Summary
“Meg Goes to College” puts some physical obstacles in the way of both Meg and Brian, to mixed results.
This recap of Family Guy season 19, episode 18, “Meg Goes to College”, contains spoilers.
Meg has been severely underused in this season of Family Guy, so it’s nice that “Meg Goes to College” is about her, even if her going to college only really matters in the context of Peter bankrolling it so she can eventually get a great job and spoil him in his old age. Not that Peter is particularly well-suited to the task of actually getting Meg into a prestigious college, as evidenced by the fact that he forges a recommendation letter from Big Bird.
The only solution, then, is to fake Meg being a star athlete to get her accepted on a scholarship, which works, but poses the obvious problem that Meg then has to somehow be good at sports. The less obvious problem is that Peter decides to stay on campus, embodying various quintessential college personalities until Meg gets so angry that she calls him a fraud. Peter, being remarkably childish, retorts by telling her that her entire application was a fraud, which the “Dean nearby” overhears. Suspended, she has to prove that she really can do all the things that her application claims. And, surprisingly, she can.
Meg goes through a number of different physical activities, including a song-and-dance number in Russian (Mila Kunis speaks Russian, which reminds me of this great moment). The last task, though, is to windsurf over Providence Falls, which it turns out she can’t do. There’s a moment before Meg sets out on her ill-fated mission that encapsulates the grim joke at the core of this plot — she thinks that Peter and Lois did this because they wanted the best for her when in reality Peter did it because he wanted the best for himself. It still sucks to be Meg.
In the B-plot of Family Guy season 19, episode 18, Stewie becomes Brian’s personal trainer and turns Meg’s room into a gym, but predictably it all goes swiftly wrong. Brian, having broken his arm — or is it foreleg? — instead employs Stewie’s nemesis, Doug, to train him. This upsets Stewie so much that Brian has no choice but to fire Doug and decide that he hates exercise after all, but it makes for a lot of funny dog and baby gags. Those things always work, don’t they? It’s hardly Family Guy at its absolute best, but it’s still pretty funny that Doug can’t get down the stairs on his own.
