According to one Sterling Archer, being a spy is “stressful.” Most will agree that having your fiancée die in front of you during your wedding might be construed as a source of stress. Fortunately, Archer has found a near perfect method of relieving stress in being a pirate king. He is having high seas “adventures,” he gets to play lacrosse with his fellow pirates and having more depraved sex than even he can handle with the very beautiful island women. Why would he ever want to leave? Well, this is Archer we are talking about and he always manages to screw something up. He has Rip in a prison cell, Lana and Ray are en route to retrieve the both of them and it seems that there may be other troubles in his pirate paradise. Prepare to delve deeper into the “Heart of Archness” and see if any of them can make it out alive.

We start this episode again at ISIS HQ with everyone anxious, but for different reasons. Pam wants to drink, Cyril wants to get ISIS back on budget and Cheryl wants to scream because Malory is driving them both nuts worrying about her son. Out in the Pacific, Lana and Ray are really taking advantage of the ISIS corporate card. Most don’t buy a yacht to perform a rescue mission and no one buys a man-excuse me, boy servant. Elsewhere, Archer is knee deep in pirate “booty” while his first mate Noah tries to warn him about the dangerously low level of morale of his pirates. Historically, pirates are known for raping and pillaging and good ol’ Pirate King Archer has been doing too much of the former and barely any of the latter so his men have not been paid. Being the moron that he is, he instructs Noah to just pay them because Cyril always just “found the money.” He then tells him how Pam was greatat dealing with disgruntled employees. He doesn’t get that he’s in a totally different situation until he sees the men trying to elect a new king. Archer accepts the king fight challenge and is really gung-ho about it until he sees his opponent. Think Goro from Mortal Kombat but with only two arms – still pretty damn terrifying, isn’t he?

So of course, Archer does what he does best; weasel out of things. Instead of fighting, he skips straight to the “finish him” part and shoots the giant in the knee, thus retaining his kingship. His celebration is cut short when Riley’s voice is heard over the loudspeaker trying to radio ISIS for help, which kinda messed up his real plan of actually radioing for help. Archer and Noah run to the radio room, wondering how Rip even got out of his cell and Sterling shoots the radio because he does not want to return to ISIS. The pirates use the distraction to organize and execute a full blown mutiny since the only non-islanders are confined to a small room they can shoot at and grenade. When they should be planning an escape, Archer and Riley waste time arguing with one another until Noah finds a trap door which unfortunately leads right back to Riley’s cell.

Having finally heard from Rip and Sterling over the radio, Malory decides to go home since there is nothing more she can do. She figures Lana and Ray will rescue them shortly which would have happened if they didn’t get captured on the beach at that very moment. So let’s just recap here: Cheryl is pissed that she still has to stay in the office to wait for a call from Archer, Pam and Cyril are passed out in a room where it looks like they um…”got busy” and the rescuers are now part of the group that needs rescuing. Amidst this all, Archer still manages to be smiling because he figures that Lana is still stuck on him, having come all this way to rescue him. As the episode closes, Lana has a look on her face like she is about to beat the holy hell out of Sterling. If you think she won’t, remember that she has already shot him in the foot, purposely crashed a car to send him through the windshield and threatened to kill him on more than one occasion. See ya for the finale!

I am starting to see why this storyline was separated from the rest of season 2; if they had played it all at once, we probably would have died from laughing so hard. It’s like they purposely broke the idiot meter so it could go way past 10 for these episodes. By the finale, Lana is either going to kill Archer or have sex with him again and she will probably do both. Cyril will probably try to kill himself having realized he slept with Pam and Cheryl will probably kill everyone else just because she was a crazy bitch to start with. Me, I will probably just be going through withdrawal because there will be no more new episodes until probably late January. They had better release season 2 on video soon and it had better have Heart of Archness in it as well. In closing, I am going to steal a line from Rich and say “I’m just gonna leave this right here.”