Family Guy Review: "The Big Bang Theory"

This past Sunday was Mother's Day, as all of us who were sprung forth from female loins were probably forcefully made aware if we weren't already. How did you celebrate it? I called my mother, and will regrettably be shipping off the pirated CDs of her request soon. If you were Family Guy, you celebrated Mother's Day with an episode where Mama Lois left to run errands early in the episode and was never seen again, and wherein a relatively newborn baby was shot between the eyes with a spear gun. Festive! But, ignoring the show's refusal to air an instalment with even a slight appropriateness to Overly Commercialised Maternity-Themed Holiday, I think we can at least be pleased that it is considerably less romance-themed than "Brothers and Sisters". Instead, it's about Stewie being the most important person in history and not being married to Generic Female Character #614. Also, despite its title, it's not about horrid socially awkward nerd stereotypes. "Bang" probably means something sexual, like intercoursing or something.

Stewie suddenly remembers that he has a big, hulking time machine in his room that, despite its fairly large size, we only see when the writers actually decide to incorporate it into a plot, of course. What sort of nefariously evil purposes does he choose to use it for? Why, going back in time to mess with Brian in a bunch of minor, petty ways, of course. But then Brian catches Stewie in the time machine, the two fight over the controls, and in the process they are whisked outside of the space-time continuum. After much deliberation, Stewie decides to overload his return pad thingamajig to return home. The resultant burst of energy, it turns out, WAS the Big Bang. Stewie, as it turns out, created the universe, through one of those tenuously pseudo-scientific time travel paradoxes uncommitted time travel stories throw around to justify their not-quite-coherent plotting. It's a pretty sudden, big leap from the mildly amusing low-level time travel dickery that preceded it. From this point on, they want us to know, this would be an episode with a fairly grand-scope! But not as grand as, say, one of the Road episodes. Because too much effort in one season would be...too much, or something.

It's at this point that Bertram, Stewie's unpleasantly designed half-brother played by the genuinely-too-good-for-this Wallace Shawn, catches wind of Stewie's possession of a time machine. Why is he suddenly snooping on Stewie again now after a few seasons of absence? Never mind that! Bertram schemes an evil scheme to travel back in time and kill one of Stewie's ancestors, thus preventing his archnemesis from ever being born. But it won't erase Bertram's existence because, um....well, there IS a half-assed explanation, but it's not plausible in the least. Oh, and Stewie's ancestor is apparently Leonardo da Vinci. Stewie and Brian realise that erasing Stewie "God" Griffin from history, at this point, would spell doom for the entire universe, and they set off into the past. But it's too late, and da Vinci is dead. But it's okay, because Stewie can apparently take his place. Not only was he God, in a sense, he was also da Vinci. He can just fucking do it all, can't he? And I'm not the only one who thinks it's gross that this story relies on a baby having to engage in the act of sexual procreation, in whatever specific way they were trying to imply, right? Yeah, Stewie obviously does a lot of non-baby-type things, but....ew.

So, if you hadn't gathered, here's something the series has been doing a lot lately - an episode that has a big, grand concept going for it, yet that sort of flounders because the writers have no real interest in actually exploring what they've set up for themselves. The season premiere, "And Then There Were Fewer", set up an elaborately stereotypical murder-mystery-in-a-big-country-house scenario, then grew bored with it less than halfway through, with only a few good jokes making a thread-thin plot bearable. And here, they decide to make an episode that's all about fantastical time travel, yet wherein they clearly have no interest in even vaguely actually exploring the ramifications of time travel. The closest they really come is with a short, nonsensical "rift in time" sequence that goes nowhere. Aside from this, we simply spend all our time zipping from one half-developed idea to another. Why go through the trouble of incorporating da Vinci into the episode when he has no real bearing on it? He does nothing himself, and we see nothing of Stewie's time in his shoes - surely he could be swapped with another generic important historical genius and not affected anything in the script. And why bring back Wallace Shawn just to kill off his character within the span of one act wherein all he really does is make one forgettable "over-explaining the joke" joke? If there were a more clever story-related reason for this - or, hell, even a funny joke about it - that would be one thing. But, as is, it's clearly just the show's crew deciding, "Y'know, we thought we wanted to bring this guy back, but on second thought, I actually really don't feel like having to write for him, at all." All this story boils down to watching Stewie and Brian make the occasionally amusing quip about the quote-unquote "dramatic" events transpiring around them in hyperspeed. Truth be told, not the most ambitious formula, but it works in episodes with stories that are, at least, simple enough to give the clever banter time to build up. Which is to say, it doesn't work here, what with all the arbitrary story turns packed in and all. I will beat my dead horse once more: story-driven episodes only work when the story itself is good. Perhaps I should be an arrogant C-word and give the writers more self-important advice: it takes more than a very mildly cute joke to make shameless advertisements for The Cleveland Show on your part not seem pathetic.

It's not like it's impossible to pull off a good time travel story in half an hour, either. Perhaps the suggestion most embarrassing to Family Guy and its inability to do so is American Dad's fairly terrific second season episode, "The Best Christmas Story Never Told". Of course, that was nearly five years ago, and MacFarlane and Associates have had plenty of time to get past their prime in the meantime. Bob's Burgers might not be the best show out there (though it's improving), but at least it's young blood, young enough that it's still trying, and with a heart that's fundamentally missing from anything MacFarlane has done in, well, years. By this point, everyone on this show is obviously just going through the motions, even on episodes such as this that are theoretically designed to shake up the form in some way. It's comfortable, it's sterile. Unlike Jim, I like it when television - or any other form of entertainment - tries to impress me. In unrelated summary and in unrelated conclusion, I pose you this question: In a season where the writers are bringing back old characters at least partially at random, why must James Woods and Bertram die, when Carol gets to stick around?