Office Spaceman (American Dad! Episode)

Infobox American Dad! episode
Title =Office Spaceman
Series =American Dad!


Caption =Roger in the opening newspaper
Season =3
Episode =14
Airdate =May 4, 2008
Production =
Writer =Laura McCreary
Director =Brent Woods
Guests =Raven-Symoné
newspaper_headline = ALIEN SPOTTED!
Episode list =List of American Dad! episodes
Season list = Infobox_American_Dad!_Season_3
Prev =Red October Sky
Next =

Office Spaceman is an episode of the television program "American Dad!". This episode was watched by 6.21 million viewers when it first aired.

Plot

Stan's typical intro is interrupted when he finds that the daily newspaper features Roger, as a spotted alien. He tells Roger to be more careful and stay in the house. But in a shocking revelation, Roger has been purposefully been taking pictures of himself in various locations and submitting them to the press for quick cash. The CIA soon catches on and initiates an Alien Task Force. At first Bullock appoints Jackson and then Stan after telling the former the latter hates him. The CIA gets a tip that Roger (under alias Parker Peters) has been photographing and "gotten up close", not knowing that he's the alien and capture him, a peculiar twist of fate puts him in charge of the task force in disguise. Roger tells Stan he'll go to the CIA for a week then leave. However, upon learning he has a vast expense account, Roger decides to milk it for as long as he can by taking trips to the Caribbean and Antarctica. But because he only produced pictures of himself and no real evidence, Roger is at risk of being shut down. So he gets a sample of protoplasm from himself to prove it and said that the alien is a body jumper who inhabits humans and then jumps to the next. But he left his goo all over a bathroom stall, which Stan tries to clean up. But when his co-workers come in, Roger marks Stan as an alien to protect his own identity. After getting in private with Stan, Roger comes up with a plan to say that the alien jumped into a lizard and he walks out scott free. But unfortunately, the CIA have plans to dissect Stan, so Roger decides to do it Stan's way. He has Roger reveal himself as the alien, claiming he managed to excrete him out and knocks him out to prevent him ratting. Nearing dissection, Stan purposefully turns on the morphine gas out of the tanks, knocking him and his co-workers out and allowing Roger to escape. Bullock later deduced that Roger emitted a knockout gas on them himself. Roger then decides to become a stripper but then relents.

In a sub-plot, Steve and his lab partner Katie (Raven-Symoné) are busy channeling electricity through a potato. Francine goes berserk and kicks Katie out, and Hayley and Steve think she is a racist since Katie is African American. Hayley calls her on it when she brings a number of anonymous African-Americans in exchange for using her pool, but Francine says that isn't so--she saw her writing left-handed. She then goes on a wild diatribe about left-handed people. Hayley and Steve call Mama Ling, who reveals that when Francine was five and still in the orphanage (because they couldn't adopt her due to costs until two years later) the nuns told her that being left-handed is evil. Since then, she had become fearful of lefties. They confront her and she slaps Hayley, but she soon realizes that she used her left hand and decides to become left-handed again. But she is having difficulty adjusting: her penmanship suffers, and she accidentally cuts Steve's neck when she offers to spread his butter.

Trivia

*Raven-Symoné guest-voices as Katie.

*This is the first American Dad! episode to feature an intro gag. The opening title is started, but is interrupted with a record scratch when Stan picks up the newspaper and sees "ALIEN SPOTTED!" with Roger's picture on the front page, with which Stan confronts Roger, abandoning the rest of the opening.

*Roger buys a cockatoo. Coincidentially, the "Family Guy" episode--Long John Peter--that aired that night also featured Peter Griffin getting a pet bird--a parrot. Both birds died later in the episode and were fairly quickly forgotten by their owners.

*This is the second time Steve bleeds half to death. The first time was in Big Trouble in Little Langley. Coincidentally, both those episodes feature Francine's mother.

*The Playgirl cover in the closing credits includes references to Deputy CIA Director Bullock, Father Donovan, George Clooney, Captain Monty (seen in the episode Star Trek), and Matty Moyer (the "Kids Beat" reporter from ). However, Matty Moyer's episode first aired a week after this one.

Cultural References

*The title is a reference to Office Space.
*Roger's photographer identity, Parker Peters, is a reference to Peter Parker, another photographer who took pictures of himself in another identity: Spider-Man.
*Roger in disguise, according to Klaus, steals the backstory of Fox Mulder from "The X-Files". He also places the "I Want to Believe" poster in his office. This reference could be promoting the upcoming movie, "."
*The names of places (Aruba, Jamaica, Key Largo, Montego and "a place called Kokomo") that Roger (as Parker Peters) mentioned that he has leads where the alien is are from the lyrics of the song Kokomo. Bullock finishes the joke by saying "Book a flight, get there fast and then take it slow".
*While Stan attempts to clean up Roger's protoplasm in the bathroom, Roger chants "Bloody Mary" several times in the mirror, a reference to the urban legend.
*When Roger is undressing at Stan's demand he quotes the character Sean's dialogue to Coco (who undresses) in the movie Fame.
*Stan's offhanded comment about excreting the alien ("I pooped it out") may be a reference to Stephen King's "Dreamcatcher", in which people who swallow alien spores incubate wormlike aliens that exit the body rather gruesomely through the rectum.
*After Stan knocks out Deputy Director Bullock, the CIA agents and himself with the gas, Roger states that Stan "pulled a Superman II on me." In Superman II, the villains were tricked into losing their powers in much the same way.
*When Roger is about to be cut open, he yells that he doesn't want to die before William Shatner.
*When Roger tells Stan's coworkers in the bathroom that Stan is the alien, Roger tells Deputy Bullock that he has to use the bathroom, then hints that he should sit in the stall next to him. This is a reference to the Larry Craig airport bathroom controversy.
*The "Langley Falls Post" insignia on top of the building was similar if not identical to the classic "Daily Planet" emblem seen in Superman lore.