Summary
Peter and Chris start a business in “And Then There’s Fraud”, and Stewie takes drastic measures to look younger.
This recap of Family Guy season 19, episode 12, “And Then There’s Fraud”, contains spoilers.
Running a business is a difficult thing — running one if you’re Peter and Chris Griffin is next to impossible, or at least it would be were it not for the kindness of Sully Sullenberger. But we’ll get to that. This all comes about when Peter and Chris attend a meaningless baseball game and, thanks to sheer happenstance, a member of the crowd believes that Chris caught a home run ball. Since he’s willing to buy it for $300, Peter and Chris both hit on the idea that people will buy anything if they think it’s famous in some way, and decide to start up a phoney memorabilia business. One of their sales is to Quagmire, who buys the hat he thinks Sully was wearing when he crash-landed a plane on the Hudson River, and willingly parts with $5000 for the privilege of wearing it. This is fine, if a little unethical, until Quagmire reveals he wants to get the item signed, which will expose him to Peter and Chris’s duplicity.
Except it won’t, since wise old Sully believes in… well, belief, and that if Quagmire believes he has the real hat, it might make him a better husband, father, or “sex character who doesn’t play as well in the #MeToo era”. Maybe he has a point, but it’s easy to be skeptical. It’s a good joke, though, even if it hardly justifies the minutes-long Hudson Brothers live-action video package that takes up a sizeable chunk of Family Guy season 19, episode 12.
In the B-plot of “And Then There’s Fraud”, Stewie gets mistaken for being “at least three” while at the children’s museum, so gets botox and fillers to make himself look younger until he eventually resembles, at least according to his doctor, Daryl Hannah. The solution is to have all of the bones in his face broken and then smushed back together, but he refuses to follow medical advice so he can attend the school picture day, and his entire face sloughs off just in time for the snap. (The cutaway gag to a grown-up Stewie in bed with one of his classmates is one of those wincing Family Guy jokes that you wish they didn’t bother to include.)
Bizarrely, there’s also a running joke about Meg having done something that prohibits her from being allowed to wander alone (she barely featured in the previous episode either.) The episode ends with her severing her own foot to escape her ankle bracelet and fleeing into the woods. It’d probably be funny to see where that story went.
