Original airdate: November 16, 2025
The premise: As Lisa uses Bart to run for class president against Mayor Quimby’s son, we flash back to the story of the Quimby lineage, from Quimby’s father coming to America, to a young Diamond Joe starting his political career with the help of Marge’s aunt, Beatrice Bouvier.
The reaction: I literally just talked about this last episode (but sometimes it’s my job to be repetitive. My job. My job. Repetitiveness is my job), but just as I’d put Frink on my list of supporting characters I don’t need to see more involved stories with, I’d put Mayor Quimby on that list as well. He’s the sleazy, corrupt mayor of a shit town who talks like JFK, I really don’t need to see his backstory of how he lost his moral compass and became a sleazebag. Jimmy McGill, he is not. But we got one anyway, as we see Joseph Quimby the First come over on the boat from Ireland in the 1920s, only to be met with vicious anti-Irish discrimination. He makes his fortune manufacturing barrels during the Great Depression, and later has a son, as we flash forward to the 80s and Joe Quimby II is running for Mayor of Springfield. His father openly flaunts his posse of mistresses, something that Joe is slightly discouraged by. When a brassy dame named Beatrice Bouvier helps Joe relate to the common man in the immigrant city his father lived in, he manages to pull off the election and win the heart of an honest woman in the process. But on the day of his wedding, Joe is told by his father he must be publicly unfaithful to his wife in order to have a successful political career for some reason. This feels like a backstory the show would have done a decade or so ago, at the time when every secondary character was boiled down to basically one joke. We had a boatload of gags just about Quimby being a womanizer, or having secret illegitimate families, so this back story is just supposed to be about why Quimby is a whoremonger? He’s also intensely corrupt, why doesn’t that factor into the equation? I get that JFK was beloved for being a young and fresh face in politics, but I don’t know how much of that was due to any tabloid stories about him fucking girls. I get that it’s part of the joke, but it just doesn’t make sense to me (“If he can’t even cheat on his wife, how can he repave our highways?”) Beatrice leaves Joe, which crushes him, and his father on his deathbed tells him he can make things right by having a son who can succeed in the great political path that he failed at. As we see in present day, Joe Quimby III, who apparently exists, is newly enrolled at Springfield Elementary running for class president, promising a crazy music festival with guest performers at the school rather than put money into music class. But why does Quimby’s kid need to be the key here? We know Joe Quimby II did follow in his father’s footsteps for decades of philandering and criminality, even if he was still nursing a broken heart from Beatrice, who I guess he never tried to contact ever again. Maybe he felt the sting of his father’s dying words and felt he had to leave the responsibility to his next of kin, who I guess is this random kid we’ve never seen before that he waited years to have. Whatever. By Lisa’s encouragement, Joe Quimby III rejects his seemingly predestined path, turns down his nomination, and embraces his father, who’s very proud of him, for some reason. Does that mean Quimby is a changed man now? Does it matter? Despite my initial words, I feel like maybe a Quimby backstory explaining his descent into corruption could be interesting, but this episode paints in such broad strokes it doesn’t feel like it means anything. Even calling it broad strokes is being generous. Quimby is talked to by his father right after he gets married that he needs to be a womanizer, and then speaks to Beatrice immediately after that he can’t defy his father. So all of Quimby’s retched behavior is because of his daddy issues, which he continues in gleeful excess after his passing for some reason. But there’s no specific temptation, no moral failing to be explored. It’s just more boring fluff to throw onto the nearly 800-episode-tall pile.
Two items of note:
– Let’s talk about timelines again. I feel like I’m being a nitpicking asshole when I talk about this stuff, but we have this floating timeline where no one ever ages, but the staff still wants to make jokes about pre-war America and it gets harder to stretch these characters’ ages to accommodate. We see that Joe Quimby I came to America in 1921, and by 1929 he’s a young man who must be no older than 20. We see he sold barrels during what looks to be the Great Depression in the early to mid 1930s. Then we see he started his own movie studio, now appearing to be much older in front of a theater modeled like Grauman’s Chinese, in a scene that’s presented as an old news film strip from the 1950s. On that night, Joe Quimby II was born. I naturally assumed Mayor Quimby was roughly the same age as JFK, who was 46 when he died. He doesn’t look that old, so I would say no older than 50. In the next flash forward, Joe Quimby II is running for Mayor in 1982, and even if we say he’s 18 there, he would have been born in 1964, making him 61 today. That seems way too old, doesn’t it? We also see that during Joe and Beatrice’s aborted wedding in 1983, a 3-year-old Marge is there as a flower girl, which would mean that she is now 45 years old. Two episodes ago, they just casually bumped up Homer’s age to 42, so from this trajectory, Homer and Marge are gonna be in their 50s by the end of the series. Someone in the writers room has gotta be thinking about this shit, am I crazy? I feel like it’s been a while since we had a WWII flashback from Abe or a Vietnam flashback from Skinner, as the characters would need to be way older for them to make sense in 2025, but these kind of flashbacks also make our cast way too old as well.
– Guest star line-up! I’ll admit it’s very clever casting having Domhall Gleason voice young Joe Quimby I, and then have his father Brandon Gleason take over the role when he gets older. Carrie Coon voices Beatrice, in a pretty nondescript part, but I did enjoy when she gave the character a Marge-esque rasp when he see her older on the present. Also, Cole Escola appears for the third time this season as the kid with colored hair. Why do they keep popping up? And they’ve been given plot-specific dialogue each appearance, so this character is being specifically written into these scripts. Are they trying to make Devin into a cool new beloved character? Is it working? Any Devin-heads out there in the audience?
Me Blog Write Good 
No mention of them “killing off” Mrs. Glick a second time? I couldn’t tell if that was supposed to be a gag callback or if the Selman writers forgot. (Though considering they used the same first name as last time, I’m guessing that it was a really awkward callback.)
Watch as they bring Mrs. Glick back again and kill her off a third time because death is meaningless on this show.
Might as well resurrect Maude if they’re going that route.
I’m all for expanding upon secondary characters, but I’m not for whitewashing them. You can give an asshole like Mayor Quimby (literal murderer of his political rivals, lest we forget) a sympathetic backstory if you want. But you can’t deny the fact that he’s an asshole. To say “Oh, he didn’t really do his bad behavior because he’s selfish, he had a contrived sitcom reason to do it!” is to apologize both for Quimby and the corrupt politicians he represents. They didn’t mean to be bad, that’s not their nature. Their successors definitely won’t commit the same crimes. There’s nothing wrong with the system, just a few bad apples. Pinky swear!
Stop apologizing for assholes, post-classic Simpsons. Stop glorifying the establishment. Stop depicting the parts of life you’re claiming to satirize as cozy, healthy parts of society that we should aspire to or at least settle for. Wasn’t the whole point of this show to call out the ways the American reality fell short of the American dream? To show the world as it really is and not as the rich and powerful on top would like us to believe? Or was it just to establish popular iconography you could make bank on for more than thirty years?
Because that’s all this newer, sanitized, happens-to-be-a-Disney-mascot Simpsons really is. Iconography. Look, it’s the womanizing mayor! Boy, what a wacky character! No, he doesn’t represent anything in your real life. Why would he?
I’m going to go politically apeshit, so forgive me.
To me, Mayor Quimby represents not only the JFK lineage, but he represents the modern establishment Democratic party; willing to be part of the problem, but just barely innocent enough for your resistlib to escape accountability. Hell, if anything, Quimby reminds me too much of Joe Ganim out of Bridgeport, Connecticut; a mayor who served for years, got in trouble for a white-collar crime and actually went to prison, and then was re-elected and the Connecticut Democrats insist he’s the best option despite the fact he’s criminal scum and Bridgeport is a hellhole. Heck, I would argue that nowadays, Quimby would actually switch parties and be a Republican, considering how opportunistic he was in older episodes, such as how in “Much Apu About Nothing”, he purposefully deflected the crowds bitching about a meagre tax increase by saying it was the fault of immigration and swiftly proposed rounding up all illegal aliens to force them out of town… much like what’s going on right now.
Modern Simpsons really has that problem with whitewashing assholes because all of the writers are shitlibs that are out of touch with reality but don’t care as they have pensions and health insurance, so it’s not their problem that Rome is burning. That’s why they made fun of Bernie Sanders and overworked visual effects studios; it’s okay for *them* to punch down, because centrists are fine with punching down as long as they do the occasional Orange Man Bad. One of the reasons why The Simpsons did get popular was that the 1980s was so full of television shows that presented this idealized depiction of America that Ronald Reagan was cramming down everyone’s throats, and yet if you were a minority, a woman, or gay… you weren’t part of it. And yet, here comes this show that was the counterculture that dared to present what you felt was a mirror to real life.
35 years later… it’s a toothless, bloated corporate entity that belongs to the biggest monolith on the planet and is deathly afraid of offending anyone, especially the scariest demographic of them all; the Disney Adults.
Anyway, the episode really is following that trend lately of trying to be shmaltzy, and call me hardhearted, but I’m not particularly one for The Simpsons being a saccharine series.
Weirdest part of the episode for me were the Donkey Kong references. I know “barrels” but why have Donkey Kong through the generations? Why have Bart play it on an iPad?
On Cole Escola, no idea why they keep showing up. At least I know they’ll slay as Mr. 2 Bon Clay in live-action One Piece.
If the writers knew what they were talking about at all, that scene should have ended with Nintendo lawyers abducting Bart for emulating Donkey Kong on a third party device. Smash cut to him in a chain gang now and then in the last act.
We also see that during Joe and Beatrice’s aborted wedding in 1983, a 3-year-old Marge is there as a flower girl, which would mean that she is now 45 years old. Two episodes ago, they just casually bumped up Homer’s age to 42, so from this trajectory, Homer and Marge are gonna be in their 50s by the end of the series.
Wait, what? I thought Marge was supposed to be YOUNGER than Homer.
Despite not seeing the episode because it honestly sounded very boring (same goes for the earlier Frink & Chalmers episodes this season), I’ll go ahead and mention Marge revealing that she only married Homer just to spite her parents and not because she had any actual feelings for him which alongside saying she thinks Lisa will go to hell for being a vegetarian has to be one of her worst moments in the show’s recent history!
Not only does this one line spit in the face of too many past episodes, it even goes as far as painting Homer & Marge’s marriage opto being a similar level of dysfunctionally as Peter & Lois’ over the last 10 to 15 years!
Makes Homer’s Adventure Through the Windshield Glass even more depressing when they show how Marge has all this money she’s forced to waste on Homer because he’s an irresponsible dumbass and they imply she only married him to spite her parents, not out of genuine love for the oaf.
At least this episode (from what I understand) doesn’t then try to warp this depressing reveal to make it ‘heartwarming’ with some line that was likely added the day they recorded Julie about having extra money for the new purse for next month (which probably won’t even be the case once next month arrives).
I suppose Quimby never getting past his daddy issues or falls back on them in a cynical attempt to avoid responsibility could have been an interesting look at the character, especially since he’s gone probably gone on to do way worse than anything his father has done.
“You told me to be corrupt.””I told you to be unfaithful, not steal public funds to murder your enemies!”
why the heck wasn’t martha quimby shown or mentioned even once? And how is it the staff have never heard of donkey Kong country and keep thinking that donkey Kong arcade cabinet is the only game the kongs have ever been part of? They don’t even play dk on Nintendo systems it’s tablets and vr headsets. So dumb.