The Invisible Hand of Fate

"The Invisible Hand of Fate"

"The Invisible Hand of Fate" is the third episode in the third season of The Venture Bros.

Plot

After slipping in his bathroom and falling, Billy Quizboy recovers several lost memories. Billy is about to shout accusations at Pete White when White knocks Billy unconscious with a PlayStation 2 and phones Brock.

A flashback story then begins, showing Billy on a game show called "Quizboys" hosted by Pete White. White wears gloves, makeup, and a wig to hide his albinism. Billy writes down an incorrect answer but the correct answer is unexpectedly displayed as his instead, thus winning him the game. In a reference to the quiz show scandals of the 1950s, the other contestant and the public then accuse Billy of cheating. Unbeknown to them, White's hidden and unwelcome manipulation was actually to blame so Billy's reputation is unjustly harmed. In the dressing room after the game, White reveals his albinism to Billy and offers to make things right.

Responsible for Billy's ruined reputation and loss of winnings, Pete White takes Billy to compete in a series of "underground" quiz challenges to finance a roadtrip to the Venture compound with the hopes of gaining employment as a scientist and a lab assistant. They arrive just as the OSI is hauling away a clearly disturbed Myra Brandish while Dr. Venture speaks with an agent. A baby Dean and Hank can be seen in the background, being held by H.E.L.P.eR.. After being denied jobs, White enlists Billy in what they believe is another quiz contest but is actually a dog fight. Billy loses the fight along with an eye, a hand, and all of his previous winnings (since White had placed a bet on Billy). Billy is now fustrated with White for the last time leaves him and goes off on his own.

Brock Samson and Colonel Hunter Gathers, two agents of OSI, have been tracking Billy Quizboy. They provide Billy with a robotic hand and eyeball in a plan to infiltrate the Guild of Calamitous Intent. A Professor Fantomos at "State University" is believed to be recruiting students into the Guild. Billy is enrolled in Fantomos's class and is comforted to find that most of his classmates have major deformities that make him "not so different" with his own enlarged head. Fantomos' assistant who is also Billy's roommate commits suicide and Billy is too busy answering questions to the police to write his term paper. Billy observes that Fantomos is not flexible with the paper's due date when he sees him turn another student away. Expecting to explain why his paper is late, Billy is surprised when Fantomos asks Billy to assist him with an experiment because of an impressive essay turned in with Billy's name. Once again, Billy was rail-roaded by others cheating for him and he is too intimidated to dispel the allegations. Unbeknown to his professor, OSI had cheated for Billy and used a paper written by Stephen Hawking. Fantomos is attempting to use a nuclear-powered machine to grow new limbs, as he was born with deformed, shrunken arms and legs and uses robotic appendages that fit over his real ones. The experiment goes awry, and when Fantomos tells Billy to check a crucial piece of machinery, Billy is forced to reveal that he knows nothing about this technology, and cheated on the paper he wrote about it. Billy's electronic eye is ripped from its socket and causes an explosion which apparently kills Fantomos. Professor Fantomos' once deformed limbs enlarge to normal size and become invisible, gaining the power to kill through touch and thus he becomes the villain, Phantom Limb.

As punishment for their failure, an OSI superior looking and sounding like Sgt. Hatred (later seen donning a Guild ring) indicates that Colonel Gathers was transferred to Guam and Brock Samson is apparently reassigned to be Dr. Venture's bodyguard. This puts a stop to the pair's attempts to expose the Guild.

Billy's memory is wiped by OSI and Brock delivers Billy to a disheveled Pete White. The post-credits scene returns to the present as Billy awakens from an attempted memory wipe and angrily attacks Brock, prompting White to smash him over the head a second time with the PlayStation 2.

Cultural references

• According to Jackson Publick, Fantomos is based on Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre's creation Fantômas.

• Professor Impossible's name is shown being removed from the door of the university's science department. Stephen Colbert, the voice of Professor Impossible, chose not to return to the show this season. Publick further stated that Professor Impossible's title being removed was not his way of showing disdain for Colbert leaving the show and that an early draft of the script contained a scene where it is revealed that Professor Impossible was forced to leave the university due to a scandal involving a student named Sally. The described scene appears as a voiced animatic on the DVD set.

• The OSI is repeatedly shown as a parody of G.I. Joe:

• Shore Leave is an effeminate parody of Shipwreck.
• The leader of Sphinx bears a resemblance to G.I. Joe villain Destro. The uniform he wears is similar to the 1997 toy figure.
• During the OSI Theme Song cutaway, a satirical take on the G.I. Joe theme, there are several notable cultural references including:

• General Nguyen Ngoc Loan Executing a Viet Cong Prisoner in Saigon photograph: An OSI agent is seen executing an Sphinx agent in precisely the same manner.
• The Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse photographs (specifically those featuring Lynndie England) are also referenced. A female OSI officer, drawn to look and dress like England in the infamous photos, is standing with one foot on a pile of Sphinx bodies while giving the 'thumbs-up' sign.
• The G.I. Joe battle cry of "Yo Joe!", is parodied as "YO! S.I.!"

• When Pete White calls Brock "Goldilocks" at the start of the episode, he continues to use code names: "Little Nemo" for Billy, this is a reference to a character from the comics by Winsor McCay, and Casper for himself.

• Race Bannon makes a brief speaking cameo in OSI headquarters, apparently torturing a captured Sphinx agent.

• Steve Summers, the show's pastiche of Col. Steve Austin ( aka "The Six Million Dollar Man" ) appears briefly in the OSI headquarters. Summers first appeared in season one's "Home Insecurity", and would next appear (chronologically) in season four's premiere "Blood of the Father, Heart of Steel".

• Col. Gathers mocks Shore Leave telling him that "The Village People called..." The Village People were a popular 70's disco act who—like Shore Leave and the others—dressed like a policeman, a Native American, a construction worker, a leather-clad biker, a cowboy and a sailor.

• Col. Gathers refers to Billy as "Woyzeck," the title character in a play by Georg Buchner. In the play, the innocent Woyzeck is manipulated by doctors and his military seniors (much like Billy is manipulated by Fantomos and OSI), eventually going mad as a result of this manipulation and his steady diet of nothing but peas.

• To pass the time during the road trip Brock and Colonel Hunter play the travel game Cow Poker.

• Col. Gathers mentions the Bilderberg Group and asserts that they are responsible for the fall of the Berlin Wall, which hasn't happened yet as Billy points out. This places the events of the flashbacks no later than fall of 1989.

• The Nozzle's appearance is a reference to the alien computer, Max, from Disney's 1986 Science Fiction film, Flight of the Navigator

• Billy's fall in the bathroom leading to an epiphany is a reference to Doc Brown's inspiration for the flux capacitor in Back to the Future.

Goofs

• When Fantomos is in his machine, his head is visibly unattached to the rest of the body.

Production notes

• This was the first episode produced for season three, even though it aired third.
• One of the animation directors (Kimson Albert) has a "nickname" inserted into his credits. The nickname is an unusual line or word from the preceding episode. For "The Invisible Hand of Fate" the credit reads Kimson "The Nozzle" Albert.