Family Guy may be an animated sitcom that tries to focus on the struggles of an American family man; but if everyone's being completely honest, it's really become the Stewie show within recent years. As one of the most complex and engaging characters in all of television, Stewie has practically stolen the screen and used to portray his various, high concept adventures.
The series never wants the fans to forget that Stewie is one smart toddler, as it constantly has him inventing some device to either one-up Brian or exact some revenge on some poor kid on the playground. This list will be going over some scientific achievements that should definitely be hung up on the fridge, as it runs down some of Stewie's best sci-fi adventures.
10 Back To The Pilot
When Brian just wants to find a tennis ball that he lost long ago, Family Guy, of course, takes things to the next level and has Stewie take him back to the series' pilot episode. Brian and Stewie step into the first episode as they look at, examine, and inevitably ruin the adventure that started them all.
It's almost like watching Mystery Science Theater 3000, except that the commentators actually get to step right into the flick. Stewie and all of his modern cadences and animation actually get to interact with his original self in what is easily one of the most surreal scenes from cartoons that year. Brian is inevitably tempted his own hubris, and the blast from the past soon becomes an endless loop to fix his mistake.
9 Yug Ylimaf
In case there's any ambiguity in the air, Brian is a bad dog and even more garbage as a person. When he begins to struggle in the dating scene, he decides to show off a baby's time machine as his own in order to impress a bunch of girls. After taking some girls on a variety of time themed dates, he inevitably realizes that the time machine actually keeps track of the number of years traveled and tries to Ferris Bueller the odometer.
Unfortunately, this worked way worse than in the movie, and Brian ends up breaking time. When he and Stewie find that time is beginning to run in reverse, Brian needs to fix the machine before Stewie is unborn from the world.
8 Road To Germany
Time travel is going to be a common theme throughout this list, but this series really does do them well. One of its best time-based adventures being when Mort Goldman mistakes Stewie's time machine for a bathroom and accidentally sends himself to WWII Germany of all places.
Brian and Stewie embark on an interesting adventure through the war-torn landscape, as they run, drive a submarine, and fly through the area in order to escape. Stewie even does the Tom & Jerry mirror gag with Adolf Hitler!
7 Emission Impossible
After Peter helps Lois' sister deliver her baby (odd that we see her but not the baby again), he and Lois are inspired to start trying to make another one of their own. Stewie, feeling that his own throne in the family is threatened, tries to sabotage every date and consummation.
However, when all else failed, he takes a page from the movie Fantastic Voyage and creates a shrinking ship to travel within Peter's body to destroy all of his sperm. It's a fun, high stakes adventure that only gets more interesting when Stewie meets his match and one of his greatest rivals in the entire series, Bertram.
6 Switch The Flip
When Brian's own failures start to get to him, Stewie offers to take over his life in an effort to improve it. To do so, he invents a body-switching device to let them live out each other's lives. However, when the two try to switch back, things go haywire (it would be a pretty boring show if it didn't), and they end up mixing up bodies between themselves, Peter, and Chris.
When Lois mistakenly drags Stewie in Peter's body to a seminar, the rest of them rush to get him back but unfortunately break the device along the way. In a surreal montage of different voices on different bodies, the entire town switches bodies with one another.
5 A Lot Going On Upstairs
If traveling into Peter's body wasn't enough, Stewie has also brought the viewer into the strange realm of dreams. When he becomes afflicted with a variety of terrifying and strange nightmares, he builds a machine to send Brian into his dreams and investigate the manner.
Brian has been on plenty of drug trips, but he's never been on a trip like this, as Stewie's imagination gives him the horrifying ride of his life. As he ventures deeper, he actually does get to find the root cause of Stewie's dilemma. The answer is a little surprising.
4 Roads To Vegas
In Family Guy's long reign of homages and retools of the "Road To" movies, they got to make a Vegas episode that was literally twice the fun. When Brian wins tickets to see Celine Dion in Las Vegas, he invites Stewie to come with him. To save a bundle on travel fees, Stewie uses his teleporter to try and send the two right into their hotel lobby.
Because this is a cartoon, things go wrong. The machine actually ends up sending doubles of Brian and Stewie to Las Vegas while keeping another version of them back at home. Throughout the episode, fans get to see the different adventures of the alternate pairs as they both try and have a good time in Las Vegas. Consequences of both feed into either, creating a genuinely unique dynamic in adult animation.
3 Big Trouble In Little Quahog
Family Guy at this point is trying to run through an entire checklist of different science fiction tropes and plots. Oddly enough, this one isn't inspired by Big Trouble in Little China but Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. When Brian makes fun of Stewie for his height, Stewie does the only logical thing and invents a size-changing device...to shrink Brian.
After a cathartic run of revenge on a shrunken Brian, Stewie accidentally shrinks both of them down to microscopic size. The two must now travel across the ferocious jungles of Stewie's carpet, as they try and get back to the machine.
2 Stu & Stewie's Excellent Adventure
One of Stewie's earliest time travel adventures is interestingly not done with his iconic time travel machine. After Stewie sees a man who mysteriously looks like him in San Francisco, he and Brian venture out there believing that he may be Stewie's real dad. However, he was anything but.
When Stewie actually finds the guy, it turns out that he's actually Stewie from the distant future who is only vacationing in this era. When future Stewie tries to get back to the future, baby Stewie latches on to see the world of tomorrow. In an odd twist, instead of seeing a highly advanced world, Stewie has to deal with another problem of the future: getting his future self laid. There's a lot that one can do by traveling to the future, but there are clearly some priorities.
1 Road To The Multiverse
In perhaps the greatest sci-fi adventure in all of Family Guy, "Road to the Multiverse" was the big stepping stone to define a lot of Stewie's future adventures. After Stewie enters a genetically advanced pig to the county fair, Brian asks him how he bred it. As it turns out, he didn't. Feeling proud of his latest achievement, Stewie shows Brian his interdimensional teleporter and gives him an entire tour of the universe's alternate dimensions.
When things go awry, the two find themselves trapped in a near-endless escapade across different paint jobs of the show. A few interesting dimensions include the future where religion never existed, one seemingly animated by Disney, and one where dogs and humans switch places as the dominant species.