The One That Got Away (American Dad!)

Plot

The episode begins with the family staging an intervention with

In a flashback from four days earlier, Sidney wakes up in bed feeling hungover, despite refraining from alcohol. He is shown to be a humble and polite Bible salesman, soon to be proposing to Judy. However over the next few days he discovers the trail of destruction that Roger has set for him. Calling Roger to beg him to stop, Sidney only encounters an abusive message, and realizes that Roger is not going to stop until he is done with Sidney.

The scene then returns to the point where Roger realized that he and Sidney were the same person. At this point a hitman, hired by Sidney, enters and attempts to kill Roger. Desperate, Roger locates Judy at her department store workplace, and admits to her that he is both Roger and Sidney together. While trying to determine what the password was to call off the hit, the hitman enters the store and takes aim at Roger again. Roger hides in a dressing room while the hitman threatens Judy. Glad of the distraction, Roger attempts to make an escape but is stopped when he is confronted by his Sidney personality in the mirror. The Sidney persona is adamant that his feelings are just as valid as Rogers, despite Roger's attempts to convince him otherwise by using a pair of black leather gloves they each had one part of. When Sidney points out that he bought those gloves the same day he met Judy, Roger suddenly remembers how this split-personality came about - it was part of a convoluted scheme to steal the gloves from Judy's department store. He spent $700 to buy a necklace as part of the plan to get the $10 pair of gloves. To do this he took out a credit card in the name of Sidney, which was the name the employees at the store knew him by. But after the theft was discovered and Judy was fired for it, Roger's guilt forced the personality split, causing him to live as "clean" Sidney through the daytime, and his normal self at night-times. Admitting all of this to Sidney, Roger accepts Sidney's suggestion that together they can bring out the best in each other. They embrace, and Sidney calls out the correct password (which was password1) to the hitman, stopping the hit. Roger then stabs Sidney in the back with a dagger, causing the death of his persona as Sidney disappears (along with the dagger on his back). He confronts Judy, and decides to resume his relationship with her, but as Roger this time. The episode ends with them walking off together, hand in hand with Judy revealing she is intersex.

Meanwhile, the rest of the family becomes obsessed with playing a game of

"The One That Got Away" was written by Chris and Matt McKenna and directed by Tim Parsons. Jennifer Graves served as the assistant director. Co-creator Mike Barker considered it "maybe our most ambiguous episode to date",^[1] being the first episode to feature just Roger in the A-story.^[2] It was also the first nonlinear episode they had done, with Chris McKenna noting that the second act takes place in the same place as the first. Chris and Matt McKenna came up with the storyline via their "obsession" with The Big Lebowski, imagining how funny it would be if someone urinated on Roger's rug and then he had to figure out who had come after him. Jeff Lebowski would turn out to be an alter ego of Roger, and that got them thinking of storylines involving Roger and his multiple personas, and if "one of them got away."^[2] The original story for the episode was that Roger would wake up in Shanghai and in trouble, caused by an evil persona. Chris and Matt McKenna pitched it to Barker, who declined it. They later rewrote it, this time making his persona "the good guy", and the opposite of Roger.^[2] Director Tim Parsons tried to make a difference between Roger's world and his alter ego Sidney's world, making the colors in Sidney's world "pastelly" and the backgrounds softer.^[3]

Co-creator

External links

• "The One That Got Away" at
  IMDb