Review: American Dad “Dude, You’re Getting a Del!”
OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)
Snot’s mom Esther starts hooking up with Klaus, but wants him to bond with Snot if he wants to take things further. Also, Roger revives his cat persona Marmalade to work and Haley and Jeff’s new cat cafe.
OUR TAKE
This week on American Dad: The Reunion Tour, we have yet more characters that we haven’t seen in over a decade! This time it’s Del, the guy Snot’s mom Esther dated waaaaaaaay back in Season 13’s “Paranoid Frandroid”. He was a great guy who would have made the perfect new father figure for Snot…if Esther hadn’t ended up suddenly hooking up with Klaus due to some combination of cool music playing while they were in Del’s cool basement. Well, eight years later in our time, they are apparently back at that with Klaus macking on Esther while Steve and Snot are having a sleep over, which leads to Esther letting Klaus know that he’s gotta be a dad who steps up. Because of Klaus’ numerous psychological issues, this goes predictably bad. But things are made worse with the sudden arrival of Del, who Snot quite liked. This leads to Klaus getting really jealous and kidnapping Del, only for him to realize that he actually wants Del to be his dad too…and then kidnapping Snot. Last episode we had Klaus actually push through some of those insecurities to bond with Haley a bit, but I guess the insecurity about his manhood and his lack of a father growing up is something that’s going to take some time to process.
Klaus stories often end up with his own problems slowly leading him to self sabotage and ruin what might have been a good thing for him, but then we have the B plot following Roger, whose stories are often about him sabotaging OTHER people. In this case, bringing back his Marmalade, who we first saw in Season 12’s “The Family Plan”, even further back than Del’s first appearance at NINE years, where Francine (oh yeah, those were both Francine episodes) meets more of her biological family and Roger is the patriarch’s cat. Well, now he’s a cat with a family of his own and a crappy electric car, which leads him to miss all of his shifts at Haley’s cat cafe, but he eventually takes her to court and takes ownership of it himself. Classic Roger. So yeah, another average but enjoyable episode of American Dad where the two non-human characters throw the thing they’re respectively involved with into utter chaos but also get what they really needed by the end. Next time is a Jeff episode where he apparently “comes of age”, and maybe we’ll see…I dunno, fucking…Lt. Goldberg come back.
