A Very Brief Venture Bros Retrospective

anybody who has followed a show for more than a few years can attest to the notion that many shows do not maintain a high level of quality for most of their runtime this is typically due to a variety of reasons the show has run on longer than its initial premise can produce original ideas executive meddling and forcing the show to continue on beyond this point or the original writing staff moving on to fresher ideas and leaving new writers with less familiarity with the work in charge but the venture brothers has never suffered from any of these melodies adult swim has always given a generous amount of freedom to the show rathers who themselves view the show as more of a passion project than a full-time job and of course doc hammer and jackson public have been more or less running the show themselves since its inception nearly two decades ago as such the venture bros is a show that has maintained a high level of quality for an amount of time unheard of in television seven seasons across 14 years and never so much as a hint of flanderizing characters foregoing major plot beats for fan service half-assed pacing shark jumping or so on this video was originally meant to be a retrospective of the series as a whole but i was struggling to come up with ways to organize the ideas and so i decided to make a tier list instead because that seems to be the sort of thing that youtube viewers like to see and i can put rants in between episode reviews but then the tier list ended up being far too long of a concept and not really sufficient to explain the ideas in a way that was satisfying to me as a fan some episodes are good for different reasons than others other episodes have faults that don't detract from what makes them appealing and so trying to organize everything into a simplified scale such as a tier list would lose nuance in a way that a show like this doesn't deserve this is a compilation of a much longer series collapsing every individual episode review down into one video in order to make navigation more convenient as well as centralizing the ideas and concepts in a way that better facilitates conversation the individual episode reviews are split up into four segments recap rant review and wrap up recap is a very brief summary of most of the episode's plot lines rant is a section describing one aspect of the show as a whole relative to how it appears in the episode review is a general detailing of my opinions on the episode as well as some context for those opinions wrap up is largely things i couldn't find another place for as well as being the episode's total score though this is a concept that i stopped taking seriously around season four and drop all together at season five so don't put very much stock in me saying that an episode is say four out of ten the terrible secret of turtle bay rusty doc venture is invited to the united nations to show off a new invention of his unaware that he is being stalked by a delightful japanese stereotype whose name roughly translates to masturbation addict doc's invention is initially given a negative reception by the other conference goers who constantly treat him with disrespect even before he presents until the u.s military finds a more practical use for the technology and decides to invest meanwhile incandescents of unbound naivety and wander around new york where they accidentally thwart the plans of the masked ninja before getting robbed barak then steps in and saves the day in his trademark over the top fashion this episode has the job of introducing so many different aspects of the show and ultimately does a terrible job of it only getting basic things like the initial tone correct characters are all over the place relative to their decided upon later personalities hank and dean for example seem much dumber than this episode than normal doc shows very little worldliness for a former boy adventurer and brock samson is even much smaller than in later episodes and that includes physically as well even minor characters or at least characters who were at the time minor characters are not immune doctor girlfriend has a prominent adam's apple the monarch and his henchmen have completely different costumes and the early designs and personalities for billy quiz boy pete white and professor impossible are also uncanny in their differences the tone however is more accurate to the later episodes though not seasons from the very introduction we can see the over-the-top intrigue with otaku sanzuri appearing to kill one of his own employees before revealing that he in fact cured his addiction to smoking this sort of setup fake out is the basic foundation of the entire series a series that itself began as a parody of typical genre cliches ultimately the terrible secret of turtle being it's a one out of ten nobody who's fallen in love with the show fell in love with this early version of it and barely any of the aspects that have caused the venture brothers to be so beloved are present here it watches a little bit like a knockoff made by somebody who's only heard of the show but never watched an episode and it only gets away with its lacking qualities because it's a pilot dia de los dangerous the first proper episode of the series not just because it's the first non-pilot episode but because this is the first episode where characters really begin to act like themselves doc is equal parts haughty and jaded as he gives a lecture to a group of uninterested students before heading out to find cheap prescription medication and getting his other kidney stolen still better than putting up with american healthcare i suppose hank and dean once again go missing this time kidnapped by the monarch who laments at the lack of parental affection they're receiving in part because of his own upbringing these fatherly urges begin to establish the show's nominative determinism an aspect of the show that later seasons continuously build upon core to the central theme of the venture brothers as they show this is the idea that heroes and villains sorry protagonists and antagonists in this series only act the way they do because of the label placed onto them the protagonists of the show aren't necessarily good people all the time doc views his sons as kidney dispensaries at the end of the episode and the antagonists are rarely outright evil the only villainous acts they commit are those that they are expected to do off the clock they're normal people just like anybody else i'll build more on how this show discusses labels and how these labels affect our behavior later on as more and more episodes touch on the subject dia de los dangerous gives us a few fantastic lines and great scenes but ultimately falls short as a venture brothers episode purely because of a phenomenon i've seen discussed about the show that's never really been given a name much of the show's humor cleverness deeper plot beats and so on all rely heavily on its strong characters there are very few one-liners in the show that don't depend on some greater knowledge or that aren't part of an ongoing conversation the venture brothers is a show that doesn't work very well out of context and that might be part of why it's never caught on with mainstream audiences can you name a single meme from the venture brothers a single time this show which has been running nearly two decades has managed to permeate the surface tension of its little bubble of fandom and reach the pop culture osmosis it's frustrating to think that the show this beloved has never gotten the attention it deserves all because it doesn't lend itself well to being summarized by an image macro frustrations about the show's lack of popularity aside for now diadelus dangerous gets a 3 out of 10. it's an attempt at putting not the show's best foot forward but rather the best foot it makes sense to lead with forward later episodes of this season are better but they ultimately come up a bit short as episodes to lead with due to the required prerequisite knowledge needed to appreciate much of what the showrunners are attempting to do careers in science the problem light aboard the gargantuar one turns on prompting the crew of the space station to send a distress signal directly to dr venture the venture family arrives on scene and begins to investigate going nowhere for a long period of time before ultimately having dog quietly discover that the cause was a melted plastic toy left too close to the electrical wiring the v-plot of this episode deals with the boys attempts to track a phantom space man after they were scared by what was totally meant to be a fig titch's story told to spook them and nothing else the episode c plot is a love triangle between three non-characters and yes that includes brock what i mean by non-characters is that none of them are especially interesting beyond the initial impression one might make of them anavaldovic spends most of the episode annoyed with bud but is a one-note character going from naive to incel and brock is just a murder machine with no real character depth at least not as of season 1. this is my major complaint with the first season that many of the characters we see here are pretty one-dimensional this is in part due to the limited screen time that they receive but even with barack we don't get too much characterization until later and that characterization is some of the best the show ends up offering in season 1 barack is set up as a type of person who peaked early on in life and has dropped off since then the woman he conquers in early seasons were typically meant to be portrayed as undesirable or easy that is we are meant to believe that rock samson ladies man extraordinaire is a beast for sleeping with a prostitute a woman who has spent the last several decades of her life alongside a repressed man-child strippers and the like a few episodes like midlife chrysalis and past tense even touch on the idea that brock peaked early in his college days and has since been on a steady decline his life mirrors the all-too-common stereotype of the high school quarterback who flunks college joins the military and ends up with a dead-end job he even drives a dodge charger his hairstyle was likely meant to portray him as a two decades out of date stiff but then at some time during the show's run 80s nostalgia came back into vogue and the meme of brock samson left the show's universe and entered hours i'm not really complaining the version of rock we have now is incredible and i wouldn't trade it for season 1 vroc at all it's just that it seems like the character got swapped out pursuing seasons 1 and 2. back on topic careers in science ends up being important to the plot of later seasons but for now it's a very detached story as most of season 1 is and also a pretty weak story standing on its own very little actually happens and the entire thing feels more like an introduction to some character background that only serves to explain what's going on in the present careers in science ultimately gets a 4 out of 10 by itself home insecurity this is the first episode where i feel as though the showrunners finally found the groove that would carry the show to its modern greatness you really start to see aspects of the venture brothers golden age appearing as early as this episode but just because they found the groove doesn't mean they've made their way into it with proc on a sabbatical the venture compound becomes undefended safer and untested defense system named gardo the monarch and baron underwrite both attempt to arch doctor venture during this window only to end up in a petty squabble over arching rights the henchmen share stories as the venture family are trapped inside their panic room by gardo who eventually turns on the henchman after an accidentally successful infiltration by helper in the bee plot brock meets up with steve summers a more cynical take on the six million dollar man who owes the government or a surgery he only needs because of his work with the government a story all too familiar for anybody who's ever had to work with the va the a and b plot of this episode both represent the things avenger brothers excels are doing world building subversive pop culture references and the effects those two things might have on the psyche of somebody overexposed to it all we get a few great punchlines scattered throughout i'm especially fond of the metaphorical pissing match between the monarch and underbite my only real complaint is that the best parts of the episode don't get as much screen time as they should but again this is a show runner's just figuring out what works and what doesn't despite the praise i'm giving this episode it still suffers from many of the same issues other season 1 episodes have which can hold it back through things like characters being unnecessarily abrasive or unlikable and the weird obsession season 1 had with grows out humor at least we get a few good helper moments overall it gets a 6 out of 10. the incredible mr brisby doc is called to brisbyland so roy brisby can purchase the secrets of cloning technology off of him secrets he desires so a cloned body of his own can live to see his utopic vision come to fruition but when doc's pride is hurt by roy's ranting he calls off the deal prompting his panda to kidnap the venture meanwhile hank and dean are kidnapped by the orange county liberation front a group of concerned citizens attempting to sabotage and destroy brisby's empire with all the ferocity a pta can muster after being drugged by mandalay brock's body is recovered from the tar pits by molotov a russian agent with whom brock has a long history the three plots converge in the oclf's assault on the brisby dome and the episode ends with brisby's empire crumbling as the venture family is reunited this is one of the more tightly written episodes of the show every second of screen time is spent efficiently enough that i was surprised at how short the episode felt and how nothing seemed to be a waste of time even if a few punch lines weren't strictly necessary for the plot to advance this is another episode where the parody aspects of the show come into spotlight everything about it references something from the real disputes between disney and the people who live near its parks old rumors of walt disney freezing his body to be resuscitated howard uses obsession with fresh-squeezed orange juice and of course doc drops constant references to musical theater while hopped off on truth serum unfortunately this makes the episode more entertaining to people who get the references it becomes disjointed when viewed by somebody who doesn't this is one of the few times this show makes a misstep where its plot becomes less of a loving homage and more of an outright parody this is the first we hear of david bowie in the series and it sets up so many future character interactions in plot events but standing on its own the episode is actually pretty weak it gets a three out of ten eenie meenie miney magic doc's newest invention the joy can begins to trap most of the venture family inside it's up to his newest renter dr byron orpheus to help him save his family from the vague doom that keeps being alluded to despite their efforts it's ultimately a combination of dumb luck and dean being horny that saves them dr orpheus is the best character in the show this is not up for debate every plot he's involved in immediately becomes cooler just for having the supernatural element and he steals every scene he's in he's one of the more interesting characters in the show as well thematically the venture brothers has a lot of bad parents in it but orpheus is an interesting subversion of this and that he's actually trying his best he's merely too obsessed in his work to pay too much attention to his daughter while so many others are negligent if not outright malicious towards their children orpheus can only really be accused of being out of touch a fault that makes him more relatable and easier to sympathize with he also plays well off of a lot of the main cast and that his world is similar but distinct from theirs while the winter family regularly dabbles in super science orpheus regularly dabbles in the supernatural this means that him having his own storylines results in the showrunners coming up with completely new elements of the show as well as new characters for them to interact with and these elements end up being some of the best the show ends up offering all because of dr byron orpheus the plot of this episode is actually very bare bones most scenes are only there to set up why characters end up where they need to be for the conclusion but there are very few characters involved very few locations involved and a majority of the scenes are just characters messing around or having non-sequitur conversations but it's these conversations and small interactions that make the episode so great i'm especially fond of the scenes where doc and orpheus discuss parenting as well as the various moments where something occult is established only for it to have a completely mundane function the general flow of this episode starts to wear out its welcome just before the episode ends right when it starts to get predictable it's over as a result the episode remains great throughout even if it is ultimately very low stakes it gets a five now a strong five because of orpheus ghosts of the sargasso dr venture attempts to recover a crashed ship of his fathers from the depths of the bermuda triangle when the expedition takes longer than expected the family is set upon by ghost pirates who true to the origins of what the show pays homage to are actual pirates who happen to have raided a ship full of halloween costumes the heist goes wrong however when an actual ghost pirate shows up to haunt the ship terrifying everybody until they can call for help the help is ineffective but when everybody is distracted proc shows up and throws the ghost overboard this is the best cold open the show has i am speaking from a place of bias as a big fan of david bowie but the fact that they can start an episode with an extended bowie reference and still have it make perfect sense to people who have never heard of the guy shows the extent to which the show runners have mastered what they do so often a reference in a tv show can immediately date the work it's placed into announcing to anybody viewing it in the future exactly when the episode aired and typically what year it stopped being funny in the winter brothers that rarely happens in part because the references being made are already dated meaning that they can't fall out of mainstream favor but also in part because they're never the crux of a joke the opening of this episode is a scene about a man crashing an experimental spacecraft not holding up a picture of david bowie and saying hey look a reference the callbacks from classic team venture to modern team venture and the comparisons made between the two are a neat way of creating world building and the connection to the plot that these characters end up having reinforces the show's constant reminders that the pop culture of the 70s and 80s is a dead greed the people involved having all moved on all except for the fans though this episode only touches on the very beginnings of the idea it's up to future episodes to expand on the concept we get a couple of brock one-liners and cool moments but the basic pacing of the episode isn't altogether great the dean and pirate captain scenes drag on too long and they drive the fake pirates gag into the ground very early on then trample over it several times more it gets elevated by the bowie reference by a single point ending up at a 7 out of 10. ice station impossible richard impossible former college professor and current super scientist and the employee of the united nations invites a few of his former pupils to a think tank in an antarctic research base doc's attempts to subvert the urine test are unsuccessful until he received the help of sally impossible and the two of them headed off richard overhears his wife talking to rusty and decides to intervene dropping off dock in the middle of the antarctic waste to die meanwhile hank is infected with the goliath serum an old military bioweapon designed to turn animals into bombs they track rusty to the research base where a team of scientists works together to create a serum that cures hank of his affliction or so they think in reality they just created ranch dressing and the serum wore off on its own having never been tested on a human subject there's a lot of trope subversion in this episode it's basically the poster child for the venture brothers as a parody show from racepan and sphincter relaxing postmortem to the realistic fantastic four parody and my favorite joke of the episode rusty being unable to hear impossible over the engine of the hovercraft there's an aspect of this show that feels like a nerd you went to high school with would constantly point out the unrealistic parts of superhero stories like if you could fly you'd constantly have to deal with face fulls of bug or the subzero temperatures of the upper atmosphere super strength would tear every muscle in your body since even strongmen have to rest after events if you had super speed you'd catch fire from the friction and so on you know the type of person to begin most of their sentences with um actually on a scale from nobody asked to very interesting the venture brothers veers far onto the less obnoxious side but on occasion the show can cross the line into territory that can come off as being a bit too that guy maybe i'm just rambling maybe this is just the type of encounter a person who spends too much time engaging with nerds online views as commonplace but this episode veers pretty heavily into the realm of obnoxious youtube commenters too much for me to give it any higher than a 4 out of 10. midlife chrysalis christ at christ's christian christ i finished college i know how to pronounce this after an incident involving their supersonic jet getting stopped for violating protected airspace rock and dock undergo personal midlife crises doc attempts to remedy his feelings of mediocrity with a sexual conquest but ends up getting instead catfished or caterpillared by a thinly disguised doctor girlfriend meanwhile brock since he already owns a dodge charger instead copes with his midlife crisis by working out so he can pass the spy guy exam eventually doctor girlfriend ends up feeling guilty over her complacency and dr venture's transformation and gives him the antidote brock eventually earns back his license to kill through nepotism and returns to reclaim his masculinity by punching a bartender this is dr girlfriend's first episode as anything more than set dressing and the start of the story arc of one of my favorite characters in the series her introduction and later development serve as a series of great subversions of typical genre norms at first she's exactly as her name implies the monarch's girlfriend a bit like when one of your friends brings his girlfriend over to a lan party and she sits in the corner on her phone not talking to anybody the entire night because she doesn't play video games doctor girlfriend sits in the back of the monarch's cocoon too disinterested in his slurping to put on a matching butterfly costume or even give herself a clever insect themed name she looks like she doesn't want to be there and her personality matches this idea for her first few appearances but as she begins to develop we start to see just how genuinely wholesome her relationship with the monarch really is we also get to see why she's doctor girlfriend and not mrs girlfriend since she literally has a phd something we also get to see her studying towards in flashbacks maybe the real reason i like dr girlfriend or mrs doctor the monarch dr mrs councilwoman one is because i'm a big fan of episodes that show the inner workings of the guild and she's one of those characters who's constantly involved with that aspect of the show back on topic this is the type of episode that only could have existed in season one the plot of two characters hitting a midlife crisis in a show all about washed up people living in the shadow of their glory days is a bit too on the nose for later seasons and the more fantastical super science elements are really more of a season one thing anyway the whole story isn't too complicated but then again not a lot happens in it i actually only remembered this episode as the caterpillar one and completely forgot about the proc subplot outside the training simulation it's pretty forgettable overall and gets a 3 out of 10. are you there god it's me dean a guild bylaw preventing the capture and torture of injured hostages prompts the monarch to call off an arching where he has captured the venture family while dean receives treatment for his malady hank and brock are kept in the cocoon as a guarantee for dean's return after the surgery is finished and they get to crash the monarch's birthday party giving him what he has always wanted a huge fight meanwhile billy and peter called upon to perform the surgery as dean copes with the dramatic experience of not only having his testicles twisted but of everyone knowing about it once everything is back to normal the two plots reconverge the same way the episode began you already know how fond i am of the non-arching villain episodes episodes where the characters just hang out doing nothing important just guys being dudes that we also happen to get a glimpse into some old guild history is just a bonus on top of all of that this episode also parodies old very special episodes in the most gruesome way they possibly could have gotten away with on television and hey the monarch has a birthday party this is the show's first proper introduction to 21 and 24. the character designs have appeared previously and even had speaking roles once or twice but this is the first time the characters are used in the same manner in which they appear for the rest of the show as those two guys those two guys style characters appear a lot throughout the show's run cardholder and doe tim tom and kevin watch and ward holy diver and sky pilot billy quiz boy and pete white and of course 21 and 24. dog hammer and jackson public have stated in the director's commentary that characters like this typically appear whenever they run out of ideas for an episode or they need some sort of in-medius res scene transition more often than not the two characters are merely a stand-in for the showrunners and the conversations they have are based on actual conversations just adapted for television there's a very limited plot in this episode not too much really happens this isn't necessarily a bad structure for an episode as long as the gaps in the plot are filled with interesting interactions between the characters that's fine but the episode occasionally struggles to justify a lot of what's going on at least in a way that's consistent with other characterizations the monarch for example says that he only joined the guild for the dental program but in season three we see otherwise considering the typical consistency of the show's world this type of thing stands out just a bit more it ends up getting a 5 out of 10 wrapped up by a few great moments held back by constantly reminding us that testicular torsion is supposed to be funny by the way the dreaded candiru is a real type of fish it's sometimes called the toothpick fish so sorry about the mental image you just formed in your head don't worry it doesn't actually swim up your ear and stream that part is just a myth spread by people who don't want tourists urinating into their water supply the urine stream isn't even a steady stream at that distance anyway it's more like a bunch of individual droplets if you look at it in slow motion unless you've got a urethra like a garden hose again sorry for the mental imagery tag sale you're it dr venture has a yard sale it goes exactly as you might expect it to this is by far the best episode of the first season and in my opinion the first episode where the show's later greatness really starts to show itself there's barely an overarching plot but the episode doesn't try to pretend like all that much even happens this is just a series of big nets where interesting people do uninteresting things despite the overall uneventfulness of the plot this episode also introduces so many future concepts to the audience inco makes its first appearance as hank becomes the bad boss towards dean helper and driana failing to sell hoagies and lemonade to the visitors orpheus first gets the idea into his head to get an arch nemesis of his own leading to the entire development of the order of the triad phantom limb augustus saint cloud and the intangible fancy all make their first appearances here as well as 21 and 24 finally being named on top of that so many background characters make their first appearances too and this is probably a good time to mention how this show develops side characters background characters are seldom single use outside of crowd shots of laymen and settings like new york instead each character who appears in the background of an episode is typically given a funny name and design then they're used in reuse in any episode it makes sense for them to appear in this is the first episode where the use of this technique is readily apparent but notice full future examples are now museum now you don't and pot seek spot starting in season 2 and continuing until the end of season five whenever the showrunners needed a new character they wouldn't bother drafting up designs names or character for a new parody of a pop culture icon if they could help it instead they pull from their existing pool of recurring background designs and simply develop them as needed this is what gives the show that extra tinge of re-watchability where a seemingly innocuous design in the background of a wide shot can later on become a major villain in the story it also means that newly introduced characters rarely feel like they're being forced onto the audience since you've technically seen them around already so their inclusion never feels forced season one as a whole feels somewhat disconnected from the rest of the show having this vein of early installment weirdness that exists before the characters in world really started to see the edges sanded off it's the wrinkle in the speed suit that is the rest of the series but tag sail you're it is the crease on that speed suit allowing the rest of the ensemble to stretch flexibly into the future oh man what a terrible analogy nine out of ten past tense the venture family attends the funeral of an old college friend mike sorayama only to be kidnapped partially through their reminiscence as it turns out sorayama couldn't handle the bands and has spent the majority of his life plotting an elaborate revenge fantasy against those who wronged him while being lectured on why they're all such bad people brock manages to escape captivity in order to track and defeat mike while all this is occurring hank and dean recruit the help of the original team venture who also backtracked through much of rusty's college years in their search for him the two plots converge with rock inadvertently fighting the old team venture before they learn that sorayama was dead the entire time and programmed robots to continue his vendetta as well as his life this is the first proper introduction we get to the classic team venture they've appeared in earlier episodes but served little purpose other than exposition or progressing the plot here we finally get to see their personalities and how they reflect the generational differences of the show the venture brothers parodies many golden age cartoons complete with the propensity for over-the-top danger dramatic set pieces and a general disdain for minorities and non-western cultures around the vietnam war people and by extension the media they consumed became much more cynical in nature and the good guys shoot all the bad guys era of comics ended replaced by much more ambiguity starring characters with more overt flaws or at least flaws and get explored by the comics themselves the structure of this episode is unique among many of the episodes of the show with stories simultaneously taking place between two time periods connected by location we see a scene in the present at rusty's old dorm room we see a scene in the past there we see characters from the present we flash back to those characters history it feels a bit contrived that everybody happens to have gone to college together but i'm aware this is typically how scientific fields work you network in college and that's your circle of friends forever really making friends as an adult is hard ultimately i have to give past tense a four out of ten it's a great concept for an episode but takes far too long to get to any of the interesting parts or do anything really worthy of the episode's structure this episode shows a lot of the potential that the future of the series would have but for now it's underwhelming and held back by the show being a parody first and being too afraid to stand on its own i do want to shout out rusty's impeccable music taste however the trial of the monarch the monarch is put on trial for the murder of a police officer various testimonies are given practically none of which end up being relevant and eventually the real purpose of the trial is made apparent it's a setup to arrest one tiny attorney though why he's such an enemy of the guild we can only speculate the episode ends with the monarch and his attorney behind bars something jock finds amusing this is one of the most interesting episodes of the season as it's the first real time outside of the pilot we get to see the world of supers interacting with laymen so much of how this universe works is also given an initial setup during this episode ordinarily the police do not involve themselves with guild business so long as the guild sticks to fighting superheroes and scientists this serves as a means of keeping some of the more super aspects of super signs in check as laser rifles and doomsday machines falling into the hands of petty criminals could damage society for the worse so long as super villains are spending their extra energy chasing heroes around and not threatening to blow up the planet the world will persist in the sword of peace caused by anybody with the potential to cause massive damage being preoccupied we get to see in later episodes what happens when super science goes unchecked into the ordinary world so the fact that there's an in-universe explanation for why much of this technology hasn't changed the world actually serves to make a bunch of grown adults running around in spandex more believable the trial of the monarch is one of the best behind the scenes episodes of the series in that we get to see a much more mundane side to so many of the characters lives such as the monarch crying over a tell-all book being written exposing his worst aspects while causing a lover's spent with doctor girlfriend but simultaneously we get to see a lot of the more high concept aspects of the show's world building this is our first look at guild strangers a reference to say my fourth favorite david bowie song as well as a glimpse into the inner workings of the gci this episode suffers a bit in that many of the early scenes are buildups to nothing but that largely serves in favor of the fake out halfway through the episode it builds on the universe of the adventure brothers which is the aspect of the show that i personally believe is responsible for keeping so many fans coming back to it time and time again 8 out of 10. return to spider skull island 1 corinthians 13 11 when i was a child i spoke like a child i thought like a child i reasoned like a child when i became a man i gave up childish ways doc is overwhelmed by intense pain during a screening of rocky horror prompting brock to take him to the emergency room his malady ends up being a mysterious tumor which steals his dead after disappearing from the hospital this tumor ends up being doc's twin brother who he absorbs in the womb hence all the mommy placed dreams and the two end up fighting for survival helper ends up rescuing an incapacitated brock dog and ends up knocking out the evil twin at the same time the bee plot is about doctor orpheus pursuing the venture brothers after they run away due to a conception misconception this plot converges with the sea plot of the monarch sorting out his affairs from prison when 21 and 24 accidentally killed the venture boys season 1 is an interesting season of television as you can watch in real time as the show transforms from a johnny quest parody with a touch of cynical realism into something entirely new greater than the sum of its parts all while retaining every ideal on which it was initially conceived we get to watch characters go from onenote parodies of pop culture icons to realistic character studies in their own right while the setting goes from the fantastical racism of the 50s to a semi-utopic parody of the pop cultural space of today i've always thought of the venture brothers as the result of pop culture burnout i regularly see posts from people online lamenting the overuse of certain tropes in fiction and expressing how tiring the same few predictable character arcs playing out again and again can be to a viewer the venture brothers feels like a show created by people who are tired of the lacking creativity in modern comic and cartoon writing while not having a disdain for the mediums as a whole it's a good nature parodies of these old works one that revels in the raw emotion that comes forth from embracing your inner child instead of bashing anybody who killed things fondly of those good old days to quote c.s lewis when i became a man i put away childish ways including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up this episode is a fitting conclusion to a season of television that preceded it and ultimately receives a six out of ten it's a nice send off to the old winter brothers but it's also very good that the early season of the show was put to rest in favor of what the show would later become the season finale has many of the same faults as the season before it but without this first season the growth of the characters in the world moving forward would be that much weaker thank you season 1 for being the test dummy for the greatest show ever to air on television a very venture christmas dr venture has a cryptic christmas themed nightmare followed by a cryptic christmas-themed dream followed again by a christmas-themed party involving several characters who have no right gathering at the ventures is after dean accidentally summons an eastern european holiday demon the christmas party gets crashed and ruined until midnight when the krampus leaves and the monarch kills everybody there with c4 of course this is all revealed to be a dream and the x1 has simply crashed into an international holy site if you can't already tell i don't like this episode i almost considered leaving it out of this series altogether in fact it almost didn't exist due to budgetary constraints and also aired out of chronological order leaving many viewers confused as to why the avenger boys were suddenly alive this episode draws heavily from forced christmas specials of the time it's parodying from characters celebrating the holidays alongside people they should for all intents and purposes despise to inexplicable out of character traditions coming into the center of attention nothing that happens in this episode feels like it's in character for anybody to do again it's all a dream in the end but that doesn't really excuse the episode's lacking qualities it's as though the showrunners wanted to parody old christmas specials as completely as possible down to the not being very good part if it didn't exist and never existed i doubt anybody would feel as though there were anything missing the whole special feels less like an episode of the venture brothers and more like an inside joke the audience is left out of maybe it's just ptsd for my parents leaving a christmas story on 24 7 for the whole month of december but this grinch is giving the episode a one out of ten hank and dean are dead doc goes on a soul-searching journey traveling the world in order to find himself or possibly just kill time when he returns he tests out a teleporter that jonas jr was working on only to trap himself inside of a wall distraught over his perceived failure to protect the boys byron orpheus attempts to seek their soul so that he might resurrect them only to learn that the boys are in fact clones and that dr venture has merely been delaying creating new ones over in prison the monarch plots his escape only to be thwarted when phantom limb bribes all his co-conspirators to ignore the plan love wins in the end though and king gorilla assists inspired by the monarch's passion the venture brothers has an interesting take on serialization and media naturally the cartoons on which it was based had a resetting continuity that means that every episode was told as a standalone story so they could be watched in any order and still make sense this had the downside of ensuring that no proper character development could ever occur as it would cause confusion in viewers who missed an episode or several so the universe would softer reset between episodes with the characters learning nothing and no true growth ever taking place the venture brothers excuse this relationship not by totally subverting it but by instead exploring how to resolve characters refusing to learn from mistakes with reality in any other show major characters cannot die because that would damage the continuity the viewer is never concerned for the well-being of the cast because they know this in the venture brothers hank and dean cannot die because they have backups the viewer is never concerned for their well-being because they know this the same general principle applies to character growth as well but that will be covered in a different video this is probably the episode that i come back to re-watch the most in part because it's the start of the quote unquote good seasons of the venture brothers and therefore the beginning of any half-assed re-watch but also because it has my second favorite scene in the entire show the death montage we get scenes of characters in bizarre situations nonchalantly reacting to other bizarre situations i mean how often do you see a parent joking about their child's death while trapped half inside a tv in a world that seems to constantly be on the verge of collapse where a life-changing event after life-changing event happens on a near weekly basis it only makes sense that the people living in the middle of it all would be desensitized to the madness the venture brothers really was ahead of its time in this regard and for that it receives a 9 out of 10. 21 and 24 rebuild the monarch's cocoon after its destruction including the reconstruction of its crew of henchmen their first impromptu mission is a disaster however as their plans are thwarted and the monarch crew decides to mutiny after capturing dock doc the monarch 21 and 24 team up to swarm the throne room phantom lin goes shopping for a new kitchen set only for the monarch's failed mission to ruin his afternoon he winds up nursing an injured brock back to help and the two of them team up to swarm the throne room doctor girlfriend hank and dean wind up stranded at the mall after their associates all leave without them and they team up to swarm the throne room naturally the throne room is a scene of a battle although it's one-sided since barack and phantom limb are on the same team an interesting question is raised by the previous episode powerless in the face of death that gets answered in this one namely who becomes a henchman it's not as though there's no demand for non-super jobs in the venture brothers universe you can easily make a living fitting speed suits or working in a food court or as a mall cop so i take the job of professional henchmen when the conditions are so terrible are these people who are hoping to break into the field of professional minutes are the perks that great or is villainy an industry that preys on the undereducated and vulnerable members of society with the promise of a better life in exchange for the best years of theirs we see a strong indication in this episode that the answer is the latter most of these options from the us military style recruitment cable complete with shilling the lifestyle advantages to a group of what we'll call urban youth we really see either end of the competency spectrum on this episode as far as the world of super science goes on one end a group of men in butterfly costumes wielding collectible trading cards on the other two men hopped up on muscle growth accelerator wielding experimental personal hovercrafts we also get to see just how valuable the mindless discipline of a trained henchman can be as brock comments on how much of a joke the disorganized thugs of the new monarch crew are which two amance who spent the last season mowing down the monarchs men with this car is really saying something the interactions between phantom women brock are some of my favorite in the series and it's a real shame this is the only time the two of them get to interact admirably and of course my absolute favorite scene from the entire show is in this episode set to the score of holt's mars the song i played in high school i could be pedantic about some aspects of this episode like how hank basically has no job through the entire thing or how some of the humor doesn't really work as well today but ultimately it's harder to give this episode anything lower than a 9 out of 10. assassinate 9-1-1 rock is sent on a secret mission to assassinate a rogue osi agent who was also his mentor and leaves molotov in charge of watching the venture family while he's away molotov is disgusted by the condition of the venture's physique and forces him into a physical training regimen this terrifies dean but arouses hank who begins to view his father as an enemy to his unrequited romance after accidentally drugging himself this results in him attacking his father though the sword is paper mache so the only result is him getting grounded brock begins to feel nostalgic for his days as a new osi recruit remembering all of his old training as he stalks through the jungles of the fictional macronesia when he finally tracks hunter gathers it's revealed that she has undergone gender reassignment surgery and therefore is no longer a valid target for assassination molotov's character has always served as a foil to that of brock sampson both of them worked for the government for a time before branching off to do their own work both are highly skilled assassins capable of taking out small armies by themselves both are superlative gender stereotypes brock being an excessively manly man while attacking an excessively womanly woman but their differences are what highlight aspects of each other's character molotov asks brock in this episode if he would be willing to work alongside her as a pair of mercenaries an offer that brock refuses without much thought while brock is loyal to his found family molotov has no such allegiances simply going wherever she can get the biggest paycheck brock is rarely willing to fight dirty preferring a head-on engagement and refusing to use guns molotov is never above manipulation and playing her enemies against each other an aspect of her personality that begins to rub off on brock before his ultimate revelation and retirement at the end of season three this is the episode where the venture brothers really begins to grow up so to speak hank is no longer a naive child eagerly going along with whatever his father wants brock is no longer a one note killing machine and begins to show his first signs of complexity and the cracks in the venture family start to expand more and more as interpersonal conflicts begin to take center stage brock's mission strongly parallels the schlocky manly comics of the silver age complete with cultural stereotypes and set pieces it has a decent setup and payoff with the running joke of hunter gathers always donning a female costume turning into the resolution of the episode's plot not everything about this episode is aged well some of the humor being based on stereotypes rather than references and early versions of later plots always end up feeling a little half-baked this episode gets a 5 out of 10 mostly for repeating many of the missteps of season 1 while the aspects of it that are wholly new end up being a bit forgettable escape to the house of mummies part two if you try to please audiences uncritically accepting their tastes it can only mean that you have no respect for them after being trapped inside the house of mummies from the previous episode's cliffhanger the venture family relies on dr orpheus to rescue them from being crushed to death by the spiked walls doc escapes to go get help but upon arriving back in the compound he gets into a petty argument over the merits of science vs magic this argument culminates in a shrinking contest where the smallest man after 24 hours wins orpheus asks his master for help only to be told that in the cosmic scheme of things he cannot become any smaller than he already is doc tries to obtain the shrink ray he sold to billy and pete back in tag sale you're it only to discover it broken ultimately the two competitors fail to shrink themselves at all and decide to have rice pudding to celebrate their mutual failure the entire episode is interspersed with increasingly ridiculous scenarios involving the rest of the family ranging from bill and ted's excellent adventure to the empire strikes back none of these scenarios end up being important to the overall plot of the episode as nothing ever comes of them there is no escape to the house of mummies part one or three the thematic invention of this episode is merely a joke at the expense of the section of the audience obsessed with serialization from this structure we can see that escape to the house of mummies is just another week in the life of the venture family that his boys and bodyguard being left for dead in the pyramid temple is just another tuesday to dock through the episode you might expect to see some semblance of balance to the varox scenes something to explain the end media's res opening of the episode but the longer they go on the more you learn that the plot synopsis itself is part of the joke it's a level of meta humor that the show is built on and it's funny to see it expanding even to external aspects of the show the venture brothers is serialized it's episodic but importantly the world of the avenger brothers doesn't care about its audience which is a refreshing change of pace from the modern trend of subverting audience expectations for the sake of subverting audience expectations this is probably one of the best episodes of the venture brothers to show to somebody who is skeptical of its quality or if it's worth the investment to watch the venture brothers is a show that's hard to follow if you haven't been around since the beginning due to how much of a misconception is that the show is episodic but episodes like escape to the house of mommy's part 2 show that you can enjoy an episode without being able to follow its plot the grand overarching stories have always been secondary to the character interactions and world building of the venture brothers and this is an episode that delivers heavily on the former of those two i especially love how pete white disassembled the shrink ray because he thought there was a map inside and billy frustrated interrupts stock's incredulity by it stating that they've already had the argument a thousand times this episode gets a 10 out of 10 for making no sense and using that fact to its advantage as much as it possibly can oh and has h young benjamin in it ignore me i wanted to do that since i started this series after finding an old betamax tape while doing some cleaning the venture family learns of an invention left behind by jonas which must be assembled in a specific spot on a specific date a looming alien appears and claims that it will cast judgment on humanity soon and that the ventures should simply ignore it until then the parts of the device are scattered in multiple locations throughout the world so doc reluctantly accepts the help of his brother to find each component before the deadline after retrieving them and reuniting they are caught by professor impossible who assembles the machine for them as he believes the venture family is unfit to do so when the galactic inquisitor arrives the device turns on where an alien masquerading as jonas arrives and shoots it this is the first episode where jonas jr gets to function as anything other than a foil to dock acting as a character in his own right typically he's nothing more than rusty if rusty didn't have any childhood trauma whether or not that's enough justification for his failures in this episode we get to finally see him acting as his own person and see how he behaves in situations without anybody to compare to jj is typically viewed as the stereotypical 21st century entrepreneur creating technology that's more in line with what consumers would want instead of things that push the bounds of speculation while jonas senior constructed gargantua 1 primarily as a research base jonas jr constructed gargantua ii as a casino resort first with research as a secondary function we also see the inventions as empires built on being more mass consumer-friendly such as the j-phone a clear xp of the iphone rusty meanwhile largely works on military contracts designing weaponry and killbots jonas jr represents the leap into the 21st century that so many other characters are reluctant to make and we get to see a lot of perspective of the world from an in-universe outsider to it 20 years to midnight is one of the better episodes as far as its humor goes it has great line delivery something i feel is always underrated in comedy this is also one of the grandest episodes of the series so far with the cast traveling all over the world before eventually saving it it has a high concept ending where characters speculate on life outside the universe brought back down by rusty lamenting that they don't even have gas money to show for it i like the nonchalant personality this episode gives to saving the world from cosmic beings the plot is a reference to marvel's living tribunal who deems the earth unworthy after seeing human potential for evil but is dissuaded from destroying it when he had shown the human capacity for good in the venture brothers he simply killed with a regular blast to the head seven out of ten victor echo november dr venture needs the boys out of the house so he can get some alone time and sets them up on a double date with triana and a girl who is not important at the same restaurant happens to be the monarch phantom limb and doctor girlfriend who are discussing the monarch's re-admittance into the guild during an argument phantom limbs sends a squad of assassins to the venture complex in order to flex on the monarch brock subdues a few of the guild strangers before making it to the restaurant and talking phantom lamented calling off the hit phantom limb is one of the last gentlemen villains left in the setting of the venture brothers a holdover from an earlier age of costumed aggression villainy is an industry in the universe of the venture brothers like any industry there's less demand for passion and genuine talent as there is for politicking and middle management because of this it's easy to see how a person who loves his job like the monarch can find it difficult to thrive in this line of work phantom limb on the other hand was made for the guild he loves his role as the manager of villainy and thrives under the constraints on hatred that the modern guild is forced to implement it's fitting then that it's the passion of the phantom limb that ends up getting him expelled from the guild later driven to war by his notion that he deserves more for the work he's been doing and of course when the guild is reformed later with the more caring leadership it does so with phantom limb as one of the council members in the end it was the guild that changed for the phantom and not the other way around there's an interesting trend starting in the second season of practically writing rusty out of episodes he has a very limited role in hate floats and the first active victor echo of november is essentially an explanation for why he has so little influence on the plot of this episode barack could have been trying to protect helper for all the influence doc has but with doc taking up less and less of the spotlight we get to see much more of the stage as well as much more of the rest of the cast on that stage hank and dean finally get a chance to do normal teenager things brock gets to kill a bunch of guys and we see the monarch pick out insurance options victor echo november is a great episode at not only building the universe but also moving pieces into plates for later plots all while treating us to some great action some good humor and some new perspectives on the world it gets an 8 out of 10 held back by the fact that you can really tell doc hamer and jackson public don't really know how to write teenage girls love bites the x1 crash lands in underland as the venture family is on their way home from a costume contest mistaking dean's costume for a dress underbite declares his intentions to marry dean and the venture family is unwillingly forced to attend the wedding as they plot their escape they find out that a resistance movement is alive and well within the walls of the castle underbite and they plot their escape slash revolution the wedding is ultimately called off when dean reveals his gender to underbite who has been arrested for violating his own indecency laws baron warner underwrite is an interesting villain as he's one of the few antagonists we see who isn't allied with the gci instead being the ruler of his own country underland right on the border of michigan aside from his muscles and detachable jaw underbite isn't particularly capable on his own rather he uses the resources of his country to produce menace underland is a land shown to be desolate and inhospitable to life the people living in squalor assuming they don't perish during their military service i've never been completely certain whether underwrite actually has any henchmen orpheus citizens but it's clear that he has a certain degree of loyalty from his soldiers derived from their fear of him after love bites he is deposed from the government and vanishes for about two seasons before showing up again halfway through season four to join the revenge society his role beyond this point is greatly diminished as he does a little else aside from serve as muscle for the organization he ends up being written out of the show after an ambiguous death scene in the season 6 opener and never really serves a narrative purpose beyond this episode underland as a setting is not altogether interesting we get a few jokes about how awful it is but aside from that we get very little that's done with the setting as a unique place even the resistance movement is really just there to fuel some comedy and ends up being secondary this episode could have taken place in a castle outside gary indiana for all the good it's setting did for it the jokes about dean being feminine wear out pretty quickly and although we get some great moments involving the bet love bites ends up being a pretty forgettable episode really before this re-watch i thought it was a season 1 episode at least being in season 1 would have made the 4 out of 10 i'm giving it make a little bit more sense fallen arches dr orpheus is approved for an arch nemesis but only as a team he must reassemble the order of the triad so that he can host tryouts for a new villain while he's busy the venture family is in charge of keeping triana entertained so dean puts on an oscar wilde play meanwhile at the monarch slayer the monarch entertains a prostitute before sending her through a death gauntlet in the d-pod of the episode 21-24 steal jet packs and plan on faking their own super villainy this episode even has an e plot where rusty becomes jealous of the attention that the triad is receiving i've brought up the term nominative determinism before basically the idea that the labels we assign have an influence on the development of whatever that label is attached to if somebody is labeled a villain they're going to begin to behave like a villain they'll think of themselves as a villain and they'll begin to seek out ways to reinforce their own self-image a person who is labeled a villain once will likely go down to pat the villainy on their own if only because they believe that's what they have to do with their lives the fact that people will also treat them that way only reinforces their beliefs about themselves and the whole cycle continues on the purpose of the gci and osi is largely to help with assisting people's self-image putting a label on them and giving them a place to belong in a morally ambiguous world i'm not denouncing this style of living though it's not as though this is a bad way to find yourself many real world organizations do the same thing this is why people join charities or create art or join a religion but it's also why people join cults or gangs or religions it's much easier to say i'm a fire themed super villain or i'm a black yellow hunter or i kill guys in the tuxedo than it is to try and self-reflect without at least a bass line to start with fallen arches has one of my favorite sublots in an episode that of the order of the triad seeking a new arch enemy but that plotline is forced to share an episode with four other plots and as a result none of them really get room to breathe i feel as though there could have been an entire episode dedicated to 21 and 24 failing at arches in new ways before giving up on the idea the core of this episode is great but unfortunately it's dragged down by the restraints of making room for other parts of the episode and ends up showing a mere fraction of what it could have been speaking of fractions here's one 6 out of 10 needs more dana snyder guess who's coming to state dinner gargantua 1 crashes into the desert destroying a terrorist camp and earning bud manstrong the title of national hero he and the venture family are given an invitation to a state dinner where doc plans to sell new tech to the white house and the white house plans to sell a vice presidency to bud the ghost of ave lincoln notices a microchip in the back of bud's neck and recruits the help of the venture voice to make a corporeal body so that he can save the president from what he assumes will be an assassination attempt this episode features a president who is a combination of bush and clinton and comes off as a caricature straight out of the early odds most of the episode's humor matches this and comes across as very dated in fact it's hard to rewatch this without immediately feeling like you're back in 2006 when the episode aired this is an example of when the referential humor of the show outweighs the rest of the comedy and the result is an episode of television that's barely worth revisiting often when the venture brothers makes a reference they're referencing something from long enough ago that it becomes more timeless than dated if the material being referenced or parodied is too recent it dates the episode at best and at worst makes the audience say wait people still talk about that here's a fun fact about me the first time i ever saw this episode was while i was in washington dc as part of a school trip it was neat to see an episode of a tv show take place in the same location i was currently visiting yes i was the guy who watched cartoons instead of talking to people i guess not much has changed the plot of guess who's coming to state dinner was hard to follow back then and still is now even after i know what's going on apparently we were meant to actually pause during the newspaper bits in order to fill in the gaps but again 2006 a few of the running jokes don't land well the first time they're told and then continue cropping up repeatedly and of course this episode is based on one of the weaker season 1 episodes inheriting many of its issues for forcing us to all remember what we were doing in 2006 and giving us this frame of television the episode gets a 3 out of 10. i know why the caged bird kills remember several weeks ago when i asked viewers watching at home to name a single meme from the venture brothers that managed to go mainstream instituting that there were none well i was wrong hank and dean are kidnapped by myra brandish a former bodyguard of rusty's who claims to be their mother as doc and orpheus are busy trying to exorcise in oni it's up to brock to rescue the boys in the other plot line the monarch's cocoon is being taken over by the henchmen of a mysterious dr henry killinger a villainous life coach who is trying to reunite dr girlfriend and the monarch for the sake of true love the venture brothers have had a lot of flashbacks throughout the series run most of these exist as comedic set pieces and rarely have a large effect on the plot but others are much more important the question asked then is if these moments in the past are so important why are they only now just being brought up there are varying answers throughout the series for this and the writers get great mileage out of the boys being clone and rusty not really caring too much to fill them in on everything a lot of characters get amnesia or have their memories wiped but since these are cliches of the genre being parodied the writers are again able to get a lot of mileage out of this convention flashbacks are typically the best way to inform the audience of things the characters already know without resorting to a conversation where characters recap knowledge for no real reason another common way is to have a layman character somebody new to the world slowly learn these things as they interact more and more basically the core premise of isekai in the end the venture others recognizes that it's better to show rather than tell and that flashbacks are basically just telling the audience what they should have seen before so when flashbacks are done they're done in a way that serves the structure of the episode like in past tense or done with an ample amount of bias like in victor echo november i know why the caged bird kills has a few too many ongoing plots for its own good rusty and orpheus get too little development on their relationship during their scenes to justify those scenes existing in the first place and it comes across as the two characters just being written out of the episode 21 is surprisingly annoying when he doesn't have a character like 24 to bounce off of and the plot involving him and doctor girlfriend makes this point a bit too obvious it makes me appreciate the makeover he gets in season 4. this is also killinger's debut episode and i feel like the show runners weren't quite sure what they were doing with him yet his accent is a bit too thick for most of his punchlines to be understandable and it's not until i rewatched this episode with closed captions enabled that i even realized he has quite a few great jokes in this episode 5 out of 10 for trying a lot of new things even if only a few turned out all right viva los muertos dogventure has managed to reverse death resurrecting the corpse of a fallen monarch henchmen while educating the winter stein doc learns that the army has a demand for corpses they can strap explosives to and tries to figure out a way to mold the newly resurrected corpse to this new task brock begins to feel second thoughts about his role in the entire ordeal and after more prodding accepts a deal to visit a spiritual healing party hosted by orpheus meanwhile the compound is being investigated by a group similar to the cast of scooby-doo while also being themed around various real-world serial killers brock's military training ends up overriding the enlightenment nearly achieved by the vine trip and he flies into a homicidal rage killing the groovy gang and wrapping up the plot's loose ends brock sampson began the show as a killing machine a hammer a tool of the government to end the lives of its enemies but human desires and morality can only coexist with this type of lifestyle for so long and soon brock begins second guessing his actions ultimately brock finds that he does enjoy his work so long as he can find some meaning in it and in season 4 he leaves to do just that the lack of purpose in his life comes at more than just a cost to his psyche though season six comes with another character plot where brock lacking fulfillment realizes he's becoming a subpar agent but after an encounter with a lasso of truth brock becomes more honest with himself and accepts his role in life again even if it does get a bit boring at least boring to him viva los muertos is the only episode of the venture brothers not written by jackson public or doc hammer ben edlund previously worked on the episode guess who's coming to state dinner an episode i had problems with but when given full reigns on an episode he does a much better job a parody of scooby-doo starring serial killers is exactly the type of thing one has come to expect from the venture brothers and the dark humor in this episode manages to stay engaging without ever becoming edgy despite how shocking some of the content can be it's never presented as shock humor for the sake of shock humor instead coming across as a natural turn of events within the episode this is not an episode that you can show to a person who isn't already familiar with the venture brothers it's an example of how the show can be an acquired taste something that you have to warm yourself up to being able to not only understand but enjoy but having a few esoteric episodes like this can be a boon too the subject matter of the show is already somewhat niche the target audience being people with a specific childhood experience so having some episodes that help you feel like you're in on it makes being a fan that much more rewarding even if it comes at the cost of potentially keeping new viewers 7 out of 10. showdown at cremation creek part one sick of sneaking around and meeting in private the monarch finally proposes to doctor girlfriend she accepts on the condition that the monarch cease arching dr venture permanently unfortunately during the monarch's bachelor party his henchmen drunkenly capture the entire venture family forcing the monarch to pretend he's only holding them so that they might attend the wedding the venture family receives tours of the cocoon as the wedding is being prepared and they end up going their separate ways for a time but the wedding ends up being crashed by phantom limb partially because he's jealous of the monarch but mostly because he wants control over the guild in a practically unrelated plot the order of the triad laments on their lack of training and decides to hold a slumber party slash training session this is part one of a two-parter so my off-topic rant this episode will be about something fun rather than something about the show so here are as many david bowie references that i can find he is first mentioned in episode 5 by roy brisby the opening to episode 7 is an extended space oddity reference action man is a recurring character as of that episode as well guild strangers possibly a reference to oh you pretty things the shot of rock on a dolphin is a reference to a tattoo bowie has on his leg but we appear seemingly in person in this episode referencing oh you pretty things and diamond dogs by name and hank refers to him as the guy from labyrinth colonel gentleman says oh you pretty thing verbatim a guy in the sewers is dressed in a costume from the ashes to ash's music video ours really was a totally underrated album phantom lim calls roy the thin white douche later on eat white dresses as the thinner whiter duke for halloween once again bowie referred to as queen colonel gentleman is wearing an outfit from dancing in the streets music video and of course 24 is a poser listening to a best dome the first two-parter episode of the series but not the last showdown at cremation creek is also the conclusion to the first holy new plots of the venture brothers that is this is the first big episode of the show an episode that the previous season has been building up to the things expected of an episode of this size are all present a majority of the characters introduced thus far are involved it takes place in an event where all those characters are gathered and the justification is something that should have long-term effects on at least part of the cast all of the ingredients for a finale are here but the episode doesn't quite justify using every single one of them the triad could be completely written out of this episode and it wouldn't change anything teen subplot also has very little reason to exist and it just feels like the writers couldn't come up with anything else for him to do it's not a bad episode a starting montage gives a real feeling of high stakes and the direction of the episode comes across as much more cinema-worthy than earlier episodes it's a clear attempt at making the story feel grand and the show runners pull that off even if there are a few missteps here and there 8 out of 10 for the bowie impersonation alone showdown at cremation creek part 2. the sovereign is defeated and phantomlim has managed to take over the guild and his first act is to completely crush the monarch and everybody else in his way unfortunately for him this includes barack sampson who assists the monarch's henchmen in launching a counter-offensive and destroying phantom limb's new empire meanwhile dean who was tripping on exhaust fumes from the cocoon's engine imagines an elaborate fantasy world before being rescued by the order of the triad who are also in this episode this is a finale of season 2 in the first real conclusive season finale plots being built up for the last 12 episodes all come to a head here and it ends with a big hook for the future of the series as cliches these types of endings have become in later seasons for now it's still fresh and the show pulls it off remarkably well typically jackson public and dog hammer will write the first and last episodes of each season before the rest of the season in order to give them some idea of how different episodes should progress and what plot points they should and should not cover this is a decent method for keeping the show's structure even each episode can stand on its own while also feeling like it's an ongoing serialized show season one felt like it was meant to be a standalone season of television it's not uncommon for adult swim to pick up shows for a brief period of time only to drop it just when the showrunners start to figure out what they're doing the venture feathers alongside shows like menolocalypse and aquateen hungerforce were some of the exceptions to this rule but as of season 2 it was beginning to look as though the vintage brothers would be around for a long time and yes as of uploading this video the most recent episode air 12 years after the one i'm currently talking about so this is the first season where the creators are beginning to make more long-term plans for the show rather than keeping things simple and episodic showdown at cremation creek part 2 inherits many of the problems that part 1 had mostly with plot lines existing solely to have characters involved with the episode especially with dean whose spotlight seems to exist just so they can have triana pete white and billy quiz boy listen in the end credits we also see many characters who up to this point have only been mentioned by name and passing hatred into being a major character later on and this two-parter is his debut episode though he was mentioned as early as the second episode of this season the whole episode does a great job at achieving what it sets out to do which itself is already incredibly ambitious and at the fitting conclusion to an amazing season of television nine out of ten and see you in season three shadow man 9 in the cradle of destiny the monarch and doctor girlfriend are interrogated about their mutual past with the treacherous phantom limb this episode uses a trial slash tribunal crucible framing device in order to set up its series of flashbacks that explain these relationships the scenes of the past appearing on screens in the interrogation chamber here we see the monarch's early days prior to him joining the guild as well as the first time that he meets doctor girlfriend and their developing relationship in the end the council finds the monarch and doctor girlfriend both innocent of any association with phantom limb as well as compatible villains in the b plot we see the monarch's old henchmen rebuilding the cocoon under the direction of the murderous muppets 21 and 24 conspired to call brock over to fight them on their behalf only for brock to call in reinforcements to help them rebuild the monarch was once a side character in the venture brothers but by season 3 he's gone from recurring villain to important enough to have his own episode he's a representation of genuine passion and a career field that no longer has room for that passion the monarch is an individual defined by his single-minded dedication to getting the things that he wants and is possibly the most admirable out of a cast of characters who are largely has beens and stagnant if he wants something he tries to get it and that drive of his is what causes a lot of the conflict with the guild as i've said before villainy has become an industry in the world of the venture others and like with any bureaucracy has more interest in preserving itself than the core principles on which it was founded there is no room for people who actually care in the guild and they routinely butt heads over the monarch not playing by their rules rules which seem to serve only to stagnate the conflict between each side remember at the end of season 2 when i said that the finale suffered from trying to include the venture family it's as though the writers heard my backseat whinging from over a decade after the episode aired and addressed it this is the first episode to not feature any of the venture family's voice work doc is only seen in a flashback and has no spoken lines and brock is never even viewed directly all of his screen time being from a distance and the episode benefits greatly from this advantage it's an episode with several flashbacks jumping from time to time between scenes but it never comes across as confusing or hard to follow largely because there are only two plots to follow in the present it goes heavily into behind the scenes aspects of the guild for most of the episode's run time it expands on one-off lines from earlier episodes such as the beginning of season two when dr girlfriend mentions number two for truckee lees and of course it has a wonderful callback to season two in the episode's finale being to the tune of holt's jupiter also from the planet symphonies this episode feels like i'm being pandered to so i give it a 10 out of 10 if only out of obligation the doctor is sin after a failed sales pitch to the us military and lamenting over his life in the shadow of his brother dr venture finds help in a familiar place dr henry killinger killinger assists venture in getting his life back on track revitalizing industry at the compound and soon giving rusty a second shot in life with the catch that he joins the guild of calamitous intent to arch his brother rusty considering himself a good person refuses the offer and the assistance that comes with it only for his life to return to the miserable state it was once in the venture brothers it is often said is a show about failure it's about the failure of the characters to fulfill the promises of their early lives it's about the failure to create new meaning from that lack of success it's about the failure to provide the future anybody wants or even needs everything comes back to failure but far from being pessimistic about the topic the venture brother shows the beauty of how failure can manifest people will define themselves by what they do and then not even do that very well and yet continue to try every single day characters in media can fail and in doing so make themselves more relatable to the audience rather than some supreme ubermensch to be put on a pedestal we see a human being whose flaws endear us to them more than their positive traits failure is a part of life failure is a part of success and failure is a part of the venture brothers this is the most important episode of the venture growth the ending is in my opinion the defining moment of rusty's relationship with his past future and self despite the trauma and failure of his past he still wants to be a good person and still views himself as one it's what the characters aspire to be that defines the more than what they are and that's at the core of the episode we see the return of dr henry killinger this time being a much more focused character whose role in the plot has a stronger definition than before making his inclusion a welcome call back rather than unwanted intrusion we get a lot of scenes of various characters struggling and turning to others for support and in doing so much more is revealed about them than what we would see during a typical day in their lives the moment where rusty and in turn the audience realizes that killinger is trying to groom dr venture into super villainy is perhaps the greatest wow this show has the exact moment you realize that everything he's saying makes sense and the exact moment you start to question the very foundation of the show we've taken for granted the fact that rusty is considered a protagonist in this universe just because he played one on television years ago the doctor his sin represents the exact moment where the fincher brothers has officially shed its skin as a parody of silver age cartoons and has become an original universe in its own right and for that it gets an eleven out of ten the invisible hand of fate the entire episode is a flashback that occurs as billy is having his hand recalibrated in this flashback we see billy during his quiz boy days where a cheating scandal ruins his chances at going to mit forcing him and pete white to travel across the country to work for rusty venture due to extenuating circumstances the two are rejected and pete ends up entering billy into a dogfighting competition ruining everybody's theories on how billy lost his hand and eye after he leaves pete he is poached by the osi who need a student to spy on a pre-super villainy phantom limb the spying goes wrong when professor fantamos's limb regeneration machine goes awry and billy lacks the technical expertise to fix it resulting in an explosion and the characters progressing to their modern positions billy and pete were initially planned to have their own separate videos but it's almost impossible to comprehensively talk about one without the other the two represent a semi-standard those two guys duo that the venture brothers uses regularly with the added caveat that they are rusty super science contemporaries two out of luck amateurs who routinely find their lives intertwining with the titular families feet is more down to earth and level-headed of the two lacking in ambition but not empathy while being content to spend time with the people closest to him billy on the other hand has much higher ambition but is naive about the way the world works which often holds them back from success while so many other characters inherit the traumas of their caretakers getting forced into the world of super signs billy and pete are initially outsiders entering the world with no expectations on them other than the initial impressions one might have of a person with a deformity the invisible hand of fate touches on this topic as well as that of betrayal the two things that often cause people in this universe to quote unquote go bad billy is betrayed by the crew of the quiz boy show he's on he's let down by pete who fails to keep him safe on the road he's disappointed by the real personality of rusty venture billy is explicitly chosen to spy on professor fandemos because he fits the profile of a super villain something that works to get the two of them closer together but one important thing about billy's whole journey is that fundamentally he still wants to do the right thing after being betrayed by his childhood hero he still wants to help in the fight against the gci after getting his memories back he still returns to his old ambitious self so while billy is naive about the world he never lets the cruel reality stop him from having his dreams and is an admirable character in this regard the venture brothers is a show all about nostalgia and in an era where many people seem to be poisoned by irony it's refreshing to see an episode all about a character who never lets cynicism spoil his personality billy represents the venture bros more than any other character he loves the pop culture the show was founded on and doesn't really care what other people think about the fact if they don't like it that sucks for them not him this episode gets a 10 out of 10. you think that what is effectively a lore dump would come off as forced but this episode never feels that way home is where the hate is monarch and co move into their new house formerly that of phantom limb and happen to be neighbors with dr avengers newly assigned archwill and urgent hatred after giving a gift basket of okra and a few pre-screening questions to the doctor hatred invites all his villain friends as well as the ventures to his house for a party he throws a few jabs at the monarch here before dropping a metaphorical bomb revealing that he knows about the previously alluded to theft of his property and that he plans on pampering venture in order to get his revenge on the monarch the monarch then drops a literal bomb revealing he's placed an explosive on dog with a plan to kill him in hatred's own house destroying both of them at the same time the palm ends up being a dud similarly to the b plot where adventure boys spend a bit of time with 21 and 24. an aspect of villainy often touched upon in the adventure brothers is the idea of the punch card villain we regularly see characters in the show with the capability to turn off the hatred returning to their mundane suburban lives as though their day job was that of an accountant interestingly this seems to be something unique to both veterans in the industry as well as that of villains the people with the greatest capacity for evil seem to be those who are the most likely to keep a healthy family life sure some superheroes in the show have secret identities and there are a handful of villains who are hateful all the time but these are fewer and further between than what we see of the party-goers maybe it's a healthy part of a person's psyche to be able to express both their deeper darker desires while also having comfort and conformity to fire a death laser at a man's island base and then go home to be a family man home is where the hate is is one of my favorite episodes of the avenger brothers aesthetically we see a lot more of the background in this episode compared to the rimmel and there's something about how the horizons are drawn that made the show stand out the venture compound reminds me a bit of the usaf academy both of these places are located in colorado though perhaps it's not just a coincidence but anytime we get a shot near the window i find myself looking at the mountains instead of the people seeing the landscape in the neighborhood of malice is also great it's like nostalgia for an era of time in which i wasn't yet alive that sort of late 50s early 60s retro futurism promised in old commercials and media it's fitting that this is the time period at the venture brothers parodies the original johnny quest first airing in 1964 another mundane episode that doesn't have much action to it but maybe that's why the underwhelming muppet subplot is included sometimes you really do just want to see them fire that huge crossbow the venture brothers often works best when it's just people talking in low stakes scenarios and this is another episode that best shows off that aspect it gets an 8 out of 10 high highs low lows and nothing that rocks the boat too hard to keep it an easy watch it also has several moments that reward careful viewers the buddy system doc hosts a day camp for aspiring boy adventurers featuring boots by many of the world of the fantastic runners-up here hank makes a new friend dean makes a new enemy the monarch gathers basically no good intel and in true venture fashion somebody dies and is cloned back to normal uh triana's in this episode let's talk about her the daughter of byron orpheus triana is surprisingly distant from the bizarre world of the venture family and serves as an early season normie to draw parallels from the upbringing of the venture boys she often reacts with incredulity to the boy's naivety or serves as an outsider perspective to any of the main cast's antics triana largely serves as an example of the modern teenager utterly unconcerned with the nostalgia of bygone days because who the hell is still hung up on that she's not an especially well-developed character through the course of the show up until she's written out at the end of season 4 largely because she never really gets a spotlight episode triana serves to appear in a plot react to or support some other character's arc then leave never playing that big of a role in any story she's in i've said before that the showrunners are not especially great at writing female teenagers and i'll say it again here it's a saving grace perhaps that we never do see all that much of her since it would put that lacking experience into the spotlight the buddy system is almost like a sister episode to tag sale you're it in that it's a low stake series of slightly disconnected stories all centered around the compound the difference here is the same as the difference between seasons 1 and 3. in season 1 you could have a small scale plot with several characters because these characters didn't have much development at the time and therefore could get away with being secondary to their punchlines but in season 3 we have so many more complicated characters in play that we almost have to scale back some of what's going on if only so the characters don't feel forced in their inclusion we get the introduction to dr mrs the monarch's new costume sparking thousands of cosplays over the next decade as well as an introduction to dermot dermot is somewhat of a parallel to triana in that he's a quote normie who serves to show how underdeveloped the boys are as humans i like many others didn't like dermid at first which is perhaps the intention of his character but the venture brothers of the show not about characters but interactions even here we can see some development in brock as he struggles to handle a child pushing his buttons a conflict that cannot be solved with this knife overall i'm giving this episode a seven out of ten like tag sale it's a small episode but with the evolution that the show has undergone over the last two seasons small episodes like that don't work as well it speaks to the growth of the project that this episode gets a lower rating but remember just because something is changing doesn't mean it's getting worse dr quim medicine woman the venture family is training orangutans to box in the jungle when dog steals a fertility idol from a nearby tribe he is rescued by an old childhood love the titular dr quim after this initial meetup dr venture and co decide to set up camp near the similarly themed family as they assist with their investigations into a cancer-curing plant this is only a thin veneer however as the true motivation for their cohabitation becomes more and more clear like all things in the characters lives this ends in a massive failure everybody involved worse off than they were at the start of the episode a start that brock describes as a new personal low none of the venture boys have had a normal childhood they're all stunted in many ways emotionally physically and of course romantically love is an important part of life second only to basic needs like food and shelter and to be denied that is a guarantee to have some sort of stunted growth also like food and shelter naturally this is an aspect of the characters that must be explored alongside all of the other symptoms of pop culture brain wrought in the show the results are no less gruesome than anything else the characters may have gone through for all intents and purposes rusty is no more of a man than hank and dean in this sector of life of course all of this is implied to be a result of their respective upbringings so it's natural they'd be similar in this regard this is one of the most focused character episodes of the show in part because of how withdrawn it is whereas home is where the hate is has a large number of characters involved dr quinn medicine woman has exactly eight named characters outside of flashbacks no cutaways no b-plots final destination strictly speaking there is a v-plot in this episode in the wareodile storyline but they practically flaunt how little any of it matters to the point that the mystery gets solved in the post-credits scene after the venture family has left four of the characters in this episode are mirrored versions of the venture family and the writers assume the audience will pick up enough on the parallels that some of the storylines and character motivations are left open based on this idea i appreciate that the episode is written this way instead of lacing the whole thing with exposition dumps but despite how efficiently it develops the character relationships we're still not left with all that much to go on i get that dr quim is supposed to be a female rusty but at times she's shown to be almost successful to the point of coming across as a foil like look at everything she's accomplished while rusty is training in orangutan to box it kind of comes across as a surprise when she's just as down bad as the doctor but then again we're also meant to assume that her story is close enough to rusty that this should go without saying anyway this episode manages to have a satisfying finale but the build up to that point ends up going far too predictably for the ending to have any real impact or maybe i'm just a misogynist who knows biotin what goes down must come up while renovating a giant drill rusty falls into a hole in the ground finding himself in a fallout shelter beneath the venture compound while brock ends up sealed within its control room hank and dean called the order of the triad then later pete white in order to track down and rescue their guardians instead he ends up activating mother the ai control system for the shelter in the shelter doc learns that after an accident involving hallucinogens the rusty venture fan club was sealed inside left to fend for themselves with nothing but old hygiene videos and vh1 classics mother demands to see dr venture and threatens to launch a nuclear missile if he is not presented a demand she follows through on only for the end of the episode to reveal that all of her missiles were duds due to the fan club storing their waste inside late 50s and early 60s were a period of economic societal and scientific prosperity in the west a long period of frozen scientific interchange between the east and west was finally coming to an end and weapons once used for war were now being used to launch exploratory missions into space the international geophysical year and other scientific gatherings were promising the world a future vastly different from the current prosperity of the present even better than the wealth the world knew after the second world war we are offered cities run on solar power intercontinental high-speed rail space tourism and spandex jackets whether you call it naivety or hopeless optimism the echoes of that fantastic era still resonate in our culture today and the fincher brothers is a reflection of the broken promises that we're still waiting to see fulfilled where did things go so wrong were the fruits of that bygone era really enough to nourish the promised future or were we simply abandoned in that fallout shelter with the rest of our dreams it's impossible to say exactly what happened without starting a huge fight so i'm going to talk about a cartoon instead the late doctor venture is a bad person despite his public perception he has great pr and uses this through his advantage in the most manipulative ways that he can often escaping from karma by throwing the nearest fall group under the bus what goes down must come up is the first real example we get of jonas's more psychopathic tendencies at least as far as other people than his son are concerned i hadn't realized it till this watch through of the show but almost every episode of the third season so far has made heavy use of flashbacks and are all thoroughly obsessed with exploring the past rather than the present i understand that that's the point of the show but only now is it becoming so blatant what goes down must come up continues this theme as the episodes before and a few of the episodes after do the plot of the episode is ultimately underwhelming and as much as i hate saying this the inclusion of the triad never really goes anywhere and could have been done without despite my love of classic rock i have to be harsh so as not to show too much favoritism 4 out of 10 a few good ideas but it lays on the references incredibly thick tears of a sea cow following a failed or potentially very successful depending on your point of view arching the monarch crew finds themselves without an arch or even a purpose it's around this time that the monarch 21 and 24 learn that the venture compound is undefended and after a pep talk decide to strike but the compound while undefended is not empty as hank dean and dermot are present and killing time that night the henchmen hunt down hank and dermot which 101 accidentally teaching hank that he's a highlander while 24 bribes derma to keep quiet the monarch's hate spree is ended when doctor misses the monarch launches a counter assault to retrieve the monarch while also solving the problem of the board henchmen hate is a place where a man who can't stand sadness goes quintaro miora anger and rage are the collateral damage associated with an inability to regulate one's emotional state in the world of the venture brothers however it's something that can be industrialized it isn't especially bizarre to imagine that one can build an industry off of an emotion media is how many people learn to express themselves and feel things in a healthy compartmentalized way there are books plays and movies designed to make people feel sad just as there is media designed to give users a feeling of strength or pride it follows that the ability to feel pure hatred and wrath would have a role in a society a way to rage against what's unfair about the world without destroying the parts of it that we love in the process and just as there are ways to force these emotions out there are ways to fake them how many times have you been told to fake happiness or confidence or friendship until it comes easily enough to feel genuine but when a support system tells you to fake hatred when you have no trouble doing so what result does that have it's a bit like telling somebody to calm down only for them to become frustrated at your assurance and get more upset as a result tears of a sea cow is an episode largely about independence bank and dean get a chance to act independently of brock and doc the monarch and his henchmen get a chance to act independently of dr mrs the monarch and the pupa twins and we get to see that without the limitations of the guild placed on him the monarch can enact his truly evil schemes of taking a dump in the venture's pool or giving his robot chlamydia i'm starting to think that he might be a more effective villain when he works with his wife rather than behind her back tears of a sea cow is one of the best monarch episodes we get and is probably the best hanging out with the boys story in the series we have basically zero stakes and anything going on no grand set pieces no high concepts just guys being dudes it's a refreshing change of pace in a season where almost every plot has had massive amounts of development and every story told is so incredibly consequential so this episode gets a 6 out of 10 but not at all in the mediocre way who else doesn't love those round bombs with a tiny fuse on top now museum now you don't the jonas adventure junior museum of jonas adventure announces its grand opening on spider skull island the location of team venture's victory over the fraternity of torment he invites many people from venture's past from allies to associates to the villains gallery naturally this powder keg of conflicting desires ends up getting lit and the museum viewing ends in a huge fight stopped only by some out-of-contact words by the late jonas venture oh and also a bomb team venture is an idea that predates rusty and has undergone two stages of life at least as far as we know of the original team venture consists of the regular allies of jonas including colonel gentleman a british bond-like bisexual action man a semi-senile super soldier kano a mute martial arts master among many other less developed allies these are all characters touring from the pages of silver age comics a time when the comics code authority began as an alternative to government regulation of printed content a time that heavily incentivized black and white morality so as to prevent moral guardians from creating outrage over the perceived link between juvenile delinquency and comic consumption it was a time where the good guys were all ultra nationalist wasps and the bad guys were a gallery of uncomplicated stereotypes the two groups engaged in basic stories designed to prevent a single complex thought from occurring in their readers less the children something something reefer madness something something communism they were always vague about this now museum now you don't is one of my favorite episodes of the fincher brothers and probably the one best episode to summarize the show you get a lot of characters in one place but not many stories about individuals only a line or two about what their faults are this episode is exactly as doc says kind of an obvious conclusion from an outsider's perspective there's just something about the super science community that attracts people prone to these kind of outbursts this is an interesting episode and that takes place almost entirely in a single location spider skull island but unlike typical bottle episodes this one is still large in scope due to the massive cast involved as i said before we don't get that many individual character plots only continuations of what we know about them this episode is focused instead on exploring interactions between the characters and dynamics between groups and we learn much more about the setting as a result now museum now you don't need a nice step back from it all that lets us see the world from a fresh perspective and in a world as interesting as that of the venture brothers the episode deserves an 11 out of 10. the lepidopterist fresh off of a five arch killing streak the monarch prepares to fight his newest foe dr venture now the other one jonas jr learns about the arching game during this time thanks to some help from cardholder and doe two associates of the osi who are attempting to prevent the death of yet another of their members but the monarch has his own plans for his new arch and they don't involve killing rather he sends his two best henchmen and some other guy to install a surveillance patch that will cause jj to misfire when he attempts to kill the monarch this has the end result of granting him arching rights against dr venture once again i referred to 21 and 24 as the monarch's best henchmen earlier in his own words they are the right combination of invulnerable and expendable and because of this he chooses them for nearly every one of his missions it makes sense that he would consider them his best men after all they have the only true quality that a henchman needs loyalty after losing his whole crew at the end of season 1 21 and 24 are the only two henchmen who bothered to come back and of course it makes sense that we'd see at least some of his hensmen see some character develop the monarch is a recurring character the monarch has henchmen it follows that we will eventually see these henchmen enough to start recognizing them neither of them has had an especially interesting journey to the monarch service it's implied 24 had a weird home life and was looking for an escape from it whereas 21 got kidnapped and developed stockholm syndrome in this way the two serve to represent the monarch's henchmen in aggregate standing for what they all stand for this is the episode of the venture brothers that is the most upfront about what the show's conflicts are all about it's just a game they sharpen their claws stare each other down and make grand speeches about their ideals before going home and pretending it was all a success it isn't just the conflict itself that drives this idea home even conversations between action scenes can get a bit meta with dr mrs the monarch running through ideas on how to appear more menacing and 21 and 24 making fun of henchman 1 or falling into cliches this is one of the best episodes for fans of the monarchs henchmen and it's fitting that it comes right before the season 3 finale we get to see a very casual sign to almost everybody involved and through it all a bit of brilliance on the monarch's part it's a fantastic episode even if it leans a bit too heavily into the voltron reference at the beginning and gets a 9 out of 10. orb a pattern in the smoke morse code tapping in the background a series of hexadecimal colors translatable into english possibly nothing possibly hidden code operation rusty's blanket orders regarding bodyguard orb a conspiracy billy finds a treasure map centered on the winter compound after scouring for clues within the old rusty venture cartoon this map leads billy and dock on an adventure through coded messages that takes them to new york where they happen upon a mysterious artifact meanwhile barack goes on a journey to learn more about this artifact its history and ultimately why he has to kill rusty should he try to operate it who is hankendean's mother why is the monarchy dr venture what does the orb do detectives and mysteries have been a staple of comics since their inception and the tales of grand adventure being hidden just beneath the surface of our world are among the most compelling the fincher brothers embraces this history of mystery so many questions are raised and each answer only reads more questions never letting the viewer rest satisfied the show maintains a steady increase in the scale of its world and the importance of its plot a season 1 episode might involve danger to the main cast but a season 3 episode will flash back to the climax of an off-screen battle while men discuss whether or not to activate a super weapon often by the time a question is answered that question is so far from the audience's mind that there's no time to dwell on whether or not the conclusion was satisfying and the answers occasionally weren't just as often as an answer would have a fascinating story behind it another mystery might practically be a non-sequitur remember in season 2 when everybody made fun of pete white for thinking there might be a treasure map hidden inside the shrink ray this episode sort of vindicates his theory it's simultaneously a knock of the kind of people who obsess over fan theories and conspiracies while also embracing that their pillar is a fandom that keep their community alive years after the original work has stopped rusty is able to quickly reintegrate back into his boyhood days solving mysteries while going on a grand journey and as a result we get to see him as his most comfortable jonas senior was a bad parent but a great scientist rusty is a bad scientist but a great adventurer orb stance is one of my favorite episodes partially because it reminds me of my days scouring for clues hidden in web comics and novels writing up elaborate theories on what will happen next and how the series will end game of thrones took about three years of my life i get the rush that billy has when he's put together another piece of a puzzle as well as the thrill of the alchemist as he solves the old cipher it gets a 9 out of 10. a solid episode though it suffers a bit from some data and references and weird sound mixing i can't understand half of what the flashback characters are saying the family that slays together stays together part one the osi's top three assassins have converged to take out brock samson after his supposed termination during the previous episode brock has to take the avenger family somewhere safe and then disappear himself before the assassins can catch up after receiving a new identity from hunter gathers as well as a list of exos eye to contact he ends up fighting the three assassins anyway before ultimately ending up in lapd custody meanwhile the monarch plans to storm the venture compound after finally regaining his arching rights only to find it inexplicably empty safe for sergeant hatred who is looking to die in battle after his wife leaves him this is the episode that manages to have the highest stakes so far sure in previous episodes the venture family has saved the planet but saving the planet feels mundane and overplayed in fiction by this point having a member of the family threatened directly a member who is unusually panicked at the prospect makes the matter feel much more personal as a result there's a desire in fiction to constantly one-up previous plot lines in succession if the characters fight for their lives in season 1 they fight for their country in season 2 in the world in season 3 and by season 4 it's hard to think of what they're fighting for as being all that engaging this is called spectacle creep and it's the idea that writers can have her undersell their previous writing and newer plots it would feel strange to lower the stakes of a story since the viewers know the characters have overcome worse before so the action sequences in this episode end up being some of the flashiest we've seen so far this is meant to be the family's greatest threat yet so of course the fight scenes have to be the grandest as well but the question of where do we go from here gets raised the osi is the largest organization in the show seen to be more powerful than several governments and controlling many things from the shadows if the top brass is coming to deal with samson directly what story lines could possibly retain the viewer's attention beyond this point the fake out at the end of the second part of this episode ensures we never need to ask that question but it goes to show that not even the venture brothers is immune to this sort of spectacle creep sure enough the setting changes drastically between this season and the next in order to prevent the show from being forced to one-up its story and this serves to keep the show from ever going stale it is still a direct part one however so it gets a ring in the next video the family that slays together stays together part two after being broken out of prison barack is contacted by the monarch and general traister both of whom are ready for a confrontation he decides to play the two armies against each other allowing them to fight each other in order to weaken the winning side enough to have a better hand during negotiations these negotiations break down when in an effort to stop the fighting dog hatred and the voice get all of the families cloned slugs killed by the monarch's untested superweapon in the end barack learns that he was never truly in danger from the osi and rather than trying to navigate the craziness of his world brock decides to quit burnout can happen to anybody in any work no matter how much passion he once had you can easily exhaust yourself and find something that you once loved and enjoyed tedious and tiring even if the thing you love is something that you have to do brock's transformation across these seasons throw an important aspect of character and dog and that's how he became so cynical in the first place rusty venture has always had an interesting life and because of this he can never truly work up the enthusiasm that the people around him have of course how could he he's seen all of this before he's seen it so many times that he's sick of it but it's not sick of him and so he has to continue putting up with the world there's no off switch to his life the same way there seems to be a solid separation of work and life in many of the villains careers and so we begin to see brock going down the same path he can no longer keep himself engaged with his life of adventure and so he walks away from it all the way so many of us wish we could the family that slays together stays together is a finale not just to the season but to the early days of the show because like brock we've also begun to see it all jock being bemused by the fantastic elements of the world is no longer novel and the show predicts that it'll go stale if it continues on this is why the finale is such a good conclusion the venture brothers doesn't want to rest on its laurels running itself into the ground and becoming a shadow of what it used to be the only way for it to go up is to take a sharp turn first this is possibly the least character driven an episode has been so far we don't get to explore all that much about anybody's psyche the way early episodes did we get some adjacent world building as brock contacts some x osi agents and we finally get to see the real inner workings of the osi but this only means that it's the world that gets development in the characters toned it's a season finale though so it makes sense that we only get payoff without any setup and the fight scenes more than distract from the fact that this episode is much less intellectual than many of the show's greatest which is an accomplishment worthy of a solid tin blood of the father heart of steel an episode told in two timelines the first is chronological following brock samson as he escapes an osi medical facility before hunting down hunter gathers and molotov for revenge the second is in reverse chronological order following the venture family as they try to navigate the different groups asking doc for illegal clones one of 24 the other of hitler season 4 takes the venture others back in time a few decades in terms of the parody aspects you can only harp on a single decade's worth of media for so long before it gets repetitive and so alongside a change in the narrative we also see a major change in the general focus of the venture bros season 4 is when the focus of the show shifts towards more pulpy aspects and the framing device of using marvel number one to ground the episode's chronology is not a coincidence but i think a conscious decision to inform the audience as to what sort of references we can expect we've gone from the late 50s to the late 30s the venture bodyguard has gone from a cold war super spy to a world war ii militaristic type the plots have shifted from being focused on comics code authority approved stereotypes to haze code sensibilities the main antagonists of the previous season's finale are a group of international assassins led by a soviet agent the antagonist of the season 4 opener literal nazis it's not subtle but this is how the venture rose stays fresh they employ a similar technique between seasons five and six with the big set piece episode followed by a change in scenery there's so many fake outs in this episode that feel a bit forced isn't it funny that dean loves hitler isn't it weird how helper's a walking eye the first half of this episode feels more concerned with raising questions without very satisfying conclusions than it does on focusing on any of the character moments that made the venture both great in the first place but the limited amount of time that each scene gets and how much they have to explain you begin to understand why it's tightly written in the sense that the plot moves along quickly but it feels very much like this was meant to be a two-parter or at the very least a double-length feature so the episode suffers as a result the non-linear nature of this episode doesn't serve too much of a purpose aside from obfuscating a few minor twists throughout and making large leaps in time appear less drastic the whole episode takes place over the course of about 8 months and naturally that's going to cause a few pacing issues were you to reorder scenes from this episode so that they flow chronologically you'll find each plot lacking serious substance not really having much in the way of character development to make up for it ultimately while blood of the father heart of steel is an interesting episode on a first watch it doesn't hold up quite so well under scrutiny when you realize just how little is going on so it gets a cgc rating of 9.6 handsome ransom rather than trying to destroy dr venture physically the monarch attempts to destroy him financially demanding a 10 million ransom for the return of his sons however as he's awaiting doc's return with the money he loses hang to captain sunshine a local superhero sunshine is overbearingly overprotective over hank for the time he's with him training the venture to become his new protege since the monarch no longer actually has hank dr fincher realizes that if he can retrieve the boy from captain sunshine then her guild rules the monarch has to return the money when all three groups meet at sunshine's sanctum hank reveals that he is not an orphan as sunshine had assumed and everything returns mostly to normal this is our first chance to see sergeant hatred doing any proper bodyguarding work with the venture family and right from this interaction we can see that he's a much better fit for the venture aesthetic than barack was while the venture family is largely dysfunctional brock always stood as an outlier being supremely competent at his job and relatively level-headed hatred is a super soldier turned supervillain turned to osi bodyguard incapable of even committing long-term to an organization like the ventures he's a failure himself in areas he considers important he's an accomplished supervillain but had to sacrifice his family life for that accomplishment now he's seeking to create a found family with adventures foregoing his previous life to do so for the first time since season 1 we see much more of the world outside our immediate characters what exactly does fantasy colorado look like outside the compound we start to see the venture family leave the confines of the established world much more often now with the characters coexisting with the mundane in a way they previously rarely did the plots are also much more human than before no longer are we seeing the destruction of dr venture as a person but the destruction of his finances captain sunshine is much more concerned with losing somebody close to him than he is with fighting crime or even training his new sidekick and of course nobody gets defeated in the episode's finale it's simply hank explaining that sunshine shouldn't try to use him as a surrogate for somebody that he lost handsome ransom is the start of a season where many of the plots strike a more unique balance between the humanity of the characters and the absurdity of the setting we see people more flawed and vulnerable than before and we see a world that's much more eager to embrace its own silliness in this way season 4 is a much larger season than what we've seen so far aspects of the show that were present before are exaggerated though not always to great success captain sunshine is a bit of a one note character the pedophile fake outs get tiring after a time and so his character feels overused for the amount of depth that he has though i understand that if you get kevin conroy on your show you're going to want to use him as much as possible the episode gets in action 5. her chance to dean a malformed clone of dean referred to as d19 survives its abortion and lives its life in secret in the attic of the venture compound plotting to make a skin suit from the discarded deen so that he can earn his father's love at the urging of dermot a grounded hank takes the family car for a joyride accidentally hitting one of the dean corpses from the season 3 finale thinking he's killed his brother hank tries to flee to mexico in the most hank way imaginable the real dean however is currently hidden away in the house listening to his birthright a crate full of progressive rock albums he finds inspiration among the chords of fragile by yes attempting to regrow his hair only to find d19 and believing he's made a monster after a chase scene d19 ends up being blown up by an explosive dark decoy hatred spent the episode working on i think we all knew a dermate growing up that kid whose life was so uninteresting he had to lie about practically everything about himself though he wasn't good enough to ever be believable even as a gullible child you knew something was up but you hung out with him anyway because he didn't quite know how to call him out on his bs durman is an interesting character and that he's one of the most developed normals out of the cast no super scientific knowledge no killer instincts he's just some kid with a weird home life in another world he might have been a henchman in this one he works in a hardware store in a mall it's not as though he's a one-note grumpy child however durgan is shown to have some desires and at least the same aimless ambition of his biological father thaddeus he makes the constant performances of masculinity typical of a misguided child without a positive male role model but does end up joining the osi out of a desire to become something greater than he is ultimately meeting dermot is one of the most important things to happen to hank as its term its groundedness that wakes hank up to the idea that the realm of super science he's known his whole life is only a small part of the world giving him the extra perspective to ultimately stop following in the footsteps of others and make a name for himself this episode has incredibly tight writing five coinciding plots ian and dean dean and doc talk and hatred hank and dermot and swat despite all of this no plot feels like it's being rushed there's no wasted time and the interactions between set pieces end up being some of the highlights rather than feeling shoehorned in when the compound is rated at the end of the episode and every character thinks it's for them it feels like a satisfying inclusion and the only misstep is that the falling action of most of these stories comes during the end credits and off-screen i am probably a bit more biased in favor of this episode than i should be due to my love of progressive rock i've been listening to the genre since i borrowed a bunch of cassettes from my dad when i was 7 and discovered yes before jojo even got an adaptation for making me realize that i'm way too similar to doc venture it gets a 21 out of 12. [Music] return to malice henchman 21 kidnaps hank and dean in order to interrogate them about the death of his friend while hatred and doc returned to hatred's old home to search for them meanwhile the monarch misses a villainous photo shoot due to an allergic reaction to a fancy salad the monarch is having trouble adapting to his new life as a maid villain he's always been somewhat of a scrappy underdog fighting against greater systems in order to pursue his passions and now that he's successful in his endeavors one can't help but wonder where he can go from here this episode sets up the mystery of who killed 24. although we see him die at the end of season 3 it's unknown who or what actually sent off the explosion to many of the characters we find out later it was tim tom and kevin detonating the device out of curiosity the two of them going on to gaslight 21 into investigating everyone but them to cover their tracks tim tom and kevin were never liked by the fanbase of the venture brothers from their initial introduction to their eventual demise people found them annoying edgy and abrasive they were initially a visual gag two weird-looking dudes dressed like victorian children to show that doctor misses the monarch's personal villainy career wasn't going anywhere but as their role in the show became larger and larger the number of viewers who began to complain about their presence increased and became more vocal and so doc hammer and jackson public did what they loved to do they ignored the fans and gave the duo an even greater presence so much of this show seems to exist out of spite whenever there's a great mystery the solution is always some non-sequitur design in such a way that nobody could have possibly seen it coming but since the show is primarily a comedy that doesn't need to take itself that seriously they're able to get away with this in a way that a show like game of thrones couldn't it's not as though this will invariably piss off the fandom and ruin several episodes due to this factor we got character arcs like hatred dermon and saint cloud seeing these characters get enough development to become interesting is more valuable because their introductions weren't as well received return to malice is a very low stakes episode where hardly anything happens but as a character-driven episode this isn't necessarily a death sentence for its enjoyability some of the character interactions are genuinely great but at other times it suffers from some awkward exposition overall it's one of the weaker episodes of season 4 but season 4 is one of the strongest seasons so far that it gets bumped up from a henchman 87-86 the revenge society phantom limb escapes his guild captivity and kidnaps two guild members as well as billy quiz boy in order to extort information out of them red mantle and dragoon tell phantom limb about the history of the guild though in their senility the story doesn't make too much sense still phantomlim is able to gather enough information to begin his plot to take over the guild by force stealing the charter the orb and threatening the sovereign with its activation the sovereign attempts to counter phantom limb's claim by revealing dean venture as the true heir and having dean crown him so phantomlin retaliates by activating the orb only to discover that it's been broken for decades the guild of calamitous intent is an old organization steeped in tradition and strongly attached to its rituals as much as its rules the dark banquet hall's high art and obsession with titles and powers attached give it an aura as though it were a secret meeting of government an invisible hand guiding the world from the shadows but when you consider the opposition the osi the stance of the guild as a world power becomes less tenable the osi is regularly portrayed as being the real power behind many world governments deciding things such as when the berlin wall will fall or which political leaders will actually hold power proc even has a contemporary bodyguard who is in charge of guarding the us president a position that is meant to make him look like a failure by comparison the guild then feels like the constant underdog in these situations henchman's flies are considered more expendable than those of heroes collateral damage is acceptable as long as it's the good guys doing it i don't have a real conclusion to this section or rather i do it just makes me sound too much like ted kaczynski to put on youtube the revenge society shows us the return of phantom limb a character clearly too good to be left to rot in obscurity for the rest of the show's run we get some world building we get some character building and we get some humor derived from a massive military force showing up and then standing around failing to be intimidating i love how simultaneously this episode managed to be high concept while also being super low stakes a usurper to a guild of international super villains plans a great heist in order to activate a super weapon and destroy what he can't take and the main focus of the plot is a teenager and his bodyguard pranking the standing military force as well as a former boy adventurer giving his son advice on how to run away from cartoon bad guys for understanding the main appeal of venture brothers though thoroughly this episode receives whatever you get when you combine a three and an eight self medication dr venture's boy adventure therapist is suddenly struck dead by a viper attack so he and the other former children of the group team up to solve the mystery their search leads them to the home of dr z who teaches him that there will always be a mystery and that sometimes the best option is to simply accept that in the b plot hatred chaperones the boys as they see a movie and conveniently at the same theater that the monarch's henchmen are currently attending during the screening his pedophilic urges start bothering him and the boys have to work together to prevent him from endangering anybody or himself everybody who's normal is normal in the same way but everybody who's weird is uniquely weird if the circumstances of your life lead you down a path separate from everybody else it can sometimes be hard if not impossible to find some common ground between them and isolation seems to turn into an inevitability because no matter how similar your story might be to somebody else's they'll still never know your exact pain and yet there's always going to be some reason to continue on because life's about who you are not why you like that in the end doc finds that despite going through many of the same traumas as the other boy adventurers he's not as broken up about life as they are purely because he still has a purpose his past was shitty there's no denying that but in the present he still has a reason to go forward the other boys in the group had nothing going for them but doc has children his own company and other people who need his assistance life doesn't get any easier but you do get better at living it self-medication is an extremely character-driven episode to the point that the general plot synopsis could work even in a different setting with the character label swapped around the number of different genres the showrunners are able to fit into the same support group as rusty shows just how universal many of the problems he faces are and how the same characterization could have been included in any type of story this speaks to the strength of the show's character writing that the writers aren't simply leaning on the setting despite how well established it is i really enjoyed this episode's a plot with the group of boy adventurers investigating the death of their therapist and it took me a few watch throughs of the show to finally figure out why the reason is that rusty isn't treated as the main character of this story every character in the ensemble is given equal screen time and they all contribute to the mystery in their own way this really helps to drive home the believability of the setting that there are no main characters in life and everybody has their own story this episode's rating is in eternally androgynous 13. the better man focusing on the order of the triad this episode sees torrid opening a portal to hell only to be quickly dispatched by the demons who escape the outrider who is currently married to orpheus's ex-wife steps in and saves the triad humiliating orpheus in the process triana discovers that her closet is a portal to the second world and inspired by words from orpheus's master decides to live with her mother and become a sorceress orpheus attempts to open his own portal to hell so as not to be one-upped by the outrider only to later discover that the outrider had placed a piece of the eye of osiris in his brain essentially taking the easier way out and saving the order of the triad a bit of face the order of the triad is a group of middle-aged men with nothing else going on in their lives so they form a group of interdimensional crime fighters in the real world they would have joined a bowling league but in the world of the venture brothers they investigate supernatural phenomena and stop people from opening coils to hell you know saturday night stuff they're an example of the type of person who lives for the game involved in the antagonist protagonist relationships as outlined in the lepidopterists they're not saving the universe because the careful balance between this universe and the next is fragile and worthy of protection they're doing so because it's great for publicity and a nice way to stay in shape magical duels are the type of thing a person gets into as part of a midlife crisis the way a person in our world might get into cars or craft beer speaking of midlife crisis this episode is somewhat of a parallel to the season 1 midlife chrysalis in that the real plot has less to do with the super superlative scenario and more with the associated feelings of inadequacy imagine orpheus training for something his whole life to the point that he consumes his familial relationships only to be the second best at it the alchemist who recently learned his boyfriend cheated on him and found himself nearly homeless jefferson twilight lamenting that he's the only non-magical member of the tri-head even billy feels inadequate that his special skill is so civilian compared to the others we get a lot of romantic woes in this episode the b-plot's hardly worth mentioning even if it has a few decent moments of hank failing to be a ladies man there's a neat comparison to draw between his failures now and his successes in seasons 6 and 7 and nothing really feels out of character even if this aspect of pain came out of nowhere this episode gets a 9 9.3 maybe end stripes and poltergeists the monarch teams up with monstroso to strike adventure through litigation threatening to repossess his property through a zoning dispute as dr venture struggles to find an adequate solution to the issue he learns that sphinx has been using his old manufacturing wing as a base when monstroso decides to double-cross the monarch 21 and brock team up representing their respective sides to renegotiate through use of force the venture brothers is not an action show even if the material in parodies advertises itself as such fight scenes are more about context rather than content can a joke be made or can the plot move forward rarely is a fight ever designed to be interesting or captivating in its own right we get instances of mismatched aggression in early seasons barack mowing down henchmen in his car or taking a tattoo gun into a hapless soul's face and later on fights are designed to show off creativity of the characters it's impressive when brock takes out two armed guards by vaulting on top of them from the ceiling not because the action is well shot but because he incapacitated a one of his super villain with his own gun good action is about good motion there needs to be a clear connection between the wind-up impact and aftershock of a blow i'm not complaining that the venture rose cuts away from fight scenes that last longer than a single strike in fact it actually serves the genre better if you want realism in a fight a single decisive blow is typically the way to do it and the venture bros is all about unrealistic setups with realistic conclusions pinstripes and poltergeist is a clear plot episode an episode designed to set up pieces on the board for the inevitable season finale as well as introducing aspects of the show that haven't been introduced yet where is sphynx and exactly what do they do who is monstroso how does he operate and we see the first hints that 24 may not truly be a ghost as a plot-driven episode we don't get to see too much characterization and what little there is tends to be divorced from the plot sections some scenes feel tacked on as though they were filling out the run time but a bit of good humor and a handful of memorable moments managed to carry this episode enough that the lack of character isn't too much of a death knell for the episode making it entertaining enough in its own right that i don't mind the narrower focus for this i rate the episode as the color 12. the diving bell versus the butter glider lamenting their sub-par equipment the monarch's henchmen go on strike in order to re-attract the attention of the monarch who is busy playing with his expensive new toy at the venture compound doc is undergoing an emergency exploratory surgery in the style of the fantastic voyage led by billy quiz boy captained by sphinx when the unsanctioned raid reaches the compound the monarch joins in only to be thwarted by the voyage's conclusion involving the shrink ray's reverse function the fincher brothers is a fundamentally science fiction show considering the subject matter of the genre it's parodying as such it has liberal use of concepts or into our world or that only exist in speculation the conceit of the show then is its ability to add a touch of realism to the concepts around which it is based traveling inside of a human body by shrinking a submarine is unrealistic but being annoyed by family members on a road trip is realistic a personal flying machine only exists in speculation but if they were commercially available you can bet every man in his 40s would buy one instead of learning his son's middle name and of course nobody owns a private butterfly-themed supersonic jet but we've all struggled to find adequate parking before suspension of disbelief can stretch incredibly far when it comes to the setting not so much for the characters the diving bell versus the butter glider is summarized well by its title alone there are two plots that barely converge outside of the beginning and end of the episode and even then you could have subbed out either plot and barely have affected the other there's a continued trend from the rest of season 4 where the writers seem to be having trouble finding a role for doc to play in the episode this isn't the first episode where rusty hasn't had a speaking part and it shows that the side characters are well written enough that it's even a bit hard to notice how often this season rusty usually takes a back seat to other plot lines ultimately this episode suffers from a few pacing issues the henchman revolting plotline doesn't get quite enough attention relative to the other scenes which seem to drag on longer than they should do we really need a full song about the butter glider and a scene with the monarch sleeping with it to get the point across and the conjecture cycles while a neat bit is a minute long segment with the punchline crammed into the last 3 seconds as well as being a mid shot i'm pretty sure i watched this episode like 4 times before i even realized they hit the fountain it has some good humor overall but in the end this episode goes the way of the 7s pomp and circuitry phantom lim recruits the help of professor impossible to steal his old muscle growth accelerator from state university ultimately making their team up permanent as they form the new revenge society this coincides with hank and dean officially graduating from their learning beds with the dean getting a campus tour and hank attempting to join sphinx professor incorrigible or indolent professor infamous professor indochine richard is yet another example of a life ruined by the pursuit of super scientific success he's not the only person we see whose family life is in tatters as a result of his obsession in fact it's common enough that we can place him on a scale with the other science deads he neglects his wife and children for his experiments but unlike jonas senior at least has a decency to feel bad about it his later turn to villainy comes about as a natural turn of events and his immediate proclivity for evil shows that perhaps he was miscategorized as a protagonist a similar revelation was almost explored with doc but he rejected the idea hoping to prove himself a decent human being and of course orpheus also neglected his wife and daughter in his obsession but has since attempted to make amends and spend more time seeking what's best for triana after joining the revenge society professor incorrigible shows an immediate improvement in his self-esteem and overall life satisfaction which calls back to the rant about meaning i went on in fallen arches about seeking meaning through malice pomp and circuitry is an episode about moving forward dean is unsure about the next step in his life as his father pushes him towards a college he's unsure he wants to go to hank is unsure about the next step in his life as the organization he wants to join isn't keen on accepting him richard impossible is unsure about the next step in his life as he lacks even the energy to defend himself during an arching the only character who really has any drive and assurance about the next step of their life is phantom lin whose return is largely dependent on recruiting the help of others we also see the investors for the first time who exist only in the background of a shot and are introduced under a fake name they play an important role later in the season and throughout the next so in true venture brothers style they're placed in the background here so as to make them more familiar when they finally do start playing a role overall this episode feels like it serves the purpose of setting up many of the later episodes in the season why does hank reform hank go later pump and circuitry why does dean get an internship at impossible industries pomp and circuitry why is his internship such a disastrous situation pomp and circuitry it's weaker as a result of trying to move characters around rather than giving as much to do with them but i think it still turns out of the pretty strong episode regardless hank's training montage as well as his later heart to heart with brock really show how much he's developed since season one it gets six urine jars out of tin any which way but zeus a mysterious flying super kidnaps multiple sidekicks from around the world pitting them together in a deadly tournament the heroes of the world are assembled to figure out the cause and solution to this issue only for it to resolve itself when gary and the others overthrow the flying figure revealed to be scott hall from the leopard optists meanwhile doc is upset that nobody's come to kidnap him so hatred works together with the voice to give him the authentic arching experience whether you call them sidekicks or number twos or deuteragonists the concept of working so closely alongside somebody whose ambition is not your own is an interesting one it's not uncommon in the real world for busy people to hire a personal assistant somebody to keep track of their appointments and arrange for things like transportation and accommodation but that physician rarely comes with the same level of loyalty one might expect to see among supervillains of the adventure world the motivation of desmond in this episode is to reward the under-appreciated assistance of the world until he is portrayed by zero whose goal is to indiscriminately punish hintsman for their incompetence these conflicting motives paint an interesting image of how hinching is viewed in the venture verse for one we can see that the monarch henchmen enjoy amenities like an in cocoon bar and ample free time a large step up from some of them mentioning that they were kidnapped into joining and that they don't even receive a salary any which way but zeus is an interesting episode in that it more explicitly spells out some of doc's expectations for his children hank is the more independent of his sons actively fighting against his life while dean is more well behaved following in his father's footsteps it's interesting then that rusty sees more of himself in hank than in dean though not unexpected doc hates his life it's only natural that he wouldn't want to force it onto his sons the way it was forced onto him but then what other life does he really know of course he'll end up forcing his way of life onto his sons he has nothing else to give to them this episode i feel is really just an excuse to show off the project greek island inspired secret meeting room as well as a set dressing around that how would something like security really work when some people can be classified as human weapons you can confiscate a knife but not super elasticity it has a few interesting ideas and runs with them as far as it can go before they're worn out and for that it gets two socks full of change everybody comes to hanks hank opens up the new front of hank co selling random stuff from around the compound while also solving mysteries on the side one such mystery turns out to be the identity of dermit's father so hank teams up with the alchemist to solve it their investigation leads to two developments hank sleeping with dermott's older sister and hank discovering that dermond is actually his half-brother his older sister having slept with rusty 17 years ago cursed with this knowledge hank voluntarily undergoes the sphynx memory eraser hank venture is the outgoing athletic twin of the venture brothers from humble beginnings as a wholesome hearty boy's xp he evolves over the course of the series into a womanizing smooth talking action hero exactly as he's always dreamed to be routinely hank is told that he can't have what he wants and this only serves to make him desire it further to him rules are meant to be broken more so if those are in any way unjust hank is a character who constantly fights against his destiny and a family trapped in cycles of living ironically it's this fighting spirit that makes him even more well suited to following in his father's footsteps the more he resists the earth should turn out like his father the more like him he becomes but this too comes with its own negative aspects often when hank gets what he wants he quickly learns that it's not the thing that he needs or that reality isn't all it's cracked up to be he dreams of being a crime fighter only to regret starting his tutelage under captain sunshine he wants to be a womanizer and very quickly learns just how quickly that can come back to haunt him and every time one of his plans works he ends up in over his head and this episode is just the example of how an over-the-top sense of adventure and imagination can quickly lead to an uncomfortable place at least in a world that's prepared to throw realistic consequences at you for your actions detective stories are among the oldest genres to become extremely prevalent in early comic book history and this episode leans into as many of their noir cliches as it can the shift from black and white to full color really helps to drive home when the show shifts from parody to outright homage the mystery becomes more compelling when they separated from the more traditional venture rose style you can really tell they had a lot of fun with this episode and i think that's one of the many reasons people keep coming back to the venture bros when you have passion fans pick up on that and they can tell when a product is made with love instead of out of obligation my number themed joke for the end of this episode is 15 actually never mind that's in bad taste bright lights dean city dean travels to new york city for an internship at impossible industries doc tags along hoping he can make his way onto broadway dean unknowingly helps professor impossible build up the revenge society who are trying to use the opportunity to crush dr venture only for a combination of their own incompetence and dean's naivety ruining their attempts dean fincher is the introspective intelligent twin of the venture brothers from humble beginnings as a hearty boy's xp he evolved over the course of the series into a realist world-weary pursuer of curiosities in spite of his efforts to avoid that life dean wants to reject the world of super science but is regularly shown to thrive in its conditions we often see his curiosity manifest itself in healthy ways and once or twice even get to have dean excel in areas where his father failed in fact it's a lot more accurate to say that dean isn't fearful of following in his family's line of work only in turning out to be the same kind of person as his father rusty is a miserable human being but that's not because he's a scientist and dean is clearly on a trajectory in life where he can discover that you can reject the negative aspects of a lifestyle without avoiding it all together in fact the few times we've seen dean cause the most trouble are the moments where he doesn't fight against the world and plays straight a cliche he was expected to subvert the fincher prose is a show ready to throw realistic consequences at people with unrealistic dreams but dean consistently manages to act in a reasonable way making him uniquely unharmed by the cynicism of the world dean's optimism in the face of adversity is perhaps his most admirable trait practically everything that happens to him in this episode is something negative or a lie and yet he comes out of it acting professionally and properly no matter what bright lightstein city is one of the most venture bros episodes of the show from the references hidden within references to realistic takes on fantasy putting him in the middle of the episode and focusing on his perspective of the different plots lets us really focus on the type of character he is dean wants nothing to do with the vintraverse but the verse wants everything to do with him this episode feels like it was pandering specifically to me so out of 10 this episode gets one point for every cockroach in dean's room i don't know how many points that is since i looked away from the screen even in cg roaches freaked me out assisted suicide dr venture undergoes a sudden stretch of suicidal symptoms which cause orpheus to enter the doctor's mind to investigate what's going on the true cause of talk's malady turns out to be the monarch who is using an unsanctioned device to interrupt his thoughts and manipulate him from the inside orpheus navigates thaddeus's psyche making his way through a series of traumas only to drive out the monarch with an army of hank and dean clones manifested from dog's guilt it's a weird episode thaddeus rusty dr venture is ostensibly the main character of the show as of season 2 and beyond although the show is called the venture prose the focus of the show quickly shifted to dog as he was the more interesting character the conceit of the show is that each episode explores some consequences of the traumas inflicted onto him as a child and invariably ends up exploring some aspect of pop culture and its effects on those who consumed it rusty had a bad childhood he was dragged all over the world with his life being put into constant danger suffering through multiple kidnappings exposure to dangerous materials and forced into traumatic experiences one wouldn't even expect a soldier to endure despite all of this he still looks back on his halcyon days through a positive lens nostalgia is a hell of a drug dr vince brags about his past and remembers it as a good time even though it clearly wasn't but rusty doesn't spend the whole show clinging onto his past as much as he misses those days they're over and he has present responsibilities to endure many of which end up giving his life the meaning he had hoped would be derived from his childhood because it's not your past that defines you it's what you make out of it that does assisted suicide is perhaps one of the most horrifying episodes of the show because of how much it reveals rusty has been forcing down through his life there's constant knowledge that jock has trauma in its past that he ignores with this sense of unimpressed cynicism but when this episode ends with every traumatic experience he's ever felt being brought to surface only for him to continue on as though nothing were wrong you begin to realize that he's even desensitized himself to desensitization dr mrs the monarch in 21 also deal with the grim realities of their chosen lifestyles the two lamenting that strange things such as the monarch mind and fracture have become mundane gary feels that normalizing such bizarre behavior could result in him losing his humanity while doctor misses the monarch reassures him that she's been in the game longer than he has and she's managed to stay fulfilled with her life this is just about as pure character-driven an episode as the show runners can get away with there are some high concept ideas in here but no matter the stakes you always fear more for the well-being of the characters physically than emotionally and you start to notice the same safe space behavior for yourself season 1 never could have gotten away with an episode like this but by season 4 we're so desensitized to the show's potential for weirdness that something like traveling inside a character's psyche is not unexpected for that the episode gets a skittle [Music] the silent partners hoping to achieve fame and recognition billy accepts money and a job from a group of mysterious investors who wish to give monstroso a second lease on life by transplanting king gorilla's heart into the giant lawyer when pete white wants his partner back he recruits the help of sphinx who accepts as the money has been coming from a group they've been tracking anyway when barack and shorley finally find monstroso billy holds them off as he takes his hippocratic oath very seriously enough to want to finish the surgery shore leave embodies the sassy gay stereotype normally when i see people like this in media i find myself feeling second hand embarrassment but in the ventureverse a personality like shoreleaf fits in remarkably well people in this world are over the top and flamboyant and so shoreleave doesn't stand out in his behavior doubly so considering his line of work soldiers and surgeons routinely resort to a gallows humor a kind of cynical optimism to deflect from how dangerous their situation can be shoreleave is often the comic relief in whatever scene he's in and as a result keeps the action scenes much more grounded preventing the show from coming off as though it we're trying too hard shoreleaf represents something extremely absent from most media of the era in a form of a positive flamboyantly gay role model often gay characters in media are outed outside of canon or they're written with no sexuality in mind only to receive one in post after all the movie tickets are sold this gives the impression to questionable and impressionable young viewers that being gay is something that should only be done as privately as possible the only beloved gay characters are the ones who act straight so having lgbt representation be as in your face as possible tends to send the opposite message to the viewer it's not that you have to be flamboyant but at the very least there's no need to actively repress parts of your personality in public and so we face the final episode before the season 4 finale as with the typical pre-finales this episode is largely there to set up various plot lines that the final episode will resolved characters move to where they need to be and any interactions that need setting up will get just that i'm typically pretty harsh on episodes that are more plot driven and this one's no exception billy acts unreasonably dense in this episode compared to his normal behavior how could he spend a whole day on a giant boat with someone and still have no idea why he's there it's not a stone when strosso was intentionally keeping him in the dark either i know that billy's a bit naive to the world of superheroes and super villains but by this point you would expect him to think at least a little bit more critically a lot of plots in this episode seem to come out of basically nowhere this is the first time we ever see billy attempting to have a legitimate medical career and especially after receiving a large check from a group of investors you'd think that he wouldn't need to fake a medical license this is also the first time we see sphinx pursuing the investors the plot line is given the weight of a story that's been building up over the entire season but really it just comes out of nowhere here the silent partners has a few great moments throughout but these are largely filler jokes in between set pieces that don't quite fill out the episode's runtime it gets a 12 not a 12 out of anything just a 12 you know why operation rom hank and dean are thrown a miniature prom in the venture compound's hangar to celebrate their recent graduation all of their associates are invited including a few saboteurs disguised as well-wishers hank and dean quickly abandoned the prom to win back triana after dean's inner incel scares her off the monarch crew ends up having a fight which results in 21 quitting and the black hearts led by molotov enact a plan to kidnap monstroso from sphinx the through line of the episode is an ongoing argument as to what type of sex move a rusty venture is the frenzy aesthetic of the vintage rose can largely be attributed to the music of jg thurwell but you may also recognize from his work on archer interestingly his music is actually what inspired the show rather than the other way around as jackson public has mentioned before that the idea to turn the venture rose into an animated series instead of a comic was based off the sound the music of the venture rose is a bombastic big band sound inspired by what was popular at the time the content on which the show takes so many notes from was popular there are loud orchestral hits to punctuate the action giving a lot of weight to things like movement i can't help but draw parallels between the music and the adventure bros and the music in team fortress 2. it's not by chance that the two works have seen crossover in the past my medic loadout is actually still to this day in the weather master operation prom concludes only a few story instead transforming many others dean finally snaps getting over his schoolboy crush on triana and combined with some developments during the following episode transformed into a new character one much more pessimistic about his lot in life after experiencing what it's like to work with the good people both in their morals and skill gary decides to quit the monarch crew to join sphinx only for sphinx to reintegrate with the osi after tracer manages to both clean the organization of moles and pass leadership over to hunter and of course barack quits pursuing molotov deciding to move on from her after he realizes that she's much more trouble than she's worth ultimately this would have been a potential point to cancel the show with how many plot lines got wrapped up there's sort of a balance to everybody's lives following this finale the boys have graduated from their learning beds and are taking the first steps towards moving away from their own lives the osi is back in full force with proper leadership and sphynx no longer needs to exist ideologically 21 gets over his trauma over the death of his friend and realizes that he no longer needs the monarch for fulfillment i consider season 4 to be the peak of the venture bros it has enough world building that you can grow attached to the setting but not so much as to eliminate speculation the characters still have room to grow but their general trajectory is largely understood by now and so the finale of season four goes on to exemplify all of what's made of inter-row so great and it can only go uphill from here right right a very venture halloween orpheus invites several magical contemporaries to a brimstone assembly an exhibition of various magical anomalies angatine and derman go on a test of courage to the potter place while doc and hatred make bets on whether any kids will make it past the security system the boys end up meeting an old associate of jonas's who tells dean about their real history including the fact that dean is a clone of himself the episode ends with the broomstone assembly raising the dead who have been buried on the ventra property only to be chastised by the master who has taken on the form of santa claus not a lot to say about this one there's a cool speech from orpheus at the end of the episode that i think summarizes the whole costumed villainy thing pretty well if inadvertently the idea being that when we finally get the chance to be something other than ourselves that's when we're actually able to be ourselves when you're under the scrutiny of the whole world it's easy to repress aspects of who you are in order to be more pleasing to strangers we're social animals it's basically survival instinct to not lead conversations by talking about old crpgs for four hours so once you have an excuse not to please others you're finally able to please yourself i thought it was a bit weird that dean discovers he's a clone during a holiday special these tend to be non-canon episodes not part of the conventional timeline of events it's easy to picture somebody skipping over this episode assuming that's not important to a watch through the way something like the shallow gravy documentary is it's also placed sort of in a weird place chronologically the episode aired before season 5 did but takes place between the first halves of the first episode of season 5. this means that as the episode was taking place doc has a bunch of college interns running around the eden working on a concussive shield for a space station overall i think the biggest thing i took away from this episode was the new visual aesthetic the shift from world leaders entertainment over to titmouse came with a dramatic change in how the characters look and move a lot of shots are now done in more ambitious camera angles characters rarely appearing in a simple three-fourths perspective for a while this meant that characters would routinely shift into off modelesque faces as if you were taking a photo of somebody while they were sneezing or clearing their nose but it's an issue that gets cleared up sooner than you notice unless someone points it out what color is your clean suit doc wakes up the morning following the homeschool prom mutated fly escort slash assassin still in bed next to him this has to be somebody's fetish he learns that he's well behind schedule on a ray shield he claimed he would be able to produce for his brother and hastily assembles a team of interns from a nearby college to do the work for him the funding is provided by an old collector friend of his augustus saint cloud who has a history of competing and bidding wars with billy quizboy but the lack of safety precautions in the development lab cause issues with the students growing irradiated extra body parts soon enough the inevitable result of sequestering a bunch of stem nerds with radiation-based superpowers comes to be and they create their own culture and religion threatening the safety of the venture family as well as the deadline when the monarch finds out about this project he misconstrues it as a training camp for a super mutant army and begins to plot to destroy the students only for dr mrs the monarch to temper his well temper and change his plans at the last second to simply cure the students of their afflictions giving the episode a happy ending daddy's venture son of jonas venture is a failure of a scientist his business stays afloat purely on the sale of his family's legacy a legacy that he himself has contributed nothing to because of this one may be led to believe that he's a bad scientist but this is not true while his business may be failing it isn't as though rusty himself is utterly incompetent when it comes to the realm of super science he's managed to run and maintain an underground clone farm for nearly two decades something unheard of in the venture verse when a boy dies under his watch he not only clones the child but cures him of cancer in the process he's shown a proficiency in biology reanimating the dead and creating machines of destruction once at the same time the spanish fly variant in the previous season's finale is likewise not something that should be overlooked rusty is a good scientist just not a profitable one and certainly not the scientist his father would have wanted him to be it's for this reason that he's a failure he's simply in the wrong line of work what color is your clean suit is the second feature-length episode of the venture bros following immediately after the first one the plot of the episode is self-contained being one of the few season 5 episodes not to be based almost exclusively on callbacks but rather introducing a majority of its cast then and there it's also an episode that pushes many character plots forward dean begins rebelling against his life more openly gary begins to throw away his old life pushing the monarch further and further away to the point that he's practically written out of the season and we start to see the development literally in hatred as he reacts negatively to a super soldier's serum there are a lot of different plot lines in this episode as characters leave and reform alliances and i'm glad that it makes the most out of its feature length runtime i've complained before about how certain episodes have too much going on and feel rushed as a result and this episode gracefully starts that without feeling as though too little occurs either even if there are a few missteps such as hank and durman having nothing to do though at least they're not given a throwaway plot it's a fine episode but someone should have told the writers that college students don't talk like that venture libre the us army confronts dr venture on the malfunction of one of his old inventions venture stein the zombie has managed to create a revolutionary group of abominations and scientific experiments who yearn for freedom dr venture has been recruited to assassinate his former creation but the plan quickly goes awry when hatred and dog are captured they end up getting freed by hank who is overdosing on caffeine and trekking the jungle dressed as the bat the world of the venture rose is very much unlike our own and yet it's also very much the same as thoroughly as we get to see the fantastic side of things the rest of the world tends to function as normal people still have mundane jobs living mundane lives and the rest of the world's culture seems to have continued on as those superhumans did not exist so much of our popular culture is shaped by world events since this pop culture is the same did these world events play out the same as well would david bowie's space oddity have captured the imaginations of the world had it been released in a universe where extraterrestrial beings were commonplace see organizations like the gci and sphinx do everything in their power to mitigate the effects that advanced super science has on the world and when it leaks when scientific abominations threaten to create their own government and potentially shift global power away from the status quo the army steps in and orders a complete wipeout how much scientific suppression is necessary to keep society functioning as normal we've seen how far the osi is willing to go to stop rusty's teleportation device from hitting the market but who's to say just what else the government has been doing of course i understand that i'm looking way too deep into the setting but it is at the very least nice that the venture bros is the kind of show that facilitates taking a deeper dive into understanding how we interact with media venture libre is an episode that almost takes a deep dive into certain characters but backs out at the last second dean goes on a rebellious treat continued from the last episode and for a moment we get a scene teasing a heart-to-heart with helper but halper gets called away and the moment is resolved off-screen during the credits sergeant fatridge gets a moment where he feels called towards the allure of erg a militaristic society filled with like-minded individuals where he feels as though he'll finally belong but when the other members try to kill him again he quickly changes his mind we get a scene of hank unleashing his inner bet trained by barack and with the scrappy survival instincts of his father he's shown to be a considerable adversary to the fledgling nation we get some classic rusty moments he's sent to assassinate the head of a communist nation and his reaction is merely to laugh at the idea of a communist boogeyman than to complain about lack of payment but a concerning thing about this episode is that it exemplifies the worst of season five namely that about half the episodes are just references to an earlier episode of the series i get that many people enjoy when the show does callbacks but rarely are the callbacks the entire point of the plot rather than merely an aspect of it sphinx rising lamenting the loss of his own life and failing to adjust to his new one gary decides to recruit new members for sphinx in order to reinvigorate the organization the monarch and doctor misses the monarch use disguises to infiltrate the venture compound and place explosives around the sewers which ratred uses as an excuse to spend some quality time with teen as the two clean up the mess gary soon learns that this new sphynx crew are the original bad guy sphinx and hank who thought to go out in a blaze of glory before their mandated cyanide implants expire when the osi steps in to save gary from the mess he winds up homeless before the osi had their shadow war with the gill there was sphinx a group of evil for the sake of evil bad guys who could be unambiguously trashed by a group of do no wrong patriots but as the silver age gave way to the bronze age the writing of antagonists was less beholden to black and white systems of morality and we began to see villains with tragic backstories or who believed they were riding a wrong and so too did we see the venture reverse shift towards a more systemic conflict between groups with sphinx being wiped out and replaced the new sphinx ironically serves as a third-party lawman dedicated to reinforcing the existing conflict between the two worlds play by our rules of controlled opposition or else snakes rising is one of the most egocentric episodes of the series a majority of the conflict is caused by losers trying to rise above their failures to make something greater only for their ambitions to be dismantled despite reinvigorating sphinx and nearly restarting the pyramid wars gary's life is only spared by the osi out of pity the original team's fanx is mostly washups stalking their exes or sitting in dark rooms obsessed with snakes they haven't let go of the past and support their commander in a suicide mission to fuel his ego gary too is trying to feel a sense of fulfillment after abandoning the monarch only to fail when going out on his own the only groups who find any amount of success are those who are winging it going out for the sake of fun rather than for something more fragile here we get the beginning of a multi-season plot regarding the monarch's true identity prompted when he finds an old photo of himself with a young rusty it isn't until the seventh season that this would be explained and even then only in part this is also the beginning of a mini arc involving kang's strength suit destiny yet another entry in the season 5 trend shifting the show to a slightly more serialized format this manifests as individual character arcs that come in and out of the show over the course of the season but a majority of the episodes are still standalone plots spanakopita rusty takes a vacation to a remote creek island where the locals have a tradition of playing a series of strange games which turn out to be a coping mechanism to pretend that they didn't kidnap rusty as a boy wanting to physically own as much nostalgia as possible saint cloud buys his way to victory in every event much to the annoyance of billion pete throughout the entire episode hatred suspicions grow and grow until he finally calls barack who assures him that although the villagers are bleeding rusty dry financially he should go along with it as this is one of the few times that rusty is ever happy there are some things that we're better off not knowing for the sake of nostalgic enjoyment it helps not to know that the things you enjoyed as a child weren't quite all they were cracked up to be watching a movie in class during elementary school was always a highlight but in retrospect that only happens on days where the teacher is hungover many of our favorite childhood tv shows were really just 22-minute advertisements for toy lines taking an objective look at many of the facets of your childhood will reveal that you kinda had bad taste but more than that you start to become introspective your perceptions of many groups of people were likely shaped by how they were portrayed in cartoons a person with large muscles may be portrayed as a meathead with no practical knowledge but realistically a person who spent half an hour in the gym every day probably has a strong sense of self-discipline and therefore is more than capable of maintaining good grades in school obviously i'm not saying that all of this is about groups like people who spend too much time in the gym but again i'm not here to start a fight spanakopita is an episode that builds on the rivalry between conjectural technologies and sync cloud as well as one that gives a surprisingly human view of the small time thugs of the ventureverse there's a meme out there of batman brutalizing small-time lawbreakers breaking every bone in a jaywalker's body before leaving them for dead in an alleyway and the antics of jonas senior are hardly any different he's good at fighting the ambitious plans of supervillains not so much at handling crimes of poverty this episode has a lot of overtly referential humor but considering the nature of saint cloud's character as well as that of his pop culture fueled rivalry with billy it makes sense and adds to the episode i especially like the background gag of every child on the island looking like a tanned brock really helps to fill in the gaps of what he was up to for the last 19 years [Music] os i love you the osi captures molotov and monstroso aboard monstroso's private boat and takes the two of them in for interrogation monstroso reveals a bit of information about the council of 13 but before they can get more than a single name out of him the investors face him out of the guild airship and he plummets to the ground presumed dead meanwhile molotov has escaped her salon is wreaking havoc aboard the ship hunter gathers sends a group of agents to hunt her down only for her to take them out one by one before finally confronting brock brock prepares to kill her once and for all before gathers reveals it was a setup and the osi is recruiting her for mercenary work as well as to help track down monstroso's associates the office of secret intelligence is a military organization that began primarily with the goal of protecting the orb a potentially devastating device with the power to change the world or something like that throughout its history it has enacted various secret coups and seems to control many of the world's governments going so far as to admit that the president of the united states is merely a puppet and there's a secret president sworn in following the invisible american revolution but outside of the fake conspiracy theories its current mission is to combat and counteract the movements of the guild of calamitous intent an equally secretive organization that is simultaneously their number one enemy and also not officially acknowledged as a legitimate it has long since outlasted its original purpose and now mostly exists to justify its own existence fighting wars against organizations that function as controlled opposition without lies to the cat and mouse game getting bullied into compliance osi love you is a bit like the season 3 episode shadow man 9 in the cradle of destiny in that it's a set of interrogations that flash between the future and present the difference this time being the number of characters involved in the period of time that's passed since the flashbacks a lot of the plot in this episode happens in the flashback sequences which initially calls into question the structure if there's so little development occurring during the interrogations why use the dreaming device in the first place the twist at the end of the episode does a little bit to justify that it was a setup to the ending but the nature of the investors called into question why was necessary in the first place it works to fool the audience but you have to have that moment of realization later the investors had already infiltrated the ship they can shape shift they can face through walls why bother stealing classified information from osi agents if they were there brock doesn't actually kill molotov this episode but this is still the last time she appears in the show as of the end of season 7. so the other twist in this episode that of molotov being a what triple agent now ends up going nowhere this feels like a very plot heavy episode but ultimately has little role other than introducing many of the osi agents that appear later on in the season for all the circumstances around this episode the biggest development is the death of the nozzle [Music] mama's boys dean plans to meet up with a mysterious woman revealed to be myra who is currently in an asylum for insane villains hank dermot gary and halper plan to rescue dean by faking their own insanity but only hank sacked is convincing enough to get thrown in meanwhile doc is tracking a talking teddy bear he spoke with last season kind of a long story in order to save him from a perceived danger not knowing that it's simply a series of pre-recorded lines designed to keep doc distracted while hank sneaks out when hank meets up with dean they learn that myra is planning to unbirth and then rebirth the voice so she can finally be their real mother they react the same way you just did assuming you reacted normally in the end gary inspires an uprising and the two escape the asylum in the chaos while rusty and vatriot are rescued by teddy talk to me the voice actor of the stuffed bear rusty had grown to befriend possibly the longest running mystery of the venture bros is that of the identity of hank and dean's mother the very first scene we get with the jewel acknowledges this and the very last episode out of writing this radio is what finally answers it true to form the answer we get is practically a non-sequitur their mother is confirmed by the action man to be an actress who hasn't been heard about once in the series and who likely won't come up again but prior to this the boy's mother has been teased multiple times not just the venture boys but doc and malcolm's as well from myra who was later deconfirmed to miss quim where ling would join a senior to literally any of the potentially hundreds of women the late dr ventura slept with willingly unknowingly or otherwise [Music] personally my theory is that the action man is unreliable the name's just a mix-up he hadn't said as senile folks are like to do and the real identity of hank and dean's mom is scare bear no i won't elaborate episode setup is one of the more bizarre in the series a woman manages to recruit both a man who can turn back time as well as a man who can transform others into babies also she can unbirth the teenager who she wishes with her son after she lures him into an insane asylum that she's transformed into a cult it's bizarre to be sure but the other plot of the episode is dr venture being obsessed over the safety of a talking teddy bear this episode even lampshades how out there are some of the show's plots can be after all if shapeshifter david bowie didn't break your suspension of disbelief then this episode really shouldn't either there's a lot of coincidence going on in this episode the fact that it all coincides with three different groups going to the exact same location is just short of a plot hole but then again this episode plays with those sort of expectations also i never imagined that a dermot and orpheus conversation would ever occur let alone have as much comedic content as it did [Music] pot seeks bought members of the guild attend the funeral of the clue clown the member of the council that was identified by monstroso before being silenced by the investors after selecting a new member for the council the attendees plan on going to a villainous nightclub for elevations the osi spies on the guild funeral in the hopes to identify potential members of the council of 13 managing to identify vendetta who has put out a personal ad after being roasted by the other council members for having no emotions the osi manages to track the location of this nightclub only for rusty to end up tagging along getting voiced inside and finally threatened by the clubbers barack and shoreleave attempt to rescue him only for the monarch to end up stepping in ruining everyone's fun so he can have venture to himself the hayes code also known as the motion picture production code was a series of do's and do-naughts implemented by many american motion picture studios as an alternative to government regulation they found a favor in the late 60s replaced by the mpaa but the cultural impact of the guidelines is something still felt to this day restrictions included things such as a negative view of religion promiscuity or sexual content drug use and any depiction of a mixed race couple as time went on and these codes were relaxed the use of the above was permitted so long as he so-called vice's were portrayed in an exclusively negative light because of this the cultural zeitgeist was molded to accept certain behaviors and heroes and villains of media the heroes must be heterosexual non-atheist socially conservative figures the villains however have free reign to showcase all sorts of outsider groups and so should a character on television be coded as anything else they're regulated to the role of antagonist this is even reflected in the venture rose though done so in a self-aware way the osi is a significantly less diverse group of people than the gci who are more promiscuous more sexually diverse and overall more open-minded than their opposition this is probably the perfect adventure bros episode and the venture boys aren't even in it i know i'm clouded by personal bias but the casual camaraderie of the council deranged dynamism of tawn hells and sentimental stakes of the s brock are the ways that the episode showcases every strength of the show additionally there are ample callbacks and even call forwards is that managed not to be in your face like doctors he recognizing the yeti mummy costume from the buddy system and vendetta mentioning the plane crash that killed the monarch's parents although only in passing and i can't be the only one who feels like the nightclub's location is a fallout reference i think part of what makes this episode work so well is that despite having such a large cast present the writers don't include very many major characters giving those who do show up ample time debris then get their own stories and punchlines in the references to other episodes are subtle enough as to never get in the way of a punchline while also rewarding attentive viewers and of course the pop culture references are so abundant that they actually loop around from overuse into the territory of aesthetic the devil's grip with thaddeus believed dead hatred sees off the boys as he sends them to the houses of their godfathers hank is sent to live with the action man who recruits his assistants in burying paul entman and later will wing billy's mother dean is sent to live with colonel gentlemen who has been assisting with his memoirs back at the compound hatred recruits the help of a semi-homeless gary in rescuing doc's body from the clutches of the monarch accidentally destroying his home in the process during this time the monarch is actually attempting to torture rusty only for every attempt to result in failure as the two of them cope with the fact that they're getting too old for the cat and mouse game a point i've raced a few times already throughout this series is the idea that people crave identity it's not enough to have a fulfilling life you need others to acknowledge that fulfillment otherwise what's the point we have a basic need to lead a healthy social lifestyle and to interact meaningfully with others to this extent if there exists a person to whom you are their arch enemy then to that person your existence is valuable even if life feels meaningless having a schizo dedicated to messing up your lawn and giving a grand speech on how he's going to crush you can give your life some purpose since you know that you matter to at least one guy the monarch has shown extreme levels of jealousy to talk to venture in the past going so far as to practically save his life in the previous episode also he can crush the doctor himself so for the monarch to announce that after all of that after only years of arching and hatred that he doesn't care enough to kill the guy only speaks how little influence rusty venture has at this point your life is so worthless that killing you is a waste of your worst enemies time how low can an individual possibly sink the devil's grip is another set-piece episode combined with ample setup to move everybody into place for the season 5 finale the finale is a large episode the biggest show ever gets in terms of cast scope and even setting so they need an episode like this to bring everybody together for the big conclusion to so many story lines so going from side character to side character to bring the audience up to speed on who where and when our plots have left off as well as where they're going is a necessity that said when watching the episode you barely notice that this is what they're doing since the flow of the four plot lines works flawlessly there's equal billing for humor action and world building while also allowing from some great moments of character introspection there's a strong sense of ambiguity as to whether or not the monarch actually believes he crushed dr avenger or if he merely told his wife that he was psychologically torturing the doctor to save face in the end this is an episode that manages to get you hooked on the story of the series the kind of episode that makes you want to see where they're going from here and boy do they go somewhere special all this and gargantua ii jonas venture junior unveils his multi-season plan to open the gargantua 2 to the public in a grand debut day inviting everybody who's anybody despite somehow for getting orpheus but whatever however jj is also dying of cancer so in order to finish construction before his body fails him he took on loans from the investors revealed to be relatives of henry killinger who is not human but some kind of guardian entity the sovereign not actually david bowie owes the investors money and realizing that they'll be aboard gargantua 2 alongside practically everybody who has ever been his enemy decides to go full meltdown and destroy it alongside everybody on board he's evil we already knew that among the list of his enemies includes the current council of their teen who he plans on eliminating even the freshly oriented doctor girlfriend misses the monarch councilwoman one she alongside a few other members with an interest in not dying form the guild resistance allying themselves with the osi in order to take out the sovereign before he can destroy anymore speaking of the osi they're on a reconnaissance mission barak and emperor have commandeered a civilian craft in order to place civilians cameras onboard the space station as they learned that the investors are on board and are trying to keep jj safe despite the fact that he doesn't believe in the arching game but who does believe in the game if not poor phantom limb who is leading the revenge society in the heist of gargantua 2 but also simultaneously plans on leaving a back door open for the sovereign so he can destroy the space station their mutual enemies and he can get to see on the council that he's been demanding since season 2. but the heist is stopped by the classic team venture who have reunited after the finale of the last episode revealed that philly's mom is actually offensive a sentence later billy has brought aboard the ship alongside dr venture in order to perform a physical examination on jj to no success however as they're in the medical bay they discovered the body of timothy traister who lost herself into space in the season 4 finale because he had the bb cancer and has been felt by so much game of radiation that he has actually become the whole key was on slide 2 about being when the investors learn of this sovereign portrayal associated with men and women they shut down the race healed forcing the doctor venture and dean to work together to manually reboot the system in order to buy everybody enough time to evacuate when the reactor goes critical everybody except for jj who alongside traister dies valiantly steering the ship far enough away from the civilians to do any harm during this escape dr henry killinger has arranged for every competency and sound of mine villain to meet a board meteor major where they reform the council of 13 from the remnants of the various villainous groups who survived the inferno speaking of infernos as the monarch is making his way to space to kick phantom limb's ass he burns down the venture compound leaving the venture family homeless upon their return at least until the post-credits scenes where it's revealed that jonas jr has left his successful business to rusty and the scene set to a pirate durge cover of the crash test dummies and that is the short version the venture brothers is a show about failure that is a quote from a single 2005 interview where dog hammer and jackson public were asked a question almost completely out of the blue and they just sort of made up an answer on the spot since then it's been parroted time and time again on forums and discussion threads by every person who's writing a fifth grade book report in a fortune throughout our youtube comments section do not comment below calling me a subnormal hypocrite i already know i am but so much of the discourse surrounding the show became familiar this and familiar that eventually the showrunners grew sick of it and openly stated that they were trying to put more emphasis on the character's successes in spite of their setbacks so hank gets to have romantic success that he only pretended to have before dean finally gets into a decent university and begins to separate from the super science rocket doc inherits a large corporation along with all of its profits brock gets to bodyguard dock again like he's been secretly longing for since he left while also getting to deal with threats that are on his level doctor mrs the monarch becomes dr mrs councilwoman one and it looks like everybody is starting to live the life that they've wanted the days of watching our heroes circle the drain while pretending they're doing the backstroke is over their olympic hopeful days are here and we have front row tickets to okay it's not a very good metaphor all that in gargantua 2 is the end of the unofficial act 2 of the venture bros it marks the second major shift in the dynamics of its cast with seasonal villains being wiped out whole organizations reorganizing and of course a change in setting there's always going to be the problem of having way too many people in one place at a time some characters are going to feel relegated to supporting roles with very little to do their appearance is coming across as a cameo at best baron underbite is one such character they even lampshade this in the episode's opening scene where killinger isn't quite sure what he's useful for now that he doesn't have a country or anything but on the other hand you have characters who feel almost completely absent a single line is though to remind us that they're also in the episode a lot of the osi is practically absent safe from brock but then again he really is the guy we're all here to see i remember actually falling for the sovereign figure the first time i saw the episode but almost immediately realizing that no rusty's father is not a shapeshifter it's a nice little twist on the shocking final act plot twist that doesn't really mean anything in the midst of a time when the sovereign seem to be going down the list of villainous cliches in the end this episode feels almost like a statement as though doc hammer and jackson public heard about the myth of the jumped shark and how it spelled doom for many a show before them so they found the nearest shark set up a jet ski on a ramp and proceeded to show the amateur allerge how to jump a shark and land safely on the other side as if they were trying to make the rest of culture look bad what do you mean it's bad to jump the shark we just jumped to shark in space and our show still rules sounds like a you problem to be honest a style makeover the venture family is getting settled into their new home in new york city dean visits a nearby university hank meets a woman and rusty instantly ruins the company the local color is introduced exemplifying the higher status of the new location the remaining members of the council of their team try to reform the guild from the ashes but are struggling to do so without the support of the new york branch who view the recent fiasco at gargantua 2 as an excuse to threaten secession new york city has been referenced time and time again throughout the series from offhand references to specific nightclubs to outright visitation so the setting moving over makes sense and doesn't come out of nowhere the way so many soft reboot setting changes often do like the shifting tone between seasons three and four the shift here is a clear transition from the pulpy action comics of the golden age to the edgy blood fests of the bronze age heroes aren't working for free the villains are much more sophisticated and the setting is rife with potential for collateral damage season 5 was somewhat of a stagnant season of the winter bros what i feel was the weakest overall season since season one for a time i had hoped the sixth season would be the final one that the showrunners needed to wrap things up before they saw themselves going the route of the long-running sitcom but the change in setting and stake saw a refreshment of what the show could be and the sixth season feels like a brand new show with the same characters we've grown to love new york is not for small timers the crusaders action league are professionals selling their services rather than working pro bono and they even get a chance to show off their skills by incapacitating brock and a jbot with ease this is also the point at which the show really enters the current year whereas before there was a strong retro futurist vibe to much of the tech now we're beginning to see characters using social media referencing more modern trends and even updating their fashion to fit in with people in current year hostile makeover is ultimately an episode with very little going on but it starts the trend of winter bros going for full serialization while previous seasons would have made standalone episodes with small plot threads reeving in and out season 6 is where the show begins to have ongoing plot lines with standalone stories weaving in and out basically the tipping point where you can no longer miss an episode and still have a good idea of what's going on [Music] maybe no go doc is desperate to fix the company but also refuses to compromise his lofty ideals for the soulless corporatism of his brother after holding an intervention to get pirate yes that's his name off trankdart the venture crew brainstorms ways to keep the company afloat in the meantime barack and vatrid work together to beef up the security and anticipation of a coming arching from wide whale though with limited resources available to them the best they can do is a high school prank the monarch infiltrates his wife skilled computer to steal the files on every villain ahead of him in line to archdoctor venture who is now considered a serious protagonist and then harasses the first name ahead of him before learning of the secret blue morpho cave then in billy and pete's plotline conjectural technologies arches saint cloud to retrieve a sacred artifact a pop culture reference that i didn't get they agreed to sell their company in exchange for the artifact and end up in the employ of fintech industries augustus saint cloud real name augustus saint cloud is the inheritor of a plastic's fortune turned super villain after losing a bidding war to billy quizboy unlike many of the antagonists of the series it's hard to pin him as being especially evil only joining the guild because his longtime rival happened to be with the osi he rarely does anything malicious and the biggest crime he can be accused of is being a bit too obsessed with pop culture though relative to his arches he comes across as downright normal his fixation on all things trivial renders him a fitting rival to billy quizzaboy and their reliable relationship is ultimately based on the mutual love of their hobbies the only differences between them are their finances and philosophy on ownership billy is the belongs in a museum kind of enthusiast while saint cloudesti belongs in my collection kind maybe no go is an episode about adjustment every character involved in a plot at some point has a pivotal moment where they realize they have to rethink their lot in life millie and pete find a new employer pirate gets off tranquilizer rock is still in the process of setting up his defenses and the monarch has to suddenly deal with not being as full-fledged as a villain as he once was starting the climb to the top from scratch i think what really makes this episode are the little interactions between characters it's pete upset with billy for trading conjectural technologies for a rubber ball but not reprimanding him because he understood why his friend did what he did it's a brock invatred bonding over some low-tech arching it's stain-giving pirate captain a kitten it's wide whale speaking like an excited child when he recounts his arching to his butler when i was in high school i did the office full of balloons thing to one of my favorite teachers i blew them all off myself manually it's breathing funny for like three days and sometimes on really hot days my mouth still tastes like rubber and we didn't put a polar bear inside her office though making miracles [Music] while setting up the speculative engineering wing of fintech talk and crew accidentally unleash a gel full of nanobots which proceed through the buildings ventilation before ending up inside of dean these nanobots end up assisting dean in his college entrance exams unbeknownst to the boy hank meanwhile has taken up a job in india by pizzeria delivering to the house of serana whose bodyguards are not pleased about the meeting in the same building the guild is having a meeting alongside multiple civilians only for the monarch to arrive in full costume copycat then sabotages the monarch's career by pretending to be him while breaking multiple guild laws resulting in doctor miss councilwoman one to leave angrily vendetta originally venturion originally the blue morpho originally donned fitzgeraldo is a character who has spent a majority of its life being used and exploited by others as fitzgeraldo he was exploited by his friend jonas senior who blackmailed him into becoming the blue morpho then after his plane crashed reassembled into venturion but the reassembly was imperfect and eventually a glitch caused him to attack a young rusty forcing his former associate kano to destroy him the body was then found by dr z who rebuilt him as vendetta and later as a member of the council where once again he was mistreated and looked down upon by his contemporaries in the end it's hard to feel anything but pity for the man machine hybrid faking miracles is the next step in the venture bros experiment in serialization picking up plots exactly where the previous one left off while focusing more on progressing storylines rather than telling any self-contained tales every plot line in this episode is merely a continuation or expansion of an existing story dean's college journey has continued here as is hank's romantic endeavor with serrano dog billy and pete continue with their speculative engineering not really making any progress but instead establishing their attempts at setting up the new lab there is no story contained exclusively in this episode taking a more serialized approach to storytelling comes with a few additional obstacles that the writers still seem to be struggling to handle most notably without the premise of an episode to lean into it becomes a lot harder to come up with content for the characters to act and react to a standalone episode can produce an absurd premise and then get mileage out of the characters engaging with said premise or having them explore a new setting with serialization it becomes much harder to explore character by throwing a new challenge at a group and so we end up in a situation where the character interactions alone have to be sufficient that's why an episode like escape to the house of mummies part 2 works so well the b plot was able to be completely incoherent while still working well due to the new and unique situations the characters were able to find themselves in in an episode like this forcing new interactions for each individual plotline will get overwhelming and so it works best to have larger overarching stories that can affect everybody something this episode ultimately lacks rapacity in blue upon discovering evidence that his father may have been a proper villain the monarch in 21 agreed to don the old blue morpho and cano costumes in order to destroy the remaining arches between them and dr venture starting with orangutan he's currently assaulting the venture compound getting into a shouting match with brock that's broken up by wariana doc uses the arching as an opportunity to test out his new god cast designed to make the subject more susceptible to suggestion in the end the blue morpho enters vintage tower at just the right time to save the day with 21 killing orangutan mostly by mistake the god gas also hit brock who then rushes to worry on us to confess his attraction to her barack is a changed man since his early season appearances as his character developed we got to see him become more and more jaded by his lot in life protecting a has-been scientist from threats that wear out their novelty fast in season 4 he returns to his secret agent roots taking out threats to the world and once again finding fulfillment in his work soon enough though he ends up back with the osi and back in his old job of protecting rusty but a fulfilling career is not enough to make a happy brock at the end of season 4 he declared that he no longer felt affection for molotov his longtime love interest although it took another season before he finally got over those feelings for real in os i love you brock has never had trouble with a woman but he's also really never had a meaningful relationship with one either viewing woman mostly as something to be conquered the way one might win in a fight it isn't until meeting a woman who is his equal that he starts to feel things for her first molotov now orianna rapacity and blue exemplifies the direction that the venture bro starts to take in its final two seasons as far as the balance between serialized and episodic content goes while season-long plots are typically ongoing each episode will typically have some sort of through line tying at least a few of the plots together in this episode it's god gas in the last episode it was the nanobots there's a through line to this episode that deals with manliness both in the way hank looks up to barack and asks him for advice as well as the way in which brock begins to doubt his masculinity when his performance of it doesn't actually serve to impress wariana so what's the point of trying to act macho if people aren't buying it an example of a character who subverts this relationship is dean he isn't what one might consider macho but dean doesn't care he has his own interest and pursues them in exception of what others think ignoring the snide comments made by billy in this way he comes across as more confident than brock does in this episode and it's all because he has no interest in faking a personality for others this episode makes a few missteps in the way and handles the plots it's left to hold and comes across as though the season was planned heavily but not the episode itself some of the plots feel a bit strange such as the way in which orangutan leaves after being knocked out only to return later with very little fanfare to his arrival it's as if while writing the episode they realized there wasn't enough time for every character to undergo their needed plot progression prior to the climax and so some events were moved around semi-carelessly as such certain parts of the episode suffer from strange pacing moving very slowly before rushing to end like there was an important scene skipped tanks for nuttin dog venture gets a new arc in one of dean's professors think tank think tank approaches vintage industries expecting a game of chess versus his intellectual equal only to instead be beaten up by a joint effort of a newly inspired brock and wariana elsewhere the monarch dodged the costume of the blue morpho in order to retrieve his car from an impound lot after his previous excursion at the same garage is dr mrs councilwoman one who was picking up orangutan's tank as a favor to his widow battle axe when the couple meet up a fight ensues with dr mrs councilwoman incorrectly concluding that dr venture is the blue morpho after their chase ends in vintec tower canonical pairings within this show are always about some sort of mutual gain i don't mean pairings as in shipping even if that's an aspect of it but i use the word pairings that include things like arches or associates characters stuck together will have one major thing in common and one major thing that's different rusty and the monarch are similar in their tragic childhoods but rusty has become jaded and cynical as a result while the monarch revels in his own passion so when rusty inherits vintec and has officially made it into the big leagues the monarch has to be down on his luck so that the two characters can maintain some level of opposition a level 10 rated monarch versus a level 10 rated dock just doesn't fit the tone of the venture bros that well i've never been too keen on the idea of arching levels from the venture bros 6th season and onward although the idea was introduced in a limited form as early as season 2 the latter season seemed almost obsessed with the idea villain is judged on their arching levels more or less independently of their skills or reputation and while i get that the amas system is designed as a commentary on excessive bureaucracy it often feels like a shorthand version of an establishing shot rather than showing the audience and the character is influential within the guild we're simply told that they are a level 9 and it's left at that there isn't too much to say about this episode that isn't just an expansion on one of my earlier season 6 reviews so i won't waste much time i like how consistently people are shocked at rusty this season he has all of his inherited prestige and yet he's still the same incompetent guy from season one think tank assumes rusty will be similarly intellectual just because of his title dr mrs councilwoman one assumes that he's capable of being the blue morpho just because he has a skyscraper the scientific community assumes that dr vince will be continuing the legacy of his late brother just because he inherited his titles for the first time people are judging rusty according to the life he should have lived rather than the one that he has it happening one night raqqa gets word of a level 10 arching coming to ventech tower so he orders everybody into the panic room to wait it out naturally hank leaves to date serrano dean leaves to wing man for hank and brock leaves to track the boys down leaving dr venture alone to be arched by the performance villain wes warhammer and the doom factory while the doom factory is empty due to the arching the monarch and 21 decide to blow it up reducing his arching level so the monarch looks better by comparison as soon as any sort of creative endeavor goes corporate alternatives to what's considered profitable become a necessity lest creativity and art start to become bought and sold like commodities or worse it becomes a form of propaganda designed by those in powers to retain their hold on society whenever the art scene becomes predictable something new arises out of disdain for the pop capital that precedes it and this is what begins most great periods in the medium's history if a few splotches of red paint on a canvas are able to elicit rage in someone enough that they attack the canvas with a knife then the purpose of art should become clear there's a shocking amount of empathy in this episode that may go under the radar on a first watch through as it did on mine sets up a series of elaborate set pieces to impress serana all of which she sees straight through and yet she goes along with it not out of pity but because she's genuinely impressed by the amount of unfiltered emotion hank is putting into the relationship when brock and rocco are planning to storm yumi thinking it's a real ninja hideout brock reveals that his gun isn't loaded and just when you think rocko's about to make fun of him for it he instead offers brock a bit of advice and recommends a self-help book even ducks arching while also reflecting a trait that andy warhol was notable for plays to his insecurities with a surprising amount of precision rusty being fond over but then quickly thrown out just as he was when he stopped being a boy adventurer and started being an awkward teen i love how unafraid this episode is of being weird obviously the actual happening is esoteric and weird but so much else happens in this episode that the adventure brothers desensitizes you to that would stand out in any other show saranac casually digging into a wrist with a switchblade to pull out a tracking chip comes and goes practically without any fanfare and of course there's almost a two minute segment of this episode that is nearly a word for word recreation of an old cartoon's introduction a party for tarzan doc throws a lame party for a celebrity he thinks he's managed to befriend only for nobody to show up to watch a lunar eclipse with him aside from billy and pete across the way members of the council have agreed that doc is the blue morpho and have planned to extrajudicially assassinate him the monarch and gary agree to split up with gary dressing as the blue morpho and assassinating the next person on the list while the monarch goes out for an arching at the same time in order to up his rank and down suspicion the episode begins and ends with the same scene that of dr mrs councilwoman firing a shot at dock as he stands out on his balcony gary struggles with ptsd after accidentally killing haranguting this season with the guilt that he feels from the incident putting it through lying to his arc through seasons 6 and 7. gary has never responded well to death with the death of 24 at the end of season 3 causing him to go on a training arc so no one else has to die due to his negligence despite being a cog in a machine that throws lives away like so many expendable insects he still cares deeply about the people who stand to suffer the most from the exploitation the way that only a person who has spent the most of his life in the middle of it all can interestingly gary still enjoys what he does despite the clear negative effect it's had and shows a surprising ability to commartmentalize the best aspect of hinching from the worst perhaps it is his love of his career that makes him so fervent in his desire to save others from it he loves to hinge and if he can just keep his contemporaries alive long enough to see the potential it has they'll love it too like a person telling you to stick with their favorite tv show because it gets much better after the first season the whole episode is told largely through voice over narration characters narrating backstory with their own personal twist on the events at the start of scenes this combined with the long panning shots during climactic moments makes the episode feel as though it's paying homage to martin scorsese soundtrack and all though this and the other references end up feeling a bit forced the whole episode seems a bit obsessed with itself one of the major plot centering around a real world celebrity and although you don't necessarily need to know them to get the joke all the other references throughout make it feel like you're missing something if you aren't in on it between that the coincidences had pushed the plot towards the finale and the fake out ending this episode ends up being pretty lackluster i know all those things are venture bros staples but these aspects get overwhelming at the expense of the episode's humor and character building not to mention the much heavier plot focus this season already has in the end a party for tarzan feels like a crowded rushed episode that's obsessed with itself more than it is at telling a decent story some fantastic shot composition and well prose script make up for its faults a little bit not quite enough to make this episode stand above any of the others in the season red means stop fearful of another death on their watch the guild agrees to cooperate with the osi in order to create a fake arching at vintec so that the blue morpho might fall into their ambush the monarch realizing that he can't take out a supervillain on the level of red death decides to use deception in order to take the arching rights from him he pretends to have kidnapped the death family only for the scheme to backfire on him and red death to track him down but rather than vaporizing the monarch he takes the high road and talks it out with him the two villains realizing that they have much more in common with each other than the monarch once thought red death voluntarily surrenders his right to arch dr venture to the monarch because he understands that hatred to some is more than a career choice to some it's about passion about purpose red death craves destruction and enjoys killing exhibiting signs of physical discomfort when he's denied a kill so he understands the frustration that's felt by the monarch when he's denied his right to hate venture rent death feels as though he was put on this earth to kill just as the monarch feels like it's his purpose to menace venture having an older mentorly character be the one to understand and facilitate this type of relationship makes sense after all it's extremely common that once a person finds fulfillment in their life the next thing for them to do is to assist others in finding their own fulfillment when a person is happy they want to share that when they're unhappy they spend more effort trying to convince others that they are red means stop is the final episode of season six though it isn't as much of a finale as things like all that and gargantua 2 or operation prom managed to be the reason for this is due to some behind the scenes miscommunication that the showrunners would have more episodes in season 6 than they got causing the finale to feel underwhelming as they didn't have enough time to wrap up the overarching plot the real finale of season six is the first three episodes of season seven with the plot lines from season seven hopefully being wrapped up properly in the movie confirmed for hbo everything about this episode is so self-aware there's a big deal made about the danger of the situation everyone's in but it's hardly taken seriously both in and out of the narrative rusty's more annoyed than anything hank and teen are fine messing around with watching ward even red death is having a good time personally i think that hank being on the villain side of the volleyball game is a bit of foreshadowing not that hank is going to be all evil but he'll end up in the gzi as a sort of robin hodesk type the venture bros and the curse of the haunted problem the vintec building exhibits symptoms of a haunting the systems within behaving in strange ways damaging the psyche of every one of the ventures safer hank who has been struggling to enhance his relationship with serrano under the watchful eyes of rocco and white whale dean calls the order of the triad for help while talk as pete white work on solving the suspected hack the source of the problem ends up being the problem light from back in season one revealed to be holding the corpse of jonah's adventure in a sort of stasis across the way hank dons his enrico mutasa persona in order to win his way to serana through her father only to be told he must kill the blue morpho in order to prove his loyalty i've seen some baseless pessimism over the potential for a return to the venture brothers complaining preemptively that the finale movie may be ruined by wokeness while this is likely just the eternal whinging of twitter users i still feel the need to say this the venture brothers has always been quote unquote woke the base concept of the show is an exploration of toxic masculinity and the negative effects that these unrealistic expectations can have when placed onto young boys the show has explorations of the way race and sexuality are portrayed due to conservative social policies and how these portrayals have warped our perspectives of different groups typically for worse so to say that the show has become woke or that it's in danger of doing so is to imply that the central premise has gone over your head and you're just here for the explosions but despite all the ugliness that the venture rose holds a mirror to there's still something overall good nature about the show it's saying that yes these old cartoons were incredibly flawed but we love them and recognize the role they've played in our culture the first three episodes of season seven were initially planned on being a three-part finale for season six known as the morphology or morphology the morpho trilogy intended to wrap up the ongoing blue morpho story while expanding on the background and world in a satisfying way the setup of the episode immediately captivates you calling back to season 1 where a machine caused seemingly supernatural incidents and orpheus was called in to investigate the rest of the episode goes deeply into many aspects of the past and how they've been pulled into the present dropping references to so many earlier parts of the show in the process i especially love the exorcism scene where many of the ghosts of venture past come to haunt the cast so many of them show off just how dark the family has always been overall it's a good episode held back by the burden of focusing so heavily on plot that we don't get much space for characterization between that and the world building it's interesting and the few moments of respite we get from the constant barrage of stakes managed to have some good humor but ultimately despite splitting the plot of this episode in two sharing developments with the next episode of the season it still feels cramped the roar call affair the council discusses what to do about the blue morpho as the guild is beginning to collapse under the fear of the villain killer red death volunteers for the task of slaying him he teams up with dr mrs councilwoman 1 and gary to storm an osi dummy corp elsewhere the monarch in his blue morpho persona is captured by white whale who reveals that he knows his real identity and has been plotting revenge against him for years after the monarch killed his brother dr dugong back in season three but before he can enact his revenge the dummy core parade finishes and red death enters with dr du gong in tow revealing he survived the incident due to a starfish dna and has been in osi hiding of course dr du rong wasn't dead the narrative still needed him had he not served a purpose to the plot later however he would have stayed dead his character being a mere footnote in the monarch's character journey in the real world death is random it has no meaning but in fiction death has a story and serve the purpose whether that is to give character around motivation to change or to add stakes to a conflict be it a sense of finality or climax the venture rose manages to subvert this in a few key situations while also playing it straight major characters still only die when the narrative have served his purpose for them but their actual cause of death is rarely something karmic or poetic a character won't die in battle against somebody they have history with they'll just get shot by a stray bullet or they'll get killed for buckling their seatbelt i've complained about heavily plot driven episodes before so i'll spare you me repeating my thoughts yet again this episode manages to mitigate most of my complaints by keeping its pacing tight as such it manages to keep a steady flow of interest in what's going to happen next and the writers withhold just enough information that some aura of mystery gets maintained without giving the viewer too much time to figure out there's supposed to be a twist until it happens wide whale being the brother of dr dugong is a great callback to earlier seasons in the trilogy of episodes that's full of callbacks from season one all the way up to season six calling back to so many different moments in the show's history can come off as a bit fanservicey even in the best of circumstances the venture bros isn't even immune to this but because this is the last season of a show it's not as much of an issue the callbacks come across as a celebration of the series history rather than a simple look at that thing sort of throwaway joke arrears in science vendetta the original blue morpho arrives at vintech tower in order to communicate with his old confidante in jonas senior many members of the guild and osi arrive to investigate the incident and once there end up discussing the history of team venture including the blue morphos transformation into venturion and then later vendetta the movie night massacre alluded to back in season 1 and the history of the pyramid wars against sphinx in the end vendana jonas senior rusty and malcolm end up crashing into a thanksgiving day balloon float where the plot wraps up with the original blue morpho being apprehended while the monarch gets the credit there is a single line in the season 5 episode the devil's grip that often gets overlooked for its importance as a foreshadowing device rodney and hank are attending the funeral for ant-man and they mentioned that he was the first of team venture to die it seemed like nothing at the time but re-watching the series you start to realize is significant we've been told for so long that jonas senior was dead we never stopped to question if that was true in the end the mystery of who killed jonas venture is solved with the last two answers anybody might have guessed one he didn't die and then two beat white doctor dugong is the brother of a wide whale who has been holding a grudge against the monarch for years who the movie night massacre alluded to in season 1 is what caused the world to believe that jonas senior is dead a council member visible as early as season 3 is the monarch's father the set up and pay off for these mysteries is possible because of something i mentioned in my tag sale your it review back in season 1. there's a great amount of care given to the designs of the world background characters and the minutia of their actions not because the entire show's arcs have been planned since as early as the first season but because doing so allows for new plots to be made up on the fly pulling from whatever evidence has been left behind throughout the rest of the show and so we enter the final stage of the season six answers arc this is by far the most plot-driven episode of the entire series with almost half of it being told his flashback and the other half being context for the flashbacks very little actually happens in this episode in terms of the development it's mostly everybody going to fintech declaring they don't know what's going on then leaving i feel as though there may have been more subtle ways to dump this much backstory onto the screen in a short amount of time something along the lines of a past tense and its dual arc structure or they could have fully committed to a flashback such as in the invisible hand of fate in the end this episode feels very much like a lore dump more than a story thankfully what information we do get is interesting enough that it still serves as a satisfying conclusion to the ark which is a pleasant surprise considering just how much was left behind to facilitate these last three episodes [Music] the high cost of loathing [Music] after botching a surprise inspection that tanks is arching level the monarch attempts to get a loan only to learn that his trust fund is overdrawn his following attempt at robbing the bank is toward it too as new york is crawling with superheroes dr mrs councilwoman one motivates him to get back into arching lower level villains to work his way up to venture and his first new job is to attack dean's botany professor but when it turns out that dean's botany professor is actually the son of a high-ranking guild villain the monarch ends up over his head only for the day to be saved by dean who simply bribes the monarch to leave him alone who becomes a villain who out there really longs to be hated and reviled by the general populace making their living from their ability to inspire such negativity years ago i would have considered this an interesting point to raise but after spending more time on the internet it doesn't really seem so far-fetched that a person would be able to make a living off of making people mad but even then these people never label themselves as such even the villains of the real world consider themselves useful people troop sayers patriots freethinkers labels that fit the aspect of a positive idealist merely pushing back against things that might stifle free speech or damage their country but the villains in the venture bros are rarely portrayed in a realistic or sympathetic way so many other series will try to justify their villains actions they're stealing money to pay for an operation through taking over the world to end hunger they're reclaiming the american dream to put an end to pointless wars villains in the venture verse will have the more simple motivation of trying to destroy a nemesis or they'll simply steal things because they can despite this venture villains tend to be much more relatable and respectable purely because their internal pressures are things we can understand better it doesn't matter if the antagonist of assyria didn't do anything wrong that doesn't make him relatable this is a financial episode almost every plot ends up involving money in some way the monarch is lamenting his lack of funds and is limiting his lack of allowance doc is hospitalized in an attempt to revitalize his company's finances and teen solves his issue with a checkbook in the midst of these financial troubles many characters open up about their insecurities and worries for the future thanks heart to heart with talk occurs when both characters are in a vulnerable space the monarch's sense of failure largely comes from financial wills and of course the only reason dean is able to stop the world he's rejecting from encroaching on his life is by using the money obtained from that life to stave it off not a lot happens in this episode and the overall plots are very low stakes a refreshing change from the dramatic trilogy we just came off of keeping plots small has always been the go-to way that the venture bros focuses on character and this episode is no different [Music] the enamorata consequence the guild and lsi meet in the remains of the venture compound in order to negotiate the terms of the second treaty of tolerance while doc is mediating tensions between the two sides hank and dermott wander off to discover a guild mole while dean meets an old helper model who reveals the origins of the robot helper is the ever faithful assistant to the venture family staying with them from the very beginning and always appearing in the background ready to serve some small purpose he speaks exclusively in the beeps of voiced by soulbot though members of the venture family are always capable of understanding whatever he says this includes both dermot and brock so whether it's a biological thing or merely acquired the way one might learn a language is unknown in this episode dean mentions that it's like talking to a microwave so there's really no confirmation one way or the other he's quite well-spoken allegedly quoting famous poets and and very unselfish ready to put himself in harm's way unprompted and sometimes unnecessarily in order to rescue his family as with most parts of the venture family he was constructed by jonas venture only for the project to be abandoned at the first sign of failure or malfunctioned but the issues that helper has never stopped him from being considered part of the family they rebuild him when he breaks take him along to their new home and of course he's even capable of feeling emotions like jealousy and envy this is an interesting episode in that it's extremely focused on the past but only has a singular flashback sequence in it instead of telling us history we're shown its consequences and so the core of the episode is largely about moving on from our paths doc agrees to the summit because he doesn't want to be shown up by his father dean tries to encourage helper model 2 to leave the hotter place not letting himself be constrained by his fear of the atrocities of the past and of course the treaty of tolerance's second meeting is plagued by either side being too consumed by past mistrust to come to terms ironically it's doc venture who chastises the guild in lsi for refusing to grow up he himself still clings heavily to the past but it's not uncommon for people to recognize their own failures in others and offer surprisingly sound advice that they themselves cannot follow there is probably some symbolism with doc showing off that he's grown up from his past while visiting the charred remains of it but i'm too smooth-brained to get too deeply into that the pp jokes in this episode run on a little longer than they are funny but the episode still has a lot of good humor such as hank's insane rambling plan in the jacket room and the casual way that snoopy and red to groom say i shall be your undoing it kind of makes me wish we had more reliable relationships between pro and antagonists [Music] the bellicose proxy hoping to buy some more brownie points with the guild and hoping to get a chance to annoy venture by proxy the monarch assists saint cloud with his career as part of a big villain program doc realizing it's the monarch who is going to be menacing his employees decides that he's going to assist in their training as he views it as a personal attack unbeknownst to both groups the guild is planning on sabotaging the arching so that the osi will intervene and a double agent of theirs will get the chance to talk to a girl he has a crush on dr z is a legacy member of the guild one of the few original members of the council of their team to survive the purge he represents every aspect of the 1960s supervillain that has come to define the term even to this day as an embodiment of the golden age cliches he's also uniquely gifted at seeing them coming and as such regularly manages to get the upper hand on those who play by the same rules simply because he's been doing it longer and better his story is very similar to that of the monarch in that he made most of his infamy by ministering the same boy adventurer for years and years with only the occasional excursion into general villainy the two also share their mutual love of hate they thrive while doing field work and are in their element when giving grand evil speeches and showing off their shiny new death ray the only key difference to them is that dr z also happens to have a knack for the bureaucratic side of things while the monarch resents the fluff associated with his career this is the most petty episode of the venture bros everything about it is pedantic and unnecessary and i mean that in the most endearing way that i possibly can the entire concept of a pampered level one arching serves nobody and accomplishes nothing the monarch and doc venture both agree to assist in this arching because of their mutual animosity towards one another using this momentous occasion in the two up-and-comers careers to vicariously get at each other the way two soccer moms might feud over their six-year-olds game of touch football the whole intro sequence involving the various secret rooms inside the guild hq is nothing but a series of jokes that don't add to the episode but then again this is an episode all about the performance of super villainy and how can you have a performance without the look at my cool sequence the episode is ultimately a very small one small people involved in small plots with small stakes the only thing in any danger here is talks and or the monarch's ego but it's refreshing to see an episode that doesn't take itself at all seriously the writers know it's all a game just part of a show and so they put on the best show they possibly can it's indulgent it's overstated and it's totally trivial could not represent the show any better [Music] the unicorn in captivity ventec speculative engineering manages to perfect teleportation and technology with the potential to completely disrupt the global power structure the osi demanded he scrapped the project which richer refuses so they resort to plan b trap dock and virtual reality while they steal the teleporters themselves but the osi aren't the only ones who want the new tech the guild has a heist plan to steal the teleporters on the night the dock leaves though copycat plans on double-crossing this team to steal the glory for himself in the end all the plans collapse when they encounter each other leaving the monarch in 21 in sole custody of the functioning teleporters it was incredibly hard to find screenshots of this episode that are safe to be uploaded onto youtube so apologies in advance if it seems as though i'm misrepresenting the episode's plot i could maybe go into some long tangent about how rusty hastily accepts a secret underground cabal of billionaires and military representatives running the world because he himself has always lived in the shadow of the osi's iron grip on politics but i don't have enough pictures for that so i won't i will however point out that the mexican community college professor is apparently one of the most powerful and influential people in the entire world i know this is just because the venture bros reuses background characters for stuff like this as well as the fact that this is all just something in rusty's head so naturally everybody who appears is going to be somebody who's appeared in his life before two of the biggest cop-outs in the entire run of the show both in the same episode the entire subplot involving the illuminati ends up being a fabrication with the vr goggle fake-out twist at the end and there's the monarch in 21 ending up with the teleporters by sheer random chance i know the show's done this sort of thing before and got away with it because of the more carefree tone the show had but once you start to include plot lines that are meant to be taken more seriously with overarching stories where the stakes are much higher it's harder to justify and get away with this kind of writing that's not to say the writing is bad in fact this episode is actually one of my favorites of the season due to the humor and cleverness of many of its setups resto jinjo is an absolute treasure the fact that he's voiced by mark hamill just adds to an already fantastic aspect of this episode this is a good episode overall who doesn't love a good high story the writers certainly do as the actual heist scenes were played surprisingly straight even down to the and then something went wrong cliches that get added part ways through i could be much harsher on this episode but in the end it's got enough of the ventured charm that i just can't stay mad at it the terminus mandate doc venture plans on inviting a black widow to his wedding in order to seduce her despite knowing full well that she has a reputation for killing all of her husbands after training them financially brock decides to err on the side of caution and their date goes horribly though doc survives meanwhile the council learns that each member is not allowed to be an active villain while serving on the council and so they all must arch their final arch putting their careers to rest for good the rest of the episode follows the individual members as they put their past behind them and come to terms with their own history red death is the prime villain everything about him from the way he carries himself to his passion for his work to his physical appearance is a villainous when you imagine a bad guy his is the image that should pop into your head and it's not just outside the venture verse that this is true many of the characters in the show feel the same way to the point that the monarch is flattered that his work is recognized because it's not just about his career it's about his character he has a love of villainy and that's reflected in the way he treats others no gatekeeping his hobby no telling others they're beneath him if they're a villain then they must have the same passion as him somewhere and so he cares enough to try and spread the word about his career choices hoping to guide others to the happiness he himself has found every bc or d plot in this episode is perfect we split between so many different characters and perspectives and yet it always feels as though the exact right amount of screen time is given to every plot nothing is held for too long nothing is given too little attention the exploration of the history of the council is done by letting them revisit their past nemesis their final arches let us see their journey to where they are today and these journeys all end up being reflective of the environments that the characters themselves reflect or a few examples wide whale represents the political villain and politics is a field where you regularly find yourself in opposition to people you're friends with as well as working alongside people you can't stand red death lives in the hatred of the moment his final arching being against the last person to have annoyed him phantom limb is the gentleman who will keep a lifelong rival and its final arches against somebody with whom he has a long history of malice this episode not only has one of the best overall plot lines but also has several of the best individual moments of the series red death's history of villainy speech is one of the most iconic moments of the entire show dr z's flashback sequence even has stilted animation reflecting the cut corners of the cash grab era of animation this whole episode feels like a love letter to everything the venture rose is based on and in a sense to the show itself [Music] the forecast manufacturer an unseasonal blizzard has blocked out the light over new york city assumed to be the result of an old school weather machine doc venture and billy are sent to investigate they learned that it was piloted by guild stranger s464 hoping to make his crush jealous while the blizzard is raging hank beraves the weather in order to contact sarana only a pass out when he hits his head he gets rescued by scare bear who drops him off in dean's dorm where hank discovers the two of them in the act the monarch is selected for a guild mission to infiltrate the peril partnership and assassinate one of their leaders the creep while masquerading as defectors in the end the monarch and gary witness the creep accidentally kill himself when they're distracted by doc and billy emerging from grover cleveland's presidential time machine which baffles them as much as it baffles us malcolm and thaddeus are blood relatives engaged in a decades-long feud over well we never really find out if you'll bear with me a moment i'd like to explain my personal theory as the last few major mysteries back during his blue morpho days jonas venture quote unquote assisted his friend with conception troubles the implication being that he forcefully seduced miss fitzgarando after the couple had twins don fitzgeraldo stumbles upon information that leads him to believe jonas senior lied about the arrangement he orders a dna test but before the results can come back jonah's senior sabotages their plane to crash above new jersey in typical venture rose fashion i believe the dna test would have come back defying expectations and that the fitzgeraldo twins are biologically descendants of the blue morpho and his wife this would of course mean that rusty was never truly a venture giving one final ironic twist to his life that the man whose shadow he spent his entire life trying to escape from was never actually his father and then the reason that the monarch hates dr venture is the fact that he was left to fend for himself in the woods while his twin brother was adopted by a rich super scientist who pampered him and took him all around the world it's clear that the showrunners were trying to wrap up the season with this episode we've been seeing the peril partnership teased since early on in this season and then the leader of the split branch gets killed off rather unceremoniously by an unsatisfying conclusion to a six season long time travel setup you can really tell that for the amount of circumstance around the creep he was meant to be a much larger antagonist but in the incarnation we got his character seems to come out of nowhere only to get killed off just as fast hank's obsessiveness manifests in a suicide mission to bother his girlfriend that ends up with him discovering that she's sleeping with dean in another unsatisfying conclusion to a story arc that feels like it needed more time to be built up to dean and surround a kiss once in the high cost of loathing and then five episodes later are suddenly closer than hank and serrano are a few of the jokes land but many more of them seem to drag on longer than they should in fact a lot of the scenes here seem a bit longer than necessary like the episode's run time wasn't long enough and so they stretched out a couple of jokes to fill in the gaps gaps which just as easily could have been filled with more development for some of the rushed character plots the saphrex protocol dr venture is kidnapped by a group of guild strangers so that he might be used as a prop for the monarch's tinning ceremony a ceremony to celebrate and initiate the monarch to the arching level of tin meanwhile dean apologizes for all the times he's wrong tank while the latter venture voice comatose hank however is having a coma dream alongside phineas phage and the action man where he learns the identity of his mother the guild strangers keep rock occupied while the ceremony occurs which details the trials and tribulations of safrax the first super villain at the end of the ceremony it's revealed that the monarch and rusty are in fact blood related the final episode of the venture brothers to many a fans dismay at its peak the show was able to pull in just under 2 million viewers on new season openers and finales but numbers had been dropping off for some time with season 7 rarely managing to break the 600 000 threshold while the cancellation was unexpected it wasn't unsurprising long waits between seasons and viewership that wasn't keeping up with other cheaper to produce content meant that the only thing keeping it around was mike lazo's personal love of the show so when he left the winter bros was quickly and quietly dropped in the end we got a cliffhanger a bit of fan service and a finale that didn't know it was meant to be a finale as far as episodes that conclude a season go the safrax protocol only fares slightly better than red means stop as far as being at all conclusive this is largely due to behind the scenes factors but judging the episode independently it's still difficult to call it convincingly conclusive the monarch has just started the climax of his career what he's been building towards for the last two seasons if not his whole life the fact that rusty is his blood relative is shocking at first but the guild has never had any issue with pairing siblings against one another before so it shouldn't really affect anything in the long run hank is wandering off on his own a setup for a potentially hankless season as dean searches for him but in the end since we aren't given much direction on what he's searching for other than himself we have very little to base speculation off of the safrax protocol had incredibly high expectations placed onto it and to no surprise fail to live up to them maybe it's a bit like the venture family in that same regard but i'm certainly looking too much into it if i make that conclusion the very best thing i can say about the episode is that it encapsulates the adventure spirit major plot lines are given a random solution characters find themselves in weird situations but spend most of their time arguing semantics and we get a bit of a fanservicey callback at the end it was a good episode that should have been a great episode and as a result comes across as an ok episode hi thanks for sticking around this long i know i've got a monotone voice so it couldn't have been easy to listen to me drone on for this long this was originally a bunch of individual videos because i'm super greedy but i started to feel bad about flooding people's sub boxes so i condensed it down to this big one instead my original plan was to upload one episode review per day for three months but one month then i realized that it probably wasn't a wise idea especially for people who are not here for this type of content if you like the video and want to see more content like this in the future too bad this is sort of a one-off thing if you comment i will read the comment i may not reply to it but i do enjoy reading them the fincher brothers will probably be getting a movie at some point in the future there's no exact date and even if there was the show writers are notorious for pushing back deadlines and delaying the show until it's perfect that's something we as fans have grown to expect the venture bros is a show beloved for its quality not quantity of course there's also always going to be behind the scenes stuff we're never privy to so even the fact that the wrap-up movie will come out is also something that's not a guarantee i'm personally not going to hold my breath in anticipation until we get much more news but it's not as though i think the story of this beloved show has an unhappy ending we got seven great seasons of television that made us laugh as much as they made us think i've gotten into so many other hobbies as a result of watching this series and i've made friends through the community so instead of feeling sad that it's over feel glad that it happened glad that the show that started out as an early 2000s cynical take on old hanna-barbera content managed to spawn something so much greater over the years because i don't think we'll ever see another show like the venture rose again most modern media is designed in such a way that we see an endless loop of in-house reimaginings and recreations in order to keep the works out of the public domain for as long as possible so a next generation exploration of media and the style of the venture bros can likely never exist purely because there's nothing that media conglomerates are willing to part with long enough for any amount of pop culture analysis to become relevant it's become a time capsule for a specific era of history and it's time to bury that capsule once again you

Channel: viedo gaems

Views: 587,841

Keywords: The Venture Brothers, Venture Bros, Video Essay, Analysis, Listenable, Adult Swim, Rusty Venture, Brock Samson, Dean Venture, Hank Venture, The Monarch, Dr. Mrs. The Monarch

Id: Lf8q1uTb9aM

Length: 235min 3sec (14103 seconds)

Published: Sun May 01 2022