When Archer's pilot episode debuted in 2009, the show seemed like a generic James Bond knockoff. Each episode followed the antics of the show's titular, Sterling Archer, the world's greatest secret agent who also happened to be a pathetic drunken chauvinist. While the premise seemed perfect for dumb humor, the show had some of the smartest dialogue on TV.
In fact, the entirety of Archer is incredibly smart. While it has struggled to keep fans' attention in later seasons, the series constantly invokes literary references while playing around with genre tropes. It is basically a love letter to the fictional works that inspired it. With that in mind, here are ten obscure literary references in Archer that audiences missed.
Bel Panto
"Bel Panto" is a two-part episode in the show's seventh season. The episode's name is a literary allusion to a novel by Ann Patchett, Bel Canto.
Both the novel and the episode have a plot involving a hostage crisis. In both the novel (based on the real-life hostage crisis of the Japanese Embassy of Peru in the '90s) and in the episode, the hostages taken are mostly wealthy. In what may be a dig at the novel's armed criminals, Archer depicts the criminals as wearing clown masks.
Emile Gorgonzola Burger
The actor H. Jon Benjamin is the voice of both Sterling Archer and Bob Belcher, the protagonist of Bob's Burgers. This resulted in an episode of Archer in which the superspy Sterling had lost his memory to amnesia and was working as the cook at a burger joint under the name "Bob," even having a family resembling the characters in Bob's Burgers.
The specialty burger of the day was the Emile Gorgonzola Burger, a reference to the 19th Century French novelist Emile Zola, who was known in his life for his Naturalist style.
Pantagruel
In the episode "Waxing Gibbous," Archer references an encounter with Frankenstein. Cheryl Vandertunt is present, and corrects him, saying that Frankenstein was not the creature but was in fact the name of the mad scientist who built him. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is the first work of science fiction, but it is also not an obscure reference. Then Cheryl tells Archer that a better monster to reference would be Pantagruel.
Pantagruel is a giant, one of the titular characters of a series of five French novels from the sixteenth century, The Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel, written by Francois Rabelais.
Lenny's Rabbit
In John Steinbeck's novel Of Mice and Men, one of the two main characters is Lenny, a large man with incredible strength but whose cognitive abilities are impacted by a significant developmental disability. At one point in the book, Lenny is petting a rabbit but accidentally kills it, not knowing his own strength.
When Len Trexler, the head of the rival spy agency, is permanently brain damaged by Krieger, he asks for a rabbit to pet. In the episode "Archub Y Morfilod," Lana calls two Welsh terrorists "George and Lenny." The two are being pursued by British agents and want to run, which is to say, they want to rabbit.
Emily Post and the Hooker
In the opening scene of the episode "Blood Test," Sterling enters his mother's office to find the sex worker Trinette waiting for him alongside his mother. Trinette gets angry at Sterling for not calling her, which his mother makes worse by demanding to know where his manners are.
In response, Sterling says he "skipped the Emily Post chapter about how to introduce your mother to a hooker." Emily Post was an author who wrote about good manners in the late 19th and early 20th Century. To put it politely, her sense of traditional etiquette did not make allowances for sex workers.
Mithril
There are a number of references to J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings throughout the series. The techie at ISIS is known as Bilbo. In the episode "Archub Y Morfild," Lana wakes up from having been drugged unconscious, and upon seeing she is in the Welsh countryside, she asks whether she is in the Shire.
The best, and most obscurely specific, reference to Tolkien is in the third season in the second part of the episode "Space Race," when one of the scientists aboard the space station describes a door as being made "some alloy of adamantium and mithril." In another multi-layered invocation of the fantasy metal, Bilbo even mentions mithril armor to Conway Stern. While characters and places like Bilbo and The Shire are not too obscure of references, mithril, a metal used by dwarves, is likely something only diehard Lord of the Rings fans would notice.
Harry Hole
One of the FBI agents in the fifth season episode "White Elephant" is named Agent Hawley. Like many references in the show, this one is is a throwback to detective fiction, in this case, specifically invoking the name of Detective Harry Hole, a character created by the Norwegian author Jo Nesbo.
Interestingly, Detective Hole shares a number of traits with Sterling, including an estranged relationship with his father, a family history of cancer, and a history of working with the FBI.
Jacques Cousteau
The episode "Live and Let Dine" takes its title from the James Bond novel/film Live and Let Die, but it is filled with many more literary references. At one point, the episode invokes the French explorer Jacques Cousteau, who wrote the book The Silent World: A Story of Undersea Discovery and Adventure.
In the episode "Sea Tunt," Archer also calls Cheryl's brother Cecil "Jacques Cousteau."
"Stay Gold, Ponyboy"
In the second half of the two-part episode "Bel Panto," Pam tells someone "Stay gold, Ponyboy." This is a reference to the novel The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton.
The Outsiders deals with class struggles, which is a nice detail for an episode in which the super-rich of Hollywood are being robbed and the lowest-paid characters are forced to dress as servants to go undercover.
Silva Browne
"Vision Quest" is one of the more uncomfortably awkward episodes of the series. The plot revolves around the main characters all being locked in a broken elevator together.
At one point, Cheryl mentions having psychic abilities. Archer likens her to Silva Brown, an author who also claimed to be psychic. Despite being an idiot a lot of the time, Sterling is incredibly well-read.