Confessions of a Family Dog Viewer: "Family Dog Gets Good and Sick"

Original air date: 28th July 1993

Baby, we made it.  We've reached the tenth and final episode of Family Dog - once this particular instalment had aired, the character's career was at a total dead-end and the series was immediately consigned to the scrapheap of ill-fated and ill-advised ventures into television animation, where it had Fish Police, Capitol Critters and the Hollywood Dog pilot for company.  The really pressing question, of course, is does it at least enable the series to go out on a high note?  Yeah, I'd say so, in that "Family Dog Gets Good and Sick" is easily the outright weirdest episode in all the series, and that's not such a bad way of wrapping things up.  Not to mention that it actually works pretty effectively as a finale.  If you read the introductory post I wrote on the series back in June, you might recall me mentioning that there were originally intended to be thirteen episodes of Family Dog, although production difficulties meant that three of those episodes never saw the light of the day.  As essentially nothing is known about the three discarded episodes, I cannot say definitively if "Family Dog Gets Good and Sick" was actually intended to be the series finale, but if you'd presented it to me as such then I could certainly buy it.  The closing images have a surprisingly poignant sense of finality to them - in fact, for each and every flaw I've picked at over the course of this retrospective I do have to give the series props for rounding things off as sweetly as it does.  If there's a totally, 100% sincere complement I can pay Family Dog, it's that the specific scene it bows out upon actually ranks as one of my all-time favourite series closers.  There's a lovely, delicate sense of subtly and sensitivity in the final moments that was totally absent from just about everywhere else in the series.  It's so beautiful and yet it also frustrates the hell out of me, because it hints at what Family Dog might have been with just a dose more heart and sharper scripting.

The biggest weakness of "Family Dog Gets Good and Sick" is, as has so often been the case with this series, story structure.  This episode feels, more than any other before it, like two back-to-back shorts which happen to be linked upon a common theme; namely, the dog feeling out of sorts for various reasons.  In the first half, the dog has his first encounter with canine mortality when he comes face-to-face with the corpse of a neighbourhood dog who was struck down by a car, and descends into a state of feverish paranoia upon realising that he could be next.  In the second, the dog gets bitten by a radioactive mosquito (no kidding) and becomes a feverish, now perpetually-vomiting wreck (no doggy vomit appears onscreen, but he gets up to some first-rate gagging).  In both cases, a certain female chihuahua from Family Dog's past plays a vital role in leading him down the road to recovery.  "Family Dog Gets Good and Sick" sees the return of Al and Katie from "Doggone Girl Is Mine", which also adds to the sense of finality - Al's long list of misfortunes have been intermittently alluded to over the course of series, so there is a sense here of an underlying subplot coming full circle.

As I say, "Family Dog Gets Good and Sick" is a weird little episode, which is largely due to the state of stomach-churning delirium in which the dog spends most of its running time (be warned that this may be a bit much to handle if you happen to have a particularly sensitive stomach yourself).  The whole radioactive mosquito thing is pretty far-out, although it's honestly nice to see the show wandering into somewhat freakier territory - a dash more of this kind of warped insanity might have enabled it to overcome some of tedium which weighed down a number of episodes.

The episode opens with the dog crying out mournfully as a plane passes overhead and Skip observing that he does that every time he notices a plane in the sky.  This behaviour mystifies the Binfords, who are happy to write it off as another symptom of their pet's perceived stupidity, although the episode is at pains to remind the viewer that it's because the dog is thinking about his loved and lost, Katie, from whom he was cruelly separated at the end of "Doggone Girl Is Mine".  We get a lengthy flashback to that episode, which lasts for over a minute and is another example of this series either being really desperate to fill out the time or simply not recognising when a sequence is dragging on too long (did we really need reminding that the dogs "made fireworks" in that episode, for instance?).  Obviously, the idea is to ensure that viewers will remember who Katie is, but they could have pulled it off a lot more concisely.  Included at the end of the flashback is a moment between our dog and Katie which wasn't actually part of the original episode, in which our dog shoots a really cheesy, distinctly anthropomorphic grin at Katie shortly before being tossed off the plane by the airline stewardess - turns out that the dog is actually dreaming this portion of the flashback, so I guess that some artistic license can be taken.

The dog awakes with a start to the sounds of an extremely nasty-sounding thud, coupled with an ominous whine coming from the real world, and slowly rises to his feet as a neighbourhood woman can be overheard arguing with a priest about why he failed to stop in time.  The dog casually strolls over to the garden fence and, through a tiny crack observes a few more of the neighbours rushing over to the scene in question - among them the Mahoneys, making their last ever appearance.  The dog gets excited, thinking that a really fun adventure is happening further up the street and that he needs to be a part of it too, so he goes inside the house to grab his leash and gesture that he wants to be taken for a walk.  Inside the house, Bev can be heard ordering Billy to stay put while she goes out to investigate with Skip, but Billy happily disregards that when he sees the dog with the leash in his mouth - "I'll take you", he tells the dog, a little too gleefully, "but I don't think you're gonna like it."

Billy and the dog head over to the gathering crowd, some of whom are wailing out in horror, but most of whom are complaining angrily about the lack of a stop sign on the street and how an accident like this had been inevitable for months.  It takes a while for the dog to get past them, but the instant he gets a gander of what they're all gathered around - the crumpled body of Noodles, the beloved dog of another local family - as Billy predicted, the wag goes right out of his tail.  There's a particularly morbid bit where our dog walks right up to Noodles' corpse and, not quite understanding the situation, attempts to nudge him back to life, but gets nowhere and resorts to barking in desperation.

At this point, Skip and Bev get wise to the fact that Billy has snuck out to the accident scene against their wishes, and it suddenly occurs me that Buffy must be all alone inside the house without any form of supervision.  Surely Skip and Bev weren't stupid enough to suppose that Billy would make a responsible babysitter?  Oh well, one more negligence point for them, I suppose.  Billy attempts to drag the dog back home but has difficulty keeping him under control - suddenly, the dog has become a jittery bag who jumps at the sight of everything on wheels (this leads to a rather nice sight gag in which a car whizzes by bearing the license plate DOGETR).  Billy of course isn't terribly sympathetic, but there is a fleeting moment in which he does seem genuinely concerned for the dog.

Back at the house, the dog's nerves still refuse to settle, as he discovers that his fear of being struck down by anything on wheels has generalised into a fear of just about everything around him that can be construed as vaguely threatening.  The sight of Bev chopping up a watermelon for dinner becomes the stuff of nightmares, as does Skip munching on a cooked chicken, and Billy digging ravenously into a box of - what else? - noodles.  Be warned that this particular sequence isn't for the faint of heart - not because it's scary in any way, shape or form (although does succeed in being sufficiently uncomfortable) but because the sight of Billy scarfing down those noodles is rendered in stomach-churning detail (this is coming from somebody who has a thing about seeing other people eat, but nevertheless, I defy you not to start grappling with your own gag reflexes while watching this scene).  Billy notices that the dog is staring uneasily at him and tauntingly asks if he would like some noodles (Billy is a terrible person, but then I'm sure that you get that point by now).  Bev orders Billy to leave the dog alone but then goes ahead and pours a whole tub of noodles into his bowl, which the dog, unsurprisingly, has no appetite for.  Buffy is overheard chanting, "Kill the eggroll!" over and over - this is the only Buffy moment in the entire series that I'd say comes halfway-close to working, in that it does set you somewhat on edge.  The dog finally decides that his had enough of the Binfords' culinary horrors and retreats outside to the yard, but even there finds no peace of mind, thanks to a couple of neighbourhood kids on the other side of the fence who are playing catch and dissecting the Noodles occurence with morbid fascination.  The dog has a disturbing vision in which Skip and Billy invite him to play catch with them, but are actually conspiring to kill him by throwing the ball out into the street and having him chase out after it into the path of a speeding car.  Actually, given Tim Burton's involvement in the series, I suspect that this may even be a reference to the original Frankenweenie - at any rate, this grisly method of doggy execution seems to be a recurring motif in his projects.

The dog may be paranoid, but that doesn't mean that the Binfords aren't actually a bunch of callous creeps out to get him.  The absolute low point of "Family Dog Gets Good and Sick" is a scene in which Billy and Buffy are tormenting dog by hurling lumps of play clay at him inside his kennel, and Skip, instead of chastising the little demons he sired, encourages them to switch to tormenting the dog by pelting him with kibble, on the grounds that "at least he can eat it".  At this late in the game I shouldn't really be shocked by the Binfords' casual cruelty, but I've always seriously disliked how this series tries to have it both ways with regards to the family's treatment of their dog.  We're supposed to believe that the Binfords really care about their pet and that, if he were to disappear from home (as we saw in the previous episode) or become deeply, horrendously ill (as we'll see later on in this episode) they'd be devastated, but the notion that that somehow nullifies unpleasant and utterly pointless acts of abuse such as this really doesn't wash.

Bev, thankfully, has the decency to stand up for the dog, commenting that he appears to be unwell, as dog gazes down upon the pieces of kibble Skip just threw at him and, in his paranoid frenzy, sees them morph into an array of bugs and earthworms which start crawling around at his feet. Skip and Bev continue to argue over the dog's health as the family retires to the house for the evening - Skip asserts that the dog is simply having an odd mood, but this is really just an excuse to start mooing at Bev and give us our final reference to the couple's barnyard-themed sex life.  They leave the dog in the midst of yet another nightmare, this time involving his kennel being destroyed by a car and him being knocked into a bizarre fantasy land populated by hordes of rolling care tyres.  It's a pretty tame sequence for the most part, the most eye-poppingly surreal element being that we to see the dog in unusually anthropomorphic poses that at times seem almost Wile E. Coyote-esque.

Things take an unexpected turn when the dog feels a friendly tongue licking his face and looks up to see Katie standing above him.  Suddenly, all his fears and anxieties fade away and it transforms into a very pleasant dream sequence indeed, the dog getting to romp around with Katie through a picturesque green park.

The dog wakes up in considerably better spirits and, seeing a butterfly, leaps up to chase it playfully around the yard.  The Binfords observe their reinvigorated pet from their bedroom windows and remark that he appears to be over his period of sickness/low mood.  Thus ends the first half of the episode, and the incident with Noodles ceases to be an issue from this point onward.  As I say, this episode feels even bittier and more disjointed than usual, the second half relating to the first in only a thematic sense - in retrospect, the entire Noodles scenario seems like little more than a drawn-out means of establishing the magical healing influence of Katie, since it's the only really direct continuation that we have between the two halves.  One can't help but wonder if it started life as a separate episode altogether but got merged into another because the writers couldn't figure out how to make it stand up on its own.

The second half has distinctly odd beginnings, as we fade in to find ourselves in the entirely alien environs of a heavily polluted river languishing within the outskirts of a nuclear power plant.  A water rat is seen swimming around in the toxic waste-filled depths and emerges to reveal that it's actually a hideous rodent-fish mutation, while a sickly-looking frog perches upon a nuclear waste drum and belches out incessantly.  None of these sight gags are as endearingly warped as Blinky, the three-eyed fish who inhabits the river beyond the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant in The Simpsons, but there is nevertheless something vaguely disconcerting about this entire sequence, underscored by the jarring absence of any background music.  A mosquito hovers above the polluted waters and drinks its fill before flying off, all poised to inflict a bellyful of toxins into the bloodstream of an unsuspecting suburbanite.

The mosquito has its own leitmotif, this really twangy, incessant little tune that's not exactly threatening, but does add neatly to the overall sense of confusion and delirium that runs throughout the episode.  We see the world from the mosquito's perspective as it hovers around the Binfords' back yard, approaching each member of the human family for a sneaky nibble but repeatedly being repelled before it can get quite close enough, until finally it finds an easy target in the sleeping dog.  The dog cries out in pain as the mosquito chomps down upon his muzzle, but the instant he tries to leap to his feet he finds his senses dissolving in a dizzying whirl.  As he staggers feebly across the yard, we hear more of that eerie, twangy guitar music, only this time drawn-out and with a heavily disorientating vibe.  One thing that this episode pulls off very effectively is in giving us a convincing sense of the dog's sickness, perhaps a little too much for comfort - indeed, by the time the dog reaches to the grass clippings bag and proceeds to unload the contents of his digestive system therein, I suspect that you'll already be halfway reaching for a barf bag yourself.

The Binfords can't deny that there's something seriously, life-threateningly wrong with their dog on this occasion, so in the very next scene they're all gathered in the living room, Bev clutching the woozy dog upon her lap while Skip leafs through the phone book in search of a cheap vet who's open Sundays (leave it to the Binfords not to spring for any particularly expensive veterinary care for their pet, even in the event of an emergency).  Just as Skip stumbles upon a promising ad, the dog's gag reflexes start going berserk and the family quickly twig that he's going to barf yet again.  This leads to a wonderful moment in which Bev drops the retching dog on Buffy's lap and, as Buffy erupts in a horrified scream, I kept thinking about how glorious it would be to end the series with the dog vomiting all over this ghastly little hellspawn.  Alas, no such scene occurs; Bev grabs a hold of the dog yet again and manages to get him successfully upstairs and above the toilet bowl before he unloads.  Again, no canine vomit appears onscreen, but it you're the easily grossed-out sort then odds are that you won't appreciate just how nauseatingly graphic some of the sound effects are.

The following morning, Skip takes the dog to the vet and it's worth noting that, from this point onward, he's the only human Binford to appear onscreen for the remainder of the episode.  We do hear Billy and Buffy's voices at the very end of the episode, but their ugly mugs are now out of the picture forever, and it gives me immense gratification to be able to type that.  The dog has a tough time of it on the way to the vet's, owing to the number of potholes in the road and his still very-fragile stomach.  He's also none-too-happy when Skip pulls up outside the building and he recognises the veterinary building which, being a fairly typical dog, he associates with being poked and prodded in uncomfortable places.  Once Skip's actually dragged the dog inside the building however, we see a dramatic transformation in his demeanor, his sickness and anxieties ceasing to be the instant he gets wind of a delightfully familiar scent lingering around the waiting room.  Yep, Katie was here, and the dog just missed seeing her before she was taken away into a veterinary room for a check-up.  Skip is rather put out that the dog appears to have made a miraculous recovery just as he's managed to get him to the vet's, and insists that he's going to get a shot regardless.

As the dog is taken away by the vet and subjected to a highly unpleasant-looking anal probing, Skip runs into Al, who explains that he's now a qualified pilot and able to fly back and forth between South Dakota and his former stomping ground on weekends, so he's brought Katie back for her annual check-up (apparently having failed to register her with a local vet in South Dakota).  Al claims that his donut shop has been a success and that his break-up with Vina was the best thing that ever happened to him, but lets it slip that he's still very much fixated on her.  Meanwhile Skip, who's no better-disposed toward Al than he was in "Doggone Girl Is Mine", struggles to feign any degree of interest or sympathy.  The dog receives a shot, which the vet informs Skip will leave him unconscious for the rest of the day, but before it can fully take effect the dog makes one last desperate effort to be reunited with Katie, managing to make it as far as her carrier before completely keeling over.

Outside in the veterinary parking lot, Skip shakes hands with Al, wishing him a safe flight back home, but can be heard muttering "Buddy Holly, Patsy Kline and Al..." as he turns to walk away (yeah, Skip's a jerk, what else is new?).  Back at the house, Skip carries the unconscious dog out to his kennel and leaves him sleeping peacefully on his side (he strokes the dog fondly before finally leaving him, which is a pretty sweet touch).  The dog is so heavily sedated that not even in the sounds of a plane crashing down upon the Binfords' roof mere moments later are enough to rouse him.  As the Binfords all cry out in confusion, we hear Al nervously explaining that he forgot to put fuel in his tank and might need to stay with them for the weekend.  Meanwhile, a blackened Katie lands beside the kennel and, escaping her disintegrating carrier, is thrilled to pieces to find herself unexpectedly reunited with the love of her life.  She attempts to wake our dog but is unable to do so; alas, the effects of the drugs are simply too strong.  This saddens Katie, but she resigns herself to settling down and sleeping alongside him.  As the two animals lie huddled together, we see a thought bubble revealing what the dog is dreaming, and with it, our final image of the series - poignantly, his dream involves himself sleeping peacefully inside his kennel with Katie right there at his side.  He sleeps on, unaware that his dream has become reality.

Call me sentimental, but I actually do get a slight tear in my eye during this scene.  Family Dog did succeed in bringing out my inner sop, even if was literally at the very last second.

Anyway, this being the end of our Family Dog saga, I thought I'd round off with a general overview of the series and how I rank each episode individually.  Here are my collective impressions:

Best of a Runty Litter: Doggone Girl Is Mine, Eye on The Sparrow, Party Animal, Family Dog Gets Good and Sick

Decent Enough: Dog Days of Summer

Somewhat Tedious: Call of The Mild

Pretty Fricking Tedious: Show Dog, Hot Dog at the Zoo

Broken: Family Dog Goes Homeless

So Fucked It's Art: Enemy Dog

Oh, and hang tight because there is still an epilogue (or should that be prologue?) to come for this retrospective.  I couldn't possibly bid farewell to the character without also taking a look at the original Amazing Stories episode, now could I?