Archer is clinically insane. The countless traumas heaped on him by his mother as he grew up, coupled with the stress of his work as a spy, and compounded by multiple brain injuries (including two cases of meatball surgery, a mind-control chip, and Woodhouse admitting to knocking him out-cold "three or four times a year") has gradually pushed him to further and further extremes of disassociation with reality, up to the point where he has a two-month-long retrograde amnesia episode at the start of the fourth season, where he thinks he's Bob.
In a flashback we see a young Archer being shuffled out of a child psychiatrist's office by an outraged Malory, calling the doctor a quack, possibly implying that she or Woodhouse noticed something was off about him, but when the doctor said it might be autism, she angrily refused the idea outright. (He also can't figure out a simple shape-sorter game at what we assume is at least 5 years old, going by the details of his birth revealed in ''The Double Deuce").
Archer's conversation with Ray in "Archer Vice: The Rules of Extraction" may or may not point to him being suicidally depressed.
Ray: How long will it take you, Archer, to admit that you dick around every time we're in danger, just to screw with everybody, because of your complete - no, your utter contempt for your own mortality?! Archer: I mean, yeah. Duh.
In "Training Day" Archer hints at being depressed.
Archer: Happy, Cyril? Cyril: No! No, I'm not happy! Archer: Well, guess what? Me neither! I mean, big picture, I wouldn't say I'm a happy person.
Is Archer just a gigantic entitled douchebag who picks on Cyril just because Cyril's meek? Or does Archer's bullying of, and general bad attitude towards, Cyril, stem from Archer's own self-loathing? Archer, like many people in similar situations, ultimately blames himself for his own awful adolescence - his apparent friendlessness due to having been moved to several boarding schools over the years, his mother's constant drinking and overpowering control-freak tendencies in Archer's life and decisions despite a general neglect for her son's actual mental and emotional well-being, the extremely violent bullying he endured, and especially the father he never knew who (in Archer's mind) must not have loved him and stayed away because of Archer. Cyril is a reflection of how Archer used to be as a child - timid, naïve, and otherwise happy - and as a result, all the anger Archer feels towards himself and his own childhood is projected onto Cyril. Or Archer's just a giant dickhole. Y'know, whichever.
Or, is Archer actually trying to connect with Cyril as a friend on a real emotional level, but his extremely dysfunctional upbringing combined with his potential unnamed mental disorder means that the only way he can try and emotionally bond with him is through what Cyril (fairly correctly) characterizes as bullying?
Did Archer know Cyril was a Jerkass all along, or did the constant bullying drive Cyril to that?
Did Archer ever cheat on Lana or was it just a combination her insecurities about her looks and Never My Fault tendencies projected on to him. In season 7 while Archer was attracted to Veronica Deane (as was everyone else) that was it. He only kissed her after seeing Lana tried an Operation: Jealousy after seeing the two having a business conversation. Then later after torturing Archer to find out if he had feelings for her and refused to accept no for an answer. This caused her to break up with Archer (take a break) only to perform Operation: Jealousy again. Archer’s responded by sleeping with Veronica.
Archer openly admitted to cheating on Lana a bunch, e.g. in the fallout of Cyril's infidelity. One of the more recent series as well has a flashback to how Lana knew Archer cheated on her featuring a shitfaced Archer bringing a woman home with him, not remembering that Lana was staying at his. Like, she didn't walk in on him cheating, he walked in on her, while cheating. But that's not to say that Lana's insecurities and tendency to get very Lana about things didn't essentially goad him into some of the instances.
Cheryl/Carol is actually a sensitive woobie who's afraid of alienating other people with her wealth, and she keeps working at ISIS because her coworkers are her only close friends. The woman's worth millions, so she obviously doesn't need the paycheck. And before she revealed her wealth to them she had probably been at ISIS for at least a few years, but the others didn't find out about her family until late in Season 2. Considering how open she usually is about personal stuff (like her weird fetishes) it seems a little odd that she kept that little detail to herself for so long. Maybe she was afraid of losing her only real friendships.
She kept secrets from her coworkers and had an alias (she went by Cheryl Gimple) as a way of preventing people from finding out she was a 'Tunt' heiress, (she is in fact worth half a billion) so she could live a 'normal' life. Once she revealed her identity, this was no longer possible, and she unravelled over the following seasons. This is all part of her arc: mysterious and a little weird, to out-and-out headcase eg. "You're not my supervisor!"
Alternatively, given Cheryl/Carol's statements about thriving on hatred for those around her (saying it's the only reason she gets out of bed in the morning in the season four premier) and her admission to Sterling that she's aroused not only by physical but also emotional abuse, hanging out with the violent, dysfunctional ISIS crew might be a pleasurable experience for her. When she revealed that she was loaded everyone treated her more favourably and less like a lowly secretary which coincided with her becoming more taunting and mean because she wasn't getting the abuse she craved from them.
Yes, she no longer gets the same abuse for being a weird nobody, but these statements and increased dysfunction - as well as her emotional sadism - are later developments (devolution) of her character. She unravels due to her rubber cement addiction and her general insanity increases due to the fact that a 'normal' life is no longer possible for her. She hints heavily that her family had incestuous tendencies, so a lot of her pathologies can be explained by her family background and thus provide another reason to want to distance herself from it, and its traumatic grip over her life. Her brother Cecil is no sane fellow by all accounts.
The ISIS crew in season 6, did they really fail every mission given to them? Or was Holly and Slater setting them up for failure the entire time? Fans tend to go with the latter due to fact that Holly and Slater are very vocal about how they feel the ISIS agents are incompetent and unskilled but repeatedly give them extremely important assignments and use plans that suffer from Complexity Addiction. Lana even argues this in the season finale. To cap it off, Holly and Slater only hired ISIS to begin with because they were being blackmailed by Malory, giving them reasonable motives to find an excuse to get rid of them.
Archer is in love with Pam, not Lana. He has the best relationship with Pam out of anyone else in the cast, to the point where he admits she probably his best friend, and she gave him what he considers the best sex of his life. Meanwhile, his relationship with Lana is increasingly toxic and hostile. What's more, in Dreamland and Danger Island, Pam always takes a prominent role in Archer's coma hallucinations while Lana only occasionally interacts with him. At one point in Danger Island, Archer even muses on the possibility of marrying Pam, much to her mockery. Meanwhile in the same season, Archer admits that his infatuation with Lana is superficial rather than romantic.
Did the crew really become better more ethical people because Archer was in a coma for three years? Or is because Malory spent those three basically living in Archer's hospital room? Given Malory's methods of running the business, it would be much easier to turn the agency around if she wasn't running it. And if it is a mixture of both, which was the bigger factor?
Did Cyril really regress back into a wuss because of Archer's return or is it an extension of the emotional break down he had after he found out the robot factory guard he killed in cold blood had children? The next episode supports this a little with Cyril wanting to focus back on office work instead of going on missions.
Were the crew better people while Archer was in his coma or were they really just pretending everything was fine? Given how no one said anything about Cyril using all the space in the office fridge until Archer brought it up, how Cheryl pretty much immediately gave up on being her new self, and how Lana doesn't know much about her husband of two years and has nothing in common with him, everything clearly wasn't as perfect as they claim it was.
Archer himself puts out another theory in the season 11 finale. That instead of actually becoming better people, the crew secretly wanted an excuse to act like their worst selves and just didn't have a good one until Archer came back. Given their reactions to this idea, Archer seems to be onto something.
Tbh that would make a sort of sense. The shock of Archer ending up in a coma could have been a wakeup call for them to all try and make changes in their lives, to better themselves, but after three years of that? They were all basically desperate for any excuse to go back to their old ways.
