When it comes to the Fox shows on Adult Swim, none do a better job with holidays than American Dad. Throughout its 7-and-a-third-or-so season lifespan, the show has had the Smiths celebrate the holiday in a myriad of different ways– adopting the spawn of Satan, trying to kill Jane Fonda, having a shootout with Santa and his elves, or holding a gun to God’s head– but one of them sticks out more than the others: riding out the rapture.

Season 5′s “Rapture’s Delight” is one of the episodes that stand out to me in the entire run of American Dad episodes. It’s one of the couple that got me into the show initially, along with “My Morning Straitjacket”. And it’s one of two standout American Dad holiday specials (along with “For Whom The Sleigh Bell Tolls”, from Season 7. But we’re focusing on this one). Here, we join the Smiths getting set for Christmas mass, trying to find parking at their usual church. When they finally do get inside, they find that the church is standing-room only, because of the “fair-weather Christians” that Stan rants about only showing up on Easter and Christmas. To calm Stan down, Francine pulls him into a closet in the church and the two have sex, later coming out to find the building empty and bodies floating into the sky outside– the Rapture had started and the two of them were left behind. The episode just gets better from there– the concept of heaven being actually a variety of “personal heaven” rooms for each individual person leads to a gag where Steve finds his by finding a woman riding a horse that then poops out mounds of pepper-jack-cheeseburgers. Roger dresses as Moses with two slabs with “party commandments” on them (“SURF, DOOBLE, CHOW, PARTY, HELMET, SLEEP”), but is disappointed that the rapture has prevented him from doing “something hilarious”.

The second half of the episode is where it gets brilliant, and weird. Francine has long left Stan for Jesus, who she met in a diner, and years pass, bringing the episode into a Mad Max parody where Stan has lost an arm which has been replaced with a hook. Jesus meets up with him in a bar in Detroit to tell him that Francine has been kidnapped by the Anti-Christ, and Stan reluctantly agrees to team up with the man who stole his wife in return for being raptured up to heaven. The two meet up with Roger, trying to fix his ship, and enlist him to help get them to the Anti-Christ’s lair. This scene has a callback to a particular recurring gag as well– the Golden Turd storyline.

Eventually, Stan and Jesus find the Anti-Christ, who turns out to be one of the best gag characters all episode. His character is a literal mirror character to Jesus, an example of which he explains after trying to trap Stan, Jesus, and Francine in a shoddy glass prison filled with sand: “Jesus was a carpenter! I’m not handy at all!”

After a tearful reunion between Stan and Francine, where she finds he had been wearing their wedding rings all these years, Stan dies when the Anti-Christ’s lair is blown up and he’s brought to heaven. He’s brought to his personal heaven, which is simply just life with his family, and the first scene in the episode back at the Smith house all over again– except nice and happy. And with a dead Klaus mounted on the wall.

This is one of the best things about this episode, that it totally turns the show on its head in a small way and makes you wonder: what happens with every episode after this one? Do they take place on Earth? Or do they all take place in Stan’s personal heaven? Sure, one could say it’s Earth, because Klaus is alive in subsequent episodes, and it’s a cartoon, one that’s episodic, why would they be that faithful to continuity? But it is entirely possible that the entire cast has been dead since this episode and we’re now just in Stan’s heaven. It doesn’t change anything at all, honestly, but it’s a cool little detail if true.

This episode is a brilliant holiday episode, and a great example of what is a pretty brilliant show at times. It shows American Dad’s storytelling abilities pretty well, and has a lot more emotion than  one would expect from a show like this. It’s an unconventional Christmas special. While everyone else has a nice family episode where someone gets in trouble and everything ends up okay, American Dad has the end of days, dead family members, and in the end, only the current reality for one of the characters and none of the others.

If you’ve never seen this episode, and you’re wary of it because it’s a MacFarlane show or you just plain aren’t a fan of American Dad, I recommend checking it out. It could very well change your mind in 22 minutes. Plus, it’s something fun to watch around now. We’ve got the end of the world and Christmas coming up. It’s topical!