archer anymore, that she is only doing her work, and when they get to the island, she keeps screaming… which helps the pirates find them and now they are prisoners too. Maybe on the next episode they will get better at spy stuff.
Today I learned: Cats can get Feline infectious peritonitis (FIP)
Joke of the week:
Pirate: Hantu!
Bucky: No, no hantu! They are not ghosts… They’re just white
Other Pirate: Racist…
And that’s it for this episode, it’s hard to “rate” it because it’s part of a continuing story, but I loved every joke in it. What did you think of this episode? Leave your comments below and join us next week for our take on episode 303, the final part of the “Heart of Archness” saga.
