Earlier this year, Archer creator Adam Reed made it clear that his long-running FXX series—which recently spent a season-long sojourn in a noir-flavored coma dream—wouldn’t be returning to “normal” any time soon. Up until tonight, Reed was staying coy about what sort of setting the show’s ninth season might send Sterling Archer and his friends, associates, and various general irritations to next, but he opened up at the show’s Comic-Con panel this evening. So you’d better prep your best Hawaiian shirt (and your finest “Lana? LANA! LANAAAAAAA!”), because Archer is headed to Danger Island.
The teaser image above makes it pretty clear that the show is going back to the “Pirate Archer” motif briefly touched on in season 3’s “Heart Of Archness.” (Which means we’ll keep our fingers crossed for the return of Patrick Warburton’s pulp hero Rip Riley, Manhunter.) Beyond that, Reed’s keeping the actual details of the season—and the question of whether Archer is ever going to wake up—under wraps, although he did tell us in a recent interview that we can expect a return of the mother-son dynamic between Jessica Walter’s Malory and H.Jon Benjamin’s Sterling, after he regretted making them strangers in the show’s eighth season.
Archer is still renewed for two more seasons—Danger Island, and one more—on FXX.