10. Brian Goes Back To College
After landing a dream role at The New Yorker it emerges that Brian the self-proclaimed 'intellectual' never graduated from college and is instructed to do so or lose his job. This is clearly an embarrassment for Brian who opts (as the name of the episode so aptly suggests) to go back to college - naturally with Stewie in tow. Throughout the episode we see Brian's moral compass strained as he is forced to cheat on his physics mid-term paper with no hope of passing it on his own merits. He tries to come clean but is unintentionally emotionally blackmailed out of doing so by his Stephen Hawking-esque tutor who explains that Brian's progress has given him a reason to live. Aside from all the humour drawn from the situation, it's very interesting seeing how Brian deals with these difficult decisions and even though he makes the morally right decision in the end, he suffers for it as the rest of the Griffin's aren't moved by his honesty and tell him that he might as well have cheated. As an advocate of honesty and a generally good person, these trials show the viewer just how human Brian is: he might see himself as a perfect upstanding citizen, but it's when these cracks in the veneer show that he becomes more relatable.