Better The First Time

Family Guy, S10E22

There were three different stories, supposedly based on some suggestions by fans.  The first was a British version of Family Guy where Peter wanted to prove that he was related to the Queen of England.  The second was about Peter having the ability to turn anyone (and eventually anything) to Robin Williams.  The third was a story that took place entirely from Stewie's point of view.

I was expecting something pretty good from the episode since I enjoyed the first version of viewer mail stories.  However, it's hard for me to say which one I liked the best because all of them weren't that good.  It felt like they didn't try very hard to think outside of the box (which might have been a problem of them using fans' ideas if that were true) and the stories weren't as bizarre as they could have been.  They might have been limited to what they could accomplish with a story that had to be a third of the time they usually had to work with, but I still think they could have done better.

I think maybe the British version of Peter and the others was the most interesting of them all.  I liked seeing them with ridiculously bad teeth and more distinguished noses.  Plus, Brian was a horse instead of a dog, and Stewie had an American country accent instead of his usual British one.  Another interesting twist was that British Peter's random bitter enemy was not a chicken, but a quail and their fight was much shorter and ended on a more polite note than any of the Quahog Peter's fights have.  Basically this story's appeal was the funny differences between America and England.  But Peter chasing after the Queen of England and killing her in the process to get some hair for a DNA test, seemed like a pretty lame adventure for him to get into.  But perhaps that was the point--showing that British Peter can't measure up to the American one?  I don't know, but it was pretty boring.

The second story was just awful.  There is a limit to how many Robin Williams jokes I can tolerate, and I think they exceeded that within the first few minutes.  This one was more like a horror story, but not horrifically funny.  It was more like if I had to see one more Robin Williams appear, I was going to go as crazy as Peter did.  The best part was the end, surprisingly (not simply because it was ending), but because it was so disturbing.  Peter had kept 5 of the Robins and dressed them like his family.  That was so freaky and sad!  Then to make things even more so, Peter had chopped off his hands.  It was like the end to something from the Twilight Zone, but not even a fraction as enjoyable to watch.

The last story wasn't too bad, but it was just amazing how everything through Stewie's eyes wasn't more interesting.  After all, he's a baby that acts like an adult most of the time.  There were two creepy moments that worked well in the story.  The first was Quagmire asking Stewie to come over so he could see if the smell of Lois' boobs were still on him.  Geez.  There is really no low he won't go when perving on Lois.  The second is when Stewie saw Herbert hanging underneath a school bus and Stewie warned him to stay away from his brother's butt.  That was probably my favorite joke in the whole episode.  The last thing in that story I thought was a little funny was the book Lois read Stewie to bed.  It was about the town from Footloose.  I liked how Stewie wondered who the intended reader of the book was and how one line from the book referenced "the church where you slap your daughter."  That was a pretty good joke.

I was pretty disappointed that they weren't able to top the first of this kind of episode.  This was one of the last episodes in the season, I so I expected something a little more flashy and memorable.  Instead, there were just a lot of stories that felt uninspired and boring.  Mostly this was the fault of a story about an invasion of Robin Williams, but the others had their faults as well.  If this had been the last episode of the season, I would have been incredibly dissatisfied.