Well, The Venture Brothers is back in full-on offensive mode after last week’s palate cleansing, unexpectedly sweet episode. This is also the mid-season finale (I hate those!) for thesixteen-episode fourth season. The show’ll be back in a few months.

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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…

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Sorry for the delay in the review, but for some reason my DVR will *NOT* record this damn show. It’s recorded the season premier twice now, the second episode not at all, the third episode, and not this one. I don’t know what the hell is wrong with it, but of course this results in me shooting my blood pressure through the roof, and having to find some other source for the episodes, which is surprisingly time-consuming, because Adult Swim doesn’t post ‘em online immediately after they air anymore, for some dam fool reason. Also, irritatingly, the site is running all wonky today.

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.

After last week’s disappointing and needlessly confusing season premier, my first impression of this episode was “Oh, thank God! They’re back to normal!” My second thought was “Oh, God, no! Not more child molester jokes!” My third impression was essentially to vacillate back and forth between my first two impressions, with “Oh, God, no!” winning out around halfway through.