Archer Dreamland: "Ladyfingers"

Archer Dreamland: "Ladyfingers". Also called Archer (season 8), Archer: Dreamland; "Lady Fingers". Season 8 of Archer, episode 4 (26 April 2017), episode #89 for the run of Archer. Adam Reed, director, script, series creator. Archer Dreamland is a TV mini-series of 8 episodes on FXX. At the end of Season 7 it "was revealed that Archer has been in a coma for three months," and "finds himself trapped in a 1947 noir-esque Los Angeles setting called Dreamland," which is the setting for the miniseries.[1]

Animation for adults. See for Barry Dylan's becoming (yet again) a bionic man,[2] in this case a variation on a killer cyborg of a human with visibly robotic prostheses for limbs. For a variation on another Archer theme, note the b/w flashback in which this Dreamland version of "Dr." Algernop Krieger[3] both is and is not a Nazi mad scientist: as "Krieger feverishly works to fulfill Barry Dylan’s destiny" to end up "a mutilated, evil cyborg, Krieger "flashes back to his time in the Third Reich. He was a Nazi scientist as we all suspected but it turns out he was actually an undercover Jew named Aaron Liebowitz doing what he could to sabotage the German war effort. This of course means building an army of robotic dogs (and one wonderfully aloof robotic cat) while ensuring that all the soldiers he operates on die of 'sepsis.'"[4] — That is, Liebowtiz poisons them. The dogs are decorously Doberman Pinschers with robotic prosthetic limbs like those of the Barry-Dylan/"Dutch" Dillon character,[5]; similarly for the cat, giving them an Industrial look appropriate to the 1940s. For an anti-Nazi audience, these very Germanic dogs are ironically heroic: when Liebowitz's identity is revealed, he sics the dogs on the Nazi officers who would shoot him; off-screen, but with highly visible splatter, the dogs kill the officers. Krieger/Liebowitz and his assistant have just declared their love for each other, but she, of course, renounces any love for a Jew; so Krieger/Liebowitz sets the robo-dogs on her as well, and she, too, is bloodily ripped apart off-screen in a moment of very dark comedy.

RDE, Initial Compiler, 27April17