Original airdate: March 6, 2016

The premise: When she successfully resuscitates a drowned raccoon, Lisa starts working under the local veterinarian. Meanwhile, Marge earns some extra cash cleaning up crime scenes, but the grisly sights end up deadening her inside.

The reaction: This season feels like it’s littered with Lisa episodes, and it’s starting to get boring, especially since elements of this one feel incredibly similar to the last episode. Lisa becomes super popular at school after giving mouth-to-mouth to a woodland critter… because that makes sense, I guess? Riding off this high, she gushes to her mom, Marge complains about the traffic, so Lisa bitterly muses, “And so ends the moment being about me.” I suppose moments like this are supposed to communicate how Lisa is disregarded by most people and a sad, intellectual loner, like she’s always been. But considering how involved Lisa has been with so many different characters and the entire town as a whole over the last few decades doesn’t speak to that anymore. “Moaning Lisa” featured a quiet, contemplative girl who had no one to share her passions with. Nowadays, she’s desperate for attention and becomes pissy when she doesn’t immediately get it. So she goes to work under the local vet, who is a soft-spoken kindly old fellow, in a relationship that sort of felt like Lisa and Hollis Hulburt in “Lisa the Iconoclast,” except without the jokes. Lisa eventually takes on more and more responsibilities, and starts getting a big head about the work she’s doing. When she saves a goat at Martin’s birthday party, she smugly quips to Bart, “Life or death. I make the choice.” There’s an element of Lisa being interested in this because of the cute wittle animals, but like the last episode, most of it comes off like this self-absorbed superiority complex. Whether it’s helping a sick homeless woman or healing wounded animals, Lisa seems to be far up her own ass more than anything, and it makes her unlikable. So like last episode, Bart rains on Lisa’s parade by snapping her back to reality; there’s four minutes left and we finally have an actual “conflict” when Bart brings in the school hamster Lisa agreed to look after over spring break, neglected due to Lisa’s work at the vet’s office and her arrogant grandstanding. Like I said last time, I really don’t get why they write Lisa like this. An episode with her thinking animals are adorable and wanting to help them seems like a no brainer to make Lisa act like a precocious little girl. Maybe there could be some kind of outside force or antagonist standing in her way for her to overcome. That’s what Lisa episodes were always about, one little girl facing down an opponent, be it the Malibu Stacy company or the entire US Government, armed only with her morals and principals. Instead, nowadays, it seems Lisa’s greatest enemy is herself and her inflated ego, and that’s just no fun.

Three items of note:
– There’s another Bill Plympton couch gag, but it was surprisingly weak. The couch and TV dream of being together, the TV stretches out and ends up smashing onto the floor, dead. Then the episode just starts. It felt like it ended before it even began.
– The B-plot features Marge working with Chief Wiggum to clean up violent crime scenes because she needs the extra money, but being surrounded by such gore and death begins to take its toll on her psyche. There’s nothing really wrong with this story, and it’s pretty sweet how Homer shows her cute funny YouTube videos to try to get a reaction out of her, but there’s not really much to this. They bridge the two stories by having Marge’s heart melt when Lisa confides in her about the dead hamster, leading the two to break down in each other’s arms (you can really hear Julie Kavner’s voice straining when she’s trying to voice Marge in tears.) It kinda makes sense, but any points I give it are immediately revoked when they have Homer and the vet patting the writers on the back for their basic story structure (“Well I’ll be! Lisa learning about death helped Marge feel again!” “Yes, the perfect dovetail!”) I can just hear the writers high fiving each other.
– The lead-in to seeing Lisa be thrown off her high horse is she’s examining one of Mr. Burns’s hounds and admonishing him for not taking better care of them. Burns, perfectly in character, submits and walks off sadly (“Smithers, I’ve been shamed. Prepare a thimbleful of ice cream.”) If you wanted to paint Lisa as being irrational at this point in the story, wouldn’t it make more sense to have her browbeat a nice pet owner, not the most evil man in town? And Lisa’s probably right, the hounds likely aren’t treated the best. Although we’ve seen a couple times where Burns is genuinely affectionate to them. But I dunno, it seemed sloppy. And, of course, Burns is a wuss, but that happens all the time now.

One good line/moment: Lisa and the vet have the hamster on the operating table, and there’s no time to waste (“We’ve done all we can. The next 24 hours will be crucial… oh, he’s gone.”) Flat line. I didn’t see this twist coming, and Michael York’s flat, uncaring delivery followed by Lisa crying was pretty morbidly funny.

Original airdate: February 21, 2016

The premise: Bart lets a homeless woman sleep in his closet, and when Lisa finds out she has an incredible singing voice, she arranges an outdoor concert for her to perform.

The reaction: Are you ready for a very special episode? It’d be awful enough if this was just a cloying and cliched tale of a poor old homeless lady that the kids help get on her feet, but the writing is so goddamn poor that they can’t even do that. Bart accidentally destroys Hettie’s hobo cart, so he lets her stay with him. Lisa finds out about it, but her tune changes when she hears her sing, and then she decides she wants to help her. But it’s not about helping to get her back on her feet, find her a job, give her any semblance of a life, it’s having her put on a concert. I guess the implication is that once she gets “discovered,” everything will work out for her, but it’s not really framed that way. Through it all, Lisa is incredibly self-serving, giddily taking ownership at her hand in arranging the concert and seeming pretty full of herself. In a sentimental moment between her and Hettie, she tells her, “You’re having a moment with someone who has so few moments.” You realize you’re talking to a literal homeless woman, right? Lisa’s got a pretty sweet life in comparison. I can’t tell if this is another instance of the writers using Lisa to make fun of liberals, paying lip service to social causes but making it all about themselves, but it’s hard to tell, and also I hate when they do that, because Lisa’s a sweet little girl and I don’t like seeing her as a smug asshole. But here comes our twist: in a radio interview, Hettie reveals she’s a drug addict, and Lisa is crestfallen. Hettie ends up missing the concert, and when she finally shows up, Lisa is pissed. “I am never, ever going to forgive you!” Again, she’s speaking to a clearly mentally ill homeless woman with a drug problem. When she initially announces her addiction, you’d think Lisa would have been sympathetic and tried to help or something. Instead, she got upset because she’s made all of this about herself. Why do all these episodes make me hate Lisa? She used to be the most likable character, but now for whatever reason, they think it’s funny to make her pretentious and annoying. Sigh.

Three items of note:
– The B-plot involves Homer proving to Marge he can be her handyman by fixing a broken tile, but ends up getting Snowball II lost inside the walls. At the very least, it provides some mild amusement as a break from the horribly boring and awful main story. But as Homer busts into the wall to crawl inside to get the cat, all I could think of was Sweet Dee having the same problem in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and how much funnier that was.
– Hettie is voiced by Kate McKinnon, so chalk her name up on the giant list of incredibly talented comedians completely wasted in disposable, nothing roles on this show. Her singing voice is done by Natalie Maines. We hear pieces from four different songs in this show, and all of them are pretty terrible. Maines is a great singer, but the songs are just… nothing. They’re partly trying to be funny, I guess, because they’re about being homeless, but nothing that makes you laugh. They’re just annoying filler.
– How this episode deals with plot progression is some of the worst I’ve seen yet. To start, Hettie offers to give Bart a dollar a day to live with him, so we get an extremely long montage of him walking into different places to use his newfound wealth set to rap music, like the 98-cent store, not-Yogurtland and the Try-n-Save. It’s over a minute of this, and the joke is played out in the first ten seconds. He’s looking cool on the little airplane machine for small children outside a department store, and Lisa overlooks him through one of those tower viewer binoculars. I don’t know why one of those is set up in a dirty suburb, but how else would Lisa be able to observe what’s happening? But I can almost stomach that, even though it annoyed me. As Lisa gets more invested in Hettie, Bart, apropos of nothing, is worried about her (“I’ve seen you like this before and it ends badly. She is gonna break your heart.”) Why would he say this? Is this them trying to be meta, like all episodes inevitably end with Lisa not succeeding and staying in the status quo? But it turns out this is the most transparent lead-in I’ve ever seen. W get to the radio interview where Hettie says she loves heroin, and we see Bart and Lisa through the window in the other room, as Bart smugly holds up a sign reading “I WAS RIGHT.” Fuck you. First off, I thought he was worried about her getting hurt, now he’s rubbing it in her face? Second, he’s literally holding up a sign to the audience saying how he feels. We can figure it out by his expression, why the fuck did they need to do this? The dialogue is on the nose enough, with the interviewer asking Hettie about how she’s let down helpful friends and well wishers over the years (JUST LIKE LISA!!) When Hettie leaves the booth, as I mentioned earlier, Lisa asks her to tell her the truth (“Please reassure me, because I am frightened!” That’s a literal piece of dialogue.) So, so fucking terrible.

One good line/moment: As much as I hated the scene itself, I did like McKinnon’s performance as Hettie on the radio nonchalantly mentioning her rampant drug use. It’s more her cadence than the actual dialogue, so quoting it wouldn’t make a difference. It just reminds you that she’s a really gifted comic performer, one who is utterly underutilized here with a shit script.

Original airdate: February 14, 2016

The premise: Yearning for a companion, Professor Frink uses science to reinvent himself into the most desirable man in town. Meanwhile, the residents of the retirement home start hallucinating from some new pills or something.

The reaction: Remember that ten-second joke in “Grampa vs. Sexual Inadequacy” where the love tonic turned Frink into a suave ladies man? Ever wanted that idea expanded into a full episode? No? That’s a fucking awful idea, you say? Well, too bad, here it is. I don’t know about you, but I’m perfectly fine with keeping Frink a wacky joke character. I’m sure it’s possible to do a whole episode on him, about his latest inventions, him trying to get respect from his industry peers, crazy science hijinks, something like that. But instead we get this, where he tries to find… love? (“Who’s been screwing with this thing?!”) I guess if it “worked” for Comic Book Guy, why not do it again with Frink? So Frink analyzes a sampling of women saying what they want in a man, but ultimately all he does is make himself taller and loses the glasses. Is this a so-called satirical comedy, or is this fucking She’s All That? This is material I expect to see from a subpar children’s cartoon with a nerd character trying to appeal to girls, it’s such base-level material. The last step is Frink altering his voice with a chip (Hank Azaria channeling Seth MacFarlane channeling Frank Sinatra), but then when he talks to girls, he’s well-spoken, smooth and suave in his dialogue. Why would the chip eliminate his glavins and hoyvins? Maybe it’s a confidence thing. What shit. So he goes to a yoga class, wins over all the ladies there, and then all of a sudden, he’s sleeping with every woman in town, from Cookie Kwan, Booberella and the Crazy Cat Lady (I guess this speaks to the show’s severe lack of female characters more than anything.) The ending is fucking awful: Frink invites all the women he’s been with to the planetarium to announce who he’s going to pick, then he announces he’s created an algorithm to pair the lonely men and women of Springfield together. All the men walk in, sharply dressed, the women gasp in excitement as they get matched up, as sweet music plays. What a pathetic display. This is all irony-free, the women are super psyched to be paired up with such losers like Moe, Skinner, Gil and the like. What the fuck is this? Again, this show used to rip empty and saccharine endings like this a new asshole. And why did all the women connect with Frink in the first place? Was he just play-acting like a cool guy this whole time? For an episode all about him, we really barely see him in action or understand his motives. In the end, he’s just content to be alone with his robot wife or whatever. So what’s the point? What did we learn about Professor John Frink? Absolutely fucking nothing.

Three items of note:
– At the Valentine’s party, Homer and Marge are having a nice time, and Homer suggests they live out a fantasy he’s always wanted to do at the plant. I thought this would be setting up a classic gag where you think it’s going to be sexual, but it’s actually something very childish. But, they play it straight, and we see the two of them in silhouette making out nude on Burns’s desk. Though I guess it makes sense given their exhibitionist past in “Natural Born Kissers.” It also seems like these two are a lot more aggressive sexually in the last decade or so, I guess because they can get away with more of that kind of material nowadays. I dunno, call me a prude, but I think innuendo and misleads are funnier than just watching two cartoon characters furiously dry hump each other. Where they go out dinner and dancing, and we cut to them sitting in the car eating fast food rocking out to the radio (someone please tell me what episode that was from, because my brain is burning trying to remember.) Or when Burns tells Homer to show his wife the time of her life, and his immediate response is, “We’re getting some drive-thru and we’re doing it twice!” to Marge’s bright smile. I love that sweet shit.
– I honestly don’t know what to make of the B-plot. The retirement home starts giving out new pills that make the old folks hallucinate elements from their past. Abe gets visions of Mona (I sure hope Glenn Close got a free sandwich or something from her frequent guest voice stamp card at this point), then he ends up running away into his full-blown sepia tone fantasy, until eventually Marge snaps him out of, using his grandchildren or something. I don’t know what the point of it was, or if there even was one. Just sweet, sweet time killer.
– Driving up to the planetarium, Homer and Marge explain what’s about to happen to the audience, because I guess they didn’t bother or forgot to show Frink actually formulating his plan (why give screen time to the star of your episode? That’s time better suited to a vestigial B-plot!) Homer then comments why they’re bothering to recap this information that they already know. Marge’s response? “I like talking to you.” Again, more wallpapering over shitty writing with self-aware meta bullshit. This show was making fun of this garbage over twenty years ago in “Bart’s Inner Child” when Homer explains events the family all knows driving to Brad Goodman’s seminar, capped with Bart’s killer line, “What an odd thing to say!” Now we’re here, and the show regularly pulls this shit because they don’t know how to write, but it’s fine, because if we recognize that it’s bad, then it’s funny! Sigh.

One good line/moment: I got nothing on this either. It isn’t helping that these last few reviews I’ve been writing a day or two after I watch the episode, so whatever fleeting okay moments there were, I’ve forgotten, and can’t find while skimming through the episode. What a tragedy.

Original airdate: January 17, 2016

The premise: Sanjay hands down his share of the Kwik-E-Mart to his now college graduate son Jamshed, who proceeds to reinvent the convenience store as a trendy health food market.

The reaction: For a show to run for almost three decades now, and make absolutely zero effort to introduce any change, you end up with running jokes, show elements, and even whole characters who start to feel out of date. Apu is one such example. Born from a simple stereotype of an Indian convenience store clerk, he has since grown into a more nuanced character, but seeing him after all these years, as television has grown more and more diverse, a hilarious Indian caricature voiced by a white guy seems a little bit off (the show has also done some offensive, borderline racist jokes with Apu over the past decade as well.) I only bring this up because the show calls this out directly, as Jamshed butts heads with Apu, calling him out on his exaggerated stereotyped persona. It felt like another example of the show pointing out the laziness of their writing and feeling like that excuses it, but to me, it just makes things worse. Not-so-little Jamshed makes his return, as does Sanjay, having both been absent for over fifteen years. “Jay,” as he likes to be called now, is a recent Wharton graduate, and seeks to completely overhaul the Kwik-E-Mart into a healthy “Quick-N-Fresh” store. So what’s the point of all this? With Jay, I was vaguely reminded of Aziz Ansari’s Master of None, which features his complicated relationship with his traditional immigrant parents. It’s a rich topic, and that show is consistently hilarious in dealing with it (helped in no small part with Ansari’s father playing himself, who is just the best.) But we don’t get anything like this. Jay is just a venue for them to make first draft hipster/millennial jokes (“Swipe left on that accusation, bro!”) Didn’t this show have its fill already after that Portlandia episode? We’re at the point where these episodes feel so empty, they’re about nothing and they’re saying nothing. We get nothing new from the Jay character, his store is filled with limp health food jokes we’ve seen several times before, and we learn nothing about Apu except he had a stupid addiction to scratcher tickets. Meanwhile, a subplot involves Bart promising Homer he’ll give up pranking, he does, and then in the end, he starts pranking again. This show is like an empty void.

Three items of note:
– This episode features Tress MacNeille doing a few lines as Manjula, her first speaking role since the death of Jan Hooks. I guess that puts her in the same category of Lunchlady Doris… sorry, Lunchlady Dora as replaceable guest stars. Why not write her out like they did with Mrs. Krabappel? Again, I really don’t understand what the line is. What separates performers like Phil Hartman and Marcia Wallace from the likes of Hooks or Doris Grau?
– Because I guess the show didn’t get its fill from an entire Treehouse of Horror segment out of it, we get a stupid Clockwork Orange moment when Bart is convinced to prank once more. He stares at camera as music from the film plays, which is all you need. We get what this is referencing. It’s halfway decent in context. But as always, we need to both push it too far, and acknowledge what we’re referencing. So Bart puts fake lashes on his eye like the protagonist of the film, and Homer comments, “I never should have bought that Clockwork Orange video for his fifth birthday! I thought it would help him tell time!” Also, what a belabored set-up for such a weak joke. But I expect nothing less from this show.
– Apu getting called out for being a stereotype is nothing new. Remember “Team Homer” with the bowling team The Stereotypes? (“They begged me to join their team! Begged me!”) Luigi was on said team, who shows up as a capper to the scene where Apu and Jay square off, where the joke is he says he doesn’t like stereotypes, but he totally is one! That’s what I mean when I say all this feels wrong. All of this material the show has already pushed to the nth degree. By season 7 and 8, the show was already ripping itself inside out, making fun of its running gags and being very meta and self-conscious about show hallmarks. That’s why a character like Apu feels almost like a relic to me, but he’s untouchable not only because the series is such a hallmark, but the show doesn’t change anything regardless unless a cast member dies, and sometimes not even then (see: above). I’m interested in seeing the documentary The Trouble With Apu by comedian Hari Hondabolu to see a different perspective on the character. I guess the larger point for me is that I mostly feel about Apu like I do with everything else about the show: it’s all played out, it’ll never change, and it should have died years ago.

One good line/moment: Bart and Lisa teasing Grampa, making him think his hearing aid was busted was pretty cute. It’s always nice seeing them getting along. The context is that Bart is actually getting good grades now that he isn’t pranking, but is ignored by his parents, which Lisa fully relates to. But isn’t messing with Grampa sort of like pranking? Or is that just child-like fun? Oh, whatever.

Original airdate: January 10, 2016

The premise: Bart falls for his new military vet teacher, but must combat with Skinner for her affections. Meanwhile, he and Lisa deal with accelerated puberty thanks to hormone-blasted “Buzz Milk.”

The reaction: “Tell, not show” is not just commonplace in episodes these days, it’s the fundamental piece of bedrock the show sits on. It’s to the point where I’ve tried to stop complaining about it so much, but it seems like it just keeps getting more and more egregious. This episode is a pretty awful example, featuring piles of exposition performed as characters inner monologues. Bart’s new teacher is a beautiful badass war vet who quickly wins over the room by how cool she seems to be. In case you can’t figure out why Bart would be smitten by this by, you know, his behavior on screen, his mind tells you for us, like we’re listening to descriptive captions (“What am I doing? I’m sitting up straight, my hands are folded like a nerd! Now one’s up in the air!”) The next morning, Bart is well groomed to impress Sofia Vergara (who voices the new teacher, whose name I won’t bother to look up), and Marge exposits some more (“Hair combed? Face washed?”) There’s not even a funny third observation, it’s literally just saying aloud what’s on screen. It’s all over this episode, moreso than usual. So what happens is that by way of hormone-tainted milk, Lisa gets a bunch of zits and Bart starts growing a mustache (which looks incredibly disturbing, as seen above). To disguise her facial blemishes, Lisa takes to wearing make-up, which makes her a hit on the playground. The progression of her “plot” is 90% internal monologue (“Oh my God, I’m popular! Hope this doesn’t go to my head. …it went right to my head!”) Later on, she’s all tarted up at a cool kids party, then notices it’s about to rain, and we get twenty seconds of her thinking what’s going to happen when she’s exposed, and decides to just come clean. When she gives her rambling, nothing speech to the other guests, someone off-screen yells, “Is there a point to this?” Is that the audience surrogate? The main story involves Bart and Skinner fighting for Vergara’s affections. It reminded me slightly of that episode a few seasons back of the Kristen Wiig art teacher inexplicably being interested in Skinner. There’s one brief scene of Skinner and Vergara bonding over having both served in the military, so at least there’s somewhat of a connection there, but it doesn’t really matter. But this plot of a boy and his principal fighting over a woman, their jabs and one-ups at each other… it felt like such a sitcomy premise, the kind this show used to make fun of. Among many of this show’s sins, one of its biggest is embracing the old TV tropes and conventions it used to gleefully satirize. Rather than feel above such common television trappings, the show is now content to wallow in the conventional, non-challenging ooze.

Three items of note:
– This episode I guess is the first to really address what has become of Bart’s class now that Mrs. Krabappel is gone. We start with Willie as an ineffective substitute, then they bring in Vergara. By the end of the episode, she breaks up with Skinner after taking one look at his mother, and our final tag features a throwaway line about her re-enlisting to Afghanistan to get away from them all. You figure at some point the writers are gonna have to bite the bullet and come up with some solution to this vacancy in the cast. A new character, maybe? But that would be too hard, considering this show has just been recycling the same jokes from the same batch of characters from the first ten seasons for about fifteen years now. I don’t know for sure, but I’m almost positive that over the next few seasons, there will still be no new fourth grade teacher. Again, writing new things is very hard, so why bother?
– As mentioned, the constant exposition is absolutely rampant here. Homer drives along singing what his BAC level is, passes by Wiggum, and he comments on what Homer just said. Then Marge appears in a thought bubble and tells him to pick up milk (“And not just any milk. Healthy milk, without any hormones!”) She holds up the carton and there’s a brief pause, so I guess you can laugh or something. Then as we get another close-up of the same carton as Homer walks it to the counter, we get an ADR line (“Woo-hoo! I’m running a basic errand!”) The amount of time that passes between reiterating what’s happening in the story is getting shorter and shorter.
– Homer teaches Bart to shave, which inevitably reminded me of the same sequence from “One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish.” Great relatable bits like Homer tending to his many bleeding areas and freaking out after applying aftershave are replaced with him wanting to eat shaving cream because that darn Homer sure loves food! He’s also a big dummy because he shaves with the razor strip still on, so then he actually shaves his beard and reveals a creepy-looking chin. He runs to show it off to Marge, but his beard reappears off-screen during a cutaway. Wasn’t it funnier, and visually more interesting, seeing Homer’s beard reappear mere seconds after shaving it with an audible ‘pop’ noise in “Some Enchanted Evening”? Honestly, I really try to avoid doing direct comparisons, especially with similar jokes, but when the parallels are this close, I can’t help but think back to how much sharper and smarter the humor was back then.

One good line/moment: Another outsourced couch gag, this time done by British animator Steve Cutts. “La-Z Rider” is a pastiche of 1980s pop culture, mostly Miami Vice, featuring tough cop Homer and his partner, his cybernetic couch, kicking ass and taking names set to “Push It To The Limit.” It’s a truly bizarre, but wonderfully executed sequence, really fun and imaginative. The level of creativity in guest pieces like this or the pixel opening is just so stunning, that you can just see the clear artistic divide between these and the episodes themselves. Even the couch gags over the last few years have been really dull and lazy, sometimes they ending before there’s even a clear punchline. It’s even more apparent in this instance. For whatever reason, they decided, seemingly last minute, they needed an in-universe “joke” to end the piece on, so we get the family on the couch, having just watched this fake opening title. A hastily animated Homer jots his arm forward to turn the TV off (“Damn reruns!”) Then Maggie rolls by in a little couch with a trail of flames, the other family members remaining static save for their pupils keyframing from right to left. Just lazy, lazy shit to immediately follow a beautifully animated sequence.