737. When Nelson Met Lisa

Original airdate: November 27, 2022

The premise: Through repeated flash forwards, we see a love story between Lisa and Nelson develop, as the two continue to bump into each other at pivotal moments in their lives.

The reaction: I really like the idea of doing future episodes, giving us a glimpse into a whole new setting with new, matured versions of our favorite characters, re-contextualized at a different point in their lives. But most of the time the show has gone to the future well, they never seem to have an interesting idea to go along with the fantastical setting. The last future episode had Lisa not wanting to go to college and she didn’t speak to Marge for decades until she was President. It was fucking terrible. Some fans seemed to enjoy “Barthood,” the Boyhood “parody,” so I guess they figured they could rip off another movie and give that a shot. So here we have When Harry Met Sally but with Lisa and Nelson, who I guess is a shipping couple to some freak fans out there. The episode matches the format of the movie, where we jump forward through time as the two characters keep running into each other, and their affection grows and grows. In the movie, Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan are college graduates sharing a commute to New York City, where they debate, banter, and confide, and the seed of their relationship is planted. This episode is built upon season 8’s “Lisa’s Date with Density,” where Lisa had a bad boy crush on Nelson, they “dated,” and went their separate ways by the time credits rolled. In this episode, we learn that Nelson and his mother moved later that year, and he and Lisa reconnect before her college graduation fourteen years later. Think about that amount of time. Lisa went through ten more years of primary school, plus four whole years of college. Think about all the people you’ve met in that time, and the impacts they made on your life. Even if a shut-in super dork like Lisa never had any serious relationships in that time, surely she had some casual friends or big crushes on people that would hold greater stock in her mind that some dumb kid she knew when she was eight. But whatever, that really doesn’t matter much, because Lisa and Nelson aren’t really fleshed out characters here, they’ve devolved into flat cliche movie characters. As what usually happens when this show attempts a genre parody, characters will speak in wink-wink dialogue meant to highlight tropes rather than actually behave like real people (“It’s all flooding back. My attraction to a bad boy, plus my compulsion to fix you!” “Your troubles are reeling me in. All I need to hear is one clumsy compliment, and I’m hooked,” “Nelson, do you think this could be one of those moments that changes your life forever?”) Lisa and Nelson never connect over anything. They don’t argue over anything. There’s absolutely nothing to latch onto between the two of them, so as we jump forward and see they’re with their own spouses, I couldn’t possibly give a shit about what happens. By the end, Lisa gives Nelson a variation of the Meg Ryan speech at the end of the movie, and it just doesn’t mean a thing. We’re shown nothing to make us care about their relationship, so we don’t. See you in a few years for the next future episode, maybe they’ll crack it next time.

Three items of note:
– Every future episode since “Lisa’s Wedding” uses the time jump as an excuse to basically make Futurama-level jokes about a technologically advanced future even though we’re only advancing a decade or two forward in time. They’re a little more restrained here (outside of Bart having an invisibility cloak for some reason?), but I’m still a little bothered that we see full on sentient AI and robots walking around in what’s just supposed to be fourteen years in the future when the episode begins. We also see the skyline of the city a few times and a lot of the buildings are just straight up Futurama buildings. Even if technology advanced that fast, they couldn’t rebuild an entire damn city in a decade and a half, especially an absolute dump of a place like Springfield.
– The final scene has Lisa and Nelson as maid of honor and best man to Jimbo and Sophie Krustofski’s wedding. Boy, I’d love to hear how those two got together. Why didn’t they just have Jimbo marry Shauna? We’ve seen the two together before, and last season had an episode where Lisa and Shauna bonded, so it would actually track that they’d stay friends. Whatever. I guess Natasha Lyonne had a free afternoon to come in to record for an hour. Also in this scene is a hologram of Rabbi Krustofski to perform the ceremony, giving us one line from Jackie Mason. He died last year, so I guess they used an unused line from a previous episode. The good Rabbi ended up having more posthumous appearances than when the character was alive, and I’m hoping that won’t be the case with Jackie Mason himself. It was kind of uncomfortable hearing a dead man’s voice come out of a dead character.
– The episode ends with another reference to When Harry Met Sally, which features interspersed segments of older couples talking about how they met (which were true stories from real people performed by actors.) Here, it’s clones of Abe Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, who were shown in the episode previously. I can’t imagine what the hell someone would be thinking who didn’t know the original context. Hell, I do know and it’s fucking bizarre.