Original airdate: October 29, 2023
The premise: As told in a documentary style, a young hotshot entrepreneur Persephone Odair cons Mr. Burns into funding her dream desalination project, devoting a whole section of the power plant into their offices. The two later get married, as Persephone’s power increases more and more.
The reaction: This show has done a couple of episodes like this, full-on parodies of different kinds of documentaries featuring testimonials by our favorite characters. This time they’re doing their version of the story of wild-eyed biotech “visionary” and current prison inmate Elizabeth Holmes, which recently was subject of the Hulu mini-series The Dropout starring Amanda Seyfried. Persephone Odair is clearly a Holmes stand-in, an Ivy League school dropout with a vision, winning over everybody with her supposed intellect and grandiose promises that she most definitely can surely keep. Voiced by Elizabeth Banks, her character hounds Mr. Burns to invest in her company LifeBoat, with her device that can allegedly perfectly desalinate any water source. She talks in ridiculous tech-based gobbledy gook (“Water is the original crypto, and we are the aquanauts of the potable future!”) and for some reason, she talks Burns into fully supporting her with his own fortune. Why does Burns decide this? I dunno. Why does he later decide to marry her? Don’t know that either. It happens because it’s supposed to mirror the real life relationship between Holmes and Sunny Balwani, and that’s kind of the problem with most of these different format episodes. The characters end up fitting into whatever slots are needed for the writers to tell a story that vaguely kind of sort of works within the setting of The Simpsons. Someone watched The Dropout, they wanted to do a parody, so of course you would use Mr. Burns, but the problem is they didn’t bother to give him any motivation in the story. I can see an Elizabeth Holmes-type appealing to Burns in a way that would make him want to be on board, but they wrote nothing of the sort. Weirdly, he seems to genuinely care for Persephone, with only passing lip service given to his selfish, ruthless character (“It wasn’t that she was evil! I love evil! It’s that she still insists that she’s good!”) If anything, that could have been an interesting angle to take: Burns relishes in being outwardly contemptuous and punishing to his fellow man, but freaks like Holmes and Sam Bankman-Fried act like they’re doing humanity a favor and helping them while fucking them over with their actions. With them and other Silicon Valley psychos like Mark Zuckerberg, it’s a whole new playing field of different kinds of billionaires that Burns can contend with ideologically. Instead, it’s just The Dropout but with a Simpsons skin (as far as I can tell, I haven’t seen the mini-series, but I know the basics of the actual story. If anyone’s seen the mini-series, I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts.) I recall enjoying the show’s 30 For 30 parody, thinking that it hit the sweet spot of being a believable story within the Simpsons world, but exaggerated just a bit for comic effect within the fake documentary. Here, the story is just too large and with so many all-new characters that at times it barely feels like a Simpsons episode at all. And ultimately it’s just kind of boring. Persephone’s company is revealed to a sham, of course, with sweetener being added to the regular ocean water to mask its saltiness. It’s not even a funny or clever reveal. I dunno, none of the satire felt particularly funny or interesting, more like just going through the motions of this kind of story until it reached its inevitable end.
One item of note:
– I’ll be honest, I don’t really have much to say about this one. Usually when I watch the episode, I take mental notes of anything extra I might want to talk about down in this section, but with this one, nothing really came to mind. The only thing I’ll point out is that I did get a smirk out of seeing a picture of the Feebles walking down Abbey Road on Peter Jackson’s wall.
Me Blog Write Good 
People tend to dislike these one-off character stories, but the thing is, I think they could work in the hands of another show. One that’s willing to either make the one-off characters and plots inherently heightened and absurd or use them to tell us something new about our main cast. But modern Simpsons is such a basic bitch of a show. It just copies something else, paints it yellow and goes through the motions of the original work.
You can tell watching this that the writers only operate in the micro-scale. So what if the overall plot and characterization is dull, it’s just a means to an end! And that end is a barrage of cutesy “lolsoquirky” moments, like Persephonedin writing paragraphs in the sky or Carl’s big dark secret being that he really likes a certain band. As long as the show has a bunch of these detached wacky moments, it’s a rip-roaring comedy, right?
These last few seasons under Matt Selman are better about this than the ones under Al Jean, but there’s always lots of episodes like this one that still coast on that “zany little moments” mentality. Selman-run shows just tend to dress that up more. Yeah, we’re parodying The Dropout. Don’t expect us to have anything to say about it, though.
I’m looking forward to next week’s Treehouse of Horror, since last year it was a welcome exception to this rule, but episodes like this have me worried TOH33 was just a fluke. Guess we’ll find out soon…
Treehouse of Horror XXXIII was a success in large part due to Carolyn Omine. Brian Kelley is running this year’s special and I have far less faith in his ability to match her standards. Look no further than Not It…
He did Not It? Crap. That was everything wrong with modern THOH “parodies”, dragged out over a full 22 minute episode. Kinda makes “Bart becomes a NFT” sound like a less than stellar episode premise…
Even as a bit of a Selman stan, I totally agree Aidan. It was a huge disappointment for me, especially after Cesar Mazariegos’ previous script (A Serious Flanders).
This is B-Boy from NoHomers, by the way. When I log in to WordPress to comment now, I can’t seem to use that name anymore. Ah well!
Sounds agonizingly boring.
I skipped this one as the synopsis just reminded me of past episodes like A Springfield Summer Christmas for Christmas and Meat is Murder (the most un-Simpsons episode of the whole show, and when I thought Selman reached his burnout point). And considering I didn’t like either of those episodes, I figured I probably wouldn’t like this one either.
The mixed reception it’s getting on Nohomers just further validates my decision.
Usually I watch new episodes a day or two after they air, but I haven’t seen this yet and am hesitant to.
Don’t worry, if you didn’t like A Springfield Summer Christmas for Christmas or Meat is Murder, then you’re not missing much based as on what I’ve heard it’s more of the same as those episodes.
“Here, the story is just too large and with so many all-new characters that at times it barely feels like a Simpsons episode at all.”
This succinctly describes my thoughts on this episode and ‘Meat is Murder’, both of which were co-run by Rob LaZebnik. It also brings ‘A Springfield Summer Christmas for Christmas’ to mind. These outings rarely take off for me – while they demonstrate basic competency, the specificity of what they’re referencing and lampooning (I use the latter word loosely) can be alienating, and they rarely (if ever) have something insightful to say about it. The Simpsons is better when it’s broader, especially these days.
Agreed. I skipped this episode simply because it reminded me of those two and I didn’t like them either. I’ll even go as far as to say that Meat is Murder doesn’t even feel like an actual Simpsons episode.
Remember when this show used to be really fucking funny? Shame…
It used to be Simpsons could parody something and still be coherent if you hadn’t seen the source material like Bart of darkness being a Hitchcock spoof.
I hadn’t seen the theranos documentary and it made no sense to me. Greetings from No homers.
Hi GlitterCat (assuming that’s you).
It is!