Review: American Dad “Paranoid Frandroid”

The bubble has burst! Not the review bubbles, though.

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Stan and Francine enjoy the beginning of their day watching a hamster wedding on Morning Mimosa, Francine’s favorite morning show. Hayley, being Hayley, objects to this being the only source of information Francine gets out of the day, while Francine seems totally content. That is until she sees an eccentric guy go up the stairs holding a jar of filthy change. Seems Roger’s put together a convention entirely for conspiracy theorists and the theories they theorize about. Francine’s mind is blown by all of this new and unconfirmed information, but she doesn’t think much of it until she finds out she’s actually in the middle of a conspiracy herself. At some point, Stan took over the station and uses the show to keep her nice and pacified. Outraged at this betrayal, Francine joins Roger in spreading outlandish theories over a podcast, but one of them turns out to be right: The CIA has been using mobile cameras to get footage of people on the toilet in order blackmail them later, but now that Francine has guessed at the operation’s existence, she must die. Bullock tries keeping Stan off the case by sending him and his co-workers on a Dave & Busters run, but the op gets leaked, and Stan understands what he’s been doing to Francine over the years now that he’s been on the receiving end. He manages to track her down in Verizon Wireless’ one dead zone and convince her to fake her death in front of Bullock, but they decide to pretend Stan got a new wife exactly like her at the funeral.

Meanwhile, in the B-plot, Snot’s mom has a new suitor who has offered to let them move into his house in a really classy neighborhood. Snot gets the basement, which Klaus turns into a swanky bachelor pad, but Steve and Snot are unable to attract local trim. The allure of the basement DOES hook Snot’s mom, however, leading her to sit on Klaus’ face and destroy her relationship with the new beau. Status quo is restored.

OUR TAKE

“Fake news” and the rise of conspiracy theory nuts in the mainstream media has been a growing topic over the past few years, so an animated sitcom like American Dad tackling it was inevitable. It just seems like they were just shy of getting from “okay” to “good”. At the start of the episode, Hayley suggests Francine be exposed to real news instead of just getting information from one source, and Francine’s backlash against Stan was to take ALL information from EVERY source. I feel like if Hayley had stayed important in the episode, she could’ve worked as a good compromise between these two extremes and had the episode actually have a relatively well thought out lesson of being OPEN to new information, but also having healthy skepticism to help weed out what’s true and false. But I guess if we did that, we wouldn’t have time to watch Steve and Klaus randomly sing Linkin Park and induce mass cringing from the viewership.

Not that we really have to worry about any of OUR readers not knowing what’s true or not. After all, you trust Bubbleblabber to be your only source for adult cartoon coverage, right?

Good, that’s what I thought.