Review: American Dad “The Legend of Old Ulysses”

Ulysses?! Oh god, please tell me I’m not going see any lolis. I can’t go back to jail!

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Stan and Steve are getting ready to head to a Halliburton-sponsored father-son event at Possum Lake. However, there’s rumors of the reemergence of Old Ulysses, a mythical leviathan whose legends must be sung in a Gilligan’s Island-esque tune. Snot gets jealous of this trip and hires Tuttle to be his substitute father, and they start creaming them in all the events that the Smith’s usually take with ease. This causes a rift between Stan and Steve, so Steve plots to sabotage their rivals by pretending to be a new son for Tuttle. When Stan finds out about this, he drops Steve, forcing him to be with Tuttle anyway. But Steve’s conscious gets the best of him…just in time for Old Ulysses to begin its feasting of campers. Steve and Stan finally work together with the help of caffeinated energy drinks, slaying the beast once and for all.

Meanwhile, Francine and Hayley dehydrate while trying to get a tan and Roger scams a biking class while also assaulting the instructor, claiming Ulysses’ legend for himself.

OUR TAKE

It’s times like this that recapping this show really doesn’t do it justice, because as dryly as this synopsis describes the events, they’re filled to the brim with American Dad’s special brand of weird and out-there comedy. This is one of those times where the show really makes use of what sets it apart from Family Guy and Simpsons, that being when they’re willing to dive head first into the really strange jokes while constructing a world and using its characters to build a hilarious scenario.

In this case, it plays on a lot of established traits of Stan, Steve, and Snot that plays on each of their dysfunctional relationships with having or being dads. Snot never really knew his dad, so he’s desperate for someone to fill that role, apparently even if he has to hire someone like Tuttle for it (in one of the most elaborate but probably best jokes of the episode). Meanwhile, Steve has often been notorious for lording things he has over Snot, in this case having a semi-functional relationship with his own father, to the point that he can’t stand Snot surpassing him with a dad-for-hire. And Stan, while wanting to have a good time with his son, ultimately just wants to get away from work and have fun. I remember an episode where he ended up actually really taking a liking to Snot, which I guess wasn’t worth bringing up this episode, but that also plays into Stan’s character of repressing emotions as well.

The sing-song legend of Ulysses (which luckily didn’t involve and pedophilic French alchemists or Sumerian Space Satellites) is another example of the surreal weirdness I like from this show, taking what could have been a pretty generic Jaws-ripoff and turning it into a jaunty camp myth. And while it didn’t really factor into the plot until the very end (making the title kind of misleading as a result), it added just enough flavor to the plot that it felt like a welcome part of the episode.

We’ve got five episodes left of this season and, based on the titles, they look to be right up to par with everything we’ve gotten so far. Not quite the show’s best, but still a sign it’s got plenty of life left as it chugs through the halfway point of its second decade. It’s a good time to brain your off turn to, I can that say much.

Score
8/10