Original airdate: October 5, 2014

The premise: Homer and Bart are forced into a conflict-resolution cruise to mend their strained relationship. Meanwhile, Marge takes over her husband’s fantasy football league, striving to win in order to put an end to trash talk.

The reaction: Alright, a father-son episode! Surely this won’t be a repetitive, nonsensical affair bereft of characters acting like human beings. Homer is upset that Bart disobeys him, with the two getting into a stalemate regarding Bart eating a piece of broccoli at dinner. I like seeing these two so childishly obstinate about something so small, but they just drag it on and on and on. Fed up by this nonsense, Marge surmises there’s only one course of action left: she has her husband and son kidnapped in the middle of the night (why? Your guess is as good as mine) and hauled off onto a conflict resolution cruise called the Relation Ship. From that point, we got a montage, Bart grows an affinity to the sailor’s life, all the way up to being christened superior office, much to Homer’s chagrin. It really feels like we’re going nowhere fast, because, as usual, every scene is just the characters explaining what’s happening and what they’re feeling (“You’re my son and you will hate what I hate!” “I like being a sailor,” “He can’t order me around. I’m his father!” “He’s your superior officer, so he can and will order you around.”) For our big dumb ending, a storm comes out of nowhere, and Homer and Bart butt heads on how they should proceed (Homer is really adamant about dropping the anchor, for whatever reason.) Bart then presents a broccoli and eats it as a sign of peace with his father, which really surprised me that they actually tried to tie this nonsense back to the beginning, but it doesn’t really amount to much. What is the point? Everything felt completely empty to me, not that that’s anything new, though.

Three items of note:
– The B-plot is just as inert. Marge takes over Homer’s fantasy football team, and spends the first half of her story gasping repeatedly every time someone emails her some trash talk. Then she vows to beat the men at their own game, and then, over a montage with a sports announcer, she does. And that’s it. It’s just shameless filler, complete with a tiny sprinkling of fan service with Marge wearing Tom Landry’s hat from “You Only Move Twice” atop her beehive.
– The other families on the boat don’t fucking matter, they’re just set decoration. We’ve got Ned, Rod and Todd, Cletus and one of his kids (these two groups are the only ones with lines), Apu and one of the octuplet, Lewis and his dad, and… Arnie Pye and his teenage son? Boy, they must have been really desperate. Nameless extras are seemingly verboten in this series now. Seeing this line-up gave me flashbacks to “How I Spent My Strummer Vacation” with the crowd of familiar faces who paid a pretty penny to be a rock star, regardless of it makes sense for these characters to be there. How much strife could Apu possibly have with just one of his eight children, who is still a toddler? How could Cletus afford to be on such a cruise? Wouldn’t Chief Wiggum and Ralph be a more logical space-filler than Arnie Pye and his offspring we’ll never, ever see again?
– Nick Offerman plays the captain in an absolute waste of his talents. Giving him a character with a personality or some jokes I guess was too difficult. Also, he’s put out of commission in the last act after being tempted by some rum, where he desperately monologues just like Lionel Hutz back in the day, taken by the siren song of the brownest of the brown… what’s that? You want me to drink you? But I’m in the middle of a trial! …yeah, much more well done back then.

One good line/moment:
– I did like some of the sections of the broccoli stand-off. I found myself enjoying Dan Castellaneta and Nancy Cartwright’s interplay through most of it, especially when they were taunting each other to forfeit.

Original airdate: September 28, 2014

The premise: Rabbi Krustofski kicks the bucket, and in addition to a comedy roast cutting him especially deep, Krusty has a crisis of conscious of what he should do with his life.

The reaction: Looks like it’s about time for Krusty to quit showbiz again. What’s this, the eighth time now? This episode is basically tenuously connected scraps of Krusty stuff we’ve seen before, most obviously “The Last Temptation of Krust” with him feeling alienated from modern-day comedians. Jeff Ross and Sarah Silverman are on the roster for Krusty’s comedy roast, and Krusty gets his widdle feelings hwut. But it’s not even like he goes through any kind of change where he’s game at first, and the jokes get too real and eat away at him. Instead, despite being a seasoned industry veteran, he seems bummed out the entire time, not understanding what a roast even is (“Nobody warned me this roast would treat me the same way as every roast I’ve seen and laughed at!”) What garbage writing. In “Krust,” we clearly saw that Krusty was a comic trapped in the past, whose old material didn’t connect with modern comedy sensibilities. Here, Krusty is sad just because. Bart appears later to go talk to his father to cheer him up for some reason, and when Krusty visits the rabbi at the temple, he ends up dying in mid-sentence. I guess like Mona Simpson dying with her eyes open, it was just regular old age, like God just came down and took ‘im. Krusty is haunted by his father’s interrupted last word of “Eh…” on whether he thought he was funny, and ultimately quits his show because of it. He spends the rest of the episode being sad and explaining why he’s sad over and over. How do we wrap this nonsense up? Bart takes Krusty to the temple of his father’s rabbi, which he just happens to know, I guess, and finds that he is using Krusty’s old jokes in his sermon, ergo, he did think Krusty was funny. Sure, that works for an ending, why not? Rabbi Krustofski was one of the show’s legacy characters who made one or two legendary appearances in the show’s prime, and then later was trotted out multiple times for fan service purposes. We’ve heard Jackie Mason’s increasingly weakening voice several times over (him straining to sing the poorly written Jewish Heaven song at the end was kind of sad to hear), but as we just saw with Glenn Close, not even killing the character will keep them from dragging them back for more. And really, what else have we learned about the good rabbi in these other appearances? Absolutely nothing.

Three items of note:
– This season premiere had a bit of buzz going into it that I recall, as the writers were incessantly teasing the “death of a recurring character who is voiced by an actor who won an Emmy for the character.” Al Jean and company were quoted a bunch, beating around the bush about how it could possibly be anyone, but I wasn’t buying that shit. I saw through this publicity nonsense fifteen years ago with Maude Flanders, and that’s when I still tolerated the show. Maude may have been a tertiary character, but at least she had a bunch of episodes under her belt, plus her direct connection to Ned, one of the main secondary characters. From the info they teased, and the fact that it was a Krusty episode, I thought it might be Rabbi Krustofski, and thought, wow, if this is who they’re killing off, that makes this gimmick even more hollow and meaningless. And that’s what they did. But I get it, at this point, every year or two, they’ve got to do something of note to get some minor press. They did the LEGO episode, and then every other season, they can acknowledge a milestone, like the recent 600th episode. It’s just a “Hey! We still exist!” where everyone pretends to still like the show, and then right afterwards goes back to avoiding it like the plague.
– The B-plot was very, very scarce, and felt very strange tonally. Krusty’s speech at his dad’s funeral about how death can come before you know it gets Lisa worried about his own father’s poor health and seemingly fast-approaching demise, and she, of course, narrates everything she’s feeling (“Dad, I’m worried about your health. I don’t want to lose you!”) Later on, we get a scene of Lisa overseeing Marge struggling to keep a breathing mask on Homer’s face as she sleeps, an overly long sequence that feels more depressing than slap-sticky fun. It makes me feel sad for all involved; compare this to Lisa’s similar worry in “Bart’s Friend Falls in Love,” instead of a light, absurdist touch with quick flinging jokes like the Good Morning Burger or a dream involving lowering Homer’s carcass into his burial plot with a crane, we get this depressing scene of a woman desperately trying to tend to her sick husband who’s gasping for air. This plot ends with Lisa wrapping Homer in bubble wrap to protect him (again, it’s really sad to see a little girl this paranoid in worry about her father dying), and then her precautions being vindicated when Otto crashes the school bus through the backyard and into Homer, and the bubble wrap buffering the blow. And then that’s it, I guess. What a waste of time. At least it was short.
– Minutes before the end of the episode, Krusty awakens from a drunken coma, having just had a vision of his father telling him to help people and do good unto others. Then we see him open up a new animal shelter. A reporter chimes in with an expertly written question (“Krusty, have you fulfilled the promise you made to your father in the dream you never told anyone about?”) It’s the equivalent of making a joke about how a joke they just did isn’t funny. Krusty responds, “Somehow, a brief act of uncharacteristic generosity solved nothing.” This is intolerable. It’s like the writers are incapable of pushing a plot forward without characters explicitly say exactly what is happening. Again, I might as well be listening to an audio book.

One good line/moment: Another guest couch gag, this time done by surreal independent animator Don Hertzfeldt, probably best known for the Rejected short films, which I remember being quoted ad nausea at my high school back in the day. The couch gag bears resemblance to that film, as we get a glimpse of the future incarnation of the series, where the Simpsons have been reduced to black-and-white, grotesque, barely coherent, catchphrase-spewing creatures. It runs a little long, but at least it was something different. Can’t they just let Don Hertzfedlt or Michel Socha or Bill Plympton make a whole episode?