730. One Angry Lisa

Original airdate: October 2, 2022

The premise: Homer gets Marge a “Pedalon” bike, but he gets worried when she quickly becomes obsessed with it, and her handsome instructor. Meanwhile, Lisa is surprised to get a jury duty summons, and even more surprised when she actually ends up serving.

The reaction: I feel like I only know about Peloton bikes from people making jokes about them. I’m sure they’re really big with affluent people who work in entertainment, so I guess it was only a matter of time they’d be satirized on this show. Although there must be people all over the country who have Peloton bikes, so it might be a more recognizable subject matter than I think. Either way, the plot line is so basic, it’s not that hard to follow. Marge could have joined an in-person gym and it basically would be the same story. After seeing a flashy commercial for the bike, Marge urges Homer to get it for her birthday. It doesn’t take her long to get sucked into the world of Pedalon, with her hunky instructor Jesse, and climbing the digital hierarchy of her virtual training sessions. Homer encounters fellow despondent husbands at Moe’s whose partners have fallen under the Pedalon siren song. Homer finds out where Jesse lives to confront him, only for him to get his ass beat, then Marge tracks them both down and saves the day, and that’s it. I’ll be quite honest, I feel like I don’t have a whole lot to say about this one. Like I said, the premise is pretty thin and cut-and-dry. They do a handful of “Peloton is a cult” jokes, which are fine, I guess, but it feels like they could have been a lot more creative though, with some greater scheme by Pedalon to scam these brainwashed suckers. Jesse tricks Marge and all the other women into thinking they were going on special private bike rides with him, but that never translated into them being fooled into buying more merchandise or sending him money or anything. So what was the point? It just didn’t feel like there was enough going on in the story. Meanwhile, the Lisa plot line is barely even a B-plot, it’s a C-story that we briefly keep cutting back to. She can’t convince the hard-ass woman at the courthouse she’s a literal child, so she ends up sitting in the jury box. As the trial that we see maybe twenty seconds of wraps up, Lisa addresses the court to admonish the entire system, and the judge for being negligent in her duties. She’s put in contempt of court, resulting in a hung jury. But like, who cares? We don’t even see what Lisa is so pissed about; all we saw of the trial was the Blue Haired Lawyer questioning Chief Wiggum. There’s so little plot here that I don’t even feel I can comment on it. It’s especially weird that the episode is named after this story line. Maybe they wrote this and the Pedalon story, realized they were both too short, combined them together, but then it was too long and decided to trim the Lisa story? But it definitely felt like they could have trimmed Marge’s story down to make more room. It’s all very strange.

Three items of note:
– Bill Plympton returns with his sixth couch gag, which is a pretty impressive stat. The Simpson family gets sucked into a vortex or something? I didn’t really get it, nor was it really that interesting. The one couch gag he did that’s been stuck in my brain since I saw it involved Homer fucking the couch, it getting pregnant, and the couch attempting suicide by leaping into a garbage truck. No, I’m not kidding. Looking it up, turns out that was actually his very first guest couch gag. All the ones since then have been nowhere near as interesting (or as fucked up). I don’t mean to put his work down, the man is an incredible artist, but I think he can definitely come up with more engaging ideas than the last couple segments he’s done for the show.
– I really miss generic characters. Marge’s virtual Pedalon group consists of familiar faces like Helen Lovejoy, Smithers, Rainier Wolfcastle, and Luann Van Houten. Miss Hoover’s there too, as just seen in last week’s conspiracy group. There must have been a certain point where the show decided to phase back on no-name crowd characters and use known faces in as many situations as possible. Granted, this show has an incredibly large supporting cast, but seeing the same sixty faces or so over and over for decades makes the show end up feeling smaller to me. It also feels illogical in certain contexts, like we see Brandine in the Pedalon group. How the hell can she afford that bike? I did catch a glimpse of a random black woman in one shot of Marge’s screen, and then later at the bar, we see three generic disgruntled husbands sitting behind Dr. Hibbert, Kirk Van Houten and Reverend Lovejoy, grumbling silently as the named characters do all the talking. I guess they only break out the generic background characters if they absolutely need to, since there’s only so many married men characters with recognizable wives on the show.
– The episode ends with Marge biking Homer back home at sunset, with the two singing “Just the Two of Us,” and it’s virtually impossible for me to not think of the end of “Duffless.” I don’t really care that they’re reusing that ending, especially almost thirty years later (unbelievable…), but it certainly draws unavoidable comparisons to how much more emotionally potent and effective the ending of “Duffless.” Homer (for one episode) sees the benefits of sobriety, opting to spend time with his wife, compared to him going to beat up some guy who was not really going to take his wife? What exactly was he trying to do? Does it even matter? Not really.