Family Guy: "Switch the Flip"

Family Guy: "Switch the Flip." Season 16, Episode 17, running episode count 306. 29 April 2018. Mike Kim, director. Kevin Biggins, script.

Plot given on Family Guy Wiki, picking up after the talking family dog, Brian, has complained about over-reliance on technology: "Brian sinks to a new low when he falls for Peter's new" virtual assistant, the Siri/Alexa-like Brandee, "and when he overspends on its advice, his belongings as well as Brandee are repossessed. Stewie offers to build a device to swap their bodies so he can straighten out Brian's life, but finds the task more difficult than he imagined. When they attempt to return to their own bodies, Peter and Chris burst in fighting and interfere with the process, with Stewie and Peter swapping bodies while Chris and Brian do as well. Stewie finds his position particularly precarious" since Lois wants to take Peter, now Stewie, on a sexual retreat. "Brian and Chris, with Peter in tow," still as Stewie, "try to […] switch everyone's bodies back, but an encounter with a prostitute and her pimp that Stewie encountered earlier in Brian's body results in a car chase that ends when they smash into a power pole and a fallen transformer amplifies the device so that most of the town swaps places. Trying to fend off a horny Lois, Stewie coaches Brian through rewiring the device and placing it on a cell phone tower where he can get it struck by lightning." Brian is reminded that he's an atheist and can invite a lightning bolt by cursing God, which he does. He's ignored by Yahweh in heaven, and the curse goes one level up to Indra, who uses his multiple arms — perhaps more than the usual four — to hit Brian with a barage of lightning "reversing the effect for the most part, although Brian manages to land in Peter's body to have sex with an unsatisfied Lois."

See for parody of motif of man falling in love with a device, as in S1M0NE or more closely HER. Note also idea anD images of spirit-transfer (so to speak) by a moderate-size electronic device, subject to failures that help push to the amusing grotesque the potential dangers of overweaning technology and human dependence thereon. Note also placing such machines in a world with a lot of pretty animalistic sex.

RDE, Initial Compiler, 29Ap18