There’s plenty of room in Archer’s sandbox for all sorts of sci-fi toys—the majority centering around Krieger’s resume, ranging from the marginally practical to the horrifying abominations that spit in God’s eye. But the show’s setting is, primarily, one based in the same “flexible” reality the 007 film series inhabits. Sterling Archer has absorbed an obscene amount of bullets and alcohol with no apparent lasting physical damage, with his brush with cancer being the only real threat to his mortality he’s faced (and his recovery during remission nothing short of supernatural). Other than the fact that Archer’s reality is slightly misaligned with our own in that the Cold War never really thawed, anything else too crazy to happen in Moonraker or The World is Not Enough is typically the result of the characters’ varying levels of mind-altering substance abuse. But “Nellis” goes ahead and opens up the show’s world—make that galaxy, I suppose—and I’m not sure the sandbox was ever built to those specs.
It’s a good opening act: Archer, having recently suffered Lana’s very badly thought out trial of his childcare skills, went on a particularly mad bender in Las Vegas, forcing him to call the office and demand they get him home. It’s not as simple as sending him a plane ticket, as his drunken insistence on getting into the pilot’s cabin permanently landed him on the No Fly List. So, Cheryl offers to send him a train ticket instead, but it turns out he’s not allowed on any of those, either. (“I had no idea there was a No Train List!”) Luckily for Archer, Cheryl’s family fortune includes at least one luxury jet (the Sky Tunt) that the entire staff (minus Lana and Malory) take advantage of to pick up Archer on their way to Branson. Archer assumes it has to do with
> Cherlene, Cheryl’s country music star alter ego from last season, but in an amusing development, it seems she’s blocked out all memory of that period. “It’s not just a country music festival,” enthuses Krieger, “there’s Tony Orlando… Charro…” Pam seems most excited about the appearance of Yakov Smirnoff, which makes sense, given her many “In Soviet Russia…” riffs.
Flying close to Area 51, the gang pesters Ray (who’s accruing some flight hours toward a pilot’s license. Good for him!) into moving closer so they can get a better view. Sterling, incredibly, is the sole voice of reason here, reminding them that—alien harboring conspiracies or no—it’s still an active, restricted military base with anti-aircraft ordinance. Naturally, their plane is shot down. Everyone survives (Ray’s a pretty damn great pilot, too, it seems!), but they’re immediately taken into custody, until Archer bluffs the officers by impersonating Slater and using his CIA credentials. It’s funny, and totally in line with what Archer might do just to piss off Slater and the gang (he makes them strip and tells them to pretend they’re his prisoners), but as we saw in previous episodes, his spy creds tend to already override at least conventional law enforcement, so it probably wasn’t necessary.