Episode - Season 2, Episode 1 (Production Code: 2-07)
First Aired: June 25, 2006
Following the deaths of Hank and Dean, Dr. Venture flees the Venture compound to travel the world. Brock is in pursuit, trying to encourage Venture to return since the bills are stacking up and Doc needs to "deal with" what happened to the boys. Finally, Brock catches up to Doc at a rave and tranquilizes him.
A montage plays showing the situations of the shows other prominent characters. Triana is shown consoling a distraught Dr. Orpheus, who blames himself for the death of the boys. The Monarch is shown still in prison. Dr. Girlfriend is still with Phantom Limb, though she looks uneasy. Henchmen 21 and 24 are shown blowing up the Cocoon, per The Monarch's orders. Billy and White are shown fitting Jonas Jr. with a robotic arm, similar to the one Billy has.
With Venture back at the compound, it is revealed that JJ has been taking on all of Rusty's contracts, as they were addressed to "Dr. Venture" and JJ has since earned two doctorates. (In the month that Rusty was gone.) He only has two contracts remaining and gives one (a teleporter already under construction) to Rusty. Rusty goes to his manufacturing wing, which he had padlocked years ago, to find that two men have been living there and working on the machine. One of them is Hector, Rusty's former boyhood associate, while the other is Swifty, a former prize fighter and friend of Jonas Venture Sr. Rusty doesn't remember them and fires them on the spot. Rusty attempts to use the unfinished teleporter, leading to a power surge.
The Monarch attaches a microfilm message to one of his pet butterflies (which the prison allows him to keep for rehabilitation purposes,) intended for 21 and 24 about The Monarch's pending escape. It is instead intercepted by a Guild agent and reported to Phantom Limb.
Dr. Orpheus, still distraught over the death of the boys, wonders how Brock is managing his grief so well. After the power surge, Brock sets off to find the source of the problem, but instead finds Rusty's legs and torso sticking out of different parts the wall. (His upper right section is nowhere to be found.)
Orpheus, driven by guilt, decides to resurrect the dead boys using necromancy, upsetting Triana. Orpheus makes a trip the underworld looking for the souls of Hank and Dean. When he returns, he finds hairless, skinless versions of Hank and Dean wandering around and muttering something about "milkshakes."
The Monarch tries to organize a breakout with his fellow inmates, assigning them each a role in the escape plans. Unbeknownst to The Monarch, Phantom Limb visits one of the inmates, King Gorilla, and threatens him into betraying the plan. Meanwhile, 21 and 24 both meet out of costume in a henchmen support group.
Brock has brought together the portions of Dr. Venture that he can find, and the two assure a distressed Orpheus that he did nothing wrong. The earlier power surge awoke two clones of Hank and Dean early. As Dr. Venture explains, when you have death prone children, you keep a few clones handy to replace them. Brock and Venture then recall some of the boys' previous 14 deaths.
The time comes for The Monarch's escape, but everyone else bails on the plan, leaving Monarch alone to battle three prison guards. Once they subdue him, The Monarch is dragged away cursing and screaming, mentioning his love for Dr. Girlfriend in the process. King Gorilla, upon hearing of The Monarch's deep love, decides to assist The Monarch and takes out the guards. He breaks away the toilet in his cell, which allows The Monarch to crawl through the sewer pipes to freedom.
Venture and Orpheus argue over the ethical ramifications of Venture's cloning, to which Venture argues that it's no different than the necromancy Orpheus practices. He explains that the boys' memories are recorded in their learning beds and are downloaded into the new clones, so for all intents and purposes, they are the exact same boys as before. The two clone slugs make their way into the room, with Venture telling Brock to take them back to their machines to be finished. The boys perform a garbled "Go Team Venture" salute before collapsing onto each other.
The Stinger shows The Monarch, covered in filth from the sewer pipes, successfully escaping prison. He reaches out for the hand presented to him to help him out of the muck, thinking it to be one of his henchmen. However, it turns out to be the disembodied right section of Dr. Venture.
Tropes:
- Accent Upon The Wrong Syllable: Before heading to Spider Skull Island, JJ pronounces bikini as "bi-kini," in the same way one would pronounce "bicycle."
- Biting-the-Hand Humor:
- Done very subtly. The creators had to fight tooth and nail with Cartoon Network to get them to cough up the money to use a licensed song in the second season premiere. According to the DVD commentary for the episode, the network may well have had a decent point because (according to Doc Hammer) the rights cost an eighth of the entire series budget.
- The same commentary plays with biting the hand humor too, playing a message from CN denying them the money, and revealing that the network only agreed after seeing the scene cut to music written by Doc Hammer which was bad enough to convince them they needed the track to make the sequence work.
- Black Comedy Rape: Stated to be the reason, or at least one of the reasons, why King Gorilla is in prison.Phantom Limb: You eviscerated and sodomized Vince Neil on live television!King Gorilla: I only sodomized half of him.
- Body Backup Drive: Hank and Dean have died at least 14 times by the time Brock Samson was assigned as Doc Ventures' bodyguard, Rusty decided to create several Clones of his boys and tied its functions into their sleeping beds to scan Hank and Deans' current memories in order to copy them over to a new set of Clone Slugs should the current pair die.
- Celebrity Casualty: King Gorilla is serving a life sentence for, to quote Phantom Limb, "eviscerating and sodomizing Vince Neil on live television".
- Cool and Unusual Punishment: Phantom Limb threatens to turn King Gorilla's penis into a coffee table if he doesn't betray The Monarch.
- Clothes Make the Superman: Tigerrific, one of the villains in prison with the Monarch, gets his powers from his tiger suit.
- Credits Gag: The new opening credits show Rusty and JJ in Dean and Hank's positions, giving off the impression that they really are dead and gone. It's of course, a Bait-and-Switch.
- Death Montage: One is shown depicting many of the previous times the boys died. (In a few of them, only one of them is shown dying, which begs the question of what did Rusty do with the other boy in those cases?)
- Ectoplasm: Orpheus ends up covered it in while trying to bring Hank and Dean back to life.
- Et Tu, King Gorilla?: Said by The Monarch when King Gorilla (initially) refuses to help The Monarch escape.
- Expendable Clone: Rusty seems to think nothing of his boys dying and then cloning them. He and Orpheus debate the ethical ramifications of this.
- Extremely Short Timespan: While Rusty was away trying to find himself in various isolated locations and evading Brock Samson along the way, Jonas Venture Junior managed to get himself a robotic arm from Billy Quizboy, two doctorates and complete several Government contracts entitled to Venture Industries.Rusty Venture: I was only gone a month.
- Flat "What": The Monarch's reaction to finding Dr. Venture's disembodied right half during The Stinger.
- Great Escape: The Monarch hatches a daring escape plan, involving the cooperation of several fellow imprisoned villains... who all look the other way when he makes his move due to threats of death from Phantom Limb. He got out with help from King Gorilla, who defied Phantom Limb due to his own issues with the Guild and The Monarch's reveal why he was framed (Phantom Limb getting with Dr. Girlfriend and trying to keep The Monarch out of the picture.)
- Heroic Sacrifice: Though threatened by the Guild, King Gorilla goes through with helping Monarch escape.
- Jail Bake: Phantom Limb sends his regards to King Gorilla by baking a "Tarzan" into a cake.
- Love Freak: King Gorilla's reason for helping The Monarch escape is how much The Monarch loves Dr. Girlfriend.
- Manly Gay: King Gorilla, who is muscular, aggressive and a would-be rapist.
- Not So Stoic: Triana's personality can normally be summed up with the word "whatever", but when Dr. Orpheus explains his plan to raise Hank and Dean from the dead, she completely freaks out and starts crying in terror that the boys will come back as zombies.
- Prison Rape: King Gorilla tries to rape The Monarch while in prison but can't get aroused because The Monarch's thin body is "too much like a girl."
- Sad-Times Montage: The episode opens with a montage of the characters looking depressed, Doc breaking down, fleeing the compound in the X-1, and then Brock tracking him through various exotic locales as Doc "finds himself". Unusually for most montages of this type, the accompanying music is an upbeat techno track, which undergoes a Diegetic Switch as Brock finally catches Doc at a rave.
- Shout-Out:
- Venture calls Brock's plan to reassemble him by putting his misplaced body parts back into the teleporter machine "just like that Jeff Goldblum movie."
- The song that plays during the intro is Everybody's Free (To Feel Good) by Rozalla. note
- The Monarch escaping prison through the sewers is a nod to The Shawshank Redemption.
- King Gorilla is based on Gorilla Grodd from The Flash, as well as fellow DC Comics villain Monsieur Mallah.
- King Gorilla is said to be serving a life sentence for eviscerating and then sodomizing Vince Neil on live TV.
King Gorilla: I only sodomized half of him! - Mr. Monday is based on Calendar Man, the Batman villain.
- When looking for the boys' souls, Orpheus has pictures of their faces on his hands like Mr. Dark does in "Something Wicked This Way Comes".
- Brock says the incomplete clones feel like giant "Stretch Armstrongs
" to him. - Early in the episodes, Rusty refers to JJ as "Twiki" and mimics Twiki's "biddi biddi biddi" expression.
- Dr. Orpheus claims that David Blaine, Evel Knievel, and Ronald Reagan were all clients of his.
- Sleep Learning: The boys get an education through their learning beds. It is also revealed that the beds record their memories for later implantation into clones when they die.
- Soulless Shell: It's made clear that the clones really are Hank and Dean, as Orpheus cannot find their souls in the afterlife because they went into the new clone bodies.
- Special Edition Title: The opening credits replace the deceased Hank and Dean with Rusty and Jonas Jr.
- Teleporter Accident: Leaves Rusty in pieces (though still alive). He is back to normal by the next episode.
- There Was a Door: Doctor Orpheus teleports through the lab's ceiling, covered in ectoplasm, much to Rusty's annoyance.Venture: "We have a door, Orpheus!"
- Took a Level in Kindness: JJ is much nicer than in his previous appearance, though he's still fairly smug.
- What the Hell, Hero?: Orpheus is rightly shocked and disgusted to find out that Rusty simply replaces Hank and Dean when they die with identical clones.
- William Telling: One set of Hank and Dean clones died trying to do this to each other simultaneously.
