(originally aired March 12, 2006)
A story within a story within a story… I bet the writers thought they were real clever when they came up with this concept. It’s not a bad idea, if only the stories themselves were interesting or funny at all, which unfortunately they are not. The Simpsons get lost in an uncharted cavern, and while the others search for a way out, Lisa keeps a stuck Homer company and tells him a story of when she was trapped with Mr. Burns after being terrorized by a vicious ram. Burns then tells a tale of him losing his fortune and having to work at Moe’s. This leads to another story of Moe’s past love affair with Mrs. Krabappel, and how he came upon a sack of priceless gold. All of this comes to a head when the gold is revealed to be hidden in the caverns, and all the parties involved show up to claim it as theirs. I feel I should give the writers a little credit for setting up all the stories and having them come together, as the characters mostly work in their roles and the motivations are fine. I guess.

Each story has so much weird stuff going on, and altogether, that really hurts this episode. Lisa gets into Burns’s mansion, then she and Burns manage to continuously outrun this swift enraged animal, in a sequence that just goes on and on. The youthful Lisa, maybe, but decrepit old Mr. Burns? He and the Rich Texan’s scavenger hunt is also bizarre to me, and it feels weird and random that he’d end up at Moe’s. The Moe story was a bit better, but not by much. I believe Krabappel being with Moe about as much as I bought her being with Comic Book Guy, even less so actually, since she’s fresh off the bus you’d think she’d have higher standards than the modern day despondent Krabappel does. We also get an unnecessary and dumb origin story for Snake, filled with stupid hackneyed dialogue (“I’ve been robbed! I’ll take my revenge on society, by which I mean convenience stores!”) Everyone has a showdown for the gold, Marge tosses it off a cliff and everyone is grateful for it for some reason. Whatever. Given the potential of such an interesting story format, I think the episode sadly comes up short.

Tidbits and Quotes
– This episode won the Emmy for that year, which is fine, I guess, mostly because nothing can infuriate me more than “Three Gays of the Condo” winning one too.
– We’re at the point I can predict jokes now. When Bart goes nuts playing with the water bottle, I knew it would end with Marge saying, “He’s gonna sleep well tonight!” Mostly because they’ve done this joke before.
– Burns inputs his place of birth in a gate code: Pangaea. It’s funny because he’s old!
– Not a fan of Burns saying “Dream on, bitch!”
– How exactly did Moe manage a relationship with Krabappel so long without her finding out about the bar? It’s called Moe’s, for Pete’s sake.
– The bit with Bart and Krabappel in the classroom is very odd to me. At first it struck me as echoing “Bart Gets An F,” but at this point in the series it feels so alien for Bart to appear actually giving a shit about his education. Then later they pull the rug out where Bart reveals he was just distracting Krabappel while Nelson stole shit. So I guess those two are randomly in cahoots. It just seemed strange, and making that connection just makes me remember how “Bart Gets An F” is a thousand times more enjoyable in every respect than anything I’ve seen in many a season.
– Burns risking his life to save Lisa? Fuck that. Just a few episodes ago he took money from a children’s hospital to increase his own lifespan by mere minutes.
– The only joke I laughed at was Moe stepping out from the shadows with a bat, only to be surprised that Burns and the Rich Texan have guns, so he sheepishly steps back and pretends he has one too. Nice performance by Hank Azaria.

(originally aired February 26, 2006)
Previously in “The President Wore Pearls,” the show tried to tackle an Evita parody, but came up short because they weren’t mindful of their characters, just shoving them in this situation to match the musical even when it didn’t make sense. This is another musical parody, but it works a thousand times better because the story and songs being parodies this time work within the context of the show and its cast. Taking off My Fair Lady, Lisa attempts to turn gruff, drunkard Willie into a proper gentleman as her entry into the science fair. Well… that aspect doesn’t entirely make sense, but it doesn’t really matter. When Willie’s shack is destroyed, he stays the night at the Simpsons, and he resolves that he would like to better his lot in life. With some effort, Lisa completely transforms Willie to be completely refined, eventually becoming maitre’d at the Gilded Truffle. But like everyone in Springfield, he finds that where he was the happiest was right back where he started, so Willie gives up his proper trimmings for his life in festering squalor.

As I said before, this parody works because it fits the characters: Lisa was shoehorned into the role of Eva Peron, but Willie as Eliza Doolittle makes more sense. The songs are also quite good, and all serve to move the story along. The first one kicks the plot off, then another during Willie’s teachings, then another when he’s completely reformed, and then a final one as he is forlorn for the life he once had. They’re all riffs on songs from My Fair Lady, which helps to make them more memorable, but I definitely think they stand out on their own. Also great is Dan Castellaneta as Willie, giving a heartfelt performance as Willie proper, and also proper Willie, altering his voice to sound more dignified, but still maintaining the character. There are a fair amount of bits that don’t work, and a mostly uninteresting B-plot about Homer’s pants, but this is a pretty good episode, with great music and ultimately an interesting character study. After “Pearls” and so many other examples, I thought the show had forgotten how to properly do parody, but I guess I was wrong. Though I’m sure it won’t take long to be proven right once again.

Tidbits and Quotes
– We don’t see Mrs. Pommelhorst, the gym teacher that often. She dates all the way back to “The PTA Disbands,” unseen but mentioned by the girl stuck on the handlebars (“Hellloo! Mrs. Pommelhorst! I’d like to get down now!”) She was in “Little Girl in the Big Ten,” and I’m sure a couple other ones. But here we start with the big joke: this masculine, tough woman is going to get a sex change and be Mr. Pommelhorst! Hilarious, right? It just feels too obvious.
– Bombardment, bombardment, bombardment… boy, that dodgeball schtick grew old instantly, and it’s the only joke for the first four minutes of the episode. And it just feels cruel to a point too, this grown man viciously pummeling children in the face with dodgeballs. They then attempt a Full Metal Jacket parody with Bart brandishing an evil grin holding the frozen-over ball with the teacher screaming, “What is your major malfunction!” That ball could easily have killed him, but I guess I can overlook it since Bart probably isn’t smart enough to have thought that through.
– I like the false start to the first song, showing Willie’s low expectations for life (“All I want is a place somewhere…” [beat] “And?” “That’s it.”)
– Nice flashback of Willie’s father yelling and screaming at him minutes after he’d exited the womb. The reveal was pretty obvious, but it was still funny (“Would you like to cut the cord?” “Let him cut it himself! It’s time he learned life ain’t one big party!”) Baby Willie with his shaggy unibrow is pretty adorable too.
– The bullies enact their own parody of Around the World in Eighty Days. For some reason. Chalk them up as more characters the writers have absolutely no clue how to write for anymore.
– “The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain” has become “What flows from the nose should not get on my clothes.” Willie swinging Bart and Lisa around by their nostrils is a wonderfully gross sequence, and Lisa singing her next line all nasally is pretty great.
– I actually felt for Willie in the episode. The final number “The Shack Where I Lived” leading up until the end I thought were very sweet. His shack is rebuilt with one final touch, a “Home Sweet Home” picture frame Lisa put up. Willie appears touched, but when Lisa leaves, he rips it down in disgust (“I liked it the way it was!”) A sweet ending with an amusing final moment to end the episode? I’m shocked how competent most of this episode was.

(originally aired January 29, 2006)
Hey, another tepid episode! Although to be fair, aside from the terrible non-ending and the B-“plot,” this one actually isn’t too bad as a ramshackle Homer-Bart story. There are scenes between them that actually feel authentic as a father and son at odds with each other, but there are also others that don’t work at all. A catastrophic prank by Bart leaves Skinner urging Homer and Marge to send the boy to a rigorous reformation camp in Oregon. When Bart is unable to fly by himself, Homer is forced to drive him there, making him miss his trip to Vegas with his bar buddies. A highlight here is where Homer reflects on his miserable stasis in life (“I’m 38 years old, driving a crappy car with a son who doesn’t respect me, and I’m one Snickers Pie away from losing my foot to diabetes!”) It’s said out of rage, but it’s so unbelievably refreshing to see Homer lamenting his poor lot in life, rather than just giddily laughing at everything and being so upbeat all the time. Blissfully ignorant Homer is fun, just not for the entire runtime of an episode.

Homer and Bart bond over mocking a more loving father and son, which is another great, classic-feeling scene. But Bart tries to make his escape, leaving Homer to track him down, ending up almost plummeting off a cliff. This leads to a “hysterical” scene where Bart raises and lowers the fender of the car to mess with his dad, giving Homer mood whiplash, going from fawning and loving, to increasingly disturbing death threats (“I’m gonna double kill you! Then I’ll bury you in a shallow grave, dig you up and kill you again! That’s the beauty of a shallow grave!”) Homer dumps Bart off at the camp, feels guilty for it, then takes him back and drives away. Whatever. Back home, Marge holds a yard sale to unload her husband and son’s junk, but finds her biggest seller are expired pills. I could almost buy this if they kept up Marge’s naivety, but Snake openly says he’s buying illegal drugs, and Marge couldn’t be happier to sell them to him. Very out-of-character. The ending features Lisa returning home to find her parents are both incarcerated, and she sighs how she always figured the family would whittle down to just her. Not only is it an unsatisfying, unfunny ending, but it continues to paint the Simpson family as rickety and dysfunctional, where they used to be loving and close-knit despite their squabbles. This episode’s got some surprisingly good scenes in it, but the stupid shit kind of weighs it down.

Tidbits and Quotes
– Milhouse is another character that seems to becoming impossible to write for. He’s sort of like Marge, where they can’t write dialogue for a meek, out-of-touch character (“We can’t leave here without turning one little valve!” “Yeah! It’d be like going to Amsterdam and not taking a walking tour of famous doors!”) That would be slightly odd for Marge to say, but it’s even more out-of-place for a ten-year-old boy.
– There’s barely any story here, so there’s lots of sequences and jokes stretched to fill out the runtime. The steam filling up the school feels so long, and other gags like Flanders singing the colors of the dreamcoat and the aforementioned bit of Homer screaming at Bart just go on foreeeeeeeever.
– It’s sort of dumb as the explanation for why Bart is “no-fly,” but I love the flashback of Bart’s egregious transgression: removing his seat belt before the light went off upon landing (“Thanks a lot, 33C! Now we all have to go back to Minneapolis! And I’m very tired!”)
– The scene of Homer and Bart at the diner is honestly the best I’ve seen in years. It was so charming seeing those two enjoy each other’s company believably, by mocking others. It felt like when the family mocked Flanders’s note in “Dead Putters Society,” or the ending of “Saturdays of Thunder.”
– Why would Marge be selling the Mr. Plow jacket? She loves that thing. It just seems like more cramming in old references without really understanding what they mean.
– Smithers is buying estrogen! It’s funny because he’s a gay man, that means he wants to buy female drugs? (“It’s for a friend… who’s trapped in the body of another friend.”) Wait, does that mean he wants a sex change operation? What the fuck have they done to this character?
– Homer’s Vegas nightmare with the sexy Bart waitress is incredibly disturbing (“Hey Homer, you wanna eat my shorts?”) Burt Bacharach turning into Bart Bartabart is a pretty good gag though.

(originally aired January 8, 2006)
You might have noticed that first acts in later years have been becoming increasingly more tangential, having absolutely nothing to do with the main story. While they do present the opportunity for some good jokes or satire (which there have been neither of lately, but that’s besides the point), as a viewer, you feel a bit like your time has been wasted, that the writers couldn’t come up with a full enough story so they bullshitted for six minutes before actually kicking the plot off. This episode has, bar none, the worst unrelated first act in the entire series. Marge is incensed that a toll booth has been put up on a busy road, and instead opts to take the free alternative. To combat this, Quimby installs dividers on either side to block that route, which would already be enough, but also they also put in tire spikes on the street to lock everyone in. Why? You’re already boxed in as it is. Marge freaks out and slams into reverse, which causes an entire row of cars behind her to get rear-ended. It’s like the stupid shit in “See Homer Run,” there’s randomly like twenty cars bumper-to-bumper. So all the popped tires get thrown on the tire fire, which causes a greater amount of smoke to rise, so much so that it melts the ice caps of a nearby frosted mountain, revealing a frozen postman. What was he doing up there? Was he fucking flash-frozen? How are his letters still intact and not soggy and unreadable? This is the catalyst for the plot to start: the Simpsons receive a long lost letter. There are a billion ways they could have started this story, and this is the one they landed on. It’s baffling.

The main story just bored me more than anything. The letter is from an old lover of Homer’s mother, who believes that her child is actually his, leading Homer to think Abe might not be his real father. Homer tracks down the mystery man: wealthy treasure hunter Mason Fairbanks, voiced by Michael York. He’s a delightful old Brit who Homer immediately latches onto, tossing Abe aside like a sack of hot rocks. It’s actually not as cruel as it sounds, so I wasn’t annoyed, it was just kind of uninteresting. We know that Fairbanks isn’t his father, so the episode is meant to posit how Homer’s life would be different had he been raised by another person. Except it doesn’t do that at all, as instead, it ends with an undersea treasure salvaging where Homer nearly dies. The only thing that aggravated me here is that he has visions of his father in the past, depicting Abe as a great dad, which as we’ve seen, he wasn’t at all. Him playing around with Li’l Homer is fine and sweet, but the bit of him giving Homer all his money on his wedding day feels so phony (“I gave you everything, and it still wasn’t enough.”) Sure, this did actually happen in “Lisa’s First Word,” but emotionally it was handled so much more efficiently and they undercut it with a joke. Here, it’s just super sweet for its own sake. In the end, Abe reveals he’s the real father… God, whatever. How could an episode with such a startling in-universe reveal be so safe and boring?

Tidbits and Quotes
– Joe Frazier returns for a quick guest spot, which only makes me wish I was watching “Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?”
– “Voila! Which is French for ‘ta-da’!” “I’m trapped like the ‘L’ in a BLT!” These guys are really at a loss in writing dialogue for Marge. Every line makes me cringe a little bit.
– I can’t get over how fucking stupid the frozen mailman thing is. I could bitch about it for so much longer than I already did, but why bother? It’s one of the dumbest things ever done on this show.
– I definitely believe that Mona cheated on Abe, given the time period and how much of an ass he was, but it’s kind of uncomfortable to hear. I dunno, it’s like the bit from “D’oh-in’ in the Wind” where Seth and Munchie not-so-subtly admit they banged her to her own son.
– This episode would be remedied instantaneously by a DNA test. At first Abe refuses to take one, then by the end of act two, he instantly agrees to it. Plus there’s the fact that Homer basically looks like a non-wrinkled Grampa, as he demonstrates to the audience. Of course they’re related, you dolts.
– The dream sequence of Li’l Homer playing catch with a question mark is kind of cute. Then they break a window and an exclamation point comes out shaking its fist.
– Marge warns Homer not to get too emotionally invested, seeming very apprehensive about the whole thing. Next scene they’re all on Fairbanks’s boat yukking it up. Whatever.
– The treasure hunt is so uninteresting, like who cares? What is is supposed to mean, that Homer’s life would have been more exciting if this guy was his father? Is that what he wanted? I really don’t know.
– Homer’s new catchphrase seems to be a very looooong moan. They keep using the same one, but condense it when need be. It’s annoying every time. Every. Single. Time.

(originally aired December 18, 2005)
Oh boy, another anthology episode, and this time it’s a holiday edition! It’s quite… boring. I usually find these shows that insert our characters into famous stories rather lazy and uninspired, and even though only one of the three here is an adaptation, I still get that feeling anyway. The first tells the story of the very first Christmas, with the birth of Jesus Christ, here played by an adorable baby Bart. Marge is Mary, Homer is Joseph, other characters are… other characters. And there are jokes made. These segments are honestly just so uninteresting to me. You know the story they’re telling, so you’re just waiting for them to go through the motions. Maybe if they had some interesting religious commentary, or subverted the tale in some manner, but that would be too risky. Why take a chance in comedy when you can take the safe route?

The second segment is the best, in that it made me the least sleepy. Grampa spins a nonsense tale of being stuck on a deserted island with Mr. Burns after being shot down during World War II. They then accidentally shoot down Santa Claus on Christmas Eve, and must help him repair his sleigh. There’s a few lines here that are amusing, but just as many that aren’t. Moreover I enjoyed seeing a younger Abe and Burns, and hearing Dan Castellaneta and Harry Shearer off their typical autopilot making the characters sound sixty years younger was also nice to hear. The third segment is just a series of vignettes set to the Nutcracker Suite, the most glaring of which is a joyful montage of Moe’s many failed attempts at suicide. I had just chastised the show for not being ballsy, but in this instance it’s completely misdirected. As I’ve mentioned previously, any taboo topic can be turned into comedy, but the fact that being suicidal has become nothing more than a quirky character trait for Moe that they can joke about, it ultimately feels so completely dour and offensive. And it’s the gag that closes our show: he curses that a tracker trailer didn’t hit and kill him! Merry Christmas, everybody! A thoroughly forgettable holiday show.

Tidbits and Quotes
– Baby Bart causing miracles nodding his head a la I Dream of Jeannie, Homer and Skinner acting like the Three Stooges, all the bits from the first segment really fall flat. There’s only one moment that comes close to being amusingly self aware. Eddie questions the moral rightness of going in and slaughtering a baby, to which Wiggum responds, “Don’t worry, boys. No one will ever speak or write of this again.” That joke works. It’s similar to an earlier bit where the Archangel Lisa appears to explain Bart/Jesus’s life story to the disillusioned baby, but this line feels more organic. But how do they unnecessarily cap off the joke? Matthew is standing by, scroll in hand! “What a boffo beginning for my book!” See, just in case you’ve never heard of the fucking Bible, we’ll show a guy writing it! So see, the story will be written of, so what Wiggum said was funny! Get it! Get it?!
– The second segment has some chuckle-worthymoments in it, like the reindeer performing CPR on Santa, and a few good lines (“Donner! Blitzen!” “He’s German! That’s good eatin’!”)
– They lead into the singing in the third act by mentioning how the Nutcracker is in the public domain, so they don’t have to pay any royalties. Fair enough, but this show has utilized so many licensed songs they’ve had to pay for at this point, a good share of them only for a few seconds. Hell, in the next episode, they play Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” for what can’t be more than eight seconds. That must have cost them something, and added nothing to the episode.
– The final scene with Marge getting Homer a gift for him to give to her is kind of sweet. I guess. I’ve been lulled into a disillusioned stupor at this point, so I’ll take anything that isn’t Homer screaming or humiliating others.