772. Shoddy Heat

Original airdate: October 27, 2024

The premise: The police seek Abe’s help to uncover the mystery behind a second corpse found in an unearthed coffin, holding a business card from Abe’s old P.I. business. Abe recalls his last case he saw his old partner alive, as Lisa seeks to figure out what happened to him, unraveling a story that may have drastic repercussions, or something.

The reaction: I really don’t get these stories that are focused on teasing out a big reveal regarding a mystery of some sort. The stories are never that interesting as to make you cling to the edge of your seat for twenty minutes waiting to finally be given the answer to a question that you don’t really care about being answered. This is one of the more bizarre ones we’ve gotten in a while. Am I supposed to give a shit about Abe’s old detective partner, a character we’d never heard of before, and whether he’s still alive forty-plus years later? And that maybe Burns had him killed? What does it matter? Lisa decides to investigate because why not? She finds traces of blood on the buried business card, which match the rare blood type of Abe’s old partner William O’Donnell. He last went out to scope out Burns, having been hired by his suspicious lover, Agnes Skinner. Again, all this snooping and “intrigue” over a character we don’t even know. But the episode attempts to sweeten the deal, with Abe intoning that he cannot speak the full truth of what happened, or it would ruin Homer’s life. In the end, we find out why: in the past, Abe confronts Burns over O’Donnell’s disappearance, and in exchange for dropping the matter, Burns promises Abe a future job for his clearly challenged son, one he swears to never, ever fire him from, to which Abe accepts. So I guess this is supposed to be our long-awaited explanation as to why Homer still manages to keep his cushy plant job despite all of the horrible accidents and near meltdowns that have happened under his watch. But… who cares? This is an episodic show, I haven’t found myself seriously wondering why Burns hasn’t permanently fired Homer yet. Springfield is filled with people grossly incompetent at their jobs, Homer isn’t alone on this front. We then discover that Burns actually paid O’Donnell off all those years ago to keep from exposing his shoddy building cost-cuts building the plant, which was apparently enough cash to keep the man retired in a tropical paradise for over forty years. How much money did Burns give this guy? Seriously, a younger Burns would have just had this man killed, but instead, he just gave away what must have been several million dollars to this random detective, and then promised another detective a carte blanche job for his dimwitted son. It’s all just so painfully uninteresting to me, like if you’re going to have a mystery, at least go big. And they seem to care so little that we get a stapled on tag scene that gives the joke explanation as to who the second corpse in the coffin was. Why did the headstone just say “Died 1982”? I just don’t get how anyone could be into these kinds of episodes. A mystery for its own sake, or giving unneeded answers to trifling questions, aren’t why I watch this comedy program.

Three items of note:
– The timeline in this show truly doesn’t matter anymore, which is something I always mention right before I bitch about a new wrinkle in the timeline. We flashback to Abe in 1982, where we also see li’l Homer, whose age I’m not quite able to place. This is after Mona left them, which happened when Homer was 9, which I looked up was apparently confirmed in the recent Al Jean-written episode “Mothers and Other Strangers.” He looks and acts much younger here though, like maybe he’s 6 or 7? But regardless, unless I’m forgetting something, Homer is still canonically 40, so he shouldn’t have even been born yet in these flashbacks. They could have just made the scenes take place in the early 90s, but maybe that might have made Al Jean and the other writers feel too ancient, writing a decades-old flashback during a period when the show was still on the air. Or maybe they didn’t want to give up their great 80s jokes, like Abe’s business card photo and design being like Miami Vice, and Agnes having completed a dozen Rubik’s Cubes waiting for O’Connell to return from his stakeout.
– The Agnes stuff might as well not even be in the episode. She sweet talks Abe, then we see they had a furious love affair, as well as seeing Abe’s ridiculously buff body and pixelated penis. They later have wild sex in the present as Bart and Skinner wait uncomfortably in the other room, so that’s fun. In the end, we learn from O’Donnell that Agnes was supposed to tell Abe about his whereabouts a week after he left, but Agnes wanted Abe to believe Burns was dead so he would kill him. But then why did O’Donnell never try and contact Abe? How would Burns have found out about that after all this time? Anyway, Agnes is mad at Burns because he’s evil, but we never find out how he slighted her in the past. He wasn’t cheating on her, so what’s the deal here? Has she been holding this murderous rage in her heart for over forty years? And if that’s the case, way back when, why didn’t she try to stoke the flames a bit to put her plan in motion of Abe wanting to kill Burns? Did she see that Abe was going to do nothing, and just shrugged her shoulders and forgot it? None of it makes any sense to me.
– Like all flashbacks featuring Abe, this is yet another exercise to rehabilitate his character, showing that he actually was a loving father, as we see with him sacrificing learning the truth about his friend and partner for a lifetime security position for his son. I hate this shit. Homer being raised by an uncaring, emotionally abusive single father is why Homer is so fucked up in the present, it’s an integral building block for his character. And it can’t be how episodes like this or “To Cur with Love” are re-framing it, where Homer just thinks his dad doesn’t love him or did something horrible when actually he was trying to protect him, that’s a cop-out. What is the driving force behind this? Why can’t they just leave young Abe as an asshole? There’s another moment where Lisa is trying to get Abe to open up about the mystery, and hurt, she tells him, “I always looked up to you, Grampa.” What? When has she ever viewed him like that? Her sundowning codger of a grandfather is a heroic figure? Is all this a veiled effort to valorize grandfathers by the veteran writing staff, who are assumedly becoming grandfathers themselves?