Freakin' Sweet Forum 10.15.07: Mind over Murder - Episode 4
Posted by Cory Lynn Schibler on 10.15.2007
This episode contains adult content and is brought to you by the letter 'H'
I’m back baby! It is I, the sultan of Stewie, Cory Schibler. I want to extend yet another thank you to Jerome for covering the Freakin’ Sweet Forum for my last week during my hectic school schedule. I hope to one day be at a point that I can get several of these written up and I can just pull them up and upload them. Alas, it was not to be again this weekend. So again I sit at my computer the night before my deadline having to watch Family Guy instead of watching Private Practice. Oh well, Addison shall have to wait as “Mind over Murder” awaits my semi-critical eye.
Mind over Murder Original Air date : April 25, 1999 Production Code : 1ACX03
Written by Garrett Donovan, Neil Goldman
Directed by Roy Allen Smith
Principal Cast Peter/Brian/Stewie : Seth McFarlane Lois : Alex Borstein Chris : Seth Green Meg : Lacey Chabert
We open with a great Mentos commercial parody that shows President Lincoln going to Ford’s Theatre, which for all you non-history buffs is the place of his assassination. We then see the dastardly John Wilkes-Boothe, complete with evil villain mustache. It plays out like a standard Mentos commercial. Afterward the family is complaining that the commercial was ineffective and didn’t make them want a Mento. Peter then walks off in a zombie trance claiming that he has to kill Lincoln.
While Lois is in the kitchen listening to Stewie complain about the pain in his gums from his new teeth coming in, Peter, Brian, Quagmire, and Cleveland are out on the lake fishing. Peter wishes that his friends were beers because they drank them all and Cleveland says he needs to get back so he can trim the hedges and be tender with his wife. Peter comes home and says he took care of dinner and all Lois has to do is gut it, scale it, clean it, and cook it.
Lois becomes increasingly upset with Peter who won’t do anything around the house for her. She finally convinces Peter to take Chris to his soccer game, where Peter gets drunk with Quagmire instead of going home to help Lois. Meanwhile, back at the house, Stewie decides he has to make a time machine to fast forward through the teething process. Back at the soccer game, Chris grabs the ball with his hands and is insulted by one of the other parents. Peter takes offense to that, and knocks the parent’s block off. We then discover that the parent that Peter punched was actually just a very ugly woman, who also happened to be pregnant.
As a result of his actions at the soccer game, Peter is put under house arrest. Peter becomes increasingly agitated at his new predicament and says that he can’t even watch TV anymore because the shows are running together. It is after this statement that we get my all time favorite Family Guy cutaway of all time which goes something like this. Announcer: “Today’s program contains adult content and is brought to you by the letter ‘H.’”
Homicide: Life on Sesame Street
Bert: “Hello? Son of a bitch. I’m on my way. Some poor bastard go his head blown off down at a place called Hooper’s.
Bert downs a bottle of liquor.
Ernie: “Bert, I wish you wouldn’t drink so much, Bert.
Bert: “Well, Ernie, I wish you wouldn’t eat cookies in the damn bed!”
Ernie: “Bert, you’re shouting again, Bert!”
Back in the house, Peter says that Lois can’t understand what he is going through because all the things she likes to do are around the house. He starts to tell her that she is really lucky, but fortunately Brian saves him. Peter goes to the basement to find some beer and the spirit of the Pawtucket Patriot appears and after a few gay jokes from Peter he decides he is going to build a bar in the basement. After completing the bar, Peter says that he feel like Tim Allen because he builds stuff and has a criminal record. Allen then appears and snorts up the entire screen with a straw.
Trying to use the old home remedy of whiskey to fix a toothache (in the cutaway, young Peter complains about a tooth and his mother chucks a whiskey bottle at him), Peter gets Stewie drunk.
Skip ahead a little in time and drunk Stewie is in Peter’s bar, trying to explain to a blonde with huge bazumbas named Misty that his time device uses silicon, not silicone. He then begins to explain the intricacies of the device to her.
Upon discovering that her piano is downstairs, Lois is furious and Peter quickly covers by saying he brought it down so she could play for them. Peter ask them to pretend they like it no matter how much it sucks, but that isn’t a problem because the foxy Lois was born to be a lounge singer.
Fast forward to breakfast the next morning and not only is Stewie’s mouth still in pain, but he is also hung-over. Peter is becoming increasingly jealous because of the attention that Lois is getting from his bar patrons over her singing and revealing outfits. In a great bit, a guy makes a comment about Lois being hot and Peter asks him if he is a woman. After he says no, Peter knocks him out. At the super market we get another great bit of innuendo where a guy walks up and says Lois has nice melons. Peter starts to get offended but Lois shows him she is in fact holding melons. The guy then comments that her hooters aren’t bad either. Peter again tries to get offended, but Lois shows him that she is holding a pair of owls. Finally, the guy says “you’re wife’s hot” and runs away. This is enough for Peter to decide to put an end to the bar singing.
Lois runs away to get ready for the show and Peter runs into the woman that he knocked out earlier, as well as the wives of all the women who have been ogling Lois and he tells them to come and stop her themselves. Lois then convinces them that she sings for fun and the angry mob begins to console Lois. Meanwhile, Quagmire accidentally sets the bar on fire. Upstairs, Stewie has decided that since his time machine blue prints were discovered, he must reverse time back to before he made the blue prints.
Meanwhile in the basement, Peter and Lois are trapped behind some burning rubble, where Peter apologizes for his behavior and says that he realized he needs to treat her better. He then says that if he hadn’t taken Chris to his soccer game, he never would’ve learned that valuable lesson. At that point, Stewie rewinds time to the point where Lois asked Peter to take Chris to his game. Peter gets up to go and trips on Stewie’s time machine and claims he hurt his foot and can’t go, thus negating the entire episode.
Stewie is upset about his machine, then his teeth start to bother him again. A tooth then pops out of his gums and claims his mouth in the name of incisor. Soon after, a bicuspid pops out to stop the incisor. They then decide to bite the tongue and the episode fades to black.
The good thing about this episode is that contrary to what Jerome said in last week’s review, this episode actually does have a running plot line that focuses on Peter and the way he treats his wife. Sure, it all gets erased at the end, but that’s not as bad as when Dallas erased an entire season. There are not as many cutaways or allusions in this episode as there are in many standard episodes, but it doesn’t really hurt the episode.
Again, my main judge of hilarity for these episodes is how much stuff there is with Brian and Stewie. This episode has some pretty good Stewie moments, but is lacking on the Brian material except for a couple of funny one-liners. However, Brian’s day is coming very soon, so that is ok. This episode delivers us our first real plot-oriented episode and it does a pretty good job of keeping the viewer interested.
Continuing in our look at Chikara Pro Wrestling, here is Podcast-a-go-go number 9.
The 411: The first truly plot driven episode does well, but is not quite as funny as the others episodes we have looked at so far. The show is still carving out the niche that it will fit into perfectly near the end of season 2. With this one out of the way, we inch ever closer to the end of season 1 and the greatness that is Brian:Portrait of a Dog. However, this one is funny enough to fall in just behind the first 3. 7.0 out of 10.0.
For those wondering, I would have rated Chitty Chitty Death Bang around a 7 as well.
