REVIEW: AMERICAN DAD “The Adventures of Twill Ongenbone and His Boy Jabari”

Spoilers Below

Roger’s got a bunch of trophies in his collection but he’s actually never won anything. Feeling depressed and useless, Roger assures everyone that he is going to run a marathon to show everyone what he can do and Francine offers to help. Luckily enough, Francine does actually help Roger win the race, but only after he tricks her into driving him to the finish line. This causes Francine to drop any sort of positive support she had for Roger of which our little grey friend so desperately needs. As a result, Roger begs Francine to let him try one more time at legitimately winning a competition to which she agrees. What are the stakes?? Roger has to go back to school and EARN a college degree, not just invent one. Roger wants to get an archaeology degree, so he starts digging for ancient artifacts, but eventually him and Francine fall underground and meet a lost tribe that was thought to be long gone for thousands of years. What they actually are(and what Francine doesn’t know) are paid actors who are just there to impress Francine enough to be convinced that Roger deserves her praise.

The whole charade starts falling apart as the actors are growing restless and wanting to go home. To fix this, Roger stages a chase scene where the tribe runs them out of the cave, but not before Francine kills one of them. This causes Roger to come clean and Francine is actually….impressed! With all his hard work, Francine thinks the world of Roger despite the fact that he just killed Cuba Gooding Jr.

Meanwhile, Steve needs to do a paper at school where he interviews his dad, but Stan’s being unwilling to help. However, whenever Steve calls Stan on the cell phone the son of a bitch spills all the beans, but nothing to do with the questions that Steve had from class. Rather the questions are deep and penetrating answers to Stan’s soul that were just begging to be uncoiled. Steve tries to explain his case to the teacher and even puts Stan on speaker to prove what he’s going through which causes his teacher to jump out of a window.

Not a terrible effort by American Dad this week, as I rather enjoyed Stan’s phone conversations as Seth MacFarlane did a wonderful job really acting out the seemingly dark parables. The main plot was OK, but nothing GREAT. To be honest, I wanted more of the Steve plot because sometimes too much of Roger gets boring to me as I prefer him in smaller doses. The writers did stick in a rather novel twist near the end that was perfect for the other-worldly being.  That said, the writers gotta be careful to not go to the well to often, it was only a few weeks ago she was unearthing a dude from the underground and this week she almost did it again. I also think the title of the episode overplayed what was going to be the plot, as Jabari was literally in the episode for 10 seconds max, and there wasn’t a whole lot of ‘adventuring’ but I wouldn’t mind a couple more of these.

Score

8/10

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