Original airdate: May 4, 2014

The premise: Homer wakes up in a world entirely made of LEGO, but he begins to get flashes back to his flesh-and-blood reality featuring he and Lisa finding common ground through building playsets together.

The reaction: “It’s not selling out, it’s co-branding!” Whatever lets you sleep at night, guys. This Homer line opens the show, as this episode was meant to coincide with the release of the new Simpsons LEGO figures and sets. But, to this episode’s simultaneous benefit and detriment, it also came right off the heels of the wild success of The LEGO Movie. Despite it being written and directed by super geniuses Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the brilliant minds behind Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and Clone High, most people weren’t really expecting the movie to be as absolutely astounding as it was. It surely reignited people’s love of LEGO, so that probably helped this episode coming out during the wave of it. But, it also leaves the episode in a weird place where all their cute LEGO jokes and sight gags are kind of unconscious retreads of material from The LEGO Movie, except not as sharp or gorgeous looking. But there’s no real point to comparing the two, so let’s drop that and look at this episode for what it is. With pretty great looking animation and a shocking amount of jokes that actually land, this is definitely the strongest episode I’ve seen in years, but a mostly shit script holds it back from any further notoriety for me. Even in CG-animated LEGO form, the never-ending problem of characters reiterating the plot and saying how they feel aloud is in full force here, in particularly obnoxious fashion. In the real world, Homer bonds with Lisa over her LEGO sets, but is hurt when she blows him off to hang with some older girls. So he takes refuge in his coma-induced LEGO world, where “everything fits with everything else and nobody ever gets hurt,” a line that is repeated verbatim at least five or six times. As he talks with others and bonds with Lisa, Homer continues to explain what’s happening and say exactly what he’s feeling over and over again. His epiphany comes from realizing “the fact that kids grow up is what makes time with them special.” How do I know this? Because he just says it, and in the previous scene, he monologues all of the things he’ll never do if he’s stuck in the toy world. We don’t see Homer getting bored with doing the same thing day in and day out, or have a realization based on something someone else says; the only thing the writers can do is have Homer literally say what his conflict is, what he feels about it, and how he can fix it. In the limitless imagination world of LEGO, the storytelling is still stuck in one dimension as always.

Three items of note:
– This episode also suffers a little bit in comparison to a similar episode of Community that aired around the same time, wherein a 40-year-old Jeff Winger goes into a coma, taking refuge in a G.I. Joe-styled dream where he can revel in his nostalgic youth forever. It features cartoon Jeff getting flashes back to his life-action self, as well as acknowledging that they’re all just action figures, similar to the moments in this episode where LEGO Homer gets flesh fingers and gets flashes of his ink-and-paint “real” world. “G.I. Jeff” is a thousand times better written than this slop, so that doesn’t help.
– The scenes in the real world are written even worse than the LEGO stuff. Homer finds himself enjoying playing LEGO with Lisa, and spends an entire scene expositing that fact. Later, he walks in on her hanging out with three older girls, who all get their own dialogue explaining why they’re there, because hell if I know. They’re bonding over “The Starving Games” book series, and boy, I wonder what that’s a parody of? Terrible, just fucking terrible. The ending tag features them going to see the movie, where they show it’s just a trifling love triangle that the girls are going apeshit over. I’ve seen the movies, haven’t read the books, and I’m not, nor have I ever been, a young girl, but I don’t know if that’s the biggest appeal of this series. I’ve seen a couple other parodies that hinge on Katniss and the two guys, but it was never really a huge critical part of the movies. Maybe one of the writer’s daughters are all about the romance angle and so they wrote it that way, but it felt a little reductive to have the only parody angle be that The Hunger Games is just like Twilight, part two.
– It really is impossible to watch this and not think about The LEGO Movie. The ending with Bart showing up in his giant robot, hodgepodged together out of various in-congruent styles and franchises felt exactly like the finale of that movie with Emmett and the gang building their machines to fight back against Lord Business. I don’t know the facts, but I’m pretty certain all of these similarities are unintentional, but it still stings a bit when they lampshade it at the end, as Homer describes his adventure (“I had this crazy dream where I was in a world made of LEGO bricks and learned important lessons about parenting!” “Isn’t that kind of the plot of-” “No it’s not! It’s a new plot.”) As usual, pointing out your shitty writing doesn’t make it any less shitty.

One good line/moment: This is always a struggle, at times an impossibility to pick out something I actually enjoyed, but as I mentioned, this is easily the best episode they’ve done in a while, with a lot of gags that worked. My favorite scene was the church with Lovejoy, which was strong through almost the whole thing (“What if everything isn’t made of plastic? I think there’s more to this world!” “You mean, like decals? The Orthodox don’t use them, but we are a reformed congregation.”)

Original airdate: April 27, 2014

The premise: Bart uses a voodoo doll on his art teacher to get out of class, but is shocked when she arrives the next day announcing she’s pregnant. When word of his magical powers of fertility spreads through town, Bart and Homer are taken to Fat Tony, who wishes to conceive a thoroughbred racehorse.

The reaction: Man, are they running out of story lines or something? Let’s just dive right in: Bart is agitated by his ultra-positive, free-wheeling art teacher (Willie acts as a nude model for a bunch of children, don’t even want to touch that one), and wants to get rid of her because he hates art. He seems more mildly annoyed by it than anything, it all feels very flimsy. He then visits a racist stereotype and gets a voodoo doll from her, calling for the spirits to give her “aching tum,” and the next day, she shows up pregnant, which for some reason means that she can’t teach anymore. And that’s the last we see of her, which is fine, since she was never a real character anyway. For some reason, playground gossip of Bart getting someone pregnant spreads through town and grown adults buy into it, and soon Bart has couples from all over to bless with his magical “gift.” Boy, this sure is exciting, right? Halfway through, all of this started feeling a little familiar, and then when Fat Tony enters the picture, I realized that this was like a nonsensical version of “Faith Off” (well, more nonsensical), where for whatever reason he buys into Bart’s bullshit and relies on him to breed his horses. Left alone, Bart claims this is all Homer’s fault, that he should have been a stronger male role model for him. Oh, so this is a father-son episode now? It comes completely out of nowhere. Bart cites the opening scene where Homer passes out on the lawn after a pub crawl in his defense, but we never saw him react sad or disgusted by his father before then. But this doesn’t mean anything; the ending involves Homer and Bart getting two horses to fuck with a big musical number that only at the very end did I realize they were doing a take on Les Miserables. It’s absolutely dreadful, one of the worst songs they’ve ever done. The horse is pregnant, and then that’s it! Episode over. Empty conflict, empty resolution.

Three items of note:
– Bart gets the voodoo idea from Shauna, who he didn’t notice was standing right outside the school a few feet away from him. She’s shown up a handful of times since her inception, so I guess she’s a recurring character now. Oh boy. And she locks lips with Bart again! Remember how not skin-crawlingly creepy that was the first time around? They also reveal her to be Chalmers’s daughter, so I guess that’s something. I don’t know what that something is, but it’s something, alright.
– They want to make a joke that the racehorse is gay, so he wants no part in this impregnation plot. There’s so many possible gags they can make to communicate this point. So what do they do? The horse trots over to a stereo that for some reason is sitting in the corner, and dances to “It’s Raining Men.” How on-the-nose can you possibly get? It’s so fucking bad. Even the animation is terrible in that scene; the horse has one leg down and it’s like he’s rotating on a turntable. And then in case you still don’t fucking get it, Homer walks in and says, “Y’know, I don’t think this guy likes girls.” YOU THINK?! The way this show is written now, it’s literally like they’re making for it for an audience who’s got the TV on in the background and is 15% paying attention.
– The very ending of the episode features a recreation of the Modern Family opening with different groups of characters appearing in picture frames. Sigh. Between this and the How I Met Your Mother bit in the Halloween special, this really is just sad. Beyond the fact that these are simply references and not parodies, it just feels so pathetic, this show desperately trying to plug in elements from more successful modern shows to feel like they’re current. This series has been on life support forever, and any time they do something like this, it’s like they’re leeching a tiny bit of life blood off of a flavor-of-the-month. It’s just a bummer.

One good line/moment: Another guest directed couch gag, this time by Polish animator Michal Socha, featuring a red and black tinted nightmarish trip through Homer’s body. It’s so surreal and oddly beautiful, it’s probably my favorite outsourced couch gag so far. They should just do these every week.

Original airdate: April 13, 2014

The premise: Thirty years into the future, Bart is still dealing with the heartbreak from his divorce, Lisa struggles to deal with her husband Milhouse’s zombie disease, and Marge finally breaks up with Homer, who after years of being replaced with clones, is now reduced to just a floating head on a screen.

The reaction: I guess after the unusually strong positive response the last future episode received, it makes sense they would go back to that well one more time. So this is, what, the fifth future show? This one feels like a hodgepodge of elements we’ve already seen from the last two. Bart is a deadbeat dad living in the school, Lisa is still inexplicably with Milhouse, Homer and Marge break up again, none of this is new material. But before we get to the future, we’re one minute into our present day when Homer drops dead, and Professor Frink wheels into the funeral with a Homer clone. In present day. It’s glossed over quickly with a joke as to why the fuck Frink would have cloned Homer at all, then we get a hilarious montage of Homer dying or killing himself over and over and over again throughout the years, without explaining why Frink would bother creating new clones. So we get to the future, and everyone is more or less in the same place as we saw them in the last future episode. Bart’s still a big loser who can’t get over his ex-wife Jenda, so he goes to get his heartbreak wiped from his memory (so they’re ripping off an old episode where they ripped off a movie now?) Then he fucks a bunch of girls, because we needed to have that mental image, then he and Jenda get back together, and then they break up, both instances being incredibly simplistic and formulaic. Bart experiences a single moment of clarity around Jenda, and she instantly becomes putty in his arms, and then later she gets mad at him for not paying attention to when she’s talking, like all women do, am I right, guys?! So in the end, Bart accepts that he’s done with Jenda, a character we don’t really know or care about, and also Homer and Marge get back together because of course they do, all while we’re inundated with more half-baked, rejected Futurama jokes that the writers fished out of their trash bins. Bleh.

Three items of note:
– This is now the third episode where we’ve seen Jenda, Bart’s wife. You’d think after this much screen time, we would know a little bit about her. Likes, dislikes, personality quirks, why she fell in love with Bart to begin with… but no. Nothing. Can anyone tell me one goddamn thing about her? She rode a skateboard and was kind of like a cool kid in “Future Drama,” but here, she’s just a blank slate. And she’s voiced by Amy Poehler, who now, almost a decade after the first appearance of this character, is way too big a star to be slumming it with this shit.
– Homer’s robot body goes to Moe’s on its own and guzzles down beer. I guess they were gearing themselves up for that Futurama crossover early.
– Toward the ending, Bart and Lisa drunkenly tell each other their problems (y’know, like they did in the last future episode), and a drunk Marge appears out of nowhere to tell them the secret to a successful marriage or something. She then decides it’s stupid to stay mad at Homer for the billionth time because she knows she’s going to go crawling back eventually, so she downloads herself into the monitor with Homer, and gleefully allows him to devour her entire head, complete with Pac-Man sound effects. Bart and Lisa look on dumbfounded, as does Moe, who comments, “I can’t tell if that was love, suicide or a really boring video game.” It’s like he’s speaking for all of us. Especially that “really boring” part.

One good line/moment: Bart works for the Jurassic Park rip-off Cretaceous Park (“Now Correctly Named.”)

Original airdate: April 6, 2014

The premise: Lisa starts spending time with a little fat boy, which leads Marge to worry she might end up with an overweight loser of a partner just like she did. Meanwhile, Bart protects Snake from the cops, and he returns the favor by stealing a bunch of stuff for him, much to Mihouse’s jealousy.

The reaction: Just when I said last episode was the worst I’ve seen in terms of repetitive expository dialogue, here comes another hearty contender. It’s become yet another shortcoming of this show that I feel I have to stop bringing up again and again, it’s just what the series is now. “Tell, not show” is this show’s mantra now. Lisa meets this kid Lucas, an earnest failure who wants to be a competitive eater, and thankfully we have Lisa’s brain to tell us exactly what she’s feeling (“Aww, he’s sweet. …what am I doing? He’s just Ralph with a dream! But I’m sure I could totally change and fix him.”) What? So Lucas comes by the house and the two just kinda hang out, with Lisa seeming to barely tolerate him. Marge and her sisters are watching them in the backyard, with Patty and Selma taking swipes at his poor kid for being fat, and chiding Marge that her daughter’s going to end up with an obese tub of lard just like her, which felt incredibly mean-spirited and vindictive for them to say. Then the episode completely switches gears, leaving Lucas behind to become a Homer-Marge episode. Marge proposes Homer taking Lisa out to dinner to improve their relationship, and after Homer talks about all the things he wants to do, Marge replies, “Homer, you can’t just do the things you want to do!” This is later followed by Homer speaking more of the plot (“She might marry someone like me? You think that might be bad!”) The whole show is filled with people just saying what they’re thinking or currently doing or what they previously just did. Our ending involves Marge crashing Homer and Lisa’s dinner date to apologize. She takes him over to a corner of the restaurant, then removes off her coat to reveal a fancy, sexy dress, then stands over a convenient floor grate to have it billow further up her legs. I guess we’re supposed to forget that their daughter is a few feet away and can see all of this. Marge claims she sold her sewing machine to buy the dress, and Homer makes some kind of reference to Project Runway. I honestly do not understand what this is about. And this is our conclusion. What is this? This show is all about over explaining, but for this bit, I feel like it’s the opposite.

Three items of note:
– The B-story is just as inane. When Bart gets Chief Wiggum off of Snake’s trail, he repays him by stealing a bunch of stuff for him. The sympathetic angle played to Bart, and later Milhouse, is Snake’s excuse for robbing to be able to support his son. So was this all a lie? Is there some kind of parallel between Bart and Snake’s son, any repercussions to Snake favoring one over the other? Nah, not really. Milhouse gets jealous and turns Snake in, but then Bart ends up saving him. Except not really, he gets out by Wiggum and Lou’s (?) utter incompetence. Like more so than normal, to an insulting degree. The story just ends with Snake explaining what “suicide by cop” means, and then that’s it. I guess any conclusion is good enough, I guess.
– There’s a whole two minute sequence at the beginning explaining how Homer got stuck in a big playground coil. All I could think of is how It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia did the same gag, but realized it’s even funnier (and less time consuming) to just show a character in that predicament and not explain it.
– I thought the title “Luca$” would actually mean something, like the kid was rich, or something to do with money, but Luca$ is actually the kid’s would-be competition name. It’s weird that we got this and “Diggs” within the same season, two episodes named after new kid characters for no discernible reason other than didn’t want to bother coming up with any other title.

One good line/moment: There’s a running gag toward the end where Homer and Lisa’s daddy/daughter date is treated like a real date, like when Homer nervously calls his daughter with the guys at Moe’s egging him on, or later when Marge arrives, Homer treats her as if she were a jealous ex. That stuff starts to come across pretty weird, pretty quickly. But the sequence of Homer and Lisa at the restaurant having a good time and genuinely enjoying each other’s company was pretty adorable. Homer really wasn’t that buffoonish and insane this episode; he reacts understandably hurt at Marge’s insulting dig toward him, and puts 100% into his dinner with Lisa, which only serves to make Marge look like even more of a bitch for the way she acts.

Original airdate: March 30, 2014

The premise: An impassioned speech from Lisa about her father’s brief stint as a referee from eight seasons ago gets Homer tapped to work for FIFA at the World Cup in Brazil. During the season, he is pursued by local gangsters to fix the games, but he refuses, determined to stay in Lisa’s good graces.

The reaction: A major sports organization contacting Homer to work with them after seeing an online video… I guess if it worked nearly ten years ago (!) for “Homer and Ned’s Hail Mary Pass,” why not a second time? Though I would much rather be watching that episode. As dumb as both examples are, Homer being an obnoxious, crowd-pleasing ham brought on to teach professional athletes how to showboat actually has some coherent connective narrative tissue, rather than Lisa offhand mentioning her father calling her out once during a soccer match during a B-story in an episode nearly a decade old leading to Homer reffing the fucking World Cup. Without the context of “Marge Gamer,” this narrative leap makes even less sense. Lisa gives a speech on the fly about the nice things her dad has done for her, and him giving her a red card way back when is just one throwaway example. It’s not like she was espousing how honest and unflappable Homer is. But whatever, this is our insanely flimsy excuse to get the Simpsons to the World Cup, so maybe we can get some sweet cross-promotion with sports fans, just like their Olympics show a few seasons back. We also get the family back to Brazil, where we get a handful of callbacks to “Blame It On Lisa,” including reappearances from Teleboobies and the samba instructor. Does it count as fan service if they’re bringing back jokes from episodes that aren’t fondly remembered? Once they’re international, the beats of the story are presented so ham-fistedly, the worst we’ve seen yet. When the family is out to eat, Homer walks outside apropos of nothing so gangsters can randomly appear to offer him a bribe to rig the game. Then we get over a minute of a montage repeating over and over that Homer won’t play ball. After that, we get a scene where Bart unnecessarily tells Homer that he wasn’t Lisa’s first choice for her hero, with some just plain awful lines (“I’m just examining what kind of person I am and whether I should destroy your happiness forever.”) As usual, we don’t see Homer actually emote and get sad, instead they just keep expositing lines to do the work for them. Later, we get the exact same type of scene when Lisa appears to stop Homer from cheating, and then later again during the showdown with the gangsters, and them being saved by a completely ridiculous Chekov’s gun. It all feels like the minimum amount of effort to push a threadbare story along, with none of the humanity plugged in. Characters just say their lines explaining what’s currently happening, scene after scene after scene. It’s like watching an episode of Cliff Notes.

Three items of note:
– The opening act was pretty bad. There’s a school assembly that Skinner can’t get control over (remember when he actually ran the school with inflated authority? Wasn’t that a more admirable and humorous character quirk than spineless wuss?) featuring a fake Lincoln-Douglas debate. The joke is that they stay in character in trying to appeal to the kids, but repeatedly get heckled and have things thrown at them. Over and over again. After the fiasco, the school holds a contest to award the student with the best speech on who their hero is, sponsored by a sandwich chain so they can do a Jared Fogle “parody.” Forgetting the awkward in hindsight nature of this, it feels far too late to be doing Jared jokes. In fact, the show already did one in a Treehouse of Horror episode in 2005, so maybe this was an old discarded post-it someone found under a couch or something. Then the conflict is that Martin takes Lisa’s idea to do Marie Curie as his hero, which is revealed so laboriously slow. Is this supposed to be tense or something? And they play it up like Martin gave a fucking awesome presentation with the kids cheering and going nuts, that Lisa has to top that. What school is this? Then Lisa gives her stupid speech, and because we can’t tell from the writing that it’s supposed to be good, we get shots of the judges and the crowd confirming that they indeed do love it. Again, we can’t tell just from looking at the screen, we need to be told what we’re supposed to feel. As usual nowadays, it’s always tell, not show.
– This episode was the first official reveal of Lunchlady Doris being renamed to Lunchlady Dora through a headline in the school newspaper. When asked on Twitter whether this was just a typo, writer Michael Price replied, “The show introduced Lunchlady Dora after Doris Grau passed away. So we did the opposite of forget.” I’ve talked about this multiple times, and I believe the staff to be full of incredibly compassionate people, but this whole thing feels wrong to me. They retired her character for a decade, and then one day figured that enough time had passed, dusted her off, and brought in Tress MacNeille to do a half-baked imitation of Doris Grau, and went about their merry way. And I’ll say again, why not bring back Troy McClure and Lionel Hutz? What’s the difference between keeping them silent and bringing Doris/Dora back?
– There’s a quick joke that feels really vindictive to me: on the plane to Brazil, an old woman (later revealed to be the gangster’s mom for some reason) switches seats with Lisa so she can watch premium HBO. We then cut to a very quick shot of a screen displaying three shows, Hung, Bored to Death, and Enlightened. She lets out a disgruntled “Meehhhh!” and that’s it. What’s with this motivation-less dig on HBO? And, per usual, this show has lost all privileges to make fun of any other show on the air. You can’t take shots up when you’re at the critical bottom.

One good line/moment: This exchange from the gangsters was smirk-worthy (“We will get to him. We have our ways.” “Well, what other ways besides guns and money?” “We have two ways. Two very good ways.”)