Original airdate: December 3, 2023
The premise: Shortly after developing a kinship with Willie, Bart is shocked to find out he’s been kidnapped and brought to Edinburgh. When he and the rest of the family arrive, they’re surprised to find themselves part of a wedding, as Willie has been reunited with an old flame from his past.
The reaction: Many times over the years, I’ve felt like this show has attempted to wring an emotional character story out of an episode that barely examines why a character might be feeling something, since they’ve barely taken the time to actually show it. This feels like a pretty huge example of this. Bart is given special detention with Groundskeeper Willie, and the two end up bonding over their latent misogyny. We then get a quick montage of the two doing wild antics at the school to post on TikTok, and then after that, Bart gets the video message from Willie. Later in the episode, Bart explains, “Hanging out with Willie was the one time I ever felt I wasn’t the only crazy one. That someone understood me.” The totality of their relationship we’ve seen is that Bart thinks girls have cooties, and Willie is equally angry at women because he felt he was stood up by his true love. It’s viewed innocently through a child’s eyes, but not only is there barely any emotional connection to latch onto in this episode, since we have barely a minute of Bart and Willie actually together in the first act, but it almost starts to veer into weird incel territory, as Bart snaps, destroying the wedding cake, yelling, “Men don’t let men down!” He later uncovers the wedding has secret ulterior motives, with Willie’s bride-to-be Maisie’s family wanting to exploit Willie’s expert sense of smell to recover their business or something, but it’s hard to really care about any of it. But Maisie had no idea about it, and the two end up getting married, with Bart finally coming around to being happy for his newfound friend. So I guess we’ll put Willie next to Moe as characters with new life partners who we may or may not ever see again in the future. This is just a very strange, slapdash episode. There’s a marriage “crisis” subplot with Homer and Marge that feels like it’s running on fumes, and because we needed to kill more time, I guess, Lisa randomly walks off on her own in a foreign country to attend their Fringe Festival, so the writers can make fun of bizarre, esoteric art while writing the 758th episode of a series that’s been creatively stretched to its limits for decades. Cool!
Three items of note:
– Homer goes on a long rant about destination weddings, as they do multiple time cuts showing him continuing to complain at work, out shopping, at the dentist, and so forth. Then we cut to Homer and Marge in the bedroom, with the lights off, where all we can see is two pairs of eyes, with one on top of the other going back and forth slightly as Homer still can’t shut the fuck up. At first, I thought that this was a misdirect, and we’d see the light turn on and there’d be a joke that something else was happening, but no, they move onto the next scene. So I guess we just saw Homer and Marge have sex in the show. Sure, there’s been a few times we’ve seen them rustling under the covers about to initiate, but is this the first time we’ve seen them actually have penetrative sex? Please don’t ponder this for too long, I feel horrible that I wrote this out to begin with.
– The Homer/Marge subplot sucks. Marge is excited to get an invitation to a destination wedding (we never find out from who), and she loves the romanticism of going to another country to have a fun adventure. Homer is grumpy about it, but eventually relents, but when Bart tells them with his Willie problem, they all go to Edinburgh instead, where Marge is delighted to find she’s at a destination wedding after all. Homer isn’t too pleased with having to go through Willie and Maisie’s cutesy pre-wedding festivities. Later at the rehearsal dinner, Marge makes a drunken speech about how she hates her marriage and thinks her life is too boring. This is based on the beginning of the episode, where we see that Homer and Marge sharing cute and funny videos on their phones is the “sole spark” left in their marriage. But in the end, Homer sends Marge another phone message and they make up or whatever. This whole plot line reminded me of the opening of “Pixelated and Afraid,” which finds Homer and Marge dug into a rut on the couch, contently watching TV and eating snacks together. Lisa is appalled by this, fearing her mom and dad’s marriage is in trouble, that it’s lost its magic. But the point of that episode is that the two are perfectly happy just being in each other’s company, and that’s what a lot of fans seemed to positively respond to. No Homers is really my only major window into what the fanbase thinks of the show now, and lots of people seem to really like recent portrayals of Homer and Marge being in a reasonably solid place, that they don’t bicker and fight over dumb bullshit and act as a loving union. And yes, after enduring so many marriage crisis episodes in the 2000s and 2010s, I can completely understand why people would be sick of it. That’s why this subplot feels like such a throwback, it’s something Marge would be pissed about in a season 16 episode, but written in an even lazier fashion.
– Even though the first act’s story hinged on whether the Simpsons had the funds to be able to fly out to a destination wedding, we see basically everyone from the school is in attendance for the multiple days of Willie’s wedding. Superintendent Chalmers probably has a semi-decent salary and savings to swing this, but Mr. Largo? Lunchlady Doris? Miss Hoover? A couple seasons ago, she had her own episode where we see the shitbox apartment she lives in and how she was incredibly poor and her life sucks, how the hell is she affording to fly to Scotland? And why do any of these people want to interact with Willie anyway? I thought the point was that Bart and Willie bonded over being weird loners? It doesn’t make any sense. They’re only there because in Homer’s rant, he mentions how at destination weddings, you end up stuck with people you know, but don’t know well enough to actually have a good time with. But then he doesn’t even interact with anyone there anyway! Man, this episode sucks.
Me Blog Write Good 
This was another Jean show, I just know it.
That Homer/Marge subplot has to be the worst since Judge Me Tender easily.
Nope! It’s a Matt Selman joint, co-run by episode writer Michael Price.
Ah. I guess the blame is on Price, because this didn’t feel like a Selman show at all.
I don’t really even think Selman has much involvement in the more recent episodes. It just seems like the co-run is doing a lot of the heavy lifting, good for him.
What does ae mean? Do they mean aye as in och aye?
I hate this show.
According to Merriam-Webster, “ae” is a Scottish word meaning “one”; what makes sense next to the word “bonny” which means “pretty” or “cute”.
Horrible. The worst episode from Selman as a showrunner. It was loud, obnoxious, and angry with far too many underdeveloped, hackneyed and outright baffling plot threads. The kids going nuts on nicotine at the start really set the tone, did it not?
As outlined by Mike and on the NoHomers episode, this was apparently primarily ran by Michael Price while Selman had little involvement.
And BOY, you can really tell….
Also on the NoHomers thread, they’re saying Carolyn Omine has left the show.
I don’t know if that’s true or not. But if it’s true, GOOD. One less problem to worry about.
Now we need to get Jean and Price out, and replace them with new, creative and actually GOOD people to work on this show. Maybe rehire some of the people who worked on the first 8 seasons.
Omine has not left the show. Which is, on the contrary, excellent news. She has simply stepped down as co-runner of episodes that aren’t written by her.
I ran a little experiment watching this episode. I pretended the characters had aged in roughly real time, so Homer and Marge were pushing 70 in this story, while Bart and Willie had developed a connection over the past couple decades where the writers gave Bart several blue-collar jobs with him as a grown adult.
And honestly, that felt right. I found myself forgiving this episode’s sins in this new, imaginary context. Modern Simpsons is better when the characters’ lives have consequences and weight. It lends the show a sense of actual purpose.
Episodic TV shows are pretty nihilistic by default. There’s a sense that nothing in any episode matters except the status quo. Like many great series, classic Simpsons was an exception to this rule, because it either made that struggle against the status quo a source of meaning in of itself, or it made its nihilistic resets hilariously absurd. But there are very few post-classic Simpsons episodes that do either of those things, and even fewer that do them well. Without that extra effort, The Simpsons stopped being an exception to the rule. It began to feel meaningless.
I think that underlying nihilism is why modern Simpsons has such harsh detractors, myself often included. When an episode doesn’t click, it feels outright pointless. Meaningless, trite Simpsons-brand “content” to throw onto the pile. Predictable, formulaic, unchallenging, safe content. So if I don’t gel with an episode, there’s this cynical aftertaste that stays in my mouth. This sense that I wasted my time watching something defined more by corporations looking to make money than by artists with a story to tell. Nothing matters, but here’s more shitty product for you to consume. That’s not The Simpsons to me.
Well said.
I beg to differ. There is nothing inherently superior about serialised television and nothing inherently inferior about episodic television. These are styles – different modes of storytelling – that have their respective pros and cons.
I don’t disagree, actually. Like I alluded to, there are many great episodic series which shake off the “nothing matters” feeling I described. But that’s because they actively worked against it or constructed a formula that fits the episodic format really well. The original Star Trek is a perfect example – not only is the text expressly anti-nihilistic, but the Enterprise crew usually visits a new location each episode, so whatever happens in that location doesn’t have to reset at the end of the week, and would still feel like it was meaningful to everyone that isn’t a main character even if the series wasn’t explicitly championing ideals.
But most series aren’t the greats that endure across decades. The average mediocre episodic show stays in that default state where you know exactly what will and won’t happen and there’s only so much the characters are allowed to do. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing — as you said, they’re simply different — but it does create a sense of futility and when an episode is bad, there’s nothing else it can fall back on to justify its existence. It won’t matter to the characters next week … why should it matter to the audience? That’s not a problem when the show is good, but when it’s bad, it fundamentally feels like an empty waste of time.
I very much agree with you, with added reasoning: for years now, the show has written the characters older without actually changing their ages. Like Bart having a string of girlfriends doesn’t make sense for a ten-year-old but does make sense for an older teenager.
This is a “so bad it’s worth writing about” episode. Abysmal in many respects: the subplot at some points seems to take over the main plot, and never really has anything to do with it. Unless they wanted to somehow show H&M’s relationship having troubles, while Willie finally finds love? Anyway, the episode is so bad it’s not worth thinking any further about what it’s about!