Quagmire's Dad (Family Guy)

"Quagmire's Dad (Family Guy)"
"[V]ery sympathetic portrayal of a transsexual character" --- you be the judge of that.
Series: Family Guy Part of Season: 8 Episode Number: 18 Air Date: May 9, 2010 Writer: Pete Michels Director: Tom Devanney Previous episode: Brian and Stewie Next episode: The Splendid Source

Quagmire's Dad is the eighteenth episode of the eighth season of Family Guy.

Summary

Quagmire's father Dan comes to visit, and during his stay he tells Quagmire and the Griffins that he is transgender and plans to have sex reassignment surgery while he is in Quahog. After his operation, he starts going by Ida and has a one-night stand with an unknowing Brian.

Why It's Fatherless

1. This episode mocks transgender people by claiming it's the exact same thing as being gay.
   • To add insult to injury, Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane had said that this episode would be "sympathetic" to the LGBTQ community roughly two months before it aired.
2. The process of Dan going through the sex change seems unsympathetic, as he just instantly breaks the news to Quagmire without ever thinking about how Quagmire would feel about him getting a sex change, especially when he sees him as an idol and a hero.
3. Like Mr. Garrison in South Park's "Mr. Garrison's Fancy New Vagina", Dan/Ida is allowed to spontaneously have a sex change without any real life experience as a woman, which generally cannot be done in the real world.
4. The episode tries way too hard at being controversial as it tackles a lot of LGBTQ+ sensitive subject matter yet it is very poorly handled.
5. Lois acts like a hypocritical jerk in this episode, as she (along with Peter) thinks transgender and gay are the exact same thing; she calls Dan/Ida odd, tells Meg to throw out a pan of crumble Ida had made with no explanation as to why, and calls Peter out for being inappropriate even she says worse in this episode.
6. Ida and Brian form a relationship that is completely forced.
7. The scene where Brian vomits for a few minutes straight after he finds out he had sex with Dan/Ida is disgusting and only serves as pure filler.
   • To add insult to injury, Seth MacFarlane also defended the reasoning for this scene being dragged out.
   • The scene also just feels lazy, since The Cleveland Show episode "A Brown Thanksgiving" has Cleveland (and later his father LeVar) vomiting for similar reasons (keep in mind that episode aired six months before this one).
8. Brian's infamous line: “When they move to a new place they're supposed to notify the neighborhood, that’s how it works!” mixes up transgenders and sex offenders.
9. The Infamous Ending: Quagmire brutally beats up Brian at the end of the episode and it's not satisfying to watch because Brian never really did anything wrong; his sex with Ida was consensual and he didn't even knew that she was Quagmire's dad. Even an unlikable Brian getting beaten up like this is not justified or satisfying, nor did Quagmire get his comeuppance for committing animal abuse.
10. Peter and Lois never learn the error of their ways for mocking Dan/Ida. In fact, their last scene in the episode is them laughing at Brian after finding out he slept with her. Peter and Lois are never punished for their awful behavior in the episode either,
11. It is never explained how Quagmire got into the Griffin family house to beat up Brian without anyone noticing.
12. As Quagmire is shown beating up Brian and becoming a complete karma Houdini over it, it causes the episode to teach a couple of bad morals: animal abuse is okay under special circumstances and it is okay to physically assault anybody who dates a relative of yours if you have a problem or disagreement with that person. Which is a very mean spirited moral as stated earlier.

Redeeming Qualities

1. Dan/Ida learns the error of his/her ways.
2. Despite the infamous ending, the part where Brian says "Hey........I f*cked your dad." was funny.
3. To be fair, learning you slept with the transgender father of someone you hate is a pretty shocking realization.
4. "So, Ida, you miss your penis?"
5. Brian, Stewie, Meg, Chris, and Ida are all likable. For Ida, this was a decent introduction for the character despite the episode not being good, and for Brian, he isn’t flanderized like he usually is.
6. The concept of one of the main character discovering that one of their closest relatives was trans was an interesting concept, but was poorly executed.
7. One may interpret that Brian's vomiting was more directed to discovering that the woman he slept with was Quagmire's dad rather than the fact she was a trans woman.
8. The phoque joke (seal in French) which is on the dvd version of this episode is actually pretty funny.

Reception

Although "Quagmire's Dad" has a 7.5/10 rating on IMDb, most reviews of it were negative and it attracted controversy over its depiction of a transgender person, along with the other characters' treatment of Dan/Ida. However, some reviewers defended it, feeling it could have been much meaner going by what type of subject matter is commonplace in modern Family Guy.

Trivia

• The topic of transgender people was revisited in the Season 17 episode "Trans-Fat".

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