Recap / The Venture Bros S 3 E 7 What Goes Down Must Come Up

Episode - Season 3, Episode 7 (Production Code: 3-33)

First Aired - July 13, 2008

A man in torn clothing is shown wandering around what appears to be some sort of abandoned hellscape. He curses Dr. Venture for abandoning him there so many years ago.

Dr. Venture and Brock are in the compound renovating a giant drill vehicle originally built by Jonas Venture Sr. While guiding Brock, who is driving the vehicle, Venture falls through a set of trap doors in the floor and the machine falls in after him, plugging the way out. Brock and Venture find that the sub-level blocks their communicator watches, leaving them unable to contact each other. Brock descends through a nearby door to the sub-level looking for the Doc.

Meanwhile, Venture is several levels below in a sewer-looking area. A madman calling himself "The Firestarter" runs past Venture.

Brock enters a dark control room but is immediately attacked by the man from the pre-credits segment, who's revealed to be quite tiny. The tiny little man stabs Brock through the latter's boot with a sewing needle, causing Brock to flinch and inadvertently close the door behind him.

Hank and Dean have gone to consult Dr. Orpheus about the disappearance of their father and Brock. Orpheus believes that the two may just be off on another of their typical adventures, but Hank and Dean point out that they would not have been left behind in that case, as they are always drug along. Orpheus summons the other members of the Order of the Triad (interrupting the Alchemist's TV viewing and Jefferson's Blacula hunt.)

Brock turns on the lights in the control room and talks with the tiny man. The tiny man is revealed to be Dr. Entmann, an associate of Jonas Venture Sr.'s who has been trapped in that room for 30 years. His tiny size is the result of a failed experiment to correct a previous failed experiment, which left him as a giant. He reveals to Brock that with the door sealed, they are both stuck in the room (a nuclear fallout shelter) for another 40 years.

Venture finds an emergency phone on the wall of the tunnel, and it happens to connect to the bunker that Brock is in. They simultaneously ask each other to get them out of their current situation without realizing that the other is also stuck. Venture is then captured by a girl and three men armed with improvised weapons.

The Triad enters the subterranean area in search of Brock and Venture. They combine their powers, allowing Orpheus to telepathically locate the missing men. However, before he can pinpoint them, each member of the triad receives a terrifying vision of an 8-bit female face and a demonic face. The Triad flees back to the surface in terror. There, it is revealed that Jefferson got so scared that he literally shat his pants. Orpheus goes to seek advice from his Master, excluding the Alchemist (because he is gay) and Jefferson (because he soiled himself.)

Orpheus returns after his Master instructed him to call "tech support." Thanks to a flier he found on his car windshield, he knows to call Pete White. White arrives and leads the others to a room with video feeds of several security cameras all over the compound. Looking at past footage, he finds where Brock entered the bunker but cannot see further. He instructs the boys to crawl around under the desk and look for unplugged wires. They find one and plug it back in, bringing the master computer "MUTHER" online.

MUTHER, the pixelated face that scared the Triad, appears on the main screen. She demands to see Dr. Jonas Venture Sr. and threatens to launch a nuclear missile if she does not.

Down in the tunnels, Dr. Venture is brought before a group of strange people, dressed either as 1980s musicians or in Rusty Venture t-shirts. They deem Venture to be an unclean outsider and consult their "father" on what to do with him. They play an old punch card video of Jonas Sr. speaking to a young Rusty about personal hygiene. The captors believe that Jonas (in the video) is their father, and that they are all named Rusty. The actual Rusty removes the punch card, ending the video, and demands that he be returned to the surface.

Brock and Entmann have also seen that MUTHER has been activated. Entmann explains that Jonas Sr. built MUTHER to run the nuclear fallout shelter and help assist the distraught survivors of a nuclear apocalypse. In that event, she was programmed to release small amounts of mood enhancing drugs into the bunker ventilation. However, MUTHER dumped a massive dose of the drug into the vents while the original Team Venture was giving a tour of the facility to a group of orphans. When everyone went berserk from the drugs, Jonas arrived to rescue his team (Col. Gentleman, Action Man, and Kano) but left the orphans behind.

The Triad, meanwhile, use the drilling machine to try to rescue Brock. Jefferson, having military experience driving tanks, is able to start and drive the machine with ease. They drill their way into Brock's bunker, just as MUTHER manages to connect to the nuclear missile's systems.

Venture is being chased by the crazed orphans and ends up in a dead-end missile silo. He climbs on top of the missile to escape, only for the missile to begin to launch, revealing that it is the missile that MUTHER threatened Brock and Entmann with earlier. However, the missile, having spent 40+ years abandoned under the compound without maintenance, malfunctions and falls over as soon as it leaves the silo, revealing itself to not be filled with a nuclear payload, but excrement, which spills all over Venture.

The Stinger shows Venture sealing up the shaft he fell into earlier; he explains to White about how the orphans dumped their waste in the missile so that "Father" would make it clean, attributing their uncanny survival skills to being honorary gold members of the Rusty Venture Fan Club. Venture further reveals that in 1978, Jonas Sr. gave the orphans the field trip which ended with their entrapment, making the video of Jonas Sr. their only contact with the outside world (alongside VH1 Classics due to cable wire shenanigans, additionally explaining the classic rock/punk icon aesthetics). Meanwhile, Brock and Entmann have set up a video reel of Jonas Sr. in front of MUTHER to keep her occupied.

Tropes:

• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Around 40 years ago, MUTHER went rogue and flooded the tunnels beneath the Venture compound with hallucinogenic gas and when reactivated in the present day attempts to perform a nuclear strike on the compound. But while she was probably advanced for the time she was created in, she's not very intelligent by today's standards, and is easily fooled by a recording of Jonas.
• The Apunkalypse: The overall vibe of the orphans in the basement (because they've been watching too much VH1).
• Bring My Brown Pants: Jefferson Twilight soils himself in the attempt contact the peril to the Venture family.
• Cargo Cult: The group of chemically addled children trapped in the underground bunker derive their entire culture from punch-card recordings Jonas Venture made to educate Rusty in the event of a nuclear apocalypse... and VH-1 Classic.
• Dumbass Has a Point: Hank and Dean note how Rusty and Brock have vanished, and since the two always bring the boys for their adventures, they realize something is up. They lose points later when it turns out that they didn't bother checking the basement.
• Expy: Dr. Entmann is a parody of Dr. Henry Pym, Ant-Man.
• Innocent Innuendo: This dialog, which clearly has a reason for playing over an Establishing Shot of the compound before we see they're just trying to do something with a massive drill-mobile (while Rusty giggles immaturely):
  Dr Venture: That’s it. Just like that. Easy! Pull back a bit. God, you’re right on top of me!
  Brock: Can’t help it. It’s— it’s stiff, Doc. Maybe I should lube this thing up before we take it down there.
  Dr Venture: It’ll be fine. It’s not built for speed. It’s built for deep penetration.
  Brock: All right, that’s it. You promised, no penetration jokes.
• Mushroom Samba: The effects of the mood enhancing drugs on the original Team Venture are....Unsettling, to say the least....
• Poke in the Third Eye: Spoofed when the Triad attempt to mystically divine the cause of the problem and are utterly horrified at visions of MUTHER's simple pixelated face as it flashes into a pixelated demon.
• Ragnarök Proofing: Averted. The old missile that MUTHER manages to launch has spent 40+ years rotting underground and being used as a communal toilet. By the time it actually manages to launch, it barely gets out of the silo before malfunctioning and falling over.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Instead of saving the kids (and Dr. Entmann) when MUTHER releases the drugs, Jonas Venture Sr. instead has the rest of Team Venture get into his drill vehicle and escape, abandoning the others to their fates.
• Shout-Out:
  • In addition to the the video of Jonas Sr., the orphans also got VH1 Classic due to a crossed wire. This explains why so many were dressed as characters from 1980s music videos, including:
    • Trevor Horn from The Buggles in "Video Killed the Radio Star"
    • Michael Jackson in "Thriller"
    • Keith Flint of The Prodigy in "Firestarter"
    • David Bowie in "Ashes to Ashes"
    • The members of Art of Noise in "Close (To the Edit)"
    • General Boy and Booji Boy from Devo's "Jocko Homo"
  • When Brock is trying to remember the Marvel Comics superhero Entmann reminds him of, Entmann incorrectly guesses Sub-Mariner, Hawkeye, and The Mighty Thor. (It was really Ant-Man, but the characters never get to him.)
  • MUTHER is a reference to MU-TH-R from the first Alien film.
  • Jefferson Twilight's mention that he raises carrier pigeons is a reference to Forrest Whitaker's character in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai.
  • During the flashback showing MUTHER releasing the gas underground, Colonel Gentleman hallucinates a scene similar to the infamous "dog costume" one from The Shining, only with a cat costume instead (and himself as the man being "serviced").
  • The way the gas affects people is quite similar to Scarecrow's toxin in Batman Begins.
• Wilhelm Scream: One can be heard when one of the orphans falls over the railing in the missile silo.
• You Know I'm Black, Right?: Averted and parodied when the other Triad members want to meet Orpheus' master:
  Jefferson Twilight: [to Dr. Orpheus, regarding why Orpheus doesn't want him and the Alchemist to see his master. Note that Jefferson is black.] Yeah, tell the truth. You're embarrassed of us, aren't you? It's 'cause The Alchemist's gay, isn't it?
  Doctor Orpheus: No, it's because you soiled yourself... and he's gay.

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