Original airdate: December 8, 2013

The premise: Principal Skinner barters a field trip on a nuclear sub off to the most well behaved students. When Bart tries and fails to pass his overly strict criteria, he teams up with Homer to get revenge by making Skinner think he killed his mother. Meanwhile, Lisa saves Krusty from bankruptcy by convincing him to license his show out to foreign markets.

The reaction: Boy oh boy, what a spectacle this was. Skinner starts the episode drunk with power as he spends over a minute on this belabored setup: he’s giving all the students a clean slate to get a chance to take a trip on a submarine, but one slip-up and you’re out. While an actually authoritative Skinner is at least a little pleasing to see, it all feels pretty meaningless. Bart pathetically sucks up to him, but Skinner busts him for a small transgression anyway, and no amount of sad puppy dog eyes from Bart will sway him. It feels so vindictive for no real reason; even if Skinner had said this was to stick it to Bart for the years of torment, it would be flimsy. So Bart wants his revenge, and boy does he get it. Skinner awakens one morning to find Agnes lying on the kitchen flood in a puddle of blood and a giant combat knife lodged in her back. Homer and Bart arrive to witness the scene, so now they’ve got him by the balls. I’ll say this plot twist certainly jolted me from my usual state of half paying attention to these episodes. Good thing Skinner didn’t bother to check if his mother was still breathing, or touch the body at all, or be able to tell the difference between blood and jam, or any of the multitude of things that one would do to be able to easily tell that she’s not dead. Also, why does Skinner automatically assume he did it, and not think his mother was murdered? I assume the combat knife may be from his army days and that his prints are on it, but why do I have to make that assumption? The episode feebly attempted to set this up with an earlier phone call where Skinner angrily hangs up on his mother and stares daggers at her picture (“Some days I wish I could just kill you.”) But these are like the tinest of breadcrumbs I’m lapping up here. A better twist would be that Skinner is thrilled to be rid of his mother, and gleefully assists Homer and Bart with the disposal of her body, throwing them off guard. Maybe that would be too grim, but when you’re at episode 537, why the fuck not? Instead, Skinner becomes the spineless limp noodle he’s known for nowadays, going along with the stupid scheme, wearing a crazy disguise and being carted off onto a bus in a potato sack. He returns to face the music for his crime, but Marge randomly puts a stop to the whole charade and reveals Agnes is alive. Agnes first appears heartbroken, but it was actually just a setup for a joke to end the show on (“But when I just heard you say you were glad to see me dead, I thought now I’m gonna be meaner than ever!”) Nothing gained, nothing lost. What an insane episode. Sorry, that’s one letter too many. Inane episode. That’s it.

Three items of note:
– The B story starts when Lisa just so happens to ride her bike by Krusty’s mansion, and Krusty just dumps all his financial problems onto this little girl she doesn’t recognize. Lisa gives him the idea to sell his image to overseas markets, because of course she would know about that, as she handily whips out an iPad that had a foreign version of SpongeBob set up and ready to play, a time-killing segment which I don’t even really understand. This would almost be a rip-off of “Homie the Clown” if the plot were developed further and I could understand what was going on. We get a tortuously long section devoted to Jamaican Krusty and their Itchy and Scratchy equivalent, The Itchem & Scratchem Blow, complete with a whole new theme song. I don’t even need to tell you what the new lyrics were, or what the content of the cartoon was, I’m sure you can make an educated guess. The ending is almost an afterthought, played at the very end of the episode. And it’s not even an ending, the foreign Krustys chase Krusty and his lawyer in a golf cart and that’s it.
– We open with a daydream of Skinner as a Wild West sheriff, complete with his own theme song that plays throughout the episode. Just over and over again. Between this, the Jamaican Itchy & Scratchy theme, “You Only Live Once,” Burns’s song from the wrestling episode… songs on this show used to be so damn catchy and memorable and funny. Now it’s just like, where are the jokes? Plus, it was a little disconcerting seeing Skinner dream about blowing up the heads of his students (graphically and on screen), and then seeing Sherri and Terri in saloon girl attire, and have one faint at the sight of Skinner. Weeeeeeiiiirrrd and creeeepyy.
– There were a few small jokes at the beginning that bothered me, so I’ll condense them here. First, the submarine video ends with a context-free “YVAN EHT NIOJ” on the screen, one of the most transparent instances of fan service the show’s ever done. The joke is, “I remember that episode!” At the end of the assembly scene, Bart aborts mission on his prank by freeing his piloted drone. Then we see it flies all the way up to space somehow, passing by Sandra Bullock, George Clooney and the busted space station from Gravity (“Help! I’m trapped in space with a man I don’t like!”) As the movie had just released this fall, it felt like the show trying to quickly crowbar in a topical reference last minute. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was animated well after the fact of the episode itself. And it’s not even a joke. That line feels more like giving context to make sure the audience recognizes that it’s Gravity and not just two random astronauts in space. And again, this is fucking Family Guy level shit. I KNOW WHAT GRAVITY IS SO I CLAP NOW. Lastly, Homer goes to Moe’s after dinner, but can only leave if Marge blows into the breathalyzer for him. What a sad, sad scene. This poor, poor woman enabling her husband to drive drunk to a bar where he’ll get even more drunk, and then drive back. This is like frat boy shenanigans, not something I would expect Marge fucking Simpson to put up with.

One good line/moment: Irish Krusty got a chuckle out of me (“Me ma, she had twelve children, but only three lived, then they closed the mill. …hey hey.”) But then they use him two more times and the joke gets less and less funny. But that’s standard procedure with anything halfway decent nowadays; if it worked once, it can work five or six more times!

Original airdate: November 24, 2013

The premise: Lisa befriends new student Isabel, but is horrified when she discovers that she’s a conservative. The two run against each other for 2nd grade representative, which the Springfield Republican Party tries to rig in Isabel’s favor.

The reaction: A big part of Lisa’s character degradation was when the writers seemed to forget she was a child. She became the show’s liberal mouthpiece, the smug, self-satisfied voice of reason on a number of political and social issues that no eight year old should have any concern over. But over the last few seasons, I feel like her character has taken a different turn that feels just as aggravating to me: her desperation for attention. Lisa is now a sad, lonely nerd girl who craves recognition from her classmates, even if it’s on a superficial level. We’ve seen it a few times lately, particularly in the Facebook episode, of her bending over backwards to be included by bitchy girls like Sherri and Terri. Lisa was always a loner, but she was never pathetically yearning for any kind of interaction. At the start of the episode, she mournfully sings the Harry Nilsson song “One” to herself (forty whole seconds of it, without music), then she gets hit with a spitball, and coos, “Well, at least I’m getting some attention!” What’s that about? Anyway, this episode merges these two awful characterizations with Lisa’s pity party being broken thanks to her instant kinship with Isabel, a new student, but she quickly is disturbed to find out she is a Republican. There’s nothing more natural sounding than two eight-year-old girls discussing their political views, is there? But they don’t really even do that; when they do talk at all about their beliefs, it’s very vague and surface-level tropes of liberal and conservative mindsets. The episode is mostly focused on their school election, with Springfield Republicans courting Isabel to indoctrinate young minds with their platform. Seeing their castle headquarters, Dracula being used for gag after gag… everything just feels so much more blunt and less inventive. Or fun. This is another episode where it seems like nothing really happens. In the end, Isabel wins (though, as she’s a guest voice, she’ll never appear again), but Lisa still feels vindicated by the feedback by her classmates, rhetoric that sounds eerily familiar to our last election (“53% of people said they’d vote for a liberal. Just not you.”) A meaningless election with a meaningless new friendship featuring a meaningless one-off character. Next!

Three items of note:
– Lisa’s first meeting with Isabel is so bad (“That’s a reference to the Bronte sisters!” “You got my reference to the Bronte sisters?”) They agree to do their presentation on FDR together, where Lisa first finds out about Isabel’s viewpoints. So, what, did they write two separate papers and neither of them talked about them at all? Terrible, terrible writing.
– This episode is seemingly political, but, like I said, it’s really not saying anything. We get two giant time-killing chunks indicative of this. First, Marge tries to placate her daughter by taking her to the attic and revealing that in the 80s, she went through a Republican phase as a Reagan supporter. But then it just becomes a minute of I Love the 80s where Homer and Marge play around with their cassettes and VHS tapes and old classic music. And whatever the Super Bowl Shuffle is. The second time-killer is later on with Lisa’s nightmare about Democratic losers featuring Bill Clinton and John Kerry. I’m not even sure why it’s there story-wise. They predict Lisa will lose, and then she does. Just an excuse to trot out a Clinton impression again, I guess.
– The Republicans take Isabel to Phineas Q. Butterfat’s, a classic show location that hasn’t been seen in ages. Isabel is firm in her beliefs (“You couldn’t buy me with a wheelbarrow full of ice cream!)” Pimply Faced Teen, wheeling said barrow in the background, immediately turns around and walks off. That was the Mt. Bellyache, of course, from “Lisa’s Pony.” I was wondering, does that count as fan service? What a stretch. But the scene ends with her leaving, and Teen returning with an entirely different ice cream concoction. He drives in on a little Zamboni, and it’s called the Yum-boni. You see? So what’s the joke here? The parlor is seemingly known for their elaborate and huge sundaes? It just felt like another example of the show not only feeling disjointed from scene-to-scene, but in same scenes themselves. It’s just throw whatever you want at the screen, regardless of what came before or after it. Gotta fill twenty minutes somehow.

One good line/moment: A two minute opening sequence paying homage to the classic Silly Symphonies Disney cartoons, featuring our Springfield cast as living instruments. I feel like David Silverman had a sizable hand in this one, and it’s a really nice piece of animation isolated from the terrible episode.