Why an ‘Archer’ Bottle Episode Is One Of Jessica Walter’s Finest Half-Hours

The death of Jessica Walter on March 24 at the age of 80 has already sent many fans back through her extensive career to revisit her many highlights, ranging from her terrifying role in Play Misty for Me to her best moments as the iconic Lucille Bluth on Arrested Development. Those are certainly worthy places to start a personal tribute to the legendary actress, but my Jessica Walter comfort food of choice turned out to be Archer (streaming on Hulu), and when I began revisiting her work on Adam Reed’s action-comedy series I found, once again, an actress who made just as much of an impression doing voiceover work as she did during her live-action triumphs. 

As with all of her other work, there’s no such thing as a bad or lackluster Jessica Walter performance in any of Archer‘s many eras, but if you’re looking for the perfect encapsulation of her gift and how it enhanced the show week after week, you probably won’t ever do better than “Lo Scandalo,” a Season 3 episode that highlights the rich and often dark inner life of her character like the show never had before, and gives Walter a chance to play a whole range of comedic subtleties over the course of a single half hour. 

Walter’s character, the acid-tongued Malory Archer, has always been a central piece of the Archer ensemble, and not just because she’s the title character’s mother. From the early days of the series, Reed and company realized that Walter was just too talented to wall off into singular roles like The Boss or The Dysfunctional Mom, and so Malory became more. If her son Sterling (H. Jon Benjamin) was an over-the-top parody of the gentleman spy, then Malory was an equally potent parody of the jaded espionage veteran, a woman who’s seen and done it all and is rarely impressed or even shocked by anything. This juxtaposition between mother and son creates one of the most fertile running threads on the show, as Sterling and Malory’s relationship rides the constant wave of secrets that they always end up revealing to each other no matter how hard they try to avoid it. 

Which brings us to “Lo Scandalo,” an episode that takes place entirely in Malory’s upscale New York apartment and centers on a secret she’s kept for decades. What starts with a dead body in bondage gear quickly expands in classic Archer fashion, until eventually the entire ISIS crew packs into the apartment for a “dinner party,” Malory’s left to deal with a nosy detective, and Sterling realizes that his mother has been sleeping with an Italian politician for literal decades out of pure spite, biding her time until she could conduct a vengeance killing. 

“Lo Scandalo” is far from the first time Archer chose to dig deep into Malory’s romantic past (a running joke in the early years of the series is that the ISIS crew is always going on missions to steal back her sex tapes), but it is the first time the entire cast devotes an entire story to literally stepping into her strange world, with its secrets and its long-held grudges and its sardonic approach to the life of a spy. That means that Walter gets to really explore the space of her character like never before, in part because the central tension of the episode turns out to be not what happened but why. 

As the episode begins, she’s shell-shocked and panicked, but still manages to land a few verbal barbs even as her son prods her for the strange way in which she seems to be handling the rather brutal situation. Then the clown car of ISIS employees starts to pile in, and she morphs a bit more into Workplace Malory, condescending and exasperated and a little bit racist. By the end of the episode, as Sterling and Lana are piecing together what really happened and Archer realizes that even he underestimated the lengths his mother would go to in order to win a dispute, she gets a funny, biting, and even moving monologue that explains how the episode came to be in the first place. The zany setup turns out to be little more than a framework to let loose a breathtaking spectrum of characterization from Walter, all delivered in that classic, elegantly venomous voice of hers, and it plays now as a towering monument to her talent. Only Jessica Walter could make a cartoon episode about a weird sex murder turned chaotic dinner party this compelling.

Matthew Jackson is a pop culture writer and nerd-for-hire whose work has appeared at Syfy Wire, Mental Floss, Looper, Playboy, and Uproxx, among others. He lives in Austin, Texas, and he’s always counting the days until Christmas. Find him on Twitter: @awalrusdarkly.

Watch Archer Season 3 Episode 8 ("Lo Scandalo") on Hulu