Review: Family Guy “Baby Stewie”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

When the family goes to an escape room, Brian ends up stealing the solution from Stewie who had it figured out no problem. When Stewie confronts Brian about stealing the answer, Brian tells him that one day he is going to lose his intelligence and it doesn’t matter.

Stewie takes this news to heart and quickly assembles a machine that will assure that his genes are pure and he will remain a genius as he grows up. Unfortunately, the device backfires and causes Stewie to regress into a normal dumb baby.

When Brian realizes he lost his friend and is stuck taking care of a miserable infant, he tries to reverse the experiment. However, he only makes things worse as Stewie becomes a monster. He is left with one last option to travel back in time and apologize before Stewie changes himself.

Our Take:

Just a couple of episodes ago we got to see the future world of Family Guy in which Stewie was an old man.  Now, we get to see a world where Stewie is a baby. Well, I guess he is technically a baby already.  But, this time we get to see what life would be like if Stewie was an actual helpless infant. Of course, the only person this would affect would be Brian considering the rest of the family is not supposed to understand the little psycho anyway.

The results are pretty enjoyable and well-written. Because Brian typically is the one that hangs out with Stewie, when the baby regresses, Brian is left responsible for taking care of the infant. Where once they could hang out and make intelligent jokes, now Brian is left changing diapers and being screamed at. And, obviously, whoever wrote these scenes was a parent themselves because they paint the nightmare of parenting perfectly.

This episode does take an unexpected turn (have you ever heard that in a Family Guy review before?).  What you would expect through the episode is that Stewie is doing this as revenge and showing Brian not to take advantage of his intelligence again. But, that’s not the message at all. Surprisingly, Stewie did mess up his own experiment. And, you would never have expected this episode to end with Brian time travelling to fix the mistake. A dull ending compared to what could have been if Stewie were just pretending to be an annoying infant.

To add insult to injury with this miscalculated ending, the show ends on a strange note. With not enough time to fill the timeslot, the show turns into a parody of a Pixar short. Maybe this was a knock at The Simpsons who recently had a short to open up the newly released Onward. But Family Guy just ended up proving why it wasn’t their show that got the honour. The couple-minute Cleveland featured short was not only pointless and uninteresting, but it also ended on a dark tone unfit for Disney-Pixar.

It sucks that I have to say that another Family Guy episode failed to accomplish what is intended here. What could have been a memorable episode was mistreated and lacked any of the turns that would have made it fun. Sure, it may have been predictable that Stewie was manipulating the situation, but sometimes predictable is satisfying. This season has seen a downturn compared to the last few that have been released. Hopefully, this show can find it’s stride before their contract runs up because it will be hard to convince Disney to keep this show in the Fox line-up as it is.