“American Dad!” recap: “CIAPOW”

Last week’s season premiere of American Dad! on its new network, TBS, topped basic cable entertainment programs for the evening — delivering 2.5 million viewers between its TBS premiere and its encore presentation on Adult Swim. The episode also was tops for basic cable entertainment in key demos, drawing in over 1.6 million adults 18-49 and 1.2 million adults 18-34, according to a TBS release.

We’ll see if the new episodes continue to draw similar numbers, of if people tuned in that first night to see if the show may be “edgier” than its FOX incarnation. As I wrote about last week, that wasn’t necessarily the case with the premiere episode. Nor was it with tonight’s episode, “CIAPOW.”

american-dad-ciapow

This episode was good in that it brought us back to Stan’s (Seth MacFarlane) job at the CIA (including a voiceover from the always-welcome Patrick Stewart as Director Bullock, seen at the beginning of the episode in the process of having himself transformed into a robot). Stan and fellow agents Dick, Jackson and Hooper are on assignment in Thailand, where they after a terrorist group. But before they can accomplish their mission, a drone strike ordered by Bullock swoops in and finishes the job (leading to a funny conversation between Stan and Bullock about how machines can make mistakes, with Stan using the example of Herbie Goes Bananas).

Bemoaning the fact that modern technology is quickly replacing their jobs, Stan and company decide to try to prove their worth by doing something that a machine can’t — sneak into the king’s palace and steal his jewel-encrusted inhaler.

The group is quickly captured, thanks largely to Dick’s inability to use his new smartphone to snap a pic of the group as a souvenir while they are in the act of stealing the inhaler, and put into a “super-futuristic Thai prison.” During their attempt to escape authorities, the men hide out at a Burger King, thinking it’s a safe house simply because it’s a U.S. corporation (the episode must have been finished before this merger).

In prison, the men are tormented by a diminutive (and yak-obsessed) general (I suppose this could be seen as an “edgy” element, as the depiction of the general might be seen as racist by some). As Stan and friends argue among themselves about who is at fault for their capture, with Stan primarily blaming everyone else, the general takes all but Stan away and injects them with truth serum to find out why they are there. He then later injects Stan, telling Stan that the serum will make him reveal to his friends the real reason they were captured — Stan clumsily left their hotel info at the scene of their theft, leading police right to them.

Stan decides they should try to escape old-school style, by creating a distraction with a fake fight. Before he is finished stating this idea, the others oblige by beating up on him (with Dick using the excuse that “I can’t punch loneliness”). They are able to get out of their cell and into the prison’s main operational center, where Dick’s technological incompetence is used to crash the main computer, opening the doors and freeing them. (“Human error triumphing over machines,” says Stan.)

However, they decide once again to steal the inhaler, and are promptly reimprisoned. This time, they are freed when Bullock — now completely turned into a half-human, half-mechanical spider thing — bursts through the prison wall with a catchphrase, “Did anyone order an awesome rescue?”

Throughout the episode, a pretty forgettable subplot involves Francine, Hayley, Steve and Roger back at home trying to amuse themselves with a “slow-motion race” — walk across the room as slowly as possible, with the last one to touch the wall on the other side of the room the winner (Roger ends up tricking Steve into getting a boner at the end, with his erection touching the wall and therefore disqualifying him, so there’s some of your “edginess” again, but it probably isn’t anything they couldn’t have done on FOX). This plot had some humor in it mainly when the slow-motion was used to offset the frantic Thailand adventures Stan was having, but overall not the most satisfying use of the other characters.