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serpentinemalignWARNINGS:
NAVIGATION
Welcome back to my Venture Bros. retrospective! Between the last part and this one, we found out A FUCKING VENTURE BROS MOVIE IS COMING. So it's never been a better time for me to continue this series. Today we’re taking a look at Season 3. It took me a little longer to get through the season, partly because I’m in the midst of finals and partly because there’s a lot more to digest. This is the point of the show where it gets really good. The show adds more depth to the characters so they can respond organically to bigger plot events. It also experiments more with episode format, meaning that episodes can vary massively in scale and scope. We have some ‘traditional’ (ad)Venture capers, but we also have two whole flashback episodes to fill us in on character backstory. It works so well in fleshing out the world and making us care about the cast, who felt a little bit threadbare in places. This season is the moment I understood why Pete and Billy were, like, there.
It’s difficult to figure out how to rank the season’s episodes, or to choose a ‘star of the season’. I think it's because we have an actual plot now. The episodes never stop being silly or funny, but the plots have actual substance to them. At this point we know the basics of all the characters and them being their usual selves risks being boring. So to expand our understanding of them, Doc and Jackson put them in situations that test their comfort zones. They parade Rusty around a supervillain house party. They (seemingly!) send the force of the OSI after Brock. The Monarch is forced to arch other people than Dr. Venture, and consequently JJ is forced to deal with an arching relationship. Plot is mostly prioritised over cramming in as many jokes as possible, but I don’t think this is a bad thing for the show. However, it does mean that characters who normally steal scenes, like the Monarch, now have more meat to contend with.
Speaking of meat! The backstory with Jonas gets fucked this season. We already knew he was a terrible, abusive father. But now we find out it wasn't limited to Rusty, that he'd abandon anyone and everyone — from orphan children to his supposed best friend — to chase his ambition and maintain public admiration.
Expanding the limits of Jonas’ awfulness helps in fleshing out Rusty and the kind of person he is. It's why I think that Rusty is the star of season 3. This season hammers home that the main role model in his life prioritised success (and the appearance of success) over everything else. Rusty's failures are so painful to him because failure and imperfection is to be avoided at all costs. But he doesn’t have the optics his dad had to make ill-gotten success possible while still appearing to be one of the ‘good guys’. And JJ is twisting the knife by being that perfect ‘good guy’, recuperating the Venture legacy, acting as a sort of idealised vision of Jonas. JJ does show a few cracks in his persona this season, but he isn’t the same callous, careless monster their father was.
Despite Rusty being the star, that doesn’t mean he actually does much this season. In fact, the season is more marked by what he doesn’t do. He doesn't switch sides and join the Guild, and he doesn't do anything with the secrets from his family's past. His absolute nonchalance in response to the wild shit happening around him is a joy, and it's performed brilliantly by James Urbaniak, but it does mean he stays disconnected from the action. That is, when the action isn't related to some horrible shit his dad did. Given that Sergeant Hatred barely scratches the compound the whole season, we can be assured that Rusty’s real arch-enemy this season is... his father. I know, I know, it’s a cliché. But it’s true. He spends the season quietly confronting his past and his future, the idealised Venture name and its fucked-up realities. And it forms an arresting character conflict. It does make me wish we'd had an arc of Rusty going to the dark side, though I've talked about why it was never gonna happen at the start of this season anyway.
The season goes to a lot of lengths to blur the Guild and the OSI and show they’re really not so far apart. We get the sense that maybe the only winning move in this great battle between good and evil is… not to play. And that’s exactly what Rusty does throughout this season, both by his own volition and otherwise. This is also the season we find out that Brock’s bodyguard assignment was never to protect Rusty at all. I think this revelation is perfect for the overarching themes of the season. Rusty has inherited every aspect of this life against his will, and here he finds out he's a pawn in an even greater conflict than he thought. Is it any wonder he takes as many opportunities as possible to say 'no' to it?
Of course, he says 'no' while he traumatises his sons with the same life. I'm thinking particularly of when he has a nice soak in a motel bathroom while the boys and Brock fend off an assassin in the adjacent room. He neglects his sons, but for different reasons than his father. Decades of trauma and peril have desensitised him to the point he’s almost oblivious to the fact he’s putting his sons through that same trauma. He does have a potential wake-up call when the boys’ clones get killed off at the end of the season... but then the Rusty of Season 4 is even worse.
I think the one weakness of this season is it struggles to balance the characters’ screen-time. It’s probably just that it’s so hard to introduce this many subplots in one season. But it’s so weird how rarely we see Sergeant Hatred in action arching Rusty, and then by next season he’s defected to the OSI anyway. (Though maybe I was relieved by that on first watch, knowing what I did about him and not knowing where his character would eventually end up.) Likewise, I understand why they gave JJ a bigger role and a chance to show he’s not as perfect or as infallible as he seems, but he's not a compelling enough protagonist to justify the amount of screen-time he gets. I don’t care all that much about his team either. There's just a multitude of other characters who could serve the same purpose but be more fun about it. I wish we'd seen more of the Triad, for example, because they can often serve as a similar moral foil to the main cast while being more enjoyable and dynamic to watch.
But, even with that, this is a strong season, as my rankings show:
S-tier: What Goes Down, Must Come Up; ORB; The Family That Slays Together, Stays Together (Part One)
A-tier: Shadowman 9: In the Cradle of Destiny; The Doctor Is Sin; The Invisible Hand of Fate; The Lepidopterists; The Family That Slays Together, Stays Together (Part Two)
B-tier: Home Is Where the Hate Is; The Buddy System; Tears of a Sea Cow
C-tier: Now Museum – Now You Don't!
D-tier: Dr. Quymn, Medicine Woman
E-tier:
Our weakest in the rank is Dr. Quymn — a frustrating episode for a lot of reasons. I really felt Dean's utter horror at the amount of rampant heterosexuality in this episode. The episode sticks out because it doesn't appear to hold any relation to the overarching plot, and the backstory we get isn't interesting enough to justify its existence.
Still, even with a few misses, we have three S-tiers. What Goes Down grants us access to a part of the Venture compound we’ve never seen, along with a few of Jonas Venture's many skeletons in the closet. Also I love The Prodigy. ORB is a hilarious and well-plotted set-up for an object that’s gonna have real consequences later, though not the ones we think. And our penultimate episode features some of the best action sequences of the season, introducing three incredibly cool assassins that are promptly and boldly killed off. The episode is also a kind of swansong for our Venture family status quo, as Brock defends the family only to exit it an episode later. And, with the finale killing off 24 and Dean and Hank's clones, this season is solidified as a farewell to what we think we know of The Venture Bros. Now it seems that anything is possible... and that's a beautiful promise of what's to come.
- Venture Bros. spoilers, of course.
NAVIGATION
Welcome back to my Venture Bros. retrospective! Between the last part and this one, we found out A FUCKING VENTURE BROS MOVIE IS COMING. So it's never been a better time for me to continue this series. Today we’re taking a look at Season 3. It took me a little longer to get through the season, partly because I’m in the midst of finals and partly because there’s a lot more to digest. This is the point of the show where it gets really good. The show adds more depth to the characters so they can respond organically to bigger plot events. It also experiments more with episode format, meaning that episodes can vary massively in scale and scope. We have some ‘traditional’ (ad)Venture capers, but we also have two whole flashback episodes to fill us in on character backstory. It works so well in fleshing out the world and making us care about the cast, who felt a little bit threadbare in places. This season is the moment I understood why Pete and Billy were, like, there.
It’s difficult to figure out how to rank the season’s episodes, or to choose a ‘star of the season’. I think it's because we have an actual plot now. The episodes never stop being silly or funny, but the plots have actual substance to them. At this point we know the basics of all the characters and them being their usual selves risks being boring. So to expand our understanding of them, Doc and Jackson put them in situations that test their comfort zones. They parade Rusty around a supervillain house party. They (seemingly!) send the force of the OSI after Brock. The Monarch is forced to arch other people than Dr. Venture, and consequently JJ is forced to deal with an arching relationship. Plot is mostly prioritised over cramming in as many jokes as possible, but I don’t think this is a bad thing for the show. However, it does mean that characters who normally steal scenes, like the Monarch, now have more meat to contend with.
Speaking of meat! The backstory with Jonas gets fucked this season. We already knew he was a terrible, abusive father. But now we find out it wasn't limited to Rusty, that he'd abandon anyone and everyone — from orphan children to his supposed best friend — to chase his ambition and maintain public admiration.
Expanding the limits of Jonas’ awfulness helps in fleshing out Rusty and the kind of person he is. It's why I think that Rusty is the star of season 3. This season hammers home that the main role model in his life prioritised success (and the appearance of success) over everything else. Rusty's failures are so painful to him because failure and imperfection is to be avoided at all costs. But he doesn’t have the optics his dad had to make ill-gotten success possible while still appearing to be one of the ‘good guys’. And JJ is twisting the knife by being that perfect ‘good guy’, recuperating the Venture legacy, acting as a sort of idealised vision of Jonas. JJ does show a few cracks in his persona this season, but he isn’t the same callous, careless monster their father was.
Despite Rusty being the star, that doesn’t mean he actually does much this season. In fact, the season is more marked by what he doesn’t do. He doesn't switch sides and join the Guild, and he doesn't do anything with the secrets from his family's past. His absolute nonchalance in response to the wild shit happening around him is a joy, and it's performed brilliantly by James Urbaniak, but it does mean he stays disconnected from the action. That is, when the action isn't related to some horrible shit his dad did. Given that Sergeant Hatred barely scratches the compound the whole season, we can be assured that Rusty’s real arch-enemy this season is... his father. I know, I know, it’s a cliché. But it’s true. He spends the season quietly confronting his past and his future, the idealised Venture name and its fucked-up realities. And it forms an arresting character conflict. It does make me wish we'd had an arc of Rusty going to the dark side, though I've talked about why it was never gonna happen at the start of this season anyway.
The season goes to a lot of lengths to blur the Guild and the OSI and show they’re really not so far apart. We get the sense that maybe the only winning move in this great battle between good and evil is… not to play. And that’s exactly what Rusty does throughout this season, both by his own volition and otherwise. This is also the season we find out that Brock’s bodyguard assignment was never to protect Rusty at all. I think this revelation is perfect for the overarching themes of the season. Rusty has inherited every aspect of this life against his will, and here he finds out he's a pawn in an even greater conflict than he thought. Is it any wonder he takes as many opportunities as possible to say 'no' to it?
Of course, he says 'no' while he traumatises his sons with the same life. I'm thinking particularly of when he has a nice soak in a motel bathroom while the boys and Brock fend off an assassin in the adjacent room. He neglects his sons, but for different reasons than his father. Decades of trauma and peril have desensitised him to the point he’s almost oblivious to the fact he’s putting his sons through that same trauma. He does have a potential wake-up call when the boys’ clones get killed off at the end of the season... but then the Rusty of Season 4 is even worse.
I think the one weakness of this season is it struggles to balance the characters’ screen-time. It’s probably just that it’s so hard to introduce this many subplots in one season. But it’s so weird how rarely we see Sergeant Hatred in action arching Rusty, and then by next season he’s defected to the OSI anyway. (Though maybe I was relieved by that on first watch, knowing what I did about him and not knowing where his character would eventually end up.) Likewise, I understand why they gave JJ a bigger role and a chance to show he’s not as perfect or as infallible as he seems, but he's not a compelling enough protagonist to justify the amount of screen-time he gets. I don’t care all that much about his team either. There's just a multitude of other characters who could serve the same purpose but be more fun about it. I wish we'd seen more of the Triad, for example, because they can often serve as a similar moral foil to the main cast while being more enjoyable and dynamic to watch.
But, even with that, this is a strong season, as my rankings show:
S-tier: What Goes Down, Must Come Up; ORB; The Family That Slays Together, Stays Together (Part One)
A-tier: Shadowman 9: In the Cradle of Destiny; The Doctor Is Sin; The Invisible Hand of Fate; The Lepidopterists; The Family That Slays Together, Stays Together (Part Two)
B-tier: Home Is Where the Hate Is; The Buddy System; Tears of a Sea Cow
C-tier: Now Museum – Now You Don't!
D-tier: Dr. Quymn, Medicine Woman
E-tier:
Our weakest in the rank is Dr. Quymn — a frustrating episode for a lot of reasons. I really felt Dean's utter horror at the amount of rampant heterosexuality in this episode. The episode sticks out because it doesn't appear to hold any relation to the overarching plot, and the backstory we get isn't interesting enough to justify its existence.
Still, even with a few misses, we have three S-tiers. What Goes Down grants us access to a part of the Venture compound we’ve never seen, along with a few of Jonas Venture's many skeletons in the closet. Also I love The Prodigy. ORB is a hilarious and well-plotted set-up for an object that’s gonna have real consequences later, though not the ones we think. And our penultimate episode features some of the best action sequences of the season, introducing three incredibly cool assassins that are promptly and boldly killed off. The episode is also a kind of swansong for our Venture family status quo, as Brock defends the family only to exit it an episode later. And, with the finale killing off 24 and Dean and Hank's clones, this season is solidified as a farewell to what we think we know of The Venture Bros. Now it seems that anything is possible... and that's a beautiful promise of what's to come.
