782. The Past and the Furious

Original release date: February 12, 2025

The premise: In a brutalist alternate reality where Springfield is devoid of any nature, a nihilistic Lisa is given a special therapy device that transports her back to the 1920s, inhabiting the body of her great-grandmother. She makes it her mission to fix the future with the help of a young, music-loving Monty Burns.

The reaction: I don’t know at what point the deal was made that certain episodes of this season would be released on Disney+. The two-part Christmas special, and now this alternate reality/time travel story definitely feel a little unique apart from the season, but on that same point, the show has done a lot of rule and reality-breaking episodes over its history, and especially in recent history, so these could have just easily been run on FOX with no question. But anyway, what we have here is a pretty bland sci-fi story where Lisa tries to change something bad from happening in the past, and shock of shocks, it turns out that she accidentally caused that bad thing to happen in the first place! Who could have seen that coming? But let’s start at the top. We open with a “Wuhu” streaming interface playing the episode from an ‘Alternate Realities’ playlist, then we see Springfield is more cold and architecturally dominated than normal. But call me stupid, but I wasn’t putting together right away that the town was completely devoid of anything green whatsoever, to the point that I was puzzled when we see the establishing shot of the Simpson house at the start of act two with no front lawn or backyard, only concrete. But yes, this is a hopeless alternate reality with seemingly no hope for an ecological future, until Lisa is magically thrown back to the 1920s, trying to get a young and spry Mr. Burns’ help to save the “mini moose,” a then-current day pest whose impending extinction will lead to Springfield’s environmental collapse. Young Burns is a singing and dancing, carefree young man, content to tend to his expansive greenhouse garden in honor of his mother. But when Lisa accidentally spooks the mini moose and they destroy it, Burns vows to become a heartless tycoon and make it his life’s mission to make sure nothing ever grows in Springfield. This culminates in a showdown where Burns enters his young self’s body and past and present argue about the benefits of being evil. Burns of course stays his wicked course, but not before leaving behind a sliver of hope for the future for Lisa: some orchid seeds. I don’t quite get it, though, did Burns cause ecological destruction across the entire planet? What’s to stop Lisa traveling a few towns over to get some seeds to bring back? What’s Burns gonna do if she starts a backyard garden? None of this is really made clear, since so much time is devoted to explaining all the time travel shit, and explaining the incredibly obvious reveal at the end as mentioned earlier. Futurama on Hulu just did this with that Robot Santa episode, revealing that the Professor was responsible for him being evil in the first place, and I thought that “twist” was tired then. I was more bored than anything else for this “special.” Nothing of note is learned about Burns’ past, or Springfield’s past, or anything, really. And the point of the episode? “It turns out one little girl can make a difference, as long as she travels through time.” For a fantastical alternate future, Springfield didn’t look different enough for any of this to really feel that impactful. Like I said, it didn’t even register for me at first, the town normally is an overly polluted hellhole (sorry, pee-pee soaked heck-hole.) Overall a pretty dull episode, which feels more unfortunate as its status as a one-off streaming “special.”

Two items of note:
– Lisa is transported back to 1923, where Mr. Burns is a spry youngster. He’s certainly past his adolescence, so let’s just say he’s 18, which would make him born in 1905, meaning in present day, he would be 120 years old. None of this really matters much, of course, since Burns is meant to be absurdly old, but this kind of stuff, showing a young Burns in the roaring 20s leading to the Great Depression, reminds me of the times they still depict Abe as a WWII vet or Skinner having been to Vietnam, incredibly time-specific backstories for characters who have not aged in almost forty years. Even if Skinner didn’t ship off until the ass-end of the Vietnam War as an 18-year-old, that would make him 70 in 2025.
– Don Jon himself Joseph Gordon-Levitt voices young Monty Burns, and honestly, I think he did a pretty good job, adopting a turn-of-the-century old-timey accent, but speaking in the recognizable tenor of Mr. Burns’ vocal range. I actually thought for a few seconds that maybe they digitally finagled with Harry Shearer’s voice, but it’s obviously all JGL, especially since they have him singing too. That brief confusion about vocal trickery made me think about the recent New York Times piece with Hank Azaria worrying about the ramifications of an AI future where his characters come to life without him. It’s something that I’ve considered (with horror) that what I always thought would be an inevitable show killer, the death of one of the core six cast members, could be avoided thanks to AI acting as a replacement voice. But even putting aside the still imperfect technology at this point, I kind of feel that Groening, Brooks, Jean and the other veteran show producers would feel weird about putting that into place should Shearer or Kavner or whoever passes aways X number of years from now. For some kind of future Simpsons project way, way down the road? AI is (sadly) a possibility. But I don’t see it happening with the show itself, at least in the form it’s in now.