TV Review – The Venture Brothers Season Five

The Venture Brothers Season Five (Adult Swim)
Written by Doc Hammer & Christopher McCulloch
Directed by Christopher McCulloch

If you make it to season five of The Venture Brothers, you must enjoy the show. Coming off the incredible high of the season four finale, I was interested in seeing where the show went next. Season three had been concerned with building out the world and many supporting players, with Hank & Dean getting little screen time. Season Four allowed the brothers to develop into more complex characters, especially Dean, as he faced the challenges of being a grown-up. Season Five is a happy medium between these: the brothers keep developing as characters, and our supporting players pop up consistently. Doctor Orpheus and his Triad comrades are the only characters who don’t get much attention.

Season Five opens immediately in the aftermath of the prom. Well, not exactly. One important thing to note, given the luxury of all seasons being available on streaming, is the timeline of when these seasons were released. Season Four aired in 2010, and the following summer, a short focused on Hank, Dermot, and Helper’s rock groups Shallow Gravy. Over a year later was the Venture Brothers Halloween Special, which occurred sometime during Season Five. It wouldn’t be until June 2013 that Season Five began airing.

The most significant change immediately is Dean’s going into an Emo phase. While the Halloween Special shows him discovering his origins as a clone, the season proper gets there later. Instead, we get an oversized episode where Doc Venture is commissioned by his brother, Jonas Jr., to develop an energy shield for Gargantua-2, the space station he plans to launch soon. Being Doc Venture, he cuts costs by getting the nearby university to send him interns. His outsourced labor are given different color cleansuits to distinguish their “castes.” They’re given a defunct biodome as a residence, and exposure to extreme levels of radioactivity turns them into mutants. Dean falls in love with one of the white suit mutants, making him their champion and pitted against the dominant greens. 

This episode also sets up the status quo for nearly every other supporting character for the remainder of the season. Billy Quizboy and Jack White are given their arch-nemeses in the form of Augustus St. Cloud and his manservant Pei Wie. Gary, aka #21, finds that SPHINX disbanded as soon as he joined. Hunter, Brock, and the rest have been brought back into OSI. However, the former henchman decides to go it alone, becoming a one-man SPHINX and trying to fight evil. The Monarch is in denial about #21 leaving, and Dr. Mrs. Monarch lets him hold onto the delusion for now. 

Of course, little running jokes thread themselves through the season, too. One of my favorites was the trilogy consisting of Sphinx Rising, Spanakopita, and OSI Love You, where Hank is wearing the Countess’s power suit. The Countess is an analog to Cobra’s The Baroness, and in Sphinx Rising, we see the old villainous members return for one last strike at OSI. As a kid who grew up religiously watching GI Joe and had many action figures, I found this exceptionally funny as they played up the parts of characters that made them silly. The Countess’s suit is designed to mimic an athletic & curvy female form, and Hank seems to enjoy how it gives him another level of power. I found it funny & a sign the writers had evolved since the early days when Hank comments about other people assigning their gender norms to him. 

At the end of this season, there’s a moment that cements who exactly Hank is. Dean is going through a tumultuous period of self-discovery. When he finally tells his brother they are clones, Hank shrugs it off. His reasoning shows what a confident, good guy he has become. While Hank is typically framed as the “dumb one,” that’s a misinterpretation. Hank generally represents the Id of the human psyche, while Dean is the Superego. Part of becoming mature adults is both young men finding a way to let their ego be the driver, regulating their extremes. Or, more pointedly, they both need to learn to get over the hump their dad never could, a man wholly tangled up in his neuroses. 

This final moment with Hank shows that he is there. He’s not phased by being a clone. It is who he is, and he loves the life he has. There was a slight acknowledgment from Dean, a shock that his brother reacted this way. I’d like to see that carry over into season six and see Dean move closer to being a fully realized adult, and I expect that will be the direction we’re headed. 

There are multiple callbacks to previous episodes as well. Venture Libre has Doc, Sergeant Hatred, and Hank going to Central America to deal with an old creation gone rogue. Hank gets to become Batman in that one, and it is as satisfying as we always imagined it would be. The previously mentioned OSI Love You is both a funny episode and a fantastic action movie with exciting moments onboard an OSI floating cityship. Momma’s Boys brings back Myra, the bodyguard Brock replaced & the woman convinced she is the boys’ mom. My favorite, though, was Bot Seeking Bot.

In Bot Seeking Bot, we finally get an up-close look at the members of the Council of 13 for the Guild of Calamitous Intent. Vendata, a Robocop disaster created by the original Doc Venture, is looking for a hookup. OSI had been searching for a way to get close to the Guild leadership and brought Ghost Robot to pose as Galacticon and go on a date with Vendata. This segues into a trip to Don Hell’s nightclub. When Doc Venture sees this, he believes Brock is going to party without him and suckers Billy into tagging along. It ends disastrously, with Doc believed to be dead.

That transitions to the season finale, which I didn’t feel matched the impact of Season Four’s final episode. It’s still good, but that gave me expectations for something even more significant. Sergeant Hatred sends the boys to live with godparents until they determine things are safe. Hank ends up in Boca Raton, hanging out with Action Man at his retirement community. Meanwhile, Dean is put under the charge of Colonel Gentleman in Tangiers. Hank loves his experience because he makes the best of any situation. Dean becomes more neurotic. Sergeant Hatred gets a bit of a spotlight here, teaming up with Gary to infiltrate the Monarch’s cocoon base and discover Doc’s whereabouts.

My biggest takeaway from this second half of the Ventures (so far) is how much higher the production quality has gotten from those first cruder seasons. The writing and animation are both in another tier and are consistently outstanding. When I think about most contemporary adult animation, there’s laziness to the character designs, with Family Guy having become this sloppy watermark that every slapdash animated series copies. The Venture Brothers feels like a show where the people making it don’t just want to make an animated series; they want to make a genuinely original & high-quality one. There are only two more seasons left to go, and then the movie.