'Archer' Season 6, Episode 1: 'The Holdout' Recap

First off, let's pour one out for ISIS...the good ISIS, the one run by Mallory Archer that is no more. In the season 6 premiere of "Archer" the show's creators made good on their promise to change the name of the show's spy agency, and all we saw of ISIS was a glimpse of the old logo being rolled away.

It's not so much that ISIS changed names as it became a different entity entirely: after the old office blew up in the events of last season's "Archer: Vice" storyline, the agency has merged into the CIA. That's right. Sterling Archer is now a government employee.

He's also a father, as we learned at the very end of last season. That baby that Lana was carrying is Archer's, but Archer doesn't seem to be adjusting well to fatherhood. In this season opener, our first look at the super-spy has him waking up with a wicked hangover thanks to some cobra whiskey, a rather infected-looking ear piercing, and couple of "ladyboy prostitutes" in the bathroom.

Archer has been on a bender for about six weeks, and Lana is pissed that he's neglecting the chance to involve himself in his daughter's life. That's Archer's emotional journey in this episode: realizing that he has a chance to be a good father (scratch that...a decent or at least relatively present father) and making the choice to be there.

He goes on that emotional journey via a new mission, his first as a CIA operative: Archer must parachute into a rebel-controlled island in the Pacific, find a computer on a crashed U.S. plane, then blow up the remains of the crash.

When Archer arrives (via a cargo plane instead of the usual private jet, gasp), he's almost immediately ambushed by an elderly Japanese soldier...from WWII.

This soldier, Sato, has been on the island since 1942, and has no idea that the Allies won the war and that it's all over. He doesn't know about a lot of stuff that Archer, in a fun stretch of dialogue, attempts to explain: smartphones, personal computers, astronauts and, horrifyingly, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This character is based on actual figures in history, as Japanese soldiers during WWII were so stubborn in their refusal to surrender that some remained on isolated islands for years and years after the end of the war, only to return to Japan years later to a completely changed world.

Sato ends up being the voice of morality, if not reason, when he and Archer bond and Archer relates his inability to return home and get to know baby Abijean. Sato has dreamed for years of returning home to see his wife and daughter, and Archer has that chance...but he is indeed a "dickhole," as Sato says.

There's surprising emotional punch to Sato's character. Watching him discover what happened with the atomic bomb is a reminder of the horrific way the war ended, and his call to his wife even made Archer shed a tear (and fire on some CIA agents).

The good thing here is that, despite the events of last season that have carried over to this one, nothing has really changed. Archer is still Archer despite his new fatherhood, and even the offices of the Agency Formerly Known As ISIS (we need a symbol for that) are literally exactly the same, thanks to the work of Cheryl/Carol, Krieger and Pam, who not only recreated the entire office exactly as it was before, but also put in an elaborate hologram to make Mallory think for a beautfiul moment that she actually had an office that reflected her high standards and exceptional taste.

Oh, and speaking of Krieger, he failed to remember Pam's name when the two shared their Japanese bath house moment, so signs are pointing to this being a Krieger clone and not the one we know and love, a point that was left open-ended at the end of last season.

Ultimately, though this wasn't the most laugh-heavy episode of "Archer" ever made, it transitioned us nicely into this "un-reboot," as the show's creators put it. We have high hopes that this will be one of the best seasons of "Archer" yet.