'Family Guy' Season 10, Episode 14 Recap - 'Be Careful What You Fish For'

In the pantheon of really weird episodes of "Family Guy," this week's episode might rank near the top in terms of the "what the hell?" factor.

Our main storyline starts with an ocean liner shipping Mercedes cars sinking off the coast of Rhode Island, which gives Peter the idea to go fish for one. But when he attempts to do so, he just ends up catching a talking dolphin named Billy Finn, who is voiced by Ricky Gervais.

Billy gets Peter the hood ornament from one of the cars, which is good enough to make Peter happy. Peter nonchalantly offers to return the favor to Billy anytime, which Billy takes him up on by crashing at the Griffin household for a while to "try things out on land."

Talking animals are nothing new on Seth MacFarlane shows (Brian here, Klaus in "American Dad," the bear in "The Cleveland Show"), but there's something about seeing a dolphin, voiced by Gervais, standing at the Griffins' front door that sort of makes you go "huh?" which then leads you to ignore the rest of the scene because you're thinking to yourself, "Do all animals on this show talk? No, I've seen some that don't. Can dolphins survive on land? I guess they breathe through blowholes, so... well, but it seems like they would dry up. Hmm. Wait, what's going on in this scene?"

Gervais is a funny man and has a gift for little bits of improvisation that end up being pretty darned funny. He's a bit out of place on this show, which is so heavily scripted, and is mostly relegated to fish puns, so it all seems sort of a waste. Plus, this is very similar to the storyline in which Death was an unwanted houseguest (or, for that manner, any other sitcom episode ever with an unwanted houseguest).

Brian and Stewie's storyline isn't anything new, either. It starts out with Brian hearing worse and worse things about Stewie's preschool teacher, who apparently chains the kids to the sink, leaves them unattended for hours at a time, only feeds them leftover Baja Fresh, and leaves guns and knives lying around for the kids to play with.

Before the joke can even hit, you know exactly what's going to happen: Brian will meet the teacher, she'll be very attractive, and Brian will suddenly ignore the horrible problems in front of him. I suppose it's a testament to the strong characters on this show that we know what's going to happen, but let's put Brian in a new situation, eh? One where we learn something new about him?

Also, there was too much too fast with the preschool. The proper way to play that would have been to reveal a few slightly irresponsible things at first, and then "heighten the game" so to speak until we start finding out that children are disappearing and other horrible things.

As for Billy Finn... well, he ends up reunited with his dolphin wife, which of course is something we don't care about at all. But with Gervais (a noted animal rights activist) there, the storyline at least affords some opportunities to make some commentary about killing dolphins, our refusal to only buy dolphin-safe tuna, and our trashing of the ocean.

Cut-aways of the Week:

- Making us read the cut-away: A+, very original, a nice slap in the face to increasing illiteracy (by choice)

- Living with ants: B+, like the punchline

- Brian seeing "Milo and Otis": C, seemed to be missing something, maybe Brian's reaction not enough?

- Cocaine and dollhouses: C+, ridiculously strange, also aimless

- Peter singing "Reunited": C+, not a big laugher but Peter singing is usually a winner