Summary
“Pawtucket Pat” explores the thorny issue of pulling down statues after Brian’s new journalism career outs one of Quahog’s founders as being slightly more unpleasant than advertised.
This recap of Family Guy season 19, episode 8, “Pawtucket Pat”, contains spoilers. You can check out our thoughts on the previous episode by clicking these words.
You can rely on Family Guy to address contemporary topics, but you should never expect the show to do it well. With that having been said I must admit that I found a lot of “Pawtucket Pat” to be pretty funny, with well-chosen targets — the desperate tactics of online news media, the knotty issue of removing statues, the generally useless trend of expecting historical figures to have a contemporary sense of morality — that are made fun of, yes, but are also shown to be a bit more complicated than just simple gag-fodder.
It all starts when Brian gets a new job working for The Hog, Quahog’s premier online magazine, and quickly runs out of asinine listicle ideas. Instead, he looks into the titular Pawtucket Pat, a famed brewer whose diary reveals that he stole his recipe from Native Americans. Brian, hungry for clicks, reports the news, and it causes a major ruckus in town.
Brian and some similarly-liberal townsfolk would happily tear down the statue of Pawtucket Pat that has been around all of Peter’s life, which seems to be his only justification for wanting to keep the thing standing. Lois has a better counter-argument, which is that if you judge every historical figure by a modern level of wokeness, you’d never have statues of anyone. Peter’s friends and indeed the rest of Quahog are similarly divided on the issue.
The best joke of the episode is that Peter doesn’t really have any idea — at least not one he’s able to articulate — why he’s so adamant about the statue staying up. But after enlisting Kid Rock (and his father, Adult Rock, but not his brother, The Rock) he starts to win public support anyway. Nobody, presumably, really and truly understands what they’re annoyed about.
But the Natives do. After Brian and Stewie pull the Pawtucket Pat statue down and tow it away, a rally develops that the Native Americans themselves are in attendance for to put across their point of view. Even for a show as ridiculous as Family Guy, Lois getting all of the angry whites to apologize seems pretty far-fetched.
What did you think of Family Guy season 19, episode 8, “Pawtucket Pat”? Comment below.
