“Bloody Mary, full of vodka, blessed are you amongst cocktails.” – Archer
I’ll admit that I always had a fickle sense of what “Catch 22” meant until Archer taught me; the amount of alcohol Archer needs to sleep with Pam would literally kill him – Catch 22! But that was a while ago, and Archer’s liquor tolerance has been gradually building and Pam… Well, she’s Pam, enough said.
When he wakes up, riddled by a rare hangover, Archer starts piecing together the events that culminated in what he clearly remembers as the best sex he’s ever had. Forgetting who he was with, however, Archer makes this confession to the closed bathroom door Woodhouse points him in the direction of, revealing an equally-satisfied Pam perched on his porcelain. And so begins Archer’s latest, and self-proclaimed greatest secret sexcapade with the ISIS office’s most vulgar, gossiping, fight-clubbing, street-racing, bathroom-evacuating human-resource manager.
Mallory, meanwhile, has her own personal matters that need attending to by her employees, as the KGB, Nikolia Jackov, and the now-bionic Barry Dillon make their long-anticipated returns to the Archerverse. Barry has taken over command of the KGB, and despite – or maybe because of – Jackov’s role in having Barry’s legs broken and subsequently rebuilt as a cyborg, Barry wants him dead. Escaping his assignment to Siberia, Jackov decides to defect to the United States, assuming he can work for ISIS and move in with Mallory, but instead gets put up at the ISIS safe-house.
Even though they share a history of spying against and betraying each other, Archer and Nikolai might also share some of the same DNA. Bonding over vodka in their matching muscle-shirts, Nikolai and his maybe-baby Archer agree to get a paternity test to discover the truth. Archer soon gets whisked away by a booty call from Pam, however, leaving Jackov to record his KGB secrets alone, but vulnerable.
Because it turns out that whatever Nikolai thinks he knows, he thinks he knows because Barry wanted it that way, anticipating the Russian’s plan to defect. Barry uses Cheryl to track down Jackov to the safe-house, where he crafts a makeshift bomb that will eventually destroy the safe-house, Major Jackov, and most importantly to Barry, Archer’s sanity.
Did I mention Barry’s crazy? Barry’s pretty crazy.
While Pam lays out some ground rules for her and Archer’s new tryst, Jackov records a goodbye message for Archer, leaving him with a “things are not always as they appear before detonating. We don’t know what’s on the rest of the tape, but I have a feeling that we haven’t seen the end of Major Jackov. And Barry still has a genius master plan that will make our heads explode when we hear it; crushing Archer’s hopes and dreams was just a “goof” to amuse the bionic bipolar, and even that was elaborately thought out.
Some stats and info about Archer, “Crossing Over”
TV SHOW – Archer
SEASON/EPISODE – Season 3, Episode 10
AIRED ON – March 1st, 2012
NETWORK/STREAMING SERVICE – FX/Hulu
GENRE – Animated Shows, Spy Shows, Comedy
CREATED BY – Adam Reed
CAST – H. Jon Benjamin, Judy Greer, Amber Nash, Chris Parnell, Aisha Taylor, Lucky Yates, Jessica Walter, Adam Reed
This review originally appeared on TV Geek Army.