All About Steve (American Dad!)

Infobox American Dad! episode
Title =All About Steve
Series =American Dad!


Caption =Steve and his friends at the ball game.
Season =1
Episode =10
Airdate =September 25, 2005
Production =1AJN08
Writer =Matt McKenna
Chris McKenna
Director =Mike Kim
Guests =Stephen Colbert as Dentist
newspaper_headline = "Gas prices higher than dude at Weezer concert"
Episode list =List of American Dad! episodes
Season list = Infobox_American_Dad!_Season_1
Prev =A Smith In The Hand
Next =Con Heir

__NOTOC__"All About Steve" is an episode of animated series "American Dad!". This episode goes into detail about the life of Stan's son, Steve.

Plot

A hacker shuts down a hydroelectric power plant. When Tom Jorgensen, the man who is the "single most effective weapon in the war against terror", tragically collides against the dam, all of the CIA's remaining resources are focused on catching the hacker. But first the practice for the father-son softball game. Stan talks up Steve as an "absolute warrior", which Steve of course is not, outside of "Dungeons & Dragons". He takes Steve to the batting cage to polish his skills, only to have the "big slugger" show that he isn't the athlete that Stan thinks he is. So Steve can see how professionals hit the ball, Stan takes Steve and his friends to a Yankees game and to the locker room to meet Derek Jeter. But when the four nerds take off their baseball jackets to reveal not Yankees uniforms but uniforms, Jeter tells Stan that his son is a geek.

In denial, Stan runs home. He finds Steve's nerd toys, and an advanced algebra book hidden inside a porn magazine. Horrified, he tells his wife Francine that he would prefer Steve to be the product of a torrid affair than for such a nerd be his own child. He breaks out in a stress rash and grinds his teeth into misalignment. Stan ditches Steve (pretending it was raining) and brings a mid-20s-aged African-American ringer ("Darnelle" Smith) instead to the softball game. Steve figures out he's been ditched and becomes angry. Stan goes to the dentist, because he now needs to get braces due to his being a "class A grinder." Now that Stan has zits and braces, the other CIA agents beat him up and make fun of him. They ditch him when they go on a mosque raid, in the exact same way that Stan ditched Steve. Stan returns home to the basement and finds that the hacker's language is the same language used in Steve's card game, "Elvish." Steve's friend Snot adjusts Stan's "rear bracket" to get rid of his lisp, and they translate the hacker's notes, discovering who the hacker is. Stan's stress zits go away. They go to the sci-fi convention to find the hacker, Dan Vebber, a J.R.R. Tolkien fan who "hopes to create a Middle-earth in the here and now."

Roger feels cooped in the house, like it is a prison without the thrill of a daily cavity search. Hayley's first idea, going to the beach in a burka like a Saudi exchange student, doesn't satisfy Roger. The next idea is for Roger to get a job, the only one available, as a Jumbo Juice costumed advertising man. The Taco King costumed man thinks Roger is in his territory, and savagely beats him up. Hayley overhears Stan going to the sci fi convention and tells Roger he could go there and fit in.

At the convention, Roger finds that the one human he probed (and whose Celica he set fire to) is at the convention. The human's name is Kurt, and he went insane after the abduction. Roger spends the next two hours in the bathroom hiding from Kurt, both because the probing is presented with the undertone of a one night stand and because Kurt wants to show Roger to his ex-wife Eileen to prove aliens exist, which would blow Roger's cover.

Stan with the four nerds look for Dan Vebber. Dan is giving a keynote on Frodo Baggins v. Luke Skywalker. After a fight and chase, Stan and Steve corner Dan Vebber. Steve burns a pair of Peter Jackson's underwear to distract Dan, then Stan shoots Dan in the leg. Stan tells Avery that the credit belongs to Steve.

Cultural references

* One of the Star Wars fans Stan fights against at the Sci Fi Convention is the Star Wars kid.
* Stan's home run speech includes quotes from Reagan's speech memorializing the "Challenger" explosion. In turn, both quotes from Reagan's speech originally came from the sonnet "High Flight" written by an American citizen serving as a Royal Canadian Air Force flight-lieutenant, John Gillespie Magee, Jr., who was killed in World War II at the age of 19. The same quote was spoken by a purportedly American Air Force general in "The Simpsons" episode, "Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming."
* When Stan discovers Steve's a geek, he runs away, on an empty street, and keeps having flashes of his son. This is very similar to the opening scene of Vanilla Sky, and the track playing is Mondo '77, by Looper, which is actually a soundtrack of the movie Vanilla Sky.
* The episode's title is a reference to the 1950 film "All About Eve" (another 20th Century Fox production).
*When Derek Jeter says that he thought the CIA were done with him, he still 'gets the headaches' and asks who he killed in Munich is likely a reference to Jason Bourne, namely in The Bourne Supremacy.

Notes

* Dan Vebber (the J.R.R. Tolkien fan who "hopes to create a Middle-earth in the here and now.") is the real name of one of the writers on the show and former writer of Futurama.
* Bo Peep (the stripper from "Stan Knows Best") stands in a booth at the Sci-Fi-convention (right after Stan met two visitors disguised as Agent Scully and Agent Mulder). The policewoman (who remembered that she wanted to work as a civil engineer after her breast implants popped) from the same episode appears, too.
*The supposed "Elvish" language on the first note and the RPG card is actually hiragana, one of the Japanese phonetic syllabaries.
*When Stan is shot in the back, he points out he is wearing a Kevlar vest. But when he gets up there is a bullet hole in the front of his blazer.
*At the convention center, it misspells "convention" as "convevtion" on the banner.
*Steve and his friends' Star Trek costumes are supposed to be the archetype of the geekdom that Stan despises, however, Stan is shown to be a fan of the show in the later episode Surro-Gate.