What Goes Down, Must Come Up

Infobox Television episode
Title=What Goes Down, Must Come Up
Series=The Venture Bros.
Season=3
Episode=33
Airdate=13 July 2008
Writer= Jackson Publick
Director=Jackson Publick


Caption = "I think I've got something! Maybe it's all... just a dream?"
Production = 3-33
Prev=Dr. Quymn, Medicine Woman
Next=Tears of a Sea Cow

What Goes Down, Must Come Up is the 33^rd episode of "The Venture Bros." and is part of Season 3.

Plot

The episode begins as Dr. Venture and Brock are in the Venture Compound Hangar, renovating an excavation vehicle left behind by Jonas Venture Senior -- it is a large metal car on treads, with a gigantic drill bit on the front. While Brock is driving the vehicle out of a garage, Dr. Venture falls through a pair of ancient doors, which the vehicle then falls partly into. Topside, the vehicle has completely blocked any access below, so Brock descends through a nearby door, which is nearly rusted shut.

Oddly, the basement of the Venture Compound is largely abandoned and unexplored. Brock and Dr. Venture quickly get lost in the labyrinthine sublevel, despite being in close proximity originally. Dr. Venture finds all the watch communicators are dead, but suddenly encounters a wild man similar in appearance to Keith Flint in The Prodigy's Firestarter music video.

Meanwhile, Brock has entered a darkened control room, and is instantly attacked by a six-inch tall man wielding a needle. Almost immediately, the door closes, trapping Brock inside the darkened room.

Topside, Hank and Dean have become suspicious of Brock and Dr. Venture's disappearance, and go into the Hangar to investigate. Being too afraid of the basement to descend and seek out the missing duo, they instead consult Dr. Orpheus for help, who in turn summons the other members of The Order of the Triad (much to their annoyance) with a chant that follow the same rhyming pattern as the Green Lantern's oath.

Down in the control room, Brock manages to restore power and illuminate the room. The tiny man turns out to be Dr. Entmann, Dr. Venture Senior's onetime employee who has been trapped in the room for the last 30 years, barely surviving and fighting off marauding ants. Dr. Venture manages to establish communication with Brock via emergency wall phones, until he is captured by more subterranean lurkers -- a little girl and three men in suits (dressed as The Art of Noise).

The Triad descends into the basement to find Brock and Dr. Venture. By combining their powers, they enable Orpheus to use telepathy to locate the missing men. He establishes that they are safe, and begins to locate them, until all members of the Triad receive a horrible vision of a pixelated female face alternating with a demonic face. Terrified, the Triad retreats back to the surface. They remark on the horror of the experience, and how they can still smell sulfur (associated with hell and the underworld) but Dean points out that it is just that Jefferson Twilight has lost bowel control. Doctor Orpheus goes to seek counsel with his master, but not before admitting that he's excluding the other Triad members because The Alchemist is gay---and Jefferson has soiled himself.

Orpheus' master instructs him to call "tech support," which in this case is Pete White. White uses the video recordings in a room previously unknown to Hank and Dean, used to see all over the compound. He locates where Brock entered the basement but can't see further. Working underneath the console to fix this, the boys inadvertently bring the master computer, "M.U.T.H.E.R.," online. M.U.T.H.E.R. is a HAL-like computer that shows the same computerized feminine face that spooked the Triad. The computer instantly demands to speak to Dr. Jonas Venture Senior, and Dr. Entmann is terrified, telling Brock that this computer is completely irrational and dangerous.

Doctor Orpheus and the Triad come to visit White and the boys with pizza roll snacks. Upon seeing the pixelated facial representation of M.U.T.H.E.R., they immediately recognize it as the face from their terrible vision. M.U.T.H.E.R. now threatens to launch a nuclear missile if Dr. Venture senior is not presented. At this point it/she begins dialing up via modem. Pete White maintains optimism since the phone lines are old and the mainframe must be based from reel-to-reel tapes.

At this time, Thaddeus is brought into a large room filled with hordes of subterranean dwellers, all wearing tattered new wave garb and costumes. They all refer to themselves as "Rusty," and worship a loop of Doctor Venture Senior's edu-bed lessons on personal hygiene. Dr. Venture, fed up over this nonsense, takes away the punchcard, and demands the dwellers take him topside, immediately. Instead, they set upon him. Around this time the Order of the Triad sets out in the drill vehicle to rescue Brock and Dr. Venture, and succeed in breaking into the control room where Brock and Dr. Entmann have been holed up.

Meanwhile, Dr. Venture flees from the outraged horde. He stumbles upon a silo holding a nuclear missile and climbs to the top. The missile is launched by M.U.T.H.E.R. while Thaddeus haplessly holds on. Everyone watches the missile's emergence from the Venture Compound Command Console, helpless to stop it. However, seconds after it lifts off, the missile harmlessly plummets back to the earth and lands, unexploded, on the compound lawn to reveal Dr. Venture covered in human excrement. The basement dwellers have corrupted the missile's structural integrity through thirty years of using it as a toilet, rendering it inoperable.

Later, Dr. Venture is bolting the bay doors closed, and explains to Pete White that the subterranean area was an abandoned bomb shelter. In 1978, Dr. Venture Senior conducted a guided tour for orphans who were members of the Rusty Venture Fan Club. During the tour, M.U.T.H.E.R. went crazy and filled the shelter with mood-enhancing, presumably psychedelic gas. Jonas and M.U.T.H.E.R had gotten into an argument about how to treat the "survivors" living in the bomb shelter: Jonas felt that in the event of nuclear war, the survivors would be too depressed to continue functioning as a society, so he wanted to flood the shelter with low levels of hallucinogens for the first few days after its activation to try to medicate the survivors. However, M.U.T.H.E.R. angrily disagreed with this; Dr. Entmann explains that her response was comparable to "when your parents catch you smoking, and they make you smoke the whole freakin' pack as punishment": during the tour of the shelter Jonas was leading, M.U.T.H.E.R. released a massive overdose of hallucinogens into the bomb shelter. Jonas Venture led his team mates out in a hurried escape, abandoning the children. Over the next thirty years, the children grew up and "de-evolved" as a combined result of the hallucinogenic gas, and their only source of contact with the outside world coming through transmissions of "VH1 Classic" they picked up due to a wiring error with Dr. Venture's cable hookup.

Meanwhile, Brock and Dr. Entmann present M.U.T.H.E.R. with Dr. Venture Senior -- as best they can -- by playing the personal hygiene punchcard lesson for her.

Production notes

* One of the animation directors (Kimson Albert) has a "nickname" inserted into his credits. The nickname is an unusual line or word from the preceding episode. For "What Goes Down, Must Come Up" the credit reads Kimson "Blacktion" Albert.

*M.U.T.H.E.R.'s voice is credited as 'Herself'.

References