Stewie the Creator

When I read TV Guide's description for last night's episode of Family Guy, "The Big Bang Theory," in which Stewie unwittingly winds up creating the Universe with his time machine, I thought to myself, "That might actually be a good episode." And it was a good episode. It was funny and riveting, and the dumb, racist non-jokes were kept to a minimum. Also, the writers deserve props for managing to reference both Back to the Future and Star Trek: The Next Generation at the same time.

However, any episode of any show that deals with time travel is certain to have holes in the plot and nits to pick. This latest episode of Family Guy is no exception. Let's say that we buy the whole notion of the temporal causality loop and predestination paradoxes in general, and specifically the one that threatens to destroy the Universe in this episode.

For an evil genius, Bertram (Wallace Shawn) doesn't seem to fully think through the ramifications of snuffing Stewie out of existence, even allowing for the fact that the former doesn't at first know that the latter created the Universe, and conceding that Bertram understands that he can't kill any of Peter's ancestors since he doesn't want to delete himself as well.

One way to delete Stewie from the time-space continuum is to kill Lois before she gives birth to Stewie. But even doing that is fraught with the danger of consequences that could also prevent Bertram's birth. What if Peter is so grief-stricken by the death of his wife that he kills himself? Or, less melodramatically, what if Peter never goes to the sperm bank and his seed is never implanted into the woman who turns out to be Bertram's biological mother? Bertram's idea of killing Leonardo da Vinci (who is presumably an ancestor of Lois) has the danger of far more unintended consequences than killing a more recent ancestor. (And anyway how did Bertram trace Stewie's ancestry so far back?)

Bertram does succeed in killing Leonardo da Vinci. Stewie sends Brian back to the present and somehow "injects" his DNA into Leonardo's girlfriend (without having sex with her). But why would this be the thing to do that preserves Stewie's maternal line? Wouldn't that introduce genetic material that was meant to be introduced later? Or is that another predestination paradox? Wouldn't the right thing to do have been to extract Leonardo's semen? (Though I can just begin to imagine the disgusting jokes the writers would have come up with if this had occurred to them). In any case, Leonardo was already quite old when Bertram killed him. Leonardo may have already passed on the necessary genetic material, in which case Stewie's "injection" is completely irrelevant.

Lastly, I wonder how Stewie had the resources to build himself a cryogenic stasis chamber and have himself deposited in what was presumably yet to be colonized Quahog but not the resources to build himself another time machine (as Doc Brown did in the 19th Century in Back to the Future Part III).

It is precisely because the episode was actually funny and engaging that it is fun to pick it apart like this. I hope they do more episodes like this and fewer episodes in which Brian is complaining about his failures with women or as an author.