691. Three Dreams Denied

Original airdate: November 22, 2020

The premise: Three tales of minor misfortune: Comic Book Guy fulfills his dream of coming to San Diego Comicalooza, but blows his chance to get a job at Marvel, Lisa’s newest crush ends up screwing her out of first chair saxophone, and Bart gets a voice acting gig, but is shocked to find out he’s voicing a princess character.

The reaction: This isn’t one of those my most dreaded anthology episodes, but merely three different stories that don’t intersect or mirror each other thematically in any meaningful way. It’s like someone took a bunch of undeveloped story scraps and crammed them into one episode. The title “Three Dreams Deferred” implies the episode involves three characters having their most desired dreams dashed, but that’s not really the case. Story one has Comic Book Guy get the cash he needs to finally go to San Diego Comic-Con… errr, I mean, Comicpalooza, but his actual  dream is getting the chance to work at Marvel. He believes if he asks the perfect question at a Hall H panel, he’ll get the job, but sadly, he loses the card he wrote it down on and ends up humiliating himself. This is definitely the most promising of the three stories; Comic Book Guy at Comic-Con feels like a no-brainer of an idea that you could tell a multitude of different stories out of, but what little we have here, having to share screen time with two other dull plot lines, it’s not enough to develop into anything interesting. Story two features Lisa crushing on a new boy who plays the saxophone, who later turns out to be a double crosser who sabotages her out of her first chair. Blake is a non-character, so his dramatic reveal as a backstabber (he literally takes out his bright blue contacts to show his evil red eyes) means nothing. But what was Lisa’s denied dream? I guess being first chair forever? Story three has Bart becoming friends with the man running the Android’s Dungeon in Comic Book Guy’s absence, a voice actor who invites Bart to the studio and ends up getting a part. Remember Bart’s series-long dream to do voice acting? It’s hard to get any investment of a goal we never knew a character had. Bart is teased when it’s revealed the character he voices is a princess, then Lisa gives him a pep talk that he should be proud for being woke, then he’s publicly vindicated when the princess character becomes a violent badass who gores people with her unicorn. Whatever. An episode with three independent stories might work if they were some significant connection between them, but this was just a bunch of fractured nonsense.

Three items of note:
– Blake is voiced by Broadway performer Ben Platt. This show has had many guest stars who voice new classmates of Bart and Lisa’s, and many of them sound pretty jarring since they’re basically doing their adult voices as children. Of all of the worst examples of this, Blake may be the worst of all. His voice is so deep, he’s a literal adult man that Lisa is just fawning over, and it’s kind of uncomfortable.
– Comic Book Guy spends two seconds lamenting that his beloved wife Kumiko won’t be able to go to Comicpalooza with him, as we see a letter saying she’s visiting her sick father. But of course she’s not in the episode. Just like Selma’s daughter Ling, the writers have shown they have absolutely no interest in further developing these seemingly “important” characters after they’ve been introduced. Why did they bother giving Comic Book Guy a wife and then proceed to do nothing with her? Her only other moment of note I can recall is in the “Sad Girl” episode where she finds Lisa’s discarded graphic novel and decides to publish it in her husband’s store. And regarding CBG going to a convention, there was an episode a few seasons back, “101 Mitigations” that ended with CBG taking Homer to Comic-Con. Like the actual Comic-Con. So he’s already been to the biggest convention ever, and just like this time, he didn’t take his beloved wife.
– Bart’s subplot gets so little screen  time that I don’t even feel like complaining about how little sense it makes. Bart gets the voice over job on the spot, and the cartoon instantly goes on the air? (they make a joke about it, but come on.) The opening credits show it’s a cast full of A-list actors, but a nobody child like Bart gets a solo billing card. Bart gets a check from Warner Bros. Animation, but why are they recording in Springfield? Who gives a shit, who gives a fuck.