Characters / Archer - Main Characters

Main Character Index | Sterling Archer | Main Characters | Recurring Characters | One Shot Characters: 1-2, 3-4, 5-7, 11-13 | Dreamland | Danger Island | 1999

The main characters of Archer.

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In General

The "heroes" of the show.

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• All Men Are Perverts: Cyril is a sex addict, Ray is a gay dude into fetish night, Archer is a manwhore, and Krieger...is into something much darker.
• All Women Are Lustful: Lana is a Dominatrix into porn; Cheryl is a masochist who gets off on pain, asphyxiation, and death; Malory tries to seduce any man that takes her fancy and is not shy about her activities; Pam is right into any action that might be happening, and that's just the main cast
• Anti-Hero Team: They're a team of amoral spies and dangerous international agents. They all have their petty, psychotically flawed moments, even the nicer ones. And usually jeopardize a mission because of selfish reasons. Still, they're on the side of good if only compared to the enemies that they face.
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: Yes, they can be assholes to each other, but there are genuine moments in the series that shows that they truly love and care for one another.
• Badass Crew: Played with. While the group is individually talented, they get along like fire and gasoline and have extreme difficulty doing anything as a team other than bickering.
• Blonde, Brunette, Redhead: Pam is (at times) a Dumb Blonde, Lana is Brainy Brunette, and Cheryl is a redhead but ironically is the least fiery of the three (as she's insane and unstable but pretty cowardly and doesn't do much fighting).
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Pretty much everyone in this series. No matter how dysfunctional they are, they all turn out to be good at their jobs, if only when they are given a reason to be.
• Butt-Monkey: Most of the gang pretty much suffer a lot throughout the show, sometimes they deserve it and sometimes they don't.
• Cast Full of Crazy: Just about the entire top tier of ISIS personnel is borderline insane, and in Kreiger's case, almost certainly well past it. Him aside, almost all of them are sociopathic hedonists who seem incapable of thinking of anything other than drink or sex long enough to actually accomplish their missions.
• Cunning Linguist: All of them are shown to have at least some knowledge with various languages.
• Dark and Troubled Past: All of them have dealt with some kind of emotional trauma during their lives. The ones who downplay it are mostly Lana and Cyril since the former had a relatively stable childhood compared to the others (the "dark" part likely came when she worked for ISIS and did shady deeds for them) and the latter hardly talks about it (except for the dead mother and implied emotionally abusive father).
• Dysfunction Junction: The entire team is erratic at best and outright insane at worst.
  • Cheryl is the most obvious, being a delusional pyromaniac with an alarming sadistic/masochistic streak.
  • Archer, alcoholism and possible undiagnosed disorders aside, has been utterly messed up by his Hilariously Abusive Childhood.
  • Krieger is a hilariously unethical and depraved Mad Scientist.
  • Cyril is a neurotic bundle of insecurities, right up until he gets a whiff of power at which point it promptly goes straight to his head.
  • Malory and Pam are relatively sane, even if the latter has serious problems with substance abuse and general immaturity, while the former is a greedy, borderline-narcissistic alcoholic Abusive Parent.
  • Lana and Ray are both quite competent, serious and generally sensible. At least until they get enough of their buttons pressed.
• Everybody Has Lots of Sex: Everyone in the main characters have been known to get it on with each other to the point that they bring it up in one episode. It gets creepy most of the time considering Cheryl's choking fetish, Krieger's Cloudcuckoolander behavior, Cyril's sex addiction and Malory's... well, Malory.
• Four-Girl Ensemble: Cheryl is The Ditz, Pam is the snarky Brawn Hilda, Lana is the Ms. Fanservice, and Malory, while not an admirable character, is the oldest and The Leader.
• Four-Man Band: Archer is the Lovable Sex Maniac, Cyril is the Butt-Monkey, Krieger is the Mad Scientist and Ray is the gay Straight Man.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: Sterling Archer, of all people, calls out his team for using him as an excuse to be their worse selves. Sterling Archer always had a strained relationship with his co-workers because he's an annoying douchebag on his best days and a complete a-hole on his worse days, with him constantly bullying and belittling them. Even the closest ones he has to friends have a hard time tolerating him at times. He was also a toxic influence on them. So when Archer was shot and put in a coma for three years, he found that his co-workers have become successful without him when he woke up. And it is implied that they are content without him in their lives, with them leaving him to his own devices for three months and trying to keep him from going on important missions with them. With Archer back and acting like an obnoxious, antagonistic, and impulsive Manchild, the rest of the characters start reverting to their self-destructive and dysfunctional selves. However, Archer himself did not do much to corrupt them. He just made a few comments that started fights. And while Archer causes Cyril to lose his confidence, he didn't do much but make some mean comments and sabotage his diet; but despite spending three years being a successful spy, it doesn't take much prodding from Archer to make him break down. This all comes to a head in the 11th season finale, where Lana angrily tells Archer despite him just saving the world, that she wishes he stayed in a coma and admits that she OK with the Earth being destroyed if he was gone with it. Archer just asks if she ever considered that they like having him around so they have an excuse to be their worse selves, leaving Lana and the team a with no words.
  Archer: Hey everyone! Why are you bitching?
  Lana: Hey! You’re the one who made all our lives worse by not being in a coma!
  Archer: (visibly hurt) Hmm, true. Cyril’s a wuss, Pam’s gone full horn-monster, Gilette’s probably binging again, and Lana, you’ve been a bitch to Sandra for, like, no reason. But let me just call up 7.5 billion of my closest friends to get their opinions. Oh, hey, guess what! They’re totally fine with it because they’re alive! And how many times did you guys save the world while I was in a coma?
  Everyone: (dead silence)
  Archer: I’LL TAKE YOUR SILENCE TO MEAN ZERO TIMES!
  Lana: Honestly, at this point, I’d wipe out the entire Earth if you went with it.
  Archer: Did you people ever consider that you need me around because you want the excuse to be your worst selves?
  Lana: Oh, shit!
• The Friend Nobody Likes: It's usually anyone that's not Ray or Lana but most of the main characters are usually demeaned, disrespected and seen as punching for their worst qualities like Cheryl's craziness, Krieger's creepiness, Cyril's patheticness and Archer having the same egotistical, narcissistic and obnoxious personality with his mother. Pam can sometimes well-liked and treated as a friend but she's usually treated as a unattractive and lowbrow fat joke.
• Gender-Equal Ensemble: The main cast consists of four male main characters (Archer, Cyril, Ray and Dr. Krieger) and four females (Malory, Lana, Cheryl and Pam).
• Hair-Trigger Temper: Most of the main cast can be pretty dangerous when their intense anger issues gets too far out of hand, especially Lana who's one of the more level-headed members of the group.
• Incompetence, Inc.: Past season one, they grow steadily worse as an espionage organization, having a longer tracklist of failures than successes to the point their reputation has pretty much been tarnished and anyone who would want them is just to prove how better their agency or force is by comparison (Ironically the one time it happened is when ISIS actually succeeded...somewhat).
  • By season five, they get shut down by the FBI due to operating as a spy agency without authorization or approval from the US government. They switch to being drug cartel but even they can't do that right as their cocaine stash is either eaten (thanks Pam), confiscated, stolen, given away or destroyed. And then it turns out that the FBI raid was a ploy by the CIA to start a False Flag Operation with a foreign country. They manage to get back into the spy business by becoming contractors for the CIA...and pretty much blow their chance with them which ultimately gets the team blacklisted from intelligence work globally. By season 7, they're forced into working as private detectives as it's the closest to their skill set they can do legally. Three years later, at the start of Season 11, they are officially reinstated as spies.
• Jerkass: Much like the main characters in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, each of the main characters has done something shady for selfish and petty reasons and they frequently screw each other when opportunity fits best for them.
• Large Ham: The characters' erratic and buffoonish behaviors quite often lead them to behave in ways that are outrageously over-the-top and they also tend to scream a lot and have a lot of distinctive catchphrases like Archer's "DANGER ZONE!", Cyril's "SUPPRESSING FIRE!" and Cheryl's "YOU'RE NOT MY SUPERVISOR!". Luckily for viewers, it's always funny, entertaining and add to the charm of the show.
• Lovable Sex Maniac: A lot of the main cast have sex often being their biggest weaknesses like Cyril being a sex-addict and Cheryl being obsessed with a lot of disturbed and outright dangerous fetishes. The levels of promiscuity between these people can be comedic but it serves to make the characters look very impulsive, selfish and too distracted to focused on their missions and surroundings so they are pretty much too inappropriate to function in modern society.
• Manchild: Most of the cast pretty much behave like impulsive and emotionally unbalanced juveniles that are unable to act like functioning adults during a risky situation.
• Nominal Hero: Most of them are petty, hedonistic, often slightly insane assholes, and do things that are morally questionable or just plain stupid in their spy business.
• "Not So Different" Remark: Despite how much they're willing to curse out Archer for his failings, he (perhaps correctly) points out that they can easily be just as dysfunctional as him.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: ISIS/The CIA Freelancers/The Figgis Agency. Subverted in that they fail as often as succeed.
  Sterling Archer: Why would you wanna work for those Ivy League white-shoe D.C. pricks? That's not who we are! We're the outsiders, the scrappy underdogs! We're Delta House, The Dirty Dozen, The Rebel Alliance. The Commitments. We're the Bad News Frickin' Bears, and our Lupus is an openly gay cyborg dying of sepsis in a wheelbarrow!
• Really Gets Around: All the main characters are some of the most sexually active characters in T.V., because not only are they often quick to have sex with other people but also with EACH OTHER.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Sterling, Malory, Cheryl, Pam and Krieger are the more red onis and Lana, Ray and Cyril are the blue onis
• Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist: The main characters display a lot of despicable traits, do all sorts of sinful acts and treat each other like crap but they always manage to be very entertaining and they do often suffer from their misdeeds.
• Villain Protagonists: Though some of the characters have their noble moments, their selfish and reckless behaviors often cause a lot of mayhem for others whether it's by accident or not and sometimes, they are even willing to illegally sell cocaine to criminals, weapons to dictators and even find ways to conceal murdered victims.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: They will viciously insult one another, but when the chips are down, they are a team and care about each other, especially when they're essentially family.
• With Friends Like These...: A group of dysfunctional and screwed up anti-heroes who often bicker, physically abuse, and screw one another over.

Sterling Archer

Sterling Malory Archer

"Lying is, like, 95% of what I do."

Voiced By: H. Jon Benjamin

"I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of my deafening awesomeness!"

To officials, he is Codename: "Duchess". To his mother, he is "Sterling". And to his enemies (and occasionally his friends), he is known only as, "You!!" But to us, he is Archer himself, the world's most dangerous spy. And oh boy do we mean "most dangerous."

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• For tropes related to him, see here.

Lana Kane

Lana Anthony Kane

"When we first started going out, I may have injected a tracking device into your body."

Voiced By: Aisha Tyler

"So as far as Archer is concerned, I feel like I dodged the world's most dysfunctional bullet."

Another of ISIS' top agents. Like Archer, she's an excellent but flawed agent, her problems manifesting in her sarcastic and slightly bloodthirsty nature. She routinely squabbles with Archer, both of them bringing up their previous sexual history with each other. She also has large, mannish hands.

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• AB Negative: Averted. Her blood type is A-negative, quite common.
• Action Girl: She's received all the same training as Archer, and kicks as much ass as he does.
• Action Mom: She still kicks ass after becoming a mother.
• All Girls Want Bad Boys: As Malory stated, Lana is attracted to dangerous men; one of the men of danger she is deeply attracted to (despite active denials) is Sterling Malory Archer.
• A-Team Firing: Lana has a tendency to use quantity over quality when shooting. Fittingly, her preferred firearm is a TEC-9, a weapon not known for being accurate. Lucas Troy even nicknamed her "Spray and Pray". Furthermore she’s also known for only carrying two back up magazines. Lucas again exploits this, waiting till she runs out of ammo to give chase.
• The Baby Trap: While she definitely loves AJ, the real goal of Lana's pregnancy was to force Archer to focus more on her. To the extent that she is enraged that he does not immediately accept responsibility for a child which she conceived using stolen frozen sperm, and which she did not even tell him was his, until after the baby was born! And even during the pregnancy, when Archer proposed thinking he wasn't the father, she claimed she would "rather lose the baby than marry [him]" while (unknowingly) pointing a gun at her belly.
• Betty and Veronica:
  • The Archie for Archer's Veronica (dangerous, Sociopathic Hero) and Cyril's Betty (mild-mannered, Butt-Monkey).
  • The Betty (longest friend, on-and-off lover, usually the Only Sane Woman) to Katya's Veronica (a sultry, Russian spy, who later becomes a Cyborg and more of a jerk) for Archer's Archie.
  • The Betty (mother of his child and known for a long time) to Veronica Dean's Veronica (sultry, seductive and mysterious) for Archer's Archie.
• Black Boss Lady: Becomes The Leader of the Agency in the Season 13 finale.
• Blood Knight: Lana likes her job, and also likes violence a bit more than is healthy.
• Brainy Brunette: She has brown hair, the Only Sane Employee of her peers, and is a quick-thinking spy agent.
• Broken Ace: She's at least as big a badass as Archer, if not more so. However, Lana has insecurities over her good looks, severe trust issues in romances, and (as Cheryl points out), Lana will never quit her job because it's the only thing that she has a stable relationship with.
• Broken Tears: After discovering that Robert cheated on her with Sandra and realizing that she'd brought this on herself with her own unfaithfulness, Lana rushes off and cries her eyes out. When Archer sees her in this state, he wordlessly gives her some comfort.
• Character Catchphrase:
  • "Asshole" to Archer.
  • "God damn it, Archer!"
  • She also has an overly drawn out "nyooooooooooooooope" or "yuuuuup".
  • A Share Phrase "What the shit?" with Archer.
• The Chew Toy: Depending on the episode, such as "Pipeline Fever", where she severely burns her hands and is shot full of morphine. The Space Race episodes also make her into one of these, vomiting continuously on the simulation and having her clothes destroyed and forced to run around in just her underwear and stickers on her breasts.
• Clingy Jealous Girl: Lana has trust issues when it comes to relationships and can react harshly when she finds out or suspects her significant other of cheating. For example, in "Training Day", she threatens a coworker with a switchblade because Cyril mentions talking to her, then tracks down Archer and Cyril and shoots at them while pursuing them in a car, claiming "my feelings were hurt", then reveals she implanted a tracking device in Cyril (note that Archer was training Cyril to become a field agent, on orders by their boss, Malory).
• Combat Stilettos: Her default footwear is thigh-high heeled boots. She'll occasionally switch these out for stiletto pumps, especially when going undercover. In Space Race, even her NASA-jumpsuit had stiletto-heeled boots. She does, however, wear more practical combat boots on missions requiring combat and running, or where high mobility is a factor.
• Cool and Unusual Punishment:
  • When Cyril lies to her she first tries to gun him down, then makes him rent a raunchy adult film from their local convenience store, right in front of the sweet old Korean lady who runs it.
  • After Cyril gets caught cheating on Lana (willingly, unlike Lana's at the time coerced infidelity), she offers herself to the entire male staff at the office to spite Cyril.
• Covert Pervert: Into interracial porn and is familiar with the variety of fetishes on the Internet.
• Cunning Linguist: Lana is shown to have some fluency with various Romance languages, specifically French, Italian and Romansh.
• Deadpan Snarker: Most often she snarks at Archer.
• Demoted to Extra: In "Archer Vice", she takes a less active role due to being pregnant. Pam, Cyril and Ray seem to take turns being Archer's aide during this season.
• Did Not Think This Through: In Season 7, Lana has a hard time adjusting to being neither a spy nor a drug trafficker. She doesn't realize that her Hot-Blooded behavior can get her into trouble.
  • Ray warns her that going to the Country Day School headmaster's home to lobby for him to admit A.J. is a very bad idea. Lana ignores him, after threatening him to stay out of her business, and is arrested for stalking and carrying an unlicensed weapon.
  • While physically abusing Archer when she was angry with him might have been an acceptable outlet when she was on the other side of the law, her attempt to use the fact that she was virtually down the hall committing felony assault on Archer around the time her other possible lover Ellis Crane was murdered proves to be a poor alibi.
• Dude Magnet: Cemented when she offered to have sex with anyone at ISIS to get back at Cyril for cheating on her. The (nearly) entire male employees took that offer. Including Ray, who's openly gay - but, when this is pointed out, responded: "Girl, please, nobody's that gay."
  • Conway Stern. He tries flirting with her on their second encounter, not giving any thought to the instance where she caused him to lose his hand.
• Dude, Not Funny!: In-Universe. Her reaction when Pam compares herself to Schindler and Gandhi.
• Education Mama: Lana started planning out A.J.'s academic career while she was still a toddler in a stroller. Which is yet another example of her hypocrisy, as she complained about her own parents (both professors) putting so much pressure on her as a child. In season 11 it is revealed that Lana has sent five year old A.J. away to boarding school, in Switzerland, supposedly to get her "the best education in the world".
• Embarrassing Middle Name: Anthony, from Susan B. Anthony.
• Even the Girls Want Her:
  • Both Pam and Cheryl make comments about how they might be interested in sleeping with her. Both of them follow through, too - Cheryl gets an orgasm from a beating from her, and Pam gets pity sex from her.
  • Even The Gay Guys Want Her: Ray was willing to have sex with her, when she was seemingly allowing all the men (except Cyril, whom she had recently broken up with) of ISIS to have sex with her in the Season 1 finale. and when asked why by Cyril:
    Ray: Girl, please. Nobody's that gay.
• Everyone Has Standards: She may have done some messed up shit for Malory, but she draws the line at a number of things.
  • Dismembering a human body.
  • Shooting a cop/detective.
  • Keeping animals in terrible living conditions and hunting them for sport (one of the few things she and Archer can agree on).
• Fatal Flaw: For as beautiful and successful as she is, Lana is horrendously insecure. Anytime she enters a relationship with a man she becomes super paranoid about them cheating on her (not unfounded, since Archer, Cyril and Robert have all stepped out on her), and constantly needs her looks praised lest she start to feel ugly.
• Form-Fitting Wardrobe: Somehow Lana always manages to wear the most skintight clothing possible.
• Gold Digger: She eventually marries billionaire Robert, despite already having a well-paid job and nothing in common with her new husband.
• Guns Akimbo: Lana's sidearm of choice is a fully automatic TEC-9, of which she carries two.
• Guns in Church: Despite being a self-proclaimed "covert operative", Lana usually wears a side-holster with one or two guns on top of her otherwise skintight dresses, in public.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: She's very easy to agitate and can be very petty, hostile and aggressive when offended. If you manage to get under her skin while she's holding a firearm, kiss your eardums goodbye.
• Happy Marriage Charade: In season 11 it is reveal Lana got married to a man named Robert, a wealthy man much older than her. Lana insists that they are extremely happy together, but over time more and more cracks start to appear, like how Lana actually knows very little about him and they don't really have anything in common. With their differences becoming more apparent, Lana becomes distant from Robert. This continues into season 12, where after a big fight, Lana begins flirting with other men and almost cheats on Robert. Their marriage finally implodes when Robert, who believed she was doing the same, sleeps with another woman.
• Has a Type: Lana's sexual partners are all white.
• Heel Realization: In "Caught Napping" Lana acknowledges that she might have subconsciously allowed Robert to convince her to send AJ to boarding school so that she could pursue her spy career without having a child to worry about, much like Malory did to Sterling.
• Hidden Depths:
  • In "Heart of Archness" and "Space Race", she displays insecurities with her looks and needs to be reassured that she's good-looking.
  • She can imitate Darth Vader word for word, complete with inflection.
  • She reveals in "The Kanes" that as a child she always felt very pressured to follow her the dreams of her parents for her to be a scientist, going to science fairs while crying and vomiting from stress.
• Horrible Judge of Character: Lana's taste in men is questionable to say the least. She doesn't get along with any of her suitors, with Archer being a case of Too Much Alike while Cyril and Robert were both unappealing and had little in common with her.
• Hot-Blooded: Easily pissed off, to the point where she'll get into screaming matches over nothing. She can be downright terrifying at times, a prominent example being when she finds Katya's robo-vagina in Archer's sink in "Reignition Sequence", as they were rekindling their relationship.
• Hypocrite: Lana isn't good at practicing what she dishes out.
  • Complains that Cyril's too clingy, but she herself secretly implanted a tracking device inside his body so that she could always know where he was.
  • Despite cheating on Cyril herself with Skorpio and Archer during Season 1 (at the same time, no less), she finds it absolutely unforgivable when he later cheats on her.
  • Got mad several times at Archer for the implication he has a fetish for black women. Also forces Cyril to watch interracial porn, which she apparently enjoys.
  • Spends almost the entire episode "Pipeline Fever" getting annoyed at Archer's clear disregard for the environment of the wetlands (especially doing things like hunting trout to eat), and mocking his intense phobia of alligators. When an alligator attacks their boat she immediately begins screaming at Archer to kill it, and when Archer calls her out on it, she screams, "Screw the damn ecosystem!"
    Archer: You are such a hypocrite! I bet you eat veal!
    • In the same episode, it's revealed she used to be an anti-fur activist, but then Malory hired her and she found herself killing a man in Tunisia, the act of which doesn't seem to weigh on her conscious one iota.
  • When Archer broaches the idea of Malory taking AJ in the event that both he and Lana are killed, she unequivocally rejects the idea. However, whenever she has a mission or something else going on, it seems as if the first person that Lana herself hands AJ off to is Malory, even though she allegedly has a Polish au pair. This despite Malory's lack of experience with infants (she was absent from Sterling's life until he was five) and her openly-stated desire to get AJ to lose weight by underfeeding her.
  • Hires an actor to pretend to be a terrorist to know if she could trust Archer with AJ, not being bothered in the slightest when he sustains multiple gunshot wounds in the process of him desperately trying to protect his daughter. Archer quickly calls her out on her hypocrisy over the issue of trusting.
  • Despite jabs at Malory throughout the series for how she raised Archer (or failed to), season 11 reveals that Lana sent AJ to a boarding school, which was the source of many of Archer's own hang-ups.
  • In episode 4 of season 11, Lana is dismissive towards Archer's insistence that Barry intends to double cross them, and criticizes Archer's willingness to kill. The end of the episode demonstrates that she'd secretly brought an EMP grenade to deal with Barry if he double crossed the team. Even after he'd proven his loyalty to the team, she was still perfectly fine with using it to destroy the remaining androids to save the team, not caring that doing so would also kill Barry in the process.
  • Lana knows full well what it's like to be cheated on, yet she cheated on Robert out of spite.
• I Can Change My Beloved: Lana is almost obsessively attracted to Archer, but cannot stand his personality. Rather than treat this as a non-starter, she instead repeatedly tries to get him to behave more the way she would like him to. She's mostly gotten over this by season 11, but her marriage to Robert has its own issues.
• Informed Deformity: Her hands are apparently huge. There's really no visual evidence of this, since the art style puts no definition in any character's hands.
  • In Season 3 it's remarked that her breasts are beginning to sag. In the same episode she's forced to go topless with a pair of makeshift pasties and her breasts don't look particularly worn down.
• Informed Flaw: In Season 14, Archer keeps telling Lana that she doesn't go out in missions as much as she did because she's become the new boss of the Agency, but she's almost always shown to be tagging along in shown missions.
• Ink-Suit Actor: A weird example, her appearance isn't directly based on Aisha Tyler's, but some of her traits, such as being over 6 feet are very much in line with Tyler.
• Jerkass Ball: Lana usually gets a pass from fans because she is fairly competent, professional, and shows more noticeable morals than some of the other characters, but she also totally has her moments of being, for lack of a better word, a bit of a bitch.
  • She threatened Scatterbrain Jane with a switchblade twice in "Training Day".
  • She slapped Archer hard enough to cause hearing damage, then complained when he couldn't hear her in "Diversity Hire". She also called Conway Stern, "Homeboy McJewerson" because she was jealous of his status as The Ace. Sure he was a traitor, but she didn't know that at the time. She even punched Cyril for insinuating she was jealous of Conway.
  • When Uta asked her if she wanted the Nordic dish Gravlax, Lana responds: "No, I'm allergic to cat piss. Go away."
  • She shot Archer more than once. Even though he himself is a Jerkass, none of the things he did warranted physical violence.
  • When she shot her gun right by Archer's ear in "Movie Star".
  • She let Cyril get his ass kicked by Calzado, just because he got a little overzealous with his leadership during "El Contador".
  • Tells a woman who had been held in captivity, "With your looks, bitchy probably isn't the way to go," in "Space Race Part II".
  • A lot of people agree that though a semi-sweet moment, it's morally dubious at best when she stole Archer's sperm to impregnate herself, only told him after the child's birth that he was the father, and acts extremely indignant when, while faced with the sudden realization that he's now a father without his permission, flees the country for six weeks.
  • Sends an actor to stage an elaborate hostage situation just to ensure Archer was serious about taking care of A.J. She isn't even concerned that Archer was shot twice or that A.J. was put in real danger by the actor.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Lana is far from perfect and has had numerous jerkass moments (see Jerkass Ball). However, she is on the side of good, possesses a strong moral code, and genuinely cares for her friends.
• Knight Templar Parent: When Archer gets to babysit for A.J. by himself for the first time Lana stages an elaborate hostage situation, with Slater and Malory's help, to make sure he's serious about taking care of her.
• The Lancer: To Archer. Lana's usually the one to back him up on missions and will maintain focus when Archer inevitably gets distracted.
• Leg Focus: The very first shot of Lana is a pan up her long, shapely stems clad in tall boots and a short skirt.
• Light Feminine and Dark Feminine: The dark to Katya's light, due to have a much more sarcastic, surly disposition, an antagonistic relationship with Archer and an affinity for dark and sultry clothing. Inverted after Katya's resurrection as a cyborg and her palace coup against Barry. Katya even starts wearing a much darker KGB uniform.
• Made of Iron: Her hands. They're so strong she was able to keep a helicopter from flying away by holding onto a grappling hook that was latched onto it and pull open an electromagnetically locked door.
• Mal Mariée: She marries the much-older Robert while Archer is in a coma. While Robert is a genuinely kind person who is supportive of Lana and adores her daughter, Archer's reintroduction to their lives leads to Lana gradually growing dissatisfied with her marriage. This further spirals and takes up most of her arc in Season 12. It is revealed that she's been actively avoiding Robert since he started asking about having children with her, and his decision to finance ISIS and in effect become her boss puts further strain on their relationship. Archer's simple accusation that married life has made her boring leads to her nearly cheating on Robert multiple times. This culminates in episode 6 where she has a masturbatory tryst with another man, which her co-workers repeatedly point out is still essentially cheating, even if it is emotional rather than strictly physical. Their marriage completely falls apart by the end of the season.
• Mama Bear: Given her temper, she is an unsurprisingly fierce one when it comes to A.J.
• Manipulative Bitch: In the Season 1 finale "Dial M for Mother", she offers to sleep with all the men in the office to get even with Cyril. She actually doesn't have sex with any of them and charges just for being able to say they did; she gets away with it because she knows none of them will admit he didn't sleep with her.
• Married to the Job: Hints of this in the first few seasons, and made very clear in Season Four when Carol rips into Lana with a "The Reason You Suck" Speech that pretty much beats her over the head with this trope so hard that she's left totally speechless.
• Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy: Lana's Masculine Girl and Cyril's Feminine Boy. Lana is a powerful secret agent who is a crack shot with all manners of guns and rifles and has a hot temper to match while Cyril is a meek introverted accountant who loves to cook.
  • Also to Archer on a much smaller scale, due to Lana having large hands and Archer being a breast cancer survivor.
• Master of the Mixed Message: To Archer. She proclaims in the first season she hates him, but it's still shown she has feelings for him despite her stubborn denial. Then, when she impregnates herself with his donor sperm and before anyone knew, she is adamant that she doesn't want his help. However, after A.J. is born, she reveals that he is the father and later gives him a hypocritical What the Hell, Hero? moment after he runs away (a semi-realistic reaction to someone who has had parenthood literally sprung on them). And even after he shows he is taking being a father seriously, she still doesn't want him near their daughter, stating that if she were to die on one of her missions, her parents and later her sister (if the former die) would take custody.
• Mirror Character: At the end of it all, and God help you if you bring it up, but she and Archer are more alike than either would like to admit. She is more socially-adjusted than Archer, yes, and less sexually promiscuous (though she has still shown to use sex to get back at others) but both are hot-blooded, hypocritical, and stubborn to a fault. Like Archer, she has been shown to hijack or outright ruin some Agency operations just to prove a point, get her way, or simply to stoke her ego, and adamantly refuse to admit any responsibility when things go sideways. She and Archer are also enthusiastic lovers of animals, though Lana tends to veer more into the animal rights (and wrongs) activism side at times, while Archer genuinely makes friends with them. All this comes to a head in Season 12, where Cyril outright accuses her of becoming Archer, much to Lana's deep irritation.
• Mistaken for Cheating: In season 12, when Robert sees Lana flirting with a bartender and taking his number, he assumes she slept with him. She did not^*At least not in that instance; she later cheats on Robert for real in "Dingo, Baby, Et Cetera", though she insists it was only "emotionally" cheating since they never technically had sex...which only causes several people to accuse of being even worse., but Robert sleeps with another woman before she can explain that to him.
• Morality Pet: While he is a jerk to Lana most of the time, Archer shown a number of times that he does care about her, and in "Heart of Archness" he admits that she's his Only Friend.
• Ms. Fanservice: At least once a season she'll somehow manage to parade around in her underwear. At least before Season 5.
• Nerves of Steel: It's what got her spy job — during a protest at a local furrier. She was about to throw red paint on Malory Archer's new fur, when Malory pointed her gun at Lana's forehead. The rest of the protesters fled, including Joshua Gray, but Lana was not intimidated. Malory, impressed by her nerve, offered Lana a job.
• Never My Fault: She accuses Cyril for being a jerk for cheating on her and while he did was wrong, she was hostile, controlling and clingy in their relationship and also had a threeway with Archer (who's relationship with Lana made Cyril insecure and jealous) and Skorpio.
• Not So Above It All: While she may act as the Only Sane Employee among her co-workers, Lana can be prone to selfish actions like them.
• "Not So Different" Remark: Cyril eventually points out that Lana's gradually turning into a distaff Archer, pointing out her mood swings, lack of teamwork and improvising on missions.
• Official Couple: With Archer once again as of "Pocket Listing".
• Only Friend: Archer admits that she is this to him, although he and Pam develop a genuine friendship in later episodes. Given Lana's antisocial attitude, this is implied to go both ways.
• Only Sane by Comparison: Lana may be the most competent member of ISIS, but when interacting with anyone not involved in spycraft she comes across as quite belligerent.
• Only Sane Woman: Lana is easily the most competent and level-headed member of ISIS, along with Ray. Her outbursts are usually due to someone/something that has gone crazy (most of the time, via Archer) and is very good at her job. However, while she might be the most moral, it's only by default.
• Only Sane Employee: Compared to most of the crew, she's intelligent, level-headed and rational and does her job very seriously.
  "Since when is babysitting Archer my... oh my God, that's exactly my job."
• Open Mouth, Insert Foot: In the season five premiere, she tells Archer that she'd rather lose the baby than marry him. She immediately realizes her mistake when she sees his reaction. Notably, it's not certain which part of the statement upset him, given that Archer was surprisingly supportive of her having a baby.
• Operation: Jealousy: Lana lives and breathes this, even though it probably causes more drama in her relationships than it solves.
  • Basically her entire relationship with Cyril was this, with the intent of annoying Archer.
  • When Cyril cheats on her (never minding that she also cheated on him), Lana pretends to have sex with all the men in the office just to humiliate him.
  • Whenever she feels that Archer is not paying enough attention to her, Lana will pick some available guy to try this with. In Season 7, furious over Archer's infatuation with movie star Veronica Deane, Lana enters into an implied relationship with Deane's ex-husband, movie producer Ellis Crane (which also makes Malory jealous).
• Pet the Dog: In "Stage Two", she takes a genuine interest in Pam's diorama of her family farm, made of marzipan (except for the barn, which is graham crackers and icing) and chewing out Malory for intentionally destroying it by dumping coffee over it.
• Phrase Catcher: Lana. Lana? Lana! LANAAAAAHHHHHH!
  "WHAT?!"
• Playing the Victim Card:
  • She pulls The Baby Trap in order to force Archer to focus more on her, to the extent that she is enraged that he does not immediately accept responsibility for a child which she conceived using stolen frozen sperm, and which she did not even tell him was his until after the baby was born! And even during the pregnancy, when Archer proposed thinking he wasn't the father, she claimed she would "rather lose the baby than marry [him]" while (unknowingly) pointing a gun at her belly. She has also waterboarded Archer using the excuse that he had skipped out on the training when she really just wanted him to admit he was attracted to Veronica Deane. She also repeatedly tried to manipulate Archer using Operation: Jealousy because her jealousy of Veronica only to get mad when it backfires.
  • She did the same thing while dating Cyril, being put off by his trust issues despite admitting, after chasing him in a car and shooting at him, that she implanted a tracking device in him. She also gave him a really hard time for cheating on her, even though she cheated on him a few episodes earlier.
  • Cheryl eventually called her out on this admonishing her for constantly complaining about her job despite knowing that she would never leave it.
• Pregnant Badass: For the majority of Season 5 she's pregnant via a donor, who turns out to be Archer. She's still a force to be reckoned with, given her going Guns Akimbo in the 5th season premiere while saying this line:
  "Son of a — Bitches! I am pregnant!"
• Proud Beauty: In one episode she claims that Archer is still attracted to her because "he'd have to be blind not to".
• Race Fetish: All of the men Lana has slept with and dated were all white men, regardless of their personalities or level of sex appeal. Including the one she marries.
• Really Gets Around: Lana has been in sexual relationships with Joshua Gray, Barry, Archer, and Cyril, and cheats on Cyril with Archer, Skorpio, Pam and almost Sandu Singh in Season 1^note Although to be fair, Archer and Skorpio was part of a do-or-die situation, and Sandu Singh was to get information on a potential bomb threat. In the Season 1 finale, she pretends to have sex with every man at ISIS to punish Cyril for cheating on her.
• Reluctant Fanservice Girl: Loses her clothes on a few occasions, most notably when ISIS goes into space and they need a distraction and another time when Archer uses her bikini top as a slingshot (both of these end with her wearing large label stickers like pasties). She's very annoyed at all this, especially when Archer starts making comments about her breasts.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: Dislikes Conway because of jealousy, not realizing that he actually is a traitor.
• Sassy Black Woman: ''"Yuuuuuuup!"'' She's like a ball busting combination of Turanga Leela, Ashley Williams and Purna Jackson.
• Say My Name: And it's always Archer's name.
• Ship Tease: With Archer; couples with Everyone Can See It. Season four amps this up to infinity. Season 5's finale has her come out and admit it, but Archer is distracted and doesn't notice.
• Single Woman Seeks Good Man: Subverted. Lana was in a relationship with Cyril, who was more stable than Archer. However, their relationship doesn't work out for a variety of reasons, including the fact that Lana was still interested in Archer.
• Slap-Slap-Kiss: Finally happens with Archer at the end of "Pocket Listing".
• Soapbox Sadie: Not surprisingly for the child of academic parents from Berkeley, Lana has a history of animal rights and environmental activism. She tends to get very preachy about the moral pros and cons of the missions they get, sometimes even endorsing missions for ideological reasons that even Malory doesn't really care about, and just as often opposing them.
• Stalker with a Test Tube: Lana rationalizes stealing Archer's frozen sperm from the doctor's office because he is actually pretty amazing physically-speaking. That said, The Baby Trap was an even bigger motive, although she does not admit it.
• Statuesque Stunner: Easily one of the tallest women (being 6'0) on the show, which is appropriate considering her voice actress, and frequently noted to be highly attractive, not to mention having tons of fanservice moments.
• Steel Ear Drums: Averted; like Archer she has Tinnitus from multiple gunshots and explosions going off near her head but "Placebo Effect" establishes that she has a much better ear doctor than Archer and ergo doesn't suffer it as severely.
• Straight Man: Primarily to Archer, though she frequently has Not So Above It All moments.
• Strong Girl, Smart Guy: Strong Girl to Cyril's Smart Guy. Lana is the top agent Action Girl, while Cyril is a Non-Action Guy who is more adept with tactics and strategy.
• Stupid Sexy Flanders: In a twist, Lana is attractive enough that Gillette - a professed homosexual man - is perfectly willing to sleep with her, saying that "No one is that gay."
• Stripperific:
  • All of Lana's outfits seem tailor-made to show off her figure. If not that, then she'll invariably end up in a situation where she'll be stripped to her underwear.
  • As lampshaded by Archer when he gets distracted by her in underwear when they're in the middle of a gunfight:
    Lana: Now?! Really?!
    Archer: Oh, right! Because you walked into Strippers Discount Warehouse and said "Help me showcase my intellect!"
• Too Much Alike: Lana is just as horny and violent as Archer. Part of the reason why she can't stand him is because his antics are a reminder of how little self-control she truly has.
• Ungrateful Bitch: To the extreme in the season 11 finale. Lana is immediately whining about how stupid Archer supposedly is and how she wishes Archer had stayed in his coma after he literally just saved the entire world. Thankfully Archer shuts her with a brutal "The Reason You Suck" Speech.

Malory Archer

Malory Duchess Archer

"If I cared what you did on a weekend I'd put a shotgun in my mouth and pull the trigger with my toes."

Voiced By: Jessica Walter

Head of ISIS and Archer's mother. Just about as snarky, selfish, sex-crazed, and jerkish as Sterling, if not more so. At times she'll abuse her power (such as using a bomb threat to steal a first-class cabin on a blimp from her hated neighbor), but mostly she'll try to make sure that ISIS missions go as smoothly as possible, sighing all the way as her idiot son screws everything up.

---

• 0% Approval Rating: With the more likely exception of her son, almost everyone at ISIS cannot stand Malory, with good reason though. As such, whenever her subordinates get one over her, it's quite cathartic.
• Abhorrent Admirer: While there are many men who find her very attractive, Malory is also prone to aggressively hitting on men who either express no interest or who openly try to indicate that they are not interested.
• Abusive Parents: She's the reason Archer is so messed up. Her treatment of him ranges from overprotective to neglectful to downright sadistic, appearing to have been somewhat physically abusive, and very, very mentally abusive to him.
  • She also becomes an abusive grandparent whenever AJ is put in her care, thinking AJ is overweight, despite Lana's insistence that she's a normal weight for a baby, and intentionally underfeeding her.
  • Her treatment of Seamus, when he was thought to be Archer's son was similarly poor, basically just practicing what she calls "negative reinforcement", feeding him alcohol when he cries.
• Acquired Poison Immunity: Like her son, Malory can shrug off tranquilizers without even blinking due to a lifetime of drug and alcohol abuse.
• Action Girl: Based on various flashbacks and the fact that she was able to shoot her son six times in the torso with what was revealed the next season to be a .44 magnum. She expresses pride that all six shots were grouped "in the '10 ring.'"
• The Alcoholic: A shared family trait, as she got Archer drinking at a really young age. She's rarely seen without a drink in her hand.
• Ambiguously Bi: She had a threesome with Pam and a German chubby-chaser. And during Season 5 when she and Ron were trying out an open marriage, Cheryl and Pam both had keys to her apartment, and when Cyril asks about it, the following exchange happens:
  Cyril: You both had sex with… hopefully Ron?
  Cheryl and Pam simultaneously: …Don't worry about it.
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: For all of their bad blood, Malory and Sterling care for each other, more or less, though it doesn't always last. She becomes fearful or depressing whenever she think he is in a situation where he's likely to be killed.
  • Gets a very brief moment with Sterling in "Dial M for Mother"… which he almost immediately ruins.
  • Played depressingly straight in "No Good Deed," when Archer's been in a coma for three months and Malory has refused to leave him. Lana tells Malory she should sleep in a real bed, but Malory says "I'm fine. I want to be here if... when he wakes up."
  • Then when Archer finally wakes up, Malory spoils the moment by telling him their relationship is at its core a love story. Archer is understandably grossed out.
• Bad Boss: To the extent that she expects Brett to clean up his own blood whenever he gets shot by Archer or Cyril! She also murdered the cleaning ladies when they tried to unionize, and the other ISIS employees resorted to trapping her in the elevator when she refused to give cost-of-living adjustments to their already low salaries. Then there is the question of the nerve gas canisters which she had Krieger place inside all of the air conditioning vents just in case...
  • To top it all off, she has been running ISIS outside of government sanction since day 1, leading to everyone still alive following the FBI raid charged of treason. She was forced to surrender the property in order to drop the charges, at the cost of everyone, besides the main cast, being out of the job.
• Batman Gambit: Several episodes end with the plot twist that she has set everything up, with her plans working because she knows everyone well enough to manipulate them.
• Bestiality Is Depraved: Malory's relationship with her deceased dog Duchess, lampshaded as being incredibly creepy by Archer since his spy name was given in respect of the dog.
• Big Bad: Zig-Zagged. While Barry and Katya may be the most obvious opponents of the main characters, Malory Archer has consistently proven herself to be the series' primary conflict creator, often using ISIS and its employees to commit heinous and criminal acts bordering on treason (ranging from the sake of financial gain, to revenge against another, to just getting her sex tape(s) back). To say nothing of how she treats her subordinates, more often than not, she tends to get away with it all most of the time. And that's not even covering the events of the fifth season, where she was outed for running the agency without government sanction, resulting in the charge of treason, and later made a deal with the CIA to sell a literal metric ton of cocaine, which she was perfectly willing to let Archer take the blame for, even though he wasn't involved at all. By seasons 11 and 12, however, this is ultimately subverted as Malory is forced to entrust the Agency to Robert, as she herself has run out of finances, pretty much undermining and eliminating any true authority she had, and for a large part of Season 12 she spends the time brooding and drinking, but not really making any calls or manipulating anything behind the scenes. And then, by the end of season 12, she's forced to go into hiding/retire after Robert turned around and sold the Agency to Fabien (albeit unintentionally) and Malory no longer has protection from the long list of enemies she made in the early seasons and beyond, and Passes the Torch to Archer and the rest of the cast before joining Ron.
• Big "WHAT?!": She sometimes says this when she's really irate.
• Broken Bird: In season 8, after Archer was put in a coma thanks to Veronica Deane. Malory's more or less been living in the hospital because she refuses to leave Archer's side until he wakes up. There's no bitter comments about how he screwed up or brought it on himself, no hostility towards Lana when Lana shows concern for her well being, the life's essentially been drained right out of Malory.
• Catchphrase:
  • "If [something she wants to happen doesn't], I may literally die."
  • "Zip it!"
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Applies since ISIS is a private company and not a government agency. Malory is nonetheless quite willing to engage in deals that threaten (inter)national security if there is profit in it for her. She also uses her decades worth of government and intelligence connections to get away with criminal behavior. This declines somewhat as the series progresses mostly because ISIS is Incompetence, Inc. and Malory's influence wanes due her agents (mainly Sterling) steadily eroding ISIS's reputation and marketability.
• Cunning Linguist: Malory is able to speak in German, French and Italian.
• Cynical Mentor: To Archer and the Wee Baby Seamus. Varied from the norm in that it's made clear that her "mentoring" of them is closer to abuse and Archer is deeply, deeply disturbed as a result.
• Da Chief: When berating ISIS members.
• Dad the Veteran: A mother variant. Served in the OSS during World War II.
• Damsel out of Distress: Barry kidnaps her in "Motherless Child", to force the Figgis Agency to help him. She manages to get out of the situation by herself. She in fact created a series of steps to deal with that exact situation, because she's been in similar ones before.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Was in the dangerous life of espionage, which contributed to her unfitness as a parent. And the (possible) father of her son and her apparent true love was murdered during a mission.
• Dating Catwoman:
  • In a relationship with the head of the KGB. She tries to keep this hidden, and the fact that this relationship may have produced Archer.
  • May have. There's still Len Trexler and Buddy Rich (and an assassinated Italian anti-fascist activist) as possible candidates.
• Dating What Daddy Hates: Inverted. Her son Sterling completely freaks out whenever anyone shows sexual or romantic interest in his mother. Malory herself doesn't really approve of Archer being with Lana or Katya, but isn't as aggresive about it as Archer is.
• Deadpan Snarker: One of the sharpest-witted characters in the series.
• The Dreaded: She is hated and feared by everyone in the office, especially her son.
• Dude Magnet: Despite being at least 60, Malory has had numerous flings with men who have considered her attractive.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • Despite being incredibly selfish herself, even she can't stand her son's over-sized ego. However, this is something of a deconstruction as her horrible parenting more than likely fueled his ego.
  • She was absolutely disgusted at her son for flirting with a dead ISIS agent's widow while at the dead agent's wake.
  • When she finds out Cheryl specifically missed her parents' funeral, Malory demands to know why. Cheryl says it's because Malory threatened to fire her if she missed work again, and Malory counters she wouldn't have fired her for going to that.
  • According to "The Limited", Malory is, at worst, elitist, not racist. She treats all servants the same, regardless of skin color. She does, however, show derision for the Irish, apparently because they remained neutral during World War II.
• Evil Is Petty: She turns down Pam's application to be a field agent, despite the fact that she so desperate for agents she made Cyril one, simply because she hates her.
• Evil Matriarch: Aside from her often deliberately malicious parenting of Sterling, she seems to be continuing the trend with AJ, who while still an infant is already being harshly judged by Malory. Of course, having been absent for the first five years of Sterling's life, and barely present the rest of his childhood, it's really not surprising that she doesn't realize that babies outgrow their clothes rather rapidly and that it is not a sign of developing obesity.
• Executive Excess: Despite being the head of the private intelligence agency ISIS, Malory takes the job only slightly more seriously than her dimwitted son, Sterling. She fakes terrorist attacks to gain personal attendance at restaurants and airships, wastes company money on ludicrous personal luxuries, drinks on the job almost as much as Sterling, and has actually been carrying on a series of sordid affairs with a number of VIPs around the world including the head of the KGB, which often extends to having phone sex with them in her office during work hours! In the end, these dodgy deeds and many more committed over the course of the show ends up getting ISIS shut down by the FBI.
• Expy: Mallory Archer is an Evil Matriarch who's played by Jessica Walter and has a domineering relationship with her son; It’s clear that the creators had Lucille Bluth in mind when developing Mallory.
• Family Versus Career: Averted. Malory prioritizes her career over her son, leaving Woodhouse to raise young Sterling. On the rare occasions when she did spend time with him, she usually tormented him in order to teach him a lesson.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: She mentions in "Movie Star" that, despite being a dreaded spymaster and a former secret agent, she used to live a relatively normal life as a prospective actress...until the head of the OSS offered her a job.
  Malory: Three weeks later, I was in Tunisia, killing a man.
• Full-Name Ultimatum: If her son so much as pisses her off, she calls out his full name "Sterling Malory Archer" in a tone that exudes Tranquil Fury. Which is often.
• Generation Xerox: For all the crap that she gives her son about his uncontrollable libido, it gradually becomes clear that she was every bit as lecherous as him when she was younger (and she still has plenty of affairs on the side).
• A Glass in the Hand: As Malory is almost never seen without a drink in hand, it's guaranteed that she'll drop or crush it whenever something goes wrong, especially when her son is involved.
  • For example, Malory breaks the last of her Steuben glass set in frustration when Nikolai hangs up on her in "Dial M For Mother".
• Greed: Probably Malory's defining trait, even ahead of her abusive parenting and sexual licentiousness. Malory is ruthlessly materialistic, bratty and self-absorbed woman who is obsessed with making money, living an elite lifestyle and showing up others (especially her neighbor Trudy Beekman). There is literally nothing she will not stoop to if it stands to profit her enough.
• Has a Type: She includes Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich on the list of Sterling's possible fathers; admitting that she "never could say no to a drummer."
• Heroic Comedic Sociopath: To the point where it could be argued that she's really the Big Bad; see that trope entry above.
• Hidden Depths: There are some moments in the series that imply Malory is regretful over how much of a horrible mother she was to Archer.
• Hypocrite:
  • Often rants against immigrants stealing American jobs. In "Coyote Lovely" it is revealed that she is nonetheless open to helping illegal immigrants enter the U.S. in exchange for a suitable bribe.
  • Has no problems in shaming her son for his many, many vices, even though she indulges in all of them herself.
  • Allegedly hates the Irish because Ireland was neutral during World War II. But she absolutely loves Italy and Italian men, despite it having been an actual Axis power.
  • Is a conservative Republican who carried on a decades-long affair with the head of the KGB during the Cold War!
• Hypocritical Humour: Mocks Lana for having slept with Pam, something she is equally guilty of doing. She gets called out on this, saying "Oh my God. That's right!"
• I Drank WHAT?!: Malory chugs an entire graduated cylinder of fluid at a doctor's office.
  Malory: I hope to God that was alcohol.
• Ink-Suit Actor: She bears a striking resemblance to Jessica Walter (though this is apparently completely coincidental).
• Insane Troll Logic: Used this a few times in Season 1 to justify her behavior:
  Archer: Who puts Oxycontin in a Xanax bottle?
  Malory: People with servants, idiot!
  Archer: But if they're stealing pills, how does it help to switch the labels?
  Malory: Because they can't read English!
• Insistent Terminology: She claims not to be racist, and that if anything she's an elitist. She treats all servants equally, which is to say, like crap.
• It's All About Me: Is even more shamelessly self-centered and than her son, and that's saying something. For instance, in "Stage Two", she's upset that Archer has breast cancer and she doesn't, since it means she's no longer the center of attention.
• I Want Grandkids: Zig Zagged. For the first few seasons she's against the idea of becoming a grandmother, going as far as pressuring Sterling to get a vasectomy to avoid any further "accidents". However, in season 6 Lana reveals that it was apparently Malory's idea for her to use Archer's frozen sperm to impregnate herself.
• I Was Quite a Looker: Confirmed in flashbacks in "The Double Deuce".
• Jerkass: She's pretty much the reason why Sterling is how he is, but unlike her son Malory is never given a Freudian Excuse.
• Jerkass Has a Point: A saint Malory is not—but she manages to convince Lana that Archer was not aware of her deal with the CIA to sell cocaine by asking Lana a single question: When has she ever been honest with her son?
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Sometimes - despite everything, deep down she truly does love her son. She's just terrible at showing it. In the Season 12 finale, she not only engages in a one-woman rescue mission to save Archer from IAA, but leaves Archer (and the rest of the cast) a very touching farewell letter when she has to abruptly go into hiding following Fabien Kingsworth's unexpected buyout of the Agency.
• Karma Houdini: Despite her amoral and completely unethical behavior, she usually escapes completely unscathed (on a few occasions she does receive her comeuppance).
  • Taken up to eleven with the season 5 premiere, what with her connections causing the FBI to set her free even though ISIS was an illegal spy ring with everyone (Minus Archer and Lana) blabbing about what happened in the past seasons. Although this was because she had a deal with the CIA to sell their cocaine.
  Malory: (After the ISIS crew have burst in on them wielding guns and having subdued several FBI agents) You'll just have to put that on my.... Crime tab.
• Lady Drunk: Malory is almost always seen with a drink. She resorts to drinking isopropyl in the third season finale.
  • It is revealed that she's at her absolute worst when drinking Absinthe. She barely remembered issuing a burn notice on her own son in "Job Offer" while under its influence.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Some finally hits her in "House Call" when Ron leaves her and takes her house since she hid it under his name. She also gets hit by this in "Drastic Voyage, Part 2" when Holly fires her and the rest of the team from the CIA and leaves her futilely begging.
  • She gets served her just desserts again in the season six premiere when Pam and Cheryl redesign the ISIS office. The office appears exactly like Malory's dream office, only to reveal it was simply a hologram and redesigned the office to look exactly the same, leaving her absolutely crushed and crying. After nagging and making Pam and Cheryl miserable the past 5 seasons, it's satisfying to watch.
  • Also occurs in 'El Secuestro' at the end when Pam gears up to kick the crap out of Malory for showing little to no concern for Pam while she was being held hostage as well as offering a pathetically low ransom amount for her. Even Archer concedes that Pam should "have this one" and stands by idly as Pam is ready to beat his mother up. Although we never actually see Pam beat up Malory, it's heavily implied she did and Malory certainly had it coming.
  • The Season 12 finale can be seen as this, though it's not played for catharsis, for once: She is forced to go into hiding and retire permanently when Fabien Kingsworth acquires the company, because 1) she very recently had a hand at demolishing Kingsworth's IAA headquarters and preventing IAA from making trillions on a fuel industry protection racket, and 2) because Kingsworth, for the previous stated reason, has no obligation (or will) to protect Malory from all those enemies (and apparently countless "lovesick paramours") that she made in the earlier seasons, pretty much meaning her head is open season for them. Essentially, all of her manipulation, scheming, and double-crossing has come to a head because IAA certainly would have kicked her out on the street with no protection, as opposed to Archer and the rest of the Agency, whom Fabien implied several times that he at least could make use of.
• Lots of Luggage: She is incapable of going on even just an overnight trip without seemingly bringing her entire set of red suitcases, the movement of which represents backbreaking labor for others. Also, don't you dare scuff them!
• Lovable Sex Maniac: Archer's father could be any one of five guys, including jazz drummers Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich. By the way, don't look in her desk.
• Mama Bear:
  • While she's not winning "Mother of the Year" awards due to her callous nature, Malory does have a protective side for her son, such as, ordering the ISIS agents to locate and bring back Archer after he disappeared.
  • Malory later becomes this to Baby AJ. When it seems as though Krieger was going to turn her into a cyborg, Malory threatens to shoot his balls off if he ever comes near her again. Earlier before that incident she thought Carol was the one that took AJ and burst into her restroom stall to strangle and repeatedly slam her head against the wall.
• Manipulative Bitch: When bullying and intimidation doesn't work, she isn't above bursting into tears to get her way.
  • In "Lo Scandalo", she tricks the whole cast into covering up her murder of the Italian Prime Minister. She even calls the police while she is having the body being disposed by Krieger so that they are thrown off once they arrive to find the room all cleaned, and they aren't aware they are being played until the very end of the episode when Lana points it out.
• Maternally Challenged: Averted. She can actually be pretty good with kids when she cares to be, it's just her approach to parenting that leaves something to be desired.
• Mean Boss:
  • Exemplified in this conversation when the ISIS support staff is on strike in "The Rock".
    Lana: What do they want?
    Malory: Oh, the same entitled crap as always. "I can't afford to make ends meet! I'm on food stamps! My child died because I couldn't afford new bone marrow!" Just me me me me me!
    Lana: Jesus, whose kid died?
    Malory: Oh, who remembers?
    • And earlier in the episode, it showed her murdering the cleaning staff simply for wearing pro-union buttons.
  • Whenever Brett gets shot, her first instinct is to berate him for staining her carpets or to order him back to work.
  • She routinely abuses ISIS resources to one-up her neighbor, Trudy Beekman. She'll make anonymous terrorist threats against some establishment that Trudy was bragging about going to (an upscale restaurant, a fancy blimp, an opera theater, etc) so that she can get ISIS hired to provide security.
• Missing Mom: She was absent from her son's life until he was five years old. Given her approach to Sterling every other time they interact, it's debatable if this was actually a bad thing.
• The Mole: In a classic case of Irony, it turns out that she is this and does not even realize it. When she is told that there is a KGB mole inside ISIS in "Mole Hunt", she responds with disbelief since she would have known. This is because she has been having a decades-long affair with KGB head Nikolai Jakov. In "Skorpio", when Archer and Lana appear to be in danger, she frantically asks him if he has any KGB agents nearby, to which he replies that he doesn't like to discuss KGB matters because it's "unprofessional". Malory is incredulous because "I tell you everything!" Later, in "Coyote Lovely" she plays this trope more straight, as she is taking bribes to assist an immigrant-smuggling ring that ISIS is supposed to be stopping.
• My Beloved Smother: Half of her interactions with Archer involves trying to control him in one way or another. It's been noted by several people that their relationship borders on incestuous because of this.
• Never Mess with Granny: Despite her age, she's still a crack shot and a stone-cold badass. After breaking free from a remote prison, Mallory scores a ride from a trucker that wants a sexual favour in return. Mallory punches him in the throat, knocks him out of the truck, and drives the truck back home.
• Noble Bigot: Holds some prejudiced views of Lana and Ray, but still recognizes and respects their skills as agents.
• Noodle Incident: Apparently her "second fake 50th birthday" was pretty bad, because Archer compared it to having a group of armed men in combat armor burst into the office and start firing, killing Brett.
• No-Sell: Completely immune to tranquilizers, due to having abused that many substances.
• Odd Friendship: With Archer's nurse while Archer is in a coma.
• Passing the Torch: Invoked deliberately. After Fabien forces her to go into hiding following the IAA HQ's destruction and Fabien's subsequent acquirement of the Agency, she leaves a letter to Archer and the gang explaining her reasoning and stating this trope verbatim, adding a warning not to "burn [themselves] with it."
• Parents as People: Archer suffered from Parental Abandonment and continual abuse due to Malory actually continuing with her career. Burt Reynolds also argues that Archer needs to allow her to flourish as her own person now that he's an adult. Though the advice ends up being incredibly faulty when it's shown how Malory is as cruel and domineering to Archer as an adult spy as she was in his childhood.
• Pet the Dog:
  • She does occasionally have moments of this. She took Krieger to see both the theatre and movie versions of The Wiz, and she did pay to have a car upgraded to a super spy car for Archer's birthday (even if she did ruin it by stealing it "to teach him a lesson")
  • She is also very caring towards her granddaughter. Unfortunately, she also immediately ruins a moment when she notices that AJ is chubby, and offers to buy her plastic surgery when she's older.
• Phrase Catcher: "That's so classic her!", usually when she's not around; occasionally to her face: "That's so classic you!"
• Politically Incorrect Heroine: Hates the Irish and isn't afraid to show it. She's also made racist comments at the expense of black people and the Japanese: when she shoots a Yakuza member off a ladder in "Drift Problem", she claims that "[it's payback] for Pearl Harbor". Not to mention how she treats Ray...
  Ray: Why don't I just stick a broom up my ass and sweep the floor while I'm at it?
  Malory: What was that?
  Ray: Nothing!
  Malory: Good. Saves you the embarrassment of an incredibly homophobic remark.
• Pregnant Badass: A flashback (albeit an Offscreen Moment of Awesome) showed Malory managing to kill one of her assassins...while still pregnant with her son.
• Racist Grandma: In spite of her claims that she's "an elitist, not a racist," she has some very outdated and pretty racist opinions on different racial groups, and a pretty strong distaste for the Irish.^note Which is implied to stem from Ireland's decision to stay neutral during World War II.
  • Subverted when it's revealed why she doesn't approve of Archer and Lana dating.
    "My god, a black... ops field agent?"
  • Malory tries to avert this by hiring Conway Stern, but given her open lust for him, it's pretty easy to make comparisons with Get Out (2017).
• Real Life Writes the Plot: Suddenly retires and goes into hiding following the death of Jessica Walter. She was last seen on a beach with Ron Cadillac, who had been absent since the death of Ron Leibman, Jessica's IRL husband.
• Really Gets Around: Just about every male character on the show over 50 (Woodhouse and her actual husband excepted) is a candidate for Sterling's father. Has sex with Cyril in "Movie Star" and Pam in "Swiss Miss". The Season 1 finale had this exchange with Archer after suspecting a KGB leader may be his father, his mother listing a group of other candidates.
  Archer: Have you said "no" to anyone?!
  [Malory slaps Archer]
  Malory: I've said "no" to plenty.
• Retired Badass: She is no longer an active field agent, but when she was, she was as feared a spy as her son and Lana are now. Even in retirement, Malory still can hold her own in a gunfight.
  • In "Motherless Child" Barry handcuffs her to a chair blindfolded and locked into a bunker ten feet underground. She not only accurately deduces that she's underground based on the lack of ambient sound, but frees herself by the end of the episode, implying it's not the first time that's happened to her and that wasn't even the worst one (briefly mentioning a time where she was hooked up to a car battery and other where she was up to her ankles in blood). After escaping, she easily beats up a truck driver trying to make her have sex with him before stealing his truck as the man chokes on the ground.
  • In "Liquid Lunch", she beats down Krieger, down to driving her heel in his shoulder, casually mentioning she has already killed seven Germans with nothing but a shovel and she'll gladly kill another one. The sight of it makes Ray quiver in fear.
• Rich Bitch: At the very least, she's a self-admitted elitist. She's willing to kick anyone out to acquire the best accommodations. This puts her at odds with her neighbor Trudy Beakman, like when she fabricated a bomb threat to have an airship's captain switch them.
• Running Gag: She gets often called out by her employers, Ron and other organization's heads for her habit of micro-managing all of her agency's operations.
• Silver Vixen: Malory thinks this of herself, as seen in "Lo Scandalo". Lampshaded in "Skin Game":
  "Dead woman my still-shapely ass!"
• Smug Snake: When called on her selfish, elitist ways, her response is usually something along the lines of "Yea, so what?"
• Strange Minds Think Alike: During Jeu Monégasque, both Sterling and Malory have flashbacks to a Halloween when Sterling was 8 years old and dressed as Charlie Chaplin. Both of them wonders "Why was I/he dressed as Hitler?"
• Strawman Political: Is a staunch conservative, and has some very odd ideas of what liberals and socialists are up to in the government.
• Strong Family Resemblance: Flashbacks of Malory, showed she had the same black hair that Archer has. That combined with her having the same blue eyes as her son means that she's basically an older, female version of Archer.
• Sugar-and-Ice Personality: Malory is usually a cold, ruthless woman but does show a kind side from time to time.
• Took a Level in Kindness: In Season 6, relatively speaking. She's still a terrible person, but she takes a strong interest in being part of her granddaughter's life, being generally kind when Lana needs help and working with her to set up a test for Archer in "Sitting". There's also her apparently genuine attempt to get her staff together to watch a movie as a team-building exercise in "Vision Quest".
  • Archer's comatose state brings out Malory's sensitive side, though it fades away once he recovers.
• Trickster Mentor: This is her parenting strategy towards her son, even though it's taken to levels that would realistically be considered child abuse. It doesn't really help that he doesn't learn his lessons, partially because she only half-asses the "Mentor" part, best seen when she buys him a new car for his birthday and hires someone to steal it.
• Undiscriminating Addict: When the agency was visiting a space station, she (as well as Sterling) was unhappy to find out there was no alcohol on board. She tried making her own drinks by mixing Tang with rubbing alcohol.
• Ungrateful Bitch: Don't expect her to thank any of the other agents for helping her, especially since they tend to mess up most of the time.
• Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist: She's an emasculating, condescending whore (both of the sexual variant and a sellout), but the show wouldn't be half as funny without her.
• Upper-Class Twit: Played with; Malory isn't exactly stupid, but she is notably elitist and has a downright bizarre view of the world.
• Villain Protagonist: Particularly in season 5 when the gang forms a drug cartel.
• When Elders Attack:
  • Despite being drunk a good majority of the time, she's still a crack shot with a pistol, a fact she demonstrated on a mind controlled Archer.
  • Demonstrated again in "Drift Problem" when she's able to precisely hit a metal ladder from a good distance away with a pistol, one handed and without looking.
  • She goes on a one-woman rescue mission to save Archer from Fabien's clutches during "Mission: Difficult".

Cheryl Tunt

Cheryl/Carol/Cristal/Carina/Cherlene R. Tunt

"You're not my supervisor!"

Voiced By: Judy Greer, Jessy Lynn Marten (singing, Archer Vice)

A secretary at ISIS. Cheryl has been known to repeatedly change her name, due to people not remembering her original one or purely on a whim. She ranges from sexually precocious to voracious and has a twisted fetish for being strangled and murdered. She's a member of the highly wealthy Tunt family. She commonly changes her name throughout the first season, but sticks with Cheryl afterwards, though if someone calls her by the wrong name, she won't object.. In Season 5, she was a country singer by the name of Cherlene.

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• Action Girl: Madness aside, in Season 13 Cheryl does evolve into a hypercompetent spy in her own right, becoming the group's demolitions expert.
• All Girls Want Bad Boys: Or bad girls. She outright claims she likes it when someone emotionally and/or physically abuses her. During the earlier seasons, she is obsessed with Archer despite, or rather because of, how emotionally cruel and indifferent he is to her whenever they hook up.
• Ambiguously Bi: While Cheryl hasn't overtly hit on any woman, her fetish for being strangled and murdered seems to apply even when women do it. She enjoys being slapped by Malory, orgasms during a beating from Lana, and solicits a choking from Pam. She later comments that she is "digging the Queen Kong vibe" Pam has in one episode. Later it is revealed that she and Pam participated in Malory and Ron's open marriage. When pressed if that means they had sex with Ron, they both look and reply, "Don't worry about it".
• Attention Whore: She'll pretty much say or do anything just for self-gratification and draw attention for herself.
  "Sorry. Ignore me. My whole thing is I just crave attention"
• Ax-Crazy: She's a compulsive pyromaniac, gets off on suffering physical and emotional violence, once spent 6 months believing that she was a werewolf, and is more often than not stoned out of her skull on either rubber cement or LSD-laced Gummi Bears (or both.) Luckily for everyone else at the company, she seems to get off more on her own pain than anyone else's.
• The Beard: Pretends to be the gay Ray's wife during a visit to his redneck brother (though she didn't realize she was pretending, and, as such, is upset that "it was never consummated").
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Played with as part of her general crazy behaviour. She can actually hear suspenseful string music when something dramatic happens but tries to convince herself that it's "non-diegetic".
• Cannot Keep a Secret: Along with Pam, she cannot be trusted with any conditional information as she'll pretty much spill it without a second thought.
• Catchphrase:
  • "Fine! JEE-ZUS"
  • "You're not my supervisor!"
  • "LET ME FINISH!" [...] No, you ruined it.
  • "Duh!" as Cheryl.
  • "Outlaw Country!" as Cherlene.
  • "I'm seriously asking."
  • "Just like the gypsy woman said!" Occasionally shared with a couple other characters.
• Characterization Marches On: In "Diversity Hire", after having sex with Conway Stern, she actually hopes that she's pregnant. In later seasons, the mere mention of the word 'birth' causes her to shudder and say "gross".
• The Chew Toy: Or more accurately, 'choke toy'. She enjoys the feeling of being choked, so she sometimes aggravates others in order to provoke them into choking her. Other times she commits acts that would result in her being injured in order to enjoy the high she'll get, such as asking to be tasered.
• Child Hater: Her present for Trinette's baby shower is a book on SIDS and a box of plastic laundry bags. When Krieger asks if she'd ever thought of having her own kids, she responds that she'd considered adopting a child… but only so she could abandon it at a mall. Taken to a complete and utterly insane level of Flanderization in Drastic Voyage where she brags about wanting the million-dollar reward to buy an orphanage so she can bulldoze it and make fun of the children's loss.
• Cloud Cuckoo Lander: She's easily the craziest member of ISIS, which is saying an awful lot.
• Combat Sadomasochist: Her response to Lana reacting to her taunts? "BRING IT!" She gets off on having the shit beaten out of her. And taunting people into doing so. Yeah, she's got issues.
• Creepy Child:
  • Her brother recounts a time when, as a child, she burned down a gazebo while laughing wickedly.
  • She mentioned in Season 11 how her horse butler snapped one day, for no reason, when she was a child. He burned her family's summer mansion and killed her cousins with a hatchet. Turns out she had been throwing darts on his back. Her harpsichord tutor snapped for no reason as well.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Beats Gustavo Calderon into submission with her guitar, and deflects multiple bullets fired at her by Juliana Calderon also with her guitar, not flinching once.
• Cunning Linguist: She is shown to be able to speak in Russian.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Grew up in a dysfunctional, incestuous family and her own grandfather sexually abused her.
• Dirty Coward: In "El Secuestro", she throws off some kidnappers by making them think Pam is her.
• The Ditz: Brought up in "White Elephant", where one of the FBI agents calls her a ditz, only to get held at gunpoint by Lana.
  Cheryl: Now who's the ditz, huh?!
  Lana: Would you just come on!
  Cheryl: I'm seriously asking!
• Ditzy Secretary: An incompetent secretary for Malory, since her ditziness and childish demeanor often interferes with her work ethic.
• Drama Queen: Out of all the female characters in Archer, Cheryl's brattiness and erratic behavior often results her acting out in the most over-the-top fashion.
• Erotic Asphyxiation: One of Cheryl's fetishes, closely related to her murder fetish. She frequently demands to be strangled during sex, has fantasies of being murdered, and has a general masochist streak in her.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • Cheryl is a pretty messed up person herself, but even she gets fed up with Archer's egocentric attitude and tells him to think about someone else for once in his life. She also loves her friends, defending them and caring about their safety (especially Pam, see: offering to pay the Yakuza millions at the drop of a hat to save Pam's life, and putting up a helluva fight with Malory's bodyguard service until they've rescued Pam from being kidnapped.)
  • Cheryl's family is frequently stated to be all kinds of messed up and horrible which she herself doesn't really seem to notice, but even she is capable of recognizing that Malory was an awful mother and her treatment of Archer when he was a child explains a lot about the way he is.
• Extreme Omnisexual: Men, women, robots, genetic clones of Hitler. You name it. She even commented that the idea of being strangled by a child was hot (she already considers being strangled hot to begin with).
• Femme Fatale: She often uses her sexuality and attractiveness to get what she wants from men, such as seducing Cyril for her own needs.
• Fetish: Has quite a few including algolagnia (sexual arousal from pain), asphyxiophilia (aroused by being strangled), autassassinophilia (aroused by the risk of being killed), coulrophilia (aroused by clowns, which is even noticed by Archer) and pyrophilia (sexual arousal from starting fires). There are also some scattered references to robosexuality. About the only thing that turns her off is handicapped people.
• Fiery Redhead: Has auburn hair and has become increasingly short-tempered and unstable over the years.
• Flanderization: Cheryl goes from being an insecure and slightly unhinged secretary to a full-blown maniac. In the space of about four episodes. Lampshaded by her brother Cecil, who claims she has gotten steadily more disturbed over time.
• Funny Schizophrenia: Though her brother takes it seriously, and tries to use this as a way of taking her half of the inheritance.
• Gallows Humor: Jokes that her parents were murdered, then laughs when she sees Lana and Malory react. Her parents were killed, but in a car accident.
• Genki Girl: Not at first, but she does become more hyper, immature and wacky throughout the series.
• Genius Ditz: In Season 13, she becomes as brilliant with explosives as she is ditzy and childish.
• The Hedonist: Surprisingly she's the one of most selfish and hedonistic of the main cast, rivaling only Archer and her mother.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: She and Pam have a close, if dysfunctional, friendship.
• Hidden Depths:
  • Season 5 shows her pursuing a career as a country music star after ISIS goes out of business and it's implied that it was something Cheryl wanted to do for a while. Lampshaded by Cyril, who wonders why a trust-fund kid with half a billion fortune would go after such an unrealistic goal.
  • "Reignition Sequence" shows that she's a startlingly competent artist and animator, having created a flipbook sequence of her plan.
  • In "Drastic Voyage" of season 6, she delivers a rather moving monologue regarding miniaturization and its potential effects on medical science… then mentions, already being worth half a billion, she would use her $1 million reward to buy an orphanage, then bulldoze it For the Evulz.
• Insufferable Imbecile: She's the least intelligent of the main characters but is generally a psychotic, bratty, self-centered and hedonistic Womanchild.
• Jerkass: She's a self-absorbed, rude, abrasive and callous brat to anyone she interacts with. She's a particular kind of evil that's extremely insane, sadistic and hedonistic.
• Lethally Stupid: In "Crossing Over", Barry talks her into taking him to the ISIS safehouse, where he kills Jakov and nearly kills her.
• Literal-Minded: Especially in season four, where she actually believes in Opposite World. When Malory tells her to tell any callers that she's not there, Cheryl believes that she's some sort of hologram or illusion. If you look closely, you can see her checking Malory in the mirror to see if she's real.
• The Load: Generally the most useless member of ISIS. While everyone else at least have their moments, she tends to make things worse whenever she does anything at all thanks to her cowardice, stupidity and impulsivity.
  • She immensely evolves from this in Season 13, becoming the group's Demolitions Expert after spending time practicing her craft offscreen. Unfortunately, she back slides back to this in time for the series finale.
• Magic Feather: Turns out Krieger didn't put the mind control chip in her.
• The Mistress: Was this for Cyril in season 1 while he's dating Lana. Cyril does have guilt for cheating on Lana and is unnerved by Cheryl's crazy behavior but he claims that Cheryl keeps seducing him. Cheryl was shown blackmailing Cyril by saying that she'll tell Lana if he doesn't have sex with her, assumed that he was "cheating" on her with Pam, and even told Cyril to dump Lana. Though part of the reason why Cheryl is behaving this way is to make Archer jealous.
• Ms. Fanservice: She has several nude moments early on in the show but she's especially in Season 5.
• Nightmare Fetishist: She loves Erotic Asphyxiation, the harder and more dangerous the better, to the point that Cyril thinks he's killed her during their hookup (the sole exception being the cybernetic grip of Barry which was too much for her). In fact, she also fantasizes about being murdered and likes being beaten. The reveal in "Bel Panto" that she is also turned on by clowns seems almost wholesome by comparison.
• Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant: Going hand in hand with her nightmare fetishes, she has quite the twisted mind sometimes.
• Non-Idle Rich: In "El Secuestro", it's revealed that Cheryl is a Tunt and is worth half a billion dollars following her parents' death a week prior. Why she's still working as a secretary for ISIS for minimum wage baffles everyone. But then most of them don't appreciate, at least at first, that their constant abuse appeals to her Nightmare Fetishist nature.
• Noodle Incident:
  • She did time in a mental hospital after pleading insanity, and was also institutionalized under a false name with total amnesia. It's not clear whether these are the same incident.
  • She spent 6 months thinking she was a werewolf, demanding that the ISIS staff lock her in the vault during the full moon.
  • Malory had to ban scissors from ISIS because of an unspecified incident involving Cheryl. It's implied that she tried to cut Brett's tongue out.
• Old Money: She got her wealth by inheritance, which itself was made and passed over the years generations ago in her family.
• Out of Focus: She and Pam seem to occupy a permanent place in any episode's B-plot.
• Paste Eater: Not the usual sort. She gets high mainly off of sniffing rubber cement fumes, but sometimes she'll drink the stuff, too.
• Pet the Dog: While Cheryl oftentimes likes to mess with Cyril and shamelessly flirts with him on occasion, in season 11, she's willing to help him with an expensive restaurant bill by making a false sexual harassment plea.
• Plucky Office Girl: Her upbeat and cheery personality is taken to psychopathic extremes.
• The Power of Hate: Apparently the only thing that can make her get out of bed in the morning, and a huge part of why she stays at ISIS after she becomes a multimillionaire.
• Psychopathic Womanchild: Cheryl is a cross between types D and E. She's pretty a deranged and impulsive brat that only acts out for her own sense of gratification no matter how sick and destructive it is.
• Pyromaniac: Cheryl mentioned watching a building burn down in "Stage Two", was seen lighting a dumpster on fire in "El Secuestro", and took delight in burning the corpses of Torvald Utne and Elke Hubsch in "Killing Utne". In "Sea Tunt Part I", she's shown watching a fire she set in her waste paper bin, and squealing with delight when Pam accidentally poured alcohol on it, then mentioned her and Pam having a date with some firemen who she met at a warehouse, her brother mentions her burning down a gazebo at an extremely young age.
  Cheryl: That's our pee, and that’s the last I better hear about it because this stupid building is a tinderbox and I will burn it to the ground!"
• Rape as Backstory: She was sexually abused by her grandfather as a child.
• Railroad Baron: Her Vanderbilt-expy family built most of the railroads in North America which is why they're so rich.
• Really Gets Around: Like most of the main characters, Cheryl has a very active sex life, though she's easily one of the freakiest, such as when she literally got off from Lana beating the crap out of her.
• Rich Bitch: Zig-zagged. She's the heir to a billion dollar fortune, disparages the poor, and in her youth tormented several servants into insanity. However, she kept the fact that she was rich secret at first, and doesn't usually flaunt her wealth even after it's revealed.
• Rich in Dollars, Poor in Sense: She's from the wealthiest family of the country, and a total Cloudcuckoolander.
• Robosexual: Gets off to being strangled by Krieger's choke-bot.
• Sadist: While Cheryl is undoubtedly a masochist (getting off on being choked, beaten up, tasered, and even verbally abused) she also shows sadistic tendencies such as wanting to bulldoze an orphanage to watch the orphans cry and tricking Malory into thinking she redesigned the office exactly how she wanted only to reveal it was a hologram and is exactly the same. She went through all the trouble of making the office exactly the same all so she could crush Malory's dreams and watch her cry, laughing and enjoying her misery.
• Sanity Slippage: Looking like this as the series progresses as she keeps getting weirder and crazier. It's theorized she has multiple personalities like Barry.
• Savvy Guy, Energetic Girl: Cyril's Savvy Guy as he's the more rational and level-headed and Cheryl's Energetic Girl as she's very reckless and immature. Same trope applies to her and Ray as well.
• Secretly Wealthy: For a while, but it's eventually revealed that she's from one of the wealthiest families in the country. Justified as she is at risk of being kidnapped.
• Shower of Angst: In the Season 2 special when Archer is turned into an Ink-Suit Actor, Cheryl laughs at his expense, only for Pam to remind her that she used to have sex with him. Cut to Cheryl hosing herself down and crying hysterically.
• Silver Spoon Troublemaker: As a mentally unstable heiress of the Tunt fortune, she has exhibited antisocial behavior since childhood, including burning down a gazebo, throwing darts at her horse trainer and piano teacher, and stabbing her high school crush with scissors. Her brother Cecil even attempted to get her institutionalized, though this was out of selfishness rather than genuine worry.
• Slumming It: The entire fact that she works as a secretary when she is actually insanely rich. It helps that she is aroused by emotional and physical abuse, two things that are a staple of ISIS office culture.
• Split Personality: Downplayed, while she doesn't seem to suffer from Dissociative Personality Disorder, she still shows sometimes traits of having different personalities, like using different names, even if sometimes she was more pushed by others, like Archer early in season 1, but she still said also to not be sure which was her name, or also when in season 5 she was sure of being an already famous Country singer named Charlene. In any case, she doesn't show to be any less crazy in any of these and still act pretty much the same.
• Stripperiffic: While her usual outfit is quite conservative, during season 5 her standard clothing consists of a crop top with ample cleavage and short shorts.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Delivers a devastating one to Lana in the fourth season:
  "Oh please. If you really cared, you’d resign. But there's no way you ever will, because you’re just counting the days, until - her face bloated and yellow from liver failure - she [Malory] calls you to her deathbed and, in a croaky whisper, explains that Mr. Archer is totally incompetent and that you, the long suffering Lana Kane, are the only one qualified to run ISIS and you weep shameful tears because you know this terrible place is the only true love… you will ever know."
• Those Two Guys: With Pam. They are shown together near constantly at work and willingly spend more time together outside of the office than any other characters, but their dialog typically involves flat out insults and they don't seem to actually like each other. Pam once thought she killed Cheryl and was entirely apathetic about it.
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: Girly Girl to Pam's Tomboy. Cheryl was raised by old money and doesn't have to work, while Pam grew up on a farm and as such knows a thing or two about manual labor. It's likely why Pam eventually ascended to agent status while Cheryl is still a secretary.
• Too Kinky to Torture: Takes pleasure in physical abuse, though choking seems to be her favorite form.
  • She goads Lana into beating her up, by bragging about having sex with Cyril, and has an orgasm from the ensuing beatdown. Also wears a ton of breast cancer support ribbons all over her body so the safety pins can poke her. In the Season 5 intro, she forces Agent Hawley to taser her and has an orgasm while being shocked.
  • This extends to mental and emotional abuse. Even Archer gets Squicked at this In-Universe.
• Took a Level in Badass: In Season 13:
  • In "Big Con", she, Cyril and Pam take down Fabian's pretend kidnappers with tasers, sonic guns, and a device called a Knife-Light (which Cheryl uses to stab two of the kidnappers).
  • "Operation: Fang" has her pelting the warlord's base with explosives from a helicopter Krieger is piloting.
  • In "Saturday", she casually reveals her newfound hobby in designing explosives before tossing one at the Broker's assailants during the gunfight.
  • In "Bank Run At Mr. Bank's Bank", her aforementioned demolition skills save the day as she somehow preemptively placed explosives during the group's escape. She then sets them off, blasting away the SWAT team that Archer unwittingly summoned during the mission.
• Troll: Very much shown that this is why she is horrid to people, hoping for a violent reaction to get off on.
• Undiscriminating Addict: Cheryl's go-to drug is usually huffing glue but she occasionally dives into other narcotics, including gummy bears laced with LSD.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: In "Crossing Over", takes Barry to the ISIS safehouse, where Jakov is in protective custody, for sex.
• The Vamp: Cheryl's a comedic type of seductress who's too unstable and unhinged for her own good with her various odd fetishes and is a pretty selfish brat who acts overly sexual to get what she wants from men.
• Verbal Tic: Has a tendency to yell out "Duh!" whether she actually finds something obvious or not. Also gratuitously uses "stupid" a lot. ("They can't get to the stupid mainframe because some stupid battery thing is in some stupid vault!")
• Vitriolic Best Buds: With Pam.

Cyril Figgis

Cyril Figgis

"Just jackin' it."

Voiced By: Chris Parnell

ISIS comptroller. A meek, cowardly, and slightly whiny man who dated Lana for several episodes at the start of the series. At times he's been a helpful influence in a few missions, but sticks to ISIS HQ and worries about Lana. Promoted to field agent as of Season 3's "El Contador".

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• Action Survivor: Easily the weakest of the field agents, though he can still hold his own fairly well.
• Acquired Situational Narcissism: Any time Cyril has some level of authority, he behaves like an egotistical, power-hungry and ruthless dictator. He even literally becomes one in a Season 5 episode.
• And Now You Must Marry Me: To Juliana Calderon, Gustavo's ex-wife, as the dictator of San Marcos.
• A-Team Firing: When holding a gun, he's a threat to everyone except the bad guys.
• Badass Bureaucrat: He's not only a self-proclaimed kick-ass accountant, in season 12 he describes himself as The Bureaucratic Master who even respects the IIA's good bureaucracy when the guards outsmart him.
• Badass Bookworm: He is a kickass accountant.
  Spelvin: Did that sound more impressive in your head?
• Badass Pacifist: Pulls off his most badass things, field agent or otherwise, nonviolently: Helping Lana push the bomb out of the blimp, bluffing Spelvin with an empty gun, and most of "El Contador".
• Badass Driver: Cyril proves to be an expert when piloting any sort of ship, including a spaceship and a ship shrunk to the size of a bacterium to destroy a brain clot.
• Berserk Button: It seems that he really hates being pushed, to the point that when Archer does it to him twice in "Coyote Lovely" he socks him.
• Betty and Veronica: The Betty (mild-mannered, Butt-Monkey) to Archer's Veronica (dangerous, Sociopathic Hero) for Lana's Archie.
• Beware the Nice Ones: As timid and polite as he is, Cyril can be downright terrifying when pushed.
• Bigger Is Better in Bed: It was revealed in the first episode of the series that he tried to get ISIS to cover a penis-reduction procedure, and his size—twelve inches—is mentioned several times in the first season.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: While Cyril likes to think of himself as a Nice Guy, he's really just a neurotic, weak-willed and insecure coward. Over the course of the series we see that he is clingy, engages in Slut-Shaming, treats others like crap when he is given power and authority over them, and is willing to force a woman to marry him if she isn't willing. On top of all that, he cheats and abandons his friends and allies whenever it suits him.
• Book Smart: Cyril is a very intelligent and educated man. He has an Accounting and Mathematics/Finance degree, took and passed the Bar examination which made him eligible to gain a Criminal Law degree and practice law as a defense attorney.
• Brainy Brunet: Has black hair and is the resident smart guy of his co-workers.
• Brick Joke: Cyril's enormous penis is a Running Gag during the first season, but is rarely mentioned again later. Cue season 8, where Archer (dreaming of his alternate identity as a private eye in 1947 Los Angeles where all secondary characters are played by the rest of the cast) and Pam, now a man called Poovey, try to get rid of an unconscious Cyril, a police detective and a minor antagonist.
  Archer: Hehe, wait. Let's strip him naked!
  [cut to Archer and Poovey sitting in their car with a blank look on their faces]
  Archer: I wish we hadn't seen him naked.
• Bully and Wimp Pairing: His dynamic with Archer is almost identical to a high school bully picking on the class nerd.
• Butt-Monkey: Archer lives to make his life hell. Even when Archer isn't around to screw with him, the universe still manages to find a way. His own father thinks that he's a disappointment. Even the other main characters love to make fun of him and the mistreatment and disrespect causes him to snap and act out in ways that are antagonistic. During Archer's coma, Cyril actually manages to be a more respected and confident person but after Archer wakes up from the coma, Cyril's mental state starts to deteriorate after getting non-stop.
• Catchphrase:
  • "Hello!" Often accompanies Interrupted Intimacy.
  • "SUPPRESSING FIIIIIIIIRE!"
  • "Jeezey Petes!" Usually used as an exclamation.
• Character Development: Grows more assertive and confident as the series continues, though Archer always finds a way to undermine Cyril confidence every time when Cyril tries to be in authority, especially in Season 11 which causes the poor guy to constantly have to struggle with his insecurities, fragile ego and body dysmorphia.
  • In season 11, when he finally becomes team leader, he's not as insufferably controlling as he previously was and is more respected by most of the group (probably except Archer though).
• Classical Anti-Hero: While Cyril is genuinely noble and level-headed, he's also incredibly wimpy, insecure and neurotic. He does prove capable of taking command and improving as a field agent during the time skip, but Archer returning undoes most of his progress.
• Crazy Jealous Guy: Lana's many missions with Archer has made Cyril feel very threatened about his relationship.
• The Comically Serious: The rigid and uptight accountant of the group, poor Cyril's intelligence don't always amount to much in the spy agency and that's mainly due to Cyril's tendency to be a whiny, spineless and neurotic coward with a fragile ego and he can be sometimes be as incompetent and dysfunctional as any other character in the show, especially with handling guns.
• Control Freak: Cyril easily gets on such a power trip that he literally becomes a dictator of The Republic of San Marcos and his bossiness usually means that no one respects him as an authority figure.
• Crippling Overspecialization: Being a skilled accountant doesn't translate well into field work.
• Cunning Linguist: Cyril is shown to be perfectly fluent in Spanish and he also has at least some knowledge of German.
• Deadpan Snarker: He can be rather snarky on occasion when interacting with boss and coworkers since he can't stand any of them. For example, in one episode when he's helping Malory with a script she's working on, he objects to the idea of a black field agent that would risk his career for a white woman twice his age.
  Malory: So make her forty.
  Cyril: Yeah, and who's gonna play her?
  Malory: Me! That's the whole point!
  Cyril: You do realize there's a finite supply of Vaseline in the universe.
• Didn't Think This Through: Wears a Hunter's Orange snowsuit in "The Wind Cries Mary" to avoid being accidentally shot by hunters, even though this makes him an obvious target for someone intentionally targeting him. Lucas Troy (the operative tracking him) even gives him a headstart out of pity for doing something so stupid.
• Dirty Coward: Prone to cowardice and panicking in the worst situations, he can do something underhanded and selfish like use a woman as a human shield. He's also very spineless and pathetic in most episodes but has moments where he's egotistical and dictatorial when he's gets too confident or in a position of power.
• Ditzy Genius: While he is a rational, analytical and intelligent accountant/comptroller, he's very inept with gun safety, is prone to making mistakes during missions and is a massive screw-up during situations that he causes for himself.
• The Dog Bites Back:
  • He's become a lot more assertive in later seasons, to the point where he actually punches Archer in the face in Season 4. Taken to a whole new level when he single-handedly executes an impromptu coup d'etat and seizes control of the nation of San Marcos, not to mention hold Archer at gunpoint with a tank before imprisoning him near the end of Archer Vice.
  • In Season 7, Cyril runs the private detective agency because California law requires a legal degree. As such, all of the employees work for him, allowing him to get revenge for the terrible things Archer and Lana have done to him. For example, he threatened to dock Lana's pay if she left early, even if it's to pick up AJ. In Archer's words, he made her "his giant bitch".
• Dogged Nice Guy: A strange subversion. He was in a relationship with Lana, but is constantly pushed aside or treated with little respect (this eventually leads him to cheat on her, ending the relationship when she finds out). Then again, it was justified as he was crazy jealous and clingy when they were together.
• The Dragon: By the end of Season 5, Lana remarks that he's "just the Vader to [Malory]'s Palpatine".
• Dude, He's Like, in a Coma!: After being knocked unconscious and having a litre of blood stolen from him in "Blood Test", Cyril is molested by both Pam and Ray separately while he's still unconscious. Later, when he wakes up next to Ray in a toilet stall after Pam tranquilized both of them, he implies that it's happened several times.
• The Eeyore: Cyril's pretty much the sad-sack of the main cast because of how much of an emotional wreck he is, which makes sense as he gets no respect from his father, his boss or his co-workers throughout his life. He starts feel more confident and respected when Archer spent 3 years in a coma but ever since Archer woke up, he bullied Cyril relentlessly and Cyril ended up reverting to being a pathetic and insecure wuss.
• Evil Genius: In season 5 and shared with Krieger. Cyril is typically making smart choices and decisions on jobs. Plus the fact that while very moral, cultured and rational compared to most of the cast ensemble, he’s still smug, insufferable, egotistical and has an extreme power-hungry side and his hatred of the other characters can go to extremely petty, creepy and occasionally treacherous lengths, especially with Archer.
• Expansion Pack Past: Cyril was a lawyer and a private investigator before becoming an accountant, neither of which were mentioned prior to their reveal.
• Extreme Doormat: A pushover to an absurd degree. While he's developed more of a backbone in later episodes, he's still quick to crack.
• Extreme Libido: Cyril is apparently actually diagnosed with sex addiction between seasons 1 and 2, after a few... well, several incidents of cheating on Lana. Everyone tells him it's not a real thing. At one point he rationalizes it as a response to his binge-eating so he can feel attractive.
• Fatal Flaw: Despite his lack of confidence, Cyril's ego has a tendency to over-inflate in moments of glory, which typically leads to aggravating those around him and ending in disaster.
• The Finicky One: His nervousness and awkwardness makes others mock him due to how pathetic, wimpy and uptight he is.
• Foil: To Sterling. Sterling is a charismatic, daring and reckless idiot who likes to take control of every situation in an aggressive manner and Cyril is an awkward, cowardly and rational intellectual who's too spineless for his own good and is often pushed around by others.
• Formerly Fat: Downplayed. While he wasn't obese, it was shown that he was still a little overweight and he was still visibly chubby, but during the course of the show he started to trim down his fat and, after the time skip, it was also shown that not only has he lost all his excess fat, but thanks to training in the years during Sterling Archer's coma he also got muscles to the point of having a Heroic Build, having even more definition than Archer.
• Gag Penis: Cyril has a 12 inch penis.
• Good with Numbers: He's the ISIS accountant.
• Goshdang It To Heck: Cyril has a habit of using bizarre half-measures when cursing, resulting in phrases like "gosh-dammit" and "Jesus H. Jones".
• He Cleans Up Nicely: "Double Indemnity" has Ray take him clothes shopping and to a barber, leading him to clean up well.
• Heroic Build: He gets absolutely jacked in Season 11.
• Hidden Depths:
  • "White Elephant" reveals he used to be a defense attorney who went into accounting after he got tired of defending scumbags. This ends up coming in handy when ISIS goes from a spy agency to a cartel, needing both good legal defense and someone who can maneuver around the law.
    • His law degree also comes in handy in Season 7 when the gang opens a detective agency in LA: due to California State Law the agency must be registered under his name (opening a PI agency requires either a law degree or several thousand hours of prior PI work), much to Archer's chagrin.
  • In Season 5, it turns out that he's also an astonishingly capable military commander, taking the San Marcan Army back from the verge of absolute defeat within three weeks of assuming control of the nation.
  • "Vision Quest" reveals he has an extensive knowledge on elevators.
• I Just Want to Be Special: The plot of "Tragical History" when he infects the ISIS computer system with a worm in order to remove it and prove his abilities to the others. No one would trust him enough to fix things and he is forced to rely on Archer when things go From Bad to Worse.
  • Also mentioned as the reason for why he wants to move into fieldwork, despite his lack of physical prowess. After ISIS is shut down, he's reluctant to return to legitimate white-collar work because of how boring it would be in comparison to his career with ISIS.
• I Know Mortal Kombat: He's apparently part of a Warhammer guild, and by applying the strategies of the game to real-life he becomes a really capable military commander. As shown when he brings back the San Marcan army from defeat, as described above.
• Inferiority Superiority Complex: Cyril's sense of ego and pride are way often to hide how insecure he really is, especially when he acts like a dictator in order to not look weak or inept.
• Insufferable Genius: While far from a jerk like Archer, he can be pretty insufferable when he shows how arrogant, condescending and selfish he can be but he does display some rationality and intelligence as he aims to works harder than most coworkers.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: While Cyril is often times a neurotic know-it-all with a fragile ego, he's usually one of the nicest and morally bounded main characters.
• Kavorka Man: For such a nebbish wimp, he gets an awful lot of action.
• Leeroy Jenkins: In "Crossing Over" and "Space Race Part 1".
• Lethally Stupid: Zigzagged. Despite being usually The Smart Guy, he becomes this whenever he has a gun, by virtue of the fact that he never bothers to look where he's shooting.
• Likes Older Women: He's had sex with Malory twice.
• Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy: Cyril's meek and nerdy Feminine Boy and Lana's aggressive and violent Masculine Girl.
• Mirror Character: While Cyril and Archer seem VERY different from each other in so many ways due to Cyril being weak-willed and awkward intellectual and Archer is a suave and charismatic idiot, both characters have dealt with an abusive parent as a child, both use their arrogance to compensate for their insecurities, both make very impulsive decisions, and they both Really Got Around.
• Nerds Are Sexy: While he lacks Archer's stunning physique, he is generally viewed as being fairly handsome in-universe. Even his geeky clothing works better for him than more traditionally suave outfits, as pointed out by both Lana and Pam. In season 11, after a lot of exercise and "protein shakes", he's pretty much the most muscular and athletically built of the ensemble.
• Nervous Wreck: Granted as he's the high-strung, fussy and insecure coward in the group and the most inept field agent (in certain areas), he often panics during the worst situations and folds under pressure. Hopefully, he gets better.
• Never My Fault: While having an affair with Cheryl (and other women) and later getting dumped by Lana, he never took responsibility for how clingy and selfish he was being and instead believing that Lana was disloyal, emotionally distant and still wanted to be with Archer. While he was being unfairly needy and possessive, he wasn't fully to blame as Lana clearly did have some feelings for Archer and when relating to Cyril, she was short-tempered, aggressive, clingy and controlling and only dated to get back at Archer and believed that both men were complete opposites to each other. Funny thing is that Lana did engage in a threesome with Archer and Scorpio in the same episode where Cyril and Cheryl had sex with each other.
• New Powers as the Plot Demands: Because it would be difficult to run a drug cartel without at least one lawyer.
• No Badass to His Valet: In the three years that Archer was in a coma he seriously bulked up and surpassed Archer, becoming known as the world's greatest spy. Archer still refused to show him any kind of respect and constantly undermined him, causing him to revert back to his nebbish, cowardly ways and lose his physique. Though any time people try to claim this as Archer's fault he's quick to point out that Cyril practically jumped at the chance to get out of the field and really he's just using him as an excuse to not self-improve.
• Noble Male, Roguish Male: The noble guy while Archer is the roguish guy. In fact, the main reason Lana dated Cyril was because he seemed too gentlemanly to be like Archer. Decontructed as Cyril is quite cowardly and self-centred when the chips are down while Archer still has a sense of nobility that drives him in similar situations.
• Non-Action Guy: From mid-season 3 and onward he seems to be trying to avert this; it's implied he's going on more missions and getting better on the field. Unfortunately, his lack of combat training and terrible track record with guns remain an issue. However, he's proven far more adept with tactics, strategy and intel than Archer, and sometimes even Lana. But in season 11, he's much better at fighting and able to do some impressive martial arts after being trained by Pam.
• Not So Above It All: While this intellectual seems like a rational, sophisticated and noble Nice Guy, he can also have moments of being an impulsive, petty and egotistical Smug Snake.
• Only Sane Man: While he's just as dysfunctional as everyone else, he's rational, level-headed and seems like one of the few people who cares about doing his job while most of the ISIS co-workers like to goof-off instead.
• Playing the Victim Card: He gets no sympathy for claiming to be a sex addict. After buffing up and supplanting Archer's poosition during the coma years, he lets himself go when Archer wakes up, to which Archer states was just so Cyril could keep blaming him for his life sucking.
• Really Gets Around: He has slept with Lana, Cheryl, Scatterbrain Jane, Malory, Trinette, Pam and Framboise, plus any number of unnamed sexual partners.
• Savvy Guy, Energetic Girl: Cyril's Savvy Guy as he's the more rational and level-headed and Cheryl's Energetic Girl as she's very reckless and immature.
• The Scapegoat: Whenever Archer does something illegal openly, he poses as Cyril, leaving him to deal with the fallout.
• Screams Like a Little Girl: In Part 2 of "Liquid Lunch" when he comes across a dead body.
• Sensitive Guy and Manly Man: The sensitive guy to Archer's manly man. Zigzagged as underneath Archer's boorish exterior he does have a tender side towards children and animals, while Cyril only cares about himself.
• Silver Fox: Minor example, his hair has begun to grey at the temples, which fits his overall look.
• Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: Archer flat out openly hates his guts, and the feeling is mutual on Cyril's end, but their relationship never goes beyond Cyril acting passive-aggressive while Archer bullies him.
• Skewed Priorities: In "The Wind Cries Mary", he insists on filling out an employee evaluation during a field mission and while actively hunted by an enemy operative, though it's mostly out of spite for Lana's behaviour.
  My only regret is I won't be able to handle this in to Pam, because it'll be sooooo scathing!
• Small Name, Big Ego: While not a complete Jerkass like Sterling, he does often let his fragile ego get the better of him so he can be quite the insufferable boss with his rigidity, uptight nature and a power-hungry streak that only got worse when he became a dictator.
• The Smart Guy: By this outfit's standards, at least due to how analytical, tactical and strategic he is. It helps that he's qualified in several white-collar vocations.
• Smart People Wear Glasses: The only one of the main cast to wear glasses + ISIS accountant + one of the very few sane employees.
• Smug Snake: While Cyril is usually almost unbearably meek, he has a tendency to let even the tiniest successes go straight to his head and turn him into an arrogant prick. Being who he is, though, he's quick to get knocked off his pedestal.
• Straight Man: He sometimes takes Lana's place as the voice of reason.
• The Strategist: Cyril is a skilled military strategist; during his brief period as the president of San Marcos, he was able to lead the country to near-victory over the Rebel armies.
• Straw Loser: It's pretty rare for Cyril to ever come out on top in a situation, and on the occasions when he does, expect it to not last for very long.
• Strong Girl, Smart Guy: Smart Guy to Lana's Strong Girl. Lana is the top agent Action Girl, while Cyril is a Non-Action Guy who is more adept with tactics and strategy.
• Suddenly Always Knew That: The season 5 premiere has him suddenly reveal he is a former defense attorney but went to night accountancy school because he was sick of defending scumbags. Apparently he had "long talks" about it with Lana but even she doesn't remember. Lampshaded by Word of God:
  Matt Thompson: […]Cyril is serving in that function as a former district attorney, which we found out is part of his background. That we just gloss right the f*ck over.
• Talking Your Way Out: Newly-promoted field agent Cyril bluffs his way to Ramon's trust in "El Contador" by pretending to be an accountant for his boss, and offering to help Ramon get a bigger share of the profits. It works
• Took a Level in Badass: When Cyril actually asserts himself, he can be pretty badass.
  • He may have caused the problems in "Tragical History" in the first place, but it was pretty cool when Cyril ruined Spelvin's server and all of the info he had gathered before bluffing him with an empty gun.
  • He's actually shown to be an intelligent and resourceful thinker when he becomes a field agent (unless it involves using a gun, in which case he's lethal to everyone).
  • Taken further in Coyote Lovely when, provoked at least, he actually punches Sterling who wasn't expecting that. Granted he gets his ass kicked afterwards but still, Season 1 Cyril would've never done something like that.
  • Taken way further at the end of Season 5, when he takes control of the entirety of San Marcos by force.
  • Seemingly played straight with Season 11, where he's initially depicted as a more competent and skilled field agent and is actually respected as the new leader of the group. Upon Archer's return however it is quickly revealed that he's placed most of his self-worth on his physique and new status as the group's leader. As such, Archer's gradual prodding and lack of respect for him quickly breaks him down again.
• Took a Level in Jerkass:
  • Cyril becomes more bitter, spiteful and insufferable in season 5, on two different scales (see below): First, he makes a lot of sour comments towards Lana because she got pregnant via sperm bank by a mysterious donor. It wasn't until Archer gave Cyril a hard slap and a major "The Reason You Suck" Speech that he finally stopped with the comments. And secondly, at the end of the Archer Vice arc, he becomes the president and dictator of San Marcos, and in the process, becomes something of an egotistical tyrant, even marrying Juliana against her will.
  • And his power-hungry side has returned again in Season 7, now that he's the boss of the Figgis Agency and uses his new position for all it's worth to get back at Archer, and to a lesser extent Lana.
  • In Archer's coma dreams, Cyril ranges from awful to monstrous in Seasons 8 through 9, perhaps owing to the framing device. He's a corrupt cop in Season 8 and a literal Nazi in Season 9. Season 10 is where he's the least amoral of the different versions of the dreams since he serves as a supporting member and not the antagonist but he's still a whiny and spineless coward that betrayed the group after being manipulated by a space captain who was trying to get the crew to kill eachother so she could cannibalize their corpses (as she had done with her own).
• Vitriolic Best Buds: In "Best Friends", Archer's new butler believed Archer and Cyril are best friends due to their Odd Couple-like relationship, and Cyril was the first person he showed off his new office to. While Cyril was touched, Archer rejects the very idea.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: Demonstrated in "Tragical History" and "The Rock", where it's implied he has some animosity towards his father.
  • In "Tragical History":
    Cyril: But what's my father ever done that's so great? School superintendent?! Big whoop! There's only like 800 kids in the entire county, K through 12!
  • In "The Rock":
    Cyril: And then I shove his hawk face right into her big brown boobs and scream, "Look at these babies, old man! Didn't need a varsity letter to get those, did I?! So now who's a disappointment?!"

Pam Poovey

Pamela "Pam" Poovey

"And that's the reason I never have sex with my coworkers. That… and no one ever lets me."

Voiced By: Amber Nash

Head of HR at ISIS. Plump, boorish, and incapable of keeping secrets, yet fun-loving and, according to Archer, amazing in bed. Strongly implied to have a crush on Lana. Often seen hanging out with Cheryl, Cyril and Dr. Krieger.

---

• Abhorrent Admirer: Pam is vigorously rebuffed by everyone she flirts with in early episodes, leading to her breaking down crying. In later episodes, she morphs into a self-confident badass sex goddess.
• Abusive Parents: There's almost no information on her mother, but if her sister Edie's comments are any indication, her father was almost as big a jerk to her as Ethel was.
• Action Girl: Pam pulls a little Suddenly Always Knew That on this trope, suddenly revealing that she's an underground bare-knuckle boxer who can snap a man's neck and take a punch like a champ. She's even got the third stanza of "The Destruction of Sennacherib" tattooed on her back under 13 tally marks. Oh, and she drift-races against the Yakuza.
• Addled Addict: After getting addicted to cocaine in Archer Vice, she becomes erratic and nearly useless, makes several incredibly stupid decisions, one of which nearly got Ron killed, and had to be physically restrained and later tranquilized just to keep her from making things worse. She cleans up between season 5 and 6, returning to her original characterization.
• The Alcoholic: She can consume massive amounts of alcohol.
• Alliterative Name: Pam Poovey
• Ascended Extra: While she was important in Season 1, she (along with Ray and Krieger) became a main character in Season 2.
• Badass Boast: Telling Barry that she's his "worst frickin' nightmare" takes the cake. And then she proves it by doing something nobody else could and defeating him with a little help from Archer.
• Badass Driver: Proves to be this when escaping the Yakuza.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Despite now being a Statuesque Stunner, she still averts this. Quite brutally.
• Best Friend: Archer calls her his best friend in "Pocket Listing". She says the same, but then quickly amends it to him being her second best friend after Cheryl.
  • In Dreamland and Danger Island, Pam is cast as Archer's old friend /partner.
  • In the series finale when Archer goes on the run as a ploy so that Lana and other members of the Agency can carry on spying, Pam goes with him.
• Bestiality Is Depraved: When asked where she got her sexual skills:
  Pam: You know I grew up on a farm, right?
  Archer: ...Really hoping that's not relevant.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Pam is usually an easygoing and fun person, but don't cross her.
• Big Beautiful Woman: Both In-Universe, as far as Archer is concerned, and amongst the fans. Although, considering how strong she is, much of her body mass might not be fat but simply a physique similar to a professional powerlifter.
• Big Eater: Won't even stop eating artificial shellfish when she's dying of an allergic reaction to it. Even after being saved from death with an EpiPen, she keeps eating it.
  • Season 5 ramps this up with her eating cocaine.
• The Brute: During season 5; Pam is constantly making foolish decisions that endanger the cartel but also contributing with muscle when the chips are down.
• Butt-Monkey: While she phases in and out of being mocked or worshiped by the rest of the cast, Pam tends to have the most physical comedy happen to her.
• Cannot Keep a Secret: Along with Cheryl, she is shown to reveal secrets mere moments after hearing them. Cheryl however at least has the excuse of being childish and slightly crazy. Pam though is just a blabbermouth to the extreme. Archer and Lana had each exploited this at one point.
• Catchphrase:
  • "Holy shitsnacks!"
  • "Sploosh!"
• Characterization Marches On: The dowdy, slightly dull Pam from the show's early days is a totally different entity to the Big Fun, Archer's friend type she became.
• Cloudcuckoolander's Minder: for Cheryl, although she’s got more than a few screws loose herself.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Don't let her appearance and behavior fool you. She can kick a ton of ass if she wants to.
• Cunning Linguist: Pam has at least some knowledge of Japanese and Italian and is also shown to be fluent in Spanish.
• Dark and Troubled Past: From snippets of her past, it's known that Pam's parents thought of her as The Un Favourite and her older sister, Edie, would relentlessly bully and humiliate her.
• Dating Catwoman: In season 13, she finally gets a love interest. Unfortunately, it's Alessia, one of the Swiss mercenaries from the Invisible Hand. However, the two develop a genuinely loving relationship.
• Deadpan Snarker: Is one, although not at the level of Sterling or Malory.
• Demonic Dummy: Her Pam doll in the ISIS training videos. It's not clear how much control she has over it, and it seems to be rather abusive.
• Depending on the Writer: While she's most consistently portrayed as being a fun-loving Big Beautiful Woman, the show occasionally veers back towards her initial characterization of being dowdy and unpopular.
• Depraved Bisexual: She very often makes sexual suggestions and jokes, both towards men and women, without much shame and seems perfectly willing to sleep with almost anyone. She also had sex with Cyril despite the fact that he was unconscious.
• Double Standard Rape: Female on Male: She has her way with Cyril while he is unconscious in "Blood Test". In "White Elephant" we learn it's not the first time she's done so, also Played for Laughs.
• Dumb Blonde: Pam is known for often making mistakes and foolish decisions which puts the rest of the group in severe danger or distress and is often deemed as one of if not the least intelligent member of the group. This was exaggerated in season 5 to the point that she almost became The Scrappy and had to be dialed down for season 6.
• Embarrassing Nickname: A inverted subversion: Pam has a nickname on the racing circuit she thinks means "white shadow", but it actually means "white pumpkin."
• Extreme Omnisexual:
  Pam: Don't get me wrong, I'd still do [Lana]
  Malory: Please, you'd do... name a noun!
• Farmer's Daughter: Maybe. The writers seem to have left it purposely ambiguous as to whether she's the typical rural example, or whether her farming experience was far more modern. For example:
  Malory: Fight them off!
  Pam: That's what daddy said when the bank man came to foreclose on the farm. (Beat with Dramatic Gun Cock) Guess how that turned out.
  Malory: You murdered a banker??
  Pam: NO. We got a loan modification! You think a bank wants to own a failing dairy farm with obsolete milkers?
• Fat and Proud: Pam is rather proud of her attractiveness and doesn't see her weight as a negative, to the point where her go-to insult towards Cheryl in early seasons is calling her skinny. Slightly zig-zagged in that her reaction to losing weight in Season 5 (a newfound confidence in her sex appeal and dependance on the cocaine that caused it) imply she might have been more insecure than she let on.
• Flanderization: Pam is reverse-flanderized, going from the tubby, unloved, and rather pathetic HR lady to a fight-clubbing sex goddess who drag races with the Yakuza. Come season 4 she ricochets back and forth between the two.
• Formerly Fat: In season 5, after eating 5kg of Cocaine she lost A LOT of weight. It was so dramatic that Archer, Krieger, Cyril, and Cheryl all find her attractive. It doesn't last after she recovers from her drug addiction.
• Formerly Fit: After recovering from her cocaine addiction, she put back all the fat she lost during season 5. Given that she only lost the weight because she was practically inhaling cocaine (and in the process had become a raging cocaine addict that could put Tony Montana to shame) in lieu of actual nutrition, pretty much everyone considers this a worthy trade-off.
• Friends with Benefits: She and Archer had a brief period where they were frequently sleeping with each other, right between Archer's stints with Katya and Lana because, according to him, Pam is the best sex he's ever had.
• Functional Addict: Pam has been known to binge on a variety of drugs and narcotics, including copious amounts of cocaine, while still being able enough to provide assistance to the group.
• Gasshole: She's extremely open with all of her bodily functions. Pick an episode, and chances are, she'll be shown burping, farting, or taking a massive dump (or at least talking about doing so). Apparently her bathroom breaks are so unsanitary Cheryl was actually concealing the existence of the women's room at the Agency headquarters from her.
• Genius Ditz: Pam is terrible at her office job… and is an experienced underground bare-knuckle boxer and street-racer.
• Gossipy Hens: Over the course of the show, Pam has blabbed that both Scatterbrain Jane and Malory had breast cancer, although Malory's result was a false positive, filmed Cyril's confession that he's going to show off Lana to his unpleasable father and texted Katya Kasanova's false double-agent status to Malory and Lana. It's to the point that if someone in the Agency suspects a secret is being kept from them, all they have to do is address Pam and wait, because she is physically incapable of keeping her mouth shut about it.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: She and Cheryl have a close, if dysfunctional, friendship.
• Hidden Depths: Despite being just as dysfunctional as the rest of the cast, season 13's "The Laws of Attraction" shows she's actually a fairly good leader, enough to take charge and secure victory over the Swedes, who had spent the whole episode cleaning the team's collective clocks.
  • "The Papal Chase" reveals she has a surprising aptitude for languages, becoming moderately conversant in Italian through listening to language tapes over an 8-hour flight.
• Honorary Aunt: Archer refers to her as "Aunt Pam" when he has her carry baby A.J. to safety in "Sitting". Come season 13 a now slightly older A.J. initially refuses to call her Aunty, but relents by the end of the episode.
• Inelegant Blubbering: The first minute or so of "Edie's Wedding."
  • She's rather prone to this in general, and is one of, if not the only character on the show to openly cry. While normally tough and happy-go-lucky, she's been reduced to a sobbing wreck several times, usually when someone insults her looks or rejects her, tying back to her abusive upbringing.
• The Leader: While this position has rotated between Archer, Mallory, Lana, Cyril and Ray, Pam has proved to be a far more competent and effective leader than all of them in Season 13, with some of them even admitting how much of a natural leader she is.
• The Load: She becomes this in Season 5, in which her stupidity, insanity and cocaine addiction cause the majority of the problems the nascent cartel faces.
• Made of Iron: Was able to take repeated blows to the head when she was mistakenly kidnapped, all the while mocking them. She also used to make money by participating in underground fighting rings, and winning handily. A flashback showed an opponent being carried out in a body bag, making her quite the Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass.
  Pam: Who taught you to punch? Your husband?
• Mama Bear: A rather primal one towards A.J. in "Sitting". In “Caught Napping”, she’s filled with so much rage over AJ’s abduction that she goes on a rampage before embarking on the rescue mission.
• The Millstone: In "Southbound and Down", she puts her colleagues in the crosshairs of a biker gang by telling them that they're carrying cocaine and losing Archer's gun in a craps game, preventing him from being able to defend against their attacks.
• Morality Pet:
  • She becomes one of the few people that Archer genuinely respects and he even refers to her as his best friend.
  • And while she and Cheryl may trade insults with each other, Cheryl shows her genuine Pet the Dog moments to Pam.
• Nobody Poops: She subverts this once almost every other episode.
• Only Friend: While Archer cares deeply about Lana, Pam is the only one of his colleagues who he considers to be his friend.
• The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: When she's about to shoot Barry, she says that only she's allowed to choke her sister.
• Progressively Prettier: She goes from a dowdy human relations worker in season 1 to badass in season 2 to Sex Goddess in season 3, and in season 5 after becoming addicted to cocaine she lost a lot of weight, to the point of turning from a Brawn Hilda to Statuesque Stunner.
• Promotion to Opening Titles: In Season 2.
• Pungeon Master: Second only to Sterling Archer, but has had moments when she's trumped him.
• Really Gets Around: She's slept with more people in the office than anyone else, and that's saying something. This includes:
  • Lana, through a pity-lay (in "Dial M for Mother").
  • Malory, as part of a three-way (in "Swiss Miss").
  • Cyril, via molesting his unconscious body (in "Blood Test") and sleeping with him when drunk (in "Heart of Archness").
  • Archer, a recurring secret sex-buddy because Archer is embarrassed about it.
  • In Vision Quest, when Pam strips from the waist down:
  Pam: Oh please, you've all seen it.
  Lana: Wait, oh my God, we actually have.
• Reset Button: She lost a lot of weight in season 5, but regains by season 6^note  which was in all likelihood because she wasn't trying to lose weight in season 5. She was just losing it because of all the cocaine.
• Sex Goddess: She is so good at sex that when Archer accidentally has sex with her once, he ends up having sex with her multiple times almost compulsively despite how disgusted he is with himself.
• She Cleans Up Nicely:
  • Comes out in this for her sister's wedding. Hubba hubba.
  • She also looked pretty good after her makeover in "Double Indecency".
• Stout Strength: As revealed in "El Secuestro".
  • When Dr. Krieger drugged her, Ray and Cheryl, she pulled a toilet from the stall she was in, by herself.
  • When the gang was attempting to forcibly break her cocaine habit cold turkey by tying her to a chair, she tore off the ropes in a withdrawal fueled fury, and carried off Cheryl ala King Kong.
  • She is able to pull Krieger's van uphill with the parking brake on.
  • When Barry kidnaps her, he strings her up six feet in the air by her arms. She's like this for presumably hours, yet when it seems like her rescuers aren't going to win, she tears the ropes through pure strength and still has enough left over to pick up a shotgun loaded with explosive rounds to take out Barry. She doesn't seem to suffer any lasting damage over this.
• They Really Do Love Each Other:
  • Pam is, although not in the beginning, one of the most beloved characters of the main crew. This is especially seen in season 5, when she got shot by Gustavo's wife. Archer fell in complete denial, Lana was about to cry, Cheryl goes berserk while Ray and Malory stand actionless. Especially true comparing that when this happened to Cyril earlier, nobody cared that much.
  • Archer in particular is fond of Pam's crass, openly-sexual nature mirroring his own, and is usually nicer to Pam than he is to any other member of the ISIS crew. In Season 6 he even tells her (much to his own surprise) that she's his best friend.
• Those Two Guys: With Cheryl.
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: Tomboy to Cheryl's Girly Girl.
• Too Dumb to Live: Despite being severely allergic to soy, she continues to eat the soy-meat shrimp on Cecil Tunt's helicopter in "Sea Tun Part 1". Remarking that she'll eat just one last one. She would have died if Archer hadn't gotten her the epi-pen from the first aid kit.
• Took a Level in Badass: Quite a few. Season two reveals that she boxes in underground matches. Season three reveals that not only is she involved with underground racing, but she also sneaks up and apprehends the Big Bad of the Space Race two-parter. Come to season 4, where she aces the field agent exam and wails on several characters to prove herself worthy of joining the others out on the field. In Season six she is the first character to lay some serious damage on bionic Barry.
• Took a Level in Dumbass: In season 5 she starts making some really stupid calls, likely due to her cocaine addiction.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: Following her cocaine addiction in season 5 she even threatened to out everyone if they didn't give her the cocaine. Thankfully, she returns to being her usual self in the next season.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Bear claws.
• True Companions: Her and Archer show shades of this from season 3 onwards and it becomes solidified in the finale when they go on the run together.
• The Unfavorite: It's implied that she was this in her family, and that her abominable sister Edie was the golden child.
• Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist: A violent-tempered Depraved Bisexual drug addict who has killed people in underground bum-fights and raped Cyril several times.
• Vitriolic Best Buds:
  • With Cheryl. They are shown together near constantly at work and willingly spend more time together outside of the office than any other characters, but their dialog typically involves flat out insults and they don't seem to actually like each other. Pam once thought she killed Cheryl and was entirely apathetic about it.
  • By season 5 she's also become this with Archer, being one of the few people in the cast who enjoys spending time with him, as seen by her glee at getting to ride with him in 'Southbound and Down', not to mention jumping in front of a bullet for him in the season finale. Archer for his part is vocally irritated by her personality but does seem to care as seen with him faking to be her boyfriend for her sister wedding, and demanding a sincere apology for Pam from Edie.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Invokes this on ISIS when she escaped her captors in "El Secuestro". The episode ends with her preparing to beat the ever-loving piss out of Malory for only offering the kidnappers $5000 for her return.

Dr. Krieger

"Doctor" Algernop Krieger

"And I love that I have an erection… that doesn't involve homeless people."

Voiced By: Lucky Yates

Gadget master for ISIS and all-around Mad Scientist. According to Malory, he is the son of a Nazi veteran who hid in Brazil after World War II. Not actually a genetic clone of Adolf Hitler despite early jokes to that effect.

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• Affably Evil: Krieger is generally a nice, friendly fellow. He's also a rampant Mad Scientist who tapes bum fights, experiments on people without their consent, steals bodies for experiments (including Katya and Bilbo), is eager to pump nerve gas into the ISIS ventilation system, and insists that he isn't a "serial" killer. He also freely sells ISIS weapons to gangs and criminals to fund his lab operations, sells important ISIS secrets to Barry and the KGB, and tried to sell uranium to North Korea.
  Krieger: [to an FBI agent] Is it murder if they're my own clones? Because I'm seriously asking.
• All Anime Is Naughty Tentacles: At least in Krieger's collection, which includes such titles as Fisherman’s Wife and Fisherman’s Wife II: The Retentacling.
• All Germans Are Nazis: A running joke that he's one of the The Boys from Brazil.
• Ascended Extra: For the first several episodes, Krieger didn't even speak. During "Archer Live" Lucky Yates rallied audiences to scream into a recording device to show their support for Yates ascending to an actual star. As of season 5, he's been promoted to the opening credits.
• Ax-Crazy: He's probably the 2nd most insane and unbalanced character with Cheryl only being "slightly" more insane.
• Bad Liar:
  • Constantly. When asked how he knows Portuguese:
    Krieger: I grew up in Braz—istol County, Rhode Island. (Beat) Lots of Portuguese in Rhode Island.
  • Later in the same episode, asked if his father was a Nazi:
  Krieger: No, he was a… scientist!
  Cyril: Pretty sure the Nazis had scientists.
  Krieger: No! That's why we—urg—THEY lost the war! Lack of science!
• Badass Bookworm: Krieger studied and became accomplished in a variety of different sciences including bionics, electronics, neuroscience, chemistry, biotechnology, surgery, and robotics.
• Bestiality Is Depraved: Implied when he used a Geiger counter on the obviously radioactive Pigley II before aiming the same counter at his crotch and getting similar results.
• Brainy Brunet: Krieger has brown hair and is an incredibly brilliant scientist and inventor.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Krieger, despite being insane and not a medical doctor (or any other kind of doctor) manages to perform brain surgery successfully—-while high on acid. With a drill.
• Calling Your Attacks: SMOKE BOMB! Granted that he never has an actual smoke bomb…
• Catchphrase:
  • "Also, yes"
  • "Me, too!" — usually removing the context in the original statement, such as when Ray says that he pisses and shits into bags (due to Ray's paralysis).
  • "Yep, yep, yep!" (or "Nope, nope, nope!")
• Cloudcuckoolander: Not as erratic as Cheryl, but he's still pretty the creepy weirdo of the group and his interests as a Mad Scientist are borderline psychotic.
  Krieger: Your authority is not recognized in Fort Kick-ass.
• Cool Car: His custom van(s) with Rush album covers painted on the side. The rest of the team think it's more of a Creepy Stalker Van, with Malory referring to it as the "S.S. Date Rape" due to its illegal window tints.
• Crazy-Prepared: Revealed to have built robot duplicates of all his co-workers and kept them around to use in his schemes as needed.
• Cunning Linguist: He is shown to be fluent in both Portuguese and German. Specifically after helping Cyril with Portuguese. After he is questioned by Cyril who assumed he is of German origin, he claims instead to have German-Brazilian roots and to be from a Portuguese speaking community in Rhode Island and to not know German, but Cyril continues to pressure him, suspecting him of being a hidden Nazi, and then he also suddenly asks him a question in German and Krieger also in turn answers him without thinking in German, later regretting it. He's also shown to have at least some fluency with Japanese.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Krieger doesn't remember much of his past himself, but what we've seen implies some pretty dark things. Among other things, his father was murdered (sicced upon and eaten alive by the pet Doberman dogs) when he was 14 (a reference to The Boys from Brazil) and Malory was involved somehow, he apparently lived in some sort of compound, then there's the business with the Krieger clones he met on San Marcos. Krieger has no idea if he's a clone of them, or them of him or if they're all clones of some other original person.
• Dead Person Impersonation: It's played with that the Krieger from seasons 1 to 5 died in San Marcos, and was replaced by one of the Clone Bone club. There is continual evidence both for and against this theory, such as him not remembering the names of his friends, or to the contrary, knowing about the supposed microchip he injected into Cheryl/Cherlene's brain. The others seem to be aware and accepting of this theory, with nobody reacting at all to Cheryl predicting that Krieger is scared the others will find out he's just a Krieger clone.
• Disco Dan: In "Drastic Voyage", he uses phrenology (which was discredited in the 19th century) on the patient, who he mistakes for a violent criminal due to be executed, which gets him laughed out of the room by other scientists.
• Ditzy Genius: Despite a mad scientist and one of the more intelligent people in the main cast, he can also be very boisterous, reckless and childishly naive.
• Easy Amnesia: The other explanation for Krieger's identity post season 5: during the clone fight the surviving Krieger is shown to have experienced significant head trauma from the battle. His inability to recall people's names afterwards could be attributed to brain damage from the fight and fall. The following seasons demonstrate he continues to have memory problems even with new information, such as spending time with Abbiejean but forgetting her existence a few weeks later. If he is the original Krieger, his memory impairment may be so bad that he himself can't quite remember if he's one of the clones or not.
• Establishing Character Moment: In his first appearance, he is being chastised by Pam for being an apparent food rapist. Three episodes later, when he first speaks, one of his first lines is introducing us to Fister Roboto.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Has raped food, sold sensitive government information, and meddled in God's domain, but even he draws the line at releasing nerve gas on New York City or hurting Abbiejean. He also finds the idea that he's a clone of Hitler quite disturbing, and emphasizes evidence to the contrary.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": His 401k actually has the word "Doctor" instead of a first name.
• Evil Genius: In season 5 and shared with Cyril. Krieger takes a non-action job by working out the mechanics of their drug operation. Unfortunately for Malory, he does a terrible job of it, and ends up destroying most of their remaining cocaine supply when he used it as ballast for a mini-submarine that he blew up in a fit of despair when he realized he had no way of moving it out of it's construction site.
• Exasperated Perp: Cyril gets him to reveal he might be a Nazi scientist this way (in German):
  Cyril: Why did you move to Brazil?
  Krieger: To continue the fight for my Führer! Shit…
• Extreme Omnisexual: Krieger has shown sexual interest in women, men, homeless people, dead people, God, holograms, food, robots, and many other things.
  • He's drugged interns with gay hormones, choked Cheryl (and used a robot later), and in the first episode, is revealed to have been raping employee lunches and returning them to the refrigerators.
  • In "Tragical History" Archer noted that he created a virtual girl that was "so real, the state of New York [was] allowing him to legally marry her."
  • "And I love that I have an erection… that doesn't involve homeless people!"
  • In "Skorpio", when Pam expresses a willingness to murder someone for food: "Every single noun and verb in that sentence totally arouses me."
  • Averted with his own clones when they "clonebone". They just say he's not doing it right.
  • It's played straight In-Universe so much that, in "Nellis," when Archer sees a blinding flash of light where Krieger's standing (which was really two aliens teleporting away, he thinks that Krieger was actually trying to have sex with an electric socket and everybody else but Pam won't believe otherwise.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: To call him "friends" with any members of the main cast might be a stretch, as they are all creeped out by him to varying degrees. But they do still hang out with him.
• Hidden Depths:
  • He is a huge fan of Rush, and has been trying (unsuccessfully) to nail the drum solo from "YYZ". His vans all feature scenes from Rush album covers, doctored to add him and with the name altered. To date, there's been Exit… Van Left, Vanispheres, Caress of Krieger and Van by Night. All four have been destroyed.
  • His scientific expertise also applies toward cooking; with a single sniff he is able to diagnose what's wrong with Archer's spaghetti sauce, and how he can fix it.
• Hidden Heart of Gold: "Placebo Effect" starts with him telling Archer, of his own volition, that there must be something wrong with his chemotherapy drugs if he's not experiencing any of the typical side-effects of it when no one else noticed this, and conducted tests just to be certain. Since most of the characters think Archer is an asshole, (not an unjustified opinion, mind you) and considering all the messed-up stuff Krieger does in almost every episode where he features and that he may be a genetic clone of Adolf Hitler, it speaks volumes to his sense of morality that he took the time to do this when no one told him to or made him do it.
• Identical Twin ID Tag: When he's with his clones, they all wear neckties and he wears a bowtie.
• I Love the Dead:
  • Clearly gets aroused by touching Katya's corpse in "Skin Game".
  • And when he's disposing a dead body in "Lo Scandalo":
    Malory: Is Krieger hard at work?
    Archer: He literally might be.
• Ironic Name: "Krieger" means "Warrior" in German, but Krieger is the Non-Action Guy of the cast, and gets in less physical fights than almost any other character.
• Last-Name Basis: His first name, Algernop, is only given in the book How to Archer and in the episode "White Elephant", but he still goes by Krieger.
  • The aliens in "Nellis" also use his first name Algernop.
• The Loins Sleep Tonight: A common running gag implies that Krieger has trouble "keeping it up" when having sex with his holographic girlfriend, despite having an absolutely ghastly list of fetishes that will get him hard as soon as any one of them is so much as mentioned.
• Mad Scientist: Has created, among other things, tablets that temporarily induce homosexuality in the user.
  • In "Lo Scandalo", when asked to dispose of a body, he responded by putting on a respirator and saying only "Thank you".
  • In "The Wind Blows Mary" he built some kind of laser device to deal with the "ant problem" in the ISIS break room. It looks like it was some kind of attempt to let Krieger absorb the power of ants.
    Archer: What were you going for? Ant strength relative to the size of a human?
    Krieger: ... Shut up.
• Me's a Crowd: He's attempted to make clones of himself before. Season 5 reveals that someone else has already made clones of him, as three other Kriegers are working for the president of San Marcos.
• The Millstone: He single-handedly sabotages the mission in "Drastic Voyage" and puts his colleagues out of work all just to get back at some scientists who ridiculed him.
• Morally Ambiguous Doctorate: Batshit insane and possibly a clone of Adolf Hitler. Once mentioned that he is Not That Kind of Doctor and, technically, not the other kind of doctor.
• Mysterious Past: He's maybe a genetic clone of Adolf Hitler, but that's about all we know about him.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: The German word "Krieger" means warrior.
• Nightmare Fetishist:
  Archer: Wait, are you still taping bum fights to get off?
  Krieger: No, now I'm into something much… darker.
• Non-Action Guy: He never really gets involved in the action, mostly sticking to just building machines. The few times he does, he's easily beaten, as he doesn't have much in the way of combat skill.
• Noodle Incident:
  • Archer implies that Krieger used to lure bums into his home and videotape them fighting and doing other unstated, unsavory things. Things that were not disturbing enough for Krieger, who told Archer that he stopped doing that and had moved onto "something… darker."
  • "Fister Roboto" is mentioned, but never shown. Neither is Goatley, which might be a Half-Human Hybrid, or the first Piggley, which definitely was.
• Not That Kind of Doctor: Or the other kind, technically.
• Occidental Otaku: Kind of implied. He created his own sentient holographic perfect mate, and she's a pink-haired anime girl who calls him "Kuriga-san".
• Omnidisciplinary Scientist: Genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, bionics, pharmacology, chemical and directed-energy weapons and brain surgery are among the fields he dabbles in and he's also a capable gunsmith, wiretapper, computer programmer and auto mechanic.
• Pet the Dog: Offers to give Ray his ability to walk again. Although he resorted to drugging him, he did make Ray's life much better without any selfish intent. Also, in the episode "Stage Two" he checks up on Archer's cancer progress and informs him he's being sold fake medication, kicking off the episode's plot.
  • He also resurrected Katya as a cyborg after she was seemingly killed by Barry.
• The Precious, Precious Car: Krieger's many sleazy airbrushed '78 conversion vans, all ultimately destroyed over the course of the series.
• Promotion to Opening Titles: As of Season 5.
• Psychopathic Man Child: He's more than a little unhinged and has many childlike attributes, such as "Fort Kickass".
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: His claim of Rhode Island having "a lot of Portuguese". Portuguese is the third most common language in Rhode Island, after English and Spanish.
• Robosexual: Dr. Krieger built a sexbot named "Fister Roboto", a "choke-bot", and a virtual girlfriend so realistic that the state of New York is allowing him to legally marry.
• Serial Killer: Is implied to be one, and acts very mysteriously on the topic. Although he denies being a serial killer.
• Sexbot: He built one that he named "Fister Roboto."
• The Smart Guy: As the Mad Scientist of the group, he's particulary knowledgeable, crafty and creative in a distinctly weird and sinister way.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: He's not a… serial… killer. If you don't count holograms like his wife as people, it could be true…
  • And he doesn't have a hybrid pig-boy… anymore.
• Those Wacky Nazis: It's heavily implied that he's a clone of Adolf Hitler. Nope. The fact that he looks nothing like Hitler was the first clue.
• Token Evil Teammate: While very few (if any) ISIS agents could be considered very "good", Krieger is the only one who is pretty much undeniably evil. Despite this he is also one of the more genuinely friendly ISIS employees.
• You Cloned Hitler!: He may be a clone of Hitler himself (also there were three Krieger clones working for the San Marcos government). This gets thrown into his face constantly after its revealed to the group, though Krieger finally gets sick of it and calls everyone out on it.
  Dr. Krieger: If I was a clone of Adolf Hitler, wouldn't I look like Adolf Hitler?!
  Malory: Huh. I actually hadn't thought of that.

Ray Gillette

Raymond "Ray" Q. Gillette

"She has never liked me. But someday I'm gonna write a book about this place. Mhm, a real smackaroonie."

Voiced By: Adam Reed

Spoilers for the first five seasons, mostly relating to Ray's various injuries, unmarked below.

ISIS' openly gay head intelligence analyst. Possibly one of the few competent employees at ISIS. Pronounces his last name "Jill-ETTE", while everyone else in his family pronounces it "GILL-it." He has a knack of getting himself injured and/or paralysed time and time again.

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• AB Negative: His blood type is O-positive.
• Ace Pilot: The only member of the team with an actual pilot's license.
• Agent Peacock: Just because he's a pooftah doesn't mean he can't kick your ass.
• All Gays are Promiscuous: Played with in that he routinely goes to hardcore gay fetish clubs, but is the only ISIS staff member who can (pretty much) keep his sex life out of the office.
• An Arm and a Leg: While he often loses the use of his legs, he has his legs sawn off by Krieger in an operation to give him Cyborg replacements, and loses his right arm in Season 6 battling a ferocious plant.
• Ascended Extra: Voiced by series head Adam Reed, Ray spent pretty much all of the first season as a barely named extra sitting at a desk and talking sassy with Lana over the phone. But starting with season two onward it's shown he is an agent too, and he later becomes a series regular.
  • However, it should be noted that, unlike the rest of the characters, he doesn't show as a silhouette in any of the show's opening segments.
• Big Brother Instinct: When Ray thinks his younger brother is in trouble, he enlists Archer and Carol to go to his hometown to help him. Throughly averted when Ray found out that Randy lied to him and he refused to give up his drug farming business and go clean.
• Big "WHAT?!": Has one after Archer's "'M' as in 'Mancy'" line in "Skytanic".
• Butt-Monkey: He is treated as such by the ISIS staff, especially during the "Heart of Archness" arc. He also ends up losing the use of his legs constantly throughout the series. See Handicapped Badass.
• Camp Gay: At first, but this is turning into an Informed Attribute: His voice and mannerisms were very effeminate in his first few appearances, but this is becoming less prominent and the rest of his personality is more like Straight Gay or Manly Gay.
• Catchphrase:
  • Ray has "Dukes!" and "Double dukes!" and "Triple dukes!".
  • "You know…" when he's angry/annoyed.
• Characterization Marches On: Originally, he was more sane than even Lana. But as he got more prominent, he started to indulge in the other characters' sillier ideas. (Like thinking it would be exciting if they were branded as traitors and formed a rogue state, or painting Cyril's face to make him look fierce.)
• Color Blind Confusion: He say's color blind, probably red-green, which is something of a problem as he's ISIS' demolitions expert (though it's possible he was just Trolling Archer by intentionally hitting the wrong buttons in an elevator). If true, then by extension he likely lied in order to get his aircraft piloting license.
• Commuting on a Bus: He's missing for some time during Season 12, and is not seen again for some time until Colt Express, where he's revealed to be moonlighting as an IIA agent.
• Cultured Badass: Ray has a recurring and open fondness for Japanese culture. His apartment is decorated in a modern Japanese style, and he traditionally eats a Bento box paired with Sake for lunch. He is also known to pack no fewer than five kimonos when on trips, which he claims is not excessive.
• Cunning Linguist: Ray has knowledge of German, Yiddish and Latin.
• Cure Your Gays: Married for 2 years to a lesbian, whom he met at a pray-away-the-gay Bible group. Not clear if they were each other's beards or they were actually trying to go straight.
• Cyborg: Has his legs roboticized by Krieger. At first he was on the fence about it, but after having it unwillingly done on him, he was thrilled to walk again. His arm is replaced with a robot prosthesis, like Conway.
• Dark and Troubled Past: His parents (especially his father) were noted to be physically abusive towards him. And because his father was extremely conservative, Ray was forced to hide his homosexuality from everyone around him.
• Deadpan Snarker: Is from time to time shown to be a bigger one than Archer, likely due to his work environment.
• Demolitions Expert: Seems to be his job at ISIS, at least in the first two seasons.
• Depraved Homosexual: Heavily implied to have taken advantage of an unconscious Cyril in "Blood Test".
• Disabled Snarker: Though he goes back and forth on the 'disabled' part.
• Extreme Doormat: Never has the will to stand up to his co-workers when they give him abuse for being in a wheelchair, only ever responding with his usual "You know…".
• Eye Scream: Gets accidentally stabbed in the eye by a manicurist when their boat hit a wave during season three's "Heart of Archness" arc, though he isn't particularly troubled by it. He's seen with an Eye Patch Of Power in subsequent scenes in the arc, but is back to two eyes afterwards.
• Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling: The Responsible to Randy's Foolish. While Ray has a relatively stable life and a credible job, Randy is an illegal drug farmer and tricked Ray into thinking that the sheriff was corrupt.
• Foreign Culture Fetish: Has a huge fondness for traditional Japanese culture, often wears kimonos as casual clothing, and his lunch is usually shown as a bento box eaten with chopsticks.
• Forgot About His Powers: At the very least Ray has Super-Speed, as shown in "The Figgis Agency". He was apparently also strong enough to literally twist Archer's arm to make him give up trying to be pilot of the Nereus in "Drastic Voyage". Nevertheless, he has not taken advantage of any of these abilities in other circumstances where they might be useful.
• Freudian Excuse: In Colt Express, he moonlights as an IIA agent as a backup job in case the Agency falls under. Given the group's track record and IIA at the time being one step of them along with their benefits, it's hard to blame him.
• Gay Best Friend:
  • Is this to Lana.
  • He's possibly this to Cyril as well, as he usually ends up teaming with Cyril during operations or they team up to combat Archer's stupidity. Cyril once asks why he always has to share a hotel room with Ray when they travel but shortly admits that he doesn't mind it. Ray jokingly says Cyril is gay for him.
• Guns Akimbo: He has two nickel-plated M1911 pistols.
• Handicapped Badass:
  • During Season 3, after the "Heart of Archness" arc, he is left paralysed from the waist down, preventing him from going on any field missions. He was faking the whole thing because everyone just assumed he was paralysed when the doctors made him leave the hospital in a wheelchair.
  • He gets paralysed for real in the Season 3 finale after Archer crashes the space shuttle, leaving him disabled for half of Season 4, until Krieger gives him robotic legs.
  • The CPU in his cyborg legs gets fried at the end of Season 4, when Archer tickles him, resulting in the defibrillator they used to revive him going off. In Season 5, Krieger reveals that all it took was a quick manual reset to fix it.
  • He also pretends to be paralysed in the Season 5 mission "The Rules of Extraction" to get Archer to carry him.
  • In season six, he stabs a man-eating plant to death with a trowel after it bit off his right hand.
• Heel–Face Revolving Door: Between Season 12 and 13. In Colt Express, he's found out by the gang that he's moonlighting as an IIA agent in case the Agency goes under. Despite this, he blows his cover to assist Lana and Archer, and later save Archer. Following this, in The Big Con, he's revealed to be Fabian's informant, gathering dirt on the team which could in theory could get them fired if not arrested. Naturally, no one takes this well. Afterwards, he's still a part of the team, genuinely aiding them with seemingly no underlying personal intentions. In Distraction Action, however, he's missing for the entire episode before it's revealed he fled to Manatina with Fabian. Ultimately, it's revealed in ''Dough, Ray, and Me" that Ray was a Fake Defector all along, being The Mole for the CIA.
• Hidden Depths:
  • Won an Olympic bronze medal for slalom skiing.
  • Is a disgraced minister (but is still licensed to perform marriages).
  • Was once married to a lesbian he met at a "pray away the gay" Christian camp.
  • He's fiercely loyal to his redneck family (despite knowing that they wouldn't approve of his sexuality), and was willing to sacrifice his life in a shootout with police in order to protect his marijuana farmer brother.
  • Ray is a very good artist, being able to flawlessly draw the snake that bit Archer in "Once Bitten".
• I Call It "Vera": His pistols are custom-engraved with the names Barbra and Liza.
• If It's You, It's Okay: Although a clear and out of the closet homosexual, he doesn't pass up the offer to have sex with Lana, claiming "Nobody's that gay".
• Ink-Suit Actor: Weird subversion, as he's the only main character directly based on a cast member - Lucky Yates, the voice of Kreiger.
• In-Series Nickname: Almost always referred to as "Ray" instead of "Raymond".
• In Touch with His Feminine Side:
  • He told his brother he was an interior decorator.
  • In "Legs", a pair of ballet slippers can be seen in Ray's trophy cabinet, suggesting that he was at one time a dancer.
• Laughing Mad: Ray does this in "Pocket Listing" immediately after he has his arm bitten off by a carnivorous plant:
  I guess I've gotta hand it to you!
• Mistaken for Racist: After losing his hand to a carnivorous plant, his replacement robot hand is black. His sheer hatred of the thing leads everyone to assume he hates it for being black, but he was just annoyed at his increasingly mechanical body.
• My Greatest Failure: In the season two opener "Swiss Miss", after Archer leaves the room, he reveals he cried himself to sleep after winning the Bronze Medal for downhill slalom skiing.
• Mysterious Middle Initial: The "Q." of his middle name has yet to be revealed.
• Nice Guy: Ray is one of the more optimistic and good-natured agents at ISIS.
• Noodle Incident: Revealed at the end of Season 2 to be a disgraced former minister, with no details given; brought up again in Season 3 when he officiates at Archer and Katya's wedding, wearing a suit. He also reveals he was married to a lesbian he met at a "pray-away-the-gay" camp. Whether they were each other's beard or genuinely trying to be straight is unknown.
• Obfuscating Disability: Twice - once in Season 3 when everyone assumed he was disabled because he left the hospital in a wheelchair, and once in Season 5's "The Rules of Extraction", where he acts like The Load to get Archer to admit his utter contempt for his own mortality.
• Only a Flesh Wound: In the season 6 episode "Pocket Listing," he loses his lower right arm in a fight with a carnivorous plant at the Tuntmore House botanical garden. Everyone else just makes fun of him.
• Only Sane Man: Compared to the rest of the cast, at least, Ray is the most normal of the bunch, with no particularly damaging hang-ups or mental instabilities notable enough to negatively affect his job.
• Real Award, Fictional Character: Won the bronze medal in giant slalom.
• The Reliable One: Pretty much the only field agent who is consistently competent at his job. He may not be as flashy as Archer or Lana, but he never does anything nearly as stupid as they do.
• Smoking Is Cool: The only ISIS agent to smoke. According to Cheryl in "Vision Quest", it's an addiction.
• Southern-Fried Genius: He's from West Virginia, from a classic rednecks, though his brother is a very skilled marijuana farmer. But, as noted above, very smart.
• Super-Speed: Demonstrates this in the premiere episode of season 7, "The Figgis Agency". Being a cyborg evidently has its advantages.
• Throwing Off the Disability:
  • Type 3: Late in Season 3, he is caught using his legs by Lana and Archer, having faked his paralysis the whole time.
  • Type 2: After losing the use of his legs for real at the end of Season 3, Krieger gives him cyborg legs in Season 4, allowing him to walk again.
  • Type 2: Although the CPU in his legs get fried, all it takes is a quick manual restart from Krieger in he middle of Season 5 to help him walk again.
  • Type 3: He also reveals he was faking his paralysis in "The Rules of Extraction" to get Archer to admit that he doesn't care about his own mortality.
  • Type 2: Krieger replaces his missing lower arm with a robot prosthesis, albeit with a black skin tone in "Archub Y Morfilod".
• Took a Level in Jerkass: He got quite a bit more cranky after Season 3's ending with him paralyzed for real, which is mostly justified given how his life was made much harder thanks to Archer's mishap.
• Useless Superpowers: Ray's bionic legs and bionic arm, which don't actually do much for him as compared to Barry and Katya's full conversion to cyborgs. Krieger did not opt to install any kind of augmented structures in the rest of his body which would allow him to actually do things like lift great weights. Subverted, though, when it's revealed that he has Super-Speed; see above.
• Vocal Evolution: Ray's effeminate voice becomes less camp and more southern as the series goes on.
• Weaksauce Weakness: Ray's bionic legs are very vulnerable to being disabled by electrical discharges. Although Krieger can reboot their processor (when he remembers to do so).
• Weight Woe: He seems to be very insecure about his weight, despite not being even slightly overweight; he's shown several times admonishing himself for indulging in even modest portions of rich food, and in season 11, it's outright stated that he has a recurring problem with binging and purging.

Woodhouse

Sir Arthur Henry Woodhouse GCB

"Sir, that stolen lemur bit one of your prostitutes right in the face and she says she can't go to hospital because she's, quote, 'tripping balls.'"

Voiced By: George Coe, Roy Mc Crery (young), Tom Kane (Archer Vice onward)

Archer's elderly, long-suffering valet. Also essentially raised him.

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• Ambiguously Bi: He was Ambiguously Gay for the longest time but, in The Man From Jupiter, he responds to Burt Reynolds' comment that Malory is "drop-dead-sexy" with "Oh dear God, yes."
• Been There, Shaped History: Blood Test reveals he shot William S. Burroughs' Joan Vollmer in Mexico in a William Tell-style bet for heroin.
• Beleaguered Assistant: Malory treats him like dirt. Archer is even worse.
• Bus Crash: No Good Deed reveals that Woodhouse died some time between his disappearance in Season 5 and the first episode of Season 8, which features his funeral.
• Butt-Monkey: Woodhouse is given zero respect from Malory or Archer, especially the latter.
  • Karmic Butt-Monkey: However, he was a neglectful heroin addict in Archer's youth. And as stated below, he admits that he has knocked Archer out a couple of times a year only to blame it on alcohol and hookers. Knowing this when rewatching the earlier seasons makes it difficult to feel sorry for the abuse Archer puts him through now.
• The Comically Serious: What really sells his quote above is how he reports the strange situation in the calmest possible way.
  Archer: I have to go. But if I find one single dog hair when I get back, I'll… rub sand in your dead little eyes.
  Woodhouse: Very good, sir.
  Archer: I also need you to go buy sand.
  Woodhouse: Yes, sir.
• Cool and Unusual Punishment: Archer devises all sorts of bizarre punishments to subject Woodhouse to whenever he fails in his duties or betrays Archer. One notable example is forcing him to eat a big bowl of spider webs, a threat he makes in Season Two and carries out in Season Four.
• Cool Old Guy: Does heroin, hung out with William Burroughs (and was the person who actually killed Joan Vollmer, as part of a bet for more drugs), ate "long pig" aka human flesh while in the service, and likes to listen to jazz. His coolness was such that two assassins who encountered him not only bought him new clothing to replace the ones Archer destroyed, but also purposely spared his life when they went after Archer.
  • Even more in "The Double Deuce", where we learn that in World War I, after a sniper killed the man he loved, he killed and scalped 50 Germans in one night in a fit of rage, and also helped Malory fight off 4 armed German agents with two sawed off shotguns in World War II.
• Covert Pervert: He has no problem doing online GILF pornography videos, as shown in season 5.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Saw the love of his life be killed by a sniper.
• The Dog Bites Back: While he'll rarely stand up to Archer's face and does take the worst of the abuse, Woodhouse is more than willing to work against Archer on Malory's orders (as she's the one who pays his salary, while Archer was unaware that he was paid at all, leading to Woodhouse locking Archer out of his apartment when Malory fires Archer). He admits that he knocks Archer out a couple of times a year only to blame it on alcohol and hookers and in season four, he is even willing to refuse to mail Archer money when he is trapped in Quebec without a passport.
  Woodhouse: You ass!! You unbelievably gigantic ass!!
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: He disappears during Season 5 and no one really cares. Archer puts up missing posters in Season 6, and he is not mentioned at all in Season 7. The Season 8 premiere reveals that he has died.
• Expy: Has quite a bit in common with Alfred, being a British valet/manservant with (in most version) a distinguished military history.
• Extreme Doormat: Ever since Archer was a child, he's been treated with nothing less than complete disdain by Archer and has frequently been subjected to his cruel and bizarre punishments, but he (mostly) obediently accepts it.
• Functional Addict: Woodhouse has lived a surprisingly long time for a (very active) heroin addict.
• I Was Quite the Looker: Was very handsome and dashing in his younger days.
• I'm a Humanitarian: Ate human flesh, which the locals called long pig, while serving with the British military in Africa, though he said he didn't really care for it much.
• Identical Stranger: Looks exactly like the then-current pope, Benedict XVI, enough so that he is able to be used in a Twin Switch plan.
• If It's You, It's OK: Woodhouse seems to have this for Reggie Thistleton. In "Honey Pot", Charles and Rudy make a remark about Woodhouse not being gay, and he corrects them not by saying he "was very fond of a boy at school", mentioning Reggie. He elaborates on his relationship with Reggie in "Double Deuce", including his death on the battlefield. The only other indication of any kind of love/sex life at all is in that same episode when he's in bed with two women on a drug running ship… and he's openly pining for Reggie.
• The Jeeves: A textbook example, and named for the Trope Namer's creator. Like the trope namer, he's a valet, not a butler. And Archer pronounces it right.
  Archer: And so, here is what I propose... We finish these, get some roadies, head back to my huge penthouse, drink chilled champagne served by my valet...
  Woman: Isn't it pronounced valay?
  Archer: Only if he's parking your car.
• Jerkass: Despite initial claims in early seasons by Malory, Season 4 reveals that Woodhouse's brand of "raising" Archer apparently involved much of the same mistreatment Archer now heaps on him, such as ignoring him for selfish reasons, frequently passing out in the bathroom from heroin use instead of celebrating childhood Archer's birthday, and ultimately explaining much of why Archer treats him so poorly.
  • After pistol whipping Archer into unconsciousness in "The Double Deuce", he states that he would simply douse him in scotch, throw women's clothing around him and claim Sterling slipped and hit his head chasing a hooker, then reveals he does this several times each year.
• Meaningful Name: Named after English author P. G. Wodehouse (pronounced the way Woodhouse's name is spelled), most famous for writing the Jeeves and Wooster series. See The Jeeves entry above.
• No Name Given: His full name, Arthur Henry Woodhouse, was only revealed posthumously in season 8.
• Out of Focus: Has had considerably less appearances starting with Season 4, and disappears in Season 5.
• Parental Substitute: Woodhouse was the closest figure Archer had to a father.
• Put on a Bus: He hasn't been seen at all in Season 6, with Archer joking that he was at rehab before explaining that he was on his annual two days off. However as of "Reignition Sequence" it appears that he's gone missing, with Archer printing missing posters for him. "No Good Deed" reveals he's dead.
• Retcon: Mentioned he served with the King's Rifles in Africa in "Killing Utne", but mentions Reggie dying in Flanders in "Honeypot" and reveals he was in the Royal Flying Corps in "The Double Deuce".
  • His gravestone reveals that he was awarded both the Distinguished Service Cross and the Military Cross, which at the time Woodhouse would have served, the former was only available to officers of the Royal Navy and the latter was only available to officers in the British Army, while "The Double Deuce" shows he was a Lance-Corporal in the Royal Flying Corps.
• Retired Badass: Was quite the soldier in his younger days (see the Unstoppable Rage entry below). His decorations—as revealed at his funeral—included the Victoria Cross, Distinguished Service Cross, the Military Cross, and Champion of the Distinguished Service Order. He was also apparently a Knight of the Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath. That's right, all this time he's been Sir Woodhouse.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Killed and scalped fifty German soldiers after Reggie was killed.
• Stiff Upper Lip: Woodhouse mostly accepts Archer constant abuse and berating of him with an obedient "Yes, sir" or "Very good, sir". He does break down crying at times, such as when Archer forces him to eat a bowl of spider webs.
• Tontine: Part of one started by his CO. He estimates its worth to be approximately $1 million. Won by Stinky, his only other surviving squadron mate (assuming he hadn't passed away between seasons).
• Unstoppable Rage: He went into one when Reggie was shot in front of him during the Great War and killed 50 Germans in one night. He could have made a blanket out of the scalps. Even Archer is impressed/horrified when he hears about it.
  Archer: That's a lot of scalps!
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Woodhouse disappears in the fifth season after being sent to buy supplies for a baby shower. This is lampshaded several times over the course of that and the subsequent season, but is not answered during either. He dies at some point after this and his funeral is held in the first episode of Season 8, but when and how he died have not been revealed.
• Would Hit a Girl: Hit Pam over the head with a frying pan.
  Woodhouse: Only thing for a grass, mum.

Zara Khan

Zara Khan

Voiced By: Natalie Dew

An ex-Interpol agent who signs onto the Agency in season 14.

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• Absurd Phobia: She believes in curses, ghosts, and voodoo, which earns her ridicule from Archer (who's not any better).
• The Ace: Zara reveals in her debut episode that she was so effective at Interpol that she made everyone else look bad. Upon joining the Agency, she says that she will be the best at whatever they do just like she was at Interpol. She demonstrates this by successfully manipulating Archer into completing the mission and outdoing him at every turn.
• Action Girl: She kicks as much, if not more, ass than Archer. Throughout her debut episode, she and Archer compete to see who can knock out the most members of a terrorist organization. They're neck and neck for most of the episode.
• Always Someone Better: She's basically a much better version of Archer who gets the job done and isn't a pain in the ass to her partners, which stings Archer something fierce.
• The Chessmaster: She wraps Archer around her finger by playing on his pride in order to effectively control the mission to take down a terrorist organization.
• Crazy-Prepared: Compared to Archer. She compares his shoe phone with her shoe gun to escape from really dangerous situations rather than waiting for help to come.
• Loved by All: Practically all of the Agency either respects her or looks up to her. Archer, however, at first, was into her because she looked hot, until she started working really intensively and he got very suspicious of her, before getting endeared by how she thought the Agency is pretty cool and playing the trope straight (to the point they almost kissed), before she ditched him in a car chase as a distraction without his consent which put him back into thinking she's a pain in the ass.
• Manipulative Bitch: A heroic version. She knows how to get Archer to work all by stroking his own ego involving a mission at hand.
• Mirror Character: She's more of a female Archer than even Lana is, but she's more competent than him.
• The Mole: Averted. Archer believed her to be this in Interpol. Turns out, she was going against them because they just don't like how her work makes them look bad.
• Not So Above It All: Despite being miss perfect in the field, Zara has some of her own vices which include: gambling debts, hating the rich, and has trouble controlling her mood swings. At the very least, this helps Lana make Zara feel more welcomed in the Agency as everyone else have their own flaws.
• Proud Beauty: She doesn't blame Archer for being attracted to her.
  Zara: (after Archer apologizes for trying to kiss her) No, no, I, I get it. I mean, look at me.
• Sixth Ranger: Zara is the new girl of the team as everyone else in the Agency has known each other for years. Of course, this leaves her learning the group's antics as a true outsider.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: A black woman spy who serves as a foil for Archer, since Lana can't go on missions now that she's Da Chief.

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