The Venture Bros. review: “The Saphrax Protocol”

“The Saphrax Protocol” ends the seventh season of The Venture Bros. on the highest of notes, and reminds us why this show is so special.

I’ve been reviewing The Venture Bros. all season long, but haven’t given any episode an “A” grade. At times I worried I was being too hard on the show, but no more. THIS is what a great episode of The Venture Bros. looks like, full-bodied and fun, genuinely moving and straight-up absurd, hand-crafted down to the smallest detail. All year, I’ve thought something was just a little off; maybe it was creator Jackson Publick handing off directing duties to Juno Lee, maybe it was mild seasonal rot, or maybe everything was building to this climax. Whatever the reason, “The Saphrax Protocol” is a reminder of why The Venture Bros. is the best show no one is watching.

This episode juggled several plotlines. All of them worked, but let’s take the simplest first: 15 members of a Guild blackout team are trapped in VenTech Tower with Brock Sampson, who methodically picks them off one by one, only stopping to take a whiz break. This is the single-minded Brock we met in the series premiere, doing what he does best: killing the f**k out of henchmen. (“They’re stacking up like cordwood!”) Brock has gained a lot of depth since then and I wouldn’t want him to be in Swedish Murder Machine mode 24/7, but the show gives us so little of that these days it’s a treat to see him cut loose.

Sometimes you just need a little gleeful cartoon ultraviolence, and Brock delivered.

The Guild blackout team uses the teleporter the Monarch stole back in “The Unicorn in Captivity” to infiltrate the tower, paying off that plot. They’re there to whisk Dr. Venture up to Meteor Majeure, where the Council of Seven (or Eight, including Dr. Phineas Phage) is making the Monarch a Level 10 villain, his reward for “killing” the Creep last week. The initiation ceremony is wonderfully gothic, with the council members donning costumes while the Monarch and Gary walk through events in the lives of Saphrax and Altheaeus, the first villain and first henchmen, respectively. (If the show hadn’t already beaten me to it a few weeks back, I’d say it reminded me of Eyes Wide Shut.) It’s got a Station-of-the-Cross feel to it, but sinister, and with far more pop culture references. The bit where the Monarch sticks his hand in the log, for example, is lifted from Flash Gordon:

The references help undercut the self-seriousness of the whole secret society thing, as does Red Dragoon, who never has trouble stealing scenes. (“You begged me for a line.”) And we can’t forget about the Council, serving as Greek chorus, chiming in whenever the Monarch or 21 cross an important threshold. (“Altheaeus, the father of ‘Made you look!'”) The sequence is hilarious from start to finish.

But it has a point, too. As his final test, the Monarch is given the opportunity to kill Rusty. He refuses, calls the Council out for mindf**king him, and quits. Likewise, Gary rejects the Guild’s offer to make him a Level 4 supervillain, saying he doesn’t want to hate without his best friend. This, of course, is what the Guild was looking for, and they instate the Monarch as a Level 10 villain, with Gary as his Number 2. It’s a sweet moment, and a satisfying payoff to a relationship that’s been developing since season 4.

But like any good season finale, the show can’t just leave it there. Before we sign off, Watch and Ward break the news that the Monarch and Dr. Venture are “blood related,” something they found out after testing Rusty’s DNA when he was brought aboard Meteor Majeure. The Monarch’s response is predictable. “ARE YOU KIDDING ME?”

It’s a cliffhanger, but the good kind of cliffhanger, the kind that only comes after you’ve resolved another plot. The Monarch becomes a Level 10 villain but now has to figure out how and whether to arch his half-brother. The leg of the journey ends and another begins. It’s paced perfectly.

I could say much the same thing about Hank and Dean’s story, which for my money is where the real meat of the episode is. After passing out in Dean’s dorm room last week, Hank has slipped into a coma. Now dressed as Lando Calrissian, he shares an Empire Strikes Back-themed fever dream with the Action Man, who’s been in his own coma ever since his stroke in “Arrears in Science.” (The Action Man’s subconscious, for the record, has more of a Barbarella thing going.) The Venture Bros. has always distinguished itself making weird, deep cut pop culture references, so it was great to see “The Saphrax Protocol” lay them on thicker and faster than any other episode this season. Yes, lots of comedies make Star Wars jokes, but how many have a character try and seduce a wampa with a line from an ’80s-era Colt 45 commercial starring Billy Dee Williams?

And also the supervillain Dr. Phineas Phage is there, having gone into a coma after suffering an offscreen teleporter accident. His bottom half now looks like an AT-AT from Empire Strikes Back. It’s a party in Comatown.

But as in the Monarch’s subplot, the references aren’t there for their own sake; they’re window dressing for genuine character development. Hank’s been adrift for a while now. He’s not in school and he doesn’t have a job; Sirena is one of the few things he has going for him, and the Action Man thinks he needs more. In short, Hank needs to grow up.

But Hank has his own idea idea of what growing up means. He thinks he’s proving his manhood by jumping into the Matmos, a mysterious lake of alien goo pulled from Barbarella. (The Action Man: “It’s like this energy that surrounds everything.” Hank: “Like the Force!” “Yeah, but it’s confusing and it might have other powers. It’s completely unnecessary to the plot of the movie.” “Like Midichlorians.”) As Phage points out, that doesn’t have much bearing on adulthood next to stuff like child support payments or prostate cancer, but who’s to say there’s only one way to be a grownup?

Hank has always forged his own path, and it’s hard not to be a little inspired by the way he throws himself into whatever decision he makes, even if it’s not always the right one. (The Action Man: “That kid has moxie.” Phage: “That kid has undiagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.”) At the end of the episode, he rises from his hospital bed and disappears into a crowd, a parody of the final scene from Darkman. Is he going to find himself? Is he going to find his birth mother? Wherever he goes and however he changes, I hope Hank never loses his wide-eyed sense of wonder, not completely. I don’t think he’s in any danger of that right now, since he was wearing his old Batman mask as season 7 faded to black.

But let’s not steamroll over that birth mother thing. In their coma dream, the Action Man reveals the name of Hank and Dean’s mom: Bobbi St. Simone, which has a very late ’60s Venture Bros. kind of ring to it. It’s a testament to how well “The Saphrax Protocol” is written that this reveal, so long in coming, doesn’t crowd out the other plotlines or feel like it needs more attention. It’s just slipped into the flow of the episode, setting up interesting times to come. What is she like, I wonder?

But that’s a question for season 8. Meanwhile, in the season 7 finale, the strongest scenes belong to Dean, who sits by Hank’s bedside and lists all the reasons he’s “a crap brother.” The Venture Bros. is a comedy first and foremost, but seeing Dean pour out his heart to a comatose Hank tugs at the heartstrings. At bottom, his fears are very simple: he regrets that he and Hank have grown apart. The show doesn’t pin down an exact reason why he slept with Sirena because it doesn’t have to; Dean knew it was a stupid thing to do and still did it, because he’s confused and adrift and feeling alone.

Looking back, the show set up this scene in “The High Cost of Loathing,” when Hank confessed some of these same fears to a comatose Rusty. “It ain’t easy maintaining my famous can-do attitude when you’re always all can’t-don’t to me,” he admitted. “I don’t get it. Dean cuts and runs on Team Venture and you give him whatever he wants, but I stick around and you punish me for it…I just feel so…kind of alone.” Meanwhile, Dean wants to return to a time when it was just him and Hank sharing a room and going on weird adventures with their family. Hank and Dean are feeling the same things, each of them resenting the other, and neither knows how to open up about it. As bizarre as their childhoods were, and as off-the-wall as their world is, what they’re going through is universal and relatable: they’re growing up, which is what Dean really regrets. “The Saphrax Protocol” captures this with grace and sensitivity, and it calls out those annoying Bop It toys, because we can’t have things getting too serious.

The episode’s one big flaw is its treatment of Sirena, or lack thereof. Why did she do what she did? How does she now feel about Hank, and about Dean? When the show set up this plotline back in “Loathing,” I worried Sirena would be used as a plot device to drive the emotional development of the Venture brothers, and it looks like I was right. We got nothing from her.

Sirena deserves better than that. The show needs more female characters and she’s a great one, warm and brash in equal measure, with a distinctively endearing voice courtesy of Cristin Milioti (who’s also the mother on How I Met Your Mother, by the way). I hope we explore her side of the story next season. Maybe she and Dean could look for Hank together?

Oh, man, next season. I have a couple problems with “The Saphrax Protocol,” but the biggest is that it’s single-handedly rendered the wait for season 8 unbearable, and it was already going to be bad. Get on this, Adult Swim! Give Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer the resources they need and ride the show into animated history!

Grade: A

Nothing But Bullet Points

• “Llama meat has half the calories of pork!”
• It’s a good thing Brock didn’t go through the teleporter. With that metal plate in his chest, he could’ve ended up in a coma like Phage.
• Red Mantle and Dragoon have really gotten used to sharing the same body. “We were going to pierce our ear like Jimmy from Road House!” They don’t even distinguish whose ear.
• Saphrax was a real guy, a chieftan of the Greuthungi people in the fourth century. He ruled alongside Alatheus, which sounds a lot like Altheaeus, the character 21 played. Together, they faced down and beat a Roman army.
• The dolls from Barbarella really are that creepy, and probably that fragile.

• “Now we’re talking. Well, not you, obviously, I broke your windpipe.”
• I wonder which member of 98 Degrees Dean thought looked like “a shoebox with eyes.” You be the judge.
• “Bobbi St. Simone,” Hank and Dean’s mother, sounds a like like Robert “Bobby” Simone, Jimmy Smits’ character on NYPD Blue. I have no idea if it means anything, but you have to look under every rug with this show or you miss something.
• Ever notice how Radical Left only talks out the left side of his mouth?
• “I learned to count when I was 3.”
• “We had different strokes.” That’s gotta be the best setup for a “Whatcha talkin’ ’bout, Willis?” ever.
• Hank gets in a quick Wizard of Oz reference when saying goodbye to Phage. “Don’t cry. You’ll rust so dreadfully.”
• So Hatred really did have the letters on his body removed. Except the ‘D,’ because it’s Tender Vittles down there.

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