(originally aired May 8, 2005)
Beyond some psychopathic Homer characterization and its dull-as-dishwater premise, this is actually a pretty nice Homer-Lisa episode. Its trappings are kind of odd, but I found I could forgive most of it as the core of the story was so sweet. Through an ultimately inconsequential opening, we learn Lisa has a pretty good singing voice, and when Krusty announces he’s holding a “Li’l Starmaker” competition, the family urges her to compete. She ends up high in the running, with Homer as her coach and song writer, which is logical considering his history with the Be Sharps. The competition is clearly an American Idol knock-off, which they openly joke about, because the rule now is that if you steal an idea, just admit you did and it will be funny. The fact that it’s being held by the hacktacular Krusty saves it a bit though, even though I’m not sure why he’d hold a competition like this. Previous Idol winner Fantasia Barrino guest stars as Lisa’s top competitor… except not really. Her fantastic rendition of the song Lisa sang earlier ends our first act, making it seem like she’d be a big part of the plot, except she’s not at all. She sings that song, then we don’t see her again until she’s eliminated from the top three.

Homer becomes a ruthless stage dad during Lisa’s tenure on the show, but there’s not much reason to it. He just straight out attacks people without engaging in a dialogue with them, culminating in him strangled Pimply Faced Teen in front of his family, threatening to kill him. He’s a ruthless sadistic maniac, but it’s slightly less bothersome that his motivations in wanting to help Lisa are pure. The third act focuses on the rift created between the two of them. Homer has now agreed to coach Lisa’s competition Cameron, a petty, childish move from Jerkass Homer, but surprisingly we see glimpses of how broken Homer is. The scene where he sheepishly gives his daughter advice on stage while rehearsing with Cameron is unusually touching. His timidness there compared to his insane rage earlier is so stark, but for some reason it works for me. For the finale, Lisa sings a sentimental song for her father, then Homer reveals he’s sabotaged Cameron with a ballad insulting the audience, much to Lisa’s delight. Despite some weird elements, this has got to be the most emotional episode I’ve seen a good while. Two good episodes in a row? What is this madness?

Tidbits and Quotes
– I’m not a fan of how casually the Simpsons give no reaction to Apu being robbed at gunpoint. Then they frequent Cletus’s vegetable stand right by the curb. I feel like if they were going that far, they should have went all out and had a gunshot and a body hitting the floor, while the family continues to do nothing. Then later we see Apu and Snake during Fantasia’s song, and he could have bandages on his abdomen and they hug. Also, Cletus and Brandine are so unfunny at this point. Every time they show up, I know what the joke is. He holds up that burlap sack, I knew there were going to be babies in it. In “The Seven-Beer Snitch,” during the Shelbyville musical with the bum Springfield caricature, Lisa comments that it makes Springfieldians look like hicks. Who do we pan to? Cletus and Brandine. It’s all become so obvious now.
– The winner of the competition gets animated into an Itchy & Scratchy cartoon. Lisa dreams of what that would be like, and wouldn’t you know it, she complains about animal cruelty and promotes PETA! Again, these set-ups make it easy to predict jokes.
– The girl.. .what’s her name… who cares, Fantasia is supposed to be like ten, but she sounds like an adult. They couldn’t have raised the pitch up a little in post or something? It doesn’t matter, this all just smells of FOX cross-promotion anyway. But it’s nowhere near as egregious as later on when they actually do American Idol and have all the judges on, including Ryan fucking Seacrest. I’m happy to say I’ve never seen that episode. Very happy.
– It’s bothersome how insane Homer acts, but it’s one of those things where it’s so over-the-top and ridiculous, I don’t really hate it completely. Plus the jokes along with it are pretty good (“You don’t need to help me by humiliating people!” “Oh-ho-ho! You love sausage, but you hate to see it getting made!” “I don’t love sausage!” “Then would you like to see it getting made?”) Then later when everyone gets out of the car and hoofs it, Homer screams like a maniac, “Wait, come back! I’m calming down!!!” and drives off with the doors flapping open. Then we cut back to the house and the doors are still open. It’s bipolar Homer, but it still permeates as funny to me.
– Lisa’s song at the end is really touching, and then Cameron’s is wonderful as well, an incredibly pompous, fuck-you to the audience, “Privileged Boy” (“Then I’ll go to Yale, because I am a legacy! I’m better than you!”)

(originally aired May 1, 2005)
The season’s almost over, but surprise, finally here’s an episode that I can say I enjoyed overall. It’s got problems for sure, but it’s a simple enough story packed with enough gags, and one of the greatest guest stars returning for another go definitely boosts it a lot in the third act. New vending machines crammed with terribly unhealthy snacks arrive at Springfield Elementary, and no one eats them up more, literally, than Bart. It isn’t long before he becomes very overweight, and ends up suffering from a heart attack. Now, for Bart to get this fat, you’d think Marge would have said something, rather than just relent and give in like she did earlier in the episode, but I’m sure she must have done something. The second act shows her efforts to get Bart to eat right, but then we see he’s got junk stashed in his room, and he disposes of his healthy food in favor of snacks at school, it all works and makes sense for the characters. Eventually the family holds an intervention, and when that proves to be a bust, they cart Bart off to fat camp.

Said camp is run by Tab Spangler, Marine Corps retiree, and voiced by Albert Brooks, the first character he’s voiced in eight years, and goddamn did I miss him. Sure, Spangler isn’t quite as memorable as Jacques or Hank Scorpio, but he’s just as insane and hilarious as you’d expect a Brooks character to be. Almost every line of his completely works (“Son, I’m gonna tell you a story, about a young man who came here and failed. Well, that is the story. I shouldn’t call a sentence a story. Anyway, it’s you!”) To pay for Bart’s treatments, the family opens up the house to a youth hostel, where they’re quickly overrun and run ragged by pushy German backpackers. It’s kind of an odd, but it works when Spangler takes Bart there to show him the cost of his actions. To make things right, Bart returns to the school, destroys all the vending machines and takes the money he retrieves from them home to the family. And Marge just takes the money, no questions asked. But honestly, even though it’s not played up as big, I can see her putting her morals aside for a moment just to get those backpackers out of her hair. Then we end on some great ad-libbing with Brooks and Dan Castellaneta. So finally, a good episode from season 16, and with only five left to go! Just under the wire…

Tidbits and Quotes
– The episode starts with some good old fashioned Skinner ass-kissing (“It’s not my birthday, Seymour, you know I’m a Sagittarius.” “Really? I’m a Libra. There’s a lot of compatibility there.” “Skinner, be gay on your own time.”)
– Scammer & Z-Dog are great representations of what marketing executives think is hip and that kids will identify with. And it works, because Springfieldians are a manipulative bunch (“And a subsonic neuro-jammer disrupts the child’s judgement center!”)
– The writers seem to acknowledge Lisa’s new role on the show by having her yell into a “Li’l Agitator” megaphone to protest about the unhealthy snacks. Of course this doesn’t excuse it, but at least they’ve finally lampshaded it.
– Homer’s daydream of Marge being a killer robot is really bizarre, but it’s saved when we’re back to reality (“I repeat, no one is getting replaced by a machine, until all the kinks are worked out.”)
– I love the three weeks later montage, recreating the opening titles except with a fat Bart, whose skateboard cracks the concrete, he bends the lightpole he swings around and knocks everyone on the sidewalk down. The pauses as the music waits for Bart to continue are great, when it pans outside the school, and then when the family rushes onto the couch and wait for Bart to stumble in. Also it seems like they got Brooks to do a line for Jacques, yelling, “Careful!” when Bart runs over his foot.
– I liked Homer crying for his son to do the Bartman as he seemingly just had a heart attack. It’s a joke, but it also works as concern of a father wanting his stricken son to get up and move. It makes more sense that Homer wailing about Thanksgiving for no apparent reason after thinking his son had been kidnapped.
– Great appearance by Dr. Hibbert, unlike last episode (“Bart had a heart attack, and it’s his own damn fault! These dark spots in his pulmonary arteries are malted milk balls!” “His liver looks healthy.” “That’s a wad of Laffy Taffy.”)
– The Itchy & Scratchy cartoon is way too long for too little payoff. Although I love Krusty and his chest zipper though. Seeing him bleed profusely on stage weeping while Sideshow Mel stands there unsure of what to do is fantastic.
– Bart’s stash of snacks and the scene of him tossing them in the air and them raining down on him is a parody of The Shawshank Redemption, which is one of those movies that has been on my list to watch forever. Someone comment whether this parody was good, it looked like it was.
– I just noticed when Bart gets off the bus, one car’s license plate reads ‘MANH8TR.’ Whose car could that be? Hmmmmm…
– The chariot that Spangler is getting pulled on is labeled “Chubby Chaser.” Excellent.
– Every Brooks line is amazing. I won’t quote them all, but here’s a few (“You’re lucky this is just a youth hostel. We had one family that had to take in dry cleaning. The chemicals killed their dog! Well, that’s what they told us in the lawsuit. I don’t see a dog living past fourteen anyway, do you?” “Strudel-sucking globbenheimer. You need to think about that. That’s what the human race thinks of you.”) And of course, the ending with Homer (“We got a long road ahead. You wanna pull off a hotel? We’ll split a room.” “Where will I sleep?” “We can worry about that when we’re standing naked before the bed! My goodness, no wonder you eat!”)

(originally aired May 1, 2005)
In another inaccurate marketing gimmick, FOX billed this show as the 350th episode, touting its big name guest star Ray Romano. That stuff doesn’t really bother me at this point, but the episode’s bizarre third act turn and yet another insultingly asinine conclusion certainly does. A major thunderstorm causes the Simpson house to leak, and Homer is tasked to fix it. What’s amazing is how quickly Marge gets angry at her husband (“I’ve let a lot of things slide, but when you can’t keep a roof over your family’s head, you’re just not much of a father!”) Considering the dozens of much more awful things Homer has done over the years, it seems random that this is what sets Marge off, but maybe it’s just all that bottled up rage coming out. Mainly it’s just to set the plot in motion: cast off by his family and his bar buddies, Homer ends up at a bar down the interstate and meets Ray, a like-minded slob who also happens to be a roofer. He continues to make intermittent appearances to Homer, never committing to finishing the roof, but stranger than that is that no one else seems to see Ray but Homer. It isn’t long before the family becomes worried, and hauls him off to receive psychiatric care.

The third act involves Homer getting six weeks of electroshock therapy until he cops that Ray is imaginary. It’s very weird and sad to watch a whimpering Homer getting strapped down and repeatedly electrocuted over what we know must be a misunderstanding. They couldn’t look in a phone book or on the Internet to see if a Ray Magini actually exists? Moreover, it’s just an excuse to work over Dan Castellaneta’s vocal cords, and for us to laugh because Homer getting shocked for no reason is funny, I guess. Ray shows up at the end and we explain the reasons why nobody actually saw him. All well and good, yes, but how do you explain how nobody heard him? Most egregious is the bartender where Homer and Ray first met. He had an eye patch blocking Ray from his view, but Ray also had a beer and nachos, which he must have ordered from somebody. It makes the episode just feel like a big waste when you give an explanation this shoddy, but it’s not like these unsatisfying conclusions are anything new. There’s a few choice laughs here and there, but not enough to cover the aggressive dumbness.

Tidbits and Quotes
– Stephen Hawking makes his second appearance on the show, just randomly being in Springfield for some reason. He’d show up again for a third time later on too. He’s also had three appearances on Futurama, enough for them to comment on it (“You’ve solved the problem that baffled Einstein, and drove Stephen Hawking to quit physics and become a cartoon voice actor!” “I like physics, but I love cartoons.”)
– I’ve always been confused at the Knockers waitress yelling at Homer (“Read the sign, prevert!”) That’s not a typo, she says “prevert.” Is the joke that she mispronounced it? Is “prevert” a word?
– Marge’s tasks for the day: take the dog to the vet, and take Bart to get circumcised. She’s making this decision just now at ten years old?
– Ray Romano does a fine job and gets a few good lines in (“Sorry, man, I gotta go. It says my kid attempted something… I hate the way these things cut off.”) I even thought the bit at the end endlessly promoting Everybody Loves Raymond over the credits was funny, it was really well timed.
– Walking to Home Depot… I mean, Builder’s Barn, Homer waxes nostalgic (“My dad used to bring me down to Johnson’s Hardware. Old man Johnson used to know everything about fixing stuff. When they built this place, he hung himself.”) That’s the joke. Funny?
– Homer eats the rubber mouth guard before his electroshock, because that fat Homer will eat anything! It’s funny because he ate it even though it’s not food!

(originally aired April 17, 2005)
As I mentioned with “Bart to the Future,” “Lisa’s Wedding” is this humungous shadow that looms over any time the writers decide to make another episode set in the future. It may not seem fair to have to be compared to one of the greatest episodes of the series, but if this is the topic you want to cover, it comes with the territory, and while this episode is certainly nowhere near the abortion that “Future” was, it ultimately comes up a little short. Unease sets in for me early when we first see our future, featuring Bart and Lisa heading to the prom. Marge takes a Polaroid photo of them, which morphs into a cake with the picture on it, and she comments how great the world is now that scientists have invented magic. While I appreciate the lampshade hanging to some degree, it just feels like their lazy excuse for them to make outlandish future jokes, with human cloning and sentient vomit being around in such a short time from the present. Now think back to “Wedding,” which took place even further in the future, where all the technological advancements seemed logical as far as the direction society appears to be going. Video phones, overstuffed schools, the Rolling Stones still being on tour, these are all things that basically happened by 2010, while in this episode, we get flying unicorn clams.

To be fair, this show is more focused on the plot than future gags, featuring Bart needing to find direction in his life so his girlfriend Jenda will take him back. He inadvertently thwarts a robbery at Burns’s mansion, who in returns offers him a Yale scholarship, the one that Lisa is already slated to receive. Now Bart must choose between continuing to impress Jenda with his impromptu Yale admission, or saving Lisa from a fate worse than death: settling for Milhouse. It’s a simple enough story, and there’s nothing really wrong with the characterization or situations. Mainly, the episode just wasn’t very interesting, and neither is this future, for the most part. Like I said earlier, positing what could actually happen in the future is a lot more entertaining than just making stuff up, like having the police be cyborgs or that fucking clam thing. There’s a few choice gags that work, and the core of the story is somewhat sweet, but in the end, it just ends up in the ether, smack dab in the middle of the phenomenal “Wedding” and the abysmal “Future.”

Tidbits and Quotes
– The framing device of Professor Frink’s time machine is alright. He’s a lonely man desperate for a chance to wow others with his invention, which definitely makes more sense than the owner of the Indian casino taking time out of his day to give some kid a twenty minute vision of his future (with ads!)
– There’s a few minor callbacks in this episode that I like: Bart’s retro tux is reminiscent of his father’s from “The Way We Was,” and Homer’s underwater condo echoes his dreams of living under the sea in “Homer Badman.”
– The hand wave for Maggie’s absence is to show her on a video postcard from Alaska, which now has sandy beaches presumably due to global warming. Why is a nine-year-old living across the country from her family? Is this part of a school program? Never mentioned, doesn’t matter.
– I’m a bit conflicted, but I do like the roided out teenage Milhouse. Him wanting to man up by getting buff, but still remaining the same insecure wuss, makes sense to me. Asserting how Lisa being with him would be a dead end also works, with a future vision of their horrible potential future to boot. Then the future episode last season wrote them as married with children, which felt kind of lazy and sad. I’m not covering that one since I only watched it after the unusually large amount of positive response it got on No Homers, and while it wasn’t awful, I wasn’t as won over by it as everyone else was.
– It’s not as terrible as “Future,” but still present are the designs and voices for older characters still feel like they’re little kids. A lot of the people at the prom, like Wendell, Lewis and Ralph, just look like they took the kid head and put it on an adult body. Same with the voices, many of them still sound like ten-year-olds. But the few new designs and changes that are there do work. Nelson knocking up Sherri and Terri? I totally buy that.
– Some restraint is shown in this future world in having Homer splurge on one of the first hover cars, which doesn’t fully work yet. Going through the Quantum Tunnel, he and Bart get a surprise visit by Bender (“Alright! You guys are my new best friends!”) Seeing Homer toss him out and fall apart on the road as he laughs is a little sad. It was all done in love, surely, but at this point in time, Futurama had vanished from the airwaves, and this shit show was still going strong.
– Oh God I hate the “joke” with Smithers and his heterosexuality injections. I’m sure Harry Shearer was thrilled to record the wonderful line, “I love boobies!”
– Seeing the hanging Frink skeleton is a bit disturbing, but I don’t see it as an entirely unrealistic fate for him.
– The animation at the end with the flying car dodging and zooming up between the two trees looked really good. Don’t know why, but it stuck out to me.

(originally aired April 3, 2005)
This is another one of those episodes with so many aggravating elements, but ultimately I really feel nothing for it as a whole. Just another disposable show to fill up a season. We open with the Simpsons visiting Shelbyville, which I guess is now some kind of affluent, cultural capital with high end shopping centers and musical theater. So chalk this up for yet another thing modern Simpsons has tainted: instead of Springfield and Shelbyville being two towns filled with morons trying to one-up each, now it’s snobs from Shelbyville looking down at their poorer, dumber neighboring city. Hearing their “hate hoots,” whatever the fuck those are, is a lot more interesting and entertaining than “Lemon of Troy,” surely. Marge gets famed architect Frank Gehry to build a music hall in Springfield, but it goes belly-up instantly when the townspeople, despite voting for the $30 million building in the first place, realize that they don’t like culture. I feel like another “character” dampened over the years has been the town itself: mob mentality made a lot more sense in the older episodes, as it was more about the crowd being easily manipulated and blind-sighted, not being complete idiots. Maybe new Shelbyville has it right.

Mr. Burns steps in, volunteering to take on the town’s debt to convert the music hall into a prison. Why is this? No reason. Then Homer applies to be a prison guard? Why is this? Because he can, I guess. Wasn’t he already a prison guard for two minutes last season? Then Burns meets with Quimby, informing him he needs help as his profits from the prison are down. You assumed the town’s debt, and now you need help with your random business venture? Whatever. Next, Homer is arrested when Wiggum starts enforcing ridiculous, unchecked on-the-book laws, and then he unwittingly becomes a prison snitch. There’s no reaction by Marge or the kids that Homer’s in jail, which you think there would especially be given the ridiculous circumstances that got him in there. But why spend time on that when we can milk the snitch angle and make Homer even more unlikable, having Drederick Tatum go into solitary for his youth group “gang” tattoo while Homer gets a plasma screen TV in his cell. Marge randomly appears to get Homer during a prison riot out to kill him, then they’re saved, the prison is shut down and things go back to normal. Or whatever. I was more confused than anything through most of this, so many parts of it made no sense to me whatsoever. A complete mess of an episode.

Tidbits and Quotes
– Another unnecessary guest star, but Frank Gehry got maybe the only laughs of the episode, with his shocked inquiry that Marge wrote that he was the “bestest” architect, and seeing how his buildings are constructed, by building a normal structure, than smashing the steel beams with wrecking balls into their warped shapes.
– I was mistaken before, this is Charles Napier’s final appearance as the head prison guard. He had better lines in the same role in “The Wandering Juvie,” but it’s great to hear him again anyway.
– This episode has a subplot, but there’s no point to it and it literally doesn’t have an ending. The kids notice Snowball II is getting fatter, then discover she’s wandering off during the day to be primped and spoiled by another family. Lisa confronts them, but finds that the cat likes being with the other family better. Bart goes in to get more answers, but becomes just as won over with their endless supply of treats as the cat. And that’s it. I thought about this further for some reason… perhaps this is actually Snowball II’s real family. Remember that this actually isn’t Snowball II, this is the cat that wandered by the house in “I, D’oh-bot” that Lisa adopted and named after her poor dead cat for convenience’s sake. Who’s to say she hasn’t been doing this all along, that Lisa is keeping this cat as her own when she really belongs to this other family? It’s all bullshit anyway, since we don’t really need the cat in the show. They tried killing her off, now we see her happier with another family, just get rid of her, what does it matter?
– “This is worse than when we thought Mom was having an affair! Turned out she was just going to the library to cry.” I fucking hate one-off lines like this that callously throw out just devastatingly sour information about the family. Just think about it, Marge huddled between the aisles of the library weeping about her moronic asshole husband and her awful station in life. Hilarious, right? Above it all, the Simpsons have always been a loving family, but now it’s considered joke-worthy to mention that they’re completely miserable.
– Wiggum takes a shot at CSI (“That’s it! Lots of flash and no meaning!”) Once again, this show has absolutely no ground to stand on when it comes to mocking the quality of other series.
– The ending is just one puzzling thing after another. The prisoners get all the guards out by feeding Homer fake information about a prison break, which I guess made it possible for one of them to reach the prison door opener lever that’s conveniently placed on the wall next to his cell. Homer hides out in the basement when Marge arrives to find him. The convicts show up, and rather than run out the exit door, they instead lock themselves in the gas chamber. Rather than just turn on the gas, the prisoners try desperately to get the door open. Then the guards return, knock all the convicts out with tear gas, and in comes Mr. Burns and Governor Bailey for some reason. Homer proceeds to blow the lid off of the horrible conditions in the prison… except we didn’t really see anything all that bad. The guards were malicious and sadistic? You mean Lenny, Carl and Otto? And feeding them horse meat? No worse than the gym mats being served at the school. So the prison gets shut down and Bailey announces the convicts will be sent to a garbage island. You know where she should really put them? Into Springfield fucking Penitentiary. They never mention the actual working prison a single time time in this whole episode. Did they just move all the inmates? Is the old prison condemned? It could have been excused in one scene where we show that the prison is falling apart, so Mr. Burns’s plan to convert the music hall into a new prison would be favorable. That’s all you need. But instead, out of sight, out of mind, I guess.