Amnesia: Family Guy Goes There

The most recent Family Guy episode "Big Man On Hippocampus" (season 8 episode 10 original air date 1/03/10) explores territory that even I never thought it would stoop to: Peter gets hit on the head, and comes down with a nasty case of amnesia.  Really!  

If it's wrong to nitpick the medical inaccuracies of Family Guy, then I don't want to be right.

Peter appears to have lost everything out of his head (I mean, what little was in there in the first place).  At one point, Lois has to tell him what a knife is.  (Thus leading us into a Crocodile Dundee joke which was both inevitable and staler than the half a tube of Saltine crackers sitting in the back of my cupboard right now.  But to give the writers credit, they half pulled that gag out of its nose dive with Peter's musing "I want to see that guy everywhere, and then never again.")

Two things stood out about this episode.  The first was the fake Adult Swim bump, right before the first commercial break.  I watched the episode on Hulu, and was so disoriented that I had to click back and watch it again!  The second was the cameo appearance by Dwayne Johnson (better known as The Rock) performing an interpretation of Peter and Lois making love, using Peter and Lois action figures.

Dwayne Johnson has a long and fabulous history with Family Guy.  He first entered the series when Peter speculated aloud about his ethnic heritage.  Much later, I laughed myself sick during a special Fox night dedicated to his movie Race to Witch Mountain.

"I'm black and Samoan," Johnson said, in a mock-snit.  "It's called bla-moan."

Typically tacky moments include a ridiculous escalation of props as Quagmire tries to "resuscitate" his manhood, having experienced an attack of erectile dysfunction after Lois confessed that she trusted him.  (If some poor bugger kills himself by using an Emergency Room crash cart defibrillator on his unit, the Family Guy writers will be crying their way to the poorhouse.)  

Also, and probably even more tasteless, was a gag that played on Gene Siskel's death resulting from a brain tumor.  Ha ha!  Get it?  Headache!  Brain tumor!  Those manatees really hit a home run with that one.

The "Family Feud" segment from the first portion of the show is the only thing that keeps this episode from landing firmly at the bottom of the heap.  I expected a lot of things from the set-up, none of which came to pass, except for the wacky guesses at answers.  Although Peter's wacky answer, "the flute that Captain Picard played, first in his imagination, and then in real life, in the episode The Inner Light from Star Trek The Next Generation" was a lot funnier than I expected it to be.  

(And it does raise the perennial question, where DO they get the survey answers for their leaderboard?  I always assumed it was a "survey" of the Family Feud staff.)