Review: American Dad “The Long Bomb”

Elemeno, elemeno, Pam Grier!

SPOILERS BELOW

It’s game day once again at Bazooka Sharks Arena as the team takes on the Rockville Gorilla Stars, and the staff is all getting ready for kickoff before the crowd shows. And this one is important, as it’s the first game since the death of quarterback Johnny Concussion. You may remember Johnny from the episode “Bazooka Steve”, which aired less than three months ago and whose entire character was being ridiculously brain damaged. No one is more ready than the manager, whose stickler nature keeps things in tip top shape until he is killed by ponytailed terrorists smuggling in guns and bombs.

Meanwhile, Stan and Haley are arriving in with the flood of cars and paralyzed with awkwardness on what to say to each other. Usually, their interactions are filled with back and forth snipes at the other’s political affiliation, but now with a seeming truce, what’s left to say? But they seem to be committed to making this day work…for about 2 minutes before Stan stalls for time getting concessions. The terrorists strike in the Luxury Box (near Roger, playing an escort) and kill the owner while looking for his safe and the combination. Stan catches wind of this when he finds and kills one of the goons wearing the mascot costume and suddenly we’re in a Die Hard parody. And this is going to be tough for me to say, but The Cleveland Show did it better.

Soon Hayley is captured looking for Stan, who learns the locations of the bombs and sends them to him via a food vendor communication network and a radio announcer, ironically talking to her father much better than they ever did face to face. One by one, Stan takes down each of the henchmen and disarms the bombs, each in increasingly hilarious and disgusting ways and costing the announcer his job. But terrorist boss gets wise to Hayley’s tricks and forces Stan’s hand, not only revealing the disarmed bombs were really cream cheese, but that their target in the safe was the last jersey worn by Johnny Concussion. Why? Because the leader IS Johnny Concussion! Dun dun dunnnnnnn.

Johnny, somehow made smarter by his many brain injuries, swore vengeance against the owner and his fans for how they let him destroy himself with each game. And to top it off, the real bomb is actually in the ceremonial urn supposedly holding his ashes, set to go off during the planned moment of silence with a reverse sound meter. The only way Stan and Haley can keep it from exploding is…by talking to each other. While screaming several black actress names, Stan confesses that he doesn’t know if he’s able to teach his daughter anything meaningful anymore or if she respects him, while Haley has worried that Stan would stop being interested in what she has to say. They reconcile and are tackled by security for talking. Johnny, having attempted to escape but falling on top of a car, awakens from the wreckage.

Did someone in the writer’s room just fall in love with Johnny Concussion? Did they think this character was so multifaceted that we needed to revisit him in another episode, reacting to other Smith family members, and becoming a supervillain when his debut was ONLY HALF A DOZEN EPISODES AGO? Heck, we got four more episodes in the season! We’ve got plenty of time to wrap up this crucial and invaluable Johnny Concussion Trilogy! It seriously feels like this episode got pulled from the batch for next season and kinda feels like it’s asking us to completely forget the previous episode that he first showed up in.

Though on that note, I really did appreciate the resolution to the Stan and Haley awkwardness. I’m not about to give credit to the writers and assume they actually remember how to give long run character development for the cast now, but it does sort of feel like the beginning awkwardness was the result of the two finally deciding not to argue as much anymore but finding a hole in what to talk about when it came to positives, and the outbursts at the end about their insecurities regarding what the other thinks felt very genuine. Hoping we can see more of that as we head into the final four episodes of the season.