Original airdate: October 30, 2011

The premise: In “The Diving Bell and the Butterball,” Homer is left paralyzed by a spider bite, but finds he can still communicate through his flatulence. In “Dial ‘D’ for Diddly,” Flanders becomes a serial killer under the belief that God is giving him orders on who to rub out. In “In the Na’vi,” Bart goes native on Rigel 7 to infiltrate an alien race for their precious resources, that may or may not resemble a Hollywood film that was a phenomena for about six months before becoming culturally irrelevant.

The reaction: A problem that would plague modern day Halloween specials is at its worst here, as every single segment, including the opening, is a TV or film parody, none of which are of the horror variety. The opening and the first segment are allusions to 127 Hours and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, two independent film dramas that most of the regular viewing audience probably hasn’t seen. Having seen Hours and not having seen Bell, neither segment works at all. Why does Homer drive all the way to a canyon to eat candy? And who the hell thought it was a great idea to do an entire segment of Homer farting? And capped off with a now irrelevant Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark joke. How scathing! What does any of this have to do with Halloween? The middle story is the closest to actually being “scary,” with Flanders killing some of our regulars (boring and bloodlessly, I might add). But, again, if you haven’t seen Dexter, what would you make out of the section where they redo the opening titles? This section seemed very familiar, as it’s basically a five minute version of a twenty second joke from “Radio Bart” where Bart tricks Rod and Todd with his radio claiming he’s God, a bit which had more laughs in it than entire seasons of this show have now.  The final segment is the longest, a “parody” of the terrifying horror film Avatar, by which I mean it just retells most of the movie with some softball jokes when it can be bothered. The story of Avatar is so cliched, it couldn’t be easier to rip it apart, but the show can’t even do that right. Instead we get Tress MacNeille screaming as the Zoe Saldana alien, and a humorless action packed battle finale. This has gotta be the worst Halloween special yet.

Three items of note:
– They actually got Aron Ralston, whose story 127 Hours is based on, to do a voice in the opening as the 911 operator Homer calls when he’s stuck. But they don’t even give him a joke. I guess it’s supposed to be funny that he says help will be on the way in twenty minutes, but Homer can’t wait that long to eat candy. They seriously couldn’t think of anything better for him to say? No funny hold music or anything? Come on.
– For a segment all about Flanders murdering a bunch of people, the middle story is extremely tame. I never thought you could make a decapitation boring, but when Flanders cuts off Mr. Burns’ head, it’s just… dull. He slings a rock at Snake’s head (why Homer wanted him dead, who knows), and we get a little bit blood. It’s not like I’m thirsty for violence or anything, but Halloween shows used to be a little chilling, a little shocking. Now it’s just a venue for “modern” pop culture references that may or may not be Halloween related. We also get a Wile E. Coyote/Road Runner bit when Flanders drops a giant boulder on Patty and Selma. There’s no twist to this, they just reference the old Chuck Jones cartoons, and that’s it. And Flanders holds up a sign like the Coyote does. Remember Homer dropping the trampoline off the desert cliff in “Bart’s Inner Child”? Yeah, me too.
– It was pretty disconcerting to see a lot of screen time devoted to alien Bart having sex and impregnating the Grand Midwife… I mean, Tress MacNeille alien. I don’t think she actually had a name. I didn’t ever want to hear Bart shout, “I thought you were using birth control!” Also, I sure am glad we got Jackie Mason back as Rabbi Krustofski for one line commenting on the deflowering of a ten-year-old.

One good line/moment: I hated the shit out of this one, but I’ll admit I chuckled twice. First in the first segment where Homer goes to decorate the house (“Ah, Halloween, the one time of year where the squalor of our home works to our advantage!”) and second in the final segment with alien Bart post-coitus (“I can’t believe I’m getting combat pay for this!”)

Original airdate: October 2, 2011

The premise: Skinner passes the buck of reigning in an out-of-control Bart to Superintendent Chalmers, who proceeds to inflame the boy’s imagination with the great outdoors. After an incident at an impromptu field trip gets Chalmers fired, Bart and the other kids initiate a school lock down to save his job.

The reaction: I always felt that this show could never run out of fresh ideas because of the enormous cast. Who’s to say Smithers or Willie or even Sideshow Mel can’t carry a story all on their own? But every time the show would try to do this, it would always stubbornly hone the focus on a Simpson and the “star” became essentially an afterthought. A few seasons back I remember they tried to do a Krabappel show in “Bart Gets a Z,” which featured Bart convincing her to follow her dream of opening a muffin shop or something? It was a disaster. So, this episode actually tries to create a character out of Superintendent Chalmers, and while it adds in some potentially interesting ingredients, it never actually goes anywhere or does anything with them. Chalmers is tasked with actually getting Bart to give a shit about his education, which gives him hesitation. His first solo scene is him in the bathroom psyching himself up, having not been an educator in a long time, which actually was a successful scene, until they ruin it with a Family Guy-style cutaway of Chalmers in The Breakfast Club. He reaches Bart by teaching him about the rough-and-tumble life and times of Theodore Roosevelt (I remember Al Jean was puffing his chest out in interviews about how they finally had a president on the show, via archival audio of Roosevelt). We see a lot of Chalmers in this episode: he’s drinking scotch, he talks about missing his wife (whose urn we see in his home), but most of all, he believes in tough love, that boys shouldn’t be coddled, that they need to get some real life experience in the great outdoors to be “real” men, so he takes Bart, Milhouse and the bullies out to Springfield Forest. These are all really great touches, but unfortunately we never really get to see Chalmers in action with these beliefs. We see them arrive at the forest, then it’s the next day where we get a quick scene with Bart and Chalmers before Nelson falls down a cliff in a very awkwardly animated sequence. Even though he’s the superintendent, Chalmers didn’t bother to get permission slips and just took five kids to the woods, so he gets canned. This leads Bart to be invigorated and round up the other boys to stage a coup at the school to get Chalmers back. Jimbo, Nelson and the other bullies are reduced to props as Bart becomes their ringleader in the final act. Then the conflict just ends when during a police stand-off, Wiggum accidentally shoots the comptroller in the kneecap and he gives Chalmers his job back. I can give the show a little credit for attempting to inch forward with the characterization of a secondary character, but it didn’t go far enough to make this episode feel like it really showed a new side of him. It was close, but no cigar.

Three items of note:
– This episode features another guest star couch gag, this one courtesy of Ren & Stimpy creator and animation creep John K. While he’s clearly an incredibly talented artist, I’ve never been a fan of anything he’s produced post-Ren & Stimpy, and this couch gag is a clear example of his solo style. The designs of the family in a static image are kind of appealing, but in motion, they’re nearly indecipherable. Every part of a character’s body will react and gyrate so randomly and at such a quick speed that I can’t even tell what’s going on.
– There are two bits with Skinner in the first act I take issue with. The episode opens with a school auction, where Skinner is taken for a ride by an anonymous phone call, a wealthy British dowager who buys every single item tallying up to over a hundred grand. Whoever could this mysterious voice belong to? He and everyone else falls for this, and I’m not quite sure why. Isn’t Skinner in MENSA? He was never a dumb character. Later on, we see Skinner finally break with Chalmers, biting back from one of his insults that he’s lop-shouldered from being a POW in Vietnam. Again, I like the idea of Skinner finally reaching his tipping point, but it ultimately feels a little awkward. It also reminds me of previous instances of him reminiscing about ‘Nam. Finding his POW helmet at a swap meet for Skinner is like reuniting with an old friend. In one of the funniest monologues in the entire series, Skinner recalls his three years in a POW camp and the stew he survived on… and his torture of being unable to recreate it when he came home to the States. He had always been unusually upbeat recalling the horrors of war and that was always the subversive joke, so seeing him act so defensively about it like a real traumatized veteran feels weird and awkward. Also, given the floating timeline of the show, I guess Skinner fought in the war when he was a baby? Either that or Skinner is in his 60s now. Meh.
– The scene with Chalmers at his house with the boys is probably the best of the entire episode. With his glass of scotch, he armchair philosophizes his feelings about the infantilization of boys, trying to save these poor wimps and mold them into future manly men. Again, the episode really feels like it could be going somewhere with Chalmers’s behavior, but it just doesn’t stick with it. Their forest trip results in Nelson getting a bum arm, and his mother threatening to sue Chalmers, who, as mentioned before, did not get any permission slips. The scene in Skinner’s office is the antithesis of Chalmers’s philosophy on teaching, and they could have had him standing up for himself and remaining brazen in his viewpoints, but it looks like they just missed the opportunity. In absence of this, it just looks like Chalmers was a big dummy for not covering his ass. Also, Nelson’s mom’s lawyer looks and sounds exactly like Victor the hovercar dealer from Futurama.

One good line/moment: Like last episode, there actually was some good stuff in this one. The middle chunk of the show with Chalmers working with Bart and the other kids mostly works (“I thought teachers only went outdoors to smoke and cry.” “Son, have you ever seen a horse your father wasn’t betting on?”)

Original airdate: September 25, 2011

The premise: Homer makes it his mission to befriend Wayne, the gruff, incredibly reserved new security guard at the plant. It turns out he has a secret past working for the CIA, and suffers from horrible PTSD about what he went through and the people he’s killed. This is a comedy show, by the way.

The reaction: I actually kind of enjoyed the impetus of this episode’s story, with Homer’s desperate need to get this new guy to like him; it had a “Homer’s Enemy” vibe to it. After a violent altercation with Snake at Moe’s, it’s revealed that Wayne (voiced by now three-time offender Kiefer Sutherland) is actually ex-CIA. Through the episode, we see that innocuous things like a piece of music or having a helmet put on his head trigger flashbacks to his past life and the horrors he’s endured, which puts him into an uncontrollable violent fit. The bits of the past we see have little jokes in them, but overall, none of this is really funny. This is a very disturbed character with an extreme case of PTSD, but that only makes his actions in the episode more confusing. He’s seemingly haunted by his past and wants nothing more to do with it, and when living with the Simpsons, he proceeds to teach industry maneuvers to Marge and the kids. Two-thirds into the episode, we’re finally introduced to the actual main conflict (?) involving a Ukrainian mob boss who finds out Wayne is in Springfield and wants revenge. We see in the flashbacks during a shootout, the mob boss’s wife was caught in the crossfire and killed. Homer is kidnapped as bait, and is trapped under the ice at a skating rink for some reason. Wayne arrives on the scene, violently murders all of the skating goons, and ultimately stabs the mob boss in the throat and he dies. So what about the thing with his wife? Wayne was indirectly responsible for her death, does he just not give a shit? It’s almost like second-nature for him to revert back to his ultra-violent emotionless state, but is that something he’s conflicted with, or he just doesn’t even acknowledge it? The episode just wanted to have its cake and eat it too with wanting to present his PTSD seriously when they wanted to, and joke about it when they don’t, but that just leads to a very confused character. There were definitely more amusing and/or promising moments in this than most of the episodes to date, but the core of the story here made no sense to me.

Three items of note:
– As usual, there’s so much elongated padding here. Homer’s song walking into work, Snake and Wayne’s fight in the bar, Wayne’s training flashback where he just fights wave after wave of copyrighted characters… Some of these might have been effective if they were about half the length. We also get a string of pop culture gags that, as usual, are over a year too late from the episode’s original airing: autotune videos on YouTube, and most notably, the badly animated 3D Taiwanese news segment covering the bar fight. It’s kind of amusing at first, but there’s no real joke or subversion on top of it. The real news animations are actually funnier and more absurd than this “parody” of it. There’s also the Kim Jong-il musical at the end, which may be the craziest, most Family Guy-esque cutaway the show has ever done. I was almost impressed by how random it was. Impressed and exasperated.
– The ending is shockingly violent, with Wayne literally torching a bunch of innocent goons with a flamethrower, and their smoldering corpses littered all over the rink. Then, as a goof, he sets a skating mascot’s head on fire as well. You could say it’s over-the-top for comic effect, but that’s not really the case, as it ends up being really disturbing. I just don’t get what we’re supposed to conclude about Wayne. If the episode had actually been about him overcoming his demons, or making peace with them, or just flat-out admitting that he just really likes killing people, I could have gotten behind it, but instead, he goes through no character progression at all. In the end, Marge has a revelation that as a heartless sadist, he’ll be right at home working at the DMV, almost like an afterthought as he’s walking out the door. But does Wayne enjoy being a violent maniac, or is he haunted by it? We don’t get an answer.
– This episode also features the dramatic reveal of the fate of Nedna, which really is barely worth mentioning, but I don’t have much else to say about the episode itself. We get Comic Book Guy at the beginning announcing the reveal of whether Ned and Edna stayed together will hidden in the episode, which is later shown in a montage of couples being kept up at night by Wayne’s night terrors (which I guess are so loud, literally the entire town can hear them), and we see Ned and Edna among them, complete with Edna winking to camera. And the episode ends with the two thanking the fans for voting. Groan. I tried to find any record of the actual voting or signs of anyone expressing they cared about this shallow publicity stunt, but all I could find was a nauseating press release. “Pro-Nednas worldwide cheered and anti-Nednites jeered as they saw the couple was bound together for all eternity by a majority of SIMPSONS online fans.” Ugh.

One good line/moment: Shockingly, most of the first act was actually kind of enjoyable, with the exception of Homer’s song at the beginning, and Marge’s random Master Chef fantasy (complete with superfluous guest star [insert celebrity-chef-whose-name-I-forget’s name here]). The reappearance of Charlie, “Sidewalk Closed, Pay Sidewalk Coming,” the start of Snake’s robbery, all not bad scenes and gags. I especially liked Marge cheering Homer up over the Wayne situation with pork chops and them hugging. I like it when those two show they care for each other, outside of an unearned, out-of-nowhere happy ending like we usually see.

Original airdate: May 22, 2011

The premise: Through sheer happenstance, Edna Krabappel crosses paths with Ned Flanders, and the two start up a relationship. With Edna creating tension for Bart next door, he tries to scheme up a plan to create friction in this new love affair.

The reaction: Didn’t we just have an inexplicable romance between two show regulars? It’s certainly not an impossibility for Flanders and Krabappel to develop a connection, but per usual, the relationship is barely explained and we never know why these two care about each other, ergo, we, as the audience, don’t care either. Edna literally falls into Ned’s arms after she falls out of a window that he just so happened to be walking by. They couldn’t even manufacture some kind of believable meet-cute for them? They have a lunch date, and then we just cut to a goofy montage of them being together. Why waste time developing character motivation when we can just blow over it with a montage? Edna likes Ned because he’s single, and nice, I guess? And Ned likes Edna’s laugh. That’s about all I can take from this. The two of them together are just so dry that there’s not much to even discuss about it. The emotional climax involves Ned discovering how many partners Edna has had, and it weirding him out. I guess I can understand that, but it turns into a sanctimonious issue when the conclusion involves him “forgiving” her for her past transgressions. This is shades of the new ultra-religious Ned Flanders, browbeating and making subtle digs at non-believers rather than turn the other cheek. I could see it being a cute little bit of him feeling uncomfortable with someone so experienced, but as the climax of the episode? It reminded me of “A Star is Born-Again” where the episode builds to Ned deciding whether he should have sex with that actress. I remember wishing that episode had dealt with its premise better, but at least it went somewhere and the relationship itself made a little more sense. Just like Fat Tony and Selma before it, the episode didn’t show me why these two characters cared for one another, and from this limp noodle of an episode, we’re supposed to be impassioned enough to vote whether they stay together? Who gives a flying fuck?

Three items of note:
– The episode kicks off with Bart on an ADD-level spree of chaos in the gymnasium, which ends in Edna grabbing him and slapping him. The scene is kind of weird in itself; she slaps him, and the kids running around making noise immediately stop and stare at them. Edna acknowledges this, and then slaps him again. Her first strike was impulsive without thinking, but that second slap feels like an outlet from her years of repressed rage and frustration at her greatest challenge student. This incident could have been the basis of an entire episode, examining the relationship between Bart and Krabappel. Doesn’t that seem like such richer material to work with, rather than just squandering it as the first act to a meaningless romance? Of course, it all doesn’t amount to anything. Edna is sentenced to a “teacher holding cell” while her job is in limbo, and Bart, for some reason, takes the time to break her out. And she’s initially annoyed when he shows up too (“Haven’t you caused enough trouble?”) Earlier after the incident, we saw she was mortified by what she did to Bart, but now, the first time she’s seeing him again, she’s pissed? So the break-out goes bust when the ladder Krabappel is climbing out of breaks. We see Bart run away and never come back, for no explainable reason. After he had gone through all that effort, including making a full-size Krabappel dummy to put in her place, he just leaves? I guess he had to so Ned could catch her and the episode would continue. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
– Comic Book Guy and Skinner are inexplicably at Moe’s to muse about how they used to bang Edna. Also Joey Kramer from Aerosmith is there, all alone in his own booth with a cheese sandwich, completely unacknowledged by everyone else in the bar until he speaks up. If you’ll recall, back in the before time, in “Flaming Moe’s,” we had that great scene in the back of Aerosmith’s tour bus of Joey begging horny groupie Edna for his drumsticks back. So I guess this is another fan service attempt, where Joey looks back at the experience fondly, making hilarious references to Aerosmith songs in talking about the sex. Which sounds like a more clever use of a guest star to you?
– So, “Nedna.” The episode ends with Homer and Marge breaking the fourth wall and directly asking the viewers whether Ned and Edna should stay together. I really don’t know what this promotional stunt was born of, or what the point of it was, besides attempting to drum up some kind of interest in this shambling corpse of a show. Of course, the most knee-jerk comparison is “Who Shot Mr. Burns?”, a tongue-in-cheek parody of one of the biggest cliffhangers in TV history. I was a child when those episodes aired, so all I have to go on are watching old commercials on the promotion of the two-parter, but the whole thing felt completely self-parodying and silly, especially when you finally get the reveal that the real shooter is something that no one could have seen coming. With Nedna, there’s no joke to it, there’s no twist, no commentary, just whether these two characters with no chemistry should stay together or not. It’s like when they push and pull a will-they-won’t-they relationship in a bad sitcom for an attempt at ratings, but worse. I just can’t imagine what Simpsons fan would care about something like this. I’d look up to see if there’s any data as to how many people bothered to vote, but I don’t really feel like it.

One good line/moment: I think there was a line or two I chuckled at, but instead, I’d rather bitch about one last thing, a gag that I think typifies the state of this show now. An act begins with the school bell ringing, and all the kids run out, excited. Brief pause. Then the teachers run out, equally as excited. The shot is about eight seconds long. Does it sound familiar to you? In “Lisa the Simpson,” we had the exact same joke, but done a little differently. We get a similar shot of the bell ringing, but we see the kids and the teachers running out at the same time. And the shot is half the length at just four seconds. It’s much shorter, and also funnier, because it implies that the teachers didn’t waste any time booking it and are just as eager to leave as the students, if not more so. It’s not one of the show’s subtler jokes, but it happens kind of quick that it could be a blink-or-you’ll-miss-it type joke. Nowadays, it’s like the show doesn’t feel it can risk any jokes that aren’t make explicitly clear and emphasized, and a lot of times, potential gags that could be funny are ruined either because there’s too much set up or they last way too long. Also, as we see time and time again, the show goes back to the well, consciously or unconsciously, to revisit old plot lines and jokes, but they all feel like pale Xeroxes that don’t get what the point of them was. That shot of everyone leaving the school is a perfect example: by doubling the length, you mess with the timing, and the joke is nowhere near as funny. This series is just full of these moments now.

Original airdate: May 15, 2011

The premise: The Simpson family dig through an old drawer filled with the brim with keys, and then they all go on their own mini-adventures to see what they open, the most prominent of which involving Lisa uncovering a mystery at Springfield Elementary.

The reaction: I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this episode as I was watching it, waiting for an actual plot to kick in. I’m still not entirely sure, but it feels like they tried to do something in the vein of “Trilogy of Error,” but instead of three plots running concurrently, it’s basically one plot with three other teeny tiny plots that serve as deus ex machinas for the main plot. The primary narrative is Lisa discovering a hidden room underneath the school, an immaculately advanced classroom, but everything in it is fake. As more clues are gathered and testimonies are heard, it all starts to unravel, but it’s just really really boring. And the reveal is just as dull: the school lost their grant money, so they had to create a farcical photo shoot to make sure they didn’t come under scrutiny. And then Otto was told to drive a bus full of rented dummies back to the store, except he sank the bus and thought they were actual children. So what was the plan, exactly? It doesn’t really matter. Meanwhile, Homer breaks into the Duff Brewery and steals the Duff Blimp (a “Lisa the Beauty Queen” callback?), then he just flies it and picks up Lisa toward the end. Bart tries to cause mischief with a bunch of keys and fails, and that’s it. Marge gets it the worst, who’s left with a key for a flatulent wind-up toy that ends up traveling across the whole town. She could easily outrun it, or bend over and pick it up, but instead she just follows it everywhere. And eventually it knocks over a tree that saves Homer and Lisa. So look, everything connects! Set-up, pay-off! I remember thinking that Da Vinci Code mystery episode a few seasons back was kinda unremarkable, but that was a thrill ride compared to this. Zzzzzz…

Three items of note:
– For the opening gag over the clouds, we get the grand reappearance of Hank Scorpio flying in a Globex Jet, complete with a newly recorded line from Albert Brooks. One of the greatest one-off characters ever to come out of the series, returning thirteen years later, his awesomeness diluted to a quick three-second goof done in the name of fan service. Look, it’s Hank Scorpio! Slap your sweaty mitts together, you neckbearded superfans!
– Chalmers tells Skinner that he oversees fourteen schools, but you could have fucking fooled me. This whole season, he’s been glued to Skinner’s hip, in the school and out. I get that that’s the “joke,” and I know I’ve mentioned this many times, but his character’s presence has been completely diluted at this point. When Chalmers would show up and yell “SKINNER!!”, you knew shit was about to hit the fan. His appearance meant something was gonna happen, and his interplay with Skinner would be really funny. Now, the two just show up as a poor comedy act/co-dependent relationship, or whatever the fuck.
– The dramatic climax is particularly confusing and annoying. Homer and Lisa splash down into the lake with all the other mannequins, and then after staying afloat to do a back-and-forth joke, they sink under the water and are apparently trapped under there. But there were only like 25 mannequins. We see at least two shots where there’s only like a small mass of them. Just swim around them. You can easily see open water, just swim around them. But it all happens so quickly and haphazardly that I can’t even tell for sure that we’re supposed to think Homer and Lisa are in grave danger. Soon after they go under, we get that goddamn pooter toot thing that comes in and saves the day, so I’m not sure if I was supposed to be worried or not.

One good line/moment: The returned wedding cake outlet “I Don’t” was a surprisingly amusing set piece. It actually may be the most clever thing from this whole entire season. But then for some reason, they decide to have a thrilling minute-long action scene after that with Homer driving home on a cliff edge. Ugh.