All About Steve (American Dad!)

"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 is not 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 Star Trek uniforms, Jeter tells Stan that his son is a geek.

In denial, Stan runs home. He finds Steve's nerd toys, and an algebra book hidden inside a porno 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 has 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 exactly the 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 science fiction 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 ("fear") of a daily cavity search. Hayley's first idea, going to the beach in a burqa as a Saudi exchange student, does not satisfy Roger. Next, Roger gets a job as a Jumbo Juice costumed advertising man, but this ends when the Taco King mascot beats him up for being in his territory. Hayley takes Roger to the science fiction convention, where he can pretend to just be in costume.

At the convention, Roger finds that the one human he probed (and whose Celica he set fire to) is there. 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 and the four nerds look for Dan Vebber, who 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, before 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 science fiction 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."
• While playing Dungeons & Dragons, Steve uses a Vorpal Blade, a reference to Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There
• 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.
• While Stan is looking for Dan Vebber, he meets two individuals dressed as Agent Mulder and Agent Scully of The X-Files.
• 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.
• Steve burns a pair of underwear that he claims Peter Jackson wore when he edited The Frighteners. The Frighteners was edited by Jamie Selkirk.
• At the end of the episode, whilst Stan is talking to Bullock, there is a poster for 'White Horse Comics' a reference to Dark Horse Comics.
• When Roger is conversing with people at the convention he says "Nanu Nanu", which is the catchphrase of Mork, the alien character in Mork & Mindy.
• The "Elvish" language on the notes left by Dan Vebber is actually Japanese Hiragana script.

External links

• "All About Steve" at IMDb