Episode title: “For Whom the Sleigh Bell Tolls”
Series: American Dad
Season: Six
First transmitted: December 12 2010
Written by: Erik Durbin
Note: I’m confused here. Wiki says this is a season six episode, yet shows it on the link for episode seven. My own downloads have it in season seven, so I don’t know, but be that as it may….
The first in a loose trilogy based on the Smiths’ to-be-ongoing war with Santa, this is about as far from
The Simpsons as you can get, even further than
Family Guy, made by the same team.
Stan, no surprise to anyone, does not believe in Santa and is incensed that not only his own son (who always acts to me like he’s seven years old when he’s like fourteen, but that’s a gripe for another time) but Jeff does; Hayley thinks it’s very endearing but Stan does not agree. Francine is trying to start a new Christmas tradition, but again Stan, the eternal luddite, is not interested. He tells his wife he is getting Steve a gun for Christmas, so that they can bond. She’s not happy and asks him to promise he will not but he does so anyway. Steve is less than impressed with his present, but Stan takes him shooting and, like any kid with a dangerous weapon, he soon warms to it. Meanwhile Roger is on a quest to find the strongest alcohol known to man, and is put on the trail of a legendary brewer who lives high in the Chimdale mountains.
Firing at a snowman, Steve accidentally kills a mall Santa (department store Santa to us) and while his son gibbers on, traumatised, Stan looks after disposing of the body. But before he can do so, Francine finds it in the boot of his car, and after expressing appropriate outrage that her son has killed a man, with a gun Stan gave him (a gun he had promised not to give him) she decides that rather than have Christmas ruined by having her son and husband locked up, she will go along with the secret burial of the body, and keep the police out of it. Stan seems bemused that the guy’s fingerprints are not on the CIA database, but shrugs it off. Roger meets the moonshiner Bob Todd, who says he will teach him how to make the strongest whisky on earth.
The Smith family start to get cryptic, threatening messages that seem to indicate someone knows what they did this winter (see what I did there?) and Greg the news anchor announces that it doesn’t feel like Christmas at all. There’s something missing, almost as if … as if someone had killed Santa Claus! As they debate the absurdity of such an idea - that Steve could have killed not a mall Santa but the real deal - they dig up the body and find to their horror it is gone! Nothing left behind by a bullet-riddled Santa suit. Another note warns them they have been naughty, and Santa is not happy. Just then an elf appears and tells them Santa is not dead, but recovering in the North Pole, but that he’ll be back in good time - before the sun rises - to kill them all!
Roger, returned from his spell on the mountain, leads them all back there to hide, and they all head inside Bob Todd’s cabin just as the sun sinks below the horizon. Jeff arrives to join them, much to Stan’s anger, and then his anger turns to fear as Santa appears in the sky, leading his elf hordes to war against the Smiths. Bob Todd breaks out the weapons and they engage the enemy. Wave after wave of sleigh-riding elf attacks, and the Smiths pick them off with nothing worse on their side than an arrow shot into Stan’s arm, which he contemptuously removes. Then the ground shakes and the trees part, and a massive snowman approaches.
Bob soaks a barrel in his super-strong moonshine and kicks it down the hill, where it hits the snowman, goes through him, he explodes and ejects a barrage of presents. Opening one which falls into his hands, Bob is attacked by a baby version of the snowman, but it is easily put down. All through the attack Hayley asks her mother when Stan will accept Jeff as part of the family, and Francine advises her to give him time to get used to the idea. Hayley says it’s been four years. Santa lands and tries to get Jeff to defect, tempting him with the polar bear helmet from the movie
The Golden Compass, which he had asked for in his letter to Santa at the opening of the episode. Everyone is shocked when he goes forward to accept, abandoning the Smiths, but once he has the helmet on he head-butts Santa. The helmet is spiked, so this really hurts, and Jeff legs it back to help bring Stan inside the cabin.
Hopelessly outnumbered, the family are doomed and Stan and Jeff stand back to back as they face defeat together, going out as a family. Luckily, time has run out on Santa, as he can only exist up to Christmas Day, and the sun is now up, so he has to retreat and pull his forces back to the North Pole, promising to return next year to finish the job.
Notes
While unlike
The Simpsons episodes, there are no new characters introduced here, the relationship between Jeff and Stan does reach new lows, and then finally a high as Stan sees that Jeff is ready to die for Hayley’s sake, and resist the temptation to betray the family to Santa. Of course, this won’t hold: Stan will always hate Jeff. Apart from that one time when he thought he was bonding with Jeff but it was actually an alien, but that’s another story. Jeff also comes out of his shell for once, standing up to Stan and telling him he does not approve of how he treats his daughter, Jeff's wife. He tells Stan he did not come back for his sake, but for Hayley's.
I really like this episode because it blows apart the traditional norms of Christmas episodes on TV shows, animated or otherwise. Only
Bottom has, to my knowledge, dared to turn Christmas upside down… oh, no:
Blackadder did it too. Well, they’re the only ones I know of that do it. In a time of supposed love, fellowship and peace we get a story of murder, revenge, conflict and, um, bestiality high up in the mountains. Bob Todd, a clear caricature (or not) of a moonshinin’, gun-ownin’, government-hatin’ redneck living in a cabin, works well in the story, both giving the Smiths a place to make their last stand and providing them the heavy weaponry to do so, while Roger I have to say is pretty poorly underused here, though normally he’s the one that tends to hold these episodes together, so I guess he was due an off-day.
His story of searching for the perfect whisky is okay, but without the battle it wouldn't stand up on its own, so it’s lucky it’s used as a plot device to get the Smiths to their own kind of Waco stand-off. The irony of Stan, an agent of the CIA, standing shoulder to shoulder with the kind of man who would burn down all government buildings if he could, is not lost on me, though perhaps they missed a trick by not having Stan reveal who he worked for, and making it a kind of “all hostilities suspended/truce” thing between the two while they take on the greater enemy.
I don’t like the scene where the guy interrupts the shop keeper as he’s explaining to Roger about Bob Todd - he keeps asking annoying questions and I guess it’s meant to dilute the tension, slow down the drama and poke fun at the whole idea of the story, but to me it’s just irritating and I don’t see any reason for its being there. It’s kind of a small niggle though in a story that is otherwise very satisfying, the perfect antidote for those who are at this point up to here with Christmas and peace on Earth and all that guff.
The battle is of course modelled strongly on those from
The Lord of the Rings, right up to the emergence of the massive snowman (who doesn’t last long, and should, I believe, have been given more of a chance to wreak havoc before being so easily disposed of) and the last-stand nature of the attack; I guess it’s meant to be Helm’s Deep or something. Very clever. The resolution is also good, almost a nod to vampire movies where the vampire realises too late that he has strayed into the morning sun and burns up. Santa kind of fizzles out as the sun rises, unable to maintain his coherence in the world after Christmas Day, perhaps also a wry comment on how quickly the feelings of brotherhood and love are forgotten once the presents have been opened and the dinner consumed.
American Dad’s Santa is somewhat similar to
Futurama’s Robot Santa, a nasty dude to encounter when he’s mad. So, you know, you better watch out. I like the touch where he lights his cigar off Rudolph’s red nose (well, one of the reindeer; it’s never named as Rudolph but you would guess so) and also the idea of using another reindeer as a battering ram - the antlers bringing the word back to its origin, perhaps.
It’s also nice to see - though we’ve seen it before so it’s no real surprise - that the makers of
American Dad aren’t afraid of showing violence or blood, even - especially - in a Christmas episode. If red and white are the traditional Christmas colours, there’s a hell of a lot of the former on display here! It’s violent; comically violent and yet, in a way, maybe not so much. Maybe this is a kind of catharsis, a chance for those who really have had enough of the Christmas season, carols, presents, snow and mistletoe (and overpriced toys to be bought) to really let loose on the festive period and let out a collective, animalistic roar of NO! ENOUGH!
Or, you know, maybe it’s just a really funny cartoon.