About Last Night: Venture Bros.

For too long Butler has left his precious brothers Venture neglected on WF.  Well no more!  More after the jump....

Adult Swim had a whole lot of fun jerking us Venture Bros. fans around with season 4.  Yes, we got 16 episodes, which is longer than average for an adult swim show, but was that wait from April until September not excruciating?  Fortunately, Doc Hammer and Jackson Publick saw fit to make up for this agonizing hiatus by capping off this season with a full on hour length episode that continued the fine V-Bros. tradition of making season finales that kick a whole lot of ass.

GO TEAM VENTURE!

Venture Brothers is not your average Adult Swim show.  Don't get me wrong, it's still full of pop culture references targeted squarely at your average college student, and it is still pretty absurd, but unlike most other Adult Swim programming, Venture Brothers sticks to continuity with utmost diligence, and characters continue to develop as the show progresses.  As a result, what was once a simple Johnny Quest-type parody targeted at 20-something stoners came to possess one of the most well fleshed-out casts of all of the shows that I watch.  This season in particular, now that Dean and Hank aren't replaceable with clones, was really fascinating, as they actually aged for the first time in the history of the show.  

Last night's episode revolved around Dean and Hank's homeschool prom, thrown for them by their Dad for the whopping budget of $500 and kept running by the usual gang of venture cronies (The Order of the Triad, White and Billy Quiz Boy, Brock and Shore Leave).  Meanwhile, Sphinx is trying to strike a deal with OSI to clear their names in return for Monstroso, whom they have captured, all while staying on alert for double agents.  Just in case someone out there has not watched last night's episode and is still reading this anyway, I won't give away the big twists, but suffice to say, they culminate in some action sequences that are truly over the top in genuine Venture fashion.  Plus, there is a visit from Molotov Cocktease, and you know that's always gonna mean some fun scenes with Brock.

I suppose "fun" here could have a malleable meaning.

The plot lines going on back at the prom are much more innocuous, with a hilarious (though heavily bleeped) sequence of descriptions of what a sex act called a "Rusty Venture" would be called.  Henchman 21, looking to bury the skull of 24 and put his ghost to rest, gets pulled in to a Sphinx operation and begins to question where his loyalties lie, and Dean and Triana go as friends.  Anyone who ever went to a dance in high school with someone where they went as "just friends" could tell how the situation would play out, but it was good to see them return to the Triana front.  The halfway point of the season where The Master showed Triana what life would be like for her if she settled for Dean was one of the saddest things I have seen on a comedy show, and it filled me with the same irrational hope that Dean exhibited straight through last night, that somehow things could maybe still work out and be ok.

And it's the ability of the show to make me empathize with characters to that extent that keeps me eagerly anticipating each episode and heralding it as the best animated program on tv, and one of the best THINGS on tv period.  It takes a special kind of show to fill me with existential angst about the nature of mortality and adapting to changes that we can't control, only to follow it up with a character going on a rant ending in the phrase "poo diapers".

This show has literally everything.