'Family Guy' Season 10, Episode 6 Recap - 'Thanksgiving'

It's tough to know these days what you're going to get from "Family Guy." A few weeks ago we got a horrible mess of an episode involving domestic abuse, then last week we got an instant classic, complete with a nicely put together time travel storyline.

This week's episode, "Thanksgiving," landed somewhere in between. Rather than take a light approach to a Thanksgiving episode, the writers decided to tackle a much heavier topic: the war in Iraq and a soldier's duty. And yes, this is still "Family Guy" we're talking about, not an episode of "NCIS."

It all starts when everyone gathers at the Griffin's for Thanksgiving, including Quagmire's dad, Adam West and Carol, and the Swansons. Joe and Bonnie get a surprise when their son Kevin, who they thought had died in Iraq, shows up at the door.

He has a story about how a turkey bomb put him in a three-year coma, after which he flew directly home.

But Joe discovers the truth thanks to some clues based around the release date of "The Hurt Locker" and the rise of Ed Hardy clothing, which reveals that Kevin actually faked his death and went AWOL to get away from the war.

If you're a fan of "Family Guy," you probably already know that Seth MacFarlane and most of the writing staff leans heavily to the left, with most of that political voice coming out through Brian. It's no surprise to hear anti-war sentiment coming from these characters. But what's interesting here is that they've written both sides of the debate: Joe, on one hand, believes that the law is the law, while Kevin believes that there's a right and a wrong, and that it was wrong for him to keep following orders.

But a flashback to Joe's past (why did he have a fro? Was it the 70's? Kevin's not that old) reveals that things aren't always so black and white, as Joe let a thief go who was just trying to feed his exceptionally wide-eyed children.

An interesting style to his episode, where almost all of the jokes were small asides that were sometimes in reaction, but more often completely unrelated, to the more serious discussion at hand. That led to some pretty funny stuff that didn't require a cut-away, such as Bonnie's compliment ("This food is so f***ing good Lois") and Stewie's comment to Ida ("He threw up when he found out you were a monster").

That style provided a pretty high jokes-per-minute rate, which means that this was actually a pretty funny episode, if anything just because of volume. Not all of them were winners, but a few were good for some chuckles. And the cut-aways (listed below) were solid overall.

Cut-aways of the week:

-The giant crab ("no no nono no nonono no"): B, funny and non-sequitur but nothing that will stick around as a FG classic

-Adam West's double flash forward ("Future old people are all wizards"): A-, cute and self-reflexive with a funny twist

-Peter faking death to avoid dentist appointment: C+, not the best punchline

-Pretending not to notice people's race day: A, really funny and true, then a great twist at the end. Solid!

-Guys in the editing room scrambling to understand Peter's cut-away, going into the Cowardly Lion as Lindsay Lohan's gynecologist: A, another funny commentary from the show on itself