Review: Family Guy “And Then There’s Fraud”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

Peter and Chris spend some time together by going to a baseball game. Afterward, one of the audience members mistakes Chris’s baseball for a home run ball and buys it from him. This resulted in Peter and Chris starting their fake memorabilia service. They later regretted that decision when they sold Quagmire a skipper hat he believes belongs to Sully Sullenberger. Meanwhile, Stewie uses a face-lift to make himself younger after being told that he doesn’t look like an infant. However, he took the idea too far and had to resolve it before school picture day.

Our Take:

Following the delay of Family Guy’s previous episode due to the NASCAR fiasco two weeks ago, Fox is now caught up with the show’s weekly schedule. Hopefully, the network won’t repeat that same mistake in the future. The episode started with Chris asking Lois if she’s a scientist, which seemed random at first. However, the episode later revealed that Chris’s question was supposed to be a sex joke, which I didn’t expect at all.  

This was one of the jokes in the episode that happened to be a minor improvement over the comedy in the previous episode. Some of the humor worked well in its favor, such as Chris’s scientist question and Cleveland mistaking Sully Sullenberger for Sullivan from Monsters Inc. But there were also a couple of visual gags that are just as gross-looking as a block of molded cheese. I’ll get to that in a bit. One gag that left me feeling mixed was when Peter referenced the Hudson Brothers Razzle Dazzle Show, and the episode stopped to show the entire title sequence. On the one hand, it taught me that that show actually existed. On the other hand, it’s something that seemed unnecessary. The show’s visual gags are often brief and to the point, and this gag wasn’t one of them. This joke should’ve been either cut out or shortened so that it didn’t overstay its welcome. The image of Peter and Quagmire as older people after the title sequence summarized that flaw in a nutshell. It’s so long that it felt like it lasted a lifetime.

The episode did provide a few humorous moments for the plots themselves, but they struggled a bit to keep them highly interesting. Well, except for the episode’s conclusion involving Meg. The only story that left me feeling disturbed was Stewie’s face-lift situation. When he used it once, he indeed looked a bit younger and cuter. But after he used it again, he wound up being more creepy than cute. Wait, it gets worse. After allowing the doctor to fix Stewie’s face-lift, it seemed like the problem’s all under control. However, as soon as they took the picture, Stewie’s skin just peeled off from his scalp. Yikes. This was one of the storylines that attempted to be both gross and funny but winded up being only the former.  

The episode involving phony memorabilia and face-lifts was a bit better than the previous one from last week in terms of humor. But it did resort to some grossness in Stewie’s story to force out some laughs, resulting in me feeling more uncomfortable than amused. Despite not being a fan of the Hudson Brothers gag, I would gladly take that over a picture of Stewie’s peeled-off face any day. This will surely remind me to never resort to face-lifts whenever I need to make myself look younger.