Venture Bros: I Know Why the Caged Bird Kills
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare wrote “the course of true love never did run smooth,” and while this episode of The Venture Bros shares much with that play, including star-crossed lovers and magical spirits, I doubt Shakespeare could have ever come up with a path to true love involving Catherine the Great, Henry Kissinger, a haunted car and a refugee from American Gladiators.
As with any love story, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Kills” has two protagonists, The Monarch and Dr. Venture. Both protagonists have love problems (to say the least), but for the moment, neither protagonist can pay attention to them. (Typically for this show, the Monarch’s plot is active, with him trying to solve his administrative problems, while Dr. Venture’s plot is passive, with him merely trying to get rid of his immediate problem so that he can go back to his life of steadily increasing failure.)
The Monarch’s attention is taken up by an immediate problem, that his plans to attack Dr. Venture are failing. His henchmen (at least 21 and 24) believe that the problem is one of armament (which is absurd, as the attack shown at the top of the episode is the most well-armed and effective in The Monarch’s history). Meanwhile, Dr. Venture is being harrassed by a vengeful Oni.
Meanwhile, The Monarch is visited by a mysterious stranger, Dr. Henry Killinger and his magic murder bag. The Monarch, impressed with Killinger’s organizational skills, allows him free access to his staff and secrets. In no time at all, Killinger has an elite staff of Blackguards in cool suits and has completely re-organized the Monarchs’ operation (Literally, in no time at all. Killinger does all this in the time it takes for Drs. Venture and Orpheus to walk from the library to the parking lot).
Henchman 24, suspicious of Killinger’s intentions, refers to him as a “sheep in wolf’s clothing,” and while that sounds like a mere malapropism, it’s actually a key line in the episode. Because we see that, in each plot here, love comes disguised as hate, tenderness disguised as threat. Myra shows her love for Hank and Dean by kidnapping them, 21 shows his love for the Monarch by bringing in Dr. Girlfriend to infiltrate and assault the cocoon (and ends up falling in love with her, but that’s another story). I will also argue that the Monarch’s obsession with and attempts to destroy Dr. Venture also constitute a kind of love, one paralleled by Myra’s obsession with and attempts to destroy Dr. Venture’s family. (It also occurs to me that Henry Kissinger was the inspiration for Dr., ahem, Strangelove.)
And then of course there is Dr. Killinger, who turns out to be not a malevolent figure of doom but a magical spirit of love and reconciliation (would that his real-life counterpart turn out similarly), and the Oni turns out to be working for him. Killinger is shown to be a fat, male version of Mary Poppins, which, again, seems completely lunatic on the face of it, but underneath has a deep thematic resonance with the rest of the show.
The protagonist of Mary Poppins, lest we forget, is not Mary Poppins but rather the father. What does the father in Mary Poppins want? The same thing as Dr. Venture — to have someone, anyone besides himself take responsibility for raising his children. A key difference between Dr. Venture and Dr. Benton Quest is that Race Bannon is assigned to be a bodyguard for Dr. Quest’s son Jonny, Dr. Venture has hired Brock to be a bodyguard for himself; the boys’ safety is never anywhere on Dr. Venture’s list of priorities. Brock, the much better parent of the two, seems to take on the boys’ safety himself, but only to the extent that it’s usually too much trouble to clone them again. If the boys die, well, there’s always more where that came from. The father of Mary Poppins at least hires a nanny; Dr. Venture is content to leave that job to an inadequate robot and the “lie machines” that talk to them in their sleep. The father in Mary Poppins, of course, learns his lesson and re-centers his life around his children; Dr. Venture, I fear, will never learn that lesson.
The theme of this episode is the course of true love, but there is a sub-theme of misguided rescue. Hank and Dean, out practicing their driving skills, happen upon a stricken woman, who turns out to be a deranged ex-girlfriend of Dr. Venture. They set about rescuing her, but end up being taken captive by her. Later we will find that she feels that she is “rescuing” them from Dr. Venture. The henchmen misguidedly try to rescue the Monarch, and even take turns rescuing each other at different points of the episode.
Of the episode’s short-circuited love affairs, the most elliptical is the one between Drs. Venture and Orpheus, which seemingly ends with Dr. Venture hysterically accusing Dr. Orpheus of coming on to him, then mysteriously seems to begin again when he, minutes later, casually suggests that they watch pornography together. This rocky, contentious relationship is presented as a contrast to the other “true loves” of the episode.
In an episode rife with parallel scenes, Brock and Helper are given a nice pair where, in one scene, Brock attempts to educate Helper on the subject of Led Zeppelin, and in the next, Helper is educating Brock on the poetry of Maya Angelou.
The advice Dr. Orpheus gets from Catherine the Great’s horse is never revealed — but given the circumstances, that might be for the best.
(Strangely enough, although Myra’s story is explained away by Brock, her own version of events makes more sense. In her version, she rescues Dr. Venture’s life during the unveiling of the new Venture Industries car, and later the two of them have sex in that same car, and it is that car that the Oni chooses to haunt in order to bring Dr. Venture to Myra. So perhaps Brock’s story is the inaccurate one after all.)
