788. Stew Lies

Original airdate: May 4, 2025

The premise: Homer’s efforts to reinvigorate TV food personality Thad Parkour’s love of eating lands the two at Fat Tony’s doorstep, where we learn of his special stew he learned from working under the Prussian mafia, and its very secret recipe.

The reaction: It feels like we’ve been seeing Fat Tony a few times a season for the last couple years, and as I’ve talked about before, this show’s mafia parodies get all the more tiresome as time goes on. Just look at that “Kiss the Mook” apron. Tony tries to kill Homer with the ol’ cement shoes routine. During a chase, he asks, “Where the fuddedaboutit are we?” I don’t think it’s impossible to breathe new life into this exhausted stereotype, but the show just doesn’t seem interested. I sighed once the plot found myself at Tony’s, there’s just absolutely no juice left to this character. But before we get there, there’s some sort of plot. Homer is a huge fan of Thad Parkour, a sort-of Guy Fieri-type TV presenter specializing in Man vs. Food-type challenges. When he arrives at Springfield to tape his show, Homer and his fellow fanatics are shocked to find Thad on the brink of death, collapsing to the floor. Homer vows to help Thad by getting him to fall back in love with food, except that never seemed like the problem? Thad clearly was incredibly sick from the ridiculously over-the-top endurance eating he was actively doing (“Just last episode, you were a healthy young man drinking twenty gallons of ranch dressing to win a T-shirt.”) But whatever. Homer takes Thad to some valley outside of town where you can take in all the delicious aromas of Springfield, which then leads them to follow a new unique smell to Fat Tony’s house. Said smell belongs to Tony’s special stew, which he learned from a Prussian mafia don he worked under as a child. Upon his death bed, the don bestowed the secret recipe unto him, rather than his own distant son. Thad’s love of food is seemingly recaptured, but Homer is shocked to find his new TV show is about exposing culinary secrets, starting with Tony’s stew recipe, putting both Homer and Tony in the crosshairs of the vindictive Polish mafia. This is just one of those stories where I had absolutely no investment in whatsoever. We get this really long flashback of young Tony being “son swapped” with the Prussians. The don is discouraged his only son is more interested in his budding ska career, so he bonds with Tony, who shares his love of cooking. Later, the now-adult son tracks him down to kill him (“It wasn’t enough to just take my father’s love from me. You had to steal his recipe too?”) Homer saves the day by taking them all to the aforementioned smell spot, as the don’s son can smell everybody in Springfield simultaneously cooking his father’s stew off of Thad’s show. The son tears up (“Father did love me!”) I’ve just met this character as an adult, am I supposed to feel affected by this at all? Thad gets his love of food back, vowing to travel the world sampling all different kinds of cuisine, but Homer turns down his offer to come with him because the episode is over. “But Homer, this is growth for me! Can’t you respect my decision?” Thad asks. Homer flatly says no. But Homer didn’t insult him for the idea, he just didn’t want to go with. I don’t even know what the point of Thad’s character was. Was he a proud foodie that ended up getting stuck doing an extreme food show he never wanted to do? I don’t even care enough to pontificate any other hypothetical character backstories or motivations that were never discussed. Ah, whatever. Season’s almost over anyway.

Three items of note:
– The entirety of the main story is about fifteen minutes, so after about 1/3 of the normal opening theme (a rarity to see at all these days), we get this opening set piece of Bart committing to the bit of repeating everything Lisa says, never backing down for months on end. Lisa is slowly but surely worn down into madness, but accepting her new lot in life, she decides to twist things around and make Bart do what she likes: teaches him to speak Mandarin, learning the saxophone, and helping her engage in protests. We end with Lisa reading a letter “written” by Bart, with him repeating as usual (“I set out to break my sister’s spirit, but wound up giving her a priceless gift: the knowledge that her brother will always be by her side, so she will always feel loved and protected.”) Bart finally breaks, tearing up, and the two siblings hug, closer than ever. Conceptually, I like this idea on a comedic level, with Bart taking the childish annoyance way too far, and Lisa finally deciding to lean into it, bringing the two closer together, with the prank of it melting away to the two of them bonding. But in terms of it being this incredibly emotional unrelated opening act where I’m supposed to be touched by how sweet Bart and Lisa are, I just can’t go along with it. I dunno, maybe I’m just hardened since I’ve been watching these characters for almost forty years, but I need some more emotional and narrative stuff going on to make me feel anything for these two. I guess it’s surface level sweet, but I’ve seen Bart and Lisa mend fences and hug it out dozens if not hundreds of times by now, and most often as the emotional climax of a more involved story. Like I said, I think the concept of this opening five minutes is cute and charming, but they clearly milked this final part of it to really try and hit viewers in the feels, which I’m sure worked on a lot of people, but I just need more emotional runway for this stuff. Also, Nancy Cartwright’s performance in the final repetition bit felt off, it sounded like she was speaking close to her normal voice for a lot of it.
– It’s pretty cool that our two main guest characters for this episode are both done by our greatest voice actors, with Maurice LaMarche as the Prussian don and John DiMaggio as Thad. DiMaggio especially gave an impressive performance; he’s played many a gregarious loudmouth character very similar to Thad, but there was a distinct variance to his performance here, to the point that several times I began to doubt if that was really him. DiMaggio really is a great talent, he was right to play hardball with Disney over coming back for Futurama, screw them.
– It’s unclear exactly how long ago the flashback takes place, but given that Tony’s a kid in it, and he must be in his 60s at least, then maybe it’s sometime in the late 70s/early 80s. The Prussian don’s son being super into ska felt unusual for the time period, but looking it up, it seemed like ska first had its first popular wave in America in the 80s, so it’s possible this could be accurate. I don’t know if the stereotypical checkerboard hat and tie ska look was also prevelant back in the 80s, but that might be possible too.