One If by Clam, Two If by Sea

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

“One If by Clam, Two If by Sea”
Family Guy episode

Episode no.	Season 3 Episode 4
Guest stars	Hugh Laurie, Ed Asner
Written by	Jim Bernstein and Michael Shipley
Directed by	Dan Povenmire
Production no.	2ACX19
Original airdate	August 1, 2001
Episode chronology
← Previous	Next →
"Mr. Griffin Goes to Washington"	"And the Wiener Is..."
List of Family Guy episodes

"One If by Clam, Two If by Sea" is an episode of Family Guy. Guest stars Hugh Laurie, Jennifer Tilly, Patrick Warburton, and Ed Asner as murderer Steve Bellows.

The episode title is a parody of the Old North Church lamps signal to Paul Revere during the American Revolution about how the British would attack: "One if by land, Two if By Sea".

[edit] Plot summary

Flashbacks at the beginning establish that Peter has been working at the toy factory and going to the Drunken Clam regularly since 1977.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

A hurricane convinces the Drunken Clam's owner Horace to sell the bar, and an Englishman named Nigel Pinchley turns it into a British pub. Upset over the loss of their favourite bar, Peter and friends storm a British ship in an attempt to recreate the Boston Tea Party with beer.

When the pub mysteriously burns down that night, they are thrown in jail. During the news show, it shows a picture of a giant bug burning the city. It then shows the bug in an abandoned apartment exclaiming "Good... Good" while rubbing his pincers together. Lois plans to trick Nigel into confessing that he torched his own pub for the dual goals of insurance money and to send Peter to jail with Bonnie and Lauretta overhearing as witnesses. However, they were not there but Nigel's lawyer was in his closet and overheard everything.

Meanwhile, in a parody of the British musical My Fair Lady, Stewie tries to teach Eliza, Nigel's daughter, to overcome her "common" Cockney accent and speak "proper" English. He wagers with Brian that she will be a proper lady at her birthday party. Eliza does admirably — until she wets her panties in front of everybody.

After her father gets hanged, Eliza gets sent to a rat-hole orphanage and sends Stewie a letter threatening to kill Lois if she gets out. Stewie enjoys reading her letter, as does the Giant Bug who says "Good... Good" after hearing about the death threats.

Spoilers end here.

[edit] Cultural references

The song that Peter plays on glasses during the storm is "What I Did For Love" from the musical A Chorus Line.
Awoken by Peter talking in his sleep, Lois is originally angry at what she assumes is an erotic dream involving someone named Jenny, but relieved to find out that Peter is actually dreaming about the late stand-up comedian Richard Jeni.
With the transformation of the Drunken Clam into a British pub, the girlie magazines in the bathroom are replaced with Charles Dickens's novel, David Copperfield.
Benjamin Disraeli, an English statesman and literary figure, is referenced in a brief cutaway in which he states, "You don't even know who I am". With this reference, Family Guy pokes fun at itself referencing not only well known pop culture icons and historical figures, but also relatively obscure people of whom many viewers have no knowledge.
The scene after Peter and his friends try to find a new bar standing beside a fence drinking tins of beer and only saying 'Yep' is a reference to King Of The Hill
Representing what would happen if the British took away action films, Peter imagines action movie stars Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone in a romantic film titled I remember Cecil.
One of the episode's more esoteric references is Cleveland's line "Don't tread on me" as they enter the British pub and try to reclaim it. This is a reference to the First Navy Jack ensign, which featured thirteen horizontal red lines with a rattlesnake in the foreground. (A similar, albeit longer, allusion is made in The Simpsons' episode "Whacking Day".)
Stewie's attempts to teach Eliza to speak properly are a parody of My Fair Lady.
A cutaway parodies the "light cycle" sequence from 1982 film Tron, where Peter claims he is the "green guy".
The message seen in the background during the Tron scene is, upside down: "IF YOU CAN READ THIS, YOUR TV IS UPSIDE DOWN."
Believing that they are "trained to stay perfectly still", Peter is punched in the face by a member of the British Foot Guards when he starts to say something about former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
The scene in which Peter and his friends sneak on a British ship and pour beer overboard is a parody of the 1773 Boston Tea Party, in which the Sons of Liberty did the same with British tea.
Trisha Takanawa holds a charred portrait of Queen Elizabeth II and puns on the expression “flaming queen.”
Peters says that a Channel 5 Quahog News report about a new arson suspect is better than Cops, and that "you know there's a fat, drunk guy in there". The suspect turns out to be Peter.
Peter and the gang’s arrival to jail parodies a scene in the 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption. Peter’s method of carving a tunnel out of the prison, seen later in the episode, mirrors the protagonist’s escape in that film
Demond Wilson, star of the 1970s sitcom Sanford and Son, is hiding in Nigel's study.*
Stewie calls Brian "Dogbert", a reference to the title character’s dog in the comic strip Dilbert.
Nigel and Eliza are also the names of two characters in "The Wild Thornberrys", which starred Lacey Chabert, who provided the voice of Meg Griffin in Season 1 and part of Season 2.

[edit] References

S. Callaghan, "One if by Clam, Two if by Sea." Family Guy: The Official Episode Guide Seasons 1-3. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. 140 - 143.
A. Delarte, "Nitpicking Family Guy: Season 3" in Bob's Poetry Magazine, 2.August 2005: 38 - 40 http://bobspoetry.com/Bobs02Au.pdf