Everyone Has A Story, But Not A Good One

Family Guy, S11E12

The show did a parody of the movie Valentine's Day, and showed different stories about each of the characters on this holiday.  Lois and Peter spent the day in bed, Quagmire got turned into a woman, Meg went out with a boy she met online, Stewie went back in time to the Summer of Love, Stewie gathered together all of Brian's ex girlfriends to find out what Brian's problem was, Herbert helped his grand-niece talk to Chris, and Mayor West found out Carol was seeing another mayor.

I enjoyed the beginning of this episode that was made to be like a trailer of the movie they were spoofing.  It's nothing new, but I still like this setup each time I see in a show (usually, anyway).  One of my favorite parts of that was when it said "Comes more evidence of Family Guy's decline."  I tend to like their ironic jokes like that.

There were a lot of stories packed into one episode, but none of them were particularly great.  The top ones for me were Stewie's story, Brian's story, and Meg's story.  If I had to pick the most interesting of those three, it would be Meg's simply because it was a good story for her when you consider how most of Meg's romantic endeavors go.

Meg's date seemed to be going well at the beginning, which could only mean that something bad had to happen.  However, Meg turned lemons into lemonade when she didn't want to end her date just because she was down a kidney and bleeding everywhere.  Talk about low standards/desperation.  I was happy, though, to see that Meg had a pretty great day with Toby.  They had lunch, went ice skating, got caricatures done (Meg was drawn as a pile of poo, but I could let that slide), she got her kidney back as a present, and she got a kiss.  Toby is a criminal, for sure, but at least he's sort of a gentleman (though he is kinda gross using a dead, shriveled conjoined twin as a bookmark--eww).  Sadly, Meg couldn't do much better than him, but at least he seemed genuinely into her.  I liked seeing Meg have a relatively happy end for once, instead of her looking like a pathetic psycho.

Stewie's story where he kissed his own mother as a baby wasn't surprising (as I figured it might be her), but it does speak to the idea that Stewie has a lot of mother issues.  He already has this desire to dispose of her (though not so much lately), and now he has to deal with the fact he's a little attracted to her.  It just makes me wonder how messed up Stewie is going to be when he finally gets to puberty.

I thought that Brian's story, while grabbing my attention more than others, was a waste of time.  I don't know why Stewie would think he needed to gather all of Brian's exes to know what the problem with Brian is.  It's basically everything with Brian is wrong.  Stewie's been there through all of his failures, most of them fizzling out because Brian's ego got in the way or his mountain of lies finally collapsed.  I couldn't imagine any of them saying something redeeming about Brian because he's always been the worst lover/boyfriend.  Hopefully Stewie was really just gathering them for his own amusement to make fun of Brian's many shortcomings.   Or perhaps he knew that the riot of exes he sent after Brian would help him end up in bed with a bunch of different girls.  I surely didn't expect that.  That was the biggest surprise out of all the stories.  More random to me than Quagmire turning into a woman.  Don't know why anyone in their right mind would sleep with an asshole like Brian.

This episode was only okay because I thought it was going to be good since I enjoy spoofs.  The stories weren't terrible, but they definitely could have been funnier.  I appreciate that they didn't do a single Valentine's story and tried to do several.  It just would have been a bonus if most of the stories were really memorable and a little less uneventful.

For the 23th Special, Pretty Good

The Simpsons, S24E02

A black hole that Lisa had a hand in bringing about was sucking everything in Springfield into it.  Homer filmed some paranormal things going on in the house, revealing a demon that wanted to take Maggie.  Bart went back in time to buy a comic book for less and ended up changing the present to his benefit but to Homer's disadvantage.

Surprisingly, I enjoyed this Treehouse of Horror this year.  It wasn't one of my favorites of all time, but it was definitely good enough that I felt like I'd like to see it again to see what little things I missed in it.  My favorite of the three was probably the last where Bart went into the past and made it so that he was Artie Ziff's son.  However, I will say that the second story, where they spoofed Paranormal Activity was a close second.

The first story where a black hole was sucking everything had a lot of good parts.  In a way, I felt like it was kinda spoofing Gremlins because Lisa specifically told the family not to feed it and they all kept throwing things into it while knowing the danger.  My favorite thing thrown in was Bart's homework that kept getting spat out, and Bart finally gave up and threw Mrs. Krabapple (or should I call her Mrs. Flanders?) in there.  The best line of the story was when Homer said:

A black hole?! (whispers) I'm sorry, can we call it that?

Anytime someone says something like that, I pretty much enjoy it.

The second story was a pretty good spoof of the aforementioned movie.   In general, I just liked seeing Homer and Marge act like the couple in that movie, but putting their own funny spin on it.  Specifically, I liked when Homer tried to "comfort" Lisa when she asked why all these horrible things were happening in their house:

Oh, sweetie.  Sometimes a mysterious, invisible being from Hell waits for a family to go to sleep then kills them.  Now, go to bed.

I really like when Homer says things in a comforting way, but his actual words are doing the direct opposite.  I almost always laugh when he does that.

I also thought it was funny at the end that the demon wanted a threeway with Homer and another demon if he wanted to save Maggie from being taken.  That's not what I thought would happen at all!  Then Homer was sort of a little too into it to the point that the demon wanted him to stop whatever new sex thing he was trying out.  Gross, but damn funny.

The last story was probably my favorite because I like when they do stories in different timelines.  Also, this is the second time that Bart has met Homer in the past (another was in the episode that spoofed Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), and it was so easy for Bart to screw up his parents' first meeting.  I really liked how angry Homer got at Bart and how repulsed Marge was by his treatment of him.  Then it just got better when Bart easily accepted that Homer was out of his life when he returned to the present to find he was rich and a Ziff (plus he just looked so cute with that little afro).  It continued to be entertaining when teenage Homer traveled forward in time with Bart and met his older self and they worked together to beat Bart at his own game.  I guess I'm a sucker for happy endings because I liked that even though Artie and Bart beat the crap out of all the members of the United Federation of Homers Through History, Marge realized her mistake and took in all of those guys into her home (I don't know how she'd feed them and pay for all the destruction they would do, though).  I liked all the different Homers and how none of them could find the time to take out the trash in a whole day.  Marge has to love Homer because there is no way anyone could tolerate more than one Homer at one time.

The opening animation about the end of the world according to the Mayan calendar was a little interesting, but not that funny.  I just like how it could have been prevented if Marge didn't help Homer and hadn't had Moe sacrificed instead.

I'm pretty pleased with this episode, and I hope that they deliver more stories like this in the season.  After last week's disappointment of doing New York City again, I'm happy that there's a glimmer of hope for this season yet!  Maybe there will be a hilarious episode down the road if I'm lucky.

Forget A Sexual Partner? Just Go Back In Time

American Dad, S07E17

It was revealed that Stan may not be Hayley's father when Hayley needed a kidney transplant to replace the one that was busted from an intense night of drinking.  Francine didn't know who the other possible father was, so she and Stan had to go back to the past to find out his identity.  That went well until Stan's jealousy made him stop Francine from screwing the other man, and it jeopardized Hayley's existence.  They then had to ensure that Francine did screw the right guy, which was harder to do once Stan and Francine showed themselves to their younger selves.  However, with a little ecstasy in Francine and a little push in the right direction, they were able to ensure Hayley didn't disappear from the present and obtained another kidney she could possibly use.  We didn't get to know whether Stan is the true father or not, but we did see that he valued Hayley enough as his daughter to not care about something as superficial as blood ties.

I rather like when Francine's past is brought up because she was such a party girl in the day.  So I was interested to see her old friend Kelly (voiced by Kathy Griffin) come into town, and I hoped she would slip back a little into her old ways.  I never imagined that Hayley wouldn't be able to keep up with her mother and her kidney would fail.  And that was a pretty scary display of how alcohol can damage your internal organs.  There was something about making them people-like and seeing one of them shrivel up and die that made me a little more cautious the next time I think about putting an excessive about of alcohol inside of me.  I think they should use that clip to frighten people from underage drinking.

I'm not that surprised that Francine cheated on Stan.  I would be frightened about marrying someone as white bread as him (at least on the surface, anyway--he's insane).  I didn't think they would ever figure out who the father was without Francine remembering.  Using a time machine to go back and see who it was, was a strange turn of events.  At least it was something I can't say that I've seen before in a show.

It was funny how Stan kept saying all these horrible things to Francine when he found out that she had cheated on him, but his body language kept suggesting he was going to say something sweet or forgiving.  That joke worked well for me because I didn't want to listen to him bitch about how Francine was a slut.  The humor offset me taking his complaints so seriously.

The only other joke I really liked was when Stan was explaining to their past selves about time travel and they forgot to use Back to the Future as a reference point.  I was thinking about it the whole time, so I'm glad that they were aware of what I (and probably most viewers) had in my mind.  I guess, though, they didn't bother much with that usual rule that you shouldn't reveal yourself to your past selves.

I didn't care too much for Roger's character who was the inventor of ecstasy.  I wondered what the point was of Stan taking his formula and putting it into his jacket pocket until they needed it later in the past.  Also, without that happening, Stan wouldn't have been able to call in a favor with Roger to steal the possible baby daddy's kidney. Although, Roger is pretty twisted (I mean, he was dancing around while stealing the kidney), so he might have just done it for Stan anyway.  I wish that he had a bigger role, though.  There wasn't any good Roger lines this time.

For this show, I could sort this story into one that was "heartwarming."  Stan was upset, for good reason, about Francine's betrayal and seemed ready to cut Hayley out of his life, but in the end, his love for his daughter outweighed his outrage.  It was nice that they could do that sort of thing without underplaying it too much with comedy.  Call me a sap if you will, but I appreciate these sort of moments every now and then.  It can't always be about how much you can shock and entertain us--if the show is centered around a family, at least throw in a few stories about the value of those bonds at some point.