(originally aired September 10, 2006)
What’s with these premieres being especially terrible? They don’t exactly fill me with any confidence for the season. Not that I have much confidence left anyway. We open with Bart stealing the school bus and Otto getting fired for spanking him in retaliation. But Bart thinks Otto is cool, why would he do this? But no matter, Otto is a prop character now, only showing up if the plot needs him, or if they need to make a drug reference. With the parents are stuck car pooling, we meet the new kid Michael, who turns out to be Fat Tony’s son. Despite him being meek and harmless, all the kids are terrified of him. Feeling bad, Lisa warms up to him, and finds out he’s a talented cook, but he’s afraid to tell his father about it, who wants him to continue the family business. All of this is pretty boring, and considering the kid’s name is Michael, I know it’s going to turn into a Godfather ending where he shuts the door on Lisa. It’s just a matter of waiting through the other bullshit to get there.

When Michael’s gift is revealed, a rival mafia family perceives it as a weakness and guns Fat Tony down. While he’s recovering, Legs and Louie leave to allow Michael to run the business. Umm, what? He’s a ten-year-old kid and they just leave him alone in the hospital with his critically ill father? But not to worry, Homer steps up and volunteers to be the surrogate mob boss! Oh boy! Then in the next scene we see him working the beat, assisted by Legs and Louie. So what’s going on here? Why don’t they run things themselves, why do they need Homer and Bart to work with them? It’s just so they can cross another occupation off the long list of jobs Homer’s bumbled through, and so they can promote the episode as “Homer in the mafia!” This turns the two into sadistic monsters for some reason, with Bart volunteering to shoot Flanders and Homer suggesting he knife him instead. It’s just very nasty and weird. Another garbage premiere episode.

Tidbits and Quotes
– It’s amazing how despite these episodes clocking in at under twenty minutes, there’s so much filler and elongated jokes. Otto singing Grand Funk Railroad, flipping the dial through every station and naming them, the interminable bit where Homer and Bart laugh maniacally while holding bigger and bigger weapons. It just shows how paper thin most of these stories are.
– I thought Metallica was pretty actually funny for the short scene they had. James Hetfield telling Otto “we don’t take rides from strangers,” and the band being able to recognize him from a concert from ten years back (“I was about to quit the band when I saw your lighter. You saved me that night!”)
– Skinner asks Otto to hand in his beaded seat cover, which we never seen before that point. I try not to be a stickler for this stuff, but we spent the first three minutes of show focusing on Otto at the driver’s seat, and we clearly saw a bare seat.
– Milhouse uses a car seat and tries to hit on Lisa using it… like, come on…
– The dead return in this episode. After over a decade of silence after the passing of Doris Grau, Lunchlady Doris has a brief speaking role, voiced by, you guessed it, Tress MacNeille. I was stunned the first time I saw it, because it comes from nowhere. They pan over quickly in the lunchroom for her to speak her first line of dialogue in ten years (“There’s a double-A battery in my macaroni and cheese!” “It counts as a vegetable!”) Then she opens a wartime tub of beans filled with wailing ghouls and she demands, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, get in the bowl.” This is the material they bring her out of retirement for? She’s had sporadic speaking roles since this point, and I find it pretty disrespectful. They wouldn’t dare recast Troy McClure or Lionel Hutz. Was Grau any less of a performer than Phil Hartman? And besides that, if they wanted to do jokes involving a school cafeteria worker, why not just make a new fucking character? It could even be a different chain smoking disgruntled older lady. But I guess due to laziness, they kept it as Doris. It just upsets me on multiple levels.
– Lisa, Michael and the other kids stand by the curb to get picked up by Fat Tony. His car pulls up, then when we see the kids again, Michael is gone. Again, not being a continuity stickler, but the shots were within five seconds of each other, how could no one have noticed this?
– Two Sopranos stars voice members of Tony’s rival family. They’re alright. Whatever. Not like they have much to work with. Every joke involves making analogies to killing (“The flavor just drove my sweet tooth to a vacant lot and whacked it!”) We also get another gay slam, where one of them mocks Michael calling him “Chef Boy-are-gay.” I guess it works in context here since they’re mob guys, but again, I wish the show would ease off on the gay jokes.
– Tony gets shot in the back multiple times and falls forward, but we see absolutely no bullet holes or blood. What, does this show have a limit for how much blood shed they can show per year, and use it all up every Halloween? What about in “Homer the Moe” when Homer bled profusely after hitting the jukebox? Whatever.
– The most disturbing bit in the episode, and one of the entire series, is a fantasy Homer has after Johnny Tightlips mentions a “dirt nap.” He imagine himself with his head in the ground like an ostrich, ignoring his wife’s pleas to help save their kids from their burning house. We then see the Simpson house on fire, with Bart and Lisa at their windows panicked, screaming for help. Homer’s muffled response (“Sorry, Marge, can’t hear yah! Heh heh heh…”) This is his happy fantasy? Imaging his kids burning alive and doing nothing to stop it? I remember in one of the few Family Guys I was misfortunate enough to watch, it ended with an elaborate daydream of Peter smothering his wife and disposing of the body. This bit is basically on the level of that, it’s so absolutely wrong in every respect.
– Michael rips up his recipe card after the mobsters are killed. Lisa reads it: Meats, Spices, Poison. Give me a fucking break…

(originally aired May 21, 2006)
Just as the season began, we end with another shitty Homer-Marge episode. Kinda. The best I can say it’s nowhere near the abomination of “Bonfire of the Manatees,” but it is pretty boring and stupid. The Springfield Isotopes’s new best player Buck Mitchell’s game is getting affected by his hot pop star wife, and he’s in need of some marriage counseling, and why ask a trained professional when you can consult two random strangers who showed up on the stadium kiss cam? Homer and Marge help the young couple out, sort of. But, through misunderstanding, Buck believes he overhears his wife and Homer fooling around, which is not a cliche hackneyed premise at all, or poorly executed and ridiculous, and things go sour one more. This also gets Homer in Marge’s bad graces. But everything gets resolved in the third act one way or another, as it always does, whether we believe or care about it or not.

This whole episode… just, who cares? We meet these two new characters: Buck we know nothing about, and Tabitha is just a pastiche of sexy pop stars, hoping to keep the audience awake by flashing as much yellow skin as possible. We see Homer and Marge “counsel” them twice, which consists of Marge reading from a therapy book and dispensing simple pleasantries and ideas. Around this, the characters just tell us the information rather than show it: Lisa comments how weird it is that her parents are dispensing marriage advice when their own is so shitty, Kent Brockman talks about how Homer and Marge are responsible for Buck’s improved performance, and then a sportscaster comments on how they screw it up. Do we care about Buck and Tabitha, these two strangers, and whether they’ll get back together? No. Do we care for the sake of Homer and Marge, who worked so hard to keep them together? No, because we barely see any of it. Do we even care if Homer and Marge stay together? At this point, I honestly don’t give a crap. Three more seasons to go…

Tidbits and Quotes
– “You remember when we used to kiss like that, Carl? With our respective girlfriends.” Please stop, writers. Just… please. Stop.
– I’m confused why Marge’s gossip circular has a photo of old Groucho Marx Krusty as we’ve seen in the future episodes with the headline “Krusty’s Sad Last Days.” Is this a periodical from the future?
– The main issue seemingly is that Buck feels embarrassed and uncomfortable with his wife’s music career involving her wearing as little amounts of clothes as possible. It’s what makes him lose focus at the game, and the first thing he brings up in consoling. Is it ever brought up again, or resolved, or discussed further? Nope!
– Buck hearing Tabitha and Homer’s moans through the door as he gives her a neck rub is unbelievable, like how lame and unoriginal can this show get? And the “protection” bit is just stupid. I could hear the trombone “wah waaaahhh” sound when it’s revealed to be a bib.
– There’s a bit toward the end where Tabitha volunteers to polish Marge’s lamp, and proceeds to just do a pole dance. There’s some satire to be had involving vacuous pop stars, that perhaps their sexy demeanor and behavior is more absent-minded, like just a compulsion they can’t control. It could have been delved into, considering it’s the main source of Buck’s frustration. Instead, it’s just a gag. Whatever.

Season 17 Final Thoughts
Not much left to say at this point. The series is broken in nearly every respect and shows no sign of any attempted repair. A token chuckle or two every episode is the best I hope for, and sometimes I don’t even get that.

The Best
“Milhouse of Sand and Fog,” “My Fair Laddy”

The Worst
“Bonfire of the Manatees,” “See Homer Run,” “Million Dollar Abie,” “Regarding Margie,” “The Monkey Suit”

(originally aired May 14, 2006)
As he has gone from goody two-shoes neighbor-eeno to psycho Christian conservative, Ned Flanders ends up the subject of greater scrutiny nowadays, even filling the role of minor antagonist from time to time. Marge staunchly opposed his ultra-violent religious films in “Homer and Ned’s Hail Mary Pass,” now Lisa butts heads with him in this episode covering intelligent design. In another example of how this show tries (and fails) to tackle hot button issues, Flanders is shocked to find an evolution exhibit at the museum without one mention of the Bible. As such, he and Lovejoy pressure the school to teach Creationism. Seeing the two of them stand by glaring as Skinner delivers the news to the students is unsettling to watch. Organized religion was always poked fun at in the show, but never was it vilified or truly belittled in the way it’s done here. Lisa opposes this curriculum change, citing several conservatives who believe in evolution, because it makes sense for an eight-year-old to know that. When she resorts to teaching evolution in secret, she is promptly arrested for it and prepares to stand trial.

The third act becomes a shitty Inherit the Wind riff with the two representatives that not only mirror the Brady and Drummond characters, but they also share their fucking names in case you didn’t get it. The trial is a farce, none of it makes sense, and we’re never told what will happen to Lisa if she loses. What could happen? She’s just a kid. Around this, barely, is Marge and Lisa butting heads on their beliefs, kind of like “Lisa the Skeptic,” but more shoddy and disingenuous. Marge finally ends up reading “The Origin of Species” and manages to help Lisa prove her innocence. Established in the trial is the missing link between ape and man, so when Marge gives her husband a bottle of beer, he hollers and thrashes it about like an animal trying to open it, mirroring said missing link completely. This settles the entire trial, and the case is dismissed. I thought the ending of “The Call of the Simpsons” way back when was a bit of a stretch, but this is just ridiculous. In the end, Lisa makes amends with Flanders, though I don’t recall them having one conversation in the whole damn episode. It’s stunning how the show can’t even mock such an easy topic like intelligent design. In the past, this series managed to deride groups of all kinds, but here all they can come up with is that creationists are dumb. How biting.

Tidbits and Quotes
– The opening with Bart’s last-minute summer vacation fun, I believe was left on the cutting room floor of “I’m Spelling as Fast as I Can” from three seasons back, so rather than waste such great material, they slapped it on here. Never mind the bit where Bart watches a Men in Black type film seemed dated at that point, no one will notice a thing!
– Before Flanders becomes our maybe antagonist, Homer gets in his share of assholery, cutting Ned in line at the museum and getting aggressive when he meekly objects (“Dude, I was totally here! You calling me a liar? In front of my kids! ‘Cause I’d take a bullet for you, man! Right in the mouth!”) The rest of the line takes advantage of Ned’s wishy-washy nature, and to the back of the line he goes.
– Everything at the museum is so painful to watch. Maggie pulls a switchblade on her mother. Homer shoots himself repeatedly wearing a bulletproof vest, because it’s safe to have live ammunition at a museum, terrorizing the entire room. Bart uses a medieval body stretcher on Milhouse that audibly dislocates his bones. I could not stop cringing. After that, Flanders is stuck in the horrifying Hall of Man, full of depictions of human ancestors and fossil records. He then proceeds to yell at his kids as they ask dumb questions and do dumb things. The only laugh I got is when museum guard Raphael points out the only mention of creationism in the museum: an animated diorama of God’s finger erecting life on Earth to the tune of “What a Fool Believes” by the Doobie Brothers.
– Lisa and Marge’s discussion at the kitchen table is an incredibly bizarre scene. It’s like “Skeptic” where the two have differing beliefs involving science and religion, but here Lisa asks her mother point blank, “You really have to choose here between science and belief.” Then we get slow push-ins on them as Marge thinks and emotional music plays… and we end with her running outside and joining her husband bouncing on a trampoline. End of scene. What?
– Act two ends with Wiggum watching and joking as Snake stands atop the Kwik-E-Mart gunning down innocent people. Hysterical!
– Marge finishes reading “The Origin of Species” and she’s truly enlightened. What is her commentary? (“Darwin’s argument is incredibly persuasive! And his ship was the Beagle, which reminds me of Snoopy, my favorite Peanut!”) I honestly don’t understand not only how a writer comes up with a joke like this and deems it funny enough to pitch in the writer’s room, let alone for it to end up in the actual show.
– Nelson’s disguises and the puzzle piece transitions is probably a reference to something. I thought about looking it up, but by this late in the episode, I was so worn out I don’t even give a fuck.

(originally aired May 7, 2006)
As if the gender swapping episode wasn’t cliche enough, now we have Marge getting amnesia. How does it happen? It doesn’t really matter, as the five minutes building toward it aren’t paid off in any way whatsoever. The episode is invariably a Homer-Marge episode: Marge quickly regains her memory of her children, but is unable to recognize her own husband. So the conceit of the show is Homer must make her remember their marriage and love for each other. His first attempts involve showing her photos of him savagely beating people up and suggesting that they have sex. You see, this is aggressively violent and moronic Homer, so the fact that there’s a mental block keeping Marge from remembering him seems more like a godsend than a problem that needs to be resolved. Given how much crap Homer has put her through over the years, it’s become almost impossible to believe that he truly deserves to be with Marge at this point, and nothing he does in this episode makes me feel any different.

The final act involves Marge being pushed by her sisters into a speed dating event, where she meets a seemingly nice guy, who abruptly ditches her when she eventually tells him about her condition and that she has kids. Sure, whatever. Homer shows up and delivers some nice pleasantries about Marge, which is kind of nice, and he gets back into her good graces. But how do we wrap things up? Marge remembered her kids by specific triggers: Maggie’s pacifier sucking, Lisa’s intelligence, all telltale traits of their characters and what they mean to Marge. So what’s Homer’s? It’s beer! (“You get drunk all the time!” “But you also remember that you’re an enabler?” “Of course I do! That’s why we’re such a great team!”) So the thing that makes Marge finally remember the love of her life is that he loves to get wasted, and that’s our heartwarming ending. On top of that is her gleeful admission that she enables that behavior, it’s like “Co-Dependent’s Day” all over again. This moment is really the whole crutch of the episode, and this is what their relationship is hinging on. Homer does stupid, reckless shit, and Marge puts up with it. That’s what the writers think of the core essence of their marriage now. These Homer-Marge shows are just making me depressed…

Tidbits and Quotes
– The opening is ridiculously stupid. Bart, Nelson and Milhouse come up with a “scam” of spray painting people’s house numbers on their curbs and demanding pay after the fact. Homer refuses to pony up, leaving a “74” on the front curb. This results in him getting all the mail for 74 Evergreen Terrace, because if you’re a mailman, it makes perfect sense for the house numbers to go 740, 74, 744. Marge receives a house cleaning contest winner notice, but is confused as to why she got it. Then nothing is ever made of it. Four minutes of stupid, stupid filler.
– I feel like the idea of Marge tidying up the house before the professional cleaners get there is kind of amusing and within her character, but then it just gets pushed way too far. And that’s how she gets amnesia. Alright then.
– Once more they play around with the severity of Homer strangling Bart, where an amnesiac Marge is alarmed by it. Bart weakly comments, “It hurts when I swallow,” prompting Homer to strangle him again. Hilarious!
– I mention it every time they use it, but Homer’s elongated moan seems to be a favorite clip in recent years. It wasn’t funny the first time, and continues to be not funny every time.
– A rare Dubya Bush mention in the photo album: first a picture of Homer fighting Bush Sr. from “Two Bad Neighbors,” then a picture of Homer fighting Bush Jr. in the Oval Office. It’s an amusing joke that would have worked a lot better in another context.
– Homer takes Marge out on a date to get her to love him again, which is the first sweet thing he’s done the entire episode. They go to Luigi’s, who sings them a backhanded song (“That Homer Simpson is quite a guy / He paid me ten bucks so I would lie / The truth is he’s not so great / He is the one man I truly hate”) It’s another instance of showing how Homer’s gone from just some random schmo to a town-renowned asshole. What run-in could Homer and Luigi have had that would cause him to hate him this much?
– Act two ends with Skinner and Krabappel crawling out of the mini-golf castle, having just fucked. Krabappel coldly comments, “Birthday’s over, Seymour.” Then she leaves. Funny?
– The nice guy at the speed dating builds an immediate connection with Marge. He even has two brothers who bear resemblance to Patty and Selma. Then in case you didn’t pick that up, we show Patty and Selma adjacent. Why explain it? We get the joke.
– Lenny and Carl phone up Homer to tell him about Marge’s date. This has been going on forever now, but it’s just ridiculous how these two are joined at the hip. Do they lead separate lives at all? They were just Homer’s two work chums, now they’re like hetero (maybe) life partners.

(originally aired April 30, 2006)
Ho-hum, another boring episode. It’s sad the series has gotten to this level of unremarkable where entire episodes (whole seasons, even) feel like they can be completely written off. The Simpsons see the Itchy & Scratchy musical, which is a big Lion King rip-off, and though a bit too on-the-nose, it’s probably the only interesting bit in the whole episode. After the show, Skinner has a bizarre conversation on stage with the director Juliane Krellner (or Julie Taymor, continuing the show’s tradition of taking a name, tweak it slightly, and there! Instant joke!) Here’s what’s said (“It’s no surprise you became such a success. You always got straight A’s in school!” “Well, I remember getting a B or two in math.” “Well, of course you did. You are a girl!”) I honestly can’t figure out why he would say that. The road to our main plot hinges on this, and it feels so flimsy, and eventually becomes nonsensical in multiple ways. People are outraged by Skinner’s accidental sexism and he’s replaced by a new principal (voiced by Frances MacDormand, another fine talent wasted), who jumps to the conclusion gender integration is to blame for the grading disparities between the sexes, and demands the school be split in two: a boy’s school and a girl’s school.

Lisa is excited for a challenge in girl’s math, but is shocked to find the class is focused on getting in touch with feelings and instilling confidence boosting (“What does a plus sign smell like? Is the number seven odd, or just different?”) On the surface, this is mildly clever, but I don’t get how we got to this point. If the offense was taken by statements that girls weren’t as smart as boys, what’s the deal with this class? I guess the response to the criticism was that women need to be split from the aggressive, rowdy men, except that doesn’t tie into wishy washy Skinner. Anyway, in order to get intellectual stimulation, Lisa masquerades as a boy, where the show reaches She’s the Man levels of comedy. I guess that’s not fair, She’s the Man is actually kind of charming and funny. By the end, Lisa receives an award for her outstanding mathematics and reveals her true identity. Bart stands up and declares he deserves the credit for teaching his sister to act like a boy, then Lisa throws the award at him, then she quickly realizes what she’s done and what she’s become. Except we never see any of that. Her truly blending in with the boys is told over a montage toward the end. Maybe if more time had been spent on that, showing her going native and being terrified of it, it could have been interesting. Instead it’s just a dry, dull affair.

Tidbits and Quotes
– The musical at the beginning has some good stuff in it, like the giant puppet knives and the guys in organ suits doing curtain calls at the end. I also like them alternating between using Itchy & Scratchy’s real voices, and their actually musically inclined equivalents.
– Exactly why Skinner so uniquely shot himself in the foot is strange to me, but I like his fumbling to cover up his missteps to a bunch of angry feminists (“It’s the differences, of which there are none, that make the sameness exceptional! Just tell me what to say!!”)
– I guess the school had the money to reconstruct the building, creating two separate entrances, two separate cafeterias, amongst other things.
– There’s a small running bit of Marge’s annoyance with Homer, thinking he believes women are mentally inferior. It’s silly and goes nowhere. We also get a flashback lifted from “Mr. Plow,” where we see young Marge studying for calculus before she’s whisked away by Homer, leaving her undereducated forever. It feels a bit more devastating than funny here, but the line following it is pretty good (“Since then, I haven’t been able to do any of the calculus I’ve encountered in my daily life!”)
– The boy’s school is a feral, violent, animalistic society, which I guess is the gag, but it wears thin pretty quickly. I like Nelson’s obsessive gun drawings, but that’s about it.
– Bart instructs Lisa how to be a boy in the third act. First he teaches her about eating dirty disgusting food off the floor. Then we get a Homer-Marge scene. Then we get Lisa’s final test: pick a fight with a boy. We hear her thoughts (“A fight! That would mean rejecting the last part of me that’s still a girl!”) That sure explains it. Also, what? We’ve seen none of that whatsoever in this episode. Maybe if we had, it would have been interesting seeing her transformation, but like modern Simpsons always says: tell, don’t show. Lisa gives a big speech at the end that’s supposed to be our message, about how she compromised everything she believed in, even though we didn’t see any of it, then they cut her off anyway, so if the show could care less, than I care even less than that. Whatever.