The Venture Bros: “Shadowman 9: In the Cradle of Destiny”

At this point in its development, The Venture Bros fulfills expectations by defying expectations, and in that regard “Shadowman 9” does not disappoint. Season 2 ended with a classic Some Like It Hot-inspired cliffhanger, as Monarch and Dr. Girlfriend sailed off into the sunset to consummate their marriage. The new season opens promising to answer the cliffhanger then immediately sidesteps the whole issue by plunging the Monarch and Dr. Girlfriend into a bizarre battle with some floating robots (which will, 22 minutes later, finally be identified — this is a show not likely to slow down for innocents).

(Speaking of upending expectations, it’s worth noting that this season-opener episode of The Venture Bros does not feature the Venture Brothers, nor their father, and goes out of its way to not picture the faces of any of the Venture clan (except Helper, seen in a long shot). Instead, the Monarch and his relationship with Dr. Girlfriend is placed front-and-center, complete with its own opening title sequence.)

The episode proper opens with the Monarch’s henchman, the surviving ones anyway, picking themselves up and dusting themselves off after the rout at Cremation Creek, lo these many years ago. 21 and 24 wonder what to do now that they are “ronin,” and 21 (or 24) says, nobly, “We forge our own destiny,” which becomes a kind of statement of theme for the episode. In this episode, the weak follow rules and join societies, the strong push ahead and make their own rules, form their own societies.

(You can tell the difference between leaders and followers because the leaders give themselves names and followers are assigned numbers. Interestingly, the “Council of 13” trying the Monarch, even though they are much more powerful than their prisoners, themselves have only numbers — they are leaders to the Monarch, but they are followers to the Sovereign.)

The dominant society examined in this episode is, of course, the Guild of Calamitous Intent. The Guild, we shall see, is very big on procedure, hierarchy and rules. Humans, however, invariably have their own ideas and the drama of the episode occurs where power’s zeal for order and the human instinct to forge one’s own destiny collide. The theme of instinct rebelling against order repeats itself again and again throughout the episode: The Guild brings the Monarch and Dr. Girlfriend to their tribunal, and the Monarch rebels against them (in his own childish, impetuous way of course). No sooner does a Guild lackey intone an absolute rule than another lackey comes along and carelessly flouts it, no sooner does one member of the Council of 13 demand “Silence!” than another member tries out the new command — and fails. The council can’t even decide what to call the event — a tribunal, a trial, or a crucible.

And what motivates the individual to break the rules, to rebel against authority? According to “Shadowman 9”, the answer is classic: sex and death — or love and murder, depending on your point of view. The Guild accuses the Monarch of breaking the rules because he wishes to destroy Dr. Venture, but the Monarch insists that he broke the rules in order to make it with Dr. Girlfriend (nee Queen Etheria). The Phantom Limb, on the other hand, is moved to rebel against the rules of society (and the Guild) by a romantic notion of evil, which is really only a trumped-up version of lust and revenge. The Guild can see only death as a motivation but the Monarch makes them see the equal power of love. In the end the Monarch triumphs, the Guild is convinced of the rightness of his cause, they seethe light and wed not only the Monarch and Dr. Girlfriend in villainy, but also weds the Monarch’s twin impulses, sex and death, by sending him to kill the Phantom Limb on his honeymoon. Dr. Girlfriend drives the point home by insisting on the Monarch carrying her over the threshold of the site of their first sanctioned assassination.

(In one of the episode’s two punchlines, her ass against the Monarch’s waist also accidentally deploys his wings — is Dr. Girlfriend’s ass the “cradle of destiny” of the title?)

To make things more challenging, the episode is thematically dense while the plot remains at a near-standstill. Employing a complex flashback/dual-interrogation structure for most of the running time, the episode is almost a clip show, albeit a clip show consisting of new clips.

The b-story, meanwhile, is both more straightforward and more perplexing. The Monarch’s henchmen are taken over by the Moppets, who are, seemingly, forging their own destinies. But are they? It’s unclear to me. It seems they are taking over the henchman for their own nefarious purposes, but then at the end of the show a swarm of other supervillains descends upon the scene, helping them re-build the cocoon, to put it back into the control of the Monarch. Was this the plan all along? If so, why don’t the Moppets seek the help of the other supervillains to begin with? Or are they, in the beginning, acting “against the rules” and undertaking the rehabilitation of the henchmen themselves, but, after the Guild has had their hearts softened to the cause of the Monarch, they are able to then bring in the other supervillains? And why is Brock helping out on this project? I’m sure these questions will be answered in a future episode.

Running through all of this, of course, is the constant theme of the show, the construction of an identity. We witness the Monarch and Dr. Girlfriend plow through three or four identities each in this episode as they forge their destinies and are finally united in villainhood. Meanwhile, the Phantom Limb, stripped of his hard-won identity, is left with only his “rules” (in this case, “anyone on my ‘shit list’ must die, regardless of whether they actually someone who has harmed me or not”).

Hand in hand with “identity” is “mistaken identity” — Dr. Girlfriend wonders how Phantom Limb could fail to recognize his own henchman as the Monarch when she herself has failed to recognize that same henchman is now her husband. (Phantom Limb takes this a little too far — he tracks down people based on their assumed identity, in spite of the fact that they bear no physical resemblance to the people he’s looking for.)

Tying in the theme of dual identities, we see that the Monarch, like Batman, has a giant penny in his flying cocoon.