Sterling vs. The UN

How does the world of Archer actually work? In general the show treats the world of the series like it’s our own. The series takes place on Earth, in modern times. It references our own history. Characters reference our pop culture. You don’t have to know anything more than the world of today to understand the geo-political climate of Archer. Sure, there are deeper cut references that reward knowing politics and obscure movies and the like, but those only help to cement the fact that this series takes place in our world of today.

Except there’s also a whole slew of private, for-hire, spy agencies working around the globe as well. Sure, there might be a couple of paramilitary contractors out there in the world, that’s not the same as a bunch of drunken James BondThe world's most famous secret agent, James Bond has starred not only in dozens of books but also one of the most famous, and certainly the longest running, film franchises of all time.-style spies all working for various countries to keep the world safe (or whatever). The show takes the idea of spies and then runs with it in a way that wouldn’t work in the real world, one would think. You can’t have all these spy agencies without, eventually, some government or another complaining.

That is, in fact, that crux of this season of the show. After Lana took over as head of The Agency (formerly part of IIA, formerly the Figgis Agency, formerly ISIS), she had to deal with a new issue: the fact that the UN wanted to shut them, and every other paramilitary, clandestine, intelligence agency down. Sure, the antics of Archer and his crew didn’t help, often causing more damage, carnage, and political issues than they solved, but it also seems like The Agency wasn’t the only group causing this mess. After fourteen seasons, and a whole lot of chaos, this whole world was seeing a lot of damage caused by intelligence organizations.

Of course, that’s the joke: would James Bond (the so-called greatest secret agent in the world) be able to get away with all the trouble he caused in the name of Queen (or King) and country? He goes around, like a force unto himself, telling every single person his name – “Bond. James Bond.” – and then he causes millions, even billions, of dollars worth of damage, all before his case is closed and he gets to wander off with some hot babe to have sex while the theme song of his movie plays over the closing credits. If he were a real person, working for a group like MI:6, he would have been fired, thrown in a gulag, or shot (and probably all three) within the first hour or so of his career.

For Archer to be able to get away with all of this and only see repercussions this deep into his career (presumably close to twenty years in the field, give or take a few years in a coma) says a lot about how this world works. The Agency has a long and complex web of bribes and blackmail accounts it has to handle, a whole slew of bodies buried under its elevator, and more skeletons in its closet than it can count. Can the AGency really count themselves among the good guys? Is Archer even really a moderately decent agent himself? Who do they really help, and what kind of collateral damage have they caused in the process?

Although it’s clearly in service of the finale (“Into the Cold”, which came out three months after the end of the rest of the season), this question also helps to illustrate that The Agency doesn’t exist in a void, that its antics and carnage couldn’t just be ignored. If Archer were supposed to exist in something like the real world then consequences for their actions would have had to happen. Yes, this allows the show to (one way or another) wrap up its run by, possibly, ending The Agency and sending all the characters off into new lives, but it also adds a needed shot of realism. The series can say, “yes, something like reality exists here, and this is why it’s a good thing.”

Reality implies stakes. A dose of reality reminds the viewers that what the characters do can have consequences. How many times has some in the crew been shot, or stabbed, or who knows what else? Usually the show brushes it off but, every once in a while a named character dies and it means something. Of course, then there’s also a character like Katya, who died and then was brought back by Kreiger as a cyborg. Barry has died and been reborn as a robot a few times. Archer has fought him and some of those fights should have killed him. The reality of this show isn’t so strict that elements of fantasy and sci-fi can’t come in, but any time the show can remind you that things can stick, that bad things can happen to the characters, it helps the audience invest.

As a good counterpoint to this, the three seasons when Archer was in a coma and he imagined everyone on the show as part of a Noir crime drama, a 1950s adventure serial, and a sci-fi space opera are some of the weakest of the series. None of them have stakes because each series is a self-contained adventure that ends with Archer falling into a different dream. None of those characters were real, and it didn’t matter if Pam’s character died in one season because she’d be back in the next, and then alive when Archer finally woke up. Hell, for one season Kreiger was a parrot; that certainly didn’t stick.

I appreciate that the show was willing to explore the drama of the situation. But I will also comment that the series continued to be pretty darn funny. Episodes like “Chill Barry”, which saw one more battle between Archer and Evil Barry (along with Good Barry being a fridge, which was amusing). Or “Mission Out of Control Room”, which was basically a bottle episode for Lana as she tried to use a new, all-in-one control room to aid the team, only to learn things worked better (if more chaotic) when they were left to their own devices. And there was "Breaking Fabian", which tied a bow on the Fabian storyline with one more visit from the disgraced, former leader of IIA (and which served to set up the final cliffhanger before the three-part finale). The show had great ideas, and was willing to follow through on all of them this season for a laugh.

The one part I didn’t like with the new season was the introduction of new character Zara Khan (Natalie Dew). Zara was meant for a three-season arc that, unfortunately, the show didn’t get. The production team apparently expected the show to just keep going, and not end after fourteen seasons, and presumably Zara would have gotten more development, and more time to grow, than she got here. Instead she doesn’t get that time and, to be frank, tested my patience.

Zara is like a young Archer: brash, head-strong, and she thinks she’s always right. Where Archer is a womanizer and a drinker, Zara is an inveterate gambler, but they both have their addictions and struggle to control them. They also are skilled, but can’t handle having anyone else on the team try and be better than they are. Zara could be a great contrast to Archer, showing off as the young agent while Archer was the old captain, and I could have seen the two of them work together, grow together, for kind of an “old master, young apprentice” relationship if the show could have had time to grow her into that. Instead, because the show was canceled before the producers were ready, that didn’t happen, and Zara suffers for it.

With that said, I do think Archer was growing long in the tooth. It had been 14 seasons of action, adventure, and laughs. Any show will begin to lose its audience over time, and Archer had seen steep declines in ratings over the years, down as low as 130,000 viewers for episode seven of this season, from a height of 1.7 Mil viewers watching back in season four. Frankly, FXX gave this series a long run, with plenty of time to slowly pull up, but 14 seasons is a lot, and I’m sure budgets continued to go up (cost of salaries, cost of equipment, cost of software). At some point the series had to end. It’s a pity the producers didn’t get to do what they wanted with the show, but FXX was good enough to let them have a three-episode arc to (hastily) tie things up. Some shows don’t even get that.

So while it’s bittersweet to see the show leave, at least it did so with solid writing and a fun adventure for their final season. And, hell, we still have “Into the Cold” before we send Archer off into that good night…