Review: American Dad “Roger’s Baby”

Roger explains that Jeff is an alien, with only his brain intact, and that’s why he and Hayley can’t conceive. We were reminded of this in last week’s AD! episode “Bahama Mama”. Of course, Roger explains that an alien could bring Jeff back to human form by giving birth to him– but quickly says he can’t personally do it. However, he finally agrees to do it, since Hayley says she’ll be there every step of the way.

The side story of “Roger’s Baby” is that Steve nominates Snot for “three happy days” of fun sponsored by morning TV show Morning Mimosa since Snot is poor. It’s well-intentioned, but ends up embarrassing Snot– and Steve eventually realizes this.

Roger becomes more and more pregnant, and also increasingly insane and needy. There are a lot of weird body horror type scenes involved with becoming pregnant with Jeff– which first began with Roger sucking Jeff’s brain out of his head (with his mouth). Once Roger is pregnant, they go visit a strange doctor– and a high point of the episode is the doctor’s hilarious, weird and mutated assistant.

Roger eventually becomes angry with Hayley, when she disagrees with Roger’s decision to name Jeff something different– ‘Tristan’. So Roger goes off to a nearby hotel to get away from the Smiths. My favorite part of the episode is definitely when Roger dresses up like 1980s Madonna and sings “Hayley Don’t Preach”.

Finally, Roger gives birth to Jeff (he ends up keeping his original name) and Steve and Snot make nice. “Roger’s Baby” isn’t the strongest episode of the season, but there is a lot of really great stuff in there. At the very least, there is a cool sense of maybe some serialization in the series, and Hayley and Jeff finally realize that they’re not quite ready for kids yet.