731. Lisa the Boy Scout

Original airdate: October 9, 2022

The premise: A “Bart and Lisa in the scouts” plot is quickly interrupted by two cyber terrorists, who proceed to screen a montage of unreleased show footage, featuring story lines that were cut for being too outlandish, vowing only to stop if Disney pays them a hefty ransom.

The reaction: Well, I can certainly say this is the first time the show has genuinely surprised me in a long time. A minute into an impending story line about Bart and Lisa feuding in the scouts, the “transmission” is disrupted by two hackers, threatening to tank the value of The Simpsons by airing the most nonsensical unaired footage in show history unless Disney buckles to their demands. I’ve long talked about how a show that’s run this long should take more opportunities to just do weird shit for the hell of it, and this is definitely in line with that. It’s basically a fake clip show, something that Community and Clerks: The Animated Series have done brilliant episodes of. It’s an episode full of scattershot ideas, so it’s kind of hard to discuss on the whole. The most successful clips are the craziest ones, like revealing Martin is an undercover cop in his thirties with a wife and kids, trying not to crack under the stress of the job (“I don’t know where Martin ends and my Reggie begins!” his wife cries), or showing that the Wise Guy character, a man who has appeared in various odd jobs over the series, is actually one of hundreds created in a subterranean lair by a “Queen” Wise Guy, squirting out larvae children one after another. There’s also some good scenes that lean on the meta, like Wiggum finding out Ralph is actually Eddie’s son (a long-held fan theory since they have identical hair), or an adult Bart time traveling to the ending of “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire” to give the family intel to fuel all those “Simpsons Predicted the Future” click bait articles. I’d say about half of the clips have some degree of cleverness to them, while the rest are either unremarkable (Lisa can only speak French?) or dull movie parodies like Field of Dreams and The Martian. There’s a through line story where the two hackers start to fall deeper in love with each other, but that doesn’t really matter that much. The FBI eventually tracks them down, but the hackers manage to make their escape after threatening to release footage of all Disney content (only after one of the agents says airing the Simpsons footage isn’t a big deal since no one is watching anymore anyway). After that we cut back to the “ending” of the scouting episode like nothing ever happened. Honestly, this was an excellent idea to do a crazy “what if?” episode, and there’s a lot of stuff here that really works, but I wished they pushed some of the clips even farther, almost into uncomfortable territory. Referencing fan theories was also a good angle, but it felt like they could have done more with that too. But I don’t want to be too critical about an episode (when the fuck is the last time I said that?!) that took such a big risk and departure from formula. Last season had a fair degree of experimental episodes that won over a lot of the fans, but I was less receptive to, but this episode I think was a minor success. Of course I’m a nitpicky asshole who needs to caveat that I wouldn’t call it amazing, but it’s by far their most successful non-canon episode they’ve done in I don’t know how long. This was a pretty good start, guys. Now just get even crazier! More crazy! Go fucking nuts, tear the whole fucking show down, why not?!

Three items of note:
–  We get two sections of this episode where they re-animate scenes from classic episodes, with the aforementioned “Open Fire” where future Bart arrives, and later we see the ending of “Bart the Daredevil,” where Marge tells Homer he’s been in a coma since falling off the gorge, and that all the episodes since then were all just his dreams (“I never had a pet lobster? I never went into space?! What about all the Halloweens?!”) These scenes are shown in 4:3 aspect ratio, and even more impressively, are designed and animated to mimic the old cel-animated look of the show, and it honestly looks damn good. It’s even more amusing in the first scene where we see future Bart, clean and digitally painted, placed against the season 1 scene made to look like thickly painted characters with slight drop shadows on a cel background. Kudos to the animation department, they did a real great job with those sections.
– In the final act, the hackers say they’re going to air a final montage of the most insane Simpsons moments never aired, which is funny to start with as it’s scene after scene of characters making tearful admissions (“The lies stop here!”) and throwing a glass against the wall (one of which is Selma unintentionally pelting Homer in the face with said glass). That’s where we learn Eddie is Ralph’s son, neither Kirk or Luann are Milhouse’s parents (a reveal that backfires on Milhouse when his “parents” are relieved by the news) and Selma is actually Marge’s mother, and dies before she can reveal her actual father, only getting out his first name: Disco (in tears, Marge shakes Selma’s corpse, “Disco who? Disco who?!”) The worst clips ever montage then continues with clips from the actual show that aired, which include infamously hated moments like the jockey elves and that episode where everybody’s eyeballs popped out of their head. We also get moments that I don’t consider that aggressively terrible, like the episode where Homer fights a bear, or the one where Marge and Lisa are about to go into space. I wonder how they compiled this list of top fan-hated moments. I feel like there are much better examples they could’ve used, but I’d have to really think about what they would be. The only one that comes to mind is the panda rape from “Homer vs. Dignity,” that one seems like a no-brainer. Maybe they thought it would be a little too extreme to reference such a moment in 2022, but hey, the entire episode is available on Disney+ next to Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, so who cares?
– The hackers framing device demanding money from Disney works well enough, but I feel like they could’ve done more with it. Them falling in love didn’t seem all that creative to me. I guess I was thinking of other comparable examples of this format that I mentioned earlier that were ultimately done better. Episode two of Clerks: The Animated Series was a fake clip show, starting off with showing clips from the pilot, then recalling other “memories” that got more and more absurd as the episode went on. Community‘s “Paradigms of Human Memory” made the study group look back over their past two years of misadventures, and their horrible behavior to each other and those around them via exaggerated phony clips, examining the show and its established tropes in an incredibly clever package. This episode, meanwhile, had a lot of clever meta elements, but on the whole, it wasn’t about a cohesive idea like those other two examples. And I would have been fine if it was just off-the-wall crazy shit instead, but it kind of played a bit in both camps. But I don’t want to split hairs too much on this, considering I actually enjoyed a lot of this one, but it was unfortunate it did remind me of much better episodes of other shows.