Original airdate: March 9, 2014

The premise: A socially ostracized Bart befriends Digby, a transfer student with a love for falconry, but over time, he learns his new friend might not be quite right.

The reaction: Yawwwwwn… it’s been a while since we’ve had a boring one. Episodes nowadays are pretty tepid and un-engaging to me at this point, but this one was a good ol’ fashioned snooze fest, which is saying something when the episode culminates in a child being locked in a mental institution. Bart is swayed by the words of a guest minister from Indonesia to donate some money, for some reason. He borrows a twenty off Homer, who then hounds him incessantly to pay him back. Bart gets so frazzled to pay his debt that he takes to eating things for money on the playground, resulting in him swallowing a frog full of formaldehyde, putting him in the hospital. They show Homer’s comeuppance is having to pay a four thousand dollar medical bill, but it really doesn’t excuse how fucked up the whole scenario was. But none of that opening matters; after that, Bart’s bullies are thwarted by a falcon, and his trainer Digby, or Diggs. The preceding seven minutes truly were meaningless. Bart takes an interest in falconry, and he and Diggs become friends. Alright, so what happens next? The two are up in a tree, and Diggs says, “You wanna see something cool?” He then proceeds to dive and fall straight to the ground. Later, Diggs tells Bart that he was trying to fly, and then later Bart finds out he’s being sent away to a mental hospital. What’s all this about? There was no real build-up to this, like of Diggs’s obsession with birds to the point he wanted to be one, so none of this resonates. Also, does this boy have parents? Bart’s at the hospital by himself when Dr. Hibbert comes in with the psychiatric specialist to speak with him alone. Later, Bart encounters Diggs, who conveniently has a one-day pass from the crazy house (???), and they go to the falconry contest that had never been mentioned prior, so they can open all the cages and let the birds be free. Okay. And then Diggs leaves to go back to being institutionalized as melancholy music plays. And that’s it. What the fuck was that all about? Is this a happy ending? This seemingly orphaned, possibly schizophrenic kid rides off into the sunset back to being locked in a psychiatric ward against his will. What am I supposed to feel here? This whole scenario is pretty fucked up, but even more so that the episode doesn’t seem to even acknowledge it. I don’t know what that hell this episode was supposed to be, but I’m pretty sure the writers didn’t know either.

Three items of note:
– I’m pretty stunned that they didn’t even bother to come up with a terrible punny title. Did they just forget? I guess someone just wrote ‘Diggs’ as a placeholder and no one went back to change it.
– There’s a montage of Bart and Diggs with the falcon, and for some reason, all the shots aren’t stabilized, they’re wobbling like someone’s filming with a camera, and the color is washed out a little bit too. Maybe it’s a parody of something that uses the same music? I could look it up to see, but I don’t care to.
– At the dinner table, Bart mentions he has a printout of the hospital they sent Diggs to and shows his parents. They try to play him as hopelessly naive, but surely Bart can figure out what “Twisted Meadows Psychiatric Hospital” means. For some reason, Marge gets incredibly uncomfortable when Bart asks if he can visit his incarcerated friend (“If this is what I think it is, it’s not a place we should ever ever take a little boy.”) In addition to her apparently being a-OK about a kid being permanently sent to the nut house, it’s incredibly odd of Marge to not be reassuring to Bart, telling him that his friend is getting the help he needs, and he can go visit him. Instead, she’s so ridiculously callous about this house of horrors too horrible to even speak of, making Bart feel even worse about the whole situation.

One good line/moment:
– The couch gag was directed by Sylvain Chomet, the French animator behind The Triplets of Belleville and The Illusionist. It’s very beautiful and weird, and I’d much rather watch a whole episode animated like that.

Original airdate: January 26, 2014

The premise: Everyone at the plant is giving augmented reality glasses as gifts as a secret means for Burns to spy on his employees. Marge gets fed up with Homer using them all the time and takes them for herself, but this leads to Homer discovering through Burns’s camera feeds that Marge is secretly going to therapy every week.

The reaction: Boy, this characters-explain-everything-that’s-happening problem is just getting more and more aggressive, it’s all over this episode. Burns spends $26 million buying his employees Oogle Goggles (this show certainly feels like a time capsule now) to spy on them… but isn’t that already what he does anyway? He has a wall full of screens showing the goggle feeds directly behind his normal wall of surveillance monitors. How is this any different? Nearly the first half of the episode is devoted to Homer wearing the goggles everywhere, giggling about how cool they are. It’s like the iPad episode; it all feels like the writers anxiously crossing their fingers that a box of free stuff will show up at the office.. Marge confiscates the goggles for herself, and ends up wearing them everywhere like her husband did for some reason. Meanwhile, Homer wanders into Burns’s empty office and discovers the secret monitors. “Burns gave us those glasses so he could spy on us!” he explains to nobody. We then get close-ups on all of the monitors, and Homer says aloud what’s on the screen. Y’know, in case we were watching with our eyes closed. Then comes the drama: seeing through Marge’s eyes, Homer sees that she goes to therapy once a week, and has to decide what he should do about it. What we see of the session is pretty serious and joke-free, with Marge exhaustedly talking about her husband’s violent temper and rampant drinking problem. At this point, it starts to feel like a 2000s-era marital troubles episode, where Homer’s flaws are shown as actually serious, and negatively affecting his wife, but nothing is ever done about it. The ending involves Homer showing up at the therapy waiting room to confront Marge as she leaves, but thinks better of it when she tells the receptionist how good she feels after each session. We then get two extended montages of how Marge is a cake-making sex machine every Wednesday, but by the following Tuesday she’s run down and miserable. Then, in case you still aren’t following along, Homer explains it out loud for the viewers (“Oh my God, Marge needs this! It lights her way through the dark path of marriage to me.”) First off, it’s just great that Homer thinks of his wife’s happiness through the lens of what he gets out of it (cake, sex). Second, this is seriously our ending? This is a whole new breed of Homer-Marge episode; it’s almost like after so many shows of them arguing about Homer’s problems that he’ll never address, we now have an episode that brings them up, but they’re just constants. Not once does Homer think he should change his ways, this is just who he is. We know he’s not going to change, so why bother addressing it at all? The “happy” ending is that Marge gets a tune-up once a week navigating through the hellscape that is being married to a drunken angry brute. Hooray?

Three items of note:
– There’s a ridiculous B-story here too. Apparently Nelson forces all the kids in school to give him Valentines, but Bart puts his foot down about it, which Nelson rebuffs, forcing him to write a heartfelt card or else. Like, I don’t even know what to say about this one. Why would Nelson give a shit? And why would Bart put up with this? It feels so weird and out-of-character for all involved, I can’t even comment why it makes no sense. And on top of all of that, it was baffling that the two plots were so disconnected, that there was a Homer-Marge A-story, and the fact that it was Valentine’s Day never played into it at all.
– Homer wears his goggles all day and all night, even while pleasing his wife in bed. Marge gets mad and tells him to take them off, but why didn’t she see the brightly glowing goggles in the first place? They could have written so many joke reasons on why Marge didn’t notice, how he slipped them on, or was using it during their foreplay but Marge got too weird about it, anything. Instead, it just looks like minimal thought was put in, per usual. Then the episode ends with the two of them fooling around, now with Marge wearing the goggles. Full circle!
– Lately, the show has been doing little end tags, like the story ostensibly ends, we fade to black, and then we go to one last little scene before the credits. Writing twenty-minute stories is hard, I guess. Here, we get a scene between Lisa and Ralph for Valentine’s, which I’m assuming is meant to be fan service. But season 4 Ralph was not a brain damaged non-sequitur machine, so the writers have to make do with what they have, with Lisa asking why her Valentine from Ralph contained a tooth (“Plant it, and you’ll grow a new Ralph!” “I don’t need a new Ralph. I like the old one. Happy Valentine’s Day.”) Then we end on Ralph drawing on his face with marker. Brilliant!

One good line/moment: Moe gives Homer the advice to not tell Marge he knows about her therapy. Later in the kitchen, he appear in a thought bubble to reinforce this advice, but when Homer leaves, he’s left all alone, so he floats over to the dog to give him advice instead. It was kinda funny. It reminded me of a similar bit from The Critic where Jay appears in a bubble to give his son advice, though not as funny.

Original airdate: January 12, 2014

The premise: Comic Book Guy meets the girl of his dreams, Japanese manga artist Kumiko, but their relationship comes under fire when her father arrives to take her back home.

The reaction: I guess it’s time for Comic Book Guy to get the Moe treatment of making an angry, miserable character look sad and pathetic, and for the writers to throw him a bone. CBG feels like a legacy character whose satirical role is pretty nebulous in modern times. This sarcastic basement-dwelling nerd character was novel in 1990, but at this point, “nerds” in society have branched off into so many different tropes that CBG just feels like a catch-all for everything. He’s a movie critic, a hacker, a gamer, a social outcast, an otaku… and now a husband, apparently. This show has thrown love interests to a variety of our characters over the course of two decades, some very memorable, but a lot disposable, but the lady in question here, Kumiko, is the absolute worst of them all. Not only does she have absolutely no personality, and no motivation to find CBG likable, let alone attractive, but she just says everything she’s thinking and feeling aloud to push the story forward. As usual with this fucking show, it’s tell, not show, and this episode feels like the greatest offender I can think of in recent memory. Kumiko walks in CBG’s shop, and immediately introduces who she is and what she’s doing, pulling out a copy of her autobiographical manga that she’s working on, but apparently is already finished. Why is she visiting America’s saddest cities? Later on during their first date, CBG tries to stifle his critical nature, but Kumiko defuses the tension immediately (“Oh, I don’t mind. If you think it’s stupid, say it’s stupid.” “American nerd snark is the finest in the world!”) Cut to montage, then cut to her moving in with CBG. This goes beyond male fantasy or wish fulfillment, Kumiko is effectively a Relationship Sue. She just really, really likes CBG. Why? Because she says she does. That’s it. The real “conflict” arises when her father arrives at the Android’s Dungeon and takes her away when she finds out she’s living with a gross nerd. So, besides the surface level overbearing Asian father stereotype, what’s this about? What is Kumiko’s relationship with her dad? She gave him the comic book store’s address but apparently never told him about CBG? Did she lie about who he was? Why? Again, none of that is explained. Homer gets Kumiko’s father drunk and he has an epiphany or something, and then the episode ends with him in a robot suit for no explainable reason for his daughter’s wedding. Did they cut a scene explained why exactly he’s in a goddamn motherfucking robot suit? Is it to show acceptance of CBG’s lifestyle? And I guess his daughter’s too? She’s a manga artist, but she and CBG never even talk about comics at all. Or any nerd stuff. Who is she? This show has numbed me a lot at this point, but this episode really does feel like one of the worst I’ve ever seen. A needless relationship that I can’t even call underdeveloped, because that would imply there was any development at all. It’s an episode full of characters talking about things rather than actually showing them. CBG says Kumiko is moving in, but we don’t see their cohabitation. Instead we cut to Marge telling Homer to deliver a housewarming gift, where he can have a conversation with Kumiko’s father outside to review the story we just saw in a montage, and for him to spout out his expository dialogue. None of the characters’s motivations or emotions are necessary to connect with or to understand apparently, as long as you just have them say them out loud, that’s good enough.

Three items of note:
– To make CBG feel like a loser, they bring back Milo, the owner of the cool comic book shop from “Husbands and Knives,” an episode from over five seasons before, then voiced by Jack Black, now voiced by Maurice LaMarche. But don’t worry, on-screen text pops up to remind you who this guy is, in case you forgot. I remember being annoyed that that episode featured a first act of their rivalry resulting in CBG closing the Android’s Dungeon, but that plot being completely abandoned in favor of another stupid Homer-Marge bullshit story. This is their attempt to modernize their nerd stereotype, but with Milo talking about his “comic-tolerating” girlfriend, and that Comic-Con nets an 8% female audience, it still feels stuck in the past. CBG is left to stew in his own sadness… sigh… in song (“The only thing that could make this moment more cliched is if I started to sing about my feelings… and here I go.”) So, again, they know it’s terrible, but they do it again. They have to know how bad this shit is. And the song is just awful, par for the course with the recent examples we’ve seen. Milo gets in a verse as well, so I’m assuming they definitely wanted to get Jack Black back for this, but I guess he was busy. Or he read the script and threw up in disgust. They should’ve gotten Jess Harnell in to do his Jack Black impression, like for the last episode of The Powerpuff Girls.
– CBG and Kumiko have their first date at Chuck Dukewagon’s All-American Chow Lounge, a set piece that feels like a pale imitation of America Town from “Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo.” Also, seeing Pimply Faced Teen dressed as Guy Fieri fills me with many rage-filled emotions.
– Homer and Kumiko’s father get drunk of rice wine, which leads to a two minute joint hallucination where their surroundings transform into a Studio Ghibli tribute, featuring recreations of iconic characters and moments from their movies. It’s another self-indulgent set piece of the show just imitating a popular thing or someone else’s style, in the hopes that they can get some positive Internet buzz and a bunch of articles of “The Simpsons Pays Tribute to Hayao Miyazaki and It’s Amazing!” But, as always, there are no jokes. It just comes off as nonsensical and pandering. Why “parody” something if you have absolutely no take on it, other than we love this thing and we want to animate a sequence like this thing that we love. Who gives a flying fuck?

One good line/moment: The Radioactive Man sequence at the beginning was mildly entertaining. Even if it also was full of characters just spouting exposition, it felt a little less hackneyed in that context. It features some above-average animation for this show, and certainly was much more enjoyable than that reboot nonsense we saw in the last episode.

Original airdate: January 5, 2014

The premise: Irritated with the noisy theater experience, Homer takes up pirating movies and screening them in his backyard, but Marge’s guilty conscious ends up getting him in hot water with the FBI.

The reaction: Internet piracy wasn’t exactly a new, hot button issue when this episode aired. Hell, South Park did their Napster episode over a decade before this, and their take felt more biting and was funnier than this. But most importantly, it had a point of view, whereas this episode dances around the issue and ultimately crumples, culminating in a parade of celebrity guest voices taking good-humored jabs at each other and the entertainment industry. Homer is sick and tired of people using their bright tablets and being loud at the movies (all while being incredibly loud himself), and starts a movie screening club in his backyard. I thought the point was to avoid noisy people? If the show had developed this argument, or any salient rationale to defend Homer for what he’s doing, there might have been a point to all this. The middle part of the show is a countdown to Marge admitting that she unintentionally ratted on Homer, and I guess we’re supposed to feel bad about it. But why? Even if there were emotional weight to this, it still would stand in stark contrast to all the other nonsense of the wild, incompetent FBI agents and the family hiding out at the Swedish consulate. Homer’s trial features Judd Apatow and Seth Rogan to deliver some Hollywood insider jokes, right before we get to our big dumb conclusion. Homer pleads his case by talking about being an underdog, working against all odds to fight the man, a hackneyed plot conceit that the Hollywood bigshots immediately lap up and throw themselves on Homer for the movie rights. First, if they framed this better, and by better, I mean at all, this might have worked, but I was never clear on Homer’s motivations and why he cared so much about this, that his speech is just hollow. Plus, the show does what it always does now, like we saw with Lovejoy’s speech last episode, we have to keep cutting away to people saying their reactions in between Homer talking. Writing dialogue that is convincing and makes sense is too difficult. Let’s half-ass it and have other characters react to blatantly fill in the blanks for the audience. It’s just that easy!

Three items of note:
– The opening features Homer desperately trying to avoid spoilers for the new Radioactive Man reboot. Making fun of comic book movie plot twists is fair game and all, but it was just scene after scene of the same joke. It also felt weird that we got barely one line out of Bart for this whole opening, considering he’s the one that reads the comic books. They could have used him to comment on bringing “nerd” culture mainstream, with him being an old guard fan and Homer being the ignorant mass media consumer who looks down on him or something. Later, Homer gets set off into his movie theater tirade after reacting angrily at a scene in the movie ending up becoming a giant advertisement. Is this supposed to be a take on all the product placement from Man of Steel specifically? Surely there were dozens of jokes they could have made about the look, structure and plots of superhero movies, it felt weird that they went with that one.
– The scene on the prison bus of all the other prisoners reacting gravely seriously toward Homer for his movie piracy crimes felt the most analogous of South Park‘s piracy episode. In that show, the police chief takes the boys to celebrity homes a la A Christmas Carol telling them their tales of woe, of Lars Ulrich having to wait a few months to afford a gold plated shark tank, and Master P being unable to buy his son his own Polynesian island (“I see an island without an owner,” a brilliant driving home of the Carol connection). In this episode, it’s pretty much what you’d expect, except nowhere near as funny or clever as South Park did over a decade prior.
– Judd Apatow takes his lumps, kind of, as Homer introduces “Life is Funny,” clearly taking on Funny People (“It’s based on his life, starring his family and ad-libbed by his friends. So for the next three-and-a-half hours, enjoy.”) It honestly feels like a line an actor would read off of a cue card at the Oscars. Bringing in Apatow, as well as Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann (Apatow’s wife) to voice a “joke” scene from the movie, is basically the show making sure there’s no hard feelings. We didn’t mean it, look, you’re in on the joke! Funny People was an overindulgent, bloated snooze-fest, so seeing this kiddy glove take on it was particularly annoying to me.

One good line/moment: As Bart is about to give his father the step-by-step to downloading movies online, we cut to the FOX logo, with an announcer saying they have to censor this part of the show to prevent people from learning how to pirate, and instead show some NASCAR footage. It was a little over-explained, but it’s a cute idea. It reminded me of hearing about how super paranoid FOX was about the medical marijuana episode, and that they were forbidden from showing Homer actually placing the joint to his lips; it could be an inch away, but it couldn’t make contact, otherwise, kids would know how to smoke pot! As with all actually humorous things this show manages, they bring it back a second time, at the ending to cut off Lisa when she tries to weigh both sides of the argument and make some sense of what the fuck the episode was even about. That reminded me of the stupid surfing ending of “The Great Money Caper,” not the best episode to bring up memories of.

Original airdate: December 15, 2013

The premise: When Springfield is overrun by tourists seeking out the only town in America having a white Christmas, Marge looks to make some extra cash for the holidays by renting out the house. Meanwhile, Lisa attempts to buck the crass commercialism of the season by giving gifts from the heart.

The reaction: Another one of those episodes with no real plot or conflict; it’s just a bunch of stuff that happens. A flurry of out-of-towners causes all the local stores to inflate their prices, which worries Marge, but opening her house up to paying tourists will give her the dough to have a merry Christmas. That’s her motivation for doing it. Do we see her do anything with the money? Nope. Not at all. The house guests, none of whom are characterized whatsoever, are just a bunch of nags. She ends up having a minor blowup at them, then she apologizes before they all leave. And that’s it. Midway through the episode, that story kinda gets nudged aside as we see Lovejoy perform a stirring Christmas sermon, inspiring Lisa to buy gifts for her family that actually mean something. Or something. What eight-year-old goes out by herself to buy presents? She gets Bart the book Treasure Island, which he is incensed by (“You’re smart! Why would you give me a book?”) Giving Homer a bunch of radish seeds and Maggie a kit to wean her off her pacifier, Lisa’s plan is not so much to reject commercialism, but to buy gifts to try to help her family be who she wants them to be. But in the specific case of her brother, why in the world would she think that Bart would react any differently? The conclusion to this story is that Lisa gets Bart a tablet instead, which you can use to read books, as well as play with stupid apps. Which of these do you think Bart will spend 99.9% of his time? I’d say this feels like a bunch of Christmas skits, but it really doesn’t. It’s so hard to tell nowadays when a plot starts, where it’s going, or even when it’s over. Nothing feels like it means anything. Merry Christmas, everybody!

Three items of note:
– The Lovejoy scene is just horrible. He stresses out about writing the perfect sermon to wow the out-of-towners, has a stroke of inspiration, and then we go to his big performance. At this point, I thought this was going to turn into an episode about him, but I guess it didn’t. Instead, he just delivers a very generic speech about the season being about love and generosity, with repeated cuts to the crowd murmuring and shouting what they’re feeling (“You’re losing us!” “Wow! What a showman!”) There’s no reason the crowd should have that big of a reaction. It’s like watching a show featuring a stand-up comic and everyone’s laughing, but you have no idea what the fuck they’re cackling at.
– They give a joke to Marge where she gets irrationally agitated when people get to the second verse of Christmas songs and they get too religious-y for her. They even end the episode on it; her family and the house guests are having a good time singing as she blocks it out with blender noises. I get the joke they’re going for, but it seems very weird coming out of Marge.
– There’s a sequence where a kid is playing a video game that ends with a homicidal snowman slashing away at a rack of Christmas videos. Each time he swipes, two or three videos fly at the screen, the frame holds for two seconds, and then they go away. This happens ten times. Ten. What an insane exercise in excess. I’m sure some of those were kind of amusing, but they went by so quickly, I couldn’t read any of them. I understand these are freeze-frame gags, but I should have enough time to read at least some of them. The best counterexample I could think of is whenever the family goes to the movies, we see the marquee. There might be eight titles listed, but it’s up long enough that you can read two or three, thus motivating you to pause to go back and read the others. With these tapes, they move in place and leave screen so quick, I just can’t register the jokes that quickly.

One good line/moment: We see a montage of out of state license plates over the end credits that are kind of amusing. The only thing this show seems to semi-consistently excel at are one-off sign gags.