I have spent a lot of time laughing at Archer. Stirling Archer, that is, and his band of bitter, maladjusted misfits. The show Archer did the super spy / mad scientist thing really well, so long as you can tolerate the characters being a bunch of bigoted assholes.
But the latest season is sad. It still has Archer's classic banter, but it is set in space in the far future, and the writers seemed determined to use this as an excuse for shoddy, half baked writing.
The latest episode I have watched is a perfect example. The entire story is based around the crew getting eaten by a giant space monster and their attempts to escape. Ten kilometer tall spacebound tentacled horrors are absurd, but if you really need one in order to get your story working, I am fine with that.
But don't give me bullshit lines like "We were dodging a meteor storm when we cut through this galaxy and got caught by the space monster." Galaxies are BIG. Meteors are FAR APART. You aren't suddenly dodging a meteor storm in deep space. You might blast by a single rock while travelling 10,000 km/s, but this is never going to run you into a vacuum loving squid's mouth.
The space monster was necessary, so I am happy to forgive the ridiculousness of it. However, the sorry set of excuses the show used for getting people *into* the monster was not. "We came to investigate a distress signal, and when we tried to cut the monster apart in order to get the other ship out, the monster caught us." is at least a vaguely plausible story. I don't mind making stupid crap up if it is necessary for the plot, but I hate it when writers make stupid crap up because they can't be bothered to spend the 30 seconds required to think up something that holds together.
It almost seems like the people writing this mess actually don't know what the word galaxy even means, the way they toss it around. It strikes me as plausible that if the entire writing team was asked what a galaxy is they would have nothing more accurate than "It is, like, an area of space?"
I don't mind it when the rules get bent for reasons. I get that! What irks me is when the only reason is "I was feeling super lazy."
Writing this episode, or indeed any of the episodes so far, without butchering science and sensicality would have been easy and wouldn't have required any extra time or effort. Archer went and got sloppy with the writing, as so many science fiction shows do, and it feels like the end of its appeal.
One minor correction:
ReplyDeleteIt is not set in the far future it's set in 1999 (the future of the 1960s or whenever the first few seasons of Archer were set).