Original airdate: January 9, 2011

The premise: The discovery of Bart’s childhood scar reminds Marge of three women she befriended at a Mommy and Me class, and it leads to a successful reunion. But while Marge enjoys actually having friends again, Bart doesn’t feel as strong a kinship with the women’s sons, who are much more extreme and reckless than he, and seeks to tear down the new relationship for his own sake.

The reaction: For an episode revealing information about the past, the story certainly doesn’t feel like it. Marge was apparently very good friends with these three women, but we don’t exactly know why. We also are not given any of these women’s names or know anything about them. Neither the women, their husbands or their kids are characterized in the slightest, and additionally, Marge doesn’t seem to express any specific interest in any of them either. A comparison to “Scenes of the Class Struggle in Springfield” would be way too unfair, but even going back to something like “The Last of the Red Hot Mamas,” at least you had the leader of that group have a name and some kind of personality, and you saw Marge express great interest in the group and her feeling good about having friends. In this episode, we don’t really get any of that. The time instead is devoted to solving the mystery of how Bart and the other three boys got their weird scars. It’s built up through the whole episode, and when we finally see what happened, it ultimately means nothing. The boys were a bunch of rapscallions that wandered off and got themselves hurt. We don’t see the mother group breaking up, or why they would do that because of what happened. There’s a scene where Bart and Marge have a back-and-forth where Bart wants to break up the group, but Marge is resistant (“I love you kids with all my heart, but dammit, I need something for myself!”) The problem is feebly established that the other three boys are too hardcore for Bart and he feels somewhat abused, but Marge doesn’t see any of this going on. Also, why would he have to hang out with them at all? In the end, Marge leaves the group in a super, super quick scene where one of the other moms claims Bart is the troublemaker of the bunch, and she storms out immediately (“I remember why I left this group seven years ago, and it’s why I’m leaving now!”) Huh? So, maybe the moms blamed Bart for their sons’s injuries and Marge was pissed about that? Why do I have to connect the dots for the most important part of the story, when they spend so much time on the scar mystery? Such a messy, nonsensical outing.

Three items of note:
– Not only do we have three new nameless women we know nothing about, we have three new nameless men too! Over and over, we see that whenever the four moms are hanging out and having fun, the dads are in the other room, awkwardly silent and not knowing what to do with themselves. It’s the same joke over and over. They can’t even get any comic material from Homer in this easy of a set-up? It all feels so tired and lazy. So many of these episodes feel just like filling up space so they can barely reach the run time.
– Bart and Lisa go to confront Comic Book Guy about what happened in Bart’s past when Lisa chimes in, “Can we hurry this up? I feel really uncomfortable being a girl in this store.” We see her glancing at what looks like Barbarella in her tattered, revealing rags outfit chained to a boulder. It felt like a really bizarre, awkward throwaway joke. This is subject matter that the show could have built an entire episode around if they cared enough to do it. Alienation of girls in nerd culture, female roles in comic media, all this stuff, but the most contemporary the writers can go is a movie from the 60s, apparently.
– When Marge leaves the group for good, the three women are relieved that she’s gone, so they can proceed to make out with each other. So, they’re a swinging threesome, then? Did they want Marge to join them? Why would they want Marge to hang out with them if it was going to interrupt their sexy times? These girls-only outings are seemingly their cover to get away from their husbands, so why muck up their sexcapades by dragging along Marge if they didn’t also want to fuck her too? But why think too hard into it, it’s just a dumb joke. Like earlier this season with the LOGO and Bravo guys making out, or in the movie with the two male cops sucking face, I guess the takeaway is that gay people are weird and hilarious!

One good line/moment: The fourth graders challenge the fifth graders to a fight after school, “rain or shine.” Cut to them all standing outside in the pouring rain wearing ponchos, agreeing to reconvene during “shine.” Then cut to them on a sunny day administering sunblock. Pretty amusing quick sequence.

Original airdate: December 12, 2010

The premise: Homer is sent to prison for attempting to wriggle out of a series of offenses, and the only way to reduce his sentence is to become an FBI informant and infiltrate Fat Tony’s latest operation. Things get complicated when Homer and Tony form a tight bond, leaving Homer conflicted over where his allegiances lie.

The reaction: Sometimes it’s tricky writing up those quick plot summaries. Those technically are the story and emotional beats that the story was trying to reach for, but they’re never actually successful. The core of the story is that once Homer becomes a rat, he forms a kinship with Fat Tony, thus feels bad about betraying him, except we don’t really delve into why Homer is so taken with the mob boss. Tony is swayed pretty quickly for plot convenience purposes  (“You have earned my complete, unquestioning trust!”), but why does Homer care about him so much? Because Tony threw him a party? He feels like he belongs in a group? Maybe we could have seen that Tony had a lot to lose if he was taken down. We see him visit his wife’s grave, maybe reintroduce his son Michael and make Homer feel conflicted in robbing a boy of his father. Except we start out with Fat Tony and his crew already in jail and they easily break out, so with the revolving door judicial system in Springfield, I suppose it doesn’t matter all that much. But two-thirds in, Fat Tony dies, an incredibly unceremonious exit for such a big character, but a pretty ballsy move for the show. But, of course, this immediately gets undone by the ending, as Tony’s cousin Fit Tony steps in as boss, and then he eats a lot, and then he’s Fat Tony again. So this is like “I, D’oh-bot” with Snowball V being Snowball II, a B-plot that was so dumb and insulting that I’m such a majority of the fans hated, but here, they do it again with a real human character that we care about. I dunno, do the writers just think that it’s so stupid, it’s funny? I don’t get why they think this plot twist ending could possibly work. Killing Fat Tony for good would actually be kind of interesting. Maybe they could create a new character to be the boss, or you could get to know Legs or Louie better, but the show is so terrified of changing anything about the status quo, so we’re left with Fit-Fat Tony. Bleehhhhh.

Three items of note:
– There’s a pretty terrible bit at the beginning where for no reason, Homer and Moe stumble onto the stage of Wicked. As a four second joke of them going from room to room, it might have worked. But instead, it just drags on and on and on for forty seconds, with Moe doing a little pantomime with a flying monkey, a joke you could have told in much, much less time. Finally, Moe tells Homer the information he wanted to tell in private, right at the bar anyway. With the other barflies gone, granted, but still, that whole detour was ultimately made pointless.
– Joe Mantegna seems to be getting up in years, because the Fat Tony voice was way, waaaay off here. It’ll be interesting to see from this point which voices the actors seem to lose grasp on as time moves forward. It’s not their fault, but given they kill Tony in this one, maybe this is all the more reason to keep him dead.
– Toward the end of the show, Fit Tony “tortures” Homer by forcing him to use the elliptical in his gym, which is completely empty. We do a time fade to a tight shot of the two of them, and previously we’d seen one empty machine to Homer’s left. Homer says, “I worked for Fat Tony, and he was the best boss I ever had!” As soon as the word ‘boss’ was uttered, I already knew Burns was gonna be on that other machine. And sure enough, there he was, offended by Homer’s comment. Forget how he got there, why he was there in the first place, how he got on the elliptical directly next to Homer without him realizing, but why would Burns give two fucks if one of his employees didn’t think he was the greatest boss? Maybe he still desperately wants to be loved like a few episodes ago. So, so dumb.

One good line/moment: In a rare instance of utilizing classic era elements in an actually effective way, Fat Tony orders Homer to burn down Moe’s after being insulted on the phone while trying to reach his Russian business contact Yuri Nater. Although the wrong number conceit is semi-reminiscent of “Homer the Smithers,” I thought it was a creative use of the prank call gag.

Original airdate: December 5, 2010

The premise: The Simpson family all have their own Christmas dreams: Bart travels to the North Pole seeking to confront Santa regarding an consistently overlooked gift, Lisa conquers her tree phobia with a World War II-era fantasy, Marge wishes for a picture-perfect Christmas courtesy of guest star Martha Stewart, and Maggie imagines up a comedy sketch with her family in puppet form.

The reaction: Like “Simpsons Christmas Stories” a couple seasons back, we get four vignettes that seemed to get progressively worse and worse. The first one was easily the strongest, as Bart climbs the corporate ranks of ClausCo. to get face time with the big man himself. The conceit of a North Pole with hellish working conditions isn’t incredibly original (and was done much better with Futurama‘s Robot Santa and his long suffering elves), but there were a couple of amusing bits sprinkled throughout. I also understood what the hell was happening in it, unlike the following segment. In the wraparound story, Lisa is protesting Christmas trees, because she’s a humorless, ecologically conscious harpy, which leads to a dream about a WWII-era Lisa being terrified of trees because it reminds her of when her mother was enlisted in the war effort. It makes about as much sense as it sounds. It’s all characters announcing what’s happening and how they feel, and is rounded out by an extended ending where Marge blows up a theater full of Nazis a la Inglorious Basterds, a scene which would make absolutely no sense had you not seen the film. The Marge story with Martha Stewart is three minutes of the exact same joke: Stewart is amazing, and she can make anything out a home decoration! And she’ll do it eight times! Then we have the grand finale, an holiday puppet show, which is one of the worst things the show has ever done, both in terms of regular badness, and with it being such a wasted opportunity. I’ll delve into more detail below.

Three items of note:
– Every time Otto appears, it’s guaranteed there’ll be some sort of drug joke. As the conductor of the Polar Express, he keeps the train running by shoveling in pot leaves. It’s just so sad that all of the side characters on this show are now relegated to delivering just one type of joke. And it’s usually the same joke. Two episodes ago Otto used Burns’s body as his own bong. Drug references are funny!
-I barely even want to talk about the Lisa story, because I don’t really understand it, but the wrap-up of Lisa’s dilemma is so unbelievably ham fisted. She runs down the street horrified with everyone bringing home Christmas trees, ending up at the tree lot that Marge ended up leaving her at. In case you forgot the flashback from one minute earlier, Lisa helpfully narrates, “Oh no! This is where they took Mom from me!” But all is made well thanks to wiseguy Raphael, who has kept the tree Marge picked out from last year, and proceeds to decorate it, and trim it to resemble Marge’s head and hair. It’s such a belabored explanation, and this tender moment is coming from Raphael, a man who previously made Marge spell out ‘CUP’ for his own amusement and kicked Homer in the face riding an old timey bike. It all feels empty and meaningless, and this is all before the stupid Basterds ending.
– Okay, so that fucking last segment. The only positive I can say about it is the puppets themselves look fantastic. Everything else… what a disaster. The writing felt a lot like the terrible demo tape that Homer filmed in “Behind the Laughter,” except with none of the self consciousness. I’m not entirely sure what they’re trying to parody either. There are many allusions to the Muppets, The Muppet Show specifically, but the premise is like a bad sitcom story, with the boss catching the subordinate in a lie, more than some kind of variety show sketch. All they can think to do are some softball meta jokes (Moe crumbling up cookies like Cookie Monster, a live hand appearing beneath a puppet), nothing that really hasn’t been seen or observed before. But the biggest waste of all is the appearance of Katy Perry. This was coming off of her Sesame Street skit being canned because a certain amount of busybodies were upset that she has breasts and complained on the Internet. There’s a laundry list of things you could make fun of about that “controversy,” her pop star persona, the media machine perpetuating her style of performance and music, it’s an endless parade of material. Instead, they shove her in a tight red dress and trot her out to be objectified, shoving Puppet Burns into her boobs and Puppet Moe going to town on her crotch. No thought, no creativity, just bland “shock” material. Rather than subverting the sex appeal of her image, the show just goes for the same base and vapid territory as TMZ would. What a complete and utter waste, especially for such a unique segment.

One good line/moment: The only good moments are in Bart’s story at the beginning, which has a few solid jokes, but my favorite part was when Bart takes the freight elevator down with an elven Lewis and Morton. It’s a straight ahead shot of the three awkwardly looking back and forth, with the two elves looking like they couldn’t give less of a shit.

Original airdate: November 28, 2010

The premise: Bart tends to a wounded pigeon and forms a kinship with the newly healed bird. When Santa’s Little Helper eats Bart’s new favorite pet, he’s devastated, and it creates a big rift between a boy and his dog.

The reaction: Man, this has got to be the most boring episode yet. A shred of a simple story amidst layers and layers of padding and stretching scenes out as far as possible. It takes three minutes for the episode to actually start after the full opening theme, an extended couch gag, and two lengthy extended scenes that were just random and existed to fill time. The actual “conflict” of the episode didn’t even happen until halfway through. The first half is Bart caring for the bird, then using it to send people messages. That’s it. Nothing interesting or captivating is happening, the characters aren’t dealing with any problems, it’s just Bart hanging out with a bird. “Bart the Mother” comes to mind, which featured Bart out-of-character as a treacly mess over these bird eggs, but at least there was motivation and reason for it. Here, Bart just cares for the bird, just ’cause. Santa’s Little Helper ends up eating the poor bird, and Bart is pissed at him. Then we get even more padding: the choir at the funeral, the Itchy & Scratchy cartoon, Homer looking through inkblot tests… it just keeps going. Ultimately, they’re gonna give the dog away to an ostrich farm (?), where the conflict is resolved when Bart strangles a hostile ostrich to death. Yeah. So, I guess he learned that birds can be dangerous? That the tally of birds killed is now even between them? I don’t understand, but I don’t really care either. A shockingly dull, dull outing.

Three items of note:
– The Itchy & Scratchy episode is particularly frustrating, entitled “Dogday Hellody of 1933.” I had no idea what that means, but it turns out it’s a play on the film Broadway Melody of 1936, a film I’m sure everyone over eighty years old remembers. But why the 1933? The short is actually based on the Disney cartoon “Pluto’s Judgement Day,” which was released in 1935. So, still have no idea where the 1933 came from. Anyway, the first thing that confused me was the look of the cartoon. I recalled Dead Homers already did a pretty thorough analysis of this, so if you want, you can check that out, with visual accompaniment. They were trying to go for a soft, watercolor look for the backgrounds to match the original cartoon, but it ends up looking like it’s just blurry and out of focus. On top of that, it stands in direct contrast with the crisp, clear digital characters put on top of it. There are a line of crystal clear Scratchys that couldn’t stand out more against a super blurry jury box that they’re actually supposed to be behind. The cartoon ends with the likes of Edward G. Robinson, Harpo Marx and Bing Crosby beating the shit out of a dog. Why is this cartoon being shown now on Bart’s widescreen television? Is Krusty showing a re-run? “Streamboat Itchy” and “Scratchtasia” were parodies of classic animation, but they were produced in the past, in-universe. Nothing in this shit makes any sense to me.
– It seems like every trick in the book was used to bring this thing to length. This may be a first that I’ve noticed the show literally just holding frames to pad out the time. Homer and Marge meet with Skinner, who pleads with them to keep Bart’s spirits down to retain peace in the school, a scene that starts with a kernel of a humorous idea, but drags on far too long. The final shot is a wide shot of the three of them with Marge murmuring. Then we just hold on them for two whole seconds, with absolutely nothing but the ticking of the clock on the wall, which I guess was actual audio from the editor desperately trying to make sure they hit the air length mark.
– There’s not much else to really comment on, so let’s just do a quick guest star line-up. Danica Patrick appears as herself in Homer’s dream, which feels incredibly lazy. I almost would have preferred she literally just burst in the Simpson backyard in a race car, at least it would have injected some much needed energy into this sleeping pill. In the final act, Rachel Weisz voices the family therapist, who I suppose must have a name, but she exhibits no discernibly personality or characteristics, so whatever. We are indeed a long fucking way away from Tracey Ullman as Emily Winthrop (“Pull the bloody chain, boy!!”)

One good line/moment: Probably the biggest laugh I’ve gotten so far is Santa’s Little Helper randomly jumping in to grab the bird. By twelve minutes in, I was near comatose with how dull the episode was, so the dog appearing to eat that fucking bird was like a Godsend. I only wish he would have swallowed faster, it would have been even funnier.

Original airdate: November 21, 2010

The premise: Mr. Burns is crestfallen when he finds he only has six weeks to live. When a cartoonishly botched suicide attempt leaves him with no memory and the mentality of a four-year-old, the town decides the only viable option is to schedule time for each and every citizen of Springfield to enact their own revenge on the evil old miser that negatively impacted all their lives.

The reaction: One of the biggest casualties in terms of characterization that I recall from this series was the degradation of Mr. Burns. At this point he can either be a bland stock “evil” villain, or they humiliate and degrade him to subvert that persona. This episode flip-flops between both extremes in the most bizarre episode this season, hands down. We start with Burns finding out that his days are numbered from his doctor, and rather than dropping him down a trap door, he instead gets rather sad. He holds a big gala event to announce his impending demise, and then is depressed to find that nobody cares about him, two things that feel so incredibly un-Burns. So it’s like “Monty Can’t Buy Me Love” where Burns inexplicably cares if people don’t like him. Why? Bart finds an amnesiac Burns in the woods, who is now acting (and speaking) like his “alien” form in “The Springfield Files.” The whole middle portion of this episode is very unsettling, featuring a completely out-of-sorts feeble old man being used and abused by the townspeople. Apu uses him as a human shield, Homer walks him through a construction site in hopes of gravely harming him, they keep him in a giant birdcage during their town hall meeting… seriously, what is going on? As the only one who recognizes how apeshit all of this is, Lisa uses her time to take Burns back to his mansion, where he inexplicably regains his faculties. There’s barely even a moment to signify his change, it happens over a few seconds, it’s just like, oh, okay, he’s back now. After that, the episode is basically over. The town doesn’t really learn anything, Burns I guess is just fine now that he’s surpassed his life expectancy, and we wrap everything up in under two minutes. I really think they should have just killed Burns seasons ago, it’s clear that the writers don’t seem to know what to do with him anymore.

Three items of note:
– The opening with the news leaders meeting in the Statue of Liberty’s head feels like a shallow recreation of Republican Headquarters in the spooky castle. FOX News arrives in a helicopter labeled “Not Racist, But #1 With Racists,” which is a good joke, but as usual with this show now, they keep it going too long. When the guy exits the helicopter, it gets unstable, with the pilot screaming, “We’re unbalanced! It’s not fair!” Yeah, we got it. Also, the heads of Bravo and LOGO are making out! Gay people sure are funny!
– Burns’s wacky botched suicide lasts for so long. So very… very… long. He hits an incoming airplane, he’s struck by lightning, he bounces off a bunch of tree branches, he’s flung every which way, it’s just horrible. I don’t quite understand why it’s supposed to be funny. Same thing with amnesiac Burns, watching him is just more disturbing than anything. He eats teddy bear stuffing and vomits it up, a bird violently yanks on his tongue, and in one shot, it appears like he’s air humping Santa’s Little Helper as the dog has a concerned expression. Everyone laugh at this disgusting old man who’s lost his mind!
– The ending is so, so terrible. Burns returns and vows he’ll cover the town in a dome, in a meta joke that kind of falls flat. When he confronts everybody, Marge tells him that he should be thanking all of them. He’s lived beyond what the doctor told him, and it was all because he was helping others. Is that how Marge sees it? Otto using Burns’s body as a bong was helping? Burns, for some reason, goes along with this, offers Ralph a lemon drop, and then his fucking skull caves in and he falls to the ground. Taking the candy back, his skull reforms. He surmises that his wickedness is his fountain of youth, and he’ll never be generous again. Sure, that makes sense. Then why was he given a death sentence in the first place? He’s just going to ignore his other diagnoses? It’s more of just characters explaining what they’re thinking and closing the episode out as quickly as we can. And then the very end is Burns getting muscled into going to Nelson’s school play, I guess. Oh my, what a mess.

One good line/moment: In a moment that felt like the show making fun of itself, but I don’t know if they were clever enough to be that meta, at the town hall meeting, Lisa once again must act as the rabble-rousing voice of reason, quoting Shakespeare regarding showing mercy, which is responded with overwhelming boos (Sideshow Mel is at the front of the crowd; if there’s one Springfield citizen I wouldn’t expect to boo Shakespeare, it’s him). Lisa retorts that she feels weird that she, an eight-year-old, is the only one standing up to this shit. Shocked, Mayor Quimby comments, “Eight-year-old?! I always thought you were a midget!” I laughed out loud at that, something the show hasn’t done for me in a good while.