Yeah, I tend to agree with you. I find myself missing the simpler times when it was just Rusty, Brock and the boys. Now the show is so sprawling and complicated – not helped by the elevation of many minor characters way beyond their worth, e.g. Hatred, Dermott (ugh), 21 (he was good at first but now I feel they have…

Not getting the praise for this episode, thought it was pretty average to be honest. Perhaps it's because I think Dermott is easily the worst character on the show, there's nothing redeemable about him whatever. And emo Dean is just going nowhere. Is emo even still a thing?

How awesome would this episode have been if it had just unfolded linearly… Instead they went with a hackneyed non-linear story structure which added not much at all, but did manage to take all the heat out of the action and destroy any tension. Boo.

A kid hits him in the face with a giant crayon (?) at that balls-in-the-air Little Ball Room place.

Things I didn't notice the first time #43770: When Lucille 2's writing out the $700,000 cheque for Michael, the previous cheque was for 'juice boxes' – $350.

I actually ended up kind of liking the one character focus if not just because we haven't seen these characters for so long and it was nice (maybe I get off on people being withholding?) to have to wait just that little bit longer to finally get to see where, say, Buster or Maeby ended up – and then to get a whole 30…

Eh, Wiig to me just seemed to have her Lucille Bluth dial turned up to eleventy – it was way too hammy. Jessica Walter is much more nuanced.

This season is a brilliant, if not flawed, experiment – a hot mess, if you will. As a commenter pointed out though on a previous thread, something similar has actually been tried before – the British comedy The League of Gentlemen had a similar format for its (also brilliant if not flawed) third season, albeit not on…

Heh, just noticed, George Michael getting multiple copies of Twister from his sex offender neighbours is also surely a reference to him previously getting multiple copies of Monopoly from Gob. So many things to catch on re-watch.

I really hope they don't do a movie because a movie really has to stand alone by itself to work and the amount of exposition required to explain who the characters are and what's happened would be, well… more than even in season 4.

Agreed, they were both execrable, especially Wiig. Weakest part of season 4. Only Walters can do Lucille.

Seinfeld already did the making a TV show inside a TV show thing so I was kind of hoping they'd drop that story line for season 4, but then I ended up kind of grateful for it because it got Michael away from some of the rather dire material in his first episode.

Yeah but The League of Gentlemen then went on to make a terrible movie… To quote Lucille, "this does not bode well…"

Well I'm seven episodes in and I'm really loving it. Some of the episodes aren't especially funny it's true, but I can forgive that because it's just great to be back with the characters again and I'm enjoying watching the interweaving story lines start to form a picture.

Exactly, the characters have become caricatures of themselves this season. Even ISIS itself has become a caricature – in previous seasons it was at least semi-competent whereas now it's almost totally inept, to the point where it's apparently world famous for its ineptitude.

Any enjoyment I might have got from this episode was smothered by the farts of a giant mastiff. Wow, a dog vomiting and farting over and over, hilarious!

Well I thought this episode was up there with the show's best. Yeah The Simpsons have done an Edison episode, but this was really original and creative – having a whole episode based on the re-enactment of electrocuting an elephant is pretty out there. I hadn't heard of Topsy before and the way they introduced it was…

I gave it an F.

Well, Malory has always been motivated by money, so the reveal that she was behind didn't bother me too much, although it was a pretty convoluted and unbelievable plan – surely Archer run-amok at the border would lead to border agents crawling all over. And if she's prepared to put that much effort into a ruse, why…

So I guess when you place the episodes back in order it's the episode from a couple of weeks ago that feels a bit like a rehash of this one. Both roughly go: Archer is a dick and screws up the mission and ends up being driven around in the desert looking for medical aid for his bite/wounds while he drinks/is…