Family Guy Review: "The Hand That Rocks the Wheelchair"

A Word From The Future: To those people reading my blog from back-to-front - and while I enjoy having new readers, it's embarrassing to have this older material here - allow me to explain the circumstances here. I lived with a roommate at the time, in Michigan, because I thought he would be a good friend, though in the end he turned out to be a truly evil devil, hint hint. But, anyway, he really dug Family Guy, and held it in unreasonably high esteem, so of course we ended up having to watch each new episode. As a general animation fan, I didn't outright mind, but I....didn't share his feelings on the show. (Or politics, or cheese, or perpetual virginity.) Just as something to do during a period of boredom, I decided I might as well write reviews every current episode the show while I was there. For some reason. I'd like to think I have better things to do now. Or, at least, I have more fun with the things I do now.

For some reason, it seems like this season has been receiving a relative amount of praise, for cutting back on the so-called "manatee jokes". (I use this term to call out a side note: South Park devoted a fucking TWO-PARTER to trashing ONE cartoon and, though Trey Parker and Matt Stone are certainly smart and clever people who make amusing things in other venues, it makes their show look pathetic, too) But, here's the thing - is a simple, bland, and non-engaging storyline without random jokes really any better than a simple, bland, and non-engaging storyline that's at least willing to break up its monotony? The effect is of writers who cannot write an interesting story attempting to do so, and it's a thoroughly awkward experience. Case in point: the last new episode, from a week and a half ago, "The Hand That Walks the Wheelchair".

Meg is a lonely loser - like Jesse, but without the charisma. When she's forced to look after a Joe, a character whose only remaining character trait by this point in the series is his wheelchair (and, I guess, a performance from Patrick Warburton that indicates this is little more than just another paycheck to him), she's shocked to discover a character in the show's shallow universe that actually treats her sort of like a human being. By which I mean, of course, it's only natural that she wants to be his wife. Meanwhile, Stewie is literally the last person to realise that he hasn't done anything evil in several seasons now, and he attempts to fix this by amplifying his evil, a process that ends up inadvertently creating an "evil twin" instead. An evil twin who likes murdering people in non-cartoony ways. Oh, the wackiness!

The Meg/Joe storyline isn't too terrible. This is Family Guy, so obviously it's an unoriginal film parody - in this case, the episode's namesake, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle - but at the very least, it all makes sense in character. One could also argue that this is also a lazy retread of season five's "Barely Legal", and the similarities do lead to it not feeling as fresh as it really could. On the other hand, they're different enough to make this one at least not thoroughly redundant, by having a focus that's just different enough - married life vs. dating. While it's hardly a laugh riot (though I did enjoy the absurd concept that a handicap would count as a "shared interest"), in terms of storyline, it's at least more engaging than a lot of what has come out of this season.

Stewie's storyline, however, is an absolute mess. Over-the-top violence is something that can be amusing if handled well, but when it lacks that cartoonish element, there's definitely something that begins to feel, well....thoroughly off-putting. There's nothing clever about simply slicing some chick in half, animated as realistically as this style would allow. It's just shock value for the sake of shock value. The Kool-Aid Man gag is perhaps the only amusing part of a dull storyline that is simply self-referential for the sake of being self-referential. Special attention needs to be directed toward the laziness of the ending - it's the now-standard "can't tell the evil clone apart from the good one, which one should I shoot?" cliché scenario, with the now-standard "twist" that they chose the wrong one, which I believe has been used in pretty much every parody of this sort of thing for at least a couple decades now. Is there any twist on this here? You'd better believe there isn't! Is it made all the more obnoxious by the fact that "German Guy" (which had a terrible ending in its own right, incidentally), aired the week directly before this episode, had a far more clever joke about both this cliché scenario and its cliché twist? You'd better believe it is! Oh, but I guess a last-minute reference to the "Thriller" video is supposed to count as some sort of joke that makes up for several minutes of pure laziness. Spoiler alert: it doesn't, not at all.

This reminds me greatly of a problem I had with an earlier episode this season: "Baby, You Knock Me Out". In that case, we also had an all-too-common cliché - the Rocky-esque tale of a boxer who by all means should lose to the hulking black guy/chick but is allowed to unrealistically prevail for the purposes of the narrative - played almost entirely straight. I'm all for a move toward more story, but if all the writers can muster (outside of occasional gems like "Road to the North Pole") is cliché after cliché, with a chronic inability to offer even the slightest twist on these things we've seen countless times in more competent productions, well, perhaps it would've been for the best if they hadn't removed irrelevant diversions from these extremely anaemic narratives.