Original airdate: November 23, 2025
The premise: Homer manages to score the family tickets to Springfield’s newest mega-venue “The Circulus” to see Lisa’s favorite K-Pop band, as tickets to all shows sold out almost instantly thanks to a tech-savvy scalper. The show itself is actually a covert operation to catch the re-seller, who’s revealed to actually be Bart.
The reaction: I don’t read the plot synopses in advance for these episodes, so I certainly was not expecting to see them do a parody of M. Night Shymalan’s great Trap set at the Las Vegas Sphere. And I’ll just say up front, this episode was okay! I didn’t really take much issue with the things that happened in it, there were a few jokes I chuckled at, and it mostly made sense, all not super high bars this show has had a lot of difficulty clearing in the past. The Circulus isn’t much of a satirical set piece, other than the obvious gags (it’s so huge its bright light blinds everybody, the workers push it into place like a golf ball into a hole), which is only a slight personal bummer since I just watched a great YouTube piece about the absolute evil that is The Wizard of Oz at Sphere. But I acknowledge that the discussion of the desecration of a classic work of art by mind-poisoned tech psychos is an entirely different subject. The plot thrust here is Lisa wanting to see her favorite K-Pop band perform, the Kneesock Dolls. But it turns out that that show, and every other show at the new venue, got instantly sold out in order to be flipped for massive profit by the mysterious “SeatMiser.” A desperate Homer manages to score four tickets from Otto, and the family attends the concert together. Let me applaud the animation team for the ambition of the “Circulus” scenes of the episode. We get a couple of 3D camera turns inside the venue that look pretty good, and the Kneesock Girls performances are supplemented by 3D models of motion capture performed dances that don’t look perfect, but certainly impressive for a TV budget to pull off. I also felt some of its jankyness could also serve as satire on the limitations of the technology inherent with making films for the Sphere (see: The Wizard of Oz). Anyway, then we get into our Trap parody as Bart notices the increased police presence and gets the plot lowdown from Pimply Faced Teen that they know the SeatMiser is at the show. It’s then revealed that Bart is actually the scalper. This is my only big issue with this episode; they explain later that Bart used ChatGPT to come up with the plan of how to set up the ticket racket, but how did he manage to pay for thousands and thousands of tickets? Is he committing credit card fraud as well? We see Bart has spent what must be tens of thousands of dollars on various “SKINNER SUCKS” messages written in fields of crops and in giant drone displays over sporting events. I guess I can go along with the gag, but I still think there could be a funny explanation for this they missed. The back half of the episode gets a little dull, as Bart evades detection in scenes that vaguely echo Trap, leading to a final confrontation with the lead FBI profiler (voiced by Paget Brewster, putting in great work as always), as they have recovered Bart’s disposed phone in the toilet and are checking each kid leaving with the face unlock feature. Lucky for Bart, he didn’t program the face ID with his face, as the last shot is Bart’s enormous mooning ass projected onto the Circulus. Cute! I can’t remember the last time I was amused by a twist ending of an episode rather than bored. There’s nothing exemplary going on here, but it’s a generally enjoyable episode of television, something that I wish this show had more often. This should be the baseline for a show in its 37th season!
Two items of note:
– I long retired the “One good moment” section from these reviews since I lost interest in squinting charitably to find a small thing I enjoyed in these episodes. For the last couple years, I feel like for most episodes, I’d be able to point to at least one thing I smirked at, so that’s at least something. So why not actually feature some of the good stuff here? The spin class powering the adjacent electric chair execution was a wonderfully dark joke. The “COMING SOON” of the Circulus projecting itself against the church stained glass, eliciting cheers from the crowd over the second coming is great. The Profiler correctly guessing Bart’s next plan is to project “SKINNER SUCKS” on the Moon (“How’d she know? I’m still waiting on quotes from three moon guys!”) There’s a few other bits I could put here, but I can’t remember them, but the fact that I can actually name several here is surprising to me.
– Considering this is an episode I actually kind of liked, I don’t have a ton to bitch about, so let’s talk about voice actors again! I don’t like doing this, but I still find it so hard to ignore! Especially since the top half of this episodes features a whole lot of Burns, Smithers, and Otto, we get a full taste of the aging vocals of Mr. Harry Shearer, an incredibly talented performer I have the utmost respect for. But, it got me thinking of my long-held belief that the only definitive show-ender left is the untimely passing of one of the six core cast members. But considering the show’s frayed relationship with Shearer over the past twenty-odd years, would Al Jean and company be as precious about Shearer’s passing? The other five have all been loyal foot soldiers for the show since the beginning, agreeing to basically everything the show and its extended media universe asks of them. Shearer has always been the fly in the ointment, which is a whole greater conversation that I won’t go into here, and I’m sure the staff is grateful for all the great work he’s given them, but I imagine they have to feel a less fond and strong relationship with him than the other five. So if Shearer passes first, would they dare recast his characters? I feel like it’s not an impossibility, though I think the sheer number of regular characters he covers is definitely a barrier for them. If Yeardley Smith was the grump of the group, maybe, but Shearer voices at least ten regularly occurring characters, and many more semi-regulars. I dunno, obviously I hope none of this comes to pass in the near future and these people live long, healthy lives, but as time goes on and these folks keep getting older, I can’t help but have these things present in the back of my mind.
Me Blog Write Good 
They were planning on replacing Shearer with other voice actors back in 2015 when he initially stepped down, so they could go back to that well when the time comes. And of course some of his minority characters have new VAs.
This episode is great… material to contrast with that Quimby episode last week, since both are movie parodies that take the “adult subject, but low-stakes with kids” angle to their source material.
The Godfather Part II is kind of an awful fit for this show, since it has to be crammed into 22 minutes or less, and 22 minutes today is more like 10 minutes of the classic era since the pace of the writing is slower. And it’s not a natural fit for The Simpsons, hence the present day story relying on the gimmick “the school treats a student election just like a real one, for some dumbass reason”. (There’s a reason Lisa’s Substitute didn’t have the kids roll out lines about “chocolate milk inflation” or whatever: back then the writers knew that was incredibly unfunny.)
Last week’s episode would have been better if it dropped both the Godfather and “but it’s kids!” angles and just been 20 minutes of Quimby backstory. Of course, this show doesn’t have the confidence to do that, or the competence to expand on Quimby without apologizing for him. So it is what it is.
But Trap with Bart Simpson makes perfect sense! The premise is simple, so it fits a short runtime, and the core conflict would be about Bart trying to avoid being found out by authorities, which fits The Simpsons‘ premise and characters. The core elements of the story are still there even with the stakes lowered, so it ends up just being a fun idea the show can spend some time with. And a fun Simpsons episode in 2025 is rare!
You don’t need to know Trap exists to enjoy this episode. It stands on its own. So does last week’s, actually, but last week wanted to be silly and touching at the same time, succeeding at neither. This week shows it’s a better idea to commit to just one thing, because even season 37 of The Simpsons might be able to pull one thing off.
Lisa liking K-Pop feels so wrong to me.
In the episode “Gangsta Rap”, Lisa admits she purposefully listens to jazz because it’s lame, and in the recent episode “Panic on the Streets of Springfield”, she gleefully challenges the music program to discern her specific musical tastes, as if she only wants to listen to indigenous music from natives who live in a northern Greenland village. Almost as if the writers have deviated away from a character who got into jazz because she felt like it represented an underappreciated and now ignored source of music despite its ancestry and inspiration for other genres of music and created a Newport smoking douchebag in the process.
I think you mean Pranksta Rap.
Eh, she’s always had normal-little-girl interests. Remember the Corey holiness?
Unless you mean it feels wrong because Lisa is a quintessentially 90s character now enjoying 2020s pop culture, in which case…yeah that’s weird.
*hotline
Though there was some idol worship happening there for sure…
It worked back then thanks to the writers remembering that Lisa is still a girl, but they’ve spent decades writing her as a liberal know-it-all to the point where they lost the plot.
That sliding timeline, at it again. In this episode, Lisa was born in 2017, so by then BTS was already popular in American high schools.
It’s gonna get even weirder once we get to season 40 and Lisa will be a Covid baby.
But wait until the next Thanksgiving episode when it’s Magaggie’s first time she enjoyed walking bird.
Again.