Original airdate: October 18, 2026
The premise: After some rowdy Halloween night partying, Homer and some others accidentally hit someone with their car driving home and dispose of the body. The following year, he’s surprised to find that many other Springfield residents have stories of “killing” the same mysterious costumed stranger, who is out for bloody revenge for what the entire town did to them.
The reaction: I’ll say right off the bat that if you haven’t seen this episode, you should actually watch it before reading this, although if you are reading this, I feel like it’s incredibly likely the surprise reveal has been spoiled for you already. We’ve seen two of these “bonus” Halloween episodes in recent years, but both of them felt like mostly pointless extra helpings to me. But this special actually does end up serving an important function, and I think handsomely pays it off. It takes a little roadwork to get there tough: an unlikely party group comprised of Homer, Chalmers, Professor Frink, and Dewey Largo go out and get drunk, but on their way home in Frink’s self-driving car, they accidentally run a costumed man over. Chalmers strong-arms the group into covering it up, throwing the body over a bridge, vowing to never speak of it again. Of course I immediately think about how the show’s done their I Know What You Did Last Summer parody already, but things quickly escalate from there. Homer is wracked with guilt for an entire year, but by next Halloween, he finds himself the only survivor of his group, the others having been brutally murdered by the man they seemingly killed, out for revenge. But then it turns out that Marge also has a story of “accidentally” “killing” the same man that past Halloween, as do many other Springfield residents. This “Daft Monk” somehow was wronged by the entire town and wants to get even, but who is it? At a dramatic Town Hall meeting, the truth is revealed, as he removes his helmet to show he is none other than Apu Nahasapeemapetilon. I honestly can’t remember the last time I’ve been surprised by this show, but I gotta give credit to really shocking the audience with this. Yes, at long last, this is Apu’s big return to the show. Recast with a new voice, Sunil Malhotra (obviously different than Azaria, but a pretty solid replacement), Apu tells the tale of how he was “killed” and left for dead by numerous groups of people that Halloween night, winding up drifting away and lost offshore from Springfield, and upon finally returning, he found his family had disappeared and no one would even acknowledge him, and he’s understandably pissed about it (“I am the shame you tried to bury! I am the one you claimed never to have existed!”) It felt very reminiscent to meta-storytelling that South Park would employ, with the people of Springfield acting apologetic to not knowing what to do about the whole Apu situation (“If it’s any consolation, we had so many internal conversations about it!” “Yeah, they kinda just didn’t go anywhere.”) In the end, the story is revealed to be a dream of Apu’s, with a final scene meant to affirm that bringing Apu back is actually for real-sies, as Homer invites Apu to their Halloween party (“Come on, Apu, it wouldn’t be the same without you!”) Homer and Apu’s interplay felt very natural to me, which feels like the best compliment I can give to this big swing of a special. “No Good Read Goes Unpunished” aired eight years ago, a fumbling attempt to respond to the Problem with Apu documentary that ultimately came off as dismissive and tone deaf. Since then, every other POC character had been recast, but the show seemed deathly afraid of re-introducing Apu. Even though this is a much different situation, it felt like how it took a decade for them to create a new teacher character for Bart after Marcia Wallace passed away. And while I don’t like the Miss Peyton character at all, I do like this series rectification. Just seeing the ending with Homer and Apu chit-chatting at the Kwik-E-Mart counter served to remind me how long it’s been since we’ve seen such a major character and location from the show’s history. And after so much time, I imagine it just got harder and harder to come up with a suitable way to bring him back and make it feels meaningful. Introducing it as a surprise twist in a Halloween special was honestly a pretty clever way to finally make this happen, and one I think the show actually managed to pull off. This show is still a shadow of itself in many ways, but even a grumbling cynic like me can’t help but feel a little good about Apu finally being back in Springfield.
Three items of note:
– We start with an actually cool opening bit of Mayor Quimby addressing the public on a curved TV screen as we slowly push in on him, a neat little cinematic effect. This is actually a pretty well directed episode, surprisingly done by a first-timer, Eddie Rosas, directing the first half basically like a horror movie. It’s also quite gory; I feel like some Halloween specials will be more reserved with their violence, while others will just be crazy bloodbaths. This one leans more to the latter, but it weirdly stayed appropriate to the tones of each scene for the most part and didn’t feel super gratuitous.
– Apu winds up on stranded on an island out beyond Springfield, where he runs into another forgotten face: Dr. Nick Riviera, who also has a new replacement voice, Eric Lopez. I wasn’t expecting him to be recast, but since Dr. Nick is typically the regular shade of yellow, it’s easy to forget that he’s not really “white,” since his voice is basically Hank Azaria doing a bad Ricky Ricardo. Unlike Apu, I’m not totally on board with the new voice. He almost sounds more like Phineas and Ferb‘s Dr. Doofenshmirtz than Dr. Nick. But their scene together is very good, as Nick explains they’re on an island where Springfield throws its refuse they would rather just be rid of, with the beach littered with tons of references to older episodes, as well as a great joke involving fellow cast-away Leon Kompowski. Again, this feels very South Park, and I think being used in a non-canon episode makes me feel more charitable about this kind of ridiculous stuff.
– I had to look up when Hank Azaria’s final speaking appearance as Apu was. Turns out it was the season 29 premiere “The Serfsons” from 2017, which was the same year that Hari Kondabolu’s documentary came out. Speaking of, I’ve seen a number of people making memes about Apu’s return as a big fuck you to Kondabolu, mocking him for supposedly wanting the character written off. I don’t want to dive too much into this, since I feel like most people didn’t even watch the documentary, but it’s just all bullshit. Kondabolu literally talks about in the film how much he loved (and still loves) the show, but in growing up and being called “Apu” as an insult as a kid, it left him with complicated feelings towards the character and wanting to examine not just Apu, but cultural stereotypes of all kinds, and how they can be improved and learned them. I’d have to imagine that he would really like this episode, and enjoy seeing Apu finally come back, not be a devious ethnic villain that the show has at last vanquished.
I can’t remember the last time I hated a new episode this much! Part of why I gave up being a regular viewer was to lessen my chances of killing my braincells on something like Hostile Kirk Place, Desperately Seeking Lisa or Homer, a Cracker Bro?! But eventually I guess I was bound to stumble across something as garbage as all of the aforementioned except I’m among the .1% who actually found reasons to pick this piece of crap apart that tries to use terms like ‘non-canon’ as a shield thinking that (as well as being Apu’s ‘epic’ return) automatically makes it critic proof!
Half the episode is just the same kind of gratuitous bloodshed and gore that Selman goes overboard on mostly in his THoH episodes and I fail to see how it’s any ‘better’ than something like the one segment where Bob kills Bart over and over. While the other half is the episode being annoyingly meta and think they’re being ‘cutesy’ but instead comes off as insufferably smug and pretentious! It was at this point that I kept checking the duration bar to see how much time was left (and I was watching the online version which was several minutes longer) because it’s also one of those episodes that feels longer than it actually is.
I’d already been spoiled on Apu at least speaking before seeing it but I didn’t yet have the full extent of his appearance. And it’s sad how my original prediction for his appearance (being one of the serial killer’s victims) would’ve been the better option over what we actually got…
And that’s not even getting into the episode’s many failed attempts at ‘jokes’, some of which are on-par with something from FG in terms of how lazy they are.
Put all those elements together, plus all the undeserving ‘praise’ it’s getting, and you’ve got an episode alongside the likes of Thanksgiving of Horror & Pixelated and Afraid as one of the most overrated pieces of shit from the last ten years!
Last time I checked, THOH has never been canon.
True, but very rarely does it feel like they use this a shield to make an episode like this one critic proof when it shouldn’t be.
How? What’s the difference? The difference definitely isn’t that the episode is conveniently “bad.”
Metal Ass Rising: Revengancedomagabilitizationessing