"Go Stewie Go"

This will probably go down in history as "the Tootsie episode."  The theme of this week's episode is "inappropriate sexual contact."  Family Guy eventually offends everyone, but I have rarely found an episode as off-putting as "Go Stewie Go."

The episode has two storylines.  From a dramatic plotting perspective, the intertwined stories and dramatic progression are top notch.  (Too bad it's all so creepy!)  I didn't notice any cutaways proper, and although there are several tangential jokes, the episode as a whole kept up its forward momentum until the end.

In the first storyline, Stewie auditions for an American version of Jolly Farm Revue, a British children's show which featured in the third season episode "Road to Europe."  When Stewie learns that they have already cast all their boy parts and are looking only for girls, he decides to audition in drag.  "Tootsie" references abound, but I wonder how many Family Guy viewers have ever even seen Dustin Hoffman's 1982 cross-dressing comedy?

In the second storyline, Meg gets a perfectly normal boyfriend, and Lois falls in love with him.  Nothing about this secondary plot isn't creepy and weird.  The script was clearly aiming for "transgressive," and it hit it square on.  Yay.

"Go Stewie Go" is chock full of jokes about incest, statutory rape, cross-dressing, bestiality, and false accusations of child sexual abuse.  Yay.

Stewie's sexual orientation is called into question again, and the show once again fails to distinguish between transsexuals, transvestitism, and homosexuality.  According to Family Guy, it pretty much all goes into the same bucket, which is surprisingly jockish and conservative thinking considering Seth McFarlane is an outspoken advocate of gay rights and is in his own words "passionate about my support for the gay community."

Brian takes a dig at this when he asks, "Yeah, what ARE you?"

Obviously Stewie is whatever it's convenient for the writers to say he is.  The preponderance of evidence lies with "homosexual," and there is an episode which has been produced but not aired in which Stewie comes out of the closet.  But Stewie also appears to enjoy wearing women's clothing.  ("It feels right, Brian.")  I know where MacFarlane is coming from when he says he wants to keep Stewie's sexuality "ambiguous," but I think it's probably only confusing people who don't understand that these things aren't all the same.
 
Just to cap it all off, the secondary storyline ends with an incredibly disturbing scene between Meg and Lois.  After Meg catches Lois making out with Meg's boyfriend, Meg asserts that "You couldn't even imagine the things that I do for him.  And this isn't even about making out.  This is about power tools.  I go to places you couldn't get back from."  Then she pulls out her own tooth and throws it at Lois!

Episode highlight: Jesus is on the jock side of a "jocks versus nerds" game of Dodgeball.  "Hey, you said we were gonna inherit the earth," one nerd whines.  Jesus hefts a Dodgeball and pegs the kid in the head, then adds, "Yeah, when WE'RE done with it!"