Marcian Tobay

It's a running joke that they constantly throw insults at Meg that make no sense. She's too fat, too ugly, too masculine, whatever ya got. The fact of the matter is that she's completely average. The writer's just go over the top out of their aforementioned frustration.

so you just skipped the entire original post, then?

Fun fact, they've gone on record as saying that the writers hate Meg because none of them knew how to write for a teenage girl but were saddled with her after she was put in the show.

They hate this young woman because they don't understand her. I'll leave it at that and the simple statement that the Meg joke grew old for me a while ago, and I genuinely appreciate the episodes where she gets to develop a bit.

PM me who this is, even though I already suspect.

The body count was disturbingly high...

Yeah, I noticed that. Peter leads the investigation for about 15 minutes of an hour long episode. After that, the show pretty explicitly goes "There, we met our Peter quota. Now back to the real story." A nice call on their part.

Hm... I didn't think of that. I suppose they can keep that character in their pocket for any time they want to do a serious episode again.

Yeah, that's what I was keeping in mind as I was watching it.

What was really surreal was the solution to the mystery. Not so much what it was (which is also awesome), but that it made sense, was tightly explained, and fit in the expectations of the mystery genre. I spent the whole episode dreading that the answer would be "Monkey in the closest LOLOLOL You wasted an hour of your life!"

Instead, you get one of those "I have to watch the whole episode again and see how the pieces connect" type answers.

Very cool.

I would strongly recommend people track down and watch this episode. A semi-serious homage to Agatha Christie's works, the season premiere of Family Guy is a strongly devoted hour long murder mystery. It's well written, full of twists and turns, and containing a satisfying denouement.

And here's where the stakes get interesting: The whole story is canon. Whoever dies stays dead, and whatever revelations are made will remain in future episodes. Once this sinks in, the entire episode becomes legitimately tense, as every character featured in the episode has a cult following. The chips get put on the table and the dice start rolling halfway through.

What makes it even better is that the comedy aspect is completely intact, tighter than ever, and doesn't hinder the momentum of the main story. No cutaways or nonsense gags. Just pure character motivated one-liners and actions.

All in all, the episode felt like a sort of reboot. The entire time I was watching it, I could practically hear Seth MacFarlene saying "This is how well we can do when we really try, and this is the bar for Season 9." Whether he follows through on that is a separate issue, but it completely reinvigorated my interest in the franchise.

So, go watch it. Report back.

********** SPOILERS FROM THIS MOMENT FORWARD**********

Wait, what?

Very excited about it, but very curious.

There's really not much more to the story than for the last remaining survivors to slap each other silly and call it a day. We were heavily led to believe that there are no more Jigsaw traps. Every character alive utterly hates each other.... that's it.

Beyond all of them having a Matrix style epic battle and then calling it a day, I'm confused as to how they are planning to make a full length movie out of it.

I...

but...

yes. That is the greatest exchange in any comic ever. It justifies the medium in itself.

What line? I didn't read the All-Star comic. Tell me everything terrible about it. I was raised on MST3K!

"Abed, your sense of meta-humor is SO Season 1."

List of guests on Sesame Street. There are a lot of people that you're about to slice off the list.

I haven't seen the episode yet, but that's an awesome meta-joke.