Original airdate: February 10, 2013

The premise: Mary Spuckler returns to Springfield only to find that Bart couldn’t care less about spending any quality time with her. When she breaks up with him, Bart, along with his newly martially estranged father, must figure out how to win their women back.

The reaction: Ah, corporate synergy. Thanks to New Girl, Zooey Deschanel’s Mary is back for the second time this season. Everybody’s favorite character, right? Right? This episode serves as almost a mirror image of “Moonshine River;” instead of Bart pining away at his lost love and traveling across the country to get her back, here we see Bart actively ignore and disregard Mary, driving her away. It’s pretty bizarre, but ultimately it doesn’t matter, since there’s still been no indication of who Mary is and why this relationship matters. Like I mentioned before, Mary’s introductory episode “Apocalypse Cow” was not romantic; she and Bart were friends that ended up being roped into a hillbilly marriage by Cletus. In these two episodes, their relationship is being treated like this long-standing important thing that doesn’t exist. Lisa pulls Bart aside, chastising him, “You will not do better than Mary Spuckler!” Does Lisa know something we don’t? The entire first half of the episode features Bart failing to pass incredibly low bars in relationships such as giving a shit about the other person and basic human empathy. Again, the opposite of “Moonshine,” Bart acts like a normal, attention-deficient kid, not really knowing or caring how a relationship works. He seems to not give any less of a shit, but when Mary leaves him, he’s depressed and wants her back. Why? Why? Whhhyyyyy? The back half of the episode involves Homer being thrown out of the house after an argument with Marge, and he and Bart staying at a motel with other troubled husbands. How will they solve their collective predicaments? Homer has a solution: get inspired by movies! They watch a Love, Actually “parody” involving the mending of a relationship via a grand romantic gesture, and then that’s what they do. The wives are invited to the motel to a grand symphony orchestra playing as the men stand there in tuxedos with sad puppy dog eyes, and the women fall for it, hook, line and sinker. This show used to actively subvert typical sitcom and film tropes, exposing them for the hollow, unrealistic depictions of reality they were. But nowadays, they will openly uses said tropes, but try to get a pass by acknowledging the trope itself. It’s the same as when they attempt to excuse bad jokes or bad writing by making a joke that it’s bad. But that doesn’t make it good. It just reinforces to the audience that it sucks.

Three items of note:
– This episode features two instances of characters blatantly appearing in a scene to tell their joke and leave. They’re like drive-by appearances where they walk through the scene, spouting their joke as they go. First with Skinner joking that a caterpillar would actually give their Sloppy Joes some actual meat, and then later with Homer and Abe walking through a scene, saying they represent Bart’s best possible future. It’s so damn lazy. Why bother animating a walk, why not just have a character appear in a bubble on the screen to say their joke quickly and move on?
– There’s a wraparound device of Bart dressed as Woody Allen semi-narrating the entire story, moaning on and on about how he just doesn’t understand women and he’s out of his depth, and how he screwed up, blah blah blah. A caricatured Allen shows up at certain points through the episode as well to give him pointers. This all feels very strange and uncomfortable given Allen’s romantic history in real life. It gets odder at the end where we see Woody-Bart checking adult Mary’s Facebook and seeing it’s been changed to single (after her husband just died, no less). But, it still looks and sounds like kid Bart. What is this? Is this entire thing a reference to a specific Allen film?
– The show makes a joke about how Homer is basically a regular at the local motel and that Marge throws him out of the house on a regular basis. The undercurrent of this bit is incredibly sad. The only two instances of this happening in the classic years that I can recall is “Homer’s Night Out” and “Secrets to a Successful Marriage,” and in both instances, it’s treated fairly seriously, with both parties being devastated by their alienation, and actively working toward mending fences. Here, it’s just a big goof. Oh, that crazy wacky Homer and his nagging bitch wife! A marriage as thin as tissue paper!

One good line/moment: Mary’s Bossa nova-style break-up song to Bart is actually pretty darn catchy, and partially cathartic considering Bart’s constant negligence.

Original airdate: January 27, 2013

The premise: After surviving a tornado, Homer and Marge seek out legal guardians for the kids in the event of a catastrophe. Their search ends when they find a seemingly ideal couple, a surfer and an environmental lawyer, but they’re shocked to find that they actually want to steal the kids away from them.

The reaction: Homer and Marge are driven into a panic over who will take care of the kids if they die, a pretty big decision (as openly expressed by both Marge and Lisa in the episode), that is handled with a weird levity, like the two trying to scope out a couple to swing with. They start with family members: Abe is out, we get four seconds of Danny DeVito on the phone as Herb Powell (why bother?), and Patty & Selma are written off pretty quickly for some reason because they’ve turned Ling into an overworked, overachieving toddler (she’s no longer an infant now; apparently she ages at the speed of the octuplets). They then visit the likes of Cletus, and Julio and the guy who tried to kiss Homer, which I know are supposed to be gags, but honestly, it throws the severity of the situation out the window when it looks like they’re just trying to get a ‘yes’ out of anyone in town, regardless if they’re responsible enough to raise children. Which leads to them trawling the affluent beach side of Springfield that I guess exists, scoping out rich childless couples. Who better to trust with your children’s lives than complete strangers? Upon meeting super couple Mav and Portia, at dinner that night, Marge proposes the idea of them becoming their children’s guardians. I understand the point is that they’re rushing into it because they’re concerned, but it’s still super weird. I feel like Marge would want to do a thorough background check on these people, dot every ‘i’ and cross every ‘t’ before she gave them legal guardianship over her precious babies. Instead, one day is enough, I guess. Mav and Portia ask if they can watch the kids for the weekend, and then all of a sudden we cut to a few weeks later after Homer and Marge have enjoyed some extended couples time together. The two are then shocked to find a portrait of Mav, Portia and the kids in a shop window, believing they want to take custody now. So, what’s going on here? Have they really not seen the kids in weeks? Or talked to them on the phone? The final confrontation of the two couples is probably the most limp-wristed climax I’ve seen from this show. Mav and Portia claim they fell in love with the kids, and they figured that Homer and Marge couldn’t be bothered taking care of them anymore. Which, from what we’ve seen, appears to be true; Homer and Marge had no problem letting strangers watch their kids for weeks on end with seemingly no communication between them. Mav and Portia also claim to have gone to “little league games and recitals” as well. Where the fuck were Homer and Marge for those? Then, Bart and Lisa walk in and say they don’t want them as their new parents. Were they privy to any of this conversation? Or wondering where their parents were? What is happening? Then Mav and Portia just give up and walk out of their own house. The scene ends with Homer triumphantly shouting “We won!” and giving a half-hearted “Woo-hoo.” That seems incredibly indicative of the writing staff’s true emotions. A barely thought out ending to a jumbled mess of an episode.

Three items of note:
– The first act involving the tornado is pretty terrible. Kicked off in perhaps the worst instance of characters just randomly showing up places, Lenny and Carl knock on the Simpson basement window to check in. What the fuck are they doing there? Apparently they’re amateur storm chasers, so Homer and Marge go with them to try to find Santa’s Little Helper. And it makes total sense of Marge to leave her kids alone during a natural disaster, going along with them “to make sure no one does anything stupid.” Solid plan, Marge. Homer and Marge’s lives are endangered when an entire bank falls onto them, leaving them trapped between the revolving doors. The tension seems to be that they may never get out, not that an entire fucking building fell onto them and they could have been crushed and died instantly. But a glass cutter arrives later on and everything seems to be fine. But not after Wiggum takes a shot directly at Homer and Marge’s faces, only to find it to be bulletproof glass. How hilarious would that have been if they were actually shot in the face?
– This episode has two interminably stretched out “gags.” First, an asinine discussion about what women find desirable between Homer, Lenny and Carl ends with the three holding one note for as long as they can to see who is most deserving of Marge. Or something like that. Twenty seconds feels like twenty hours. Second is where Homer and Marge find out everyone in town is avoiding them because they’ve heard they’re on the lookout for guardians. Crowds in the town square disperse around them as they walk back and forth, around and around in circles. We get three beats of them running into people and them running and hiding, that should be enough to get the joke. But then they drag it on for thirty more seconds.
– There’s a joke midway through the episode that feels really sad to me. The whole family are driving to search for new guardians, and Homer explains to the kids what their plan is for the first time. As he’s speaking, he hits a walrus in the middle of the road, the car flies through the air, hits a hand glider, then hits the road and keeps going. No one acknowledges it, no one cares, it’s like it never happened. Homer could have literally gotten everyone in the car killed with his recklessness, while having a conversation about taking precautions in case he and Marge die. And the fact that no one says a word about it means this is just a normal thing that happens that we shouldn’t even question it. But then again, I’m not the least bit surprised either.

One good line/moment: I got nothing this time. Anytime I have to scan back through the episode trying to see if I forgot anything I liked is normally a sign that there wasn’t anything worth noting.

Original airdate: January 13, 2013

The premise: District budget cuts call for the closure of the school with the lowest standardized test scores, and the fate of Springfield Elementary rests on the only student who skipped out on taking the test: Bart Simpson.

The reaction: Have you ever felt like watching a retread of “Bart Gets An F,” but worse? Well, I’ve got just the show for you! Despite their differing set-ups, the bulk of the back half of each of these episodes are the same: everything rides on Bart getting a good grade on a big test, and for once, he actually cares about doing well. The motivation for “Bart Gets An F” is Bart not wanting to be held back a grade. We see him as a kid who earnestly tries to study, but is easily distracted and waylaid by other matters at home. He’s not dumb, just not really suited academically, and it’s a deep-seeded source of embarrassment to him, as we see in his outburst in the meeting with Dr. Pryor. I could go on and on about how brilliant that episode is, but the point is that we see exactly why Bart cares so much about passing that last test, we can get behind him and root for him for the rest of the show. In this episode, Bart getting a good grade will save the school from being shut down. But why exactly would Bart care about this? We’ve seen on multiple occasions him daydreaming of the school’s utter destruction, much to his delight. There’s even one in this very episode, featuring Skinner’s hung body from the flagpole, which Bart chortles to himself about. So what’s his motivation here? Lisa effectively browbeats him into it multiple times throughout the episode, resulting in Bart being scared straight by a weird nightmare of Springfield being the world’s dumbest city or something. So we finally get to test time. How does Bart do? In “Bart Gets An F,” in one of the earliest examples of sitcom convention subversion, he flunks it, but by demonstrating applied knowledge of a historical battle in a tearful outburst, Krabappel boosts him to a passing grade. By the skin of his teeth, Bart earned his happy ending. In “Trying,” Bart also barely passes, but as a result of a bug flying onto his scantron sheet being mistaken as an answer. The proctor grades it by just looking at it, and I guess her eyesight is real bad because she can’t tell a penciled-in oval from a bug, so she gives it to him. So, the episode is Bart takes a test, he passes by a fluke, and the school is saved. How exciting. They should just remake all the old episodes as hollow versions of their past selves.

Three items of note:
– The B-plot also feels like a bit of a retread. Homer finds a parking meter at the dump and concocts a scam to bilk drivers out of a few quarters by placing it on curbs across town. Homer being so giddy over a plan that yields him very little money reminded me of the auto-dialer from “Lisa’s Date with Density.” That B-story at the time felt like an ominous precursor to years and years of wacky Homer-gets-a-job schemes and hijinks, but it was a cute little story for what it was. This time, it just feels pretty dumb. It seems like so much effort for so little reward, but over time we see that Homer has amassed a humongous sack of quarters. He’s caught by Chief Wiggum, Homer crashes his car trying to escape, busting the parking meter in the process. But then nothing happens with that. The ending involves Marge catching Homer with the money, him not confessing to where he got it all, and then him ending up throwing all the coins down a wishing well. So, is this a happy ending or a sad ending? It’s an ending, that’s enough.
– Bart’s nightmare about a moronic Springfield is really weird, but what disturbs him the most is what has become of Springfield Elementary. It’s now a spinach farm, with fields of crops being tended to by an army of Popeyes. Bart laments, “What have I done?!” I don’t understand this. Is this like a dream non sequitur thing? I’m quite confused.
– Before the test, Marge runs into the female proctor at the Kwik-E-Mart and tries to appeal to her humanity. At the end as she’s leaving, Marge runs into her again, wondering if she gave Bart any extra help to get by. I guess this is meant to imply that she actually saw the last answer just had a bug on it but she let it slide anyway? It’s never made clear. It’s not like the proctor had any kind of character that she would have an arc to go through. The two of them barely had a conversation at all about it earlier. Marge then demurely asks if she’d like to go out for coffee or dinner, which is odd. It’s like she’s feebly trying to make a new friend (or asking her out?), except it wasn’t really set up earlier or anything. It just struck me as weird and out of place.

One good line/moment: The bug flying onto Bart’s test at the end was a callback to earlier in the episode, where we see Bart skipped out on the test the first time for more stimulating pursuits: lying around a field playing with said bug until nightfall. It was pretty damn adorable watching him play with that bug. Like in the last episode with him and Lisa at the fun zone, it’s pretty great seeing them actually behave like kids for once.

Original airdate: January 6, 2013

The premise: Homer finds his way into an end-of-the-world survivalist group, and after inadvertently causing a town-wide power outage, he carts his family off to prepare for the impending apocalypse.

The reaction: Tom Waits voices… that guy on the left. He’s never actually given a name, because I guess that would mean he would need a character as well. That happens a lot lately, like the cool hipster family they didn’t bother to give a last name to. Waits spews a bunch of apocalypse talk to Homer at Moe’s, and Homer ends up joining his prep squad or whatever. Said squad consists of Herman (makes sense), Chalmers (given his recent new characterization, I buy it), Lindsey Naegle (odd, but alright, whatever), and… Lt. Smash? The boy band manager-slash-Navy recruiter? Did they really run out of characters? But it doesn’t really matter, none of them exhibit any real personality, they’re just there to exposit lines about stocking supplies and what to do if there’s an EMP or all this other stuff the writers read about doomsday preppers. Homer starts researching end-of-the-world strategies and hoarding food and hides it from his family, I guess to not worry or scare them? Even though the group says they’re all welcome to use their bunker outside of town. But that really doesn’t make any sense. All of the members are loner weirdos, and they happily invite Homer and his five dependents (Abe comes strapped to the car roof) to take up space and use up their supplies? The end “conflict” involves Homer being scolded by Marge about not caring about the lives of everyone else in town, as the preppers seemingly have no empathy toward their fellow man… except when it came to bringing in the Simpsons with open arms, apparently. This could have been an excellent point of contention, seeing the prep group’s animosity toward having to deal with outsiders and kids and Homer needing to defend them or something. Instead, it’s just more stuff happening for no real explained reason.

Three items of note:
– The “set-up” for Homer having paranoia about mass anarchy is from trauma he experienced when he was locked in a play place cafeteria with a bunch of dads going berserk and pummeling each other (it won’t make much more sense with more context, trust me). He envisions them all as crazed, out-of-control apes, and eight months later, he still is haunted by these memories. This feels even more like they should have constructed the episode with the preppers fueling Homer’s worries more, getting him to completely distrust and alienate himself from humanity and look out for only himself, but the episode isn’t really about that. Instead we have Homer eating a five pound bag of grain and having a magic, Looney Tunes-style fake wall in the basement. Much better material.
– On Homer’s watch (or lack thereof), a massive generator malfunctions at the plant, causing a massive power outage. This is the impetus for the preppers to proclaim it’s the end of the world and skip town, in an awkward sequence where Quimby is addressing a crowd outside of town hall, and Unnamed McGee pulls Homer out of the front of the crowd about two feet to have an isolated conversation about skipping town. But really, this is it? Homer suffers no repercussions at work for this, we never see Mr. Burns, no one else at the plant can figure out what happened… And then when they all return back to Springfield, everything is normal. Because of course it is. Frink explains that the power went out in Springfield, and then a few days later, it came back on. Wow. There was never any doubt the outage was only localized to Springfield because we see that it was. Maybe if they had waited to reveal what happened until the end of the episode, or if they had a line talking about trying to contact neighboring towns and being unable to, it might have made more sense. Instead it’s just dumb. Real dumb.
– We’ve seen some weird end tag jokes from this show before, but this might be the most random. Lisa wraps things up by talking about how civilization can endure catastrophe and that we’re gonna be around for a while, then we pan to outer space, where we see a flaming meteor on course for Earth. Said meteor is also covered in human zombies. Zombie meteor. That’s the gag we’re going out on.

One good line/moment: I genuinely enjoyed the bit with Homer climbing up the play place tower to reach Bart and Lisa, crawling and duck walking until he reached the top, only to be pummeled with balls from his two laughing kids. It was a pretty adorable moment where the kids were really acting like real kids, and Homer was a great dad for once for indulging them.

Original airdate: December 16, 2012

The premise: Abe spins a tale from Homer’s youth to explain his ambivalence toward Santa’s Little Helper: li’l Homer had a boyhood dog he loved more than anything, until he was forced to give it away after he bit a young and ruthless Mr. Burns.

The reaction: I’ve mentioned before about the show’s inability to marry sentimental moments with biting humor, but this episode seemed to forget it was supposed to be funny. The entire episode is Abe telling this sob story about Homer and his dog, and it all builds into one big treacly, attempting-to-be-emotional scene after another. So as we see, since he was a baby, Homer was thick-as-thieves with his beloved dog Bongo. But at a lobbying event for the new power plant, the dog ends up biting Mr. Burns, who swears revenge on the mutt. I choose to disregard the floating continuity here; the plant was just opening in Homer’s senior year in “The Way We Was,” but it really doesn’t matter. This also happened right after Mona left Abe, so is Rita in the picture yet? Why is Abe working at a smokestack delivery company and not busing tables? Speaking of “Gone Abie Gone,” where that episode cracked the door open of re-interpreting young Abe Simpson as sympathetic, this one burst right through it. Abe sends the dog to a farm out of town to save him, and ends up working for Mr. Burns for a year training his hell hounds, all while his son is bitterly resentful for seemingly abandoning his best friend. Homer, of course, has a skewed memory of this, thinking of his dad as a cruel monster. Are all the flashbacks we’ve seen of Abe being a dick to Homer just from his skewed perspective of his youth? No, because that’s fucking dumb. We go from Homer tearfully saying goodbye to his dog, to Abe sad that his son hates him, to Homer revisiting the farm later to find the dog has bonded with a new owner, to the resolution of the story: a Christmas card of the dog sleeping with his old sweatshirt, showing he did still care. My God… it’s trying so, so hard to pull at your heartstrings, it ends up being just a big pile of bland, sterile mush.

Three items of note:
– We get a full scene of Homer playing a town-building game on his myPad, because I guess “A Tree Grows in Springfield” wasn’t enough. It almost feels like subtle cross-promotion for the Tapped Out game, which had released the year this aired.
– The flashback story also gives the show license to revisit other characters. We see Herman getting his arm ripped off, Wiggum and Eddie on patrol as dog catchers, then learn in one scene their plans to join the police force, and where Ralph’s name came from. In the present, Bart has a handy checklist of origin stories covered in a lame meta moment (“Boy, we’re filling in a lot of gaps here!”) Also, after Abe finishes his one year of service, Burns demands that he forever has to wear slippers and a bolo tie, so I guess the mystery of why Abe dresses like that has been solved? Weren’t these two in the war together, and Burns was a spineless coward?
– The episode was short again, so we get a minute-long vignette of Burns lamenting the Mitt Romney 2012 loss and the fiscal cliff for billionaires. Are these end tag bits going to be a common thing now? It feels weird framing Burns as a modern-day Republican, and I’m not really sure why. I guess since he always felt like a miserly boss from the 1920s, it’s odd to hear him talk about modern immigration reform and namedrop Marco Rubio.

One good line/moment: Nothing for this one. As I said, there weren’t really a lot of jokes in here to begin with, and what was there were attempts at being meta about the flashback, or Homer and his tablet again. Yawn.