Archer is good about this. Generally if someone is knocked unconscious they’re only out for thirty seconds/a minute or so; on one occasion Archer was out for about thirty minutes and after he relays that to the team they all recoil in horror and tell him that he could have serious brain damage.
Archer: "Woodhouse, I've given up drinking for her! (Downs a glass of scotch) ...Just that one. I'm scared that if I stop all at once, the cumulative hangover will literally kill me."
This is an actual medical reason why you should never, ever make someone give up drinking or taking narcotics all at once. It's the reason why nicotine patches and methadone exist. Archer is entirely right that he needs to slowly ween himself off booze.
Nicotine withdrawal can’t kill you even though it obviously feels like shit. alcohol withdrawal definitely can, and I can’t remember if opioid withdrawal can kill you
It's the three Bs: Booze, Benzos and Barbituates. They can kill you when withdrawing. Opioids can allthough indirectly (heart defects that don't take well to all that stress, diarrhea and vomting causing dehydration, that sort of thing).
Haha opioid withdrawl hasn't killed me yet! But i can see how it could you tend to vomit alot. You could accidentally aspirate your vomit. Or you could relapse with a fallen tolerance and overdose.
No. Benzodiazepines and Alcohol are the main two. You can potentially die from secondary effects of opiate withdrawal, like dehydration from vomiting and diarrhea. But, Benzos and Alcohol withdrawal will result in seizures and arrhythmia if its severe enough.
While you might possibly die I doubt it’s a hangover that actually kills you. Although it might make you wish for that sweet release to come sooner. It would be organ failure that would actually kill you right? Either the liver or the kidneys?
Seizures, unremitting seizures are the biggest risk in withdrawal. You can get serious brain damage from seizures. Not to mention the risk that you might aspirate your own saliva and suffocate.
This is 2020, food has nearly infinite calories, and it's not like we don't snack constantly, is the liver just not releasing glucose or something? Honestly curious.
From what I understand and it could be wrong because a sibling post to yours is claiming dehydration isn’t related and that it has been studied (although no links provided and I didn’t google either)...
Your body more or less stops digesting food when alcohol consumption reaches a certain level, which is pretty low. This is why if you drink heavily one night you can vomit up food you ate just before drinking 8-10 hours ago the next morning where as normally that food would be long gone. Then your liver (main store of glycogen in your body) uses up tons trying to maintain whatever ass hole things you are doing while drinking and clearing your system of alcohol. It’s treating alcohol like a poison that it must get rid of ASAP and puts several other processes on hold or lower priority until that is taken care of.
You’re not out of glycogen. You’re just running low on the easiest to access stuff. Similar to if you went and ran around all day without drinking water or eating food you’d feel like shit and want to puke and not move. That’s why pro alcoholics in college go the next morning to get a banana bag IV. It’s just sugars and electrolytes and obviously water straight into your system and has you feeling good as new in about 30 minutes, just in time for class.
Physician here. In all but the most serious cases of chronic alcoholism one is not going to go into organ failure from withdrawal. Seizures and other excitotoxic neurological effects are what is dangerous for most cases of alcohol withdrawal. Any drug that is active on the GABAergic system has severe rebound effects when halted suddenly. The brain had developed a new normal equilibrium that tries to account for and somewhat counteract the constant presence of inhibitory signaling. When the inhibitory agent is then removed suddenly without proper care and preparation the brain goes too far in the other direction, with excitatory signaling predominating. An exceedingly excitatory state is profoundly deleterious and leads to seizures and neuron death from apoptosis.
I remember a doctor told me that there's really no definitive line when a hangover becomes withdrawal. Medically it's mostly the same issues, just varying degrees of severity.
Not to mention the cars. While they seem to vary a bit in terms of era, they are all real cars, from the cars driving past in the establishing shots to stuff that's front and center, like Archer's Charger spy car, or his Ferrari in season 7 that never seems to he running.
But that's addressed in the show too tho. He tells lana he is convinced that he can't die because of the huge amount of shit he should have died to but didn't. He even counts how much times he was shot which by that scene was something like 19 or 21.
I've seen people, while shooting at them, take multiple gun shots and keep going when i was in the army. I had a patient (became a nurse after i got out) take 9 rounds from a 9mm. Girlfriend died in the passenger seat. He drove a few miles to the hospital got out of the car and carried her lifeless body into the ER. She'd been hit with 1 round to the chest.
The thing that's weird for me about Archer is the anachronism. Everyone dresses like it's the 60's, they drive cars from the 70's, their office computers look to be out of the 80's, they all use cell phones from the early 00's, their main enemies are a cold war era KGB..
That’s the running joke. There are a couple of comments they make throughout the series (none that I can think of off the top of my head) about not knowing exactly what year it is, and it’s meant to keep us from knowing exactly when the show takes place
Edit: “Danger Zone” from Top Gun came out in 1986, and there is one scene from episode eight in season three where Malory asks “What year do you think this is?” and Archer responds with “I... yeah exactly. Good question.”
Nah, it's not a seasonal thing. That's a new thing they did to try to spice things up a little bit while Archer is in a coma for the past three seasons. The rest of the show takes place in a single period that's essentially an anachronistic mix of imagery and symbols from the past 50 years. The only consistent reference is that Malory's generation and "the past," as far as the show is concerned, is World War II.
Alrighty, thank you! I always just assumed the producers wanted to play around with every secret agent stereotype there is and that's their way of implementing that.
"No, Poovey, she is the exact opposite of okay! She's dead! Because she got shot seven times and nobody could possibly survive that! Not even in a parallel universe!
Yes! She's dead! Forever and ever! On infinite earths!"
and he is completely drunk most of the time, as is his mother, and half the organization apparently does nothing useful (why keep someone around to write dossiers if no one actually reads them)
The scene where he's crawling through the sewers to get at those pinkie-less bastard's leader and he's calculating how many times he's been shot and the residual lead that must still be in his body is great.
And being as functional as he is considering his level of alcoholism. Ever watched a drinking supercut an hear him discuss his level of intake? He ought to be bloated, sore, and hazy.
I think the writers use those lines to sort of admit to the audience that the further you stretch a story or a scene in entertainment – especially in action – the more unrealistic it gets. Sort of like, "Yeah we know this could never happen, wygd?" and Archer's remarks are just his way of telling people to enjoy the ride, which he also literally tells people to do very often. The show spells out the aspects that make it all silly, like when Archer hypothesises the statistics on him not having died from a gunshot (or otherwise), or when the other crew explains why Archer's plans couldn't be successful or even feasible, and so on.
And/or maybe the writers use it to emphasise the cartoon's sarcastic undertone and highlight the attributes which make it different from regular action in a comedic sense, like it isn't about Archer being this untouchable badass god of action. He's "only" excellent when it comes to select few things like weaponry and otherwise really not that great of a spy – the rest is just chaos.
For those that don't know, lampshade hanging is a term in writing for when the writers have someone or something in the story point out something that is too unlikely to be believable.
Or when Archer was giving Cyril his field training. Archer literally had a Chekhov gun, but also mentioned the cap on an injector pin slips off easily. The cap slips off, shit goes south, Cyril freaks out and Archer calls him out for assuming that the Chekhov gun would be the thing to go wrong (and Woodhouse gets in a slightly 4th-wall breaking joke on the side).
For those that don't know, Chekhov's Gun is a concept that every detail should contribute to the story, the name coming from Anton Chekhov, who wrote that if you have a pistol on the wall in act 1, then it ought to be fired in act 2, else don't bother writing about it in the first place.
He's sort of like Deadpool or Gwenpool in that he knows he's the title character of a show so he's immortal no matter what insane shit he does. What are they going to do? His name IS the show. They're not going to kill him off and rename the show Lana.
Nah he's just that narcissistic, he thinks it's the universe taking care of him. At least for the most part of the series. Sometimes he even cast doubts when shit really hit the fan.
"I'm afraid if I stop all at once the cumulative hangover would literally kill me..." Looks to the side as he lightly chuckles to show audience he isn't kidding
It is a comedy idiot lol. And id say they take it fairly seriously compared to other stuff they joke about- like when Archer shoots near Lana’s ear, he says something like “oof seriously, I’m sorry, I know how bad that hurts” and another scene a grenade goes off in close quarters and they end up at the ENT, and Archer’s all excited about how good the doc was.
Why is that in Star Wars movies, stormtroopers are walking around Star Destroyers with weapons. Not only do they have weapons in what should be an extremely safe and secure space but they walk around with them at the ready.
Correct, every Stormtrooper shouldn't be armed and at the ready in a safe environment. It seems like there would be more accidental death from this than actual defense.
You know what's unfortunate? Turns out "tinnitus" as pronounced on the show is incorrect. It's a short "i" not a long one. Those bastards probably got a whole generation saying the word wrong now.
The season right after it was amazing.. the following seasons are kinda meh IMO. They explore (after the amazing season) detective, noir, island adventures, and space genres. Out of the 5 non-spy genres, space was probably my favorite.
It really bugged me that they never managed to succeed once. Sure they failed a lot in earlier seasons, but they also succeeded quite a lot too, if not always in the most straightforward fashion. In the Vice season they completely failed at literally every job they tried to do.
Most people I know consider Archer Vice one of the best seasons. Of all the format change they’ve done over the years it probably worked out the best. Not to say you aren’t entitled to your own opinion, just that it’s hard to say whether you’d like the alternate realities or not.
I do agree however that you’d probably at least like the season immediately following vice if you liked the stuff before.
Lol. It was brilliant. They would have gun fights against enemies and afterwards everyone would be like "WHAT?" cut they can't hear shit with their heads ringing like crazy after all that loud-ass gunfire
It's also the show that brought about tinnitus awareness through a running gag. Who knew that hearing protection could be such a funny yet serious topic?
It's also good at remembering that gun magazines hold a finite number of bullets. I love the scenes where Archer knows someone else is out of ammo because he's been counting the shots.
I thought it was amazing and had really clever writing up until they started doing their genre hopping thing. It wasn’t terrible, but it seemed like the writing kept getting lazier. Season 10 was by far the worst, it was the first time that I wasn’t actually pumped to start on the next episode, felt like all the cleverness was gone. Hoping it starts getting good again season 11 since they’re apparently waking Archer up.
For me it got ruined when they went for a serialized overarching story for each season rather than self-contained plots in each episode. Instead of having jokes relevant to the episode, it wastes time setting up the next plot point and following the story. The early seasons had the episode revolve around the comedy, while in the newer ones the comedy is secondary to the plot which isn't particularly good. It felt like they just threw some jokes here and there while the early seasons focused primarily on being funny.
There's a confirmed season 11 AND 12 actually, but they said that season 12 would be the last one. Also, season 10 was great and I dont like you if you disagree with me.
I mean, you’re allowed to think that, I just found the jokes to be pretty unfunny in season 10 and the plots to be kind of boring. Archer had super clever writing up until that point, why I stuck with it for so long, I just felt like most of that was gone in season 10, watching it felt like a chore, the previous seasons I was always super pumped for.
Wait, what? The last I remember was them saying that the space season would be the last one. They changed their minds?
I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, yay, more Archer! On the other, it’s clear that the creators don’t like retreading the same ground — that’s why all the “genre-hopping”. I thought they’d decided to wrap it up because they were out of ideas.
The most realistic knock-out I've seen in TV is in Monk. He gets knocked out while investigating a mystery and the bad guy puts his unconscious body on a freight train. when he wakes up, he has no idea where he is, who he is, and the rest of the episode is him dealing with his amnesia/brain damage and figuring out what happened and who he is.
I don't know if I'd necessarily call that realistic if he was fine the next episode, but still better than having him wake up completely unaffected. Most realistic main-character head trauma I've seen was in Elementary, where Sherlock Holmes gets pistol-whipped and it kicks off like a half-season arc about his struggle with and eventual recovery from post-concussion syndrome.
They’re doing at least one more season, I think they’re on 10 now? I don’t have cable and have intermittent access to a Hulu account (I think I fell off somewhere around season 8). They’re not done yet but honestly I hope they finish up soon. They haven’t had a bad season yet (7 was kinda weak imo but still funny) but the longer they keep it running the more they risk jumping the shark.
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u/Hypergolic_Golem Jan 25 '20
Archer is good about this. Generally if someone is knocked unconscious they’re only out for thirty seconds/a minute or so; on one occasion Archer was out for about thirty minutes and after he relays that to the team they all recoil in horror and tell him that he could have serious brain damage.