Office Spaceman

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 feature 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. The CIA gets a tip that Roger 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. 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 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, allowing Roger to escape. Bullock later deduced that Roger emitted a knockout gas on them.

In a sub-plot, Steve and his lab partner Katie (Raven Symoné) are busy channeling electricity through a potato. But when Francine sees her writing left-handed, she kicks Katie out. Hayley and Steve calls 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 doing so and accidentally cuts Steve's neck.

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 (by breaking the fourth wall) 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.

• Coincidentially, on the same night when Family Guy episode Long John Peter aired, Peter Griffin had a parrot with him, as Roger also got a parrot. They also both died later in the episode.

• 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 parents.

Cultural References

• Roger's photographer identity, Parker Peters, is a reference to Peter Parker, another photographer who took pictures of himself in another identity: Spider-Man.
• 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.
• Roger in disguise, according to Klaus, steals the backstory of Fox Mulder from The X-Files.
• The title is a reference to Office Space.
• After Stan knoked out the scientest and himself with the methen gas, Roger states that Stan pulled a "Superman 2 on me", talking about when, in Superman 2, Superman tricked the Kryptonians by reversing the ray.