Review: American Dad “Garbage Stan”

‘Buca, ‘buca, ‘buca. ‘BUUUUUCAAAAAA!

SPOILERS AHEAD

Stan receives a notice that his father’s storage unit, which is about to go to auction if it isn’t claimed. Stan’s relationship with his dad Jack, like every animated sitcom dad from Hank Hill’s Cotton to Cleveland Brown’s Freight Train, is a complicated one dating back to the show’s second season. Starting as Stan’s estranged childhood idol before being outed as a con artist, then imprisoned for his crimes, and finally merging souls with the ancient Christmas punishment demon Krampus and taking Santa’s place soon after. Like I said, complicated. Not Avril Lavigne complicated, but pretty close.

But his influence still lingers amongst Stan’s many dysfunctions, hence why Stan forbids any access to his storage locker, including by himself. And of course, this means Steve, Klaus, and Roger head down to find it. Roger finds an old bumper pool table to start his own subplot while Steve and Klaus find a rusted garbage truck. Stan berates Steve for pulling this out at first but soon remembers this was an old job he used to do with his dad, back when he could see him in a more honorable light. Unfortunately, Steve soon finds out that Jack’s work was mainly a cover for street-wide drug deals. Dedicated to preserving a positive memory of Jack in Stan’s mind, Steve plans to raise money from the deals to go completely clean with a brand spanking new truck. Which raises a question: Didn’t Stan used to work for the CIA?

Things go all according to plan over an Irish hard rock montage until Stan finds out and shuts down the operation, though not before Steve manages to buy the new truck and break ties with the drug racket. Stan tails him in the old truck but sees the dealers planting evidence on him to get him framed at the dump, though Stan manages to save him from getting found by inspectors and dumps the new truck while learning an important lesson about how he can overcome his father’s corruption.

…oh yeah, and Roger gets Hayley to play underground bumper pool to take on another pro until it turns out he is, in fact, that pro.

OUR TAKE

Well, this was certainly a marked improvement over the last episode, but really anything would be. It really says something how they’re able to use a character’s influence to drive a story without even showing their face on screen (outside of a single flashback) as they did with Jack in this episode. And through that, it became both another in a long line of Smith Men generational episode. It shows a nice sense of development for this thread of the character growth in Stan determining his feelings about his father, as well as how he views his own raising of Steve. In conjunction with the recent focus on his relationship with Haley, this really paints Stan as a much more self-aware father figure than he’s been in past seasons, though hopefully not to a point that he loses what makes his character.

But seriously, what’s going on with his CIA job?