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serpentinemalignWARNINGS:
NAVIGATION:
Season 2 is more of a mixed bag than I remember, honestly. I wouldn't be so hard on it if I didn't know what the show is capable of doing later. It’s better and more polished than Season 1 in a lot of ways — there’s better animation, better comic timing, better voice acting — but there are still a lot of problems that would be fixed in later seasons. It’s a transitional season towards a more linear plot, but they’re still figuring out what to do now they know they can have a continuous storyline. The season has a strong start but its second half dwindles and fizzles out. Again, I don’t know if this is a fault of the season’s or more a fault of the subsequent seasons showing this one up.
If the first season was stuck and going nowhere — and that weirdly added to its depth and charm — this season feels like the status quo is on the brink of collapse, but none of the vulnerabilities come to anything. Rather than anything world-shattering, the changes are small and incremental, like tiny cracks in a windowpane. I said that Season 1 cockblocked any attempts to shake up the status quo, and if we keep the analogy, Season 2 feels like you’re being edged, all in aid of maintaining some kind of stability in the formula.
Hank and Dean start off the season dead and then they’re cloned and brought back to life. Rusty’s father is alive, but wait, he’s actually an alien in disguise. Dr. Orpheus gets a team and an archvillain and then they disappear for most of the rest of the season. Dr. Girlfriend is sick of Phantom Limb almost as soon as we see them together so we know it’s not going to last. And, of course, all through the season the boys get ever closer to finding out they’re clones, but it never comes to anything this season. I think it’s the reason I forgot half of these episodes were in Season 2. Later seasons' episodes are more memorably ‘from that season’ because of the big status quo changes happening around them — but there isn’t much to differentiate, say, the White House episode from an episode of Season 1. We don’t have the same organic development of little details where they make sense in context, it’s more ‘hey, remember that guy?’ and that's it. Like, for example, I didn't feel I learnt anything new about Bud Manstrong in Guess Who's Coming to State Dinner?. We see again that he is sexually repressed and was desperate for Baldavitch to make the first move, he is unhealthily attached to his mother, and he is jealous of Brock, and all of that shit is stuff we learnt in Season 1.
But, where maybe the plot development isn’t amazing, the dynamics between the recurring characters really become more solidified here, and that’s absolutely the best part of the season. I love that they developed 21 and 24 more; they’re so funny and the departure of Dr. Girlfriend gave them a great chance to shine.
Dr. Girlfriend herself has a bit more to her this season. We get to see how badass she is, and we also get to see how she can be pragmatic and ruthless too when she needs to be. She has ‘insurance’ for her choice of partners, like the tracking chips, which also gives us a better sense of her previous actions, like why she would maybe not feel so comfortable sharing details of her previous sexual partners with the Monarch. I was disappointed with the finale, because I felt as though we were leading up to something bigger for her and then she was kidnapped for half of it, and I don’t feel like the reconciliation with the Monarch was really earned. All the juicy development happened off-screen, for the most part. It wasn’t so much that the Monarch changed or got any better, but that Phantom Limb was just… worse. I wanted to see more of Dr. Girlfriend being, like, independent of the fools she dates lol. And, like, we do get that later! But it’s a lot later.
The star of the season is Brock. Brock gets so much good character development in this season. They focused on fleshing him out and making him more than he was, because he would be a very easy character to write monotonously. He’s more explicitly a part of the Venture family, and it’s so cute when he’s doing dad stuff, reluctantly or otherwise. But also, we get to see him break down, have remorse, struggle with the identity imposed upon him by his job. He has more of a heart this season, and his rage isn’t quite as murderous. He near singlehandedly resolves the finale and whereas I wasn’t so sure about the payoff of Monarch and Dr. Girlfriend's marriage, I was so behind Brock rallying the henchmen because that was absolutely a payoff we deserved to see. It was a nice symbolic means of absolving himself for that one henchman becoming Venturestein a couple of episodes prior. There’s also a loneliness to him this season that hit me in the heart. It fleshes him out more, explains why he would choose to stay with Team Venture. Of course he does shit for the boys (and for Rusty!) he wouldn’t do for anyone else. This is a more stable life than a killer like him could ever hope to get, even down to your practically immortal surrogate kids.
(Also, I do enjoy the combined factors of him being hypermasculine and insecure and conflicted about his mother figures but then he also wants a woman who will ruthlessly tear him open, like Molotov does… it’s -chef’s kiss-.)
It is, unfortunately, also the season where Brock is transphobic in multiple episodes. So that’s not so good. One trouble with the edginess of the early seasons is that as the general writing quality gets better, the edginess ends up being more… relevant to the plot, I guess? It’s not as pervasive, it’s more relegated to specific plots, but it can mean you might have a great episode but there’s a whole B-plot that’s really uncomfortable viewing. (Yes, I'm mainly talking about the Hunter Gathers subplot, which is the worst because I absolutely love Hunter as a character and how they developed.) Or you can have Love-Bheits, which is so bad for this that the creators disowned it.
How does the revelation about the boys alter how we see them? I mean, they’re better-written this season, but they don’t get much of a chance in the spotlight. In a sense we’re meeting new versions of Dean and Hank and we’re already primed to think they’ll be as expendable as the last pair — so this limits the amount we care about them. But it’s so tense during those brief points when we think they’re going to discover that they’re clones, or when their clones are in danger. I do like that in the latter half of the season we get to find out a little more about the nineteen years of trauma they’ve inherited from their previous incarnations — and the fact Dean is spiralling well in the direction of his father.
Rusty and his backstory takes a back-seat this season, but we have a few episodes where we see him as more vulnerable and less able to keep up a veneer of arrogance. I also like that this is the season where they ramped up the cringe factor. Everything he says and does to the boys is excruciatingly embarrassing and it is perfect.
The rest of this season is just… a lot of missed potential. Brock and Phantom Limb have a fascinating dynamic and I wish we had more of them. Orpheus gets a team but often including him and the Triad means there are too many threads to follow because then we’re getting into like, the D-plots. I do appreciate that they fleshed him out more, though, and he’s a cutie who lights up every episode with a strange (hah) wholesomeness and heart — which makes him a nice palate cleanser!
Here are the rankings for the Season 2 episodes.
S-tier: Victor. Echo. November.
A-tier: Hate Floats; Twenty Years to Midnight
B-tier: Powerless in the Face of Death; Assassinanny 911; I Know Why the Caged Bird Kills; Showdown at Cremation Creek (Part II)
C-tier: Escape to the House of Mummies (Part II); Fallen Arches; Showdown at Cremation Creek (Part I)
D-tier: Guess Who’s Coming to State Dinner?; ¡Viva Los Muertos!
E-tier: Love-Bheits
We have our first S-tier episode in Victor. Echo. November., which I consider to be close to perfect. I’m a sucker for episodes of anything where you have a bunch of volatile characters in a very small space. It has it all — danger and sexual tension and comedy. It’s just… the good shit. It’s amazing how much they get done in one episode. Hate Floats and Twenty Years to Midnight follow in A-tier after that, because they are both so fucking chaotic.
The worst episode of the season is, unsurprisingly, Love-Bheits, which was saved from F-tier because of a single joke that took me off-guard and made me laugh terribly — and also because there still isn’t anything as bad as the pilot, and, past this stage, there might not ever be. Probably the episode I was most surprised to find I didn't like much upon rewatch was ¡Viva los Muertos!. There were some parts I loved and some parts I hated and the parts I hated won out. It felt tonally weird to the rest of the season and then I found out it was written by someone other than Doc and Jackson and that made it make more sense.
Anyway, that’s it for this installment. I can’t believe I made it to nearly 2k words again with this shit. Tune in next time for more of what I wish I could be writing instead of my master's thesis.
- Venture Bros. spoilers, of course.
NAVIGATION:
Season 2 is more of a mixed bag than I remember, honestly. I wouldn't be so hard on it if I didn't know what the show is capable of doing later. It’s better and more polished than Season 1 in a lot of ways — there’s better animation, better comic timing, better voice acting — but there are still a lot of problems that would be fixed in later seasons. It’s a transitional season towards a more linear plot, but they’re still figuring out what to do now they know they can have a continuous storyline. The season has a strong start but its second half dwindles and fizzles out. Again, I don’t know if this is a fault of the season’s or more a fault of the subsequent seasons showing this one up.
If the first season was stuck and going nowhere — and that weirdly added to its depth and charm — this season feels like the status quo is on the brink of collapse, but none of the vulnerabilities come to anything. Rather than anything world-shattering, the changes are small and incremental, like tiny cracks in a windowpane. I said that Season 1 cockblocked any attempts to shake up the status quo, and if we keep the analogy, Season 2 feels like you’re being edged, all in aid of maintaining some kind of stability in the formula.
Hank and Dean start off the season dead and then they’re cloned and brought back to life. Rusty’s father is alive, but wait, he’s actually an alien in disguise. Dr. Orpheus gets a team and an archvillain and then they disappear for most of the rest of the season. Dr. Girlfriend is sick of Phantom Limb almost as soon as we see them together so we know it’s not going to last. And, of course, all through the season the boys get ever closer to finding out they’re clones, but it never comes to anything this season. I think it’s the reason I forgot half of these episodes were in Season 2. Later seasons' episodes are more memorably ‘from that season’ because of the big status quo changes happening around them — but there isn’t much to differentiate, say, the White House episode from an episode of Season 1. We don’t have the same organic development of little details where they make sense in context, it’s more ‘hey, remember that guy?’ and that's it. Like, for example, I didn't feel I learnt anything new about Bud Manstrong in Guess Who's Coming to State Dinner?. We see again that he is sexually repressed and was desperate for Baldavitch to make the first move, he is unhealthily attached to his mother, and he is jealous of Brock, and all of that shit is stuff we learnt in Season 1.
But, where maybe the plot development isn’t amazing, the dynamics between the recurring characters really become more solidified here, and that’s absolutely the best part of the season. I love that they developed 21 and 24 more; they’re so funny and the departure of Dr. Girlfriend gave them a great chance to shine.
Dr. Girlfriend herself has a bit more to her this season. We get to see how badass she is, and we also get to see how she can be pragmatic and ruthless too when she needs to be. She has ‘insurance’ for her choice of partners, like the tracking chips, which also gives us a better sense of her previous actions, like why she would maybe not feel so comfortable sharing details of her previous sexual partners with the Monarch. I was disappointed with the finale, because I felt as though we were leading up to something bigger for her and then she was kidnapped for half of it, and I don’t feel like the reconciliation with the Monarch was really earned. All the juicy development happened off-screen, for the most part. It wasn’t so much that the Monarch changed or got any better, but that Phantom Limb was just… worse. I wanted to see more of Dr. Girlfriend being, like, independent of the fools she dates lol. And, like, we do get that later! But it’s a lot later.
The star of the season is Brock. Brock gets so much good character development in this season. They focused on fleshing him out and making him more than he was, because he would be a very easy character to write monotonously. He’s more explicitly a part of the Venture family, and it’s so cute when he’s doing dad stuff, reluctantly or otherwise. But also, we get to see him break down, have remorse, struggle with the identity imposed upon him by his job. He has more of a heart this season, and his rage isn’t quite as murderous. He near singlehandedly resolves the finale and whereas I wasn’t so sure about the payoff of Monarch and Dr. Girlfriend's marriage, I was so behind Brock rallying the henchmen because that was absolutely a payoff we deserved to see. It was a nice symbolic means of absolving himself for that one henchman becoming Venturestein a couple of episodes prior. There’s also a loneliness to him this season that hit me in the heart. It fleshes him out more, explains why he would choose to stay with Team Venture. Of course he does shit for the boys (and for Rusty!) he wouldn’t do for anyone else. This is a more stable life than a killer like him could ever hope to get, even down to your practically immortal surrogate kids.
(Also, I do enjoy the combined factors of him being hypermasculine and insecure and conflicted about his mother figures but then he also wants a woman who will ruthlessly tear him open, like Molotov does… it’s -chef’s kiss-.)
It is, unfortunately, also the season where Brock is transphobic in multiple episodes. So that’s not so good. One trouble with the edginess of the early seasons is that as the general writing quality gets better, the edginess ends up being more… relevant to the plot, I guess? It’s not as pervasive, it’s more relegated to specific plots, but it can mean you might have a great episode but there’s a whole B-plot that’s really uncomfortable viewing. (Yes, I'm mainly talking about the Hunter Gathers subplot, which is the worst because I absolutely love Hunter as a character and how they developed.) Or you can have Love-Bheits, which is so bad for this that the creators disowned it.
How does the revelation about the boys alter how we see them? I mean, they’re better-written this season, but they don’t get much of a chance in the spotlight. In a sense we’re meeting new versions of Dean and Hank and we’re already primed to think they’ll be as expendable as the last pair — so this limits the amount we care about them. But it’s so tense during those brief points when we think they’re going to discover that they’re clones, or when their clones are in danger. I do like that in the latter half of the season we get to find out a little more about the nineteen years of trauma they’ve inherited from their previous incarnations — and the fact Dean is spiralling well in the direction of his father.
Rusty and his backstory takes a back-seat this season, but we have a few episodes where we see him as more vulnerable and less able to keep up a veneer of arrogance. I also like that this is the season where they ramped up the cringe factor. Everything he says and does to the boys is excruciatingly embarrassing and it is perfect.
The rest of this season is just… a lot of missed potential. Brock and Phantom Limb have a fascinating dynamic and I wish we had more of them. Orpheus gets a team but often including him and the Triad means there are too many threads to follow because then we’re getting into like, the D-plots. I do appreciate that they fleshed him out more, though, and he’s a cutie who lights up every episode with a strange (hah) wholesomeness and heart — which makes him a nice palate cleanser!
Here are the rankings for the Season 2 episodes.
S-tier: Victor. Echo. November.
A-tier: Hate Floats; Twenty Years to Midnight
B-tier: Powerless in the Face of Death; Assassinanny 911; I Know Why the Caged Bird Kills; Showdown at Cremation Creek (Part II)
C-tier: Escape to the House of Mummies (Part II); Fallen Arches; Showdown at Cremation Creek (Part I)
D-tier: Guess Who’s Coming to State Dinner?; ¡Viva Los Muertos!
E-tier: Love-Bheits
We have our first S-tier episode in Victor. Echo. November., which I consider to be close to perfect. I’m a sucker for episodes of anything where you have a bunch of volatile characters in a very small space. It has it all — danger and sexual tension and comedy. It’s just… the good shit. It’s amazing how much they get done in one episode. Hate Floats and Twenty Years to Midnight follow in A-tier after that, because they are both so fucking chaotic.
The worst episode of the season is, unsurprisingly, Love-Bheits, which was saved from F-tier because of a single joke that took me off-guard and made me laugh terribly — and also because there still isn’t anything as bad as the pilot, and, past this stage, there might not ever be. Probably the episode I was most surprised to find I didn't like much upon rewatch was ¡Viva los Muertos!. There were some parts I loved and some parts I hated and the parts I hated won out. It felt tonally weird to the rest of the season and then I found out it was written by someone other than Doc and Jackson and that made it make more sense.
Anyway, that’s it for this installment. I can’t believe I made it to nearly 2k words again with this shit. Tune in next time for more of what I wish I could be writing instead of my master's thesis.
