Original airdate: December 17, 2023
The premise: On a cruise ship for nerds, Comic Book Guy’s most prized and valuable collectible action figure is beheaded, and Bart is instantly blamed. Convinced to prove her brother’s innocence, Lisa teams up with fellow passenger Taika Waititi to find out who the real culprit was.
The reaction: I’ve talked about these mystery episodes before, and how interminably boring I find them. The entire runtime is devoted to uncovering what happened about a situation that I don’t give a shit about, nor am I given a reason to. Who cut off the head of Comic Book Guy’s beloved rare Radioactive Man figure? Who cares? Bart apparently is going to go to prison for it, but that’s just completely unbelievable. Maybe if CBG threatened to sue Bart for a lot of money, then it would actually feel like there were real stakes, but everything is treated like it’s a big goof, so there’s no reason to be invested in the story at all. Nor is any of it funny for that to be a substitute for an engaging story, either. Taika Waititi is given a much more substantial role than I was expecting, definitely the most prominent screen time a celebrity guest star has had in a good while. He seems to be playing an exaggerated version of himself, thinking he’s an incredible talent that everybody loves, but he ends up coming off as insufferable, as he’s basically put on that persona in a lot of his social media and interview appearances. The entire episode feels like it’s just going through the motions of this kind of story: Lisa is skeptical of Bart’s innocence, everybody had a grudge against CBG, Lisa finds damning evidence on Bart’s side of the room, an eyewitness is incapacitated moments before he’s about to reveal information to Lisa, and Taika is revealed to be the twist villain after all. All of this shit we’ve seen many, many times before, done a thousand times more interestingly and humorously. The final couple minutes is just Taika and Lisa’s laborious explanation of what happened, and it’s so, so dull. There’s really not much else I can even say about it. The whole episode feels like it’s on autopilot, content to hit the predictable plot beats to just get us to twenty minutes so they can cross another episode off their season order.
Three items of note:
– When the Simpsons arrive at the cruise ship, we get an extended parody of The Love Boat theme, but as “The Nerd Boat.” I’ve talked before about how weird it is this show is still making references to media from over 35 years ago, it just seems so tired. Seriously, a Love Boat reference on the eve of 2024? Has that even run on television in the last 20 years? In a somewhat related vein, we get a joke where Marge is admiring the guests on the “Harvey Deck,” referring to Harvey Comics, the publisher of such titles as Casper the Friendly Ghost and Richie Rich (Marge proceeds to ogle over the men dressed as Cadbury, Richie Rich’s butler.) Harvey Comics stopped publication of their titles in 1982, eventually starting back up again in 1986, in a much more limited quantity, before phasing out for the most part by the early 90s. Meanwhile, going by our floating timeline, if we say that Marge is 38 (she’s always been two years younger than a now 40-year-old Homer), she would have been born in 1985, well past the point of Harvey Comics being a cultural touch point for her. Sure, you could say maybe Marge bought some of the newer issues, or was given old comics to read, and yeah, that could be true, but this falls into the same category as The Love Boat joke to me. They also do a Wacky Races parody mixed together with Mad Max: Fury Road, another ancient reference. This episode is credited to Broti Gupta, one of the newer, younger writers, but this kind of stuff is obviously from the majority of the long-haul writing staff now in their 60s, clinging to these pop culture references from their younger days. It’s just so strange.
– I guess we’re still living within the Taika Waititi backlash, but I’m not as bothered by him as a lot of people seem to be. I still have a great fondness for most of his work, particularly Hunt for the Wilderpeople and Our Flag Means Death. I was terrified that I was going to hate the latest Thor movie, since I’ve either been indifferent on or hated almost every MCU project since Endgame, but I actually thought it was okay. The only thing of his I thought was awful was his role in Free Guy, an irritating and obnoxious movie in many other regards, but his “comedic” role in it was so unpleasant and unfunny. It feels like there’s shades of that character in his portrayal here, a man who’s incredibly loud and pompous, and revels in being beloved by all. The schtick gets old real fast, but I really can’t tell if it’s supposed to be a parody of this persona, when it sounds incredibly similar to jokes about himself he would make in real life.
– We get to see Kumiko again, in I believe her first major role since that episode where she and CBG agreed they’re start trying for a child. Here, she’s displeased that CBG cares more about his new beloved collectible than he does her (“When we are making love, my husband calls out the doll’s serial number! I just want back my sweet Comic Book Guy!”) I feel like a fool trying to make sense of the relationship between these two, but they did devote an entire episode to it, so I guess we should be treating it at least a little bit seriously? Kumiko is a fellow nerd, who I assume loves collecting too, but I guess CBG takes it to a more extreme degree than she does, so that’s created this rift. But we still barely know anything about her, so here, it comes off as the typical “shrew wife is mad about my guy stuff” type shit. We don’t see Kumiko engage with any nerd stuff on the cruise. Wasn’t she introduced as a manga artist? Does she still do that? Does she still want to have a child with CBG? Also, she refers to her husband multiple times as “Comic Book Guy,” which I guess I understand, but it’s still incredibly bizarre for a wife to say about her husband. They gave him a name 20 years ago, if they want to give him a wife now, maybe you can have her call him “Jeff” every now and again. We’re not going to get confused. I assume it’s still done as a joke, but it doesn’t feel like it works. Like, in the later seasons of Scrubs, they had the nameless Janitor engaged to and later marry a woman named “Lady,” but it works since it was clearly all part of the joke. Over the credits, CBG makes things right with Kumiko by tossing his Radioactive Man over the side of the boat, a toy that Taika Waititi claimed was insured to the tune of over a million dollars. He might have been lying about that, but surely CBG could have sold that toy for a large sum of money to support his family, and potential future child, but I guess the symbolic nature of throwing it away was more important. Whatever, who cares. I greatly look forward to Kumiko’s next major appearance in 2027. Who knows what we’ll not learn about her then!
Me Blog Write Good 
Happy 34th birthday!
“Love Boat” reruns are on METV. Of course, the younger viewers watching have never seen a single episode.
If it was 2001, and you showed me that episode title, screenshot, and premise, I’d wager a lot of money that you were showing me something from a crappy Simpsons comic. Not something from the show.
Btw, I don’t have a problem with the show referencing old things. The show always did that. It parodied The Shining 15 years after the film, random old Twilight Zone episodes… the list goes on and on.
I think the difference is the change in pop culture between now and 30 years ago. In the 90s, older movies and shows were more in the public consciousness, rerunning constantly on TV, finding new life on video and DVD, and so forth. Nowadays, where it seems like there’s just an avalanche of never ending new content, older stuff feels more lost to time and irrelevant. That, and it feels like we’ve already see enough jokes about this stuff. Like South Park did a parody Love Boat theme over 20 years ago.
The CATHOLIC BOAT….
An astute observation, as back then, you’d have TV stations and even cable cycling and recycling old shows for content, and then the advent of DVDs allowing a broader audience for even easier access to source material. But now that we’re in the streaming age where people require Family Guy videos spliced with their Subway Surfer footage ‘cuz we all got ADHD all of a sudden, if you mention a reference more than 3 months old, you might as well acknowledge a Buster Keaton and Fatty Arbuckle movie.
Re: Harvey Comics, you’re possibly overlooking that Casper The Friendly Ghost and Richie Rich both got major Hollywood films in the mid-1990s. I for one would be deeply disappointed in any 90s child who wasn’t familiar with Casper.
That’s true, but since Marge name drops Harvey Comics, it’s pretty clear the older writing staff doesn’t have the Maculey Culkin movie in mind. Though again, I admit this is a more nitpicky point, but when they do these references, sometimes they come off incredibly musty.
God, I’d hate to see the staff in their 80s still writing this show.
Lol this show is so bad
The whole concept of “the nerd boat”, Love Boat reference aside, feels like such a strange cultural relic in 2023.
Post-Internet, everyone’s fractured off into their own little subgroups, and has their own personal feeds tailored specifically to their tastes by algorithms. The idea that some things are nerdy and other things are mainstream doesn’t really apply anymore … it’s not like fifty years ago when everyone watched the same three networks and rooted for their local sports teams.
Though to be honest, none of this Big Bang Theory shit even made sense back in the day. Star Wars made 700 million dollars back in 1977, liking that movie was in no way living on the fringes of society. Everything that goes into this show is (or was) mainstream enough that the writers felt a casual TV audience would recognize it.
Also, this might be Matt Selman’s worst episode to date. Abysmal writing on a micro and macro level, but not anything new, just all this series’ usual flaws. Most bad sitcoms from last weekend’s Noiseless Chatter Xmas Bash were better than this.
This wasn’t good, but I think last week’s was worse. This season has been shit for the most part. I genuinely felt like there was a mild resurgence with season 33, but it’s been tapering off ever since.
Fair enough. When a show has as many episodes as The Simpsons, naming one as “best” or “worst” really is just splitting hairs.
For me at least, absence always makes the heart grow fonder with this show. The more time I spend away from it (or a certain episode), the more I forgive its flaws. Then I actually watch an episode and BAM! All the weak points hit me viscerally. I can’t count how many episodes made me think “this is a new low…” less because of the episodes themselves and more because I forgot how low the bar already was.
I’m genuinely surprised the episode didn’t reference Dungeons & Dragons which is surely both more ‘on theme’ for a nerd boat and more culturally relevant in 2023 than the bizarre Harvey comics nod you pointed out Mike.
Why go for something that could likely remain culturally relevant like Dungeons and Dragons when you could either reference something that’ll be forgotten in six months like some TikTok trend or a comic book company that made stuff that got slapped into the Kids corner while everyone else was trying to get Tales from the Crypt.
FYI, Pluto TV, an ad supported “live” streaming service, has an entire channel dedicated to “The Love Boat” (among other channels dedicated to specific shows), and the entire series is on Paramount Plus. So it’s not entirely “lost media” or anything.