Two Glaring Omissions from Those "Best of the 2010s" Lists Last Year, Part II

ONE OF THE BEST TV EPISODES OF THE 2010s: "Operation P.R.O.M." on The Venture Bros.

WHERE IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN RANKED ON THE LIST: #8, between Review and Orange Is the New Black

 

 

This all-timer of a TV episode did not make the Best Of list because I'm a stupid idiot who couldn't bother to wait 24 hours and let such a list marinate just in case I thought of any other worth additions to the list. Of course I forgot about The Venture Bros. Everyone does. It's not hard to—there's only a new season every three or four years or so. But that's the tragic existence of such a show; The Venture Bros. is made with such care and precision and joy and love that, more than most other shows in TV history, it without a doubt earns your appreciation, and yet also due to the fact that it is made with such care and precision, it also means that it is released sparsely and quietly, and so it didn't acquire the mass-populace love that it absolutely fucking deserved.

 

I dunno, I'm just bitter because The Venture Bros. was finally cancelled this year. It's a fucking travesty, because it wasn't even granted a chance at true closure. Make no mistake, it earned that chance—the pilot premiered in 2003, making it a dinosaur by normal TV standards (let alone Adult Swim standards), but the quality never dipped, not fucking once, in seventeen fucking years. That we won't find out how the story of Rusty and Dean and Hank and Brock ends is an injustice of Lodge 49 proportions.

Okay, but we're not here to lament the end of possibly the best cartoon series of all time (or maybe we are, fuck it). We're here to spout praise for its best episode, "Operation P.R.O.M." This was the season finale for Venture Bros.'s fourth season, and definitely (but not "by far") the series' best episode. The plot is to convoluted to even try to explain here—for real, it's been a little bit since I've seen the episode, and the plot summary on the Venture Bros. wiki made my head spin.

Here's what you need to know—the titular bros., Hank and Dean, have reached the age when normal teenagers would be graduating high school, and though these two are not normal teenagers (they were "home-schooled" by a robot bed... don't ask), their ne'er-do-well former-child-action-hero father thinks that they deserve a "prom" anyway. Meanwhile, the Venture family's former bodyguard, the immortal Brock Samson, is dealing with some other shit not worth getting into (quadruple-crossing spy shit and the like), but ends up on the edge of a cliff.

 

This is where it gets interesting enough that "Operation P.R.O.M." becomes one of the best TV episodes of all time. So Brock is out there, on the hood of a car that is occupied by Molotov Cocktease, whom he believes is his one true love. But she herself is a double (triple? quadruple?) agent, and states that she is going to commit suicide so that she can be with her one true love, a villain named Monstroso, who in the back seat of this car (stay with me!).

 

But before going down with the ship, as it were, Mol tells Brock that if she dies, she won't be able to call off the undercover agents, at the compound, posing as prostitutes, ready to kill the Venture family at midnight. Brock says that he can make he call off the agents by force, but Molotov pops the hood, and dies (supposedly) in an explosion as the car falls off the cliff. Brock looks at his watch. It's 11:59 PM.

Okay, alright, here's the good part. Here's the part where Brock, a stone-cold killer who has made it clear up until now that his role as the Ventures' bodyguard was purely professional, now is forced to admit that he cares about these people. It's one of my favorite tropes in TV and movies, when a character who acts like he doesn't care finally cracks and confesses that, yes, he actually does care, as much as he hates to admit it. It's not that Brock confesses out loud how much he gives a fuck about Hank and Dean and Rusty and all the rest of the gang, but you can just tell by the frantic look on his face as his rushes back to the compound to hopefully save their lives.

 

(This is all set to the Pulp B-side "Like a Friend," by the way, which might be the most important aspect of the episode, but you'll have to watch it to see/hear for yourself.)

It's a phenomenal sequence, worth every second of every year it took teams of SE Asian animators to create—Samson rides on a motorbike, crashes it as his watch turns to midnight, then runs on foot into the compound, knife unsheathed, absolutely terrified as to the carnage he might find when he finally arrives, seconds too late.

Everything I've typed so far makes it seem like The Venture Bros. is a serious drama. It is not. Not by a long shot. What actually happens is that Brock shows up only to find that the scene is going just swell for the man-children at the compound (i.e. everyone is hooking up with a prostitute, no violence in sight). Brock is stunned—Mol was bluffing. Then Rusty, behind his prostitute's back, smirks and shows Brock a vial of "Rusty's Spanish Fly" that has spiked all the hookers' drinks and which Rusty believes will act as an aphrodisiac. Instead, it horrifically turns all the prostitutes into large mutant flies who puke acid all over Rusty's tux, and Brock... well, his frown-turned-bafflement now turns to a sick devilish grin, as he realizes that he is now facing an enemy that will fall easily to his knife...

I wrote way too much about the plot here, probably because I'm three DIPAs deep and I am worse at writing than I imagine when it's actually coming out of my fingertips. But let the main thesis stand tall—The Venture Bros. is ostensibly a show about a former "boy adventurer" and his dysfunctional children, but is actually about the bonds formed between the so-called rejects of society. With Brock specifically, he started the series as a no-nonsense contract killer who could murder someone without lifting his pinky as long as he could listen to Led Zeppelin II while it happened, but he's ending the fourth season faced with the possibly unwanted self-awareness of the fact that he really does care about these fucking mopes. They are a family. His family.

And during the fifteen years (jesus fucking christ) that I enjoyed The Venture Bros., I too felt like I was a part of their family. "Operation P.R.O.M." made me think it for the first time. The amount of time in the past few months I've spent mourning their loss has all but confirmed it. GO TEAM VENTURE!