(originally aired April 6, 1997)
Well, my timing is impeccable. Just in time for Valentine’s Day, here’s an episode centered around a torrid schoolhouse romance. Having Skinner and Krabappel kindle a relationship isn’t exactly an original idea, but it’s kind of interesting to see in action. Harry Shearer and Marcia Wallace hand in very believable and nuanced performances. The scenes building up to their kiss feel very genuine, and we buy that they’re attracted to each other as two lonely people wishing to share a connection. It’s a sweet story overall, but it feels a little thin, with things included to draw it out that don’t really feel right. First, their relationship must, for some reason, remain a secret. This seems like the kind of weirdly paranoid stuff lesser minded characters would be nerve-racking about, but Skinner and Krabappel are two pretty intelligent people. Do they really think Chalmers would go into a rage if they ran it by him? What does it matter? Instead, they must keep it hush-hush, and strike a deal with the only witness of their kiss, Bart, with his silence being made in exchange for his hefty permanent record being swapped for some other poor sap (Milhouse).

From this point, Bart falls into the weird role of Skinner and Krabappel’s walking excuse. When Chalmers stumbles upon the two at a late night movie, Skinner rushes to get Bart out of bed to the theater to keep up the ruse of a school field trip. They use Bart to exchange mash notes to each other. Bart must watch Agnes while Skinner is out. Atop the absurdity of keeping this such a ridiculous secret, why are they throwing Bart around like this, and why is he agreeing to it? Bart has all the leverage, why would Skinner force Bart to say, “I love you, Edna Krabappel,” in front of the class, when he knew it would humiliate him? It’s incredibly bizarre to me. The second act is only saved due to the individual scenes being hysterical, such as Chalmers whispering to a half-asleep Bart in the movies (“Do you think they actually filmed this in Atlanta?”) and Agnes’s photo album of pictures of cakes (“You can’t have that one! That’s a coconut cake!”)

Bart finally reaches his limit and exposes Skinner and Krabappel’s make-out session in the janitor’s closet to the entire school. The innocent embellishments of the scene by the kids get their parents all flared up, as well as Chalmers, who is out for Skinner and Krabappel’s jobs. After a pep talk from Bart, Skinner springs into action, barricading Krabappel and himself in the school until their jobs and relationship is secure. Things start feeling more draggy in the third act. The silliness is ever present and you know how it’s going to end, so you’re just drawing out the clock until the credits. What is successful is how the controversy begins and ends. All the kids give their own outrageous versions of the story, some by here-say, which when it gets to the parents becomes here-say of here-say, until it goes too far (“Sordid public sexual congress!”) To completely clear his name, Skinner must make a shocking public confession: at forty-four years old, he is still a virgin. The crowd is stunned. I remember seeing this episode quite often as a kid (during my syndication viewings, season 8 seemed to be in heavy rotation), and I can’t remember what I thought about this ending or what it meant. But I love it now, how everyone is so floored and uncomfortable they just disband from the crowd as quick as they can. So yeah, while the story is flimsy and some parts don’t make sense, we’re still left with a fair share of amusing scenes, and a solid overall premise. It’s passable. But since it’s Valentine’s Day, I’ll be nice, it’s pretty darn neato.

Tidbits and Quotes
– I love Skinner’s boring morning announcements (“Finally, the bake sale to raise money for the car wash has been cancelled due to confusion.”) Krabappel’s class is so struck with boredom that Edna must light a firecracker in the middle of the room to wake them up.
– I don’t know why, but I love Homer’s little scene play-acting astronauts for a bored Bart and Milhouse. It feels really sweet that he’s doing this for Bart. The writers needed a scene where Bart decides to go to Martin’s lame party, so they needed to have him doing something even more lame. This is a logical and amusing solution. And we have Homer mimicking Richard Nixon.
– Martin’s party is a pretty lavish gala, complete with an ice statue of himself, which Bart breaks the fingers off to put in his class. We also get a great scene with the Mathemagician, who has the power to make remainders disappear (with help of a magical 7). The climax of the kids getting sick from oysters is pretty great. Bart notices Lisa on a stretcher (“Hey, why’d you eat them? I thought you were a vegetarian.” “I didn’t. I just wanted to leave.”)
– The scene with Skinner and Krabapple in the playhouse is pretty sweet (“What kind of little boy has a tea set?” “I think we both know the answer to that… a lucky boy.”) I also like both party’s compliments to each other; Edna finds Seymour’s innocence charming, and Skinner likes Krabappel’s “tart honesty and ability to be personally offended by broad social trends.”
– The scene with Agnes and Bart is my favorite bit of the show. I like seeing Mrs. Skinner act like an old lady. Later, they’d just use her to be angry and bitter at her son all the time. It reminded me of Bart having to deal with Mrs. Glick in “Three Men and a Comic Book.” (“I don’t have much saliva left, so you’ll have to lick my thumb before I can turn the page.” “Can’t I just turn the page for you?” “No!”)
– I like how childishly giddy Lisa is recounting Skinner and Krabappel allegedly being naked in the janitor’s closet, and Homer’s knee-jerk reaction to this news (“Bart’s teacher is named Krabappel? I’ve been calling her Crandall! Why didn’t someone tell me? Oh, I’ve been making an idiot out of myself!”) Then of course, there’s Ralph’s immortal retelling (“Mrs. Krabappel and Principal Skinner were in the closet making babies and I saw one of the babies and then the baby looked at me.” “The baby looked at you?!”)
– Skinner announces from the school roof they’ve locked themselves in until their demands are met, to an audience of one (“Willie hears ya. Willie don’t care.”) Bart assists in creating a scene, calling the local news about a giant octopus, spurring up a media circus. Kent Brockman reports (“So, once again, I’ve been had. But an even more interesting story has developed high atop this two-story school: a love story.”)
– Great bit with Homer and the megaphone, asking Bart where the remote is. Turns out it was in his pocket the whole time. I like how he talks back to Marge through the megaphone for a second, then realizes it and puts it down to finish his sentence. Latter-day Homer would just scream into the megaphone in his wife’s face.
– I love how embittered Chalmers is, speaking how as a public servant he isn’t permitted to use his judgement in any way, and his response to Krabappel’s request to take their case to the people, raising the dander of a certain Mr. Sideshow Mel (“Oh, yeah, that’ll be real productive. Who do you want to talk to first? The, the guy with a bumblebee suit, or the one with a bone through his hair?” “My opinions are as valid as the next man’s!”)
– I don’t buy that Skinner would go with Bart’s bomb idea, but it’s saved by jokes (Harry Shearer’s read on “I… have a bomb,” the Armour hot dogs jingle, and the animation of one lone hot dog sticking to Skinner’s shirt, then peeling off.)
– The crowd is miffed about the alleged naughty behavior going on in the school (“I don’t think we’re talking about love here. We’re talking about S-E-X. In front of the C-H-I-L-D-R-E-N.” “Sex Cauldron? I thought they closed that place down!”) Skinner’s admission of being a virgin shuts them up, with a great follow-up question from Homer (“Hey, does this mean that Mrs. Krabappel is a virgin, too?” “Ha!”) Chalmers is mollified (“Well, it’s clear you’ve been falsely accused. Because no one, anywhere, ever, would pretend to be a 44-year-old virgin.”) I love Hank Azaria’s quieted and hurried read for this last scene, so stunned by this news that he just wants to get the hell out of there.

(originally aired March 16, 1997)
Springfield is a really boozy town if you look at it. So just like depriving our main character of beer in “Duffless,” this episode depletes the entire city limits of alcohol. It all starts with an over-exuberant St. Patrick’s Day parade, where in the midst of the calamitous celebration to Lady Liquor, Bart accidentally gets drunk in the most preposterous of ways. The footage of a shitfaced ten-year-old makes waves of outrage to the moralizing busybodies of Springfield, who demand that the town enact prohibition. Upon discovering there’s already an unenforced two-hundred-year-old law on the books banning alcohol, Quimby puts it into effect, making the entire town dry as a bone. Now, not only does this throw the title of the episode into question, wouldn’t the twenty-first Amendment supersede this law? But ’tis a minor quibble. I’m sure Quimby is clueless of it, and any of the town’s drunks who could have protested with this argument are just as in the dark.

Within no time, Moe’s becomes a hush-hush speakeasy under the new guise of “Moe’s Pet Shop.” It’s quickly discovered by the aforementioned busybodies, and upon seeing Wiggum graciously partake in its wears, they make further demands to Quimby to bring in an actually competent law enforcer. Enter Rex Banner, a smart suited fed straight out of the 1930s, who outs Wiggum and boots the booze bootleggers. Banner is voiced by Dave Thomas, a Canadian comedian who gives a great old timey performance (“Listen, rummy, I’m gonna say it plain and simple. Where’d you pinch the hooch? Is some blind tiger jerking suds on the side?”) With supply cut off, Homer steps up with a plan, unearthing the dozens of buried beer barrels and swindling them into Moe’s himself, through an admittedly clever plan involving hollowed out bowling balls and an elaborate piping system. I’ll accept that someone as dim as Homer could come up with this idea (even Marge is impressed), but that he actually efficiently constructed it and put it into action? I dunno, but it’s not incredibly bothersome.

There’s a lot good about this show, but some parts don’t exactly fit right with me. I like Homer’s bravado attitude upon being dubbed the Beer Baron, and upon running out of supplies, he starts brewing his own liquor instead, with dozens of basement bathtubs all on the brink of explosion. Marge discovers Homer’s operation, and is unusually supportive of it. I could see her thinking the law is silly, but I don’t think she would support Homer in something like this. There’s also the matter of Rex Banner, who’s tough as nails, but also kind of ineffective, unable to apprehend Homer even with him right under his nose. But I’m not a fan of his expulsion by catapult, even though it never really bothered me until now. As one commenter astutely pointed out, this season is full of one-off characters getting killed, but I guess there’s a certain finesse you need to have to pull it off. Shary Bobbins was a cruel ironic joke at the last second of the show, the undoing of Frank Grimes is something the whole episode is building towards, but here, Banner is hoisted out merely for convenience only. It gives the ending a sourness that doesn’t feel necessary. But despite that, I like the overall story, and there’s a lot of great funny bits in here, so in light of the cruel, cruel death of Mr. Banner, this show gets a pass.

Tidbits and Quotes
– All the St. Paddy’s Day at the beginning is great, from Bart’s fatal mistake of not wearing green (“No one’s pinching his legs!”), Moe booting out the designated drivers (“I got no room for cheapskates,”) the Irish cops float, Marge’s green hair, and Kent Brockman’s shock at seeing the parade descend into drunken disorder (“All this drinking, violence, destruction of property. Are these the things we think of when we think of the Irish?”)
– Drunk Bart is pretty disconcerting and hilarious at the same time. I like his friends cheering him on, and Brockman’s cold echo of his drunk statements (“‘What are you looking at?’: the innocent words of a drunken child. Well, I’ll tell you what we’re looking at, young man. A town gone mad. A town whose very conscious was washed away in a tide of beer and green vomit.”)
– Marge feels she’s the worst mother in the world for what happened with Bart, and Homer assures her she’s not, citing “that freezer lady in Georgia.” Anyone want to shine light on what this is a reference to?
– When the fun police of Springfield demand prohibition, I love the responses from Quimby (“It tastes great, makes women appear more attractive, and makes a person virtually invulnerable to criticism.”) and from Wiggum (“All our founding fathers, astronauts, and World Series heroes have either been drunk or on cocaine.”)
– We get a quick look at Dr. Hibbert’s wife Bernice’s latent alcoholism. We don’t hear, or see, much from her, but perhaps there’s a reason.
– A wonderful call-back between acts: at the end of the first act, we see a newspaper sub-headline dovetailing the prohibition main story, “Bums Threaten to Leave Town.” Then at the start of act two, we see “Bums Extend Deadline.”
– Great bit with the CEO of Duff insisting that customers will stick with the brand now that it must release a non-alcoholic brew. Minutes later, the company is out of business (“Well, that’s the end of me.”)
– The animation of the partying at Moe’s is crazy. Wiggum dances with Princess Kashmir, with a tube top and breasts that laugh in the face of gravity. This leads to a great moment where Helen Lovejoy gets increasingly horrified when a tipsy Wiggum walks closer to her, and in a line delivery that you can hear shook the walls of the recording booth, she screams, “PERVERT!!!”
– Rex Banner’s brick wall in the middle of the highway with cars crashing and piling up is pretty dumb, but the reaction shot of him pleased with his work as jagged metal flies around by him is great. I also love his warming up to, but ultimate denial of Fat Tony’s bribes (“Okay. You win. From now on, we’ll stick to smuggling heroin.” “See that you do!”)
– The chase scene between Homer and Banner is kind of silly, but the over-the-top music helps it. The jangly ragtime number sort of fits the era Banner walked out of.
– Moe tells Barney a bowling ball beer’s gonna cost him a pretty penny (“Forty-five bucks?! This better be the best tasting beer in the world!”) Sip. “You got lucky!”
– I love how ruthless Banner is, smashing through the diner window to accost Barney. Then later we get the great scene with Moe’s safety switch, rotating the bar and stools for bird cages and aquariums to keep up his pet shop ruse (“What kind of pet shop is filled with rambunctious yahoos and hot jazz music at 1 am?” “Uhh… the best damn pet shop in town!”) Banner is suspect, but leaves with a warning (“Baby turtles and alligators may seem like a cute idea for a pet, but they grow up.”) Moe changes his bar back, only to find Barney had rotated as well (“Wow, those gears down there really hurt!”)
– Homer and Bart’s beer brewing operation hits a snag when the stills start exploding. I love their scream in shock at the first one, and Homer’s cover to Marge (“I think it must have been that bean I had for dinner.”) Bean, singular.
– Great moment where Banner insists the “Beer Baron” was a concoction of the media, and that the very concept of such a person is laughable. He attempts to laugh to demonstrate, but is physically unable to (“Well, you all know what laughter sounds like!”)
– Upon being released, Quimby asks Homer how long it will take to get alcohol back to Springfield, but he insists he’s done with the business. Fat Tony swoops in, insisting it’ll take four minutes. Five minutes later, the town’s full of liquor again, giving us the classic final line from Homer: “To alcohol: the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.”

(originally aired February 16, 1997)
Honest depictions of gay people on TV have been slowly emerging in the last ten to fifteen years, but if you think back to when this episode aired, they weren’t very prevalent at all. Then again, I was a kid and don’t remember too well, so someone out there can confirm or deny this. But Wikipedia informs me Will & Grace was still a year away, and Ellen DeGeneres had come out the month this aired, and later on her TV show (that then tanked.) The Simpsons seems to have been ahead of the curve, but not in a self-righteous way, just in that they thought it would a fruitful topic to explore. It’s an interesting episode set when America was still very iffy about homosexuality. …well, iffy-er. The Simpson family finds themselves a new friend in John, the eccentric owner of a local antiques store. However, despite the incredibly obvious signs, Homer is absolutely shocked to discover that he’s gay, and wishes to cut off all ties with him. The rest of the family continues spending time with John, and Homer begins to fear that “the gay” will rub off on Bart. To combat this, he, Moe and Barney arrange a hunting trip so that Bart can shoot a helpless innocent animal to prove his manly manhood.

I’ve got mixed feelings about Homer’s exaggerated intolerance in this episode. On one hand, it comes from an understandable place. Homer is representative of the average American man (at the time, at least), who assumes the worst about gays because they’ve never met any, or are just too oblivious to acknowledge those who are. Homer’s as oblivious as they come, and the fact that John maybe, just maybe might bat for the other team didn’t even occur to him (I feel like in “Simpson and Delilah,” even after Karl kisses him, I bet Homer didn’t even think he was gay). Once Marge spills the beans to him, Homer flips out and spends the rest of the episode being completely (and hilariously) irrational (“Think of the property values! Now we can never say only straight people have been in this house!”) On that note, the allegedly telltale signs that Bart may be turning are just as ridiculous: picking pink snack treats over traditional chocolate (which is absurd since nobody likes Snoballs. Nobody), wearing Hawaiian shirts, and dancing to Betty Everett in a wig. Everything is ramped up to such an high level that it becomes absurdist, just as homophobia is in real life. But toward the end when Moe and Barney add more slightly realistic bigotry to the fire, it becomes a bit more depressing. Yes, their anti-gay viewpoints are played for laughs, but there really are assholes who think this stuff for real. The episode mostly avoids villifying Homer for his ignorant viewpoints, but there are one or two scenes that don’t quite pull it off.

John Waters plays John, who seems to just be playing himself, or at least how I imagine him to be from interviews and the like. He’s a wonderful one-off character, and the perfect foil for Homer’s battle of the sexual orientations. He plays off Homer’s accusations with gentle good humor, as I’m sure he’s dealt with hundreds of small-minded fellows just like him in the past. I also like how Bart becomes critical to the plot midway through, just getting dragged around by his father to various places without knowing why. The kicker, of course, is his critique about hunting, “Something about a bunch of guys alone together in the woods… seems kinda gay.” Also, despite the thick-headedness of his crusade, I did feel a little bad for Homer believing he’d failed as a parent, wishing he’d spent more time with his son to avert this “tragedy.” Even when he’s absolutely terribly misguided, there’s something about Homer’s earnesty that ellicts a positive response from me. John ends up saving Homer and Bart from some dangerous reindeer, which gives Homer newfound respect for the man. John sums up the message perfectly (“I won your respect, and all I had to do was save your life. Now, if every gay man could just do the same, you’d be set.”) Although in terms of general viewpoints on gays, this is as relevant then as it is now fifteen years later, this is a real great episode, with a lot of laughs, an excellent performance by John Waters, and it ends up having a heart even alongside all of the hilarious bigotry.

Tidbits and Quotes
– The episode starts with Bart’s antics slapping the family with a $900 gas bill. They resort to selling an antiquity of Marge’s, which leads them to meet John… then the money issue is never brought up again. It’s a bit of a hanging plot thread. I dunno, maybe while visiting the Simpson house, John could have found some little knick knack that was unknowingly worth a pretty penny and bought it, which would get him in the family’s good graces even more. Just a thought.
– Nice campaign buttons at the antique store (“Quayle Can’t Fayle,” “Click for Dick”) and Skinner’s desire to find some non-partisan ones (“Don’t you have any neutral ones? ‘May the better man win’? ‘Let’s have a good, clean election’? That sort of thing?”) Also, a really minor point, but in the next scene, we focus on Bart and Lisa, and we see Skinner leaving the store in the background. Stuff like that makes things feel more cohesive, that each scene leads into the other, in that they weren’t separately and thoughtlessly produced.
– I love Homer’s strange defensiveness at John’s chiding of Jackie O’s poor crossword abilities (“Give her a break! Her husband was killed!”)
– That Johnny Reb liquor bottle is actually a pretty neat item. I like the cavalier way John just unscrews the top and drinks whatever contents may be inside (“That’ll make your bull run!”) Marge is understandably crestfallen over the exposure of her fradulent family heirloom (“I guess it’ll always be a monument to Grandma’s secret drinking problem.”)
– I love Homer’s confusion and inability to comprehend John’s love of camp, or even what camp is (“The tragically ludicrous?  The ludicrously tragic?” “Oh, yeah. Like when a clown dies.” “Well, sort of.”) Also, nice touch that Homer gave his Pin Pals shirt to Goodwill. At least he didn’t bury it like the Dancin’ Homer outfit.
– John is in heaven with the garish decore of the Simpson house, which is sort of a critique on the perpetually retro look of the show (“Pearls on a little girl? It’s a fairy tale!”)
– Great act break where Marge attempts to get Homer to realize John’s true colors (“Didn’t John seem a little… festive to you?” “Couldn’t agree more. Happy as a clam.” “He prefers the company of men!” “Who doesn’t?”)
– Homer’s upset that John, according to him, should have acted more gay so it would be obvious to him (how much more did he need?), giving us this classic line (“I like my beer cold, my TV loud and my homosexual flaming!”)
– As per any homophobe, Homer’s internal logic is full of holes. The only people who wear Hawaiian shirts are gays and big fat party animals, so it’s okay if he wears one. Later, he gleefully hums the “Shoop Shoop Song,” but is horrified to find Bart dancing to it. There’s so many instances of Homer acting effeminate in the past, the list would go on forever, so there’s so much delicious irony laced in this episode.
– When John confronts him, Homer gets more vehement. Only someone as lovable as Homer can make an ignorant hate speech hilarious (“They’re embarrassing America. They turned the Navy into a floating joke. They ruined all our best names like Bruce, and Lance, and Julian. Those were the toughest names we had!”) He also takes displeasure of John using the word ‘queer’ (“That’s our word for making fun of you! We need it!:)
– Homer’s mission to straighten Bart out (ha ha ha) is fantastic: first he sits him in front of a cigarette billboard featuring two sexy ladies having a pillow fight for two hours, with not-so-effective results. Bart feels like he wants a smoke afterwards. which Homer thinks is a good start until Bart mentions he’d like “anything slim.” Then we have the steel mill scene which… words cannot properly explain the brilliance that unfolds. It’s one of the best scenes in show history just because it’s off-the-wall crazy bonkers insane (“You’re all sick!!” “Oh, be nice!”) My best friend in high school put “We work hard, we play hard” as one of his senior quotes (attributed to “Anonymous Steel Mill Worker,”) and I am forever respectful for him for it. I also love how it carries into the start of the third act. Homer finishes his story at Moe’s (“…and the entire steel mill was gay.”) If you were just tuning in, what the hell would you have thought happened before the commercial break?
– When their hunting trip proves futile, Moe tries to cheer Homer up, that maybe they can try taking Lisa out hunting and make her a man. Homer says she wouldn’t since she’s a vegetarian. Moe is dumbstruck (“You and Marge ain’t cousins, are you?”)
– I love John’s explanation for why the reindeer fled his mechanical Santa (“Well the sound is just brutal, and I figured reindeer would naturally be afraid of their cruel master Santa Claus. I mean, wouldn’t you be?”)
– One of the best endings of the series: spending the whole episode in the dark, Bart is stunned that his father thinks he’s gay. Cut to C&C Music Factory as John’s car drives off into the night. Then we get the final message: “Dedicated to The Steelworkers of America. Keep Reaching For That Rainbow!” Incredible.