I Take Thee Quagmire

I Take Thee Quagmire is an episode from the fourth season of FOX animated television series Family Guy. It guest-starred Adam Carolla as Death, Nicole Sullivan as Joan and Alex Trebek as himself.

Plot summary

Template:Spoiler When Peter makes a surprise win on Wheel of Fortune, he wins a free maid (named Joan) for a week. While he shows off how he could cause a huge mess for her to clean up (specifically, giving an exploding watermelon to Meg), she meets Quagmire who immediately falls for her. He gives up his philandering ways and becomes a caring lover. He proposes to Joan. Peter, however, becomes irritated by the changes Quagmire made for his new fiancee.

Meanwhile, Lois is concerned when Stewie's teeth cause her pain during breastfeeding. Brian suggests that Lois begin weaning Stewie, to which Stewie objects.

During the reception for his wedding, Quagmire turns back into his old self when he notices Lois's engorged breasts. Realizing his mistake, he enlists help from his friends to get him out of it quick. They choose to fake his death. When their plot fails, Joan is relieved, but Death has come and must collect a body. Joan jumps in front of Quagmire and touches Death, which kills her. Quagmire's friends then inform Death that her last name was Quagmire and that she was suicidal, and so Death takes her body, allowing Quagmire to live.

Cultural references

• On Jeopardy!, Adam West tricks Alex Trebek into saying his name backwards ("Kebert Xela"), sending him back to the Fifth Dimension in the same fashion as Superman's foe Mister Mxyzptlk.
• Peter gets lost driving The Great Space Coaster.
• Peter calls Pat Sajak "Regis", mistaking him for Regis Philbin.
• When Peter is asked to guess 5 consonants and a vowel, he guesses, "Z...4...Q...another Q...a third Q...and the Batman symbol." He then solves the puzzle, guessing "Alex Karras in Webster" and gets it right. However, players don't buy prizes after the bonus round puzzle. This is especially goofy since in the background there was a "$25,000" display, the top prize for the five-prizes-a-week format.
• Joan finds a carton of Parliaments and a ColecoVision video console stuck in Peter's navel.
• Two Japanese men riding another maid pull alongside Peter. One of them sounds like Howard Cosell while he berates Peter over a PA system. This is a reference to the movie Better Off Dead.
• A cutaway shows Peter throwing a tomahawk at Ashton Kutcher. He then says, "You've just been Tomahawk'd! That's my show...Tomahawk'd." Just like the name of Ashton's show, Punk'd.
• After sleeping with a woman, Quagmire chisels his name in the wall and laughs, similar to the style of Woody Woodpecker. He also does this at the end of the episode, except he chisels his phrase "Giggity Giggity Goo", his own trademark catchphrase.
• After Quagmire talks to Joan for the first time, he daydreams about the two of them replacing some of the characters in a few Disney love films (Beauty and the Beast, Lady and the Tramp, Aladdin), as well as Aragorn and Arwen from Lord of the Rings. Note that they were shot at by an RPG while flying over Baghdad during the Aladdin sequence. Also, Sullivan is the voice of a variety of Disney characters (such as Shego from Kim Possible), so the reference is two-pronged.
• Brian is watching an episode of Malcolm in the Middle, in which Hal kills his ranting wife Lois and he and the boys walk off into the sunset, enjoying their freedom. This may be a reference to the fact that Malcolm in the Middle was in its last season and this is the way the show would end in Family Guy fashion.
• After seeing the severed Statue of Liberty foot, Adam West goes through the closing lines of Planet of the Apes.
• While faking a dinosaur eating Quagmire, Peter hums the Jurassic Park theme.
• When Quagmire asks Cleveland how he got out of his marriage, Cleveland said, "You slept with my wife." This is the second reference in Season 4 to Quagmire having sex with Loretta (the first being The Perfect Castaway).
• Death remarks that he had to see someone at NBC about Joey, and that he is going to a Celine Dion show but he's not going to kill her, he's going to watch her die on her own.
• Peter went through a Daisy Duke phase, referring to the extremely short, cut-off denim shorts, Daisy Dukes, named after the character from the television series Dukes of Hazzard
• At Quagmire's funeral the man working the cement truck remarks how Mayor West is afraid of zombies, a possible reference to the movie Zombie Nightmare in which Adam West's character is killed by a zombie.
• When Quagmire fakes a heart attack, Peter says that, since he's dead, he should release his bowels. This gag/reference was also used in South Park, most notably in the episode Something Wall-Mart This Way Comes.

Trivia

• Nicole Sullivan and Patrick Warburton also work together on the series Kim Possible.
• On the FOX version of this episode, Cleveland's use of the word "erection" is bleeped out (both when it first came on and its recent rerun in June 2006). The Cartoon Network/Adult Swim version doesn't have it bleeped out.

• Chris Griffin does not appear in this episode.

• When Peter and his friends attempt to fake Quagmire's death, Cleveland, an African American, ironically portrays a Nazi.

• This episode was rated TV-MA when it first premiered on Cartoon Network (for sexual content and violence, specifically the scene where Joan threatens to kill herself when Quagmire asks her for a divorce). In all reruns, the rating is changed to TV-14 for suggestive dialogue (D) and violence (V).

• When Stewie sneaks into Peter and Lois's room to steal Lois's breast milk, the time shown on the clock is 4:20, an obvious reference to 420, a number associated with cannabis culture. Seth MacFarlane's shows are known for stoner culture references.

• Stewie's teething was addressed way back in season one's "Mind Over Murder", and he also celebrated his first birthday then. He has also eaten solid food through the series, so presumably he should be already weaned, or Lois shouldn't be still lactating as profusely as she does here. However, babies and young mammals are known to continue suckling long even after their mother's milk has dried up, because it offers them a sort of "security blanket".

• The Wheel of Fortune scene is almost completely factually accurate down to the shopping, the bonus round with only five consonants and a vowel, the ceramic dalmatian which was frequently offered as a prize, and a near-perfect rendition of the original Changing Keys; the only gaffe being that the puzzle board is the "touch-activated board" instead of the "letter-turning board" (although this was probably just to simplify the animation).