Family Guy - 10x23 - Internal Affairs

    Over the last year or two, I've gotten more sloppy about watching Family Guy.  The episodes have been increasingly experimental, trying all sorts of tricks involving our expectations of how an episode will play out.  This can mean stuff like unexpected emotional resonance, playing some especially dark plots, and ending with things resolved in ways we wouldn't expect - or not resolved at all.
    Sometimes, I like these tricks.  The problem isn't in those tricks, the problem is that despite this effort to be cutting edge, the show is still very predictable.  The rhythms that appear, the types of references.  The types of humor.  This is what led to the show becoming stale.  This, combined with a reluctance to frame the stories within more traditional messaging.  (Strangely, the efforts to avoid messages worked perfectly for Strangers With Candy)

    So this episode deals with Joe.  In his celebration of a drug bust, it's made clear that Bonnie doesn't really like him.  Joe cheats on her with a rookie cop that likes him, and it seems that he's heading toward a divorce.  Then Peter gets involved and tries to bring them back together.

    There's a single highlight to this episode, and it's during an extended chicken fight.  While those gags are predictable, it's usually pretty fun to see how far they go, and in what direction.  In this case, it does got into space briefly, but the part that I liked was in the cloning research lab.  They fight their way into a chamber, and then clones of them appear in another chamber.  Clones of the pair, all fighting, flood the room.  Their destruction causes some explosion, which kills off all of the clones, but propels the original pair on to their next locale.

    The rest of the episode wasn't noteworthy at all.