796. Bart ‘N’ Frink

Original airdate: November 9, 2025

The premise: Bart becomes Professor Frink’s new lab assistant, and shortly after, the Simpson family is whisked away to join Frink at his college reunion at a lavish island estate.

The reaction: While I have frequently talked about how I’d love for this show to devote episodes to exploring the inner lives and exploits of its secondary cast, there are characters who I honestly don’t feel need to be peeled back any further than their cartoony exteriors, like Cletus and Brandine. I feel like I’d put Professor Frink in that category as well; the Nutty Professor riff has been perfectly hilarious as a ridiculous mad scientist type with Hank Azaria’s goofy Jerry Lewis impression, I don’t know if I want to see stories about how crushingly lonely he is or his attempt to socialize with people. I’d rather see a more humor-focused storyline involving Frink’s inventions going wrong and causing havoc across the town or something. However, I wouldn’t completely rule out a more earnest Frink story line, but all the others we’ve gotten up to this point feel either half-baked or really barely about Frink. From my recollection, this one I guess is the most successful of them all, pairing Frink with Bart for a double character arc, but it’s still pretty boring to me. After being responsible for killing his beloved D&D character, Bart ends up becoming Frink’s assistant, and the two quickly bond through a montage, because as always, that’s a lot easier than writing dialogue between characters and learning what they have in common and why they care about each other. Quickly after that, Frink is invited to a college reunion and brings the Simpsons along to a far-off venue so secretive, its location is bleeped out by the network censors (an admittedly funny joke). The bash is being hosted by Peter (Thiel?), Frink’s old college chum, who is later revealed to be a back-stabber, making his riches off of Frink’s prototypical “Siri” invention. Now he wants to do it again, chomping at the bit to rip off Frink’s new “emoji glasses,” eyewear that tells you what anyone is thinking by displaying a corresponding emoji above their heads. Frink’s submissive, borderline on the spectrum behavior is highlighted here, unable to read what people really feel, thus making him a prime target to be exploited by tech bro scumbags. Bart takes him to task for this, losing respect for Frink, while Frink counters that Bart uses his self-professed dumbness as a defense to get away with not doing any work, believing him to actually be smart. It’s all fairly boilerplate stuff, as the two rekindle their friendship in the end and it’s all played very straight and sweet. But I just didn’t really care. Some episodes are harder than others for me to articulate why an episode didn’t work for me, and here, while none of the storytelling is rickety or bad, none of it felt very interesting to me. Bart is actually pretty intelligent but he’s just a lazy kid who likes to skirt responsibility? Yeah, we know, he’s clearly been that way from the start of the series. I feel stories like these as we approach episode 800 seem so pointless since they don’t really represent anything. The Bart-Frink relationship won’t carry over to anything, Bart’s emotional realization will be forgotten, and he’ll have a new emotional arc in a couple weeks that will be discarded just as quickly. Yes, as an episodic show, this was always the case, but just by nature of how many of these episodes there have been at this point, I am just naturally more accepting and forgiving of a one-off emotional epiphany happening in a season 7 episode than a season 37 episode.

Two items of note:
– The B-plot involves the tech bros in attendance at the party being shocked that Homer apparently has the blood of a twenty-seven-year-old, and begin falling over themselves to find out his secret to longevity. All the Silicon Valley humor in the episode is okay, but it’s all pretty obvious stuff to me, and none of it is that fresh. Making fun of the likes of Bryan Johnson, who steals his son’s blood to stay young, is almost an impossible task, in the same ways that reality has basically outpaced satire in our present day.
– This episode has two major guest stars who I happen to love. Glenn Howerton voices Peter Linz (I don’t recall his last name being said in the episode, but he shares a name with the performer behind Walter from the Muppets, among other characters). I really couldn’t tell it was him until I saw the credits, which isn’t necessarily bad, nor would I want him to just act like Dennis Reynolds, but it felt like a pretty nondescript character to me. Abed Nadir himself Danny Pudi voices the one tech bro freak who learns of Homer’s allegedly young blood, with Nadir giving a nice, occasionally frenzied performance (“Tell us your secrets! Give us the keys to immortal life!!”)