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| Hank Venture and the Action Man, enjoying the hell out of life. |
The
Venture Brothers is a show that is gleefully,
unstoppably full- full of ideas, full of characters, full of plotlines that zig
and zap between and around each other with little thought for whether they will
ever meet. The show’s fifth season
finale, ‘The Devil’s Grip,’ is overstuffed.
It follows up on the cliffhanger from the end of the last episode,
wherein Doctor Rusty Venture is crushed by a giant disco ball, it spends time
with Hank and Dean as they adjust to their new lives with their godparents, it
wraps up Gary’s Season-long search for meaning, and it continues to add
elements to the show’s increasing complex mythology. It can’t help but feel a bit bloated, but by
now the show has learned to embrace its bloat.
It’s made a style of being overstuffed, and it’s learned how to use it
to leave us wanting more.
There
are a lot of threads running through ‘The Devil’s Grip’ but the meatiest
involves Hank and Dean. After Doc’s
brush with death, Sergeant Hatred ships the boys off to live with retired
members of the old Venture team, Hank with Rodney the Action Man and Dean with
jet-setting pederast Colonel Gentleman.
This season has seen the Venture twins grow further and further apart,
and pairing them up with former members of their father’s team gives us a look
into their possible futures.
Hank,
ever the good sport, seems like he’s going to be okay no matter what happens to
him. The Action Man leads a fairly
boring life- he mostly just putters around his Boca Raton retirement home. But Hank throws himself into the thick of it,
gladly helping the Action Man seduce a fellow resident who Action Man’s been “trying
to drill for, like, 40 years” and gamely participating in a fairly disgusting
Team Venture burial tradition. Hank and
the Action Man seem to be the kinds of people who can make themselves happy no
matter what their situation, even if their situation is dire at best.
Things
are less rosy for Dean, who’s been slipping into a sullen torpor ever since the
end of the previous Season. It’s hard to
blame the guy- living with his sad-sack father and enduring the endless parade
of costumed freaks who show up to fail all over his front lawn week after week
would be enough to make any teenager a little morose- but this episode makes
the case for Hank’s rose-colored outlook on life over Dean’s justifiable
funk. After all, no one wants to end up
like Colonel Gentlemen, sitting alone with his memories and passing the time by
watching Sabrina the Teenage Witch
and cataloguing which appearances of Salem the cat featured an actual cat and
which only had “that crappy puppet.”
Matters
between the brothers come to a head at the end of the episode, after they’ve
returned to the Venture compound to have a proper burial for bite-sized former
Team Venture member Paul Entmann, who the Action Man accidentally crushed under
the base of his rocking chair. Dean
finally lets Hank on the dreadful secret he’s been carrying since the Halloween
special- the two of them are clones.
Clones, Hank. Dead several times
over. Hank considers this atomic bomb of
information for a moment before responding with characteristic good cheer. “That.
Is awesome.” And he means
it. The Venture-verse can be a
humiliating, soul-crushing place to live, but Hank has chosen to enjoy it. Of late the writers have allowed Dean to have a human
reaction to the insanity that surrounds him, but I wonder if he
won’t find a way to integrate his earlier unfounded optimism back into his
personality next year. In a world this
maddening, it may be the only way he can enjoy himself.
That’s something
that Rusty Venture, after over forty years in the business, has never quite
learned how to do. He begins the episode
in a dungeon in the Monarch’s home. Dr.
Mrs. The Monarch tells him that she and her husband are going to torture him,
and Rusty is prepared to again go through the motions. Fake a little pain, maybe make an escape
attempt, beg for a bit of mercy, and he’ll be home before dinner. Only this torture session is a disappointment
even by Rusty’s standards. The Monarch
is enthusiastic as ever to break his arch-enemy down piece by piece, but
Rusty’s apathy and the Monarch’s incompetence prevent either party from getting
what they want. Eventually, the Monarch
becomes so disheartened that he just lets his hostage go, and Rusty shuffles
home despondent in the knowledge that even the Monarch can’t spare the energy
to get that excited about him anymore.
Of all
the characters on the show, Rusty is the one most often stuck in a loop,
failing to break out time and again and never learning from his mistakes, so
it’s hard to believe that this new blow will inspire him to change, but kudos
to the writers for finding new ways to reinforce just how low he has sunk. The Monarch has a different, more interesting
reaction. After sitting forlornly in his
room for a while, he makes an about-face and begins to revel in the limp
torture session, cackling to his wife that it was all designed to break Rust’s
spirit. It’s hard to know whether this
is actually the case or if the Monarch is just covering for his despair, but it doesn’t
matter. Like Hank and the Action Man, the
Monarch has found a way to love the loop he’s trapped in, turning what might be
a pitiful failure into an imagined triumph.
It’s odd to think of the Monarch as a healthy individual, but at he's embraced his situation and found a way to be happy.
So
maybe the message of Season 5 is to make the most with what you have where and
when you have it, even if you don’t have much.
It’s a compromising, even depressing message for a show full of
compromised, often depressed characters.
The producers have shown a remarkable ability to turn the compromises of
life into television gold season after season, and let’s hope that we don’t
have to wait two more years for them to keep doing it. Bloated or not, The Venture Brothers clearly has material to be by turns depressing
and hilarious for years to come.
Also-s:
- Another thing that happens in this episode: Gary and Sargent Hatred storm the Monarch’s cocoon in an attempt to rescue Rusty, Gary indicts the Moppets for killing Henchman 21, and the cocoon explodes. Again. It’s a good indication of how stuffed this episode is that these bits happen mainly in the background.
- When Hatred approaches Gary about storming the cocoon, Gary cocks a stick he’s holding like it’s a gun. Even when they’re about to change into costumes and assault a super-villain’s flying fortress, these characters still love to play make-believe.
- The Monarch does vocal warm-ups before torturing Rusty. Can't risk tripping over the tongue during one of those villainous monologues.
- It
looks like Colonel Gentleman and the Action Man will be moving to Rusty’s neck
of the woods next Season. With the cast
continuing to grow, it really makes you wish they could switch to a one-hour
format.
A-
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