Review: Venture Bros. ‘Venture Libre’

This week’s episode of Venture Bros., ‘Venture Libre’, begins with Doctor Venture and the gang being dragged off to the middle of nowhere to fix one of the Doctor’s creations.  The creation in question, the almighty Venturestein, long absent from the show but finally back.  As it turns out, Venturestein’s stint with the military didn’t go so well and he disappeared into the jungle.  Now the military wants Doctor Venture to go bring him back into service.

So off they go, minus one Dean who decides that he doesn’t want to be doing the off-on-an-adventure thing any more.  Instead he stays behind and takes a crack and turning H.E.L.P.eR. back into the proud robot that he once was, minus the walking eye upgrades.

As usual, things go wrong from the start and the Doctor, Hank and Hatred crash into the jungle.  They are then hunted by a group of strange animal-human hybrids.  Hank ends up separated from the bunch and goes a little bit crazy after trying to subsist off of nothing but coffee beans.

Eventually, Doctor Venture and Hatred run into Venturestein who explains that all the mutant people hanging about are actually science experiments.  Apparently, the jungle is filled with mad scientists (a popular place to get your work done, I guess) and Venturestein helped liberate them from their bad science masters.  With his newfound comrades, Venturestein seeks to create a nation that embraces freaky science experiments gone wrong from all over the world.

But even though Venturestein is trying to be at peace with his creator, the rest of the mutants want nothing to do with it.  And so Hank must come to the rescue, in the guise of The Bat (and with a little help from his caffeine overdose).  Luckily for everyone involved, Hank is a bad-ass when he’s jacked up, kicking butt and taking names and becoming a demon of the jungle that all the mutant revolutionaries grow to fear.

This entry into the Venture Bros. isn’t the best, but it’s not the worst either.  It was fun to see Hank actually being as cool as he wants to be, a nice change from the usual tactic the show takes of making all the Ventures absolutely useless 95% of the time.  I hope to see more of Hank’s super hero identity in the future.

The other great thing about this episode was the countless references that are hanging out in the background.  Check out the scenes when they show the various science-mutants.  See how many you can recognize.  Renegade Oompa Loompas?  Check.  Human Centipede?  It’s there.

Though there were no great developments to suggest a grander story for the season, the episode still held to the Venture Bros. tradition.  Though Adult Swim appears to be screwed up and won’t let people watch the new episode unless they sign up for something (lame!), you can at least check out a preview of the episode.

Venture Libre courtesy of avclub.com