Archer s been on the air for a while, and while it s not exactly zombie Simpsons, the newer episodes
feel different to the show s golden years in a whole bunch of ways. But there s one angle in
particular I want to investigate here, one area in which recent episodes of this show seem to differ
from what we ve seen before. And that s when it comes to stories which involve the environment
In case you re not familiar, Archer is a long-running animated comedy, originally on the FX
network, a workplace sitcom where the workplace is a spy agency. A very poorly run spy agency. If you
were going to oversimplify the show drastically, you could describe it as Family Guy meets James
Bond meets the Office. There s far more to it than that, of course, but that s the nutshell version.
It s a very irreverent show, and it s also a very long-running one, having recently concluded its
12th season. And it s this twelfth season I want to discuss in this video particularly the peculiar
way it engages with one major reoccurring theme the environment, and climate catastrophe. Because,
and I m not sure how else to put it, the way the show interacts with these ecological concerns
is weird. Hopefully, you ll see what I mean by the end of the video, and why it s worth noticing.
Like I said, the climate s brought up throughout season 12, but there s a few episodes I want to
focus on in particular, with the main one being episode 2, Lowjacked . This one starts off pretty
conventionally: Archer and the gang are en-route to a team building retreat in Paris when their
lavish plane is boarded by eco-terrorists, who are trying to shake down the wealthy passengers
to fund their cause. And while the story mostly goes in the expected direction after this:
ie Archer and co. have to mastermind a secret effort to escape the hostage situation there s
a strange tension felt throughout when our characters interact with their kidnappers,
a sort of narrative unease with these activists being the episode s villains. For instance,
at around the point where a typical episode would establish the villainy of its antagonists,
would clearly mark them as an enemy, to be stopped, this episode kind of does the opposite
Throughout the hostage situation, Archer even gives the activist leader crowd control tips,
and advises her on her course of action. And, sure, this is partly to get one over on Cyril
but given the wider way this episode and Archer in particular refuses to condemn these activists,
it s hard to view moments like these as being solely motivated by Cyrilophobia. Lowjacked even
goes out of its way to establish a secondary antagonist a bloodthirsty hostage negotiator,
who seems perfectly happy to storm the plane all guns blazing, collateral damage be damned. While
these activists are using force, even they re not trying to kill willy-nilly. Intentionally or not,
the episode positions the activists against this cop, who comes to represent the status quo and
its vicious attempts to maintain normalcy and disrupt efforts for change such as theirs. If
this is the response environmental activists face when campaigning for change, the episode suggests,
then tactics based in violence and terror such as theirs seem a shade more understandable.
So Lowjacked seems unwilling to depict these antagonists as villains, as the bad guys. But
it s equally unwilling to paint them as the good guys. One of the activists appears as a caricature
of environmental activists, for instance getting hyperaggressive towards a man drinking from a
single use plastic bottle. Archer s sometimes played with the idea that our protagonists aren
t always the good guys, due to their various moral failings and the rarely-ethical nature of
their profession. But through including characters and details like the aforementioned caricature,
it doesn t seem Lowjacked is fully interested in exploring this idea. From a structural point
of view, too, the episode spends most of its runtime treating the hijackers as the enemies,
the force that needs to be overcome by Archer and friends. The climax sees them defeated. And yet
that all feels slightly hollow, because as noted above the episode seems reluctant to commit to
vilifying them. Even that loose cannon nuthead is clearly the odd one out. As a result, the
viewer s placed in a sort of hermeneutic limbo, perpetually unsure how to view these activists,
and thus how to interpret the messaging of the episode. We re not dealing with straightforward
moral ambiguity here it s more jarring than that, almost as though we re being jerked back and forth
from sympathy to antipathy. But I think things become a little clearer if we take into account
the show s past. Because this isn t the first time an episode of Archer s had environmentalists
as antagonists. There s an episode from season 2, named Pipeline Fever , which sees Archer and Lana
travel deep into some swamp or other to protect a pipeline from an eco-terrorist named Gandalf.
As the name Gandalf might suggest, this episode is a little less reserved in its treatment of
environmental activists. It s not that this episode mocked environmentalism it didn t,
not really. In fact, the environmentalists probably come off best in this episode,
when compared to the spy agency and the fossil fuel industrialists who hire them. It s more that,
back then, the cynical, irreverent spirit of the show didn t waver even in the face of matters like
these, didn t give environmentalism a pass. Archer, especially near the start of its run,
was a fairly jaded show, and by the end of any given episode, pretty much every character
or ideology gets criticised, or undercut in one way or another. So Gandalf gives up his
mission after being convinced by Lana that it was pointless, that Americans wouldn t change
their ways, that change was impossible. In Archer s early days, environmentalism
is one cause among many, an eco-terrorist is one antagonist among many, to be cynically dismantled.
See the way Lana s ecological concerns falter immediately when she s placed in danger herself.
The environment is just another concern, just another motivation driving certain characters
and certain plotlines. However, by Archer s twelfth season, environmental concerns
seem to be afforded a special place, above the show s cynicism. We ve already talked
about the ways Season 12 episode 2 goes out of its way to nuance this set of eco-terrorists,
but it goes beyond just this episode. The next one sees Archer and the gang chased by the British
police after bugging the prime minister, and the Cheryl and Pam B-story features this moment
In the episode, that moment s just as sudden and jarring as it appears here. It s not exactly
out of character for Carol to say something like this, but given the focus of the previous episode,
this inclusion is given more weight. It feels deliberate, noteworthy, and above all
serious, in a way the environmental stuff wasn t back in Season 2.
And this seriousness continues in the following episode. Photo Op sees Archer and Lana on a
conservation mission, attempting to return a baby gorilla to his habitat. The villains here are
some truly malicious poachers this whole thing s a cartoon, but even so, these guys are cartoonishly
evil. But our heroes, now on the side of the environmentalists, are introduced with yet
more uncharacteristic sincerity. This is not the typical Archer tone, and this sincerity
isn t the buildup to a joke, or anything. It s all played straight. And given the irreverence
with which this show treated similar matters in previous years, that sticks out. That s a change.
And for the last part of this video, we re going to try and figure out what s behind this why
Archer takes environmental issues so seriously, even at the risk of compromising the narrative
or its trademark brand of cynical humour. Two major options suggest themselves. First,
it might be due to a wider, societal shift in the way we view these things. It may simply be
that the environment, and environmental activists are no longer laughing matters for Archer because
they re no longer laughing matters for society. As Crystal makes clear in that third episode,
climate catastrophe will soon be a sobering and terrifying reality, and even for shows
like Archer, even for people like Archer, it s becoming harder and harder not to take
this seriously. Perhaps the creative team behind Archer realised this ahead of the twelfth season,
and realised that even in a pretty jaded show, some things, some people are beyond irreverence.
Or this shift may well be due to a change in writing personnel on the show. It s well-known
that the creator and main writer for the early years, Adam Reed, largely stepped back from the
show after season 10. The episodes since have been written by a wide variety of others. The
show retains a cynicism, but it s now a selective cynicism and it may well be the case that
this is simply due to the different voices and perspectives of the new writers. Realistically,
it s probably both of these reasons. And both of these reasons are tied together.
Perhaps this change is just due to the different priorities of newer writers, but what is this,
if not an individual, specific example of a wider societal shift in the ways that the environment
and climate catastrophe are understood? And that itself is one of the most interesting
parts to me. There s been a lot of discussion around the diminishing returns we ve seen in the
last few Archer seasons. I agree to a point, but I think there are areas in which the show is still
trying to innovate to a degree or, at the very least, in which its trying to avoid stagnation.
And the fascinating thing about longrunning shows like this, especially ones which do their best to
stave off stagnation, is that the longer they go on, the more they reflect changes in their parent
culture. The way Archer season 12 approaches environmental issues is weird, at times,
especially when we consider the past of the show. And even if this weirdness sticks out at times,
and potentially complicates stories here and there, I don t think it s necessarily a bad thing.
If nothing else, it reflects where a lot of us are at right now. Because there s a lot of us that don
t know quite how to approach climate catastrophe. So I don t think we can hold it against Archer if
they haven t quite figured it out either. Thanks for watching, and I hope you ve found
this video interesting. If so, consider leaving a like, and if this gets much of a
response I may well return to Archer, perhaps even Archer season 12, in a future video.
And I d like to thank all my Patrons onscreen now, especially Kevin Douglas and Ian Fyfield.