Review: American Dad: “The Bitchin Race”

Better lawyer up, Pelicans.

It’s been a thrilling season on American Dad! Well, less thrilling and more jogging in place. Twenty-two episodes left the studio, hoping help prolong the show’s slow, inevitable death. Or, at the very least, try to become as treasured favorites as ones from seasons 5 through 8. Now, only seven remains. But because this isn’t a reality show, we’ll only be covering each of them one at a time.

Will that be enough to become the best of the season? Does it matter, now that Seth MacFarlane is clearly more invested in working on The Orville? Am I just dragging this intro out so that the word count will go to the next hundredth and I can add another dollar to my September paycheck? Definitely not that last one. Definitely, definitely, definitely, definitely, DEFINITELY not. No sir. But now, onto the episode!

We get a fake recap from a version of Phil Keoghan (though he isn’t named in the show) about the show-inside-the-show The Bitchin’ Race, obviously a play off The AMAZING Race in real life. Fifteen teams entered, and now it’s down to five, three of which just happen to include Stan & Francine, Steve & Haley, and Roger & real life reality show winner Johnny Bananas, as well as also real life experts of travel and survival respectively, Rick Steves & Bear Grylls, and not as real Meredith (who’s voiced by Sarah Chalke of Scrubs and Rick & Morty fame) and Justin, whose claim to fame is dying for a minute and becoming a global sensation for his precociousness. Suddenly I’m missing Morty’s “oh geezes”.

While the expert team of Grylls/Steves is easily in the lead and Roger/Bananas are just in it for the screen time, there’s a clear friction between Stan/Fran and Hayley/Steve, mainly in that the former is proactively trying to win the race while the latter just wants to stop and smell the roses. To combat this, Stan invokes the first of many product sponsored emergency rules, like the Dollar Shave Club Temporary Alliance or the Tostitos Scoop Partner Swap, which ends up swapping the “Alphas” with Francine and Steve. This leads to the formers’ doom, however, when they end up taking the wrong path and going to a prison camp run by the tiny general from an early episode of the show’s TBS run. This teaches Stan and Hayley to go with the flow as their former partners did, eventually driving the leader insane enough that he lets them go when Steve and Francine (who have learned a parallel lesson about taking initiative) arrive with the leader’s yaks. And also Klaus, who has been watching the show from home, actually won! Somehow.

I guess the main highlight of this one would probably be Stan and Hayley’s bonding over being the “alpha” of their respective teams. It’s nice to get a reminder that these two are actually related without the usual conservative vs liberal arguments they tend to have. Probably helped that Stan is voiced by series creator Seth Macfarlane and Hayley is voiced by his sister, Rachel. So weirdly enough, the sibling team made the parent child team work better.

Also, don’t think I didn’t notice that animation glitch of the host’s head suddenly raising up near the end because I totally did!