I think it is safe to say that (almost) everyone loves their mother. Even the kids whose moms were awful to them usually have some kind of emotional ties. You stick up for her and you fight to protect her. But what do you do when everyone walks around saying “Your mom’s a slut” and it’s true? You know that it is true because she has no idea who your real father is and can only narrow it down to one of three men. Well, if you are Sterling Archer, you will travel the globe for the truth and who can blame him? Last season, one of the possible candidates had him kidnapped and drilled a hole in his head to insert a mind control microchip. That is the kind of paternal bonding I think we can all live without.
The penultimate episode of season 2 opens with Ray going on an assassination mission with a Finnish double agent as his target. While the flight crew is prepping him to jump out of the plane, Ray is complaining about how Archer never volunteers for a dangerous mission and that he surprisingly did volunteer for this one, only to have Malory shoot him down. He speculates that the reason Archer wanted the mission was to instead sneak into Russia and find out for certain if KGB-head Nikolai Jakov is his biological father. After some choice words, one of the flight crew stops and reveals themselves to be Sterling, who proceeds to knock Ray out with a left hook. Ray was right though, Archer was planning to sneak into Russia, which might have worked if the dumbass had not ignored the proper jump window. Instead of landing in Finland, he lands smack dab in a KGB outpost greeted by some rather unhappy soldiers. Back at ISIS HQ, Ray tells Malory & Lana what happened and Malory realizes Archer is trying to sneak into Russia. Both Lana and Ray make sarcastic comments when Malory denies that Archer did what he did to meet Jakov, the guy Malory has been shtooping for some forty od years. There is denial, and then there is…
….this. Take a moment to scrub your eyes out with acid and try to get this image out of your head. So much for denying your affair with Jakov since Pam caught ya doin’ the LD nasty on the vidscreen. As you know, if Pam knows, everybody knows. Cyril walks in asking if they are talking about the whipped cream incident and hands Malory a communique stating that the KGB caught an American agent parachuting into Russia and that he is being held in Vyborg. She tells Ray to get ready to go rescue him but since Archer broke his zygomatic bone with that punch, Ray produces three doctor’s notes that says he stays put. Without thinking, she tells Lana to do it and Lana goes into her classic sarcastic mode and asks how she would blend in as the only black woman in Russia. So now Malory is desperate; she turns to Barry Dillon, who not only works for ISIS rival agency ODIN, he hates Archer for breaking his leg and for violating his ex-fiancée, anally.
Barry’s intel says Archer is in Moscow, where he frees him after allowing an agent to torture him for a while. Honestly, he didn’t stop the guy, he just waited for him to go take a poop break. On their way out, Archer tries to confront Jakov, but after hearing the risky chances that he may not be poppa and that Jakov was gonna kill him if he isn’t, running seemed like the best option. Unfortunately, their immediate escape is hampered by a whole squad of Russian MPs and their commanding officer. The upside is that the gunmen cannot seem to hit the broadside of a barn and their CO is pretty pissed about that. Archer suggests they climb a fire escape but Barry is afraid of heights after the last time he was on a building with Sterling. So after Archer drops Barry off the side of a building (again), he tries to hide inside. Problem now is that when Barry fell, he took Archer’s boots with him and for some unknown reason all Russian apartment buildings seem to have broken glass all over the floor. Now he’s forced to do his best Bruce Willis in Die Hard impression.
So Archer had found some “new” shoes that he traded with one of the building tenants for his coat, but he used those to knock the soldiers’ CO off the roof. Since they STILL can’t shoot for shit, he evades them easily and jumps from one rooftop to the next. To his supreme dismay, he lands in in front of two children whose favorite game seems to be “break old liquor bottles on the roof.” He hobbles away from them into the building hallway and meets another tenant whose vodka he steals to clean his wounds. Since he is in immense pain now he makes the poor decision of taking the elevator down where a death squad is waiting to kill him firing squad style. Once again luck blows her load all over Archer as the firing squad is instead gunned down by defecting KGB agent Katya Kosnova. She tells Archer she will help him escape if he takes her with him. All Archer sees is hot girl that resembles Vanessa Angel in Spies Like Us so of course he agrees. Guess I should mention that Barry lost his leg in the fall; he’s gonna be really pissy in season three.
This was far from the funniest episode of Archer this season, but it still ranks high on my list as one of the better episodes. I have said before that I love the episodes that connect back to season one, and this one does just that from start to finish. Starting with Archer wanting to know for sure who his father is and Jakov sharing that curiosity. We also get to see Jakov’s idiot right hand man whom I am not sure is sane or heterosexual. The scene where Archer is being tortured with the jumper cables dates back to the very first episode of the series where he mocked his training for the very same situation. And then there is Barry. Formerly ODIN’s top agent, he got downgraded to a desk job when he broke his leg after falling off the side of a building where Archer could have saved him. Not to mention that both Archer and Cyril butt-boned Barry’s ex when they came to ODIN HQ. But Malory was right saying that it wasn’t meant to be because neither of them forced her to spread ‘em. That said, next episode ends season two and I am guessing that Katya will double cross Archer in some way. Also, I am thinking Barry will be back in season three with his one and only driving though being Archer’s death. Many of my Archer predictions have been correct; stay tuned to see if my luck holds up.
