726. Marge the Meanie

Original airdate: May 8, 2022

The premise: Marge reveals she used to be quite the prankster back in middle school, resulting in her bonding with Bart over their shared fondness for mischief. Homer feels left out, and turns to Lisa to try to find out if any of their interests overlap.

The reaction: Sometimes there are certain episodes that feel so incredibly thin that there doesn’t feel like there’s much to grab onto. This season has had a lot of fairly ambitious episodes, so this one feels pretty undercooked in comparison, like they didn’t bother taking a few more passes on the script. Marge has a run-in with an older woman who seems deathly afraid of her (“Marge Bouvier, you ruined my life!”) It turns out she was the principal of her old middle school. In flashbacks, we see that upon moving up from grade school, Marge was all alone and a constant victim of bullies, with the principal being largely apathetic to her struggles. Marge accidentally causes the principal to trip and fall in a garbage can, resulting in her getting some much needed social cred. We then see two more intentional pranks Marge pulled on her, and that’s it. If this episode is about Marge’s actual secret inclination toward mischief, it feels like we needed to see more of her actually being a little shit and what drove her as a kid to do these things. Also, Marge was at that school for two to three years decades ago, and this principal is still traumatized by her? Whatever. Bart repeatedly tells his mother how impressed he is and how glad he has something to bond with her with (“We’re the same! I finally have a parent I’m proud of!”) Marge and Bart proceed to bond over them pulling pranks on irritable townsfolk like Comic Book Guy and Helen Lovejoy, but Marge’s conscious is taking its toll. She loves this new bond she has with Bart, but she feels bad about what she’s doing. This all culminates in a prank gone wrong involving tripping Mr. Burns into oncoming traffic, where he’s hit multiple times by cars and lands on top of power lines, getting repeatedly shocked, an aggressively cartoonish sequence that almost feels uncomfortable. Marge has a brief therapy session after that, which feels like it should delve into where these rambunctious urges of hers comes from, but we get none of that. Meanwhile, Bart seems nonplussed by almost murdering an 104-year-old man and begs his mother not to give up pranking (“If you give it up, you’re giving me up!!”) He breaks down in tears after this. The emotional stakes are ratcheted way up, but I just don’t care enough about what’s happening to buy into it. I get that Bart feels a greater sense of attachment to Marge, but this feels like it’s being pushed too far. Marge agrees to one last job, a prank pulled on her old principal, which results in her having a heart attack. However, this was actually a prank she and Marge pulled on Bart to get him to stop pranking. So being responsible for nearly killing Mr. Burns was just fine for Bart, but with this other old person, it’s fine? I feel like this has potential to be an interesting Marge episode, exploring her past and giving some insight into some hidden aspects of her character. She’s always portrayed as the perfect mom, so to see her indulging in some more off-kilter impulses might have been interesting. Instead, it all just felt so empty and pointless. There’s a lot of episodes that feel like they have premises with potential but end up falling short, but this one felt like it was barely even trying.

Three items of note:
– The B-plot involves Homer trying to see what he has in common with Lisa, if anything. He indulges in her love of vegan food, even though he finds all of it disgusting. The two plots seem to share a common thread that Homer and Marge are both doing things to bond with their children that they themselves don’t like, but they don’t really gel that well considering with Marge, it’s a secret shame she’s trying to suppress, while Homer genuinely hates everything Lisa’s making her eat. In the end, Homer and Lisa discover they have similar food allergies, and we get our sappy ending (“Dad, you passed down the most important part of yourself: your kind heart.”) The doctor lampshades this by fake coughing (“I’m afraid I’m allergic to treacle!”) Have the writers been reading this blog and seen how many times I’ve complained about bullshit overly-treacly endings?
– We see Superintendent Chalmers in the flashback, reacting to the principal being knocked in the garbage (“I’ll do a lot better with the next person I hire. He’ll be a WIN-NNERRRR!”) First off, I thought this was implying that he was going to fire the principal, perhaps being the beginning of an endless downward spiral for her, thus explaining why she despised Marge. But no, after this, we see she stayed on as principal to get pranked by Marge over and over. What? Secondly, does anybody still laugh at these “SKINNER!” variations anymore? They did a similar thing with Nelson doing alternates to his usual “Haw haw!” for a while, and occasionally still do. Thirty years of shows and we can’t stop with these cutesy takes on their catchphrases. It all just feels so fucking old. In the last episode, we actually attempted to show a different side of Chalmers, at least briefly, but even there we had him scream “SIMP-SON!” just like he does with Skinner. Maybe after seven hundred fucking episodes, we can maybe examine different things that might be funny about a side character rather than do the same running gag for the eightieth time?
– Bart’s love of pranking almost feels out of time for me. I’ve talked about how weird it is whenever he uses a slingshot in modern episodes; it harkens back to his origins as a riff on Dennis the Menace, which was an older reference back in 1990, but now is completely anachronistic. Here, we see Bart attempting to pull the peanut brittle can filled with snakes gag, something that I just can’t imagine a kid in 2022 even knowing what that is. Like maybe a really young kid might get his hands on a prank kit with a whoopee cushion, fake gum or whatever and think it’s funny, but modern day ten-year-olds are all on their smartphones cyberbullying each other on Tik Tok, not putting Kick Me signs on people’s backs. When’s the last time any kid has done that? I might be overgeneralizing a bit, but any time they try and portray Bart like this in new episodes, it always seems pretty outdated.