Review: American Dad “Stan & Francine & Connie & Ted”

It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Steve hatches a plan for Stan and Francine to finally meet Barry’s parents in hopes that they’ll become just as lax about handling Steve. But when the two couples start getting along a little TOO well, Steve is horrified to find that Barry’s parents (who turn out to be surprisingly cool people…and are apparently named “Robinson”?) are also swingers and might be trying to get Stan and Francine to fall in with their lifestyle with potentially disastrous consequences for their marriage. So, Steve has to act as a parent for once to keep his folks in line, leading to them sneaking out to a nudist resort with the Robinsons.

Luckily he finds out that the Robinsons are respecting their boundaries and not forcing them to swing, so crisis averted…except Barry’s long forgotten sinister and unmedicated personality has apparently resurfaced (with the same voice actor!) and wishes for vengeance on Steve by forcing their parents into a situation where they may yet fall victim to the swing, which helps Steve to realize that his parents are hard on him because they care. So he does the one thing he can do to stop Barry…and that’s GOING BANANAS. And also Stan and Francine still don’t end up swinging.

Also Roger gets blinded during an eclipse and inconveniences everyone.

OUR TAKE

Wait, was I RIGHT about this season’s episodes being tributes to past ones? Because this one had a pretty deliberate callback to one from AT LEAST ten years ago: “With Friends Like Steve” from 2006. Barry turning out to be a Stewie-esque mad genius without his medication was certainly a stand out all the way back then, but for one reason or another, that never got used as a plot device in all this time until now. Also interesting to get some confirmation about how long is passing “in-universe” with this show’s timeline compared to real life. It seems an episode from over thirteen years ago only took place a several months ago for these characters. I guess that explains why nothing to show the passage of time has happened since Jeff and Haley got married or Greg and Terry’s baby grew up a bit.

And quite a bit of a reveal this week as we finally get to meet Barry’s parents. Like with his medication stuff, this is somehow something that’s never really been fully tackled or addressed for a long time (which was probably the joke in this case) but now we actually get to put some names and faces to them. In the past, they were heavily implied to be some kind of abusive to Barry. Maybe not physically but at least emotionally with how much neglect he seems to get from them. I guess to Steve, that seems like him having more freedom as opposed to being less taken care of, which forms the basis of Steve’s character arc this episode. There has been some minor set up about Barry’s parents becoming more stable in recent episodes, but I still never thought we’d finally make them characters.

Although actually…I’m just now starting to wonder if this was just a scrapped Season 3 or 4 episode that just suddenly found its way back to the writers and finally got made. The stuff with Roger is pretty much the only thing that makes me thing that’s not the case because otherwise this does feel more at the tempo of early American Dad than a lot of the recent episodes, which basically means I liked this one considerable more than those. Perhaps things are looking for this season after all, so I’m going to head into next week with an optimistic attitude until we find out whatever the hell “Rabbit Ears” is supposed to be. A bit late for Easter Specials.