Archer: Into The Cold review: A funny, fitting end to one of TV's best comedies

It’s not easy for a TV comedy to earn an “everybody hugs” ending. And, to be fair, Archer doesn’t entirely try to—given that its title character dips out on the big heartwarming moment that arrives close to the end of its hour-long series finale. (He opts instead for a freaky cybernetic threeway … a ménage à trois ex machina, if you will.) But after 14 seasons of caustic spy comedy leavened with just enough heart to stop everyone involved from coming off as complete and unlikable assholes, it’s hard to imagine a crew of characters who might’ve earned that closing hug more. Archer has mutated in strange and surprising ways over its preceding decade and a half on TV, but its characters have always been its strongest asset—and Into The Cold, which dropped December 17, thankfully gives the vast majority of them a suitable send-off, sappy embrace and all.

For those dipping back into the show to see it off with the finale, here’s the score: After a series of highly public debacles (and their typically explosive spree of accompanying collateral damage), the private spy firm known as the Agency has found itself in the crosshairs of the United Nations, which is moving forward with a ban on private espionage organizations largely inspired by the company’s antics. Spymaster Lana Kane (Aisha Tyler) is thus forced to divide her forces, with top agents Sterling Archer (H. Jon Benjamin) and newcomer Zara Kahn (Natalie Dew) running one last mission in Brazil, accompanied by HR rep-turned-field agent Pam (Amber Nash) and robot-legged yokel Ray (series creator Adam Reed). Meanwhile, the rest of the cast—pyromaniac secretary Carol/Cheryl (Judy Greer), mad doctor Krieger (Lucky Yates), and sad accountant Cyril (Chris Parnell)—are tasked with rooting around in the Agency’s trash piles, trying to find any bodies in need of deeper burial, or forgotten goodies to sell in order to keep the lights on for another day.

Classic Archer, in other words, especially once the “office comedy” side of the show’s standard equation gets a special guest star boost early on, with recurring-antagonist-turned-buddy-turned-talking-refrigerator Barry (Dave Willis) getting added into the mix. Willis has always been the most natural fit out of Archer’s massive roster of guest stars, and Into The Cold teases fans with what the show might have looked like with him as part of its regular cast, instead of a once-per-season drop-in. (Which is to say, pretty damn funny; half the joke of Barry, at this point, is how convoluted his backstory is, but the other half is the glee with which Willis tackles the character’s ever-present irritation at the hell his life has become.) The first third of the finale, then, is a pretty low-key affair, at least by Archer standards—which admittedly involve jetpacks, recurring irritant Slater (a returning Christian Slater), and a decapitated statue of Jesus Christ. The big finale-style stuff comes only at the point where an episode would normally end, as Slater is (unsurprisingly) revealed to be the show’s final antagonist—along with Archer and Barry’s ex, cyborg Russian spy Katya, with Ona Grauer reprising the role for the first time since 2015.

As far as “final bosses” for the series go, both characters make able fits: Powered by his namesake actor’s talent for acerbic prickishness, Slater has always been one of the more effective of the show’s various “What if Archer, but better?” characters, playing into the themes of over-the-hill inadequacy that have been applied to our main man ever since he ended up in that three-season coma a few years back. (It’s not just that Slater can out-fight Archer, although he often can; it’s the fact that he can also out-asshole him that really stings.) Katya, meanwhile, represents the maybe 20 minutes of this show’s entire run time in which its main character was happy in a way that wasn’t at the expense of others, and so her attempts to sell him on renewed collaboration—and a new Cold War where superspies have relevance again—lands with a surprising punch.

Meanwhile, writer Mark Ganek—who’s been the most successful, and most consistent, of the various writers who’ve rotated through the series since Reed stepped down from writing every single word to come out of its characters’ mouths a few seasons back—plots both a successful (if familiar) spy romp, situated on exploding dams and ex-KGB black sites and a series of trips down memory lane that walk the right side of the line between “fun” and “self-indulgent.” (Milton the toastbot! Rip Riley, man-hunter! Reed delivering a very Frisky Dingo “Kick-pants!”) Into The Cold isn’t overly self-referential, at least by Archer’s admittedly lax standards on that count. But it still provides fans with a steady drip of nostalgic pleasures calling back to the show’s earliest eras.

Ganek also comes to terms, for the last time, with Archer’s sometimes hilarious, occasionally infuriating love affair with a good anti-climax. Archer giving up on the identity of his father, once and for all, is a nice payoff to the show’s least vital, longest-running mystery (followed by a flubbed one-liner, another Archer favorite). But building up some huge mystery with a secret door in Krieger’s lab, only to reveal that the swirly MacGuffin found there is completely extraneous to everything else going on, is classic Archer “fuck you for caring” material; in the end, it serves only as a gimmick to get more Barry—including the delightful image of his head on Krieger’s old anime hologram wife—which is about as good a payoff as an anti-climax joke on this show is ever going to get.

But really, though, Archer has always been pretty good about finales, and it holds true here: They let the show turn up both the stakes, and the feelings, just a tad, making for a nice curative from the series’ typical attitude of low-key fucking around, which can sometimes smear a saminess across its mission-of-the-week structure. (Which you can see if you squint here, cutting the finale up into the three episodes that clearly make it up.) And while Into The Cold does see the characters indulge in maybe a bit too much “what we do matters!” talk, of the sort that’s endemic of shows reaching for gravity where no gravity is required, Ganek is always quick to give it a reality check or a comedic undercut. Which is to say that a show that gave Cyril Figgis an undeniably happy and triumphant ending wouldn’t be Archer; better to have him still be inherently pathetic, even if there’s some genuine warmth on display as we say goodbye to these characters (and the actors who play them) as they vanish into the future.

And they are, as ever, in something close to perfect form: In my weekly reviews of Archer, I frequently referred to this as the finest voice cast working in TV, and it holds true just as much now, as their tenure is ending, as it did the day they first really got a handle on these roles, some time back in the midst of season one. None of these characters work without their performers; it’s impossible to imagine Pam’s evolution from “mousy” HR rep to force of nature without Nash’s brassy, infectious laughter and joy, or to even remotely believe that Carol/Cheryl would have reached the peaks of hilarious madness she’s hit over the years without the sheer power of Judy Greer behind her. Parnell and Yates both embody their characters’ uglier edges with grace and aplomb, while Dew has managed the seemingly impossible, and found herself an enjoyable niche to operate in amidst such an established cast. Tyler, as Lana, has had to shoulder the brunt of this show’s straight-man duties for more than a decade now, and has always done so in a way that still allowed her to get silly, brutal, and real as circumstances demanded. (She’s especially good in the finale, Lana’s rising desperation manifesting in a dozen different ways as the team tries to convince themselves that anything they’ve done matters.)

And Benjamin has, across 14 seasons, given what is probably the finest performance of his legendary career, embodying comedic shallowness in ways that invite empathy, rather than repelling it. Sterling Archer is a pretty awful guy, and Benjamin has a rare gift for letting us know that he knows it, buried deep down in those wonderful lower registers of his voice. It’s why we can still root for the asshole, after all this time; it’s why he’ll be a character worth missing when he goes (that, and his skill with a rapid-fire quip).

Which is all a very long-winded way of saying that Into The Cold grants this show a finale worthy of itself. It doesn’t try to re-invent, or re-define, anything that’s come before; it doesn’t try to impose any more meaningful themes than “life is a mess, so fuck it,” which is about as Archer a philosophy as you’re going to get. It’s well-written, snappily paced, funny as hell, and with 10 percent more heart than you might expect from a show that also features its main character getting his nipple burnt off with an airplane battery. It earns both the final hug and the final robot three-way. How many other long-running TV series can manage that?

Stray observations

• “So, our business that’s being banned for being dirty won’t be banned because it’s too dirty to ban. That’s your argument?”
  “It would appear … that it is.”
• “I’m not sure the answer to the question ‘How do I hurt refrigerator?’ is ‘Knife.’” How can you not miss any show that reads like this when it’s transcribed?
• R.I.P. Milton.
• Barry having his digital brain transplanted into the vacuum cleaner that originally gave Archer his loathing of machines: Truly, it’s all come full circle.
• We get to see K.G.B. goon Boris again, too, still voiced by Yates, and filling in the role of Shelly Desai’s Crenshaw in the finale’s recreation of the pilot’s opening scene
• Archer asks if Katya is planning “some kind of giant mystery thing that turns out to be an anti-climactic real-estate scam.” Shout-out to season seven!
• Also, her actual plan feels like it was lifted straight from a Metal Gear Solid game.
• Patrick Warburton: still great. His Rip Riley has gotten even more Brock Samson than it used to be.
• The Agency insisting they’re not kidnapping the Russian architect while absolutely kidnapping him is a fun bit. “I already almost explained that!”
• “Damn it, Archer, after all this time, can you finally admit that I’m good at my job?!”
  “No. But it’s a soft no!” Growth.
• Dam security guy, inadvertently ID-ing Slater: “He insulted my shoes … and implied I had relations with a reindeer.”
• “I’d say may god have mercy on their souls … but what kind of god would create Cheryl?” might be the best line of the whole finale.
• But the biggest laugh was Cheryl pulling out a gun and shooting the ground because it hurt her.
• Lana’s reference to Malory in her final speech to the crew got me.
• Our final scenes set up a new status quo: The Agency might be closed, but the official spy agencies are willing to pay Lana to track down Archer as he travels the world, doing rogue-spy stuff.
• Glad we got one last scene with A.J.; this was never really a show about having a kid, but it added a lot of texture to Lana and Archer’s characters.
• Archer’s “I’m really going to miss hearing what you think about stuff” to Lana hits so much harder than a standard “I love you” might have.
• Our final scene, though, is rooted in the most interesting unintended relationship the show ever stumbled into: the boisterous, beautiful friendship between Archer and Pam.
  “So, where to?”
  “Tangier.”
  “What we got there?”
  “Not a fucking clue.”
  “…Perfect.”
• And that, somehow, is a wrap on Archer. Thank you to everyone who read these recaps, both during my tenure on the show—seven years! Ridiculous!—and before. (A huge thank you to Emily St. James, Sonia Saraiya, and Caroline Framke, who did wonderful work in this space before I elbowed my way in ’round about season seven.) You can argue that the show lost it way at times; you can argue that it went down weird cul-de-sacs and, occasionally, firmly up its own ass. But I can’t name a TV series that’s made me laugh this hard, this consistently, over this long a period, and I’m very happy to have shared the journey with you all.

Archer is available to stream now on Hulu.