Review: Venture Bros. ‘The Devil’s Grip’

In last week’s episode of Venture Bros., poor Doctor Venture had a giant disco ball fall on his head.  This week, in “The Devil’s Grip”, he is presumed dead… sort of.  Hatred, telling Hank and Dean that their father is no more, decides to drug them up and drop them off in the care of new guardians.  In the meanwhile, he goes to hunt down the Doctor at the place he thinks him most likely to be - the cocoon of The Mighty Monarch.

In order to break into the cocoon, Hatred enlists the aid of Gary/21.  Ever since the loss of his place in S.P.H.I.N.X., poor Gary has resorted to camping out on Venture property like some sort of crazy mountain man.  Eager to get back into the game, he happily assists Hatred.

As it turns out, breaking into the cocoon is easy enough, although dealing with the malicious Moppets turns out to be a bit harder.  Hatred gets booted and Gary must take on the evil little henchman himself.  So how does he go about defeating them?  He lays the blame for the death of 24 on them, inciting a zombie-like retaliation from all the other henchmen, for a henchman to kill another henchman is a grave crime.

Of course, the Monarch really does have Venture, planning to torture him to a slow and painful death.  Now, the Monarch isn’t really the best at all this, so to be a supportive wife, Dr. Mrs. The Monarch threatens Venture, telling him that he needs to pretend to be in horrible agony or else she will give him some real pain.  And so the torture begins, complete with ridiculous costumes and less than effective techniques.  In the end, The Monarch gets fed up with it, choosing instead to release Venture.  What follows is a nice heart-to-heart between the two about their respective failures in life.

In the meanwhile, Hank gets put up with Action Man, trying to help the old guy score with an old lady at the retirement home, a lady that turns out to be Billy’s mom.  And Dean is stuck with Colonel Gentleman, helping him to organize his video tape collection and write his memoirs.  And Hatred comes back to save Venture, blowing a big-ass hole in The Monarch’s cocoon.

I was so happy to see Gary back as 21, wearing the black-and-yellow once again.  The highlight of this episode, however, had to be the torture routine.  We finally see what The Monarch can (or rather can not) do and get a glimpse into the nature of his relationship with Doctor Venture.  We also discover that Dean knows the dirty little secret about him and Hank being clones.  And Hank is super-cool with it, of course.

All-in-all, a fitting end to the half-season.  These last eight episodes have gotten steadily better and the way they wrapped it up was great.  There’s been character development, hilarity and general random chaos everywhere.  A great return to the Venture Bros. after so long a hiatus.  The only problem is - what the heck am I going to watch now??

To check out Venture Bros. online, as always you can head over to the Adult Swim website for episodes both past and present.

Photo Credits -           

Monarch and Venture courtesy of denofgeek.com