Original airdate: January 29, 2012

The premise: Moe’s bar rag (voiced by Jeremy Irons) waxes nostalgic on his past experiences throughout major events in history all around the world. Meanwhile, Milhouse breaks up with Bart for no reason.

The reaction: There’s been a lot of garbage nonsense this season, but this has got to be the most baffling of them all. I honestly don’t have a problem with the talking bar rag on its own, but the plot they do with it goes nowhere and has no real point. The rag tells stories of its past: being part of a tapestry created for a ruthless tyrant, being used by Michelangelo while painting the Sistine Chapel, being used as rag soup during the Great Depression… but at least half of the stories barely feature the rag, and some don’t even at all. The segments feel like cutting room floor material from an anthology episode, with Springfield residents filling in for historical characters (or fantasy characters, like the Arabian Nights segment. Real, fake, who cares?) Oh, and also there’s a Treehouse of Horror-level of violence featuring hangings and beheadings. But what’s the point of all this? The bar rag feels abused and mistreated, and that’s about it. Moe laments that the rag is his only friend, until the very end where we see that Marge inexplicably took the rag when he was sleeping in the backroom of the bar (how she got in, why Moe was sleeping there, who knows) and washed it for him. See, he’s got friends! Moe is the creepy bartender who has made countless untoward advances on her and who runs a bar that keeps her husband away from her and their children for days at a time, but it’s cool! It makes total sense for Marge to just steal and wash Moe’s filthy bar rag! Whatever. Then we have the Bart/Milhouse B-story, which is easily the most painful plot I’ve seen in a long time. Every word out of each character’s mouth feels so alien and out-of-character, and especially does not feel like dialogue coming from ten-year-olds. Their banter means nothing because the conflict arose from nothing. Each scene is just start and stop, and it all ends with Milhouse inexplicably summoning Drederick Tatum punching Bart in the arm off screen and the plot is over. Worse even still, the two plots don’t connect whatsoever, which feels especially jarring when we cut from the fantasy stuff back to the present over and over. And surely this could have tried to connect thematically? Maybe the bar rag was waxing on about relationships it had had in the past and lost, and how precious true friendship really is, and that tying in with Bart and Milhouse’s squabbles? But perhaps I’m asking way too much. This has got to be one of the worst episodes so far; with most shows I can at least strain to see the most basic story elements and the razor thing connective tissue feebly holding them together. I can’t see any of that here. I just can’t make sense of any of this fucking junk.

Three items of note:
– I suppose I should be thankful the episode abandoned reality right from the start, when a town hall meeting at Moe’s turned into a spontaneous dance party to Lionel Richie, with Richie himself actually there himself. And then Homer walks and dances on the ceiling. I guess this is funny because it’s like “Dancing on the Ceiling”? Ugh.
– No matter how hard I look, I just can’t find any kind of thematic thread with the historical stories. The first involves peasant Marge being possessed by demon wool (?) to work years on an elaborate tapestry, only to be burned alive in her home by King Burns, who then ends up being hung by said tapestry. Then there’s the Arabian Knights one where Sultan Nelson gets beheaded by his harem of girls. Then more death, despair, death, and lastly Homer climbing Everest with the cloth as a flag, which is stolen off his body by a Moe-faced yeti who gives it to his Moe-faced child. So, is the bar rag extremely jaded by the life its led that sopping up booze and blood at a bar isn’t so bad? Again, I wouldn’t have a problem with a talking rag as a concept if I even came close to understanding what the fuck the point of it was.
– The Bart/Milhouse story is so, so, so bad. The writing is awful enough, but it feels like it was recut and rewritten as well. The timing of their initial squabble feels weird. Bart makes a dig at Milhouse, and Milhouse laughs at it, and then he just stops and is immediately angry, beginning a long sequence of very un-Milhouse lines (“Not anymore. Friendship over.”) That line, and several others from these scenes, were definitely rewritten in post because the lip sync doesn’t match. I can’t even imagine how poor these scenes must have been before they scrambled to rewrite it. And again, Drederick Tatum just shows out of nowhere at the very end, willing to punch a child on Milhouse’s beck and call. Brilliant storytelling. Just brilliant.

One good line/moment: I got nothing for this one. Just wholly confusing and unpleasant from start to finish.

Original airdate: January 15, 2012

The premise: In an attempt to gain some actual friends, Lisa creates an online social network called SpringFace, but as its popularity spreads and ends up addicting the entire town, serious problems begin to arise.

The reaction: Wherein the writers really loved The Social Network and decided just to do that story. Mark Zuckerberg was on the show last season, so we once again have another Star Wars/Cosmic Wars scenario. But whatever, Facebook doesn’t exist, except for the times when it does. We get a framing device of Lisa on trial for her actions causing devastation to the whole town, I guess mirroring the deposition in the actual film. Surely this will all make sense when we get to the end. Except of course it doesn’t. It isn’t until the nine minute mark that the story actually kicks in. Lisa is on Springfield Elementary’s online chat room or something, and, not knowing what to say, types in simple questions like “Do you like ice cream?” of which she immediately gets four responses. Desperate for friends, Lisa uses this social meeting site as inspiration to create… another social meeting site? After the act break, we see her and the other Super Friends in the computer lab creating the website. So, does she not consider them her friends? Or does she just want non-nerd friends? They could have even made a joke about that if they had, you know, put some thought into this. So SpringFace launches and Lisa is stunned that even adults are using it. The episode then turns into a social commentary of everyone staring at their phones and not interacting with each other, which is a really softball satirical target, but even this the show manages to bungle. We barely see what people are so engrossed with on their phones, which could have created amusing juxtaposition to what they’re actually doing, or could be doing, in real life. It never extends farther than just seeing people staring at their smartphones, which ultimately leads to calamity of people texting while driving causing car wrecks, and in no time at all, the town is in ruins, somehow. It’s not clear why there’s this widespread of a disaster, and why Lisa shutting down SpringFace will fix anything. People still have smartphones they can use to text and use the Internet, what difference will this make? Trying to satirize a popular film and a social media obsessed culture, this show spectacularly fails at both.

Three items of note:
– This episode was extremely short, so not only do we get lots of padding within the actual show, but also at the start and end. First is the lengthy couch gag starring David Letterman. Remember the old couch gag where he just turns around in his chair and that was it? A short but sweet simple tribute. Here, I guess it’s an extended parody of the actual Late Show opening? I don’t even remember it, and it just drags on and on. Like I mentioned earlier, the SpringFace plot doesn’t start until nine minutes in, and that wraps up at eighteen minutes, so the actual plot of the episode is just nine minutes long. After some final joke title cards, we get a bizarre ending bit involving Patty and Selma competing against the Winklevoss twins (voiced by Armie Hammer, who played them in the film) rowing at the Olympics. I guess they figured, we want to take that part of the movie, and Patty and Selma are twins, so that will make it Simpsons-y. Then before the very end, they stop rowing and start making out with each other, because the only thing funnier than two dudes kissing is if they’re related. Incest is hilarious! But no, we’re still not done! We get a self-acknowledged “Show’s Too Short” story; Dan Castellaneta as Vincent Price narrates a prank from Bart that goes wrong, done in an gothic cross-hatching visual style. Despite the oddity of its existence in the first place, it’s easily the best thing in the entire episode. It’s just really surprising to me that considering how much needless padding that’s in nearly every episode at this point, they couldn’t squeeze in just a few minutes more.
– In recent years, the show has definitely slipped away from Springfield being America’s Crud Bucket to being suspicious similar to southern California. This episode’s opening set piece involves the Simpsons visiting the fancy new outdoor mall. The architecture and layout of some of the buildings, the trolly car, the expensive condos, the specific stores (American Girl), it’s literally the Grove in Los Angeles. Halfway through the set piece, Marge whips out a bunch of gift cards she has, even though these are supposed to be more high-end stores, so who knows how she got these? But nowadays, the family doesn’t seem to be struggling, they’re having a grand old time at the mall, with the scene ending with Homer buying the latest Apple laptop. They’re doing just fine financially, except when an episode dictates they need to be poor, and then they’re poor. Flexible reality!
– The ending really makes no damn sense. In the framing device, Lisa laments that SpringFace was being used in ways she hadn’t intended. First we see her spying on Bart, Milhouse and the bullies playing an ultra violent video game, having somehow used SpringFace to trade weapons from their accounts. What? How? Either this video game was made exclusively for SpringFace, like a Facebook game, or the company apparently struck a deal with CEO Lisa to share content through the social media site. Either way, violent video games wasn’t a problem Lisa created, and shutting the site down won’t solve it. And what’s the problem anyway? Rather than beating them senseless, the bullies are willfully playing this game with Bart and Milhouse and having a great time. That’s a positive from my perspective. Then we see Homer driving and texting, with Marge riding shotgun, also texting. Marge looks worried as she stares at her husband, but doesn’t say a word until he’s done saying his full joke. There’s even a weird second pause after he stops talking before she says, “Watch the road!” They could have made it a point that the allure of smartphones is so strong that even the always responsible Marge has gotten completely addicted, but instead here, it makes no sense that it takes her forever to tell her husband to put down the goddamn phone. So it results in a giant car pile-up, and then we see the entire town is like one big car wreck up in flames. So, video games and texting are the demons SpringFace created, two things that can be done on smartphones without a social media app. But whatever, Lisa shuts down the site, and everyone throws away their devices. Why? Did they do nothing on their phones but SpringFace? Parts of this episode feel like they were written by old men who don’t understand this new technology, but the writing staff must all use smartphones and get why this makes no sense, right? Or maybe they just don’t care. That may be it.

One good line/moment: The ending bit, the “Show’s Too Short” story. It’s nothing spectacular, but the different visual style and Castellaneta’s Vincent Price made it enjoyable, at least until the very ending where we see Skinner reading the story.

Original airdate: January 8, 2012

The premise: A viral video of Homer going nuts on an airplane gets him his own political talk show, where he blusters on about traditional values and small town American rights. His nonsensical, ill-informed rhetoric becomes so influential that he gets tapped to pick the Republican presidential nominee, famous rocker and insane person Ted Nugent.

The reaction: Boy, this is a real time capsule of an episode. Sort of. Some elements of it still feel depressingly relevant in our current dumpster fire of a political climate, but boy oh boy, Homer as Glenn Beck? Once again, despite Krusty’s cries two episodes ago about looking dated and hacky, the show doesn’t seem to care. And also once again, South Park beat them to the punch by two years. But let’s look into this a bit more. That episode featured Cartman becoming the new morning announcement reader at the school, and abusing his power by attacking the student body president because he doesn’t like her personally. He became a Glenn Beck expy, but all in a way that was in line with his character; Cartman loves attention and relishes being in a position of power, and he’s also a huge asshole. So what do we have from The Simpsons? Well, Homer goes nuts on an airplane, grabbing the intercom and spouting some nonsense about customer’s rights. He then goes on a cable news show and shouts that he speaks for the honest Joe American, which then leads to him getting his own show, where he becomes Glenn Beck Lite. Why is he doing this? He’s talking out his ass extolling good ol’ boy American values, but as Dan Castellaneta marries his Homer voice with a Beck impression, I just don’t understand what Homer’s point is or his goal. Through the episode, he flip flops between his original impassioned airplane speech, then claiming he’s just playing a character, to an advocate for the little guy, to actually wanting to implement change, and the ending involves him not able to buy into his own bullshit anymore and giving up his fame. So much of this episode is nonsensical and unfunny, but the core of it absolutely does not work when I can’t figure out the main character’s motivation throughout the entire episode. They wanted to do a Glenn Beck parody, and they squeezed Homer into that box so they could do it. So topical. Except not.

Three items of note:
– The opening at the airport feels even more dated than the Glenn Beck plot line. Making fun of TSA regulations and security checks in 2012?
– The whole gravy boat thing I guess is referencing the Tea Party? Except the episode doesn’t do anything with that. The show had some juicy material at their disposal lampooning that dumb political movement, or just the idea of a TV loudmouth holding that much influence and using it irresponsibly, but they reduce it to just one line that Lisa says to push the plot forward. The gravy thing is pretty much squandered, with screen time instead used for some elaborate fake dream to sway Homer back to reality. Bleh.
– I feel pretty stymied by this episode, it’s hard to come up with what to talk about. When we get to the point where Ted Nugent seems to be living at the Simpson house for some reason, I just don’t even know where to begin. Why is he here? What’s he promoting? He shoots an arrow into Flanders’s forehead, and then later shoots a bunch of kids into the air from his bow, and nobody bats an eye. I guess he’s just craaaaaayyy-zeeeeee so it’s fine? I dunno. This one was just really fucking confusing.

One good line/moment: Oh, I don’t know… Brockman’s headline for the gravy moment “Au Jus-tice For All!” was cute. That’s all I got.

Original airdate: December 11, 2011

The premise: During the holiday season thirty years into the future, a deadbeat Bart tries to reconnect to his kids while dealing with his wife remarrying, and Lisa struggles with how best to deal with her aloof, online-addicted teenage daughter.

The reaction: This episode first hit my radar when I heard the high praise attached to it after it aired, much higher than anything I had heard from the show in a good long while. And while this is easily the best episode of the season, I certainly wouldn’t call it good. I don’t even think it’s better than the future show before this, “Future-Drama.” We focus on the parental troubles of a grown up Bart and Lisa returning home for the holidays. First up is Bart, who living in the dilapidated elementary school and trying to be a fun dad to his two estranged sons. I don’t really care for this constant characterization of future Bart that he’s never matured beyond his ten-year-old mentality (which he literally says as such at the emotional climax). “Lisa’s Wedding” showed the most believable Future Bart to me, working in construction and promoting local tough man contests on the side. Bart was always a street-smart kid, so I can easily accept this future vision. But every other future show has him as a pathetic mooch who has done absolutely nothing with his life, which makes it hard to feel any kind of sympathy for him. His plot line features the kids getting along better with Homer, who proves to be a great grandpa, which is a pretty adorable idea I wish they’d spent more time on, and he ends up sparking the resolution with Bart and his kids, which feels pretty empty and cloying. Meanwhile, we see Lisa has ended up marrying Milhouse, another future concept I hate, but as we saw last season, the writers just can’t step away from shipping those two. Her conflict and make-up with Marge and her daughter is a little more satisfying, but nothing really notable. Surrounding these stories is an endless parade of future jokes, many of which feel like stuff picked up off the Futurama writer’s room floor. There are some amusing moments, but so much of it just seems way too fantastical for just thirty years into the future. Remember how sensational but pragmatic “Lisa’s Wedding” was with picture phones, VR headsets, and the Rolling Stones still on tour? Here we get sentient talking trees, shrink rays, hyper-evolved dogs and cats, and Flanders marrying Maude’s ghost. All and all, is this one of the best episodes the show has had in the last decade? Oh yeah. Is that saying much? No.

Three items of note:
– Also coming home for Christmas is Maggie, who is now an international music superstar. She also doesn’t speak in the episode, because of course she doesn’t. It was a joke played to perfection in “Lisa’s Wedding,” where we hear from Homer that she’s a chatterbox, and Dr. Hibbert says she sings like an angel, but she is always interrupted before she gets to speak. Here, she gets a lot more screen time than in “Wedding,” and the contrived explanation of her staying mute is that she’s pregnant, and future women need to stay quiet for the health of their baby. What? So she ends up at the airport, and then later in Kearney’s cab when she goes into labor, and then checks into the hospital, all without saying a word? Isn’t she like a hardcore rock star? When she walks in the Simpson house at the very end with her new baby, she still says nothing. It felt like the writers trying to continue the joke from “Wedding” without realizing the new context for Maggie not speaking makes absolutely no sense.
– We get to see a lot of Springfield residents and what they’re up to in the future, some of which seem kind of crowbarred in. In “Wedding,” they felt a little more natural and relevant to the story, or surprising, like seeing Quimby driving a cab working for Otto. Cabdriver Kearney isn’t as interesting. Neither is an entire clone army of Ralph killing themselves, nor is Lenny and Carl switching brains, continuing the endless confusion about what the fuck their relationship is. The Bart and Lisa stories might have been more successful if they were a bit more developed, so devoting so much time to these character sidebars felt like a squandered opportunity.
– Lisa virtually enters the Internet to find her daughter, which arguably is one of the slightly more plausible future things we see here, but it’s incredibly reminiscent of the Internet we saw in Futurama. There’s also a throwaway gag about Martin Prince now being Marcia Princess, which is very odd. There was a similar “joke” in the last Martin episode of his fantasy of being a buff basketball player with male and female groupies, and him taking a good long look at the former. Are we supposed to laugh at the idea of Martin being gay or transgender? You could make jokes about these subjects, but if the joke is just “he’s gay!” or “he’s now a she!” it’s kind of shallow and gross.

One good line/moment: The scene of Bart and Lisa drinking up in their treehouse I thought was incredibly effective. The two felt very natural and believable as they bitched about their problems and reassured each other. It’s easily the most effectively human scene this show has done in years. Not even the talking tree bullshit that ends the scene could ruin it.

Original airdate: December 4, 2011

The premise: Krusty gets fired from his own show, and ends up reconnecting with his old agent and ex Joan Rivers. I’m sure the character had a name, but I forget. Joan helps Krusty find new life on pay cable, but soon proves to be an incredibly overbearing producer of his new show.

The reaction: How many comebacks can Krusty possibly have? This is, what, his sixth? I guess going back to this story well is as good an excuse as any to trot out jokes about whatever the current trends in TV are. Or, rather, multi-year-old trends, and by “jokes,” I mean “love letters.” We open with the Simpson family going to visit the television museum, which I guess Springfield has, where they meet Annie Dubinsky (I just looked up the name of Rivers’s character), a talent agent who literally walks out of the shadows to introduce herself. Meanwhile, Krusty has just gotten fired and the Simpsons find him wallowing in shame and lamenting his fall from grace… while sitting in a ball pit at Krusty Burger, a restaurant named after him. On the street corner with a “Will Drop Pants for Food” sign, this ain’t. The family introduces him to Annie, who immediately is hostile to Krusty, and she decides to regale the story of their past relationship to these strangers she’s known for less than 24 hours. Their backstory really doesn’t matter, as the two mend fences and get back together. Despite Annie working in a rundown office and proudly claiming most of her famous clients are dead, she works her magic and gets Krusty a show on HBOwtime (such creative naming). With four minutes left to go, a conflict is manufactured with Annie being a humongous pain-in-the-ass producer, the network heads confronting Krusty about it, then she gets fired, and then the two are rehired for a Real Sex type show, because old people having sex is hilarious. What? She’s crazy, then she’s not, she’s fired, and then she’s not. What a resolution.

Three items of note:
– The episode opens with three Itchy & Scratchys, all “parodies” of Oscar contenders from 2010. We get a laborious, self-aware line from Krusty about how the jokes were topical when written, but taking a year to actually produce and animate makes them look “dated and hacky.” Part of me has always felt that the writers must be aware of some of the biggest problems plaguing the show, and this seems to be a clear example that yes, they do realize that this stuff is dated and hacky, their own words, and that they don’t seem to care. Or, by commenting on it, they think it excuses it. Also odd is that the network heads push Krusty out of his show for making too many old references that kids don’t understand. Oh, so unlike children who are keen on Itchy & Scratchy cartoons based on kiddie fare like Black Swan and The King’s Speech?
– I feel like the genesis of this episode came from the writing staff going to see the Pee-Wee Herman revival show, and thinking they could do a similar thing with Krusty. It was a live show that ran in New York and Los Angeles around this time, and a televised version aired on HBO earlier that year, but it’s something that I’m sure was not on a lot of viewers’ radars. Despite that, they build it into the plot of this show with Krusty’s retro reboot live show directly modeled off of the Pee-Wee show, with grown men openly cheering for nostalgia, which is a really juicy topic to milk for comedy, but the episode barely does anything with it. It feels more like they just put it into the show because they loved it, which would continue through the third act when Krusty makes his cable deal. We get glory shots of Game of Thrones, The Sopranos, the John Adams miniseries and The Ricky Gervais Show (in this case, they literally just show a clip from the actual animated series). There’s no joke to this, it’s just like, hey, these are some great shows on HBO! We love you guys!
– This is an episode that doesn’t really involve the Simpsons, which we haven’t really seen in a while, so it was weird seeing them constantly crow barred in. As mentioned earlier, Annie just rattles off her personal life story, and sexual past, to these complete strangers, then later I guess they get comped tickets to all of Krusty’s shows. Bart and Lisa are with Krusty during the set-up of his new show, for some reason. But the most telling line of all for me is after Annie pours her heart out about how Krusty broke her heart, Marge pipes in, “Would you ever consider taking Krusty back as a client?” Why does she care? She has no connection to Krusty. Why in the fuck would Marge care about Krusty getting work again, especially after hearing that story? There is no reason, other than we need to push the story along, someone needed to say that line, so they gave it to Marge.

One good line/moment: Krusty recalls in the past getting laughs out of kids by hitting them, at least until the 70’s (“Some jerk tracked down the kids and made a documentary. It’s called Circus of Shame, or something…”) Dan Castellaneta’s read of that last bit was pretty great, very subdued and introspective. He and his wife wrote this episode, by the way, coming after such hits as the Christmas special with Katy Perry, and the Cheech & Chong show. Such a pedigree.