Live-blogging the Venture Bros season finale

[thehefner]

Watching Venture Bros season finale.

ME: I apologize in advance for the two dozen times I'll be saying "Double up, unn, unn!" over the next couple weeks.

HENCHGIRL: (with resignation) Couple weeks, nothing. You're gonna max out before bedtime.

Bear in mind, she speaks as someone who's had to endure me repeatedly saying "Boom! Yummy" in a poor Shore Leave impersonation.

Updates may come over the next commercial breaks.

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"Meow." I will not become Rusty Venture when I grow up. I will not become Rusty Venture when I grow up. I will not become Rusty Venture when I grow up. (Quoth Henchgirl: hahaha, oh yes you will!)

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God, please, please don't let the "What is a Rusty Venture?" gag go on any longer. Please. It's actually literally gonna make Henchgirl throw up.

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WELL. About time we saw him and/or her again! Meow. ... Damn it, it's already happening.

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Nooooooo, is that truly the end of the 24 saga? God, it evokes memories of the last couple episodes of Cold Feet. ... No one has any idea what that is, do you?


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FUCK YEAH RETURN OF GO TEAM VENTURE even if it was rather subdued. Even melancholic.

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Oh Gary.

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So don't be surprised if the commentary becomes incomprehensible blather from my mind-blown asblsajsaa&&^^n.

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GENERAL! NOOOOOOOOO.

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Oh. Never mind. Yay? Yay!

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Damn, she is cold.

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AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

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I know this is exactly why you guys read my LJ: you're in it for the witty, eloquent critical insights.

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OH GOD DEAN NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO

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Welp, Dean, he's right, but y'know what? He's a smug pretty boy who gets to sleep with Orpheus' ex-wife, so screw him, and go you, you poor schmuck you. I just hope that this isn't the first step to Dean becoming his father.

Good ending. I'm both very relieved and a bit disappointed that it didn't end with a "WHAT? NO! FUCK NO NO NO COME BACK NO" cliffhanger like last season's. So there we go. Time to wait another ridiculous amount of time for Season 5.

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So wait, were the prostitutes actually Mol's girls, or was she lying to screw with Brock? If they were, then damn, Rusty saved the day by being a horrible, horrible person. If not, then Rusty really outdid himself in the horrible, horrible person department.

Comments

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

Y'know, between this and the episode with the Monarch trying to get Rusty to kill himself, I realized that... damn it, I haven't liked the Monarch lately. When watching this episode and hearing him bitch in his usual way, I actually thought, "Damn, 21 really might be better for her."

Which brings me to this: they swing? Wait. No. No no no. No fucking way that someone as petty and obsessively possessive as the Monarch would ever stand for letting someone even eyeball his Queen Butterfly. They'd get a face full of dart, a dart filled with tiny shark nanobots that would spit toxin while chewing on the victim's... oh hell, I can't come up with anything. Point is, that seems seriously out of character from what we've seen so far.

That's a great observation about Rusty vs. Monarch by the end here.

[themadhatter26.livejournal.com]

Dude, that was covered all the way back in Season One in "Are You There God, it's Me, Dean," and "Mid-Life Chrysalis." The Monarch likes the swinging as long as HE feels like he's in control of it.

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

Which he wasn't with the 21 kiss. And I forget the exact context of the "Are You There God, It's Me, Dean" bit, but in "Chrysalis," he liked it mainly because he was using it as a means to strike at Dr. Venture, and even then, he broke down into his default jealous possessiveness the second he thought she might actually have sex with Rusty!

So being okay with it? I really don't see it. At all. He's a petty, possessive little man. Especially after what he went through to get her back.

[box-in-the-box.livejournal.com]

Before, The Monarch could at least claim to be, if not always a threat, at least a pain in the ass to Rusty. This time? He didn't even manage to annoy Rusty, and Rusty is one of the most easily annoyed men on the planet. The irony is that, as a direct result of spending so much time mocking Rusty's failures, The Monarch has become an even worse failure. That pitiful attempt at a dramatic exit? Totally a retread of his similarly failed would-be dramatic exit at the end of the yard sale. He's not even bringing anything NEW to the table anymore.

And your Canon-Fu is WEAK, bitch, because The Monarch and Sheila have been established as swingers since the FIRST SEASON. When he kidnapped Brock and Hank, Sheila mistook them for additional sexual partners in a way that clearly indicated that they'd had guests in their bedroom before ("The big guy is alright, but the boy is too much. Can't we just use the puppets again?"). Likewise, when The Monarch was watching Sheila seduce Rusty via spycam, he was clearly about to rub one out to it before one of his henchmen wandered into the room. Indeed, I've seen a few folks say online that even the three-way with Manta Claus was at least hinted at before.

While you're absolutely correct about how petty and jealous The Monarch is (recall his misogynistic tirade when he found out about Sheila's previous liaisons from the tell-all book), what I don't think you're quite getting are the nuances of his controlling possessiveness. He HATED Phantom Limb sleeping with Sheila, yes, but that was because Limb was COMPETITION. By contrast, when it's a three-way, swinging or voyeur scenario that he's orchestrated, Sheila having sex with other men is not something that she's choosing to do so much as it is something that he (via the proxy of the other man) is having done TO her. Because he ORDERED Sheila to engage in sexual relations with Rusty, he can get off to it, because Rusty (and even Sheila, to a lesser extent) is merely a PAWN that he's manipulating. By contrast, when Sheila exercises her own agency — as she did by dating Hamilton, or when she was hooking up with the celebrities listed in the tell-all — The Monarch completely flips his shit over it, because he didn't give her his prior permission for those sexual encounters.

In that sense, his easy dismissal of Gary "making out" with Sheila (it was only a kiss, but for all he knew, it was much more) offers even more of a reason for Gary to get pissed at him. At first, The Monarch's constant praise of Gary as loyal and reliable seems almost like respect, until you realize that what it actually means is that The Monarch takes Gary's subservience for granted. I mean, yes, that's kind of part and parcel of being a henchman, but we're talking about a guy who's achieved LEGENDARY status in the Ventureverse, and even when Gary is clearly spoiling for a fight with The Monarch, The Monarch shrugs off the admission of Gary getting close to Sheila without even any bruises to his ego (even though The Monarch has a very easily bruised ego), because he so strongly sees Gary as being SUBORDINATE to him. Even when Gary TRIED to tell The Monarch that he was, in effect, committing treason, The Monarch still took it as a GIVEN that Gary was as dependable as ever, which was why he started coming up with wild ideas about Gary having been drugged or mind-controlled. ANY other henchman would have gotten a poison-dart in their ass INSTANTLY.