Original airdate: April 29, 2012

The premise: Bart seeks to dispel his recent ennui with a family vacation on a luxury cruise, but when he realizes his perfect week is only temporary, he schemes a plan to make the vacation last forever.

The reaction: The Simpson family once existed in a world where everything sucked. When they watched commercials for seemingly amazing attractions or products that seemed to be too good to be true, they usually ended up being huge let-downs. The show was a satire on all aspects of modern life, and no subject matter was safe from its masterful ridicule. Nowadays, whether it be celebrities who play themselves delivering softball jokes at their own “expense,” or showing the family at elaborate events and new locales based on the writing staff’s seemingly wonderful SoCal lives, it seems at times the show isn’t as interested in ripping on things as it is glorifying them. This may be the crowning example thus far, an episode that seems like an extended commercial for the cruise industry. When Bart sees the ad for a cruise line, he’s immediately won over. It looks like the funnest thing to ever be fun in the history of fun-dom. Then the family takes the cruise, and it’s the best thing ever. Everything about it is great. More fun than anything else ever. Fun fun fun. Did the writers get a free vacation out of this? The cruise industry seems like such a ripe target for ridicule, but they just let this one slip by. In the context of the story, there’s no room for satire though; the episode is about Bart’s inexplicable melancholy, and his realization that while the cruise is enthralling now, it, like all things, is only temporary. I’ll give the episode some credit, we go into some really dark places with Bart, with him imaging himself on his death bed mourning a wholly unexciting life. There are a few sequences that come close to holding real weight, but ultimately, I’m left not entirely sure why Bart is feeling this way. This type of depression about one’s future seems weird for someone as young as Bart to have; Lisa’s bout of sadness way back in “Moaning Lisa” made sense because she’s always been wise beyond her years, and we see why she feels this way, from her unappreciative school and home life. No matter how many times Bart talks about how unhappy and unfulfilled he feels, I never understood why that was. There are elements of this episode that feel like they actually could work, but by the time we get to the third act when all hell breaks loose on the ship that ends up with the Simpsons in Antarctica, it just becomes the same nonsensical slop we always get every Sunday.

Three items of note:
– The opening act is full of sequences I’ve come to expect from this show. To raise the money for the cruise, Bart sells everything in his room in a yard sale. Everything. His bed, his furniture, all of it. This all happens without Homer or Marge saying anything, it’s just a set piece where they can kill a little time. The next day, Bart is shocked to find that his funds jar is completely full, like magic! Marge announces that each family member sold one beloved item each, so then Lisa, then Marge, then Homer wait their turns to give their respective joke lines about what they sold. Like the kids talking in the movie theater in “Beware My Cheating Bart,” it’s all this super hacky set-up/pay-off style of sitcom writing that this show used to make fun of.
– Bart tricks his fellow passengers into thinking that there’s been a virus outbreak on land so they must stay out at sea, creating panic and pandemonium. We get a panoramic view of the ship that mirrors the one earlier in the episode, except all the attractions and amenities are in ruin. Everyone is miserable, everything is dirty and run down, nothing works, but for some reason, Bart doesn’t seem to care. He’s deluded himself into thinking this is all still fun, but it doesn’t play out like a delusion. Like, why is he still psyched? This could have played into some realization that it wasn’t the superficial fun stuff on the ship that was making him happy, it was seeing the rest of his family enjoy themselves that he liked. Instead, we don’t get that confession out of him until the end of the episode. Speaking of which…
– The Simpsons end up stranded in Antarctica with a few minutes of runtime to spare. They run into a hoard of penguins and Bart and Lisa make some observation about how life is about enjoying those fleeting moments of fun, blah blah blah, whatever. It all feels so arbitrary. The family is stranded in a freezing cold wasteland, but when they see the penguins sliding down the hill, they decide it’s time to exposit the meaning of tonight’s episode.

One good line/moment: I actually really liked Steve Coogan as the cruise director. The gag in his introductory video where it keeps cutting to him leaning against different guard rails as he gives his spiel gave me the first genuine, hearty laugh I’ve gotten out of this show in a long time.

Original airdate: April 15, 2012

The premise: Jimbo threatens Bart into being his surrogate to take his girlfriend Shauna to all the things he doesn’t want to go to, which results in a weird, inappropriate relationship between them. Meanwhile, Homer buys an expensive treadmill only so he can binge watch a LOST “parody” on its built-in TV.

The reaction: “Doesn’t anyone here realize I’m only ten years old?” Bart quips halfway through the episode. I feel like he’s addressing the writers here, because this is yet another instance of putting Bart in a situation better suited for a high school story, probably the most extreme one yet. I usually try to avoid direct compare and contrasts to past episodes, but seeing as this is the second episode featuring Bart’s infatuation with an older girl who’s dating Jimbo, that’s just far too specific to not have in my mind. Ah yes, “New Kid on the Block,” airing nearly twenty years earlier, featured Bart’s youthful crush on cool new neighbor Laura Powers, who impresses him with her knowledge of schoolyard pranks and ability to use bullies’s mind tricks against them. On the other hand, who is Shauna, Jimbo’s new flame? A teenage skank? We don’t get much out of her other than her occasional flirtatious nature, so Bart’s interest in her is nowhere near as believable as Laura’s was. Also, the set-up: Jimbo has Bart spend time with Shauna because he’s a non-threatening “pre-puber,” and Shauna initially thought he was a second grader, but halfway through the episode she flashes him her boobs and they start secretly making out. Gross gross groooosssss. The ages of the bullies have always been nebulous (Kearney is a father, after all), but Shauna seems like she’s probably fourteen, fifteen max? Locking lips with a kid? Weird. And as we’ve seen in the past, Bart oscillates from acting like a little boy to an older kid with a girlfriend, from happily going up and down the slide to eagerly anticipating his next make-out sesh. Halfway through, they have an extended section where Bart appears to be slightly traumatized after being flashed, but this is dropped pretty quickly after he, for some reason, urges Shauna she can do better than Jimbo. Maybe the episode could have been about Bart not wanting to grow up so fast, like his own “Lard of the Dance.” Instead we get him playing mouth hockey with a girl in a two-piece bathing suit who looks like a high schooler. I repeat: gross gross GROSS.

Three items of note:
– The B-plot is pretty boring. Once again, the show is late to the party, as LOST went off the air two years earlier. I imagine this story came about from one of the writers binge-watching the show after not having watched it first run. So Homer very quickly stops using the treadmill, and Marge, for some reason, is too much of a dope to figure out the obvious truth (“I guess the weight will come off all at once one day in the future!”) She’s upset when she finds Homer just watching TV in the basement, then later she’s not mad when she wants to have sex when the kids are out of the house, but Homer is too engrossed in the show. She ends up blurting out spoilers for the series finale, and then in the last scene, as Homer previously was murmuring to himself about killing his wife for spoiling a TV show for him, Marge gives her husband LOST-themed sexy times and it’s all okay. I’m not even upset about Homer getting rewarded after being a jackass because the plot is barely developed enough to be mad about. Also, we get a scene with Jimbo dangling Bart out of the treehouse outside the open master bedroom window. So I guess Marge is aware her son is being physically abused, and Bart and Jimbo can see her in her negligee about to have sex with Homer, and both parties are cool with that. Why not?
– The opening act features a beginning that explains too much, and an ending than explains too little. Bart and Milhouse run into the bullies and Shauna at the movie theater. Dolph explains they’re going to see a foreign horror movie while pointing at the poster, who then just explains all the jokes that are written on the poster. Meanwhile, Shauna mentions she wants to see a Jennifer Aniston movie where she rolls her eyes on the poster, then gestures to a movie poster where you see that. This whole section feels like it’s out of Big Bang Theory or something, this stilted sitcom-level over-explaining dialogue. You’re almost waiting for the laugh track to show up. Later on, Bart gets Shauna out of trouble with mall security by taking the fall for her shoplifting. He’s worried about getting beat up by Jimbo, but it just seems like such weak motivation, especially considering earlier this season the bullies were his lackeys in that Teddy Roosevelt episode. Then, there’s an explosion inside mall jail and Bart just runs out. No explanation whatsoever, they couldn’t even be bothered to write a joke for that moment, just move on, no one will care.
– The dinner table scene with Bart seeing breasts everywhere is such easy material. The cookies with chocolate nipples, Abe offering (chicken) breasts and calling him a boob… like, so, so easy. It just reminds me of that great scene in “Duffless,” the Clockwork Orange parody where Bart’s reaching for the cupcakes and falls to the floor, traumatized. I have no fucking idea how they got away with a joke like that in 1993. To go from that to this kind of amateur hour is pretty sad to me.

One good line/moment: Though it definitely runs twice as long as it probably should, the Bill Plympton couch gag was pretty entertaining. Seeing Homer fuck his beloved couch, have a little chair baby, and it attempting suicide by throwing itself in the maw of a garbage truck as its baby is in tears was pretty shocking stuff, but in a good way, in my opinion.

Original airdate: March 18, 2012

The premise: Mr. Burns replaces the entire power plant staff with robots, leaving Homer as the sole human employee to monitor them. As other businesses follow Burns’s model and the town becomes more desolate, Homer finds himself bonding with his new robotic co-worker.

The reaction: Way back when this episode first aired, I was asked to help cover this for the Crazy Noises column on Dead Homer Society. Having not watched a new episode in years, I was absolutely flabbergasted at the sub-basement-level of quality before my eyes. Now, having seen every episode before this, I’m not as aghast, but only because my expectations are at the proper low, low, loooooowww level. In this new science fiction universe that used to be Springfield, the entire power plant is run by hyper-intelligent robots, and Homer is chosen to be their supervisor because he burst in Burns’s office to yell at him. It doesn’t matter. Brent Spiner is the voice of the robots, who does a fine job delivering the very basic humor of robots interpreting things literally. Outside the plant, we see Marge and the kids wander through the desolate town, with Marge talks about the new 99% unemployment rate. So, how exactly do these two stories correlate? I was bullshitting the premise up there when I wrote it; we don’t actually see other business hiring robots, nor is it even implied. It’s just Burns fires everyone at the plant, and all of a sudden everyone in Springfield is out of work. That’s it. There is absolutely zero connective tissue between these two plot points. After that, Homer drills holes in all the robots after learning they want to abolish beer, and then the robots turn murderous and have buzzsaw arms and cut off part of Homer’s skull… yawn. Like, what the fuck is this? He runs to Burns’s mansion, who for some reason lets him in and the two become buddy partners. Then for no reason, the unemployed masses arrive to bust in Burns’s greenhouse and destroy the robots, and then for no reason, Burns gives everyone their jobs back. Problem solved! So, so terrible. This was shitty when I watched it then, and it’s the same watching it now. The only difference is I’m not as disappointed.

Three items of note:
– As is normally the case, the opening story before the actual plot begins is incredibly superfluous. As alcohol is considered a drug in the eyes of the plant, Homer must survive the weekend prior to the power plant physical sober. He then finds out he’s going to have to go to brunch with Patty & Selma. This is a classic set up: the two hags get under his skin, he tries to resist a drink, drama, tension, etc. Instead, Patty & Selma literally say nothing, and the joke involves Marge screaming at Homer for eating all the food that has booze in it. Mimosa! Irish coffee! Cherries jubilee! Lists are funny, right? In the end, the physical doesn’t even matter. Burns is made liable for medical expenses thanks to his unsafe working conditions, leading to him hiring the robots. You really could have done this set-up one of two ways: he either buys the robots because he doesn’t want to deal with safety concerns, or he doesn’t want to deal with the incompetence of the human worker. Both of these seem simple and effective enough, but instead, it’s like we did a weird unnecessary zig zag.
– This show has its fair share of elongated sequences that go on so long it makes me want to die, but this episode probably has the most of them that I can recall. The loud echoing “D’oh!” throughout the town, Homer reading the tax code, Marge’s aforementioned food list, Homer screaming “Working hard or hardly working?” at the robot, Lenny and the smallest violin (probably the most unnecessarily prolonged bit in the show’s history), and the robots running in the street after Homer and being hit by cars. If I’ve learned one thing from this show, it’s that when you don’t have things like a good story or good jokes, killing time is hard.
– They make an emphasized point in the episode to talk about how the robots can only move off on a yellow line on the floor. Then we see Homer has drawn a line from out of the plant and onto a baseball field. Not only are there players in the outfield with no line, then later we get the long bit of robots going into the road, who just walk with no regard for the line or not. Are they programmed to break protocol to save a human life? That doesn’t sound like a very Burns thing to me. Whatever. You can’t just introduce a rule and then break it barely a minute after you say it.

One good line/moment: This is another tough one… man… Moe yelling at the Girl Scout was smirk-worthy (“I ain’t payin’! Two of my shortbreads were broken!”) Even though the joke is painfully set up. We see a flashback where we find how young Moe got his face mangled, then we fade to current Moe. Buuuuut just in case you didn’t get it, we have Marge follow up young Moe’s quote! (“I guess I’ll have to become beautiful on the inside!” “Which he didn’t.”) Wow, did you really need to ADR that bullshit so people wouldn’t miss why the joke was funny? …I take it back, there were no good moments.

Original airdate: March 4, 2012

The premise: Bart vents his frustration with his father through tagging a series of unflattering representations of him throughout the city. This creative spree comes to the attention of other street artists, who help arrange a solo show for Bart’s work.

The reaction: This episode almost feels like a checklist of a lot of the problems plaguing the show now. We start out with a couch gag themed after Game of Thrones, meaning they just re-did the Game of Thrones opening titles but with Springfield. That’s not a parody, it’s a re-creation, an extended tribute to this show that the staff loves. Referencing something does not make it entertaining or funny. This leads right into our opening set piece, set at Springfield’s very own Trader Joe’s named… Swapper Jack’s. I guess we’re supposed to laugh because we recognize what it is? Again, it’s just a re-creation. Those poor background artists work so hard on these elaborate new settings, all for the purpose of nothing, aside from a few pithy comments that don’t even come close to actual satire. It also rings as more SoCal-izing of Springfield. I know Trader Joe’s has spread nationwide, but I had never heard of one before coming to LA. But as for the actual story, Homer gets mad at Bart and forces him to sleep in a rabbit’s cage (don’t really feel like going into that further), and in retaliation, Bart makes a bunch of stencils to enact his revenge, a parody of the Andre the Giant “OBEY” image, but with Homer’s face reading “DOPE.” Then we have a montage, where we see the image is everywhere: coast guard flags, billboards, airplanes… two ten-year-olds manage to accomplish all this, somehow. Bart also apparently has some untapped art skills, as he throws some Banksy-esque graffiti pieces into the mix. This calls the attention of some of the most famous street artists, who immediately offer to host a gallery show of Bart’s work. So, it’s another “Simpson is an instant success” story; once a normal rambunctious kid with an “El Barto” street tag, now Bart is an extremely skilled and talented artist. By the end of the episode, Homer feels humiliated, and Bart makes it up to him by spray painting his car, exponentially increasing its value. So the conflict was solved by Bart’s exorbitant wealth and success! This show feels more like wish fulfillment than satire.

Three items of note:
– As evidenced by the title, there is an Apu story in here, which is barely even a plot, as it lasts all of three scenes. We start at Swapper Jack’s when Apu is offended overhearing Homer saying he’s going to do all his shopping here from now on. But Springfield has a grocery store; the Kwik-E-Mart has usually been when the Simpsons need to pick up stuff quick. This ultimately leads to Homer and Apu having a little fight with toothpick swords. The “joke” is that it’s treated super seriously and goes through the motions of a typical movie sword fight. But, really, what’s going on in the minds of our characters? Why are they doing this? Once Apu gets Homer pinned, then what? He’s going to stab him multiple times with that little sword? Eight minutes later is our next scene, where a disheveled Apu attempts to rob Swapper Jack’s, and new employee Snake talks him down. Clearly, this role-reversal is the only reason they did this. It might have been clever if it was set up at all. We don’t see the Kwik-E-Mart in financial crisis, or return to Swapper Jack’s at all since the opening, so it’s random and unexpected to just return there to continue this “plot.” Three minutes after that is our final scene: Apu is boarding up the Kwik-E-Mart when Manjula arrives to tell him Swapper Jack’s is going out of business for selling monkey meat. We don’t see that either. This “plot” is all just characters telling us things that happened. I’d say this story sounds way more interesting than the street art shit, but I’m sure if they devoted more screen time to it, I’d probably hate it just as much.
– We up our total guest star count some more with the street artists: Kenny Scharf, Robbie Conal, Ron English, and, with the most prominent role, Shepard Fairy. They show up, introduce themselves, talk about how cool street art is, and praise Bart for his work and offer him a show. Where’s the humor in all this? I loved Exit Through the Gift Shop, and honestly, if you’re a comedy writer and you can’t think of some solid jokes about the business and culture of street artists after watching that movie, you should probably be considering a new career. But as is the case with most guest stars now, their role is not to be mocked, or poke fun, or anything of any substance, but to show up because we love you and the work you do, and say a few lines that sort of kind of mildly rib you a little but not really. I was stunned that they actually influenced the plot slightly in having Shepard be an undercover cop, but they over-explain the joke, which was basically already made in his first scene about him being hypocritical. Also infuriating is Bart not knowing who Shepard is, despite his “DOPE” piece being a riff off his “OBEY” piece, which he cites by name in his introduction.
– Through the whole episode, Homer is painfully oblivious to the fact that it’s his face all over town. This is the sort of thing you’d play for laughs in one scene, not through the whole episode. They just keep stretching it out, to the point that Homer silences his own brain with beer to prevent him from hearing the truth. Then, with four or so minutes to go, Bart is woken up from a dream by his father strangling him, who has figured it out off-screen apparently. Then he’s sad that Bart doesn’t respect him, and the two have a limp make-up at the end. It’s more of the show just going through the motions of these emotional beats that start and stop with no build up or motivation. Homer’s angry, and then he just switches to sad.

One good line/moment: The art show turned out to be a police sting. Lou appears as a centaur pointing a bow and arrow at Bart, which is weird. But then as the scene progresses, we see that Eddie was the horse end, and he detaches to handcuff Bart. The fact that it just happened unmentioned was a nice little background joke.