Original airdate: April 11, 2021
The premise: Mr. Burns’ latest impulse desire to be beloved leads to the creation of a new plant-based burger joint, which wins the hearts of the whole town, even the most discriminating Lisa. However, Burns’ burgers turn out to be not what they appear to be.
The reaction: Usually we have to wait a few seasons between these awful “Burns wants to be loved” episodes, but lucky us, we got two of them in one year! And man, does this make “Undercover Burns” look a lot better. I’m sure I mentioned it back then, but these premises are complete non-starters for me. You’re going to need to give me some real incentive to convince me that Burns gives even one iota of a fuck what the common folk think of him, but per usual, he just pathetically mewls after realizing people were ready to celebrate his death. The real Burns would order death squads outside his hospital room to dispose of the riffraff, but here, he literally tries to pull the plug on himself in defeat. In response, Smithers offers him one last shot at a redeemed legacy: inspired by Burns’ newfound love of Krusty Burgers, he has Professor Frink engineer the most delicious meat-free burger ever conceived, leading Burns to start the X-Cell-Ent burger shop. The entire town is won over by this, more than willing to overlook all the horrible shit Burns has done by opening a restaurant (a newspaper headline literally reads, “Lifetime of Evil Completely Forgotten.”) Even Lisa seems way too eager to embrace Burns immediately, hugging him after her first bite of the new burger, along with the other Simpsons. So Burns got what he wanted, but it doesn’t actually matter. The episode can’t decide whether Burns wants the affection of others or not. He orders Smithers to dispose of the throngs of well wishers outside of his house (with rubber bullets if necessary), then the very next scene, he sighs, “It’s so wonderful being liked!” He’s finally allowed access to the Beloved Billionaires Club, with Warren Buffett and Bill Gates (really fucking debatable how “likable” they are), but not Mark Zuckerberg, who gets a limp dick takedown scene, made even more pathetic since they graciously allowed him to a guest voice ten years ago.
We’re halfway through the episode now and I still don’t know what the plot is or where it’s going. Inevitably, Burns’ burgers will have some nefarious secret and he’ll be brought down for it, but he had no involvement in this plan at all, it was basically all Smithers’ doing. So when Lisa discovers that the plants being used for the burgers are all endangered, I don’t even know if Burns knew about it or not. Hell, why doesn’t she go ask her good friend Professor Frink who was hired to make the burger in the first place? Never mind, he appeared once to give Burns the burger and then disappeared. Lisa confronts Burns about it, randomly showing up at the Beloved Billionaires Club, and later beating Burns back to his mansion (by teleporting, I guess), but Burns doesn’t seem to give a shit or even know what she’s talking about. Then the episode becomes about Homer being the one to expose Burns. Earlier in the episode, he appeared in a commercial for the restaurant, but then the episode continued with no mention of it. Homer has a nightmare co-mingling with other fast food mascots, fearing he’s sold his soul, but I never got the impression Homer was the face of X-Cell-Ent. It felt like he was barely in the episode at all. When we get to the end and Homer struggles with admitting the truth and breaking his NDA, it feels like it means nothing, because it does. Burns snaps back to reveling in his evilness, and nothing of value was gained. This oddly feels like the worst episode of the season solely due to the “not-giving-a-shit” level of the writing being so high. It was like the ghost of a “Burns tries to be good” story with no real plot progression or character motivation, with those replaced by stale material about vegan food (it tastes bad!) As for Burns, literally the only jokes they can do with him anymore are joke about how frail and old he is. Him salivating over a Krusty Burger grossly dehydrates his whole face. He apparently only weighs 14 pounds. Ingesting one bubble of champagne causes him to float to the ceiling of his office like a parade balloon. I’d say kill the poor old man off already, but these characters have all be shambling corpses for about two decades now, so what’s the point?
Three items of note:
– In the absence of an actual plot, there’s vague hints at different subplots. Krusty finds it difficult to compete with Burns, finding Krusty Burger in dire straits, much to Bart’s dismay (“Oh, jeez, my hero’s a loser!”) Putting aside the fact that Krusty’s empire isn’t entirely based on his shitty fast food chain, this plot tease is just that: a tease. Krusty reappears at the very end at Burns’ press conference fiasco to celebrate his good fortune (“I won by doing nothing!”) Meanwhile, Marge accidentally purchases stock in X-Cell-Ent, and upon getting a good return on investment, she becomes obsessed with monitoring the stock. She’s a compulsive gambler, but I guess she’s just playing one stock? Lisa reacts in horror at her mother being a shareholder, but it doesn’t really matter, it’s all just time killing in an episode that could care less about weaving an actual story.
– Reference time! Right before we see Bart, Lisa and Milhouse biking to Burns’ processing plant, we see the Stranger Things kids ride by, being unknowingly pursued by a biking Demagorgon, as a Stranger Thing-esque music motif plays. Later on, we hold on a shot of Bart biking as three empty bikes roll by him followed by Demagorgon riding by, clearly having eaten the kids. It’s the most shameless insert-reference-here I’ve seen in a long time, made even more egregious that they literally did an entire Treehouse of Horror segment about Stranger Things last season. Also, at Burns’ plant, we see not-Anton Chigurh from No Country For Old Men with his bolt stunner “murdering” plants with it. This character appeared way back in an episode from 2009, which at least was within the window of relevancy of that movie being out. I feel like he popped up again at some point too, but here, it’s just so baffling, a random appearance of a character from a 14-year-old movie. It’s no different than a shitty Family Guy gag.
– The episode gets its mileage out of depicting Simpson-ized versions of fast food mascots, first in randomly displaying portraits of Burns dressed as Colonel Sanders, Wendy and so on in his office at the start of act two, then later the mascots appearing in Homer’s mascot. A crooning Mac Tonight serves as the narrator of the story (sort of), a long-dead mascot whose only claim to fame now is being co-opted by the online alt-right to the point that the Anti-Defamation League has “Moon Man” classified as a hate symbol. I guess that’s another issue with having a crew of 55-and-older legacy writers: not only are the references dated, but they might also have adapted all-new meaning in new mediums you’re not aware of.
Me Blog Write Good 
Poor Mr. Burns.
I honestly wonder, why doing these episodes about bein accepted? He never cared of his reputation, he was this character that no matter how bad he was, he was always on the top because he had money, power and nuclear energy on his hands. Now, suddenly cares for how people think about him? Give me a break.
I don’t wanna be mean to the staff, but do you think the writers see themselves in Mr. Burns now?
Man, “Monty Can’t Buy Me Love,” “A Hunka Hunka Burns in Love,” and “Fraudcast News” are starting to look like absolute classics now…
I don’t wanna talk about this garbage episode so I’ll talk about the title instead. It may be no “Do Pizzabots Dream of Electric Guitars?” but it’s interesting. I find it interesting how Season 32 has two punny titles based off of fast food chains. At least it makes sense in this episode but “Diary Queen” had no ice cream. Season 33 will probably have an episode called “Fat Homer Silver’s” and it will be a fantasy episode where the Simpsons are pirates and put in pirate times and there will probably be references to popular pirate-themed media. No one will like it and it will be immediately forgotten about a week after its release.
At least it will be better than “Burger Kings”
I just realized, especially since FXX reran it earlier in the day, they did the parody of “healthy fast food” in the banal episode Fatzcarraldo, when they had Krusty Burger unveil an entire new menu of food with healthy stuff like kombucha and beet aioli or some shit like that… and it immediately fell flat, since it drove away the longtime swill eaters and didn’t attract new, “hip” eaters. So naturally, instead of just reverting the changes, Krusty just buys a dank chili dog outlet and tries to make that hip.
Hell, they did that plot in 2009, with that barley burger that gave people food poisoning because they apparently didn’t account for barley rats being caught in the threshers and lacing the food with viruses in the progress.
If anything did that plot best, it was probably the South Park episode where Heidi only ate the healthy stuff and Cartman tricked her by just writing “BEYOND” on a KFC box.
Did i expect much from this ep? No. Did i get less? Somehow, yes.
Dammit, ever since FXX started rerunning the old Simpsons episodes along with the new ones, I’m really missing episodes like Fraudcast News and Brush With Greatness.
I haven’t watched this episode but the look on Burns’s face in that picture really bums me out.
Yeah, he looks so soft and friendly. TBF, this was a problem way back as far as Season 9.
That’s not Mr. Burns. That’s his wimpy twin, Zombie Burns.
No offense to the writers, but it may be time to quit if you’re giving garbage like this to your fans. Terrible story, horrible references, and out-of-character characters. What does this sound like? That’s right it’s written by the same guy who wrote Manger Things, and it clearly shows. The guy doesn’t even seem to give the slightest shit about the episode, and probably enjoys sniffing his huge payback. While Season 20-Season 30 is bad this is even worse. They don’t even try to hide the fact that they don’t care anymore. All I can say is, at least it was better than Family Guy’s episode last night which was somehow 10 times worse.
“This oddly feels like the worst episode of the season solely due to the “not-giving-a-shit” level of the writing being so high”
This wasn’t even worse than the 7 Beer Itch, was it? I don’t see how that could be topped.
And another thing, why the Stranger Things parody in this episode? Wasn’t Manger Things supposed to be this show’s parody of it?
Nah, it was just their attempt at using a punny title while doing a flashback episode.
Mr. Burns is one of my all-time favorite characters not because he was evil, but because he was nuanced. The early episodes depicted him as as close as one could be to an tyrant in a capitalist society, having nearly all dominion over a town of boneheads, and yet, there were human traits within the old bastard. Episodes like “Brush with Greatness” and “Burns’ Heir” focused on his mortality by exploring what legacy he would leave behind, and episodes like “Two Cars in Every Garage, and Three Eyes on Every Fridge” and “Simpson and Delilah” showed that there are forces stronger than him that can defeat or humiliate him, humbling the man. Granted, a few episodes would take some liberties, like the first part of “Who Shot Mr. Burns?” and “The Curse of the Flying Hellfish” made Burns especially nasty for the sake of the story, but in general, he had definition.
Then came the efforts to humanize a character who was already human. And, I defended this to a degree by pointing out that, yeah; you do have to adjust certain characters like Moe or Mr. Burns or Nelson in an episode about them from their usual selves to make it work, but those deviations would become how those characters often would act, and any attempts to make them their “old” selves would feel abstract. Yet, this is, what, the 20th “Burns seeking approval” episode since “Monty Can’t Buy Me Love”, and they all suck.
The fact that Krusty celebrates his “victory” by doing absolutely nothing throughout the episode to compete with the meatless burger and says so proves the show is far more interested in starting ideas than finishing them. This sort of reminds me of “Frinkcoin” where the show was very interested in Frink becoming super rich, but remembered they needed him poor at the end cause we need to reset everything, so they half-assed an ending that implied Frink destroyed every cryptocurrency cause “eh, fuck it”. And this particular episode has aborted ideas in spades.
*Marge is addicted to her share of stock? We’re not interested in seeing how that plays out.
*Burns suddenly wants to be loved? Eh, we’re not sticking around to that for long cause it bores us.
*Homer as the “spokesperson”? We only care about filling our weekly “Simpson family member has to get involved” quota.
The staff is also pretty clueless about the process as to how stuff like Beyond Meat is made, so let’s just do slaughterhouse jokes, but it’s okay, cause it’s plants. The Sims 4, much as I hate the game being partitioned out, piece-by-piece, due to EA’s soullessness, has a more creative presentation of how meatless products are made in one of their DLC packs than what The Simpsons came up with. This “but I’m not using my ass at all” approach lends itself more to Family Guy. the show’s only fart-sniffing contemporary left, where the world is purposefully vague due to the show establishing itself as mindlessly stupid, but when you started out trying to build your world and elaborated on how things actually worked (even if things seemed unfeasible), it makes watching these episodes all the harder when you’re reminded that you’re forced to turn your brain off
There is a good episode buried here, but the episode is too unfocused and tries to juggle too many characters and themes and once. It tries to have emotional arcs for Mr. Burns, Lisa, Homer, Marge and even throws in a little bit of Krusty, but it’s too much. It’s like they had all these potential ideas on which way the story could go, but instead of picking one and developing it to the point where it was good, they just did them all.
Why does Mr. Burns want to be liked? This has been done before in ‘Monty Can’t Buy Me Love’ and ‘Fraudcast News’ and I don’t buy it as part of his character. It adds nothing, and is not even necessary for this plot to work. The only motivation Burns needs to start Excellent Burger is the money, and then Lisa’s role in the plot is just a rehash of ‘The Old Man and the Lisa’, making this a horrible Frankenstein’s monster of various better episodes. And how many jokes did this episode have about Mr. Burns’ frailty? Like 6? There were various points in this episode where he felt grossly out of character too. Just something about his dialogue didn’t sit right with me.
I was even worried this was about to turn into a Krusty episode halfway through. Honestly, I would’ve focused this episode on a burger chain war between Burns and Krusty. That way you could also have Lisa and Bart face off, with Lisa taking the side of Burn’s plant-based venture and Bart obviously backing his hero (and remove the Homer and Marge stuff completely). Lisa can still come to the realization that Burns is using endangered plants, and she reluctantly switches sides to help Krusty, the lesser of two evils. It’s still a rehash of ‘The Old Man and the Lisa’ but at least it would be focused.
Homer is only the mascot because they need to shoehorn him into every plot. The Marge subplot had the potential to say something about Wall Street and shareholders, and it would be quite topical considering the GameStop controversy, but it does not have enough time, and let’s face it, modern Simpsons does not have the chops to handle that, especially when it feels like the show is in bed with big businesses at this point. It’s why all their attempts at lampooning corporations or celebrities feel so hollow and light-handed these days. It’s a moot point by now but: The Simpsons has become the very thing they were created to mock: the establishment.
Krusty trying to pander with his “LGBTQBLT” also had the potential to say something, but if you’re only going to scratch the surface why include it at all? Same with the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reference to J.K. Rowling’s recent Twitter controversies. (and the Stranger Things references was one of the worst, Family Guy-esque, references for reference sake they’ve done in a long time). They just threw EVERYTHING at this episode and overloaded it.
People call Lisa Goes Gaga trash. That looks like heaven compared to this hell. This season has had some of the worst episodes I’ve ever seen. Manger Things, Yokel Hero, and now this trainwreck. Why won’t anyway tell Al Jean to pack up his things, and let Matt Selman take over?
Looking at the episode image, what the hell is up with that burger Lisa is holding? The burger and the elements within it are completely missing any outlines. Why would they do something like that? It just looks so odd and out of place there.
Yeah, i totally buy that a lowbrow town of fat idiot crum-bums is going to go nuts for a new, environmentally friendly plant-based meat alternative. That’s completely in line with Springfield culture.