“We gonna make some cooch chili, or what?” – Pam
“Heart of Archness, Part One” begins three months after Archer went AWOL from ISIS. Thankfully for the audience, it doesn’t waste any time getting back to the jokes or the action.
Despite the fact that ISIS is doing just fine without him – better in fact – Mallory is hell-bent on bringing her son home. She brings in Rip Reilly, “Manhunter” a former ISIS agent and total badass to find and rescue Sterling.
As it turns out, Archer doesn’t exactly need rescuing. Rip, voiced by Patrick Warburton, finds him in the French Polynesian Islands, bushy-bearded and puka shell adorned. After the murder of his fiancé, he has been going through his “grieving process”, which involves drinking lots a liquor, eating mangoes and banging women on their honeymoons.
As would be expected, Archer refuses to return to his mother and his fellow ISIS agents, preferring to remain in an island paradise. (Who can blame him?) But Rip isn’t taking no for an answer so Sterling winds up handcuffed with a black eye aboard Rip’s seaplane. En route back to ISIS, Archer takes down Rip with a clever “ruse” but fails to realize that merely setting the plane on autopilot isn’t going to make the plane land itself for refueling. Archer frees Rip to land the plane, but another blunder by Sterling sends the vessel plummeting to a watery grave.
Rip is knocked unconscious, but Archer is okay. He grabs Rip and swims toward the surface; however his progress is impeded by a large, hungry looking shark. Sterling successfully shoots and kills the shark, but in the melee he is forced to sacrifice the bottles of liquor he grabbed from the sinking plane. “Two personal records! For breath holding and for sharks shot in the frickin’ face!” he screams in elation when the reach the surface.
Eventually Rip comes to and brandishes a satellite beacon that will allow the ISIS command center to track their location. Back at ISIS, Mallory immediately dispatches a crack rescue team.
But before rescue arrives, Rip and Archer are captured by pirates, loaded onto their ship and taken to their “pirate fortress”. When they arrive on the pirate island, Archer uses his Spymaster Watch to take down the pirate captain, then uses the captain’s gun to shoot and kill a dozen or so other pirates. When the remaining pirates see that their captain has been killed they immediately drop their weapons in surrender. Apparently according to pirate law, if you kill the captain, you become the captain.
The parade of scantily clad Polynesian women welcoming their new captain to port seal the deal for Archer. He’s home. “I’m going to be pirate king!”
Some stats and info about Archer, “Heart of Archness, Part One”
TV SHOW – Archer
SEASON/EPISODE – Season 3, Episode 1
AIRED ON – September 15th, 2011
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.