Archer has a long and storied history of weird-ass, obscure references, and tonight’s episode appears to be no exception. Titled “The Archer Sanction,” the whole thing will be an homage to the 1975 Clint Eastwood movie The Eiger Sanction, a movie that largely takes place on an icy mountain, and whose plot description on Wikipedia opens with these two paragraphs:
College art history professor Dr. Jonathan Hemlock is a retired government assassin who performed “sanctions,” a euphemism for officially approved killings. He also has a reputation as one of the world’s top mountaineers.
During his career with a secret government agency called “C2,” Hemlock amassed a private collection of 21 masterpiece paintings, paid for from earnings from his previous sanctions. The director of C2, Mr. Dragon (Thayer David), is an albino ex-Nazi confined to semi-darkness and kept alive by blood transfusions. He has an uncouth, inept aide, Pope (Gregory Walcott), a man Hemlock can’t stand.
A sophisticated retired assassin mountaineer doing one last job for an albino ex-Nazi named Mr. Dragon who hides in the shadows due to a medical condition that requires frequent blood transfusions? Yes. YES. This is how you do a movie plot. Do you hear me, Hollywood? THIS IS HOW YOU DO A MOVIE PLOT. Let’s remake this movie with Nicolas Cage tout de suite, plz.
More fun facts about tonight’s episode: One, it features Rob Heubel as a character named Crash McCarran, the bearded gentleman in the image at the top of the page. And two, because the show was picked up for two seasons last year instead of just one, it allowed the animation team to plan more things out and get a little ambitious, resulting in impressive sequences like the one in this GIF…
… that the good folks at Floyd County provided us as a teaser. This all looks wonderful. Archer remains the greatest.
