Review: American Dad “The Future is Borax”

See you next season!

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

While Roger goes on a truncated journey through a musical jingle career, Stan and Francine go on a couple’s retreat at the advice of Barry. When that goes awry, they learn that their relationship is somehow strongest when they are given intense, life-threatening challenges to overcome…but then soon realize that they will end up literally killing themselves if they keep this up and decide to just be comfortable with each other.

OUR TAKE

Over a year later and American Dad finally finishes its fifteenth season. And despite my total lack of patience with last week’s episode, this one is surprisingly more solid in plot and character. I’ve made my opinion known several times about the usual staleness of Stan and Francine’s marital troubles, but there are a few rare moments where plots involving them find a sweet spot that really gets to the heart of what makes them work as a couple. It’s so often that the focus is solely on their dysfunction, where Stan is trying to shield Francine from something he deems harmful and then has to fight to bring her back to her usual helpless self when she peeks behind the curtain. Here, though, despite it beginning with them arguing about their differences, we slowly get to see them come together on a unified front to be better for each other.

And in a surprising turn of events, I actually kind of liked the tiny B-plot with the other characters this time! As mentioned, it’s basically in Roger’s nature to take things to their limit and beyond, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a distilled version of a rise and fall of a musician before, even when it comes to jingles. First, he gets one good hit and immediately turns into an Act 2 protagonist in a rock star biopic who’s completely disappeared up their own ass, past their prime, and surrounding themselves with brown-nosers who only encourage their worst habits. Plus, the couple he writes his second jingle is half-voiced by J.K. Simmons! Man, despite being in Oscar-nominated movies, this dude is not forgetting his cartoon voice-acting roots and for that, he is commended.

But wow, hard to believe we’re finally at the end of the season after so long. It seems like only a couple months ago that we were welcoming the show back from its concerningly long absence and now…it’s gone again. It will be hard to carry on without American Dad, but we must be strong and begin our long wait for the next season. Maybe in the meantime, we can check out that underrated and obscure cult hit “Game of Thrones” and see what that’s about. And I heard they finally made an Avengers movie? Though I bet that Justice League movie was way better.

Anyway, see you next week for the premiere of American Dad Season 16!