Original airdate: February 15, 2026
The premise: Marge enlists a trainer to get Santa’s Little Helper in better shape, with the mutt surprisingly thriving in the dog show circuit. Soon enough, Marge and the dog are off to Philadelphia for the finals, but they find themselves wrapped up in a legendary conspiracy involving Ben Franklin’s gold.
The reaction: I might be forgetting something (this is episode “800,” after all), but have Marge and Santa’s Little Helper ever had any affectionate bonding moment in the past? What happened in that stupid episode “Dogtown”? Even if something is slipping my mind, Marge is certainly the Simpson with the loosest relationship to the family dog. This episode begins with a look through the years of Homer and the kids spoiling SLH rotten, letting him eat anything and everything, becoming fat and out of shape. Marge decides to finally do something about it, working with a trainer to get the dog back to his normal, skin and fit weight. When they are invited to compete in the championship dog show in Philadelphia, Marge adamantly forbids the rest of the family from coming, with their bad influences on the dog jeopardizing a potential win. As far as character motivation goes, it feels like a split between Marge being ultra competitive and actually foraging a new relationship with SLH. During the trip, she becomes dismayed that their trainer Adrian (played by Quinta Brunson) seems to have a greater hold on SLH than she does. Homer, meanwhile, has stowed away to Philly and is confronted by a group of conspiracy kooks, spinning absurd yarns about how SLH is descended from Ben Franklin’s greyhounds, and he may hold the key to unlocking the location of his hidden vast fortune. Turns out, Adrian is after it too, and Homer and Marge need to track her down to rescue their dog. Thankfully they don’t dwell on the Da Vinci Code / National Treasure stuff that much; they did it almost twenty years ago in season 20’s “Gone Maggie Gone” and I found it to be boring. The episode has an emotional climax where Marge manages to get SLH to listen to her over Adrian, and then an interminable “fake out” where you think the dog died and she’s devastated. Not only do I always hate this in the majority of media, where the characters think someone is dead but of fucking course they’re not, but the writers use this to try and wrench some easy emotional points from all the pet owners out there (“We didn’t just say, ‘Yes, I’d like to rescue this dog,’ we said, ‘Hi, I volunteer to have my heart ripped out of my chest someday,’ because no matter how much time we get to have together, it’ll never be enough.”) Thanks, guys, for reminding me I’m gonna have to live through my dog dying one day! I think my problem is that there’s really no significant bonding between Marge and SLH in this episode. It’s a common issue with these stories, where the plot just zips along, or we cover SLH’s training and rise through the ranks of the dog competition through a montage, but we don’t really get any bonding moments between these two. When SLH gets a clean bill of health from the vet early in the episode, Marge is ecstatic, arms out-stretched, cooing, “There’s my little mister!” But I just don’t buy it, because like I said, Marge has never really been super into this dog. This show has brought up serious subject matter before with great dignity, I’m not against talking about the sad reality of us outliving our cherished animal friends on principle, but the episode has to earn it, and per usual, this one just doesn’t. Even though this is a fake milestone episode, it’s still pretty unremarkable.
Three items of note:
– The opening title signals this episode as the 800th, but per usual with FOX (and I guess Disney now), these promoted anniversaries aren’t actually correct. This is the 800th episode aired on FOX, excluding the Disney+ “special” episodes, which I guess makes more sense than something like the “300th” episode actually being the 302nd for no real reason. The big joke at the end of the opening is that a battered and bloodied Homer unleashes on the rest of the family sitting on the couch, wondering why no one is helping him after Marge smashed her car into him in the driveway, sending him flying through the back wall. We haven’t regularly seen the full opening for the last bunch of seasons now (or any opening at all, it feels like most episodes go straight from title to the start of the episode), but this updated opening of Homer getting hit has been with us for almost twenty years now, and I still don’t like it. I feel like Homer getting hit by Marge rather than escaping through the garage door was pitched as a joke heightened for the new HD intro, a shock joke that after two decades of Homer outrunning Marge, he finally came up short and got rammed. But in the “reality” of the title sequence, what a horrifying incident, Marge hitting her husband with her car so hard that he smashes through a fucking wall. That man should be going to the hospital.
– Like most travel episodes, being set in Philadelphia means just namedropping as many landmarks, local haunts and pop culture references relevant to the city as possible (“Would you like the Silver Linings Playbook room or the Fresh Prince suite?”) Homer wants to try out all of Philly’s signature food, they go to a hockey game with a Gritty cameo, they go to a Roots live show… this is boring, right? Do locals find this charming? I’m not an LA native, but I feel like the times they’ve made LA-specific jokes, I always find it pretty eye-rolling. You’re just showing and saying things I know, there’s no added spin to any of this. And even when they do an added joke, it’s usually lame, like we see the famous Rocky statue, but then next to it are multiple statues of other characters from the Rocky series. Then Marge screams out “Adrian!” after the trainer takes their dog as we see the statue again, meaning the only reason they gave her that name was to make this joke. Great work, guys.
– I’ve talked about this in the past, but there’s a modern characterization of Marge that feels very extreme, quick to fly off the handle at Homer and the rest of the family. It makes sense in the larger context of the series, given the insane shit Homer has pulled over decades, but in modern episodes where Homer is much more restrained and thoughtful in his actions, the reaction doesn’t seem warranted at all. Marge is pissed that Homer stowed away, armed with a list of local places to check out, mostly for food, but it’s not like he expressly wanted to take the dog to all of them. Later, he does his best to keep the conspiracy nuts busy so they’ll stay away from Marge, but they end up being where she is anyway, and Homer isn’t able to stop them from confronting her. Granted, this is a much more muted version of this Marge gets pissed trope, but it’s still present here (“I was trying to keep them away from you!” “Well, you did a great job!”) I get that Homer’s been a real piece of shit husband in the past, but you can’t have Marge react appropriately with that history when the writers have also been rehabilitating Homer into generally being a better guy.
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