The Venture Bros. review: “The Unicorn in Captivity”

The Venture Bros. draws from heist movies, conspiracy theories and Stanley Kubrick for a quick-moving caper of an episode.

When in doubt, you can’t go wrong structuring an episode around a standard-issue movie plot. We saw a bit of this in season 6 with “A Party For Tarzan,” which strung together multiple narrations in the style of Goodfellas. The heist plot in “The Unicorn in Captivity” isn’t quite as ambitious, but still good fun, and sets up what could be a satisfying final set of episodes.

Maybe; it’s hard to tell what plot threads The Venture Bros. will follow up on and which it will drop or let lay dormant. There are several dangling in the air right now: will Rusty and the Monarch find out they’re half-brothers? Will there be a love triangle between Dean, Hank and Sirena Ong? And now, what will the Monarch do with his new teleporter? As the show has gotten older, its best episodes have tended to be the supersized blowouts that juggle several balls thrown up during the season, in the style of “All This and Gargantua-2.” Are we heading for something like that?

But I’m getting ahead of myself. “The Unicorn in Captivity” starts with Dr. Girlfriend convincing the Monarch to join a team of villains intent on stealing Dr. Venture’s newly made (if not quite perfected) two-pod teleporting machine from VenTech Tower. CopyCat, the smooth-talking villain from “Faking Miracles” is the ring leader. Tunnel Vision, who has a drill for a hand, is their way into the compound, while Dot Comm will disable the complex’s security systems with her hacking prowess. There are also a couple of new guys: Ramburgler, who has horns and steals stuff, and a bizarre Clayface/Joker hybrid named Presto-Change-O (played by Mark Hamill, who voiced the Joker in Batman: The Animated Series). It’s not the most creative group of villains the show has ever come up with (Dot Comm has been in a couple background scenes, and I was slightly disappointed to learn her name was so pedestrian), but any heist movie has to have a bench of clashing personalities, and these guys get the job done.

The heist itself is fun, too, especially after Brock stumbles on the villains mid-heist and things go horribly wrong. There’s a great moment where Sergeant Hatred shoots at the Monarch, who’s holding one of the teleporter pods, and the bullets blast out the other pod and kill Ramburgler. You don’t see that in Ocean’s Eleven. I also liked Presto-Change-O transforming into an elliptical machine to slow down Brock, although lord knows why he thought that would work. Creative gags abound.

To make a long story short, CopyCat is planning to double-cross the rest of his team, all of whom end up dead but for the Monarch and Dot Comm. In the final moments, the Monarch gets his hands on the teleporter and will hopefully do something cool with it in the finale.

As diverting as the heist is, it felt a bit rote. The better storyline is Rusty’s. He, Billy and Pete may have successfully invented a teleporter (with the Pirate Captain as a surprise human test subject), but that doesn’t mean they can just start selling it, much as Rusty wants to. It ends up the O.S.I. has set up shop in VenTech Tower, and Hunter Gathers insists Rusty hand over the invention lest it crash the global economy. (“What happens to FedEx when grandma can just zap her famous fruitcake to her kiddies in Kalamazoo?”)

One thing leads to another, and soon Rusty is hobnobbing with masked billionaires at a baroque orgy lifted from Eyes Wide Shut, his indoctrination into the secret cabal that actually controls the world. (“We’ve gone by many names throughout the centuries. The Knights Templar. The Illuminati. The Rothschild Bilderberg super sentinels.”) Their offer is simple: hand over the teleporter device and have all the money and sex you could possibly want. Or don’t, and get raped by a large man with a bladed strap-on dildo. Three guesses what Rusty chooses.

The Venture Bros. started out as a parody of Johnny Quest and has become something of an all-purpose superhero satire, so sure, why not throw some New World Order conspiracy theories in there? Writer Jackson Publick has a good time undercutting the self-seriousness of the idea. Rusty spots one member of the “pseudo-religious capitalist crony club” splashing water from an outdoor fountain on his balls, and meets a working girl who brings the whole thing down to Earth. “This gig was a lot easier before they inducted the guy who invented Viagra, I’ll tell ya,” she says. “That’s him over there next to big oil and big tobacco. They’re the ones double-teaming Patti.”

But the real punchline comes at the end, when we find out that the whole party was fabricated. The O.S.I. wanted Rusty to hand over his invention, so it hooked him up to a virtual reality machine and let it rip. Rusty dreamed up the secret cabal, and the literary and artistic references, and the orphan samplers, and gave Dr. Girlfriend’s voice to the prostitute. Ultimately, “The Unicorn in Captivity” is probably an excuse for Public and Doc Hammer to riff on Eyes Wide Shut, but I like to think it’s also their dig at people who buy into New World Order stuff; your mind has to be as lazy as Rusty Venture’s to take it seriously.

Not that the world Jackson and Publik are suggesting is any less disturbing. When it comes time for Rusty to make a choice, he gladly hands over his teleporter in exchange for the mind-blowing sex he thinks he’s having.Rusty isn’t railroaded into giving up his invention by a shadowy council of superrich hedonists, but he is tricked into it by the US government. Either way: pretty bleak.

It’s also kind of remarkable Rusty invented something this worthy of interest. Between mentoring Billy last week and being the adult in the room during the Summit of Tolerance, he seems like less of a wreck this season. I’ve already mentioned several threads dangling ahead of the finale. Can we add “Rusty is becoming a functional adult” to that number? And how might it tie in?

Grade: B+

Nothing But Bullet Points

• “Hobbit Oppenheimer”
• The O.S.I. takes up an entire floor of VenTech Tower, hidden behind a facade for a company called Dummy Corp, which is funny. I was getting slight Westworld vibes from the visuals. Also, the way Brock opens passage to the O.S.I. office is terrifying.
• “It’s for your own good.” “Oh, sure, that’s what the Nazis said!” “No, they didn’t.”
• When Rusty enters the NWO house, there’s a motto on a tapestry. It reads, “Gratias ago vos can nobis,” which Google translates to “We thank you can.” Uh…can anyone who knows Latin clarify?
• “Told you we should have just bought a drone.”
• Why is Gary wearing a Pham House uniform when he delivers the Monarch’s wings?
• The Unicorn in Captivity is an actual tapestry, part of a series, and it’s in New York City at the moment. How deep does this go?

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