Family Guy: "Guy Robot"

'''"Guy Robot." Family Guy''' 14.3 (11 October 2015). Fox-TV. See IMDb entry for videographic details.

IMDb storyline notes, "Stewie builds a robot friend after a fight with Brian and Lois makes Peter buy a new mattress," relevant here for the robot friend, rendered in cute, anime style. The robot is gendered prepubescent male, but a bit more mature than Stewie; significant for plot and what theme there is, the robot is heuristic and capable of learning, which it does: outstripping Stewie in intelligence and getting to the point where he can build two additional robots. The robotic threesome then bully Stewie until Stewie reconciles with Brian (the talking, semi-intellectual, Prius-driving family dog), and Brian very directly resolves the problem in the canine-decorous fashion of "killing" the robots by soaking them with a hose. Note comic/satiric take on motif of a boy and his dog, with friendship with the organic trumping relationship with the robotic, with the Stewie/Brian/robot plot vaguely paralleling Lois and Peter returning — briefly — to their old, sex-battered and sex-stained mattress after trying a nice, clean new one.

Note also the "critique of pure reason" with the idea here, suggested occasionally by thinkers from Erasmus's attack on Stoics to Konrad Lorenz's attack on Kant that purely rational human beings would be (in contemporary terms) unempathic sociopaths.| Note specific reference in dialog to Asperger's syndrome, described by the mother of a son with A.S. as "a form of autism typified by by a distinctly high I.Q. and a notable lack of emotional intelligence."

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