If "Business Guy" was one of the season's least random episodes, then "Dial Meg for Murder" has to be its most random so far.  The show even opens up with a throwaway gag, a montage of the news show's chopper pilot "Drunk Billy" on his drunk helicopter escapades.  Has Family Guy ever opened an episode with the news casters?  I don't think so.  And having seen "Dial Meg for Murder," I can see why.

"Dial Meg for Murder" also follows the classic Simpsons story arc, where the events of the first act randomly kick off the second and third acts, but are never mentioned again.  In this case, Peter decides to become a rodeo star.  

While Peter is busy riding a bull (and then being raped by the bull), Brian is sitting in the stands, chatting to the woman next to him.  Who turns out to be a publisher, and gives him a writing assignment: a Teen People article about today's teenage girl.

This episode was one déjà vu moment after another, as it kept recycling settings and motifs from earlier episodes.  In this case, Brian's verbal evisceration of Connie DelAmico in the episode where he took Meg to her prom.  Later we also see the prison glass window (this time in a people prison, so there aren't any female dogs pressing their six pairs of nipples against the glass) and of course Peter riding a horse (although the horse doesn't come to bed with him).

One thing all these recycled scenes have in common is that they are a lot funnier than anything which happens in "Dial Meg for Murder."  

At any rate, Brian and Stewie follow Meg to a prison, where they learn she's dating a convict.  When the convict escapes, Meg gets locked up for harboring a fugitive, and the show finally begins in earnest.  Which is kind of too bad, because we're already halfway through, but the script has wasted a bunch of our time with cutaway jokes, like Stewie's "resort for singles in their 30s" and a gag about Goofy being in hell for having helped plot the 9/11 terror attacks (not all dogs go to Heaven, you see).  

This episode tries really hard to cross the line, from a racist gag about Chinese NASCAR drivers, to the neighborhood pedophile purchasing "popsicles, roofies, and a mallet" from Mort Goldman's pharmacy.  But the most disturbing aspect of the show is that Meg returns from prison slightly more, shall we say, "sexually precocious."  She rapes her father Peter in the shower with a loofah, and rips of her mother Lois's sleeve then says "Get out now or stay and get weird."  And in the next scene, makes out with a classmate who's unconscious because Meg has just busted her chops with a pillowcase full of cans of soda.

The episode hs fun with evil prison Meg, but of course inevitably she turns around in the last 30 seconds of the show, when Brian shows her that he cares about her.  "I was just so tired being everyone's whipping girl," Meg sighs.  And everything is back to normal.  (Too bad, really.)