Review: American Dad “(You Gotta) Strike for Your Right”

T-to party…? No? Okay…

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Hayley gets ready for a new day delivering sandwiches for her new job at Sub Hub, much to the chagrin and annoyance of Stan. Even more annoying to him is that she has some minor complaints about her work uniform. This culminates when she visits him at work for a delivery and sees how mistreated the other CIA agents are, leading her to organize a strike for better workplace conditions. Stan, stubborn fool that he is, stays behind in solidarity to show an example of doing a job in spite of the problems, but Bullock soon bores of tormenting him and relents to the strikers’ terms on top of firing Stan. Hayley gets hired in his place as a negotiator but is soon taken hostage, and the best teams can’t help because they’ve gained vacation time thanks to Hayley’s strike. Stan goes in on his own, managing to destabilize the warlords using Hayley’s tactic of organizing a strike, and saves her despite neither of them budging on their respective points of view.

In the B-Plot, Francine, Steve, Klaus, and Roger discover a hidden treasure map when watching Breaking Bad backward. The journey is helped by Francine’s reverse intuition, leading them to the dried out corpse of Breaking Bad series creator Vince Gilligan. But more importantly, A HUNDRED BUCKS!

OUR TAKE

It’s always nice to see this show go back to having some semblance of social commentary, which is what makes the best Stan & Hayley episodes. In this case, the fair treatment of workers from Hayley’s liberal perspective compared to working a job despite its flaws from Stan’s conservative perspective. Fair wages and unionizing is one of the more contemporary issues this show has tackled and while I can’t comment on how well they executed it, I will say it was a nice change of pace and structure. I call this episode a win, at least for this show’s standards.