Drastic Voyage

Archer "Drastic Voyage" Part 1, season 6, #12, first aired 26 March 2015; Part 2, season 6, #13, first aired 2 April 2015. Adam Reed and Casey Willis, script.

Parody of FANTASTIC VOYAGE (1966), summarized in Wikipedia entry, "To save the life of a preeminent scientist who has discovered miniaturization, the team must enter his body and destroy a blood clot" for Part 1, and "The team's mission inside Dr. Kovacs goes awry, and they are blacklisted by the CIA" for Part 2. As in FANTASTIC VOYAGE, the sequences in the miniaturized submarine inside the scientist's body give images of humans inside a complex mechanism inside a human body that is itself in a high-tech operating room literally inside a high-security government building that is part of a figurative government apparat. Significantly, when the mission "goes awry" in Archer, the result is reduction of the defamiliarized, somewhat romanticized human body to a bloody, exploded mess, not shown explicitly, but effectively implied.

RDE 22/VIII/16