I’m going to say this has been a bit of a rebound week. Several of the shows I follow that have seemed rather out of sorts and somewhat off track have made unexpected and happy returns to form, more-or-less concurrently. We’ve got 30 Rock (Not a Science Fiction show), which made their first genuinely funny episode of the season, and we’ve got The Venture Brothers which generates a surprisingly sweet and reserved character-based piece that’s completely unlike anything else they’ve done this year. In fact, really, you could have stuck this in season 3 anywhere, and it would have fit.

Gah. This show is getting increasingly hard to review. On the one hand, after a very sketchy start to the season (by my admittedly subjective standards) this episode and “Return to Malice” have been damn fine returns to form. On the other hand, they’re giving more and more screen time to Sgt. Hatred and the attendant pedophilia jokes, which are simply disturbing, gross, and wrong, and not funny. And this week Billy gets raped. Has that ever been considered acceptable entertainment?

On the other hand, Bowie shows up again…

PLAY BY PLAY

I hate to be one of those people who say “This show isn’t as good as it used to be.” It’s typical for any poser to claim that it was funnier when it was young and raw, before everyone jumped on the bandwagon. The fact that that’s occasionally somewhat true just makes it all the more annoying, because no one likes a poser (Except other posers, it’s a kind of mating call, I expect), and a poser who managed to fall ass-backwards in to being right is damn irritating.

Before we begin, I want to point out that I love The Venture Brothers, and have from the first moment I saw it, three seasons and something like sixteen years ago. Despite their very slow production time, the show is one of those rare programs that appears to be telling jokes only *I* get, only aimed at *Me*, me, glorious me. Sure, some of the gags don’t work; sure sometimes it grosses me the hell out, but it’s a small price to pay for inflaming my solipsistic leanings.

That said, you know, I really didn’t *get* this episode.