A Fistful of Meg

"A Fistful of Meg" is the fourth episode of the twelfth season and the 214th overall episode of the animated comedy series Family Guy. It aired on Fox in the United States and Canada on November 10, 2013, and is written by Dominic Bianchi and Joe Vaux and directed by Joe Vaux.^[1] In the episode, Meg tries to get out of a fight with a tough bully while Brian retaliates against Peter for posing naked.

Plot

Peter casually starts undressing in front of Brian while talking to him about the Three Little Pigs as he sometimes prefers sleeping naked. Brian is disgusted by it, although Peter points out that Brian himself is typically naked, and claims that everyone undresses in front of their dogs. After another encounter with Brian in the bathroom naked after Brian has just finished showering, Peter realizes that Brian does not like to see him naked and starts harassing Brian in the nude including using Lois in a bait-and-switch tactic and even cutting off his own penis and mailing it to Brian in a package (though Peter collapsed from a lack of blood). After constant in-the-nude harassment from Peter, Brian decides he cannot bear it anymore. At Stewie's suggestion, Brian decides to shave all of his fur off. After falling into Brian's trap, Peter is shocked at seeing Brian hairless, wrinkled, and sporting six nipples. Brian is very affectionate to Peter scaring him even when he asked why Brian has six nipples. Too scared at what he has seen, Peter agrees to wear clothes at all times in front of Brian. Although Stewie's idea worked, Brian's fur will not grow back for three months. In the meantime, Stewie allows him to wear a pair of his own clothes in the interim to keep warm.

Meanwhile at school, Meg hears about a new student named Mike Pulaski from her friends, mentioning that he is an unstable bully, which Meg gets to see firsthand when he turns Neil Goldman into a balloon animal and pops him. While in the cafeteria with her friends, Meg accidentally spills her lunch on Mike, prompting him to plan a showdown with her on the coming Friday. Meg unsuccessfully tries to get out of the fight first by asking Lois to transfer her to another school. The school in mind is too expensive. The next day at school, Principal Shepherd announces on the PA that he is accepting bets on who will win the showdown. For her second attempt to get out of the fight, Meg intentionally released a sex tape in an attempt to get expelled from school. It is only watched by Stewie. Finally, Meg pays four of the toughest students in school to beat up Mike for $1,000. Mike grievously beats them all and writes "You're Next, Meg" on a hallway wall in their blood. Meg goes crying to the bathroom where her friends decide to abandon her for their own safety. While crying, Quagmire calls her into one of the stalls that serve as his "base of operations" and admits to Meg that he had been bullied by a girl as a teenager over preferring RC Cola during the Cola Wars. After extensive training with Quagmire, Meg faces Mike at school on Friday. Initially getting beaten up where some of the punches to Meg's face causes it to switch between her normal face (which is considered the ugly one) and the beautiful face, Meg decides to kiss Mike grossing him out. Meg then further grosses him out by popping a pimple onto him before finally flashing Mike. Meg lifts her shirt and shows Mike her breasts while everyone else looked away. While everyone else was, Mike didn't look away and ends up gruesomely melted similar to what happened in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Although Quagmire tells Meg that she will be alive to tell the story for a "long time," Meg reveals in a narration that she dies a year later from septic shock due to her body reacting to a frozen hot dog.

Reception

Eric Thurm of The A.V. Club gave the episode a D, saying "Pretty much the only saving grace in “A Fistful Of Meg” is the B-story, in which Brian can’t escape Peter’s nudity. There’s not enough here to sustain a whole episode (though I guess this is Family Guy, so maybe there is?), but Peter’s increasingly elaborate ways of getting Brian to look at his junk were pretty funny comedic escalation. And Brian’s final revenge, shaving off his hair until he becomes a horrible, wrinkled, multi-nippled thing was equally funny and kind of nauseating. The jokes in this plot (and some of the cutaways and throwaway lines) aren’t half bad, but for the most part, the terribleness of the Meg stuff makes it really hard to take the other, funnier bits out of context to boost the standing of the episode. I feel like Mike Pulaski: It’s kind of hard to pay attention to anything else when there’s unholy, face-melting awful staring right at you."^[2]

On November 15, 2013, five days after the episode's airdate, the Parents Television Council filed an indecency complaint to the FCC, alleging that the episode jokes about child molestation, exploitation, rape, the sexualized use of food and the perverse 'internal defrosting' of frozen hot dogs, and the overall theme of the episode about a boy bullying and beating up a girl, violated the FCC's indecency guidelines.^[3]

The episode received a 2.0 rating and was watched by a total of 4.18 million people, this made it the second most watched show on Animation Domination that night beating American Dad! and Bob's Burgers but losing to The Simpsons with 4.20 million.^[4]

References