795. Bad Boys… For Life?

Original airdate: November 2, 2025

The premise: We travel back in time once again to the Simpson family’s past, exploring how Homer forged a new relationship with a troublesome six-year-old Bart.

The reaction: Simpson family memories is a well the show seems to have completely tapped, which at the very least they acknowledge here (“We’ve done that a few times. Not sure what stories are left…”) I remember years ago they had the origin of li’l Bart and Lisa’s sibling rivalry, which kind of felt like it revealed nothing. This episode was promoted as being about the origins of bad boy Bart and his first prank, but it doesn’t really seem like that gets explored much to any satisfying degree. We see Homer is a doting parent to a four-year-old Lisa, but he barely much acknowledges six-year-old Bart, and when he does, he’s overly critical, like forcing the left-handed child to use his right hand for some reason. Is there any big stigma against left-handed people anymore, outside of some crazy religious types? I could buy Homer wanting his son to be “normal” back in the previous continuity, but this episode ostensibly takes place in 2021, so what does he care? Li’l Bart considers his father as a bully, so he begins lashing out at him, but then that extends to him being a rambunctious kid to everyone in general. Marge takes him to a child psychologist, who almost immediately orders that the child be institutionalized against his family’s will, which is incredibly bizarre and unmotivated. Is this supposed to be commentary on how society would rather lock up its troubled population rather than help in any way? I dunno. Homer goes on the run from the cops with Bart in tow, and along the way, manages to bond with the kid and come to some annoyingly on-the-nose revelations about themselves, like how his own critical, neglectful father became a model for his own shoddy parenting. Previous depictions of younger Homer have shown him pretty inactive, moving his kids out of the way of his view of the TV. I never considered him to be an aggressively bad parent, just not the most attentive or understanding. In the middle of the episode, we get a mini-montage of Homer bonding incredibly well with Bart from infancy to four-years-old, and it’s never explored what exactly happened to cause this big switch in their relationship. It’s one of those episodes where we get to the end and I don’t even know what I was supposed to take from it. This is the final episode showrun by Al Jean, who also wrote the script, a momentous end of an era to the man who’s held the position for over twenty years. The nicest thing I can say is this is nowhere near the quality of the truly, truly awful episodes he’s written in recent memory (“Daddicus Finch,” “The 7 Beer Itch,” “Mother and Other Strangers.”) It’s a sort-of sweet pile of mush, and I can’t get super upset about something like that. I assume Jean is taking a maybe-permanent break to solely focus on the Simpsons Movie sequel, but he leaves behind a great legacy of tremendous, foundation-forging work done with his partner Mike Reiss, and over two decades of largely disposable dreck. Just like the show itself, it’s hard to be too upset at the guy who at one time was responsible for so much incredible work, so I say Jean has more than earned some time away from the series proper.

Three items of note:
– The couch gag is a Fortnite reference, obviously tying in to the recently released Simpsons campaign within the game. If I hadn’t seen footage of that all weekend, I don’t know if I would have even recognized that it was Fortnite. I have no idea what that giant banana or the fish guy are or any of that stuff, I’m too much of an old man for these kind of games. Not much I really have to say about the Fortnite crossover itself, other than it’s pretty funny how all these media companies have to pimp out their characters into the biggest video game ever with a young audience for a relevancy grab. Sorry to all those fans still desperately holding onto the hope for a Hit & Run remake, I don’t think that’s gonna happen any time soon.
– In the flashback, Marge mentions that Homer is 38, and since it takes place four years in the past, I guess they’re officially bumping up Homer’s age to 42. How much older can they possibly make these characters? Homer and Marge were high school sweethearts whose lives were turned upside down by an accidental pregnancy, but now they had nearly fifteen years of adult lives together before Bart was born. I guess I should feel a little better that now it means there’s a chance I won’t be older than Homer when the series finally ends (as long as they don’t renew past season 40).
– We get a good two-minute nightmare from Homer about li’l Bart going to a juvenile detention center, with pretty tired gags of kids being thrown into ball pits and guards being little kids on big wheels. They try to do a weird skewed perspective look to the whole sequence, which I guess is kind of cool, but not enough to save how much time is devoted to it. Also, all of this is technically still a story that Homer and Marge are telling the kids, so is Homer spending this much time dwelling about a bad dream he had four years ago?