52 Essentials: No. 2, "Lost in Space", American Dad (2013)
Welcome to Maps & Legends, a project by two new parents looking forward to sharing our favorite art and culture with our new edition. Each week in this space, we'll pick a personal favorite of ours (or at least a favorite of one of us) and write about what it means to us and why we're excited to pass it down.
At some point, I'll probably have to explain to Max that I had married and divorced another woman before I met his mother. He's sure to find out one way or another eventually. (Maybe when he discovers this website and eagerly reads all our posts!) When he does, I'll have to explain to him that I met someone, that we gave marriage a try, that it lasted for a few years, and that we went our separate ways. If I do it right, he'll understand that even though my first marriage ended, that doesn't mean it was a failure. He'll understand that anything that teaches you a valuable lesson can't really be considered a "failure." Not entirely, at least.
For a good while after the divorce was finalized, I was convinced it was something everyone should go through at least once in their lives. Maybe some of that was just a salve for sore feelings, but I learned a lot about myself in those in-between years. As disorienting as it was to go from living with someone to being alone again, it also centered me in ways I don't think I would've discovered without that experience. I believe strongly that every misstep along the way to meeting Max's mother Jessica helped to shape me into someone ready and able to make that relationship work.
It seems to be a tough concept for movies and TV to capture, that personal growth is necessary to make even the most compatible of couples capable of building a healthy relationship together. What we're told over and over again instead is that the struggles of romantic relationships are primarily external. How will the perfect couple find each other? Will she learn to accept his flaws? Will he make room in his independent lifestyle for her? Aside from being road tester crowd-pleasers, these tropes are also easier to express visually. Thoughtful introspection is not so easy to catch on film.
Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that it took an animated series to really nail it. Cartoons have no boundaries when it comes to creative visualizations, and American Dad! has fewer boundaries than even most cartoons. The second FOX-produced animated sitcom from Seth MacFarlane, American Dad! was originally written as a hyper-Conservative take on the Family Guy gross-out, put-down, non-sequitur formula. Once the series broke free of those low aspirations, however, it eventually evolved into a rather amazing platform for completely bonkers, out-of-the-box stories and narrative high-wire acts. From an episode-long spoof on Little Shop of Horrors (complete with original Motown-inspired songs) that ended in every character dying at the hands of a murderous hot tub voiced by Cee-Lo, to a golden alien turd that appears in a half-dozen vignettes sporadically inter-cut across multiple episodes seemingly at random, American Dad! doesn't shy away from high concepts.
While sometimes the high concept amounts to little more than a well-made and well-meaning goof, like two James Bond parody episodes that add little to what Austin Powers gave us decades before, the high concept of the episode "Lost in Space" (available on Hulu) is more than a gimmick. The episode is unlike anything that the series had produced before or since. First off, it takes place entirely on an alien spaceship and the only regular character to appear (other than a few quick cameos in flashbacks) is Jeffrey, a character who only hung in the background up until that point in the series. He's the slacker boyfriend-cum-husband of Haley, the main character's daughter, who is suddenly abducted by an alien race in a surprise twist a few episodes prior to "Lost in Space."
In addition to being abducted, we learn at the beginning of the episode that Jeffrey was enslaved among a hodge podge of other alien species that gives Mos Eisley a run for its money. As a slave, Jeffrey performs menial labor on what amounts to a flying shopping mall. In between working hours, he pines out loud for his wife back on Earth to his fellow slaves. And that's how he learns that the abductors will grant him his freedom and return him to Earth if he can prove to them that he had "found true love" before his abduction. Certain that he can pass the test, given how much he misses his wife Haley, Jeffrey confidently agrees to take the test.
He's quickly surprised to learn that the test involves alien tentacles shoved into his brain that display memories of the time he'd spent with his wife on giant screens for the entertainment of his abductors. The resulting montage shows Jeffrey to be an incredibly selfish partner, blithely ignoring his wife's wants and needs, and never stopping to reflect his boorish behavior.
The montage is set to the Wax Fang tune, "The Majestic" (available on Amazon) which speaks of the desire for love and the willingness to fake it if only to avoid being alone.
In such disbelief
I thought I was asleep when I met you
My heart liquefied and I sighed
Oh this must be a dream
If I forget to set the alarm
And sleep on through the dawn
Don’t remind me
I’d rather be dreaming of someone
Than living alone
As the video montage wraps up and Jeffrey has been confronted with his own shortcomings, he collapses in despair as the song reaches its devastating conclusion:
If you’re searching the lines for a point
Well, you’ve probably missed it
There was never anything there
In the first place
The test ends as they all do, thanks to the manipulations of the heartbroken Emperor who'd long ago given up on love. That is, the conclusion that "true love" doesn't exist at all, and that we're all just seeking an escape from loneliness into momentary satisfactions.
In a lesser show wrapped up in more familiar tropes, Jeffrey would have been confronted with something far more pedestrian. Evidence of an affair that he had, or an affair that his wife had on him. Or else some other pettier offense that would cause Jeffrey to doubt whether they were indeed "perfect" for each other. The rest of the episode would involve Jeffrey concocting some grand romantic gesture to forgive or be forgiven by his wife. It would reaffirm that they were always meant to be with each other, that their problems are temporary and external, and that all they have to do is hold each other at the right angle to rediscover that they fit together like puzzle pieces.
"Lost in Space" goes a different route. When given the opportunity to have one last night of passion with a shape-shifting alien before his genitals were chopped off (I told ya, it's bonkers), he realizes that there really was something between him and his wife. That it wasn't just fleeting moments of passion coupled with the fear of being alone. He reaches this realization when he thinks of all the ways he improved himself since meeting Haley. He thinks of teaching himself to read, to improve his hygiene, to get a job. It's the confidence in himself and the desire to be a better person that she inspires in him that convinces him to fight back against his abductors.
When he breaks back into the arena and shows the crowd a different montage, he convinces them that the Emperor was wrong. That true love does exist, or at least it can exist between two people.
The episode teeters onto mere sentimentality at this point, with grand wedding proposals and physical affections subbing in for long-term emotional fulfillment. But the point is clear that Jeffrey had to go on an introspective journey, deep into space and far away from his life partner, both to confront his own emotional shortcoming and to realize that love meant more than finding someone you want to be with. It meant finding a better self inside of us through loving another person. He was finally ready at the end of the episode to begin the long, grueling journey back to Earth (only to be kidnapped along the way by another alien race, chopping into pieces, resurrected in an alien's body and then reborn after his brain was eaten by... forget it, it's not important).
The episode first aired on May 5, 2013. Just over a month later, I was engaged to Jessica. Just over a year after that, I read my vows to her on our wedding day. I told her that after we met, I knew she was the one for me because she made me want to be a better person, and I vowed to always seek the best version of myself as long as we're together. I have no idea if I would have had those realizations or made those vows to her if I hadn't spent years out in space, alone and forced to reckon with my own shortcomings and selfish behaviors. All I know is that I'm glad I did, if only because doing so led me to her once I'd returned to Earth.
Maybe it's fitting in the spirit of that observation that it took the absolutely rancid Family Guy to pave the way for Seth MacFarlane to develop American Dad! for FOX. I can't begrudge Max if he finds the rapid-fire and shallow non-sequiturs of the former easier to digest and more entertaining (particularly through his pre-teen years) than the latter's high concepts and obscure references. The genius of American Dad!, though, is that it sneaks up on you. You're not expecting to hear deep thoughts coming out of a talking fish with the transplanted brain of an ex-Nazi (again, bonkers). But then sometimes it takes going deep into space to find the truth about yourself.