603. Havana Wild Weekend

Original airdate: November 13, 2016

The premise: The Simpsons take Abe to Cuba in seek of better medical care. He ends up thriving in his new environment, and opens up a night club with an old Air Force buddy.

The reaction: For as much over explanation and excess exposition this show spews on a weekly basis, there are also many points where important details are barely discussed at all. Take our first act where the Simpsons are alerted when they find out the urine stain on the rug actually came from Abe. He appears tired and weak, sort of, through the rest of the act, and that’s about the extent of his condition. Doctors keep saying, “There’s nothing I can do,” without really talking about what’s wrong with Abe or why they can’t do anything. At the VA hospital, a helpful stranger walks up and just starts talking about finding health care in Cuba, so it’s off to Cuba then! There, a local doctor tells Abe there’s nothing he can do like everyone else. Can this be elaborated on a little more? But whatever, this plot “resolves” when Abe spies a classic 50s car and is twinged with nostalgia. Its owner offers to drive him around, and then he feels as good as new. The driver gives a long-winded explanation for this (“All our American cars were built before 1960, and studies show that exposure to objects from your youth can help you feel young again! A professor, Ellen Langer, did a study where seniors, exposed to culture from the 50s, became more vigorous and engaged!”) I had to write all that out just to show yes, that’s an actual, very real, very long piece of dialogue. It even cites a fucking medical study! This show is literally incapable of telling any story without painfully explaining everything that’s happening. Where are the jokes? We’re halfway through the episode by now, is this the point of the episode? Abe reveling in the past? Didn’t we just have this with the subplot last season of him hallucinating old memories thanks to new pills? From there, he randomly meets an old Air Force buddy who convinces him to open a night club out of an old plane, and has an affair with a hot waitress. Then a bunch of stupid shit happens that’s inconsequential. Are we supposed to care about Homer leaving his father behind? That this new woman might break Abe’s heart? None of that matters. There’s no build, no purpose, it’s just a bunch of stuff that happens played in sequence that robs you of twenty minutes. Why am I still watching this? Am I out of my freaking mind?

Three items of note:
– It’s pretty incredible when the show retreads old jokes, because it presents the most clear-cut examples of how far things have fallen. The scenario: Homer arrives in Cuba and must declare his purpose of visit. “The Trouble with Trillions” featured this in the form of a checklist with three boxes: Business/Pleasure, Smuggle Cigars, Assassinate Castro, of which Homer checks all three. This scene takes eight seconds. Clean, succinct, and no dwelling. Get in, get out. This episode nearly twenty years later features the same set-up, but the customs agent reads a now inflated eight reasons aloud to Homer as he responds to each one. Meanwhile, a bunch of shady-looking characters walk very slowly past her guard in the background. This whole bit takes thirty seconds, with ten more seconds added on with Lisa piping up with her “journalist” credentials to get them in. There’s plenty of ways I could cross-examine the differences between these two approaches, but the most glaring is the lack of confidence. The show in its prime was so dense, not willing to waste any time when they could be plugging in more jokes. The show now is perfectly content with extending a sequence as long as possible to drag things out, pad out as much as possible to get to that sweet, sweet running time.
– Again, “Trillions” in a mere minute or two gave us lots of great jokes in Cuba, from the adorable child serving donkey meat, street boxing whilst chomping on huge cigars, and the Che Guevara Duff billboard. Here, our Cuban adventure begins with Ricky Ricardo and Fred Mertz randomly appearing on the ship, who then appear randomly throughout the episode. I Love Lucy is a contemporary reference, right? Homer also watches Castro speeches on TV, which kills more time. Did Cuban television rebroadcast those after he was out of power? I dunno. He died a few weeks after this aired, so that’s interesting, I guess. Maybe.
– The ending involves the waitress actually being a CIA agent, who takes to the cockpit of the plane/nightclub to fly it back to America. The plane is filled with fugitives wanted by the United States, but they all just showed up by happenstance. Abe’s Air Force buddy wasn’t looking to open a safe haven, or attract notorious clientele, they just sort of showed up and he introduced them to Abe. Calling this a deus ex machina is an insult to the term. It’s made even worse that there was an attempted build-up, sort of, in that she knew Abe’s name before she met him, which connected to later when Homer goes to the US Embassy and it’s revealed that all AARP cards are monitored and tracked. So that was their big set-up and pay off? Do the writers think they did a great job with this? Is this their version of a slam dunk? How fucking inept are these hack frauds? Boy, I’m getting punchy.

One good line/moment: …