(originally aired February 28, 1999)
Waaaay back in the before time, in the episode “Lisa the Greek,” there’s a rather cruel moment where Homer has Lisa sit on the other end of the couch while watching a football game. It’s supposed to establish the distance between the two characters before they start bonding throughout the show, but it still feels pretty harsh, and is only saved by the fact that the rest of the episode is so fantastic. This episode feels like that uncomfortable moment for the entire twenty-two minutes. At some point the writers apparently felt it was hilarious to have Homer act like an insensitive dick, because he’s basically in flaming asshole mode from start to finish, made even more disconcerting that a majority of it is aimed toward Lisa. This has been a present problem in the Mike Scully years, but it seems even more accelerated here. Didn’t anyone notice how absolutely unlikeable Homer is when he’s abusing Lisa like this? That and there’s pretty much no story and no jokes. That also hurts the episode.
After Homer desecrates the Bill of Rights at the traveling Smithsonian exhibit, he ends up striking a deal to repay the damage with phone company/corporate sponsor OmniTouch by installing a cell tower on the Simpson roof. Homer ends up clearing out everything out of Lisa’s room to turn it into the operating station for the tower. I know Homer’s an idiot, but this is just incredible. Why would he think this is a good idea? And where are all of Lisa’s possessions? It’s absolutely horrible, and the worst thing is is that Homer doesn’t realize how upset his daughter is. That realization is what made these kinds of episodes work in the past: Homer realizes he’s failed one of his kids, then bends over backwards to fix the problem. And usually it’s for smaller stuff, like in “Lisa’s Pony” when he didn’t get her saxophone reed to her for her performance. Here he’s ripped her entire room apart with absolutely no sense of why she would be upset. Instead he acts as an absolute irritant toward Lisa, providing no answers to her concerns and being a raging dick (“Dad, why did you have to take away my room?” “Maybe you’d feel better if we watched some TV together.” “I just want to study!” “That’s no fun!” “It is to me.! “No it’s not!”) After an exchange like that, you just want to punch Homer in the face.
From all the stress at home, Lisa starts to fall ill. Yep, so now Homer’s behavior is physically damaging her daughter as well as emotionally, and he remains as thoughtless and callous as ever. It takes Lisa flat out telling him that they’re drifting apart for him to actually become conscious of the situation. The two go to a new age shop for some holistic medicine, and end up taking part in a sensory deprivation session, where they’re put in water-filled tubes to clear their minds and meditate. While Lisa has some deep introspection, Homer ends up hijacking more screen time when repo men raid the store and take his tank. It falls out of their truck on the road, and Homer is sent on an exaggeratingly cartoonish roller coaster ride as the tube is rolled down cliffs, buried, rushed through pipes and eventually spit out on shore, where it’s finally returned to the store by Chief Wiggum. It’s over-the-top and stupid, and it makes no sense why the tank never opened, or that Homer should still be alive after all that abuse. The shit kicker of an ending is that Lisa apologizes to her father. She has an out-of-body experience as him, and realizes he should be thankful for all the places Homer takes her that he hates. Well, that could make sense, except at the beginning of the show we see Homer whining and moaning about having to take Lisa out and that Marge basically forces him to do it. The point is that Homer is absolutely reprehensible for the entire episode and gets no comeuppance and learns nothing, and we’re given an ending of them reconciled and we’re supposed to go “aww” on cue like Homer-Lisa episodes in the past. Well those endings only worked when they were earned, and this time, it is absolutely not earned. Fuck this shit.
Tidbits and Quotes
– I guess everyone must have their own threshold of how stupid Homer can possibly be. At the beginning of the episode, a radio program makes a napping Homer believe he’s gone back in time. I think that’s too far. Really, it’s just like the writers are saying, hey, he’s supposed to be dumb, we can do this joke. But there’s a difference between dumb and brain dead.
– Homer’s cruelty starts immediately when he whines like a baby at the prospect of doing something for her daughter, but there’s a few glimmers of humor to be had before the horribleness starts (“You agreed to spend one Saturday a month doing something with the kids.” “Quit complaining. It’s half the work of a divorced dad.” Yeah, but it’s twice as much as a deadbeat dad.”) Also the bit about Homer against book fairs (“I’m not falling for that again. If it doesn’t have Siamese twins in a jar, it’s not a fair.”)
– The beginning actually has some good things about it. I like that OmniTouch owns the historical artifacts, and that the government sold them off to save funding for what’s really important (“Anti-tobacco programs, pro-tobacco programs, killing wild donkeys, and Israel.”) Also great is that Lincoln’s stovepipe hat is just sitting out in the open, while Fonzie’s jacket is under laser-protected glass with armed guards, right next to the Bill of Rights. Then Homer breaks in and starts reading it and everything goes to hell.
– Couldn’t Lisa have just moved into Maggie’s room? Or better yet, gut the baby’s room and move her crib into Lisa’s room. In that case you’d have no real episode, but… well, that would be a good thing, so yeah. Then they open the Bart-Lisa angle to the story with having her in Bart’s room, then drop it almost immediately. I feel like they could have done something interesting with it, other than have Homer and Bart do clicky pen wars.
– I love that as horrible as Homer is in this episode, they pepper smaller bits of him being horrible in just to intensify it more, like Lisa mentioning her father taping over her favorite movie, The Little Mermaid. This is moments after the reveal of her room being destroyed. It’s just played off so sad. Like, this isn’t funny at all, this is childhood trauma.
– There’s also a subplot where the cell tower screws with the baby monitor, causing Marge to hear in on people’s cell phone conversations. It’s actually pretty amusing and a nice story, but honestly anything would have been a breath of fresh air compared to the A plot. I like Agnes’s disapproval of Skinner driving through tunnels (“I know what they represent!”) and Bart’s play acting as a killer apparently going to the house to trick his mother.
– Really, why didn’t that fucking tube open during Homer’s wild ride? Then at the end we see Lisa lifts it open with ease. The whole third act is a dead zone, apart from a few momentary smirks from the repo men (“The crystal says your baby shall be a girl!” “Hey, shut up!”) and Chief Wiggum (“I am so sick of companies dumping their crud in our ocean without a permit! It’s not like those permits are hard to get!”)
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ugh, yes, this episode is bad and poorly written. As you said, the conflict changes – without notice or explanation -half way through the episode, from “Homer and Lisa aren’t alike” to “Lisa doesn’t appreciate Homer”. The two make absolutely no sense together in this episode and I can’t believe no one noticed this. Not to mention they just flat out ignore bits of the plot, as mentioned, eg. Bart and Lisa sharing a room/ no explanation as to where her stuff is or why she couldn’t just move in with Maggie. They’re small nitpicks, but still indicators of this episode’s poor writing.
Being season 10 there are funny moments (the Mafia at the beach), but in terms of the whole package, this episode falters, with Homer being genuinely cruel (I hate it whenever he groans) throughout a significant portion.
(… I do find him waking up and thinking it’s the past kinda funny though)
I actually think this was one of the better episodes of Season 10. Take that whatever way you will.
Would you care to elaborate? I’m curious as to why.
This is the season that had Homer Simpson in: Kidney Trouble, Sunday Cruddy Sunday, and When You Dish Upon A Star. Compared to those, this one’s actually tolerable. Plus it had that subplot.
All I’m saying is I can get by in life without a…… tooth…..brush.
yeah, when homer started obnoxiously singing the theme to the odd couple, and then bart says, “i’m going to make your life a living hell,” i really thought they were going to mine some humor from that. everyone just kinda forgets about this…
also the end to this episode really makes me want to pretend that everything preceding it was actually good, because i’m a sucker for homer-lisa episodes. but it’s just… i dunno. “wow, i can really be a pain in the butt. sure, i have no place to sleep because my dad didn’t think enough of me, but he’s a wonderful man!” also the idea of lisa being happy to go to a monster truck rally with her father just to go back home to a demolished room ruins it even further.
I do really like the last bit here, when Lisa & Homer embrace and the guy behind Homer gets blasted with a bumper & knocked unconscious. Incidental violence like that actually works well.
Also, Carl’s “Ain’t you guys gonna ask me about my hat?” is pretty great.
But, otherwise, this episode just epitomizes Zombie Simpsons for me; stupid Homer does stupid, outrageous things, no one cares, then stupid Homer stupidly fixes it while stupidly getting hurt.
(A bridge CLOSED ON HIS HEAD?!?! WTF!!!)
Finally, Mike Scully has 5 daughters and he greenlights this stuff. Not saying anything, just putting it out there.
I do believe you’ve blended this one and “Lost Our Lisa,” friend. But you’re on point nonetheless.
D’oh! That’s Zombie Simpsons for you!
Also, which episode (this one or “Lost…”?) has Carl’s “Word-A-Day” calendar? As an English teacher, I do like that one.
That’s later in “Homer vs. Dignity” in season 12. Can’t wait for that one…
Ah. Must’ve blocked that out.
– If you listen to the DVD commentaries of the golden Simpsons, you’ll find they had a bunch of jokes with Homer being really, REALLY stupid. I think the one that gets mentioned the most is a joke where Homer forgets to breathe. The difference between then and these episodes is someone had the sense to say “that’s going too far.” Where the guy went, I have no idea.
– The worse part about this episode is the message seems to be that Homer is an asshole and we just have to accept him as one and appreciate the few times his nicer character break through. Ridiculous.
It’s absurd how bad the writing is. Here the point is the difference between Lisa and Homer, but actually they are not showed at all: it’s just Homer being an asshole towards Lisa; that doesn’t mean “being different”, it means that Homer is an horrible, disgusting person. Nobody in the world could have any kind of relationship(or even a normal talk) with a man like him.
Well done. You perfectly described what’s wrong with this abomination of an episode. If somebody in real life followed the moral this episode taught, they’d likely end up dead or at least scarred, especially since what Homer did in this ended up stressing Lisa out to the point of physically harming her.
This episode is absolutely dreadful. By far, it’s my least favorite of the season and one of my least favorite episodes. I always loved Homer/Lisa episodes in the past because it showed a great bond between the two: Homer would do something wrong, then he’d go to great lengths to fix his mistake. Here, he dismisses his daughter rather cruelly. He bemoans having to do something with her, which is really out of character, and then destroys her freaking bedroom.
I have no words to describe that stupid part. Homer literally destroys his daughter’s bedroom intentionally, and somehow doesn’t register why she’s upset. And where did her stuff go? I have no clue. They don’t mention it. It’s just gone. It’s pretty terrible, really, and then it gets worse when she falls ill. Lisa’s literally falling ill because of her father’s terrible parenting, and it’s treated rather lightly. The older episodes would’ve had jokes, sure, but they’d take the situation fairly seriously as well, whereas here the situation is just a dumb joke.
Then we get the stupid part with Homer and Lisa in the tubes. Homer’s got that stupid adventure that’s not funny at all. Seriously, what’s with the action sequences this season? They’re not funny and do almost nothing to help the story. But the real kicker here has to be Lisa’s inspection.
She mentions that she’s been a jerk to her father. What? Throughout this episode, Homer has done nothing but treat his daughter like complete garbage. He bemoans having to spend time with her, destroys her room with little regard to her feelings, and causes her to fall ill because of his horrible actions. Despite this, SHE has to apologize to Homer? No! “Kidney Trouble” was horrible, for sure, but at least it acknowledged that Homer’s actions were terrible. Here, he’s treated as the good guy, and does nothing to be seen as such. This episode is an aggravating mess from start to finish. Definitely one of the worst.
That screencap is quite sad, when you think about it.
Lisa just looks at Homer with a such devastated look on her face, while Homer just blabs on with that dumb smile as if he didn’t just break his daughter’s heart and everything’s fine.
It’s such a depressing image that perfectly represents how Scully destroyed Homer’s character. In my opinion, it’s one of the saddest shots in the series, not far behind the ending shot of “Mother Simpson”.
Say what you want about this episode, but “Karma-Ceuticals” is a legitimately good name for a new age store. I’m also seeing that a cannabis dispensary in Denver has adopted that name.
The reference to The Little Mermaid is apparently because it was airing on ABC at the same time as this episode the night it premiered.
I guess their thinking was that the abuse Homer went through would balance it out. I did enjoy both of their experiences in the tank, that was by far the highlight of the episode.
I do wonder what Homer thought Lisa would enjoy about all the ‘science stuff’ in her room..
I don’t think there’s anything super wrong with having sympathy for a guy with this many problems, for whom doing the simplest nice thing for others (which he DOES do) is agony, because that’s just the way he is… but that he IS that way is the problem. It kinda reminds me of Monk, but not as well written. A lot of Homer’s abrasive tendencies are just… observational humor, couched differently. Like when he’s berating everything in the stupid hippie shop. He’s 100% correct there, and being a big critical jerk was the style at the time.
I really hope that one line wasn’t a potshot at Israel. It’s kinda hard to tell, the way it was couched. Anti- and pro-tobacco stuff IS funded by the same people, but that’s the tobacco companies. The government does force them to do it, but with their own money. Which is why anti-tobacco PSAs are clearly tobacco commercials. Not sure if that was the case back then, though.