Archer: “Skytanic” part 3
Up in the sky aboard a rigid airship, Lana has reached a crisis point with her boyfriend Cyril. Dressed as a bellhop and bearing a basket of fruit, Cyril has stumbled upon Lana in her underwear with a naked Archer. Lana, fed up with Cyril’s mistrust, breaks up with him, and Cyril flees, sobbing. Archer, whose first priority is to have sex with Lana, tells her to “go after him.” Not to patch up their relationship, of course, but because “we’re almost out of fruit.”
Mind you, this is all in the service of foiling a bomb plot. That’s one of the key things to remember with farce — the higher the stakes are, the more serious the “mission,” the more base the cast’s motivations should be. In Fawlty Towers it’s “the hotel inspectors are coming,” in Arrested Development it’s “we’re going to trial,” in Curb Your Enthusiasm it’s “There’s an important party and you need to be on your best behavior.” With the Marx Bros it’s A Night at the Opera, with Bugs Bunny it’s “The Rabbit of Seville,” with the Three Stooges it’s the “important society gala,” with Caddyshack it’s the big golf tournament, with Animal House it’s the homecoming parade.
And one of the things that makes Archer that much more startling is that it’s, of all things, “a James Bond parody,” a genre unto itself, something that’s been done to death, in every possible medium, from Get Smart to Austin Powers, from radio to newspaper comics. How Archer manages to be not just fresh, but startlingly so, is a miracle unto itself, and a testament to the vision of the show’s creators, who have turned a liability into an asset — they use the “Bond parody” style as a familiar way into their extremely bent worldview.
Archer: “Skytanic” part 2
So, our team of self-involved, superficial super-spies are now on the Excelsior. But there is one key player we haven’t met yet — Cyril, Lana’s current boyfriend. Cyril, anxious and insecure on the best of days, can’t stand the idea that Lana is going to be spending the voyage in a cramped stateroom with his rival Archer, so he sneaks aboard the airship and disguises himself as a bellhop in order to spy on them. The perfect ingredient to raise the level of farce — a character with a secret, involved in a deception, and best of all in disguise. Add to that the enclosed space of the airship, the ballooning of free-floating sexual tension and the escalation of the bomb plot (which may or may not be real) and you have a farce narrative that would work under far less well-written circumstances. (It’s essentially the plot of The Hindenburg. “Skytanic” manages to cover the same ground with 100 minutes to spare and a lot more laughs.)