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Top Ten Episodes of The Venture Bros.

9. The Better Man

THE BETTER MAN

We hit the ground running in “The Better Man”, as the Triad nemesis Torrid, the Aussie firebrand with an air of Mephistopheles, opens up the second world, bringing Cthulhu into ours as a severely underpowered Order of the Triad serves as a tissue-paper thick line of defense

The Order does about as well as you would expect a guy in golf shoes to fair against an Elder God. It is only at the intervention of the Outrider, the former pupil of Dr. Orpheus who stole his wife, that saves The Order of the Triad from tentacle-filled death worthy of a 21 and up manga.

This humiliating rescue makes the Order want to grind their proverbial magic level up, with Orpheus getting into a round of who’s got the bigger bag of holding by focusing on how to travel through Hell itself.

Other highlights include actual character development for Dean, and H. Jon Benjamin returning as the shape-shifting Master, whose Freudian, subconsciously stupefying lessons get exponentially weirder with each appearance.

It’s an episode that just seethes with the gothic, Aleister Crowleyian antics, and gallows humor so dark it could fit into a Bastille Day symposium. For a show that revolves around science, it’s refreshing to get something literally magical.

 

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Chris Davidson