Part 2: Archer's Five Seasons of Grief

PART 2

Archer's Five Seasons of Grief

If you accept that Sterling has been in a coma for the past five seasons, then you might be wondering how long this can continue on. Will he be in a coma indefinitely? What will happen next? In order to determine what comes next, it is important to realize why there have been five seasons of him in a coma in the first place. The last five seasons have been about Sterling coming to terms with his fate, with each season of Archer representing a different stage in the five stages of grief.

Season 5—Denial

Season 5 starts a series of impossible things that would make sense if they were all created by Sterling’s comatose mind. In the season 5 opening episode their headquarters being blown up, the spy agency being disbanded by the F.B.I., and the team moving into Cheryl’s house after losing all their respective properties to the C.I.A. and becoming a drug cartel. The impossible scenarios continue on from there: Sterling defeats the Yakuza single handedly (“A Debt of Honor” S5:E3), he meets his favorite music idol Kenny Loggins (“Baby Shower” S5:E6), Pam loses weight due to cocaine use (“House Call” S5:E4) and Sterling tells her he liked her better before (“Southbound and Down” S5:E5), Sterling learns all the complications of pregnancy (“House Calls” S5:E4) and becomes a doula (“Arrivals/Departures” S5:E13), Sterling survives swimming in a river full of alligators—one of his biggest fears (“Rules of Extraction” S5:E8), and he is the father of Lana’s baby (“Arrivals/Departures” S5:E13).

Yet despite all of these impossible things happening, Sterling never seems to have any doubt, until the final episode when he asks Lana if he's been in a coma for the entire season. 

This realization seems to move Sterling into the next stage of grief: anger.

Season 6—Anger

When the season 6 starts, it’s as if someone hit reset—the team is back in the old headquarters (which looks exactly the same as it did pre-explosion), the government is letting them be spies again, Pam is back to her usual weight, Ray is able to walk (again again), Sterling is back to living in his apartment albeit sans Woodhouse who Sterling says he has not seen in a few weeks. 

And again, impossible (or at least improbable) things that Sterling would want to happen start happening again: Sterling survives an avalanche (“The Archer Sanction” S6:E3), the C.I.A. makes Lana’s parents millionaires (“The Kanes” S6:E8), Lana and Sterling get back together (“Pocket Listing” S6:E9), Sterling saves Pam from a cyborg—another of Sterling’s biggest fears (“Edie’s Wedding” S6:E4), he expresses concern for who will take care of the baby if something happens to him and Lana (“The Holdout” S6:E1), he survives being shot in the back (“Three to Tango” S6:E2), the team goes to Area 51 and steal a plane from the air force (“Nellis” S6:E6), and in the finale the team gets shrunk down and injected into a human body (“Drastic Voyage” S6:E12 & S6:E13). 

But arguably in addition to improbable occurrences, the running theme through this season is anger, even more so than the other seasons. For example, Lana and Sterling get back together during an argument (“Pocket Listing” S6:E9), the rest of the team get angry at Sterling and Lana’s public displays of affection and try to break them up (“Reignition Sequence” S6:E10), and Lana spends all of “Achub y Morfilod” (S6:E11) angry at Sterling over a misunderstanding.

This season also includes the episode “Sitting” (S6:E6), when Sterling and the baby are taken hostage by a Pakistani intelligence officer. When Sterling gets the baby to safety and gains the upper hand with the hostage-taker, he unleashes all of his inner anger, saying “until this minute, my default setting has been ‘half-ass’ But that was before I had a child (…) So imagine, as I literally beat you to death (…) that a giant hand has turned my dial from ‘half-ass’ to ‘quadruple-ass.’”

But, by the end of the season, Sterling is comforting Lana, telling her when she is nervous on a mission that everything is going to be ok. Because at the end of the day, all that matters to Sterling is that everyone he loves is ok.

Season 7—Bargaining

Again, it’s as if someone hits reset at the start of season 7; now the team is a detective agency headed up by Cyril in California. And again, impossible things that Sterling would want to happen—like Sterling seeing his high school bullies violently killed (“Deadly Prep” S7:E3) and having sex with his favorite actress—start happening. 

But many episodes of this season is also focused on Sterling seeing that everyone is able to take care of themselves, without Sterling's help: the team saves Archer and Lana from a biker gang (“The Handoff” S7:E2), Malory saves herself after being kidnapped (“Motherless Child” S7:E4), Pam and Lana escape from the kidnapper clowns (“Bel Panto Part 1” S7:E5), Kreiger reveals he has made replacement robot-clones of everyone (“Liquid Lunch” S7:E7) providing replacements should anything happen to anyone.

Seeing that everyone will be able to take care of themselves without him allows Sterling to move on to the next stage of grief: depression.

Season 8 Archer: Dreamland—Depression

This entire season is clearly about depression. It starts with Mallory and Lana in Sterling's hospital room, visiting the comatose Sterling after Woodhouse's funeral. The rest of the season is about Sterling mourning the loss of his partner, Woodhouse, who ran a detective agency with him in the 1940s scenario in his mind. In addition, Dutch, a.k.a. Barry, mourns the loss of his legs, while Krieger mourns the loss of his cyborg dogs, and at the end of the season, Sterling mourns the loss of Lana, while Pam mourns the loss of the Chinese women. 

When the depression finally ends, and Sterling visits Woodhouse's grave, he tells Woodhouse he'll see him soon, implying he know he will die. This is a move toward acceptance of his fate.

Season 9 Archer: Danger Island—Acceptance

In season 9, Sterling seems to have come to terms with his fate, and he's doing it in style. He models this season loosely on his time as the pirate king in season 3. He models himself on Rip Riley, from the eye patch to the Loosey Goosey seaplane which runs out of gas. In fact, in both cases a passenger puts the wheels down on the failing plane, so that it cannot make a safe water landing. 

The seasons even open the same, with Sterling talking to a newlywed redhead who he has just bedded while on her honeymoon (“Heart of Archness” S3:E1 and “Strange Pilot” S9:E1). He even spends time with parrots in both storylines and has Noah as a translator. 

But more importantly, he shows this by repeatedly sacrificed himself for others, from letting everyone else parachute out of the failing airplane while he stays behind in episode 1, to the end of the final episode, when he jumps onto Cyril knocking them both off of the edge and into the ravine filled with lava. A death which he cannot reason away or avoid.

Which brings us to...

Season 10 Archer: 1999—???

So what does this mean for season 10? It seems, based on the five stages of grief, that Sterling should have died at the end of season 9, yet the teaser for the upcoming seasons shows that he is still (in some form or another) alive. Even Sterling seems surprised to wake up in the spaceship, saying "Oh for the—come on, seriously? What, you couldn't find a snow globe?" This is a reference to the famous ending of Citizen Kane, when Charles Kane dies holding a snow globe. Clearly, from this reaction, Sterling thought he would be dead by this point as well.

It could be that the entire season will be about the ultimate death of Sterling, much in the same way that each of the previous five seasons were about the stages of grief. This would make sense since show creator Adam Reed has stated that he always had in mind that Archer would be a ten-season story arc. But recent reports have suggested that the show might go on, which clearly would be difficult if the titular character died.

If the show does go on, it seems much more likely that at the end of the season Sterling will come out of the coma. And at that point, life could continue on. It is impossible to say, after all, how long he has been in a coma—it could have been a few weeks or a few years. Either way, once Sterling has rejoined the living, it will be interesting to see how his time in his mind will have affected his views on life, his friends, and his family.