(originally aired November 18, 2001)
My word, I thought “The Parent Rap” was bad, but at least it had some semblance of a story with a beginning and end. This episode has a completely unrelated opening and ending, all completely out of nowhere, and a middle filled with a bunch of random elements that are both dumb and make no sense. It’s perhaps the messiest episode we’ve seen so far. Our opening features Bart digging a hole. Yep, that’s it. The family becomes increasingly worried about his behavior, then we get some bizarre Chinese satellite monitoring nonsense, and then it’s revealed that it was all a story Homer was telling at the bar (“Eventually, I become king of the Morlocks.”) Aside from the fact that none of what we just saw actually happened, this has got to be the strangest first act we’ve seen yet, but honestly, I was more interested in finding out why Bart was digging that hole than I was with anything that happened in the rest of the episode. How did they come up with this? And why did they think it was funny, or made any sense at all as a story Homer would tell? Three minutes in and I’m already annoyed.
Moe finds he’s lost his love for bartending and decides to take a sabbatical to his old college Swigmore University, and of course he leaves Homer in charge of the bar. Now, Moe attending bartending school works as a quick joke, but as it went on, it kind of bothered me more. I’m sure Moe never dreamed about being a bartender, and as such, he’s not a very good one. Instead he shows up at the college and is looked on as a valued alumni. Moe’s just some creepy sleazebag who opened his own shitty bar, now he’s some kind of campus hero. Moe’s old professor informs him that a renovation to his workplace may be in order. So Moe’s is torn down to make room for “m,” a post-post-modern club to cater to the most pretentious and pompous clientele. A joint that looks like it came with an incredibly high price tag, one I’m sure Moe had the funds to afford. Or wanted built in the first place. Right. Homer and the others feel out of sorts in these new surroundings, and eventually have a falling out with Moe. This leads Homer to open up his own bar in his garage, as at this point, he never goes to work anymore ever and can do such a thing.
After realizing he’s sold out, Moe goes to make amends with Homer, only to be surprised to find his makeshift bar. When he tells Homer that he can’t operate a bar in a residential area, he counters that it’s actually a hunting club, and when Moe informs him that all such clubs are required to actually go hunting, Homer insists he’s going to shoot a turkey the next day. So our ending involves Lisa and Moe trying to keep Homer from shooting a turkey. I have no idea how we got to this point. Maybe the writers felt like they wanted to do another Thanksgiving episode but couldn’t figure out a story around it, so they decided to cram it in here. There’s literally two minutes of the episode left and we’re completely off the rails with this random-ass ending. R.E.M. appears for some reason, and we get an incredibly forced attempt at a sentimental ending where Homer and Moe make up. The level of laziness has reached an all-time high with these last two episodes, it’s absolutely staggering. Perhaps once we wade through these Scully holdovers, the series will stabilize a little bit, but I’m not getting my hopes up.
Tidbits and Quotes
– “That’s odd. He’s outside, digging.” “Probably digging for drugs.” “There’s no drugs out there.” “No… of course not.” THIS IS LIKE THE THIRD FUCKING TIME THEY’VE DONE THIS JOKE. WRITERS, PLEASE STOP.
– I honestly don’t even know what to say about the hole plot. I’m almost curious to hear the commentary, but I don’t have the DVD set for this season. But I’m sure they don’t address it at all, or mention it briefly and laugh about how stupid it is.
– I like how Moe decides who runs his bar by way of a literal pissing contest (“Oh, don’t look so proud. That was wind-assisted.”) Also good is Homer’s lack of understanding of Moe’s business (“Hey, what are you doing? I gotta pay for that!” “No, Moe, you’ve got it all wrong. People buy beer from you.”)
– If I may do a quick compare and contrast, think back to the first act break of “Homer the Smithers,” which also featured Homer being left in charge of a job he has no experience in. In that episode, Homer is befuddled by his new responsibilities, and the one question he has time to ask Smithers, he doesn’t get an answer to: what to do in case of a fire? Then we see Burns’s office is on fire. Just his luck. In this episode, Moe is out the door two seconds before there’s a giant explosion. He goes back in to see the bar in ruins, and Homer very cavalierly says, “I thought you had to go.” In the days of old, misfortune and bad luck befall Homer, and he tries to sort it out in his own dim, stupid way. Nowadays, Homer causes his own messes, and either disregards them, or belittles those who call him out on it. Which of these two sounds better as our lovable protagonist?
– I like the saloon doors at Swigmore U, but the whole set piece still bothers me, like I said earlier. Also, having Moe’s professor kill himself felt like too much. This show, especially the state it’s in now, is far too silly to pull off comedy this dark, especially making as grim as someone dying of cancer drown themselves funny.
– Homer attempts to fix the skipping jukebox like Fonzie by hitting it with his fist, and he ends up breaking the glass and bleeding profusely from his hand. Like, a copious amount of blood. This is one of the earliest instances of gross cartoonish violence being used in the series proper. When did this show start crossbreeding with the Treehouse of Horror segments?
– I feel the crazy ultra-hip bar could have been good fodder for jokes, but it just doesn’t work here. The only thing I care for is Moe’s explanation of the place (“It’s po-mo! …post-modern! …alright, weird for the sake of weird.”)
– So apparently Homer has the technical prowess to construct and program a working sentient robot. …okay.
– Being the great main character he is, we see that Homer is forcing his children to stay up until all hours of the night cleaning glasses and slicing lemons. Child abuse is funny!
– Homer somehow got in contact with R.E.M. and got them to perform in his garage. And they believed his dumb lie. Whatever, who cares, fuck you.
– This is a really small thing, but when Homer’s hunting his target, he does a really quick roll on the ground before getting back into his prepared stance. When did he get some nimble that he would do a roll like that? It’s just more sacrificing character traits in favor of whatever the fuck is happening in the scene, however stupid or ridiculous it may be.
– My God, I thought the “Three mistrials later” from “Children of a Lesser Clod” was bad. This makes that hand wave look brilliant. We have a still shot of Moe’s Tavern restored, with this ADR (“How’d you get the bar back to normal so quickly, Moe?” “It’s a snap when you use certified contractors.” “Like the ones found in your local yellow pages?” “Exactly.”) Astounding. They didn’t even bother to write an ending explaining what happened, so they just threw this together at the last minute.
Me Blog Write Good 
Wah!!! Yep, the episodes are getting pretty sh*t. What a weird, weird episode. Thanks for nailing down in detail all the things that bothered me about this episode, but I couldn’t quite put into words.
“This is a really small thing, but when Homer’s hunting his target, he does a really quick roll on the ground before getting back into his prepared stance. When did he get some nimble that he would do a roll like that? It’s just more sacrificing character traits in favor of whatever the fuck is happening in the scene, however stupid or ridiculous it may be.”
Homer has shown dexterity before… see also Whacking Day kung fu homer.
Yeah, but at least there we are shown how psyched Homer is for Whacking Day and we can assume he’s been training for it a long while. Here, it’s totally random; Homer never wanted to hunt, it was just his stupid cover.
Yeah it’s still fishy. The former was for a joke and the latter is… a thing.
Just remember whacking day and was like “Well… you know…”
Hi, long time reader, first time poster. Love the work Mike. I can’t seem to get enough of watching and reading reviews of bad tv shows/films/video games (and in this case, a tv show that fell from greatness). I have watched the Redlettermedia Star Wars prequel deconstructions twice! (:/)
I guess this is an odd time to start posting, but this is the first episode that I don’t think I have seen. I remember getting Sky tv (in the UK) around 1999 and the first series I watched straight off the production line was series 10. I remember enjoying it at the time (I was 14) and the subsequent series but I think the Tomacco episode was the first that really brought home what was happening (had happened) to this show. By the time series 13 rolled around (2002 in the UK) I had lost interest and watched it extremely sporadically from then on. Although I did not realise I gave up as early as episode 3.
I remember my friends still loved it though and I feel thoroughly vindicated that they were the ones with no taste, rather than me being too picky!
I LOVED the joke about Moe’s dirty TV set. I didn’t love the ending of the episode or the R.E.M. cameo. If Homer actually shot the hungry monster (turkey), the ending would have been better. The writing staff was PREA-CHY with the resolution.
The hole plot at the beginning is odd. It wasn’t really funny, but when I reflected on it I decided I liked it. Granted, it’s pretty po-mo, but there’s a riskiness to that sort of humor that I don’t think you’d ever see in a more recent episode.
I think that as a joke it completely fails, but as a premise it’s actually really interesting. I hardly remembered this episode, so I went back and re-watched it, and I was excited to see where they were going before they just dropped everything.
Also, is it just me, or is it really jarring when Bart shows up normal later in the episode?
Here’s a fun game: Imagine any other show on television structuring an episode like a post-Classic Simpsons episode. I can’t even begin to wrap my brain around it.
“When did this show start crossbreeding with the Treehouse of Horror segments?”
My guess is, when they realized that South Park and Family Guy were getting away with this kind of shit and getting huge laughs for it, so they brazenly decided to copy their formula in order to “stay relevant”. The fact that such gratuitous gore doesn’t fit the tone of The Simpsons one iota seemed to escape the collective consciousness of the writers’ room.
On a similar note, this is also the first episode where the word “penis” is spoken by a character, and explicit dick jokes show up in tons of subsequent episodes after the wall gets broken down here. Again, I cite South Park and Family Guy for setting the precedent for this kind of shock humor, and The Simpsons just followed along and flailed wildly at trying to be something they’re not.
The commentary notes that the hole idea came from George Meyer. He just said “There should be a bit about Bart digging a hole,” and that’s it. It seems that even he ran out of steam after all those years.
I’ll be honest, I did laugh pretty hard at the legless robot part. Yeah its completely random, doesn’t make any sense and it plays up more of Jerkass Homer’s mean traits but I still laughed at how pathetic the robot looked dragging itself down the street. Its the one memorable joke from this episode (Well also the ‘buy beer from you’ line).
(Phone rings at Moe’s)
Homer: (answering) “Yello?”
Bart: “Uh, yeah, I’d like to speak to a Mr Tabooger, first name Ollie.”
Homer: (excited) “Ooh, Bart! My first prank call! What do I do?”
Bart: (already annoyed) “Just ask if anyone knows Ollie Tabooger!”
Homer: “I don’t get it.”
Bart: “Yell out ‘I’ll eat a booger’!”
Homer: “What’s the gag?”
Bart: “Oh, forget it…” (hangs up)
Ehhhhh… not great. Plus it wasn’t even the first prank call Homer was directly involved in.
I did like the “I won’t drink at Moe’s” bit, although of course it was almost immediately followed by the revelation that Homer was forcing the rest of his family to stay up and help run his “bar”. And his response when Lisa tells him that he’s not even using the lemons he’s making her cut up? (mock baby-talk) “She’s so sweepy, she doesn’t know what she’s saying!” Fucking bastard.
“Whatever, who cares, fuck you”
I believe I read somewhere that’s what they are planning on renaming the show to >.>
The beginning with Bart digging an hole was not funny as a joke(why should it be so?), but it was really interesting.. one of the most interesting plot that I’ve seen among the post-classic seasons. And the writers fucked it up, for one of the worst and confused episodes ever. We’re only in season 13 and the level of incompetence is already shocking.
Moe went to a bartending school because it was his dream?
NO.
Moe’s dream was to be an actor. He was one of the ‘Little Rascals’, and “Pygmoelion” anyone? ugh, the writers don’t even care about their characters backstories anymore….
Yeah, fuck this episode. I watched it recently and even I was shocked at how lazy and disjointed it was.
That ending rivals “surf’s up” and “three mistrials later” as one of the worst in Simpsons history.
I can’t believe they went from delights like “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire”, “Some Enchanted Evening”, “Itchy and Scratchy and Marge”, “The Way We Was”, and “Lisa’s Substitute”….to dreck like this.
You know what likely resulted in this episode existing? I bet Mike Scully looked at all the major issues that came up in his run and decided to throw them all in one episode. This episode checks off every single box for awful Scully tropes: atrocious and unlikable characterization, messy story telling, nasty and overly tasteless jokes, random violence for no reason, jerk Homer, poor writing, random plot turns, sudden guest star appearances for no reason… they’re all here.
To start, Bart digging a hole is a really weird story. It has nothing to do with the episode and is just filler. Why is it here? Oh, right, because the main story is really thin. It makes no sense for Homer to tell this story, and it never comes back in the episode, so it should be scrapped.
We have Moe’s whole thing about making a great bar. Last I checked, his tavern was just some old place. It wasn’t his lifelong dream, as he wanted to be an actor. And why is his old tavern treated as fantastic? The whole bar school thing is really dumb, too, and the end bit where his professor kills himself is too tasteless to be funny.
Now we have Homer’s side. Of course, he’s awful. There’s the stupid joke about him bleeding profusely after punching a jukebox, which sucks. Oh, and he’s a jerk, too, blowing up the tavern in act one and acting like a jerk about it, and the awful part where he forces his children into labor. He doesn’t even use the things he makes them make, what’s the freaking point?! And why is Homer able to run a bar? He has a job at the power plant, why is that suddenly forgotten? This whole plot is stupid.
Then act three really kills any last good will. Again, the story suddenly shifts to Homer trying to hunt a turkey. Why?! It has nothing to do with the main plot and doesn’t resolve it at all, why is this here? It comes out of nowhere and has no buildup, as well. Also, if they were trying to tie it to Thanksgiving, it failed miserably as it’s not related to the main story at all. Then REM shows up for some reason. They don’t have anything to do with the story and they don’t further the story at all. They’re just here because.
The real kicker is the resolution to the main conflict. Holy crap, they don’t bother to resolve the story at all. They just threw in some random excuse for why the bar is back to normal. That’s absolutely lazy. This episode sucked, without a doubt, and feels like Scully put all his worst stuff in one episode.
This was it for me. This was the episode that made me realize, “Why do I bother with this show anymore?” I gave up on it. This is the last one for me. I really had no interest in this show after all these awful episodes.
The other contributing factor is my now busy life. At the start of 1996, during the wonderful season 7, I was 24, with my only responsibilities being my girlfriend and my 9-5 job at a hardware store. By late 2001, at the start of season 7, I was almost 30, a manager of a hardware business who worked 10+ hour days, married, and had a daughter and two sons. In that six year difference, I was no longer able to just watch cartoons every week. I was much busier, and had very little downtime.
So, yeah, that was the end of my Simpsons journey. I did catch a few episodes afterward, and also watched the movie, but otherwise I was completely done. It should be interesting to see how the rest of season 13 is, though I don’t expect it to be good.
“This was the episode that made me realize, ‘Why do I bother with this show anymore?’”
So I’ve been working my way backwards through seasons 13-16 as I can’t remember a damn thing about the majority of these episodes at all. Back in 2020 I did 14, before that it was 15 and of course 16. I got to 13 and ended up stopping for the last two years. The other night I went ahead and watched this episode and thought, “Man, why am I torturing myself watching these episodes when I could just watch the good seasons I own on DVD instead?”
I just don’t know why I’m so determined to want to remember these episodes when all I’m doing is leading myself into disappointment. Maybe it’s just because I remember nearly everything from 1-12 and 17+ (sans the ones I have not watched) and I want to remember this gappage good or bad. Then again, I’m not even sure it’s workign since I was struggling to even recall if I had finished Season 14 because the last few episodes were a blur to me, yet, I remember everything from 15 and 16.
So you weren’t prepared to hang on for a few episodes more and see if there would be any improvements under Al Jean.
I think it’s fair to say you did the right thing. 😉
So here we are. After taking a two year break from the show thanks to Season 14, I’m back to finally watching Season 13.
I actually thought this episode was better than the previous one, but that’s because I was absolutely bored out of my mind with Pranksta Rap. At least there were a couple of jokes in this one I laughed at such as the one where Homer cleaned the dust off of Moe’s TV and it went from B&W to color.
I actually liked the Bart digging a hole bit at the beginning until it went nowhere. Like what was the point of even bringing in some psychologist and then have him be gone after one sentence? They should have had him start digging with Bart trying to understand him and then Bart just gets bored and moves on while the psych keeps digging.
How many times have they changed Moe’s origin story? I ask because I’m pretty sure he was an actor before becoming a bar tender. Or was going to bar tending school something he decided to do afterwards? Not sure what the whole point of the teacher thing was though. It wasn’t the least bit funny.
Moe redesigning his tavern just made me think of his earlier stunt with “Uncle Moe’s,” and we saw how well that worked. Why would he try it again? I like the idea that Moe wants to do something different with his bar, but the way they went about it was all wrong. In fact, I think he should have brought up to his former teacher that he had already changed his bar around and it didn’t help.
The hunting bit at the end definitely came out of nowhere and felt disjointed from the episode. That wasn’t funny either.
There’s more I could talk about, but it’s not worth the trouble. The episode, while better than the last, was still abysmal. No wonder I don’t remember these episodes when I look through my Simpsons book. Hell, just the other day I was trying to remember if I had actually watched all of Season 14 or not because I struggled with some of the episodes based on their titles and ended up coming back here because I knew if I had watched the episodes in the last few years I would have posted about them in your reviews and yes, I had finished all of Season 14.
I’ve been loving your reviews for a hot minute, and torturing myself by trying to watch every season in its entirety, even past the decline in quality…
I was motivated to comment for the first time cause I noticed something in this episode and no one else seems to have picked up on it.
This season seems to be going really heavy on the transphobic humor.
The last episode had the judge talking about “when I was a little boy”, a joke they thought was so funny they had to have Snake repeat it.
This episode has two transphobic jokes packed in, the Russian model who’s penis fell off, and calling Moe a “she-male” in the “I won’t drink at Moe’s bit”.
Seriously lazy, mean spirited “humor”, obv very much of its time, but it really sticks out on rewatch.