Family Guy: Screams of Silence: The Story of Brenda Q (original edition)

Warning: Unless you’ve watched the original version of Screams of Silence: The Story of Brenda Q, this will not make sense!

Okay, I promised that I wouldn’t say anything but I can’t hold it in anymore. I worked for Seth Macfarlane, the creator of Family Guy. My job was to watch episodes of the show before they aired on TV! Of course I was excited! One episode that I found slightly terrifying was “Screams Of Silence: The Story of Brenda Q”, it was an episode that showed a controversial topic, which of course was focused on Quagmire’s sister Brenda, being physically and mentally abused by her boyfriend Jeff. But nonetheless, it was a good episode and will stay a good episode. Well, until last month.

One day, as I was going home, I found a brown paper bag that contained a thumb drive. So instead of reporting it to the police, I took it home with me. My 20 year old younger sister who lives with me was home that day since it was summer break and she usually has her friend over, therefore giving me a chance to view the contents in the bag more closely. I decided to put the thumb drive in my computer, which had 2 video files named fgsos1.wmv and fgsos2.wmv, both of them were 10 minutes each. I suddenly realized that FG stands for Family Guy!.

I clicked on the first video file, and the intro played but without any vocals, it was an instrumental version of the theme in which the instruments however played the vocal parts. Then the episode started, I thought that the episode would either be different or messed up, but no, the episode played like normal! Just the family having breakfast and Peter telling Lois that he’s going to go fishing with Joe  and Quagmire for a while, no big deal!

But when the screen cuts to Peter and Joe on the boat after a cutaway gag, things started to get weird. The camera was focused on Joe’s face after realizing that Quagmire is absent for about a minute, nothing happened, just dead silence. Joe barely moved an inch, which was a little unsettling. At first I thought there was actually something wrong with the .wmv file, but it was still playing like normal. I was uncomfortable, but continued.

It cuts to them finding out that Quagmire auto asphyxiated himself while watching clown porn like it did in the normal episode. At the hospital, Peter finds out that Brenda is coming over with Jeff. So far, nothing wrong yet. After Brenda sings a song to wake Quagmire up from a coma, he wakes up as usual. It abruptly cuts to Quagmire’s house as Brenda tells him that she and Jeff will stay as long as he needs them to. This was going like it should’ve been until the part where Quagmire says “I got another cat”. After he said that it cuts to black for 2 minutes which then cuts to a scene which wasn’t from the episode. The quality in this scene was messed up but the audio was the same.

This scene depicts Peter and Lois watching TV on the couch before Quagmire breaks in crying intensely. It didn’t sound like the usual cartoon crying, it sounded like realistic, pained crying, almost like the voice actor was actually sad.

“Quagmire, what’s wrong?” Peter asks.

“Jeff killed Brenda!” Quagmire cries out.

He then went into gruesome details on how he found Brenda’s body. I was shocked, how can a show like this take such a morbid turn? I wanted to turn off my computer, but I wanted to see how it ended. The screen cuts to a flashback, the scene was late at night and the quality was very bad. It depicts Brenda calling the police on Jeff and how he abused her. Jeff walks in looking more angry than before, not like he usually does, but it was a more realistic anger.

He grabs Brenda by the neck and screams “YOU WANT TO CALL THE COPS ON ME? THIS THAT WHAT YOU THINK OF ME?!” He gives Brenda several punches across the face and what happens next truly messed up my mind. He grabs a knife and proceeds to scalp Brenda along with skinning her head in a realistic manner with blood covering the entire kitchen. What I remember was how realistic and detailed the blood was in the scene. It looked like it was done by a professional at photoshop, not something on Family Guy. The screen cuts to static for a few seconds and then cuts to Brenda, or what was left of her. Her intestines were hung around the kitchen and blood was all over the floor.

I felt ill by the time this scene came to an end so I ran to the bathroom to vomit, I felt better after that and realized that was gone during a TV Test Pattern. This was the end of part 1, I was freaked out to say the least.

I then played part two, it began with a black screen and then showed me somethings that were beginning to scare me. It showed a funeral home, inside, there was a funeral for Brenda. Everyone was there including Joe and his wife Bonnie, the Griffins, Quagmire and his family, even Jeff was there obviously feeling extremely bad over what he did. Realistic crying flooded the funeral home and it was the only sound and stayed there for a few minutes before it cuts to a scene where Quagmire and Peter are talking at the Drunken Clam.

“W.. why did Jeff do it Quagmire?” Peter asks in a sad voice.

“I don’t know.. He was an ass!” Quagmire angrily said.

It then cuts to a blurry picture, which I couldn’t make out. When it started to clear up, this part scared the shit out of me. It was a picture of Jeff, dead, hanging by the neck on a noose while his body was swinging back and forth. The episode ends with a shot of Jeff’s dead body, fading to black.

There was a piece of text from the bible that read:

“You can kill a woman if she seizes a man's private parts without his permission: Deuteronomy 25:11-1”

It said there for a few seconds before the normal credits played.

Despite how disturbing it was, I laughed because I couldn’t believe that the show would play the normal credits after seeing all that stuff. Sadly, my laughter will soon turn into crying when a video clip was shown that will haunt me for the rest of my life. There was a video of a goat standing in a farm. I realized that the goat was my aunt’s pet goat George who went missing four weeks before the episode aired. I recognized him because he was a black goat with white patches on his fur. A man wearing a black hockey mask enters holding a stick of dynamite and a lighter, what he did next completely screwed up my mind. He lights the dynamite stick and shoves it down the animal’s throat causing the goat to yelp out. The man beats the goat on the head with a hammer over and over again until it was unconscious. Seconds later the goat explodes, causing blood, organs, bones, and fur to splatter everywhere. I cried so much after that traumatic clip until I passed out.

When I woke up, my sister was there telling me that she found me unconscious and brought me to my couch. I didn’t remember what happened, but after telling her everything I can remember, she told me to tell the show’s creator.

The next day, I went back to the studios and showed Seth the video files. After viewing both of them, he destroyed the thumb drive and told me to never mention it to anyone again as he told me that he originally planned the disturbing version of the episode to be the original season 10 finale, but he scrapped it due to it’s disturbing nature. After all that, he showed me the real version of the episode.

I was deeply disturbed and traumatized for a few days, that was it, nothing else. I was lucky that I didn’t get permanent psychological damage. However, it seemed like I was the only one who saw the episode and had no idea how it got on a thumb drive.

The moral of the story is: If you see a suspicious thumb drive, do not pick it up! Instead, report it to the police because that’s what I should’ve done rather than seeing what’s on it!