761. Frinkenstein’s Monster

Original airdate: February 18, 2024

The premise: Homer has a job interview at Shelbyville Nuclear Power Plant, but he manages to navigate getting hired thanks to Professor Frink’s help, via an earpiece and special techno-glasses that allow him to see and speak through him.

The reaction: Professor Frink is a goofy side character the show has made a few attempts at putting in the limelight, but much like Cletus or Sarah Wiggum, they don’t feel like the most fruitful personas to flesh out to more closely resemble real people. Frink, being a parody of a Jerry Lewis movie character that is now over sixty years old, is such an out-of-time character already that any attempts to really humanize him at this point feel like they’d be quite the uphill climb. But in regards to this episode, despite the title, it’s really not about Frink at all. It seems more about Homer trying to feel like he’s advancing in life, providing better for him family, but it’s really barely about that either. Homer is feeling unfulfilled in his life before he randomly gets called about a job interview at a neighboring power plant (what his job actually is is never specified.) Professor Frink is just randomly at Moe’s, and agrees to help Homer for literally no reason, sitting just off-camera during his Zoom interview, whispering answers to every single one of the questions, which I guess the interviewer didn’t hear, or consider it weird that there were enormous pauses before each of Homer’s answers (they could have easily made some kind of dumb joke about Internet lag to cover over this logical issue, but why bother?) Homer then convinces Frink to help him on the job as well, leading him to create a glasses/earpiece combo that would allow him to see what Homer says and speak through him on the spot. So Frink is basically giving up his life to pantomime through Homer’s 9-5 job every day, and he appears to be getting absolutely nothing out of it. There’s not even the simplistic veneer of Frink being a lonely man of science who cloistered himself from the world and he’s just happy to have a friend, even if they’re exploiting him. He laments about being lonely at the start of the episode, but beyond that, Frink has no motivation to do any of this whatsoever. Trying to make sense of the episode title, the implication is Frink has created a “monster” in Homer, as in the third act, we see a lumbering Homer try to threaten Frink into continuing to help him. But what’s the consequence? Again, Frink is getting nothing out of the deal, so is Homer gonna beat him up? Homer finally comes clean because the episode is ending, and we get no epilogue with Frink because the episode wasn’t ever about him. What a load of hoyvin glavin.

Three items of note:
– We open on a flashback to fifteen years ago, where a young, peppy and childless Homer is thrilled to start another shift at the power plant. I know there’s no consistent timeline anymore, but I always like to try and make sense out of the new shit we get. So since Homer is now canonically 40, he’s twenty-five here, we see the silhouette of Marge (I hope!) in bed with him, and he’s five years out from having Bart. You could presumably retcon that Homer’s burst of ambition into getting the power plant job, originally out of wild passion in wanting to provide for Marge and the impending birth of their son, could be replaced with just that first point, but as I’ve said before, the timeline floating forward has created this big gap of time in Homer and Marge’s twenties that feels unsorted. Them being carefree early twenty-somethings having to quickly reshape themselves as adults thanks to an accidental pregnancy makes more sense to the rest of the series than Homer just being a normal adult up until having his first kid at 30. But I guess since Homer is now officially an elder millennial, him having to work to scrape by and putting off his plans for a family does track given his generational reassignment.
– Lisa is suspicious about Homer’s qualifications for his new job, but she’s repeatedly shot down by Marge, who is thrilled above all else that the Shelbyville plant has a daycare, so she can relax in the bath all day. She then sings off sheet music, “Music to Lament To,” a ballad about being sad about all of Homer’s different jobs over the many years (as we see via a montage). There’s also randomly a bunch of photos on Lisa’s vanity of different Homer jobs, and one of the family playing chicken in a lake that Lisa looks at fondly. So, is Lisa concerned about Homer’s lack of qualifications for his new job as a safety/ethical issue, or is she sad that he’s not spending enough time with her? Except we don’t see that? The song also sews the seeds of concern into Marge, who listens to the song on Spotify, I guess, in the car with Homer on the way to the big company ski summit. But what is the narrative purpose of the song? What is Lisa sad about? This episode is so incredibly underwritten, even for this show’s standards.
– Homer beats out an actually qualified candidate for the job, Dr. Spivak. She begrudgingly is hired to be Homer’s assistant, who then silently plots her vengeance on him, until she eventually discovers his secret Frink connection. She’s voiced by Amanda Seyfried, but the whole time I thought she was Rachel Bloom, until I finally realized that Bloom is voicing a character in next week’s episode. I think the two actresses have sort of similar cadences, but it also speaks to Seyfried being yet another talented performer being wasted on a nothing character on this show. The joke is that she’s psychotically vindictive, and that’s basically it.