Summary (spoilers after):
Brian has a microchip that reveals he once shared a home with the Hendersons, a different family. Brian’s existence with the Griffins is made significantly more difficult by this stunning revelation about his past. The Griffins learn how much Brian is missed as Brian decides to return to living with the Hendersons.
Our Opinion
For more than 20 years, Brian has been a devoted member of the Griffin family. It therefore surprises me that they are not his first and only family. Yes, it appears that before Brian met the Griffins, he belonged to a different family. It’s about time this season brought us something intriguing.
For the first seven minutes, the focus was on Peter’s hair problem rather than the major plot. Because Jerry, his go-to barber, recently passed away, he declined to acquire one. He let his hair grow out, which turned out to be alive, and managed to dodge the new barber by using his imagination to launch a rocket into space. Peter cut the hair thing off his head and then left it live in the garage as the story came to a close. For the remainder of the show, the creature was never mentioned again. That little part felt more like an afterthought to the episode’s 30-minute running time because it wasn’t very long. Although it was amusing to watch Peter use his imagination to get trapped in space for three weeks, the whole hair situation might have worked better as an episode’s main plot.
The episode, overall, was a reasonable improvement over the previous two episodes, aside from the entire hair-raising issue. It had some amusing jokes, like Stewie and Chris’ “bonding time” that alluded to Saturday Night Live and Peter’s imagination rocket. Additionally, it had the right amount of emotion to reflect how much Brian meant to the Griffin family. Even though they were fleeting, I would much rather have such times than Lois trying to earn “Customer of the Week.”
The heart of the story was in Brian’s decision to move in with the Hendersons when he realized how stupid the Griffins could be. Due to their intelligence and riches, he believed that living with the Hendersons would be better. He was unhappy when he eventually realized that they were treating him like a regular pet. Brian quickly came to the conclusion that when he is with the Griffins, he is treated more like a person than a typical dog. Be with the family who treats you correctly, as the Family Guy would say.
This was a good episode, one of the better ones so far in the show’s twentieth season. Yes, it still has a few absurd and out of the ordinary moments, but I’ve come to expect them. However, unlike what it did to Lois a few weeks ago, it never forgot to give Brian some proper and interesting development.