Duchess is the world’s most notorious animated secret agent. He’s also almost completely invincible. He’s been shot several times, bitten by deadly snakes, drowned, captured by pirates and survived cancer – yet still has no reasonable understanding of his own mortality.

In the final episode of season six – in which the intelligence agency ISIS are shrunk and injected into a man’s body to perform miniature life saving surgery – Archer’s on-off lover and mother of his surrogate child asks:

LANA: “So can you seriously not grasp the concept of your own mortality?”

ARCHER: “Lana, nobody can. Except maybe bears.”

[And later…]

ARCHER: “Lana I’ve never had a death wish – It’s just that I don’t believe that I, personally, even can die.”

Archer’s philosophy slips the surly bonds of fear and flings him and his feckless comrades into the heart of abandon, where no danger can be perceived and no one ever dies. The question is, does Sterling Archer know what he’s doing, or is everything merely chaos?

In season 3 episode 1: ‘Heart of Archness, Part 1’, Archer perfectly describes his method – ARCHER: “I’m not really a planner, my process is more… organic.” However later on in this episode, Lana, on her way to rescue Archer from his imprisonment on a pirate controlled paradise, comments on the futility of her mission:

LANA: “[When we get there] he’s going to be all like ‘wohoooo’… Like this whole thing was all part of some dumb-shit master plan.”

Archer’s planning process is both absent and obscurely tangible. He both moulds and is subject to his fate. To help illustrate this point we can turn to the work of Japanese author Haruki Murakami and his musings on the contrast between predestination and coincidence.

In A Wild Sheep Chase he writes: “In actual practice… distinctions between [coincidence and fate] amount to precious little… It’s like doughnut holes. Whether you take the doughnut hole as blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit. “

Murakami’s theory, which is shared by Archer, is that it makes no difference whether you live life under the assumption of some inescapable destiny (a ‘plan’), or whether you live it on the cusp of uninhibited chaos; life itself will taste just the same, the only difference will be the way you define and perceive it.

Archer follows this theory through to its logical conclusion in the ‘Heart of Archness, Part 1’, where he crosses two mammoth items off his personal record list: “For breathe-holding, and the number of sharks shot in the freaking face.”

The interesting thing is that shooting a shark in the face was not on Archer’s list of personal records before he shot a shark in the face, but once he had shot the shark, it was. He never set out to shoot a shark in the face, but once he had, it became part of his plan all along. It matters little which comes first in the great chicken and egg debate. For Archer coincidence and predestination are completely interchangeable concepts.

Archer’s life is chaos, yet underneath it runs a subterranean river of fate. For example, there is the “Just like that old gypsy woman said…” gag which runs throughout the seasons. Something bizarre occurs – for example, in Season 4 Episode 4: ‘Ron Nights’, Archer is being chased through the country by a transvestite biker gang in disturbingly sexy high-heels – and someone says: “It’s just like that old gypsy woman said”, as if this seemingly impossible situation could have been foreseen, in detail, by some unnamed sage.

It just depends whether you choose to believe it. Archer’s universe is a manifestation of Murphy’s Law: whatever can go wrong will go wrong. And if both foreseen predestination and uncontrolled coincidence walk hand in hand – are randomly interchangeable – then what is the point of worrying about what’s going to happen next?

Whatever happens – no matter how bizarre – we will adapt and change to suit. Once the journey in question has ended, it will seem like everything was planned out beforehand. And perhaps it was – but it doesn’t matter. Archer challenges the necessity of a plan, and instead champions abandon, adaptability, and carelessness. It’s a perfect theory of chaos, and may just be the best way to live.

Chad Greggor