20. The Trouble with Trillions

• At some point every New Year’s Eve night, I’ll think, “Will this horrible year never end?” The opening scene is fantastic; I love the added touch that the Jebediah statue is already TP’d as the townspeople gather to count down. Also a favorite is the snippet we hear of Krusty’s drunken rendition of “Auld Lang Syne.”
• Ned doing his taxes on January 1st (complete with a fistful of mints) is very in-character, as is his explanation of what taxes are for to his son (“Policemen, trees, sunshine, and let’s not forget the folks who just don’t feel like working, God bless ’em!”)
• I really like the reveal that Marge is the artist behind the sailboat painting above the couch, and her saying she painted it for Homer is a very sweet detail (I wouldn’t be surprised if in a few seasons, we get an entire terrible episode about the story behind it.) The ending of the scene of Marge hanging the painting back on the wall, lamenting the waste of her talent, is cut in syndication, and maybe better off. It’s kind of a bummer.
• Homer is in full invincible stupid mode in his frantic rush to the post office, which sucks, but this piece of animation is ironically fantastic. It looks like the totaled car gets smashed flat; whoever was in there is most certainly dead.
  
• The reveal of the second IRS agent behind the swivel chair, followed by the first agent sitting and turning back around is a wonderfully stupid gag.
• The IRS uses Homer to spy on the gang at Moe’s, but they never say that they suspect anyone there. Did they have a target in mind, or did they just assume maybe we could arrest one of these idiot’s buddies? Also, Charlie is dressed identically to Homer with a white collared shirt and blue pants, that’s kind of weird.
• Milhouse posing in the photo booth shirtless is so great; Pamela Hayden nails his awkward and embarrassed “My… my shirt fell off” when he’s exposed.
• The whole trillion dollar bill scandal is kind of stupid when you think about it for more than five seconds. The government let Mr. Burns abscond with a literal trillion dollars for over fifty years without any substantial investigation? Plus, it’s revealed that he keeps the damn bill in his wallet, so they could have confronted and arrested him at any time. Why did they need a big dope like Homer to handle this seemingly very important, half-a-century-old assignment?
• Burns just letting Homer into his home feels off to me. They make a joke out of it, with him wanting to hurt Homer in some way before he leaves, but his feeble concessions to him (“I’ll get you a towel,”) while kind of funny, aren’t worth defanging him like this. Also, the Hall of Burns is really stupid. Why would he have these elaborate museum-quality dioramas in his private home that no one ever visits?
• I’m all for an episode that’s critiquing worthless government spending, but this episode is such a giant mess that I don’t even know if it’s supposed to have a point or not. Burns makes a speech about thinking for yourself and not letting the government control you, and then the act break is Homer giggling about making one of the unconscious IRS agents touch the other’s ass. Great writing, guys.
• People rightfully point out how out-of-character Lisa’s “screw college, we got dune buggies!” bit is, but even weirder is Marge, for some reason, assuming they would be keeping the trillion dollars?
• I love the rear IRS agent’s expression after the other comments, “They’ll be back. They’ll miss American TV.”
  
• The third act is pretty terrible, basically tanking an episode that was already careening off a cliff. There’s some good bits with Castro, but the road there wasn’t worth it. There’s also way too much of dumb oblivious Burns (settling for being Vice President after Homer “calls” it first, not remembering he’s flying the plane).
• Simpsons Archive retro review: “A pretty funny episode! The plot meandered, but at least that’s better than last week’s jumpy episode. It was fun to see a good Burns/Smithers episode again. Also amusing was the kids’ reaction to getting a trillion dollars (Lisa doesn’t need college after all!) A nice, if not perfect romp.”

21. Girly Edition

• The opening with Krusty and Lindsey Naegle is so solid. Krusty attesting to Itchy & Scratchy’s educational value (“What don’t they learn? Don’t trust mice, cats are made of glass…”), the set-up of the Mattel and Mars Bar Quick-Energy Choco-bot Hour (“That’s barely legal as it is,”) Krusty outlining his show (“There’s a monologue, those idiot puppets, Krusty’s nap time, the second monologue, Paul Harvey, Senor Papino… I tell you, it’s the tightest three hours and ten minutes on TV!”)
• I like how we see the small splats of creamed corn against the school window representing Willie’s shack exploding. It feels more creative and shows some restraint from making the event more bombastic… as well as not needing to animate it, which was probably a plus.
• Lindsey Naegle would be dulled and overused in future seasons, but she’s at her strongest in this episode (maybe second to “The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show.”) Her rambling off all her showbiz buzzwords, then not understanding Lisa’s simple turn of phrase (“Let’s be honest, Bart’s not exactly the brightest penny in the fountain.” “In English, Lisa?”) is just excellent.
• The Mojo B-plot feels like a crazy Homer story, but it never gets too off-the-wall, considering the most extreme thing Homer does with the monkey is get it to steal donuts for him, which is appropriate for him. Also great is Marge’s consistent horror at this filthy monkey being in her house, and her irritation at Homer that just grows and grows throughout the episode.
• The best section of this episode is the look into Kent Brockman’s human interest stories (“They tug at the heart and fog the mind.”) Him on the carousel pausing as it goes around (“This is Kent Brockman…..  reporting”) always makes me laugh. I also like how we see Bart attempt to mimic Brockman’s tone and some of his phrasings as he does his own imitation special reporting.
• I have no idea why the hell Burns and Smithers are in bean bag chairs, but this scene still cracks me up (“Smithers… do you think maybe my power plant killed those ducks?” “There’s no ‘maybe’ about it, sir.” “…excellent.”)
  
• Oh my, the Crazy Cat Lady. Great in her first appearance, terrible in every other one.
• The obese Mojo struggling to breathe is pretty disconcerting, but still funny.
• Milhouse’s report about discreetly discarding urine-soaked bed sheets is great, but it’s compounded and made even funnier when Bart observes the “soiled mattresses” at the dump and we quickly cut back to a guilt-ridden Milhouse.
• I love Willie’s incredibly loud and shocked “WHAT?!” at Lisa telling him Bart’s his son. I also love that Lisa saves the day by channeling her own version of Bart/Kent’s empty schmaltz reporting, and she’s smart enough to come up with one completely off the cuff (“That little hellraiser is the spawn of every shrieking commercial, every brain-rotting soda pop, every teacher who cares less about young minds than about cashing their big, fat paychecks. No, Bart’s not to blame.  You can’t create a monster and then whine when he stomps on a few buildings!  I’m Lisa Simpson.”)
• Simpsons Archive retro review: “While there were a few things in the episode which were quite funny; all of it is lost for me in the absolutely inexcusable behavior of Lisa… this was like watching PTA Disbands all over again. I have always had a soft spot for Lisa Simpson, and to see this episode was very disheartening… This wasn’t Lisa Simpson; this was someone who acted cold-hearted, egoistic, and downright selfish. Whoever wrote this episode needs a serious slap in the face… I don’t think anyone should be allowed to write for the Simpsons unless you know how the characters are supposed to act; this was horrible, and it totally ruined what I thought was an otherwise decent episode.”

22. Trash of the Titans

• The opening few minutes is easily the best stuff in the episode: Costington’s concocting a bullshit holiday to increase their profits even further (I’d love to hear more about Christmas 2), and Marge eating up the idea of “Love Day” feels very appropriate. I also love Homer’s ridiculous disappointment at getting the “wrong” bear (“They didn’t have Lord Huggington?”)
  
• The scenario of Homer and the kids prolonging taking out the trash for as long as possible is excellent (Bart stapling the banana peel to the pile is a great gag), but then that snowballs after Homer pisses off the garbagemen to them living in increasing levels of filth. It goes on way longer than Marge would reasonably be able to tolerate, as rancid trash covers the interior and exterior of their house. It feels like an instance where the writer’s room came up with a bunch of gags (Marge tossing bacon outside to distract the rats, her talking about the crazy lady who lives in their trash pile), forsaking any realism that Marge would put up with any of this. She may be generally submissive, but she most definitely would have written that forged apology after the first scene.
  
• The poison pill of this episode is Homer, who acts like an absolute maniac from the moment he storms into Ray Patterson’s office. He rants and raves about standing up for the little guy, “rattling a few cages,” but for the entire episode, I have absolutely no idea what his motivation or wants are, and I don’t think he does either. It’s just supposed to be funny that he’s a directionless lunatic? The episode even acknowledges it with the “Local Nut at it Again” subheadline in the newspaper starting act two. Homer’s confusing, intolerable behavior for the entire runtime makes this episode the worst of season 9 for me (excluding “All Singing, All Dancing.”)
• Continuing that, Homer waltzing on stage with U2 without a care in the world feels like a big turning point. He has absolutely no qualms about breaking into a rock show, attacking the female technician backstage, and addressing the crowd under the belief they’ll be thrilled to see him. The scene also ends with the very first instance of me enjoying Homer getting hurt because it felt like satisfying karma to an asshole character, as he gets beat up by U2’s goons.
• The best gag in the episode is actually at the U2 show, where the crowd is going nuts, except for Otto, who is still seated and shouting, “Sit down! You’re ruining it for everyone!” I grew to love that line even more the year I went to Comic-Con and attended the Steven Universe panel, where the crowd full-on cheered almost every few minutes. It got to be kind of annoying, as the panelists could have actually talked more if they didn’t have to constantly stop for the crowd to keep going nuts, and I felt exactly like Otto in that moment.
• More than halfway into the episode, Homer actually gets some fucking direction with his “Can’t Someone Else Do It?” campaign slogan. I like the idea of it, directly appealing to a lazy populous with grandiose claims of hired hands doing all your dirty work for you, but Homer’s attitude just sours everything it touches. “The Garbageman Can” thankfully comes off unscathed, one of the last classic songs of the series. It’s a real showstopper that I only wish was in an episode that wasn’t shit.
• Homer cutting Patterson’s brakes is his first attempted murder of the series, and sadly would not be his last.
• “Simpson, the American people have never tolerated incompetence in their government officials.” Just gets funnier each passing year!
• When we get to the third act, the episode really starts to feel like the Wacky Homer Adventures, guest starring the rest of the family, a template that would follow through the rest of the Mike Scully years and beyond. The scene where they’re at home and Homer interrupts Lisa’s explanation about sanitation work (“Wait, shut up! I have an idea!”) and runs out the door, leaving the family just sitting them, looking around vacantly is a pretty telling moment.
• I can’t really get all that upset about the reality-breaking ending of moving the entire town. I actually would have embraced a crazy ending like this if it were tacked on the end of an episode that actually tried to be about something.
• Simpsons Archive retro review: “I’m starting to wonder why I bother reviewing these anymore. Mike Scully rightfully held this episode until now, and the high-quality animation and extra attention to detail given to it because it was the 200th are the only things that can compliment it enough. I’ll soon be quoting everything like crazy so watch out… everyone with 14.4kb modems thank me for my short review. (A+)”

23. King of the Hill

• McBain fights the CommieNazis in his last great appearance. I also like that Homer crosses paths with Rainier in a believable fashion (of course he’d be the only one in Springfield using an all-night gym) and Rainier’s motivational insults are great too (“Go past the max! Master your ass!”)
• Lovejoy’s exasperated “Just play the damn game, Ned!” always makes me laugh.
• A reliable classic era story motivator was Homer wanting to regain the love of his kids or make them proud of him, and this episode holds that firm from the beginning. Him embarrassing himself during the capture-the-flag game is just devastating enough for Homer to actually feel ashamed of it (him wailing on the floor covered in deviled eggs definitely seems scar-worthy for Bart) and I like how this motivates Homer through the rest of the episode.
• The tub of ice cream with miniature pies looks pretty damn good to me right now.
• I am incapable of seeing a sign for a gym and not thinking it’s pronounced “guy-m.”
• I appreciate the restraint of showing that Homer has gotten fitter, but is not like absolutely ripped. The scene of him daring the family to find any flab, only for them to find a whole bunch of soft spots, much to his chagrin, is pretty adorable. Only two months of working out at night and he’s certainly built up his arm muscles, but he’s not a bodybuilder, unlike a handful of future episodes where he got completely roided out at the drop of a hat if the plot required him to (“Homer the Whopper” comes to mind.) 
• I don’t know why they cast Brendan Fraser and Steven Weber together as the Powersauce reps, but their repartee with each other is very good. The product itself is a great send-up on “diet” bars as nutritional substitutes (unleashing the awesome power of apples!) and Fraser and Weber play the perfect energetic corporate shills. I like later in act three when they actually break their facades to warn Homer not to climb the mountain alone, and then immediately throw him under the bus with faux-seriousness in broadcasting that Homer has switched to their market competitor (the Vita-Peach Health Log), absolving themselves of any wrongdoing or bad press.
• Those flapjacks in a can look really good too. If you had a little slot on the bottom to separate the syrup so they didn’t got soggy… man, that sounds delicious.
• Homer getting assistance from the sherpas not only makes the insane idea of him scaling a gigantic mountain a little more believable, but they also provide some of the best lines of the episode (“I foresaw your death last night.” “Stop saying that!”) I also like their absolute glee at being dismissed by Homer, and their hitchhiking inexplicably in front of the Simpson house, just so the family could see them outside and realize that Homer is fucked.
• I don’t know if I ever registered this before, but it’s odd that Abe’s rambling stories are usually complete bullshit, but him climbing up the mountain (and falling 8,000 feet?) is apparently true, as Homer finds the frozen body of his “buddy” McAllister. Abe’s failure is meant to mirror Homer’s, but before that point, it was just a nonsense story, so any emotional impact isn’t really felt. But no matter, McAllister’s last words (“Tell my wife my last thoughts were of her… blinding and torturing Abe Simpson”) and the grim finale of Homer using the frozen body as a sled are more than worth the trouble.
• Homer using the Simpson flag from the church picnic game in place of the Powersauce one is a pretty sweet detail, making the story feel like it’s coming full circle. The entire top half of the mountain collapsing is pretty ridiculous, but I don’t know how else you’d get Homer to have his moment of triumph. It’s a little rickety, but the Homer-Bart emotional through-line works surprisingly well, especially for a show this deep into season 9.
• Simpsons Archive retro review: “This episode seemed to play upon the viewer’s emotions more than usual. I think the communazi’s death was one of the most graphic scenes I’ve seen on the Simpons. Also, the closing of act I was big on emotional content. Lastly, the victorious ending. This almost seemed like a WWF match with its emotional choreography! I think that’s especially potent for those of us that see similarities between Homer and ourselves. Anyway, the whole ep ended up being a real watchable pick-me-up, due primarily to the emotional content. The amount of hilarity was kept to a minimum, which i suppose is needed in order to have a real emotional response from your audience. Here’s hoping for something crazy next week…”

24. Lost Our Lisa

• I’m sure my wife wishes that teacher conference day was as much fun as it’s shown here. Also very nice of them to invite Willie along with them.
• Bart and Milhouse just show up at the power plant to bug Homer about getting super glue, just because, I guess. They couldn’t have gotten the glue some other way? Also, why is Bart allowed to wander around the entire town on his day off but Lisa is forbidden to take the bus by herself? Maybe Marge thought Bart was just at Milhouse’s house, but with no line explaining that, it reads kind of weird to me.
• I really like Lisa playing Homer like a fiddle in order to get his “permission” to take the bus, inflating her request to a limousine and acting faux-disappointed in Homer delicately downgrading her. Lisa hanging up on her father in the middle of him saying he loves her is a perfect capper to the scene.
• The two flocks of geese flying at each other is a stupid gag I love; the pan over revealing the second flock, and one of the poor birds nosediving out of the sky during the fight, it’s so funny.
• When offered a ride in the back of Cletus’s pick-up truck full of roadkill, Lisa holds back vomit and squeals as she flees the scene. I assume it’s Yeardley Smith vocalizing while clasping her hands to her mouth, but the sound has always sounded like a baby cry to me. Does anyone else hear that?
• Dr. Hibbert’s frightening button applicator feels a little too silly for a “serious” doctor like him to use, but I love his incredibly severe insistence that “it had to be terror sweat!”
• My goodness does the episode plunge into the abyss when Homer goes after Lisa. The end of act two into act three has Homer and Lisa frantically looking for each other with a whole lot of suspenseful music in place of any humor. And then we get Homer in the cherry picker, and man… not only isn’t it funny, but it’s a very early example of Homer-getting-hurt being used as a humor crutch for the writers. He scrapes his skull against a low bridge, he smashes through an entire wooden dock neck-first, and finally, a fucking drawbridge closes on his head. Homer fell down a goddamn gorge (twice!) in “Bart the Daredevil,” and not only was he horrifically injured and hospital-bound, there’s multiple layers as to why the scene is funny outside of him getting hurt (he skateboarded over it himself to “teach Bart a lesson,” the absurdity that the “lesson” would even work, his cockiness in thinking he would make it.) Here, Homer experiences a cavalcade of serious injuries for no reason, then walks away scot free with a tire mark on his cranium and a smile on his face. How far we have fallen.
• Despite the episode seeming to have blown its wad with the endless cherry picker scene, we still have Homer’s soapbox about taking stupid risks, because that makes total sense for his character (”Me, I’m a risk taker! That’s why I have so many adventures!”) This characterization isn’t even consistent in this very episode: Homer was wary about Lisa taking the bus at the beginning of the episode, and he runs off scared for his daughter’s safety after Lenny and Carl worry him about it. Where was Captain Wacky then? But there’s even more doom lurking behind that quote. “Homer’s Enemy” cast a spotlight on Homer, the not-so-average Joe, and how many crazy escapades he’s gotten into over eight seasons. It effectively breaks the character to some extent, and it feels like some of the writers took that as permission to just go for broke on not only Homer getting up to crazy shenanigans, but for him to just flat-out admit it too. This is Homer now, and this scene is his new mission statement. And it fucking sucks.
• Boredom continues with the museum break-in. There’s just so much of it played for suspense with barely any jokes. Homer can’t even break open the stupid orb without needing a pointless sequence of all of the rope pylons tipping over as Lisa gasps in horror. This episode and “Trash of the Titans,” both at the tail end of season 9, are the biggest terrible omens for things to come: over-dramatic action and/or suspense sequences, knee-jerk character changes, forced sentimentality, and Homer the human punching bag/sentient asshole.
• Simpsons Archive retro review: “A pleasant surprise which makes Season Nine better than Season Eight, in that it’s the first episode I’ve given an A to since Season Seven’s finale, ‘Summer of 4’2.’ A realistically troubling situation for both Lisa and Homer when Lisa’s natural immaturity gets her lost in Springfield. Most of the humor is woven well into the story, too, which is rare. Not to mention everyone is in character for once, and the episode deals primarily with the family–and not the entire town. Act Three’s change of pace feels more like a story progression and less a jump from one thing to a completely unrelated other. All and all, an outstanding effort, especially for the waning ninth season.”

25. Natural Born Kissers

• The opening where Homer discovers Frank Grimes’ funeral program feels like yet another season 9 warning sign. As I talked about in “Homer’s Enemy,” that episode works only within its own vacuum, but multiple episodes past this point feature casual mentions of Frank Grimes where Homer continues acting like an inconsiderate dick, the biggest offender being “The Great Louse Detective,” where he acts like a braindead dope in front of Grimes’s own illegitimate son. Homer sleeping through Grimes’s funeral was a dark button on a subversive, but isolated story, but him not recognizing the man who killed himself right in front of him makes him seem like a sociopath.
• Up, Up and Buffet is a neat set piece, the perfect polar opposite to Homer and Marge’s intended romantic evening. The valet attendants manually shaking the restaurant to dip the wings feels like a classic Simpsons bit.
• There’s something I noticed in the scene where Homer and Marge soberly look out the plane window at the happy romantic couple at the Gilded Truffle. It feels like the character design standards shifted during the Mike Scully years where new characters were designed with slightly more detail and features more akin to actual humans than bug-eyed, simplified cartoon characters. Just look how different the dining couple looks compared to Homer and Marge. This issue would continue up through the present, as the Simpson family and other Springfield residents would look weirdly out-of-place against celebrity guests and one-off characters, like they were plucked from two different series.
  
• I really love how we see Homer not close the freezer door, but they don’t highlight the moment, so you might not totally connect it with what happens the next morning. Moments of restraint like this are incredibly rare in episodes nowadays.
• Great use of “Spanish Flea” during the divorce radio commercial.
• “Hey, are they pulling the plug on anybody today?” “Nope, everybody’s paid up!”
• I absolutely love Bart’s pirate dream with the practical pirate suggesting they use their gold to buy things they like, which immediately gets him shot. It’s a syndication cut, but I wish they’d kept that bit and cut it off at the captain showing the map carved on a cracker, definitely not as good of a joke.
• I love Marge’s read of “Hey! Look at that!” when Homer takes his shirt off trying to get the magic going. You can really hear the strained attempt at enthusiasm in Kavner’s voice.
• Much appreciated continuity at Homer and Marge acknowledging the windmill as their old love nest, and story-wise, it makes sense that their undoing as adults would occur at the same place they acted like reckless, carefree kids (“We drank so much that night!” “Yeah, I thought Bart would be born a dimwit!”)
• Even though it’s basically cribbed from a joke from The Critic, I still enjoy the Casablanca alternate ending, especially with the “The End?” end card (“Wasn’t it great? And the question mark leaves the door open for a sequel.”) But why exactly was it buried in Springfield? I guess the Crazy Old Man had all the reels in his possession when he moved to Springfield, attempted to bury some of them but then just gave up? Ah, who cares.
• It’s kind of weird that Homer knows Gil’s name when he bumps into him, but it’s a pretty solid scene, with Gil so desperate for a sale he doesn’t bat an eyelash at his potential customer’s nudity.
• Most of act there is kind of a slog, with Homer and Marge scurrying across town, then into the hot air balloon, with plenty of suspense music. Also a lot of Homer getting hurt, which is throughout the whole episode (the avalanche of silverware falling on him at Up, Up and Buffet was pretty excessive), but the bit of Homer hanging from the balloon and Marge causing him to get torched with flames that come out of absolutely nowhere is pretty damn stupid. There’s no actual joke there other than him getting inexplicably hurt. The pastor at the crystal cathedral and Sideshow Mel’s “Look at that blimp! He’s hanging from a balloon!” deserve kudos, but that’s about it.
• Simpsons Archive retro review: “I have mixed feelings about this one. While it’s a very funny episode, with an appealing plot, I would prefer it if this episode had never happened. Running around town naked and having sex in public is a road I hoped the Simpsons would never go down. Such a ridiculous idea.”

Season 9 episodes I would pluck from the scrap heap: “The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson,” “The Cartridge Family,” “Bart Star,” “The Joy of Sect,” “Lisa the Simpson,” “Simpson Tide,” “Girly Edition,” “King of the Hill”

Original airdate: March 28, 2021

The premise: On an overnight field trip aboard a battleship, Marge gets stuck with Sarah Wiggum, who turns out to be more of a kindred spirit than she expected. But it turns out Sarah has a secret past, as two of her former partners-in-crime come back to get their due, throwing Marge into an elaborate jewelry heist at the lavish Gen Gala.

The reaction: Sarah Wiggum is a non-character. Like a lot of the wives on this show, she was born in the grand cartoon tradition of men being paired up with female doppelgängers of themselves (as well as the grand cartoon tradition of largely male writing staffs being largely uninterested in writing female characters.) Like Minnie Mouse and Daisy Duck before her, Sarah was Chief Wiggum’s portly, dutiful wife, with Pamela Hayden doing her best Wiggum impression for the few instances they gave her dialogue. There are some secondary characters I can see potential in getting their own episode, but this was certainly an out-of-left-field choice. The episode certainly acknowledges it, as it’s revealed that soft-spoken Sarah is actually a lively charmer (now voiced by Megan Mullally) with a secret past, running with a girl gang of thieves in Shelbyville before her partners got arrested. Both Marge and Chief Wiggum incredulously ask, “Sarah Wiggum, who are you?” just to drill that point home. Sarah has basically no characteristics to build off of, so she’s effectively a brand new character, and then when her two former partners kidnap her and Marge, it becomes a series of dialogues and backstories between these three new characters and their past lives of crime and their new plan to get revenge on their fourth partner who double crossed them, who is revealed to be Lindsay Naegle. It reminded me a little of the Hallmark Christmas episode this season, where the lead character was Ellie Kemper and how weird that felt since we had no emotional investment in her. Here, there’s some thread of Marge relating to Sarah as an overlooked housewife, but that angle is underplayed against all of the elaborate heist planning, complete with on-screen graphics and energetic music. The final act called to mind “The Book Job,” the episode where Homer, Bart and others planned an Ocean’s 11 style heist to get their YA novel back from some evil publishing guy or something (in an episode also show-run by Matt Selman, so the man’s already repeating himself ten years later.) Here, influence is clearly taken from the all-female Ocean’s 8, which also involved a heist at a museum gala, but this episode makes the same fumbling as “The Book Job,” in that it recreates the tone and feel of those movies without subverting them at all or having any fun with the tropes and trappings. There’s barely any jokes to be had during the heist, nor do I really give a shit about what’s going on. How can I? Why should I care at all about this reinvented Sarah Wiggum or her betrayal by Lindsay Naegle, who is a gag character at best? I guess there are some that just find an Oceans heist to be interesting by itself? I mean, I believe “The Book Job” was looked on favorably by a decent number of current fans, so maybe they’ll view this episode with a similar fondness. For me, I just could not give a shit. We get a few sidebars of Homer and Clancy frantically searching for their wives, nailing down the point over and over that they don’t know anything about them. Half the episode was either an exposition dump or planning and executing the heist flawlessly, it didn’t even feel like I was watching a Simpsons episode at all. What is this show trying to be anymore?

Three items of note:
– Guest star round-up, I guess: it certainly would have been nice to give Pamela Hayden a starring role in an episode, but why do that when you can stunt-cast? Megan Mullally sounds like a less shrill, breathier Gayle from Bob’s Burgers, not really attempting to emulate Hayden’s Sarah voice at all. Nick Offerman makes a brief appearance (I guess they figured since they got Mullally, they’d bring her husband in too) to reprise his beloved character, that captain guy from that episode where Homer and Bart got in a right? “The Wreck of the Relationship,” it was called? It sucked ass, that’s all I remember. Bob Seger voices himself at the concert Homer and Chief Wiggum go to after saddling their wives with field trip duty. When they go backstage, Seger browbeats them, telling them they need to be good marital partners, and the joke is that he’s inserting his song titles into his dialogue. Hysterical. In re-casting news, gay stereotype Julio is now voiced by Tony Rodriguez, who does a podcast or something. He already had a new voice a couple episodes ago, why did they change it? And why didn’t they just throw away that fucking awful character and be done with it? At the start of the episode, Marge is excited to watch the Gen Gala and make catty remarks at the outfits (“I have firm commitments from several A-level gays!”) We see the grouping later and it’s all the usual suspects: Patty and Selma, Smithers, Julio and his partner, Patty’s ex-girlfriend… All our gay characters hang out together because they’re gay, and gay people are all friends because they’re gay.
– They attempt to do some continuity building with a flashback showing Sarah distracting a young security guard Clancy to perform a heist, but she ends up sleeping with him. Her friends end up arrested, and since she was the getaway driver, Sarah blames herself for the whole thing. But it turns out it wasn’t her fault, Lindsay Naegle betrayed them, but if Sarah held onto so much guilt because of this, would she really have wanted to see Clancy again? She believes she ruined her friends’ lives because of this man, but she then married him and lived life as an obedient housewife for fifteen-plus years? Oh, whatever. I recall an early Al Jean episode where Clancy and Sarah are slow dancing, and he comments, “You look as pretty as the day I arrested you!” to which Sarah blushes. That moment is more charming and cute than anything we see in this entire episode.
– Marge saves the day at the end by pulling some fabric to cause Lindsay Naegle to trip at the top of the gala stairs. She elaborately tumbles down the stairs, flopping comically from left to right, bouncing over a dozen times as she plummets to the bottom. I really don’t know why it was done so excessively, but it felt strange and weirdly uncomfortable. It would be overkill if it were Homer, but this is just watching some poor woman flail around in incredible pain for twenty seconds. Are we supposed to feel vindicated that she’s getting her just desserts? Why should I care that Naegle betrayed three characters we literally just met and don’t care that much about? She ends up being framed for a bunch of other thefts, and we get on-screen text reading “The Double Revenge That You Didn’t See Coming But Now You’re Like What!?!?” Again, it feels like they’re banking hard on us giving a shit about this story. Or is the joke that they’re observing that twists happen in movies?

14. Das Bus

• Homer cheering for a 5pm bedtime definitely hits harder watching in my 30s than last time in my 20s.
• “You’ve seen the movie, now meet a real-life Noah! Only this Noah has been accused of killing two of every animal! Coming up next on AM Springfield!”
• I don’t know if I ever really processed the joke of Milhouse reading out old Polish jokes as “facts,” like their submarine with the screen door. It’s certainly something I never understood as a kid watching this, I thought he was just saying a bunch of weird stuff.
• The Model U.N. banner is pretty excellent.
  
• Homer’s B-plot isn’t terrible, only because it barely feels like a story and more of just some stupid thing we keep cutting back to, helped by some pretty excellent quotes (“I think I’ll make myself… vice president. No, wait! Junior vice president!” “Oooh, they have the Internet on computers now!”)
• It’s unclear where the bus crashed off the bridge, but how far away is this island from land? The bus gets caught up by a small tidal wave, sinks, then we see the kids crawling onto the island. A cutaway back to Homer and Marge talking about the kids would have at least implied somewhat of a passage of time.
  
• Nelson gets two solid lines in response to Bart’s grandiose plans for island living: him asking how many monkey butlers there will be, and his excitement at Bart saying they’ll find some wine for the older kids (“Delicious wine?”)
• No matter how many time I watch this episode, I still hear Sherri (or Terri’s) line, “I’m so hungry, I could eat at Arby’s” as “I could eat an army.” It’s probably because that’s what I heard it as for so many viewings, but the “bys” section sounds so soft and muted. It think if they bumped up the volume of the final syllable a bit more, it would be so much clearer.
• Bart’s underwater adventure to get the sunken cooler feels like a big time killer. Very nice music, very nice animation, but this is a show that used to cram as many gags into twenty-two minutes as possible, and here we have a thirty-second sequence that all culminates in a blowfish biting Bart in the butt. Feels like a waste of good real estate.
• Exactly how did Homer get an online banner ad without even having a computer? Oh, who cares. The Comic Book Guy scene is maybe one of his best, impatiently waiting for his Star Trek pornography to load, complaining “Oh, hurry up, I am a busy man!” before taking a healthy gulp of his jumbo soda.
• It’s interesting watching Bill Gates’s appearance having just seen the new episode with J.J. Abrams, it’s a very stark compare and contrast. Gates (not voicing himself) shows up at Homer’s house, not knowing a damn thing about his business, or even caring that it’s not even a business at all, figuring the easier thing for him is to “buy them out,” meaning have his nerd goons smash the joint up (“Oh, I didn’t get rich by writing a lot of checks!”) Scathing, satirical, a truly excellent Simpsons moment attacking the rich and powerful. Compare this to J.J. Abrams (voicing himself), who is depicted as a visionary filmmaking genius who wins over everybody in the end, subject only to the lightest of ribbings about him specializing in reboots and found footage movies. Dramatically different approaches.
• I’ve seen this episode so many times in syndication, I have an unflinching degree of nostalgia for it, but there’s an awful lot of dead space in the island story where it’s mostly just straight plot with some jokes peppered in. I think they were so devoted to following the Lord of the Flies template that they forgot to subvert it in any meaningful way. Bits like Nelson pummeling Milhouse in the cage and Milhouse being deadweight to Bart and Lisa in the chase are good, but the back half of the episode with the mystery of “the monster” is pretty boring, bordering on feeling like a Saturday morning cartoon.
• Simpsons Archive retro review: “’Das Bus’ shows that you can have surreal setups, yet still maintain the characterization and ‘human-ness’ that makes ‘The Simpsons’ special. The civilized children’s slide into primitive behavior was generally funny, and didn’t violate anything we knew about their characters. A subplot detailing Homer’s attempts to enter the Internet business provides some good contrast and a few laughs. This show aired on creator Matt Groening’s birthday. It would make a pretty good present, indeed.”

15. The Last Temptation of Krust

• “What do we need church shoes for? Jesus wore sandals.” “Well, maybe if he had better arch support, they wouldn’t have caught him.”
• Gil working at the shoe store is less “desperate older employee holding on by a thread” like he was in “Realty Bites,” and more just a sad old man with a bad back. Not his best appearance. 
• The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was making Jay Leno appear like a likable, everyman guy in this episode, though he still does brag about his “acres of cars” that he loves so much. The other guest comedians are harmless set dressing who don’t really add or take away anything specifically. On that note comes a major problem with this episode, and with all movies/TV shows about stand-up comedy: the performed jokes are never really funny, so you just sit there as you’re watching an audience applaud looking as dumb as Homer (“I get jokes!” is a very quotable line.) In terms of depicting comedy, bad jokes are easy, because it’s all about the audience’s reaction and the behavior of the performer (see: Krusty’s flapping dickey, and the amazing pan of the stunned audience.) But when it’s “good” comedy like the opening comedians, as well as Krusty’s reimagining of himself as a George Carlin-type comic, the jokes never hit right. The third act felt like the writers were coming up with routines inspired by Carlin, but not really satirizing his type of humor.
• “Dog Kills Cat, Self” is a wonderfully dark newspaper headline.
• The scene of Lisa translating each line of the Spanish movie for Marge is kind of weird. It’s like someone came up with the joke concept of an annoyed movie translator, and they decided to just slap it onto Lisa because she’s smart, but I don’t expect an eight-year-old, not even Lisa, to be able to understand full dialogue in a foreign language.
• Bart finding Krusty on the Flanderses lawn after his bender feels like a believable way to get a Simpson back into the story, unlike future Krusty episodes where Bart and Lisa will just show up at Krustylu Studios for little to no reason at all. My favorite scene is Krusty coming face to face with all the garbage licensed products in Bart’s room, when it finally dawns on him how he’s sold himself out in exchange for his dignity and relevance as a performer. It’s really well done and funny, I almost wish it was put into a stronger episode.
• The classic line that’s run through my head the most times watching decades of new episodes has been Krusty’s attempt at relatable comedy (“You mean like when your lazy butler washes your sock garters and they’re still covered with shmutz?”) As Springfield slowly morphed into Los Angeles, Jr. and the Simpsons found themselves recurring instant successes in lavish scenarios, that quote would instantly come to mind.
• “Bart’s Comedy Jam” is an excellent scene, starting with Bart’s impression of his mother (Nancy Cartwright having fun mimicking Julie Kavner), much to the adorable enjoyment of Homer and Lisa. Krusty feebly tries his hand at observational humor, but falls flat (“Two cent stamps… pizza pie’s very hot these days… can’t open pickle jars… no mail on Sundays…”) I also love Bart repeating his excuse about the acoustics being bad, only to be rudely cut off by Krusty. A consistent in this episode is the classic relationship of Bart’s undying allegiance to his childhood hero, and Krusty barely giving a shit about his biggest fan.
• When (or if) the show actually announces it’s ending, I will be incredibly disappointed if a reporter doesn’t ask, “Why now? Why not twenty years ago?”
• A nice detail I don’t think I’ve noticed before, Bart’s voice has a little bit of echo on it while sitting in the incredibly spacious Canyonero.
• There’s a bunch of good, even great, moments in this episode, but it could have been a complete dud and still been saved by the Canyonero ending. Just the perfect fake ad for the obnoxiously large and questionably safe SUV (“Top of the line in utility sports! Unexplained fires are a matter for the courts!”)
• Simpsons Archive retro review: “A dismal effort. Joke after joke failed to make me laugh, with all those comedians up there you’d think something would. Celebrity cameos do nothing for me, and neither does stand-up type of humor. A very weak outing in a very weak season… something has to change.”

16. Dumbbell Indemnity

• Homer just completely destroying the water heater while trying to fix it is not a great moment. There are plenty of past examples of Homer being as stupid, if not more so, but this is Scully-era Homer stupidity where it’s more aggressive and destructive, in this case, flooding the entire house, then scurrying off to Moe’s to let Marge deal with it (what a guy!) To be fair, the animation of the flooding water cascading over the house looks fantastic.
• Rene appears to be the first in an incredibly long line of guest girlfriend/boyfriend characters on the show to have absolutely no personality. She’s a nice girl who likes Moe… because that’s what the plot of the episode is. No quirks, no backstory, no specific wants or desires, she’s just a plot device for the Homer/Moe story. It’s made all the more eyebrow-raising as she’s voiced by Helen Hunt, Hank Azaria’s then-girlfriend, so maybe the writers were hesitant to make her anything but the sweetest, blandest woman ever? She also gets introduced running a flower cart at night, which is never referred to again and makes no sense. It reminded me of one of the last episodes of Futurama where Zoidberg started dating a woman who ran a flower cart, but that actually played into the episode; she has no sense of smell, so Zoidberg’s horrific odor doesn’t offend her.
• “Bring us the finest food you’ve got, stuffed with the second finest.” “Excellent, sir. Lobster stuffed with tacos.”
• This episode also brings us our first glimpse at softened Moe, which has been a favorite with writers over the past twenty years, and it just doesn’t work. I remember liking “Moe Baby Blues” okay, but I feel like if I rewatched it, I’d be less charitable. I’m fine with depicting Moe as more sympathetic and less of a psychopath, but he still needs to be funny or interesting, and most of the time, he’s not, he’s just sad and pathetic. 
• I like that Lou is already noticeably buzzed before the cruise even starts.
• Moe’s car flies off the cliff, then it sinks, then it falls down an underwater cliff, falling, falling… man, is it boring.
• I winced when Homer tearfully said that he and Moe were best friends. His best friend originally was Barney, but that relationship has more or less faded at this point. He hangs out with Lenny and Carl all day at work and at the bar. I’ve repeated over and over why Moe and Marge should never, ever be on good terms with each other, but I also don’t like how close Homer and Moe end up becoming either. Homer can be deluded enough into thinking Moe’s a good friend of his, but I enjoy Moe the best when he’s a crass, manipulative reprobate, not the surly jerk with a heart of gold they would eventually turn him into. I guess it’s personal preference, but I just find Moe funnier and more interesting in the former characterization than the latter. As for this new Homer-Moe relationship, it’s like “The Homer They Fall” creaked the door open, and “Dumbbell Indemnity” bum-rushed its way in.
• Moe goes to talk to Homer in the alleyway of the jail, which just happens to have a window there. Meanwhile, Rene is just standing there on the sidewalk waiting for Moe to come back, I guess not particularly caring what he was doing in the alley or who he was talking to. Homer’s jail window also becomes a huge cheat because for the rest of the scene, the window is now right up against the corner of the jail so Moe can see him from across the street.
• Rene is such a non-character, she doesn’t even create the conflict of the episode. Moe inexplicably feels the need to spend as much money as possible on this woman, but she doesn’t seem to be a woman who enjoys the fancy things at all, evidenced by her initially turning down Moe’s suggested trip to Hawaii (“Let’s just get a can of poi and eat it in the tub.”) That’s all fine, as the episode could be about Moe’s incredible insecurities making him think he needs to spend, spend, spend to hold onto this woman, but that idea isn’t evident or fleshed out in the episode at all.
• The ending kind of sucks, Moe and Homer fighting in the burning bar. Then Barney comes out of the bathroom, I guess being oblivious to everything, carries Moe and Homer’s bodies out, then passes out from smoke inhalation just so he doesn’t have to be in the scene anymore. Meh.
• Simpsons Archive retro review: “This was the episode I KNEW the current staff could do! Instead of the forced references and vain attempts at Simpsonesqueness other episodes this season had fallen back on, this had what the show should always be: A funny, fast-paced, decent plot with tons of originality and classic Homer. For the first time since ‘The Cartridge Family,’ I don’t need to give an episode the benefit of the doubt!”

17. Lisa the Simpson

• Great snappy piece of animation of the vacuum sealed lunch. The squash and stretch of Milhouse’s face and Lisa’s hair points is just lovely.
  
• I like that the Picto-Puzzle is on screen enough times that you might be able to solve it yourself. It’s also the perfect catalyst to throw Lisa off her game, a deceptively easy brain teaser, one of those things that would finally click with you after spending hours on it and kicking yourself for not thinking of the simple answer sooner. Ralph figuring it out before her just pours salt into the wound (“I don’t need a hint, Ralph!” ”But you’re suffering!”)
• The exterior shot of the school as both the kids and teachers run out overjoyed at the final bell is so great, and made even better when you see the next day, the kids and teachers walking back in together, depressed about another school day.
• Homer’s innocent giddiness at the nudie pens is a nice little scene, and an effective joke to carry over the time lapse before he and Apu discover Jasper in the freezer.
• Marge cutting Abe’s hair is such a great scene. This show used to thrive on showing believable moments of a not-very-well-off family, and Marge cutting her ornery father-in-law’s hair (using the kitchen tablecloth as a bib, a wonderful little touch) is a great example, even better with two characters who don’t directly interact that much. The ending of Marge “accidentally” nipping the back of Abe’s head after he insults her cooking is a great passive aggressive moment.
• Although not his final appearance, “Someone’s in the Kitchen with DNA” feels like Troy McClure’s swan song. Each joke is a slam dunk: Troy taking off his hazmat suit, causing the other scientists to flee, two of the greatest “you may remember me” film titles ever (“Alice Doesn’t Live Anymore” and “Mommy, What’s Wrong With That Man’s Face?”) and of course, his dumbstruck look when little Billy asks him a simple question, hard-cutting to the end card.
• The Freak-E-Mart is the perfect B-plot for this episode, a breezy, dumb-but-not-too-dumb story to offset Lisa’s tale of introspective woe. Jasper freezing himself is kind of outlandish, but nothing too crazy that I can’t go along with it. The different cheap exhibits Apu puts up are great (Haunted Cash Machine: Dispenses Images of Dead Presidents) and the conclusion of Jasper awakening in the “future” is so good (“Moon Pie? What a time to be alive.”)
• The dramatic lighting and staging of Lisa joining Bart and Homer in front of the TV is beautiful. It really drives home the weight of Lisa’s resignation.
  
• “When Buildings Collapse” and “When Surgery Goes Wrong” almost sound too much like actual programs that FOX would air in the late 90s.
• The montage of Lisa indulging in enlightened pleasures before her “dumbening” is perfectly emblematic of the world of the show. Each one of her interactions is coated with cynicism: the art gallery guard who admits to forging the painting, the petulant music critic (“You have to listen to the notes she’s not playing.” “Pfft. I can do that at home,”) and finally the violinist who serves Lisa a cliche line about sharing your specialness with the world, but it was actually her trying to gas Lisa up to get her to buy one of her tapes. If this scene were done in a season 32 episode, it would most definitely have been played straight, this fellow musician dispensing heartfelt advice at the emotional climax of the story.
• Jeez. Either Sanjay’s tucking himself, or he ain’t packing much.
  
• This has got to be like the twentieth or so time I’ve seen this, and I just realized that Lisa getting on TV via an editorial reply was set up earlier with an editorial reply interrupting “When Buildings Collapse.” They didn’t need to connect those two dots, but they did anyway.
• The station director letting Lisa go off script (“Let her speak. I’m trying to get fired”) is another joke that I love that would never have happened in a season 32 equivalent scene.
• I love all the vocal variants Dan Castellaneta does for all the Simpson men. The “Simpson gene is true” ending is a bit silly, but it feels like a suitable backhanded payoff, where Lisa’s future is cleared but Bart is doomed to failure (“a spectacular failure!”) I think this is my favorite episode of season 9, with “City of New York” a close second. I do not consider it a coincidence these are both Oakley/Weinstein shows.
• Simpsons Archive retro review: “An interesting expansion on the theory that failure is familial for Simpsons, but too general and simplistically off-the-mark in the ending. The subplot was a major drag, having no relation at all to the main plot, and being incredibly stupid, mediocre and far-fetched. Another minus is Bart’s ‘dance on her grave’ line, indicating that Ned Goldreyer could use work (namely pre-fifth season work), but is on the right track somewhat more than other writers have been. I appreciate his goal to tell a story rather than to clutter a story with inappropriate or idiotic gags that try too hard.”

18. This Little Wiggy

• Milhouse and Nelson’s fantasies off of Robbie the Automaton’s commercial feel like lesser versions of these kinds of childish dreams we’ve seen before. Milhouse touches a star and it disintegrates his arm, which feels more like a Bart fantasy, and Nelson’s really interested in the Three Stooges? This feels around the point where older references were starting to grow a little stale. Did kids in the late 90s even know who the Three Stooges were? Were they still being rerun on stations kids watched back then?
• The Knowledgeum is a fun set piece, definitely the strongest stuff in the whole episode. Troy McClure gives a great intro on the moving walkway; I like his casual mentioning of your car may be subject to repeated break-ins much to Homer’s panic, but it’s kind of a slightly lesser version of the similar joke in “Lisa the Vegetarian,” without the expert pay-off of the Simpson car pulling up the driveway with a busted back window with no further mention.
• Bart runs off to “toss the virtual salad,” which feels like a pretty raw entendre for him to make. It’s one thing if they had him do a general sex joke or a boner joke, but this is a ten-year-old talking about eating ass. Is there any other slang definition for “tossing salad” that I don’t know about?
• There’s a sweet little moment when Martin takes a picture of Frink’s visible computer demonstration, and Frink gets visibly bashful about it.
• In this episode all about Ralph, he basically has no real agency in the story and just wanders about until he accidentally moves the plot forward. We’re a long ways from “I Love Lisa” where he was just this dim, oblivious kid still capable of actual emotions. This episode firmly establishes the “new” Ralph, a literal mentally challenged child whose dialogue is 80% desperate one-liner attempts at making the next “I bent my Wookie” or “Me fail English?” There have been a few later attempts to try and give Ralph a bit more to do (he had actual sentences of dialogue recently in “Wad Goals,”) but they come off really bizarre given how he’s basically been reduced to a prop character over a decade. You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube, fellas, you’re stuck with what you made.
• I really like the kernel of an idea of this episode about being stuck with an undesirable or embarrassing playmate as a kid, where Bart butts heads with Marge about being forced to hang out with Ralph. The episode doesn’t go anywhere particularly interesting with that idea, but it is there!
• “Videotaping this crime spree is the best idea we ever had!” For all the stupid “Simpsons predicted it!” “theories” that went viral over the past year, this Jimbo line feels like an appropriate analogue for the January 6th Capitol riots. A joke about stupid, short-sighted teenage shenanigans translates perfectly to stupid, short-sighted, alt-right, fame-hungry dullards.
• There’s some subtle depth to Chief Wiggum in this episode and his feelings toward Ralph, like when he almost sarcastically tells Marge, yeah, it would be nice if Ralph had some friends. He fully cops to his son having special needs and no one really wanting to be around him, and he feels bad about it, but has kind of run out of ideas of what to do. Later, when he sees Ralph and Bart playing together, his excitement over Ralph’s first friend is really endearing.
• When Bart and Ralph run into the bullies at night, this average episode takes a big nosedive. Bart giving into peer pressure with the bullies and turning away a crying Ralph feels like cliche after school special material played completely straight. I can buy Bart standing up to Ralph getting mercilessly bullied, but when it gets to the point that he actually considers Ralph a friend, it’s just too much. Them exploring the penitentiary is boring and overly drawn out, and the grand finale of saving Quimby from the active electric chair is equally as dull, especially since they have not one but two scenes of Quimby explaining how dumb the ending is, telling his staff to not help him despite how “realistic” his convulsions are. Lisa fires a rocket with a note at the penitentiary… like, even if it did actually work, not only is the plan to fire at this building way in the distance, but were they banking on it going through the exact window where the execution room was? Is there even a window in that room? Oh, who cares.
• Simpsons Archive retro review: “Can somebody please remind me why I’ve ever been  disappointed with this season? This was amazing. Nothing OOC, plenty of original, inspired gags and every member of OFF had a respectable amount of time. The plot seemed to change dramatically in the last few seconds of the first act, but it took me until second viewing to even notice. Looking back at my past few reviews, I’ve begun to realize I love this season! As of this episode, I’m raising my standards for an A.”

19. Simpson Tide

• The Planet of the Donuts is a pretty good opening dream. I also appreciate it ending right when Homer gets eaten by the monster donut; I feel like a modern episode would include some unfunny button on that scene, but instead, it got out when the going was good.
• Homer dropping a donut into the reactor (via a post office mail slot, no less) is just stupid enough that I can go along with it. I also like what we see of the aftermath that the cooling towers are on fire; I doubt that that’s very realistic, but it seemed like a believable disaster that would be worth Homer getting fired over.
• The Navy commercial is fantastic, just the perfect sales pitch that would appeal to Homer: getting drunk and doing fuck all for your country.
• The man at the recruitment office is a familiar extra, it’s the “Just Stamp the Ticket” man from “When Flanders Failed”! I don’t know if I ever noticed that. He gets a one-scene wonder as Homer attempts to answer the one crossed-off application question, much to his horror. Hey, have I brought up Dankmus recently?
• I like that during basic training, Homer is more lovable buffoon than aggravating maniac (“You like me, but I don’t like you!” “Well, maybe you’d like me if you got to know me!”) Endearing touches like that stand out in a silly premise like this. Similarly, a ridiculous gag like a gigantic untethered ship going over a waterfall is balanced by Homer actually making a competent knot but forgetting to tie it to the ship, not him completely forgetting, or worse, having a blind active hand in the accident.
• It really feels like this episode has one of the earliest “Starbucks are everywhere” jokes. When did those explode in popularity? My only frame of reference is a Lewis Black routine about “the end of the universe” being somewhere in Texas, where he saw a Starbucks across from another Starbucks, a performance recorded in 2001, while this episode aired in 1998.
• The earring subplot is fine as is. It’s not really much of a “plot,” really, but I like that Homer’s annoyance at Bart’s earring runs throughout the show, and pretty effortlessly comes back by the end to be the lynchpin to save the day.
• It’s so dumb, but I still like the “In the Navy” scene (although throwing Smithers in felt pushing it too far), if only because they just up and drown the Village People. They weren’t actually guest stars, but it’s nice to see one of the last big celebrity fuck-yous before we get deeper into the Mike Scully era and we get *NSYNC magically arriving on their speedboat to heroically save the day.
• I like that they clearly establish that Captain Tenille is not only a partially oblivious old man who projects onto people, but he might actually be physically ill on top of it (“Maybe it’s the saltwater in my veins, or the nitrogen bubbles in my brain…”) as an explanation as to why the fuck he would leave Homer in charge of the sub.
• “I told him that photo would come back to haunt him.”
  
• I absolutely love that Skinner brought Terri up with her sister on stage only to tell her to fuck off, we’re only saving one of you. That’s some good school administrator cruelty.
• This episode is undeniably ridiculous, and Homer the naval captain is no less crazy and ridiculous than any of his future professions, but this episode feels like it strikes the right loose tone that it doesn’t feel out-of-reach outlandish, considering the climax is Homer plugging a pin-sized hole on the ship. Him magically knowing how to say “It’s my first day” in penguin is acceptable since I like the scene as a callback to the opening. We also get a joke explanation as to why the hell Homer wasn’t arrested, as all of the commanding officers in charge of indicting her are actually in the middle of their own indictments, getting him off the hook (“You can’t spell ‘dishonorable’ without ‘honorable.’’)
• Simpsons Archive retro review: “I just want to say that I think ‘Simpson Tide’ was great… for an episode of ‘The Critic.’ It epitomizes the worst episodes of ‘The Simpsons:’ fast-paced gags, sophomoric humor, discontinuity, little or no ironic commentary, and a tacked-on plot which just serves as a set-up for quickie sight jokes. But the worst sin of all is the fact that the gags in this show were unfunny! All-in-all a very dissatisfying episode with a couple of genuinely funny bits. And to think I missed last week’s Ralph Wiggum episode only to see this clunker!”

Original airdate: March 21, 2021

The premise: Six years ago before Christmas, Marge throws Homer out of the house after accidentally getting drunk at the power plant holiday party. Staying with the Flanderses and desperate to be home before the holidays, Homer must figure out what grand selfless gesture will get him back into Marge’s good graces this time.

The reaction: Another milestone has come and gone. Thankfully, the self-congratulation didn’t extend any further than a chyron “700th Episode” below the main title. And wow, two flashback episodes in a row, what a treat! I seem to recall another episode where Marge threw Homer out on Christmas for not coming home, but it turned out he was staying with Moe who was borderline suicidal. This time, Homer promises not to drink at the Christmas party, but Lenny spikes his soda and Homer makes an ass out of himself. “I don’t want you coming home until I know you’ve changed!” Marge weeps as she leaves Homer behind. As the episode continues, 4-year-old Bart and 2-year-old Lisa repeatedly will ask their mother that they miss their dad and why won’t he be home for Christmas. This is really uplifting stuff! Homer’s been thrown out many a time over thirty years (to the point that it’s deflated any sort of drama or realism), but the best storylines to use that card wait until the final act because of how sad the situation is (utilized to heartbreaking effect in “Homer’s Night Out,” when Lisa asks her brother, “I wonder when Dad’s coming home,” at an incredibly awkward family dinner.) Here, Homer’s gone for almost the entire episode, made even more devastating since Bart and Lisa are just little tots. It’s an incredibly sad scenario, leaving little room for any actual fun to do jokes. On top of this, what Homer must do to prove he’s “changed” is not only totally nebulous, but even more pointless than normal given this is a flashback episode, and we know all of the fucked up crazy shit Homer will do over hundreds of ensuing “present day” episodes. Considering this exact plot has already been done in the aforementioned “I Won’t Be Home for Christmas,” there’s no real reason this needed to be a flashback episode, except for our grand, continuity-building finale. Homer stays with the Flanderses, with an irritable and pregnant Maude, and of course, on Christmas Eve, Maude goes into labor with Ned out of the house helping the homeless, so it’s Homer to the rescue! No mention of them calling Ned, who presumably would not have gone far, but it’s dawn when he finally returns, so who knows where the fuck he was. Marge seemingly breaks into the Flanders house because she just shows up at the doorway of the rumpus room as Homer comforts Maude before the birth, and all is forgiven. So all Homer had to do was deliver a child to prove he was a good guy? Why didn’t she say so? To express his gratitude, Ned names his newborn son Todd Homer Flanders, so there’s another worthless piece of canon to add to the fan wiki. We also learn about “a never-before-seen room in the Simpson home,” as teased by the promotional blurb for this episode: the small storage space above the garage that Homer camps out in as he ponders his next big move to win Marge back. Cool! With these “revelations” and the upcoming episode shining a spotlight on Sarah Wiggum, this almost feels like a new tactic for the series, solving unanswered questions about different characters and locations in Springfield, because I guess hardcore fans might care about that stuff. Too bad this fan cares about engaging stories with characters we care about, and that ship sailed about 500 episodes ago. Happy 700th, one and all!

Three items of note:
– The couch gag is yet another Bill Plympton animation. This is, what, his sixth? As usual with this show, anything that’s special once must be repeated as much as possible until it becomes bland and unremarkable. One of his earliest couch gags was like Homer fucking the couch and it got pregnant. Is that right, or did I imagine that? Now it’s just this simple, cute little animation that does nothing but eat up time so the writers can get away with writing a few less pages.
– Maude Flanders has made sporadic appearances in dreams or flashbacks over the last fifteen years or so since Maggie Roswell returned, but this is her meatiest role yet. She’s definitely much gruffer and ornery here, which at least makes sense given that she’s nine month pregnant and about to burst. But outside of demeanor, her voice definitely sounds different, and it’s not a matter of Roswell losing her step or anything, it’s just that we’re twenty years out from episodes where Maude was alive, and she definitely sounds two decades older. Likewise, Mr. Burns sounded considerably tired in his brief appearance, the 77-year-old Harry Shearer still trying his best. And, of course, there’s Marge. Part of me feels like a piece of shit mentioning this over and over… this is, what, my third or fourth time this season? But honest and truly, during her opening monologue setting up the flashback, I genuinely was having trouble understanding her gravelly, weakened voice. This became even more pronounced in the flashback, given Marge is supposed to be 30-ish, but sounds like an elderly woman. All of this is a problem with no answer, but it’s a pretty glaring sign that maybe your show shouldn’t last over thirty years on the air.
– It’s never been established (I think?) exactly how old Rod and Todd Flanders are, but I always assumed they were always in-between Bart and Lisa since they’re not in either of their classes, making them 11 and 9 respectively. Rod is taller than both Bart and Lisa, so I figure he’s older. But now, I guess Todd is 6 in this new timeline? I don’t really give a shit about them breaking continuity, but this seems like a big oversight. I know no one really remembers or cares much for the Flanders kids (to the point that even the Simpsons wiki lists Todd as the older brother in the first sentence, and says he’s the youngest member of the Flanders family in the second) but come on.

7. The Two Mrs. Nahasapeemapetilons

• Moe’s rictus grin as he walks across the stage to a sea of scornful women’s faces is great on its own, but even better with the weird knockoff “Stayin’ Alive” music. Also, I’d like to think the Sea Captain would be a catch for some woman in Springfield. The man owns his own restaurant and lives on a cool houseboat! What more do you want?
• “Sold to the five desperate chicks!” Kind of rude of Krusty to say, since one of the women is his secretary Miss Pennycandy.
• This episode sort of re-frames Apu as a shy bachelor, whereas we’ve had previous examples of him being kind of a stud (dating Princess Kashmir in “Lisa’s Pony,” banging that one girl at the BBQ in “22 Short Films About Springfield.”) He seems to get back into the groove fairly quickly, so maybe he had just been out of the dating pool for a while. I wish there was more focus on Apu’s feelings through the episode, him talking about why he loves being carefree and single, as well as him separating leisure time from his grueling work hours… there’s weirdly not much Apu characterization in this episode that’s ostensibly about him.
• Homer growling suggestively at Apu opening a note from his mother… don’t care for it. It’s a joke off of him just reading a love note from one of Apu’s dates, but it plays so weird.
• “Is it me or does your plans always have some horrid web of lies?” “It’s you.” This really feels like the first of many, many, many zany Homer schemes over the Mike Scully years. When he innocently suggests that Apu tell his mother he’s already married, he feels more like a normal guy throwing out suggestions, but escalating it to pretending Marge is Apu’s wife and his attitude to the ruse makes it more ridiculous.
• Very nice touch that Apu rolls out a Krusty the Clown sleeping bag next to Marge’s bed, seemingly having borrowed it from Bart.
• I really like Lisa’s innocence in not knowing what Apu’s mother’s “dot” is. A modern show would have Bart ask that question and Lisa would chastise him for being culturally ignorant and give a long explanation about it, but here, Lisa just doesn’t know, because she’s an eight-year-old who doesn’t know the specifics of every culture on Earth. We also get this great exchange between Apu’s mom and Bart (“Surely you know the background to your father’s heritage.” “So long you have no follow up questions, then yes… we do.”
• Like I said, not a whole lot of Apu in this Apu show, because the second act is dominated by Homer living it up at the retirement home. It’s all fine material, I guess, but it just kind of becomes the wacky Homer show in the middle of what should be an Apu episode. Also, when he leaves the retirement home, Apu and Marge just let Homer back into the house when Apu’s mother was literally just about to leave, which is stupid and makes no sense.
• There’s a Homer line I hate, when Apu confesses to his mother, he judgingly reacts, “He lied to his mother…” This kind of tsk tsking attitude toward characters who are just saying and doing things that Homer pushed them into would reoccur a whole fucking lot over the next few seasons. Also included are jokes about his complete ignorance over stuff he himself started (“Oh right, the fake marriage thing. How’s that going?”) Homer really is pretty insufferable through most of this episode, and this behavior would only continue to get more flagrant as time goes on.
• Apu’s mother just stays at the Simpson house and expects the wedding to be held in their backyard, with no real explanation, despite hating the family that just bamboozled her. As Lisa says, why is she still staying there? Well, I guess they wrote that joke into the episode to wallpaper over the complaint, but as we will see time and time again, making a joke about a shit thing in your script doesn’t change the fact that it’s still shit.
• “No pansies for me!” “It’s the tradition in India.” “Alright, it’ll cover the gravy stains.”
• They make a meta joke about it, but why isn’t the elephant at the wedding just Stampy? They could’ve had a scene where the Simpsons get him from the wildlife reserve, or at least just have one line explaining how the hell they were able to get an elephant in the first place.
• The ending is kind of strange, in that it almost feels like the writers thought that making fun of arranged marriages would be too obvious, so their subversion was to make it seem like the marriage would actually work? They do the best they can; Manjula’s Fried Green Tomatoes question is clever and her interplay with Apu, what little there is, is sweet, but there’s no real emotional investment I can muster about Apu finding domestic bliss in an episode where he fought tooth and nail to avoid it. It’s more like him going, “Yeah, maybe this will work, hopefully.” As with almost all changes that would occur in the Mike Scully years, this character development doesn’t really amount to anything. He’s got a wife, and later kids, but Apu doesn’t change at all after this, other than he occasionally will do jokes about his nagging wife and screaming eight children are driving him to want to kill himself.
• Simpsons Archive retro review: “This was, ‘without a doubt,’ as the CBG would say, the worst episode this season. Everything from the stupid premise to the tired, sitcom-standard gags were excrutiatingly unfunny and painful to watch; I probably cracked a tiny smile once. And, once again, Homer’s antics were much more grating than they could ever be amusing. Fortunately, this has been Richard Appel’s only real clunker; let’s hope he hasn’t totally lost it.”
  (note: Appel’s next, and final, episode was “When You Dish Upon a Star.”)
  

8. Lisa the Skeptic

• The boating scam set piece isn’t bad. A casual opening scene of Homer being wanted by the police doesn’t bode well for the future, but here, it’s just for 235 unpaid parking tickets, and Homer’s petulance and obliviousness to the whole scheme is pretty good (“Lousy cops. Lucky for you, I’m double parked!”)
• There’s a good amount of self-acknowledgement of Lisa’s rabble rousing, with her “Who wants to complain with me?!” and Kent commenting on her thirteenth appearance on her program. Her staunch, humorless position she takes through the whole show grows a little bit tiresome though, to be honest.
• It’s so weird how Phil Hartman’s death lines up right as the show started to tumble downhill. As such, his few appearances in season 9 (and one in season 10) feel weird to me. Lionel Hutz or Troy McClure showing up used to be such a reliable staple of the show’s high bar for quality, so them popping up even in mixed bag early Scully episodes feels a little off. Not to say he doesn’t provide bright moments, this is Phil Hartman we’re talking about. Hutz gets a solid line here (“It’s a thorny legal issue, alright. I’ll need to refer to the case, ‘Finders vs. Keepers,’”) and the character gets an entertaining, unintentional swan song next episode in “Realty Bites.” 
• Homer dragging the angel away chained to his car in an incredibly small amount of time in plain view of an entire crowd of people standing in front of it is a pretty huge cheat.
• “I’ll just leave it in here for a few years and let it appreciate in value.” “It’s probably a million years old, Dad, I think it’s as valuable as it’s gonna get.”
• A good chunk of act two involves the mystery of what the angel is, a lot of it playing out with suspense music (like when Lisa takes the sample for analysis) without many jokes. Why does it feel so serious?
• The Marge/Lisa emotional core of the show is a little interesting, but it definitely feels like something that would have benefitted with a lighter touch carried through the whole episode. Instead, Marge drops the bomb on Lisa that she believes in angels, and they have a way-too-serious dialogue about it, culminating in both of them saying incredibly hurtful things to each other (“My poor Lisa, if you can’t make a leap of faith now and then, well, I feel sorry for you.” “Don’t feel sorry for me mom, I feel sorry for you.”) Marge telling her daughter she feels sorry for her? That’s cold.
• “Science is like a blabbermouth who ruins a movie by telling you how it ends. Well, I say that there are some things we don’t wanna know. Important things!” This episode reads like patient zero for Ned Flanders’s insanely stringent religious stereotype he would devolve into. As is the case with most of these “first” episodes, it works in this “science vs. religion” episode context, but not in future examples.
• The best part of the show may be the Pope reading his newspaper in a flimsy lawn chair (“Your Holiness, there is word from America. They say an angel has foretold the apocalypse.” “…keep an eye on it.”)
• The ending as a concept is peak Simpsons, that the shopping mall owners would play on the townspeople’s emotionally-charged faith for a marketing gimmick, and said townspeople would be instantly won over by it is just perfect. I’m even willing to forgive the magical pulley track carrying the angel that clearly wasn’t there before the reveal. One big missed opportunity is we don’t get any final scene with Ned or Lovejoy, and how they react to being shoved off their pious high horse.
• It’s a pretty random guest spot, but Stephen Jay Gould is good for what little he has. I kind of like that he’s inexplicably an asshole, but it does feel weirdly unmotivated. Him shaking down a little girl for money is good (“I didn’t become a scientist for financial gain. Whatever little money you have will be just fine,”) but his ending flatly telling Lisa he never did the test (presumably after she paid him) is funny in how randomly cruel it is, but doesn’t make much sense.
• Simpsons Archive retro review: “There was something curiously unsatisfying about this episode. Maybe it was Lisa’s irritating dismissal of the townspeoples’ faith, seemingly without justification for doing so. Maybe it was a childish fantasy, but she never gave us anything to back up this claim. Then, too, there was the annoying ‘look! they’re hypocrites!’ stuff, like with Moe voice-controlling the tv. Not that it wasn’t funny. Some of it was. But in past episodes, they have managed to take a serious issue (faith vs. science) and treat it with respect and humor. Here they just sort of hit us on the head with it.”

9. Realty Bites

• The opening bit where Homer thinks it’s Saturday is pretty great. I’ve certainly fallen victim to fake Saturdays in the past…
• Homer driving Li’l Bandit like a maniac, him abandoning Marge on the side of the road… we’re not even halfway through season 9 and he already feels like an entirely different character.
• “Trying is the first step toward failure” is a late game all-time series quote.
• The kids play-acting as a couple to help Marge study is pretty adorable (“We should have lived together first…”)
• Ah, our introduction to Gil. Funny that he shows up in Lionel Hutz’s last big episode, and would eventually sort of take his place. He would certainly get a bit overused as we got into the Al Jean era, but I like Gil more than I don’t, and he’s pretty good in his first outing (“I brought this wall from home!”) We also get introduced to Cookie Kwan, who is a bad character and I have nothing further to say about her.
• Never before has lumber seemed more enticing.
  
• We get our first (and only?) appearance of Sideshow Mel’s wife Barbara, and man, she’s quite the stunner! And she’s got her husband’s teal hair. She must really dig thespians.
• Homer goading Skinner about his dead high school sweetheart feels very sour. I dunno, it’s different from the tonal dissonance about him reminiscing fondly about Vietnam, or even the more exaggeratedly tragic flashbacks like the one from “I Love Lisa,” this is just sad.
• “The truth” and “the truth” is a grade-A Hutz scene (“It’s time I let you in on a little secret, Marge. The right house is the house that’s for sale. The right person is anyone.”)
• Poor Lenny. At least this scene became fodder for a lot of great shitposts.
  
• Marge being unable to hack it in real estate because she can’t stretch the truth is a pretty good premise, but it feels like there’s too many scenes of her about to lie before she decides not to, when we already get the idea. Also, her big moral dilemma about telling Ned about the murder house is pretty overbearing. The overdramatic music cues started to creep in during season 8, and now they’re being used in full force. Also, why is the Flanders family moving in the first place? It seems like a thing they’d at least make a joke out of, but they don’t even bother.
• The Flanderses lying motionless on the floor covered in “blood” marks is pretty stupid. If you’re going to do a “fakeout” gag like that, it better have a damn funny explanation, or have some kind of twist, but “we were painting a room red and we got tired and passed out” isn’t it. Todd’s “red room” bit is good, though; they should have just had a scene where they were all in the same room painting and done that joke.
• Homer fighting Snake is fucking dumb. Snake’s allegiance to his beloved car is a nice character flourish (“Premiiiuuummmm! Duuuuuddee!”), and I also like how he and his cellmate are able to easily eavesdrop on the police auction from their cell, but this B-plot just sucks, and how it literally collides with the A-story in destroying the murder house is even worse.
• The very ending at the unemployment office is really bizarre. Marge’s line feels weirdly demonizing (“Three hundred dollars for doing nothing? I feel like such a crook.”) It comes off kind of heartless, hitting even more so given how countless people got fucked out of their jobs last year. Then we end on a freeze frame of George H.W. Bush picking up his check… what’s that about? The man’s been out of office for over five years, what is this a commentary on?
• Simpsons Archive retro review: “Dan Greaney, often Simpsons’ best writer, turns in a story that is at worst mediocre. Haven’t we had enough Marge episodes where Marge gets some job to spice up her life that she ends up failing at? That, in addition to the fact Marge fails at the hands of her own sense of honesty, makes this episode look like ‘Springfield Connection’ rehash.”

10. Miracle on Evergreen Terrace

• Busting the car heater, parking across three handicap spots, posing as a cashier to steal Christmas gifts… Jerkass Homer is out in full force immediately. It’s funny how the first two examples also happened in other episodes (“The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson,” “The Springfield Connection,”) but both of those instances had greater character or plot motivations; here, Homer’s just being a dick because that’s who he is now! Also, Homer’s reply to Marge asking why they waited until last minute to do their Xmas shopping (“You know me, Marge, I just love the hustle and bustle!”) is pretty telling. Homer is a lazy oaf who would love nothing more than to just sit on the couch watching TV, but he’s now Captain Wacky, searching high and low for his new scheme/crazy adventure.
• The kids watching the televised yule log in front of the real-life fireplace is a great quick gag, one I recall they copied verbatim in a recent episode, except they literally have Lisa explain the joke for the audience (“You know, we have an actual fireplace, and we’re watching a fire on TV! Isn’t that funny? Do you get it?”)
• Homer falling from the roof while decorating is an easy compare and contrast with “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire.” The more climactic and painful fall clashes with the simplistic, almost gentle tumble from the very first episode. I do like that Homer comes back into the house to call everyone outside, completely nonplussed by his accident, but the kids laughing in good nature at Homer’s small fall in “Open Fire” is much more adorable than them laughing at him here.
• I always liked this little animation of empty-bladder Bart leaving the bathroom (“How sweet it is!”)
  
• The tree on fire looks fantastic. I just love the fidelity of the old cel animation fire effects, I don’t know why they can’t create that great glow effect as convincingly with digital tools.
• “Cheer up. We’ll catch this guy.” “Uhhh, Chief?” “What? You can’t rule it out…”
• Kent Brockman gets a handful of great lines throughout the episode (“Is your husband or lover here, ma’am?” “Absolutely devastated? …absolutely devastated. The words of a heartbroken mother.”) I also love him cordially thanking the family at the end of his last broadcast, making it crystal clear he’s just doing his job and doesn’t actually give a shit.
• A remorseful Bart on Christmas is definitely reminiscent of “Marge Be Not Proud,” but in that episode, the conflict was much more relatable: a kid who disappoints a parent and has to make good. A bit too teevee-y? Perhaps at times. But it didn’t feel phony, has a satisfying emotional payoff, and is consistently funny throughout, never descending too deep into treacle. Here, for most of the middle chunk of the episode, Bart is racked with guilt over the ridiculous tree-destroying accident he pulled, so there’s nothing else to really grab onto. All you can do is count the minutes until the inevitable confession.
• It’s weird that the Crazy Old Man is the owner of the TV shop who shoos away the two orphans (“Come back when you get some parents!”) He was a well established resident at the Retirement Castle at this point, was this just a weird production mistake that they used his character model by accident?
• “Simpsons Scam Springfield/Angry Mob Mulls Options” is a great newspaper headline/subhead.
• The Simpson family impromptu traveling to Los Angeles so Marge can be on Jeopardy! for barely a minute of screen time doesn’t bode well for the ever shrinking reality this show has left. Luckily, Alex Trebek (RIP) is great in his small role. I love him rubbing his mustache after running the family out of the studio, and the fantastic ADR line from one of his goons (“They ain’t gettin’ the home version.”)
• I feel kind of mixed about the townspeople robbing the Simpson home ending. I like that it’s a cruel “twist” that isn’t a cloying and sappy happy ending, like how basically all episodes end nowadays, but it still feels pretty silly. What is Apu going to do with Santa’s Little Helper and Snowball II? Or Comic Book Guy with pants full of silverware? The people of Springfield are prone to riot and loot if provoked, but here, it comes off as almost pointlessly vindictive, which I guess is part of the point, but it doesn’t really work satisfyingly for me.
• Simpsons Archive retro review: “I know these characters, but not from OFF.  The characters seemed to be caricatures of themselves in this ep. Trite plot, lack of humor, Bart-must-be-the-center style all contributed to the grade. The writers have sold out, yet again. I haven’t seen an ep like this since season 1. It also seemed as if the episode started in about the last minute — i.e. the entire ep could have been condensed into act I. All in all, a big disappointment.”

11. All Singing, All Dancing

• “Gump Roast” is handily the worst clip show, but this might be the most disposable episode of the entire series. If I want to hear any of the songs from the show, I’ll just listen to them off the CDs, or off YouTube nowadays. There’s no appeal to me having them all in one episode, and the framing device is pretty bad. Snake the hostage taker/attempted murderer doesn’t feel appropriate, or funny, to sustain an entire episode. The only saving grace is the first few minutes, the movie night set-up stuff is all good (“Did you get ‘Waiting to Exhale’?” “They put us on the ‘Waiting to Exhale’ waiting list, but they said don’t hold your breath,”) and of course, “Paint Your Wagon” is a tremendous sequence, but after Homer ejects the tape into the wastebasket, the episode completely tanks. Not much more to say about this one.
• Simpsons Archive retro review: “I have to register my disgust at the utter lack of humor in last night’s episode. As a general rule, I am not a big fan of the Broadway-style singing engaged in by the Simpsons on occasion. However, I tolerate it as a necessary part of watching the best show on television and occasionally have a laugh at a cleverly worded lyric. But whoever the writer(s) is/are that insist upon this inclusion of non-funny, non-necessary musical filler should be drawn and quartered. Does anyone really feel that the musical numbers are necessary to the show? Perhaps once in a while, but not every show, and certainly not a whole show dedicated entirely to singing. Does Fox/Groening, etc. get some kind of feedback from some mythical audience that requests this piffle? To quote  Lisa, ‘Do they really expect us to swallow this tripe?'”

12. Bart Carny

• The opening with Marge trying to get the kids to do chores is actually pretty damn solid: Bart and Lisa’s “ding ding ding”s (and Homer running out for the ice cream man), talking about chopping their own hands off to avoid doing work, and Marge gloating in getting the upper hand when the carnival rolls into town, only to get undermined immediately by Homer. Marge gets the knife dug in even deeper at the carnival when Bart excitedly wants to go on the Yard Work Simulator (though she unnecessarily explains the joke, “When I ask you to do yard work…” when a simple frustrated murmur would have sufficed.)
• The Tooth Chipper is great, but definitely makes me wince. Between this and Homer chewing the tire bolts in “New York,” this is not a good season for my weird visceral reaction to dental mishaps.
• It’s not very clear why Homer deifies the carnies so much. I guess it would be okay if it were funny in any way, but it’s not. He’s slowly settling into being generally bothersome by default.
• Of course the Rich Texan would own Hitler’s car. Also, when Bart says while driving it, “Out of my way! I’m Hitler!” he seems to be doing kind of a Nazi salute?
• Homer butts in and pleads to be a carny with Bart, and the Rich Texan lets him because why not. What about his job or Bart going to school?  Also, maybe I’m overthinking this, but how could Homer and Bart doing grunt work at the carnival be enough to cover their debt in totaling an irreplacable antique car? How long are they in Springfield? None of these questions deserved answers, I guess.
• Agnes browbeating Skinner during the ring toss game to the point he switches to the knife prize is a dark joke I can get behind.
• Wiggum trying to get a bribe off Homer feels wrong; maybe it’s just me, but I consider Wiggum to be stupider than Homer. Also, he carts the ring toss game away, but isn’t the entire carnival crooked? Why wouldn’t he go after the Rich Texan as the owner? These details wouldn’t matter if the show were funnier; instead, this moment is enhanced with dramatic music, so I end up thinking about how this stuff makes no sense more clearly.
• I most certainly like how pissed Marge is at the start of act three as she grabs Homer by the collar and hauls him into the other room to chew him out for bringing two dirty strangers home. It’s a far cry from later seasons where she’s just a blank Stepford wife who puts up with all manner of crazy crap from her man child husband.
• The sunken “sister ship” is another great dark joke (“Went down with eighty-eight souls just last week,”) but it’s partially ruined by dumbass Homer and Bart taunting the shark. Marge daydreaming about a glass-bottomed car is a great bit though (“I can’t help but wonder what we’re missing!”)
• The Cooders squatting is pretty damn boring. I don’t know how you’d make the last act work better, but Homer’s hula hoop trick is a pretty damn satisfying conclusion. It’s just clever enough that I believe Homer could have come up with it, and them laughing through the mail slot, with their laughter cut off when the flap closes, is a great bit of karma.
• I wish Jim Varney was in a much better episode, but he gives one hell of a solid line reading for, “We were beaten by the best, boy.”
• Simpsons Archive retro review: “Awful, awful first act, followed by very good, very funny second and third acts. What, was this episode written by John Swartzwelder or something? Bingo! While the laughs from later acts partially redeemed the ‘setup’ act, they didn’t entirely.”

13. The Joy of Sect

• The pay-off of the citizens of Springfield coming to see the home team return just to boo and riot is pretty great, as they proceed to turn their entire plane over. A truly hilarious final touch that I don’t know if I really noticed before is the inflatable ramp that unfurls after the plane is upside-down, causing the poor suckers trying to go down it to immediately fall to the ground.
• Homer repeatedly asking the Movementarians about the free weekend felt like a poorer imitation of his questioning of each letter in “VIP” from “Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington.”
• “Remember when those smooth-talking guys tried to sell me a timeshare vacation condo?” “You bought four of them! Thank God the check bounced.” “So I beat the system!”
• I’m fascinated by cults, so this episode has kind of a soft spot for me. They do a solid job presenting the Movementarians as a functioning pastiche of different famous cults. I love how act one is how all of the traditional manipulation tactics used by many cults just don’t work on someone as thick as Homer, and the usage of the Batman theme to finally permeate his psyche is excellent.
• “Church, cult, cult, church. So we get bored someplace else every Sunday. Does this really change our day to day lives?”
• Mr. Burns the God is a completely isolated diversion from the main story, but it’s still memorable all the same, and worth it if for nothing else the quote, “Ahoy hoy, lowly mortals!” One joke I don’t quite get is when Smithers tells Burns he’ll handle creating the religion’s logo after he throws out several copyrighted options (Special K, Mickey Mouse ears), we see the final version is a giant B inside of what is clearly a Christmas tree. Is the joke supposed to be that Smithers also picked a pre-existing symbol? 
• I like how Marge just gets more and more angry as act two goes on. The woman puts up with a lot of shit on a weekly basis, but she certainly has her limits (“Homer, you know I always try to put the best face on everything, but there’s no face on that damn bean!!”)
• Lovejoy being a little bit too ready to burn down the church is a great scene (“I never thought I’d have to do this again…”)
• Willie working with Marge, Ned and Lovejoy to reprogram the other Simpsons is a great usage of a side character, having them interact with other characters they normally wouldn’t in a whole new situation, and it turns out quite well (“I made some Rice Krispie squares for our hungry deprogram-orinoes!” “You ruined the atmosphere, you daft pansy!”)
• It’s so silly, but I love the trick with the hover bikes, and even better that Ned’s weird paper comb thing to make the noise is also used by the Leader at the end.
• The ending is pretty solid, if a little bit long, but I like the double fake out where even though a single drop of beer hits his tongue, it seems like Homer is still brainwashed, but then he goes to reveal what’s inside the forbidden barn, which is actually the foretold spacecraft. Of course we never think it’s real, but it still works really well. It’s also great that the beer thing is set up from the very beginning when the Movementarians tell him that alcohol isn’t permitted.
• After having watched hundreds and hundreds of awful new episodes, I was wondering if I would be a little more forgiving to the Mike Scully era of the series, but halfway into season 9, that really isn’t the case. I certainly would take any season 9-12 episode over season 32, but the fatal problems that start creeping into the forefront here and get progressively worse aren’t any more palatable. 
• Simpsons Archive retro review: “This episode can serve as sort of a litmus test for ‘Simpson’ fans. People who like the older shows will give a ‘C’ or lower, while the ‘New shows rule’ crowd will perhaps give an ‘A.’ I’m in-between, so I’ll award a ‘B-.’ The show’s best sequence, curiously, is also the most superfluous, but it’s generally funny when taken on its own merits.”