Venture Bros: Hate Floats

1.  Great title, and illustrative.  The characters are separated and teamed with enemies and strangers, and find unlikely alliances due to the only thing they share: a desire to destroy their enemies.

2.  High level of carnage.  Could be the bloodiest so far.  Last week’s episode with the fourteen deaths was hysterical, but this was almost like real violence.  Truly disturbing.  I’ve never seen an eyeball out of its socket, animated, much less see a “point-of-view” shot of the same thing.

3.  Any TV show that includes perverse references to Superman, Turk 182 and “Winged Victory” can’t be all bad.

4.  Rusty buys Dean a speed-suit.  It’s red.  And it didn’t occur to me until they were half-way through their purchase that Dr. Venture’s suit was once red too, but he’s worn it every day of his life since he bought it as a teenager.  Now it’s faded to what my old apartment building decorator called “Desert Rose.”

5.  Terrific episode-long piece of sustained action.  Really, everything cuts together beautifully.  It’s not just funny, it’s also genuinely exciting.

6.  The most important thing, the show is completely transforming itself.  Last season, a good deal of the humor was the humor of disappointment, where they set up the action cliche and then deflate it by having something mundane happen.  Here, they set up the action cliche and then turn it on its head, pump it up, twist it inside out, increase the tempo and turn it into something that manages to be both parody and the real thing at the same time.

7.  The sustained narrative.  I cannot stress how different it makes everything.