(originally aired September 17, 2006)
There’s an odd thing with these new episodes that our characters can succeed or become proficient at something very quickly if the story dictates it. In minutes, Homer can write and release a hit song, Lisa can arrange an entire newsroom to print a town-wide newspaper, and in this episode, Bart becomes a natural drummer almost instantaneously. I remember the days of “The Otto Show” where Bart dreamed of being a rock star and got himself a guitar, but gave up when he realized it would be too much work, very believable, kid-like behavior. Here, the drum set is offered to him as a kind of therapy, and he just absentmindedly goes and starts playing it without saying a thing. The premise is basically a rehash of “Smart and Smarter,” where a Simpson sibling usurps an unusually petty Lisa from her wheelhouse. It’s actually very similar, in that like Maggie, Bart goes through the whole episode completely ignorant about anything regarding jazz or his sister’s reactions or feelings. The excuse with Maggie is that she’s an infant, but with Bart, I have absolutely no clue what’s wrong with him this show.

The entire first half of the episode is just a dump truck of “fuck you” unloaded onto a tortured Lisa, which is so much fun to watch. To counteract her sadness, or out of her new disaffected attitude, or some other third reason, Lisa takes to adopting unwanted animals, hiding them away in the attic. This leads to Bart getting his arm bitten by a tiger, and he is unable to play anymore. By the third act, I have no fucking clue what to be feeling or why. Should I feel bad that Bart lost his drumming ability? I wasn’t sure why he liked it in the first place, and the episode was never really about him. Lisa doesn’t go back to playing the sax, now she’s wrapped up in trying to get these animals good homes, which I also don’t care about due to how random that story element was. In the end, a benefit concert is held for Bart to get some operation, but he instead vows to use the money to open a wildlife preserve in Lisa’s honor. Did they honestly raise tens of thousands of dollars? Who gave that money? Oh I don’t give a shit, this episode sucks.

Tidbits and Quotes
– We open with the funeral of Amber, Homer’s Vegas wife, and my only solace is that now hopefully they will never bring her up again. Also it makes total sense that they’re holding it in Springfield, a town she visited once where she knew no one. It’s there when we get our Bart “prank,” involving paddle balls shooting about the church, lodging down people’s throats before they’re Heimliched out and shot into another person’s throat. It’s handled as clumsily as it sounds.
– Marge labeling every part of the drum as a “joke” is just like Otto rattling off the different radio stations from last episode, just serving to kill time. Same thing with the endless list of comedy jazz names Krusty rattles off later on. Imagine all the time in the writer’s room it took to come up with all those names… all those hours they’ll never get back. Ever.
– The White Stripes parody, and their guest spot, is somewhat enjoyable, I guess. It’s more of the writers just taking the idea from the clever music video and not really adding anything to it, but the Stripes chasing down Bart and falling victim to their own gimmick was kind of amusing.
– Homer turns on a white noise machine, which he mentions he bought Marge when her father died, I believe the first time they’ve ever mentioned whether Mr. Bouvier was dead or not. Outside of “The Way We Was” and “Fear of Flying,” we’ve heard and seen nothing of him. I’m surprised the show’s run this long and they’ve never further addressed anything about him.
– Smug, cocky Lisa is not adorable, it’s just annoying, asserting to her brother that he’ll never be as good as her. It’s like when she shrewdly insisted to her amnesia-ridden mother that she was her favorite child.
– Fate repeatedly slapping Lisa in the face is further compounded by Bart not even seeming conscious of what he’s doing or what’s going on. He can’t even pronounce “jazz” and he’s the talk of the town. I guess that’s the gag, but is he some kind of idiot savant or something? That’s not Bart.
– “My arm! It hurts where the tiger’s biting it!” I know I must have said it before, but this time I’m serious, this is the worst line of dialogue in this history of the series. And it’s our act break joke. I remember when I first watched it, I was floored, I could not believe what I had just heard. Read it back. Then read it again. That’s supposed to be a joke. I’m flabbergasted.

(originally aired September 10, 2006)
What’s with these premieres being especially terrible? They don’t exactly fill me with any confidence for the season. Not that I have much confidence left anyway. We open with Bart stealing the school bus and Otto getting fired for spanking him in retaliation. But Bart thinks Otto is cool, why would he do this? But no matter, Otto is a prop character now, only showing up if the plot needs him, or if they need to make a drug reference. With the parents are stuck car pooling, we meet the new kid Michael, who turns out to be Fat Tony’s son. Despite him being meek and harmless, all the kids are terrified of him. Feeling bad, Lisa warms up to him, and finds out he’s a talented cook, but he’s afraid to tell his father about it, who wants him to continue the family business. All of this is pretty boring, and considering the kid’s name is Michael, I know it’s going to turn into a Godfather ending where he shuts the door on Lisa. It’s just a matter of waiting through the other bullshit to get there.

When Michael’s gift is revealed, a rival mafia family perceives it as a weakness and guns Fat Tony down. While he’s recovering, Legs and Louie leave to allow Michael to run the business. Umm, what? He’s a ten-year-old kid and they just leave him alone in the hospital with his critically ill father? But not to worry, Homer steps up and volunteers to be the surrogate mob boss! Oh boy! Then in the next scene we see him working the beat, assisted by Legs and Louie. So what’s going on here? Why don’t they run things themselves, why do they need Homer and Bart to work with them? It’s just so they can cross another occupation off the long list of jobs Homer’s bumbled through, and so they can promote the episode as “Homer in the mafia!” This turns the two into sadistic monsters for some reason, with Bart volunteering to shoot Flanders and Homer suggesting he knife him instead. It’s just very nasty and weird. Another garbage premiere episode.

Tidbits and Quotes
– It’s amazing how despite these episodes clocking in at under twenty minutes, there’s so much filler and elongated jokes. Otto singing Grand Funk Railroad, flipping the dial through every station and naming them, the interminable bit where Homer and Bart laugh maniacally while holding bigger and bigger weapons. It just shows how paper thin most of these stories are.
– I thought Metallica was pretty actually funny for the short scene they had. James Hetfield telling Otto “we don’t take rides from strangers,” and the band being able to recognize him from a concert from ten years back (“I was about to quit the band when I saw your lighter. You saved me that night!”)
– Skinner asks Otto to hand in his beaded seat cover, which we never seen before that point. I try not to be a stickler for this stuff, but we spent the first three minutes of show focusing on Otto at the driver’s seat, and we clearly saw a bare seat.
– Milhouse uses a car seat and tries to hit on Lisa using it… like, come on…
– The dead return in this episode. After over a decade of silence after the passing of Doris Grau, Lunchlady Doris has a brief speaking role, voiced by, you guessed it, Tress MacNeille. I was stunned the first time I saw it, because it comes from nowhere. They pan over quickly in the lunchroom for her to speak her first line of dialogue in ten years (“There’s a double-A battery in my macaroni and cheese!” “It counts as a vegetable!”) Then she opens a wartime tub of beans filled with wailing ghouls and she demands, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, get in the bowl.” This is the material they bring her out of retirement for? She’s had sporadic speaking roles since this point, and I find it pretty disrespectful. They wouldn’t dare recast Troy McClure or Lionel Hutz. Was Grau any less of a performer than Phil Hartman? And besides that, if they wanted to do jokes involving a school cafeteria worker, why not just make a new fucking character? It could even be a different chain smoking disgruntled older lady. But I guess due to laziness, they kept it as Doris. It just upsets me on multiple levels.
– Lisa, Michael and the other kids stand by the curb to get picked up by Fat Tony. His car pulls up, then when we see the kids again, Michael is gone. Again, not being a continuity stickler, but the shots were within five seconds of each other, how could no one have noticed this?
– Two Sopranos stars voice members of Tony’s rival family. They’re alright. Whatever. Not like they have much to work with. Every joke involves making analogies to killing (“The flavor just drove my sweet tooth to a vacant lot and whacked it!”) We also get another gay slam, where one of them mocks Michael calling him “Chef Boy-are-gay.” I guess it works in context here since they’re mob guys, but again, I wish the show would ease off on the gay jokes.
– Tony gets shot in the back multiple times and falls forward, but we see absolutely no bullet holes or blood. What, does this show have a limit for how much blood shed they can show per year, and use it all up every Halloween? What about in “Homer the Moe” when Homer bled profusely after hitting the jukebox? Whatever.
– The most disturbing bit in the episode, and one of the entire series, is a fantasy Homer has after Johnny Tightlips mentions a “dirt nap.” He imagine himself with his head in the ground like an ostrich, ignoring his wife’s pleas to help save their kids from their burning house. We then see the Simpson house on fire, with Bart and Lisa at their windows panicked, screaming for help. Homer’s muffled response (“Sorry, Marge, can’t hear yah! Heh heh heh…”) This is his happy fantasy? Imaging his kids burning alive and doing nothing to stop it? I remember in one of the few Family Guys I was misfortunate enough to watch, it ended with an elaborate daydream of Peter smothering his wife and disposing of the body. This bit is basically on the level of that, it’s so absolutely wrong in every respect.
– Michael rips up his recipe card after the mobsters are killed. Lisa reads it: Meats, Spices, Poison. Give me a fucking break…