Original airdate: April 3, 2016

The premise: Having finally given up hope on a future with Mr. Burns, Smithers starts cracking the whip at work, leading Homer to try to find him a boyfriend. Meanwhile, the school puts on a production of Casablanca, with Milhouse hoping for on-set chemistry with his co-lead Lisa.

The reaction: As with all our characters, Smithers has gone through a transformation (and denigration) through the years. The baseline joke with him is that he’s the ultimate sycophant, the yes-man to end all yes-men. He’s so devoted to serving his boss that he’s actually in love with him, despite Burns being an evil, decrepit old skeleton. So he was always gay, but the humor usually always came from his interplay with Burns as his underling and his misguided affections. But as time went on, he became the show’s outlet for gay jokes; around season 13-18, goofs on his homosexuality became more and more overt and on the nose (at times teetering on the edge of offensive), to the point that I felt like they should just drag him out of the closet and have him profess his love to Burns since they were removing all doubt of his sexuality. So here we are now: Smithers realizes his puppy love is a futile effort, and ends up looking for love elsewhere, finding it with the flamboyant Julio. So if we’re examining Smithers’s affections seriously, then we’ve got to analyze why he was romantically interested in Burns. He must be into men of power, passion and determination, but he also likes being a caregiver, to be depended on and needed. But I’m putting much more thought into this than the show did. It feels odd that they would put Smithers and Julio together, other than they’re the only two gay men on the show (they’re made for each other!) I guess they were trying to make it like Julio wanted to loosen Smithers up and have him enjoy life a little, but as usual with this show, I have to squint charitably to try to figure out if this show is trying to actually say something. But as we just saw with Frink and Apu, this show doesn’t seem to really care about giving any more depth to Smithers. Between the time-eating B-plot and Homer and Marge arranging to set Smithers up, there’s not a lot of screen time devoted to seeing what he’s feeling or what he wants. I’m fine with giving these characters more nuance and learning more about them, but the show has to actually… y’know, do that. Instead, this episode just feels like a meaningless exercise. In the end, Smithers admits he loves the “thrill of the chase” with Burns, whatever that means, and Burns’s honest moment to him to hire Smithers back and admit he needs him boils down to him just saying his catchphrase (His performance review? “Excellent.”) These episodes continue to truly say nothing, even when it seems like they’re trying to.

Three items of note:
– The B-story is boring. I guess little kids performing Casablanca is supposed to be the joke, but that’s really as far as they went. There’s a new little kid who acts like Humphery Bogart, Ralph does a Peter Lorre voice… do they think senior citizens and cinephiles are the dominant demographic for this show? Lisa is worried since Milhouse is a terrible actor, but one paltry compliment from Lisa turns him into a show-stopper. Or, more accurately, he delivers his lines normally and the audience goes wild in applause. Remember the light, realistic touch used with crowd reaction to Ralph in “I Love Lisa”? Me too. But then, in a twist, we see that he was actually the Bogart kid in disguise and he and Lisa walk off together. Like, who gives a flying fuck? Also, Janey Powell appears and introduces herself as “Jacqueline Jones,” and is voiced by Tress MacNeille, not Pamela Hayden. I know she’s a C-list character that they barely use anymore, but surely someone on the entire staff remembered the name of Lisa’s old beset friend?
– The episode opens with Burns skydiving (with no explanation given as to why) and Smithers saving his life after he immediately goes limp. It’s just an excuse to show how Burns doesn’t give a fuck about him, but then they have him literally say that out loud because characters have to do that now. After that we have Smithers sing a song about how heartbroken he is, littered with nuclear puns. It’s not a terrible song, especially given some of the junk we’ve gotten lately, but Harry Shearer is really pushing it with his voice here.
– George Takei guest stars as himself, because of course he does. It’s the gay episode, after all! And despite having a husband, he’s at Homer’s gay mixer hitting on guys. I mean, I guess it’s all in good fun, but this show has done a lot of predatory gay jokes in the past that it reminded me of those. It’s just amazing how far removed we’ve gotten from “Homer’s Phobia.” John as a gay character would be far too subtle for this show nowadays. How do you know he’s gay if he doesn’t act gay? The audience needs to tell right away that it’s a gay! Sigh.

One good line/moment: The episode comments on the dumbness of its B-plot with a banner at the school (Tonight: Casablanca The Play, Tomorrow Night: A.M. Kindergarten presents Equus.)

Original airdate: March 13, 2016

The premise: Lisa signs up to train for an eccentric company’s Mars Colony project. Concerned, Marge signs up the rest of the family too, hoping to diffuse Lisa’s hopes to leave the planet.

The reaction: Another Lisa episode where she acts horribly… boy howdy, this is getting repetitive. And her ire here is aimed at Marge, which feels even more terrible. Although between brow-beating her daughter to give up her dream school and paying a little girl to pretend to be her friend, Marge isn’t exactly being crowned Mom of the Year any time soon. Why is the show pitting these two against each other nowadays? So the family crosses paths with two idealistic imbeciles with too much investor money on their hands who plan on launching a manned mission to Mars within ten years time, and they need volunteers. Lisa is eager to sign up, but Marge is understandably not cool with this, though she comes off incredibly harsh on Lisa as the two angrily murmur at each other. This seems to be common now; once a lovable worrywart doormat, Marge has lately been more prone to going from zero to sixty in no time flat. In an attempt to dissuade Lisa, Marge has the whole family sign up. Lisa is immediately annoyed, and even more so when she finds that her mother is performing even higher than she is during their trial exercises. So once again, we see that Lisa is just in it for her own glory-hogging. Helping the homeless, saving animals, saving humanity, it doesn’t matter what it is as long as Lisa gets all the recognition her little heart desires. When it comes down to just her and Marge as the finalists, she viciously confronts her mom (“All you are is a stay-at-hab space wife! You’re the last person I would ever want to go to Mars with!”) I honestly and truly don’t get what this girl’s damage is. For as unacknowledged and unappreciated Lisa may be by her family at times, she still loves them more than not, and especially Marge. I get it if they want to paint Lisa as childish or not thinking clearly, but for these past three episodes, the conflicts have been solely fueled by Lisa’s inflated ego and sense of entitlement. I feel like a broken record, but it’s just not fun seeing her behave like this. By the time they rush (and I mean rush) the emotional resolution between the two, it didn’t feel like enough. It wasn’t earned at all. Marge has pulled some sneaky shit on her daughter, and I guess Lisa’s just giving it right back to her. And it looks like we’ve got another Marge-Lisa episode on the horizon! I can’t wait to see what they hate about each other next! Sigh.

Three items of note:
– The lead-in to the main story involves Homer and Bart stealing fresh eggs from Flanders’s chicken coop. They decide to build their own, but they realize that the real flavor came from their satisfaction in their thievery. This is extremely drawn out and eats up the first five minutes of the episode. It sucks.
– Homer advises Marge how to deal with Lisa in informing her how the female mind operates. It’s a cute idea in principle, but the longer it goes on, the weaker it feels. The show has done this ‘battle of the sexes’ shit a handful of times over the past decade, and it always feels antiquated at best, and offensive at worst. Did you know women like it when you listen to what they have to say? What a concept! They even bring that joke back to end the episode with! As long as you smile and nod, the female species won’t get mad at you! Who better to write jokes about those finicky women types than a writer’s room of almost exclusively all men?
– The stupidity ramps up as we rocket (ha ha ha) toward the end. In competition with another corporate shill project, the two main guys move up their launch date to the following week. All the volunteers bail except Marge and Lisa, who are so stubborn they don’t want the other one to get the satisfaction of winning (do I have to mention how extremely out of character this feels at this point?) For “comedic” effect, we smash cut soon after that to the two of them in the rocket preparing for launch. I don’t get what we’re supposed to be feeling, we know they’re not going into space, so there’s no tension at all. And in the end, the main guys admit they were frauds and the rocket isn’t even finished. Their plan was to just bail as the fake launch was going on, but their car died. That’s really the explanation. What a waste of time.

One good line/moment: I did enjoy the two Exploration Incorporated heads, voiced by Tom Scharpling and Jon Wurster, just a couple of guys who only care about big ideas in the broadest terms, and willing to bend over for as many corporate sponsors to make it look like they’re achieving their dreams. Over the credits, we hear them brainstorming their next move as they drive off into the sunset (“We should fix racism.” “Racism is bad for business.” “And that is racism’s fatal flaw!”) That, and I love Scharpling’s voice. Makes me feel like I’m listening to Greg Universe.

Original airdate: March 6, 2016

The premise: When she successfully resuscitates a drowned raccoon, Lisa starts working under the local veterinarian. Meanwhile, Marge earns some extra cash cleaning up crime scenes, but the grisly sights end up deadening her inside.

The reaction: This season feels like it’s littered with Lisa episodes, and it’s starting to get boring, especially since elements of this one feel incredibly similar to the last episode. Lisa becomes super popular at school after giving mouth-to-mouth to a woodland critter… because that makes sense, I guess? Riding off this high, she gushes to her mom, Marge complains about the traffic, so Lisa bitterly muses, “And so ends the moment being about me.” I suppose moments like this are supposed to communicate how Lisa is disregarded by most people and a sad, intellectual loner, like she’s always been. But considering how involved Lisa has been with so many different characters and the entire town as a whole over the last few decades doesn’t speak to that anymore. “Moaning Lisa” featured a quiet, contemplative girl who had no one to share her passions with. Nowadays, she’s desperate for attention and becomes pissy when she doesn’t immediately get it. So she goes to work under the local vet, who is a soft-spoken kindly old fellow, in a relationship that sort of felt like Lisa and Hollis Hulburt in “Lisa the Iconoclast,” except without the jokes. Lisa eventually takes on more and more responsibilities, and starts getting a big head about the work she’s doing. When she saves a goat at Martin’s birthday party, she smugly quips to Bart, “Life or death. I make the choice.” There’s an element of Lisa being interested in this because of the cute wittle animals, but like the last episode, most of it comes off like this self-absorbed superiority complex. Whether it’s helping a sick homeless woman or healing wounded animals, Lisa seems to be far up her own ass more than anything, and it makes her unlikable. So like last episode, Bart rains on Lisa’s parade by snapping her back to reality; there’s four minutes left and we finally have an actual “conflict” when Bart brings in the school hamster Lisa agreed to look after over spring break, neglected due to Lisa’s work at the vet’s office and her arrogant grandstanding. Like I said last time, I really don’t get why they write Lisa like this. An episode with her thinking animals are adorable and wanting to help them seems like a no brainer to make Lisa act like a precocious little girl. Maybe there could be some kind of outside force or antagonist standing in her way for her to overcome. That’s what Lisa episodes were always about, one little girl facing down an opponent, be it the Malibu Stacy company or the entire US Government, armed only with her morals and principals. Instead, nowadays, it seems Lisa’s greatest enemy is herself and her inflated ego, and that’s just no fun.

Three items of note:
– There’s another Bill Plympton couch gag, but it was surprisingly weak. The couch and TV dream of being together, the TV stretches out and ends up smashing onto the floor, dead. Then the episode just starts. It felt like it ended before it even began.
– The B-plot features Marge working with Chief Wiggum to clean up violent crime scenes because she needs the extra money, but being surrounded by such gore and death begins to take its toll on her psyche. There’s nothing really wrong with this story, and it’s pretty sweet how Homer shows her cute funny YouTube videos to try to get a reaction out of her, but there’s not really much to this. They bridge the two stories by having Marge’s heart melt when Lisa confides in her about the dead hamster, leading the two to break down in each other’s arms (you can really hear Julie Kavner’s voice straining when she’s trying to voice Marge in tears.) It kinda makes sense, but any points I give it are immediately revoked when they have Homer and the vet patting the writers on the back for their basic story structure (“Well I’ll be! Lisa learning about death helped Marge feel again!” “Yes, the perfect dovetail!”) I can just hear the writers high fiving each other.
– The lead-in to seeing Lisa be thrown off her high horse is she’s examining one of Mr. Burns’s hounds and admonishing him for not taking better care of them. Burns, perfectly in character, submits and walks off sadly (“Smithers, I’ve been shamed. Prepare a thimbleful of ice cream.”) If you wanted to paint Lisa as being irrational at this point in the story, wouldn’t it make more sense to have her browbeat a nice pet owner, not the most evil man in town? And Lisa’s probably right, the hounds likely aren’t treated the best. Although we’ve seen a couple times where Burns is genuinely affectionate to them. But I dunno, it seemed sloppy. And, of course, Burns is a wuss, but that happens all the time now.

One good line/moment: Lisa and the vet have the hamster on the operating table, and there’s no time to waste (“We’ve done all we can. The next 24 hours will be crucial… oh, he’s gone.”) Flat line. I didn’t see this twist coming, and Michael York’s flat, uncaring delivery followed by Lisa crying was pretty morbidly funny.

Original airdate: February 21, 2016

The premise: Bart lets a homeless woman sleep in his closet, and when Lisa finds out she has an incredible singing voice, she arranges an outdoor concert for her to perform.

The reaction: Are you ready for a very special episode? It’d be awful enough if this was just a cloying and cliched tale of a poor old homeless lady that the kids help get on her feet, but the writing is so goddamn poor that they can’t even do that. Bart accidentally destroys Hettie’s hobo cart, so he lets her stay with him. Lisa finds out about it, but her tune changes when she hears her sing, and then she decides she wants to help her. But it’s not about helping to get her back on her feet, find her a job, give her any semblance of a life, it’s having her put on a concert. I guess the implication is that once she gets “discovered,” everything will work out for her, but it’s not really framed that way. Through it all, Lisa is incredibly self-serving, giddily taking ownership at her hand in arranging the concert and seeming pretty full of herself. In a sentimental moment between her and Hettie, she tells her, “You’re having a moment with someone who has so few moments.” You realize you’re talking to a literal homeless woman, right? Lisa’s got a pretty sweet life in comparison. I can’t tell if this is another instance of the writers using Lisa to make fun of liberals, paying lip service to social causes but making it all about themselves, but it’s hard to tell, and also I hate when they do that, because Lisa’s a sweet little girl and I don’t like seeing her as a smug asshole. But here comes our twist: in a radio interview, Hettie reveals she’s a drug addict, and Lisa is crestfallen. Hettie ends up missing the concert, and when she finally shows up, Lisa is pissed. “I am never, ever going to forgive you!” Again, she’s speaking to a clearly mentally ill homeless woman with a drug problem. When she initially announces her addiction, you’d think Lisa would have been sympathetic and tried to help or something. Instead, she got upset because she’s made all of this about herself. Why do all these episodes make me hate Lisa? She used to be the most likable character, but now for whatever reason, they think it’s funny to make her pretentious and annoying. Sigh.

Three items of note:
– The B-plot involves Homer proving to Marge he can be her handyman by fixing a broken tile, but ends up getting Snowball II lost inside the walls. At the very least, it provides some mild amusement as a break from the horribly boring and awful main story. But as Homer busts into the wall to crawl inside to get the cat, all I could think of was Sweet Dee having the same problem in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and how much funnier that was.
– Hettie is voiced by Kate McKinnon, so chalk her name up on the giant list of incredibly talented comedians completely wasted in disposable, nothing roles on this show. Her singing voice is done by Natalie Maines. We hear pieces from four different songs in this show, and all of them are pretty terrible. Maines is a great singer, but the songs are just… nothing. They’re partly trying to be funny, I guess, because they’re about being homeless, but nothing that makes you laugh. They’re just annoying filler.
– How this episode deals with plot progression is some of the worst I’ve seen yet. To start, Hettie offers to give Bart a dollar a day to live with him, so we get an extremely long montage of him walking into different places to use his newfound wealth set to rap music, like the 98-cent store, not-Yogurtland and the Try-n-Save. It’s over a minute of this, and the joke is played out in the first ten seconds. He’s looking cool on the little airplane machine for small children outside a department store, and Lisa overlooks him through one of those tower viewer binoculars. I don’t know why one of those is set up in a dirty suburb, but how else would Lisa be able to observe what’s happening? But I can almost stomach that, even though it annoyed me. As Lisa gets more invested in Hettie, Bart, apropos of nothing, is worried about her (“I’ve seen you like this before and it ends badly. She is gonna break your heart.”) Why would he say this? Is this them trying to be meta, like all episodes inevitably end with Lisa not succeeding and staying in the status quo? But it turns out this is the most transparent lead-in I’ve ever seen. W get to the radio interview where Hettie says she loves heroin, and we see Bart and Lisa through the window in the other room, as Bart smugly holds up a sign reading “I WAS RIGHT.” Fuck you. First off, I thought he was worried about her getting hurt, now he’s rubbing it in her face? Second, he’s literally holding up a sign to the audience saying how he feels. We can figure it out by his expression, why the fuck did they need to do this? The dialogue is on the nose enough, with the interviewer asking Hettie about how she’s let down helpful friends and well wishers over the years (JUST LIKE LISA!!) When Hettie leaves the booth, as I mentioned earlier, Lisa asks her to tell her the truth (“Please reassure me, because I am frightened!” That’s a literal piece of dialogue.) So, so fucking terrible.

One good line/moment: As much as I hated the scene itself, I did like McKinnon’s performance as Hettie on the radio nonchalantly mentioning her rampant drug use. It’s more her cadence than the actual dialogue, so quoting it wouldn’t make a difference. It just reminds you that she’s a really gifted comic performer, one who is utterly underutilized here with a shit script.

Original airdate: February 14, 2016

The premise: Yearning for a companion, Professor Frink uses science to reinvent himself into the most desirable man in town. Meanwhile, the residents of the retirement home start hallucinating from some new pills or something.

The reaction: Remember that ten-second joke in “Grampa vs. Sexual Inadequacy” where the love tonic turned Frink into a suave ladies man? Ever wanted that idea expanded into a full episode? No? That’s a fucking awful idea, you say? Well, too bad, here it is. I don’t know about you, but I’m perfectly fine with keeping Frink a wacky joke character. I’m sure it’s possible to do a whole episode on him, about his latest inventions, him trying to get respect from his industry peers, crazy science hijinks, something like that. But instead we get this, where he tries to find… love? (“Who’s been screwing with this thing?!”) I guess if it “worked” for Comic Book Guy, why not do it again with Frink? So Frink analyzes a sampling of women saying what they want in a man, but ultimately all he does is make himself taller and loses the glasses. Is this a so-called satirical comedy, or is this fucking She’s All That? This is material I expect to see from a subpar children’s cartoon with a nerd character trying to appeal to girls, it’s such base-level material. The last step is Frink altering his voice with a chip (Hank Azaria channeling Seth MacFarlane channeling Frank Sinatra), but then when he talks to girls, he’s well-spoken, smooth and suave in his dialogue. Why would the chip eliminate his glavins and hoyvins? Maybe it’s a confidence thing. What shit. So he goes to a yoga class, wins over all the ladies there, and then all of a sudden, he’s sleeping with every woman in town, from Cookie Kwan, Booberella and the Crazy Cat Lady (I guess this speaks to the show’s severe lack of female characters more than anything.) The ending is fucking awful: Frink invites all the women he’s been with to the planetarium to announce who he’s going to pick, then he announces he’s created an algorithm to pair the lonely men and women of Springfield together. All the men walk in, sharply dressed, the women gasp in excitement as they get matched up, as sweet music plays. What a pathetic display. This is all irony-free, the women are super psyched to be paired up with such losers like Moe, Skinner, Gil and the like. What the fuck is this? Again, this show used to rip empty and saccharine endings like this a new asshole. And why did all the women connect with Frink in the first place? Was he just play-acting like a cool guy this whole time? For an episode all about him, we really barely see him in action or understand his motives. In the end, he’s just content to be alone with his robot wife or whatever. So what’s the point? What did we learn about Professor John Frink? Absolutely fucking nothing.

Three items of note:
– At the Valentine’s party, Homer and Marge are having a nice time, and Homer suggests they live out a fantasy he’s always wanted to do at the plant. I thought this would be setting up a classic gag where you think it’s going to be sexual, but it’s actually something very childish. But, they play it straight, and we see the two of them in silhouette making out nude on Burns’s desk. Though I guess it makes sense given their exhibitionist past in “Natural Born Kissers.” It also seems like these two are a lot more aggressive sexually in the last decade or so, I guess because they can get away with more of that kind of material nowadays. I dunno, call me a prude, but I think innuendo and misleads are funnier than just watching two cartoon characters furiously dry hump each other. Where they go out dinner and dancing, and we cut to them sitting in the car eating fast food rocking out to the radio (someone please tell me what episode that was from, because my brain is burning trying to remember.) Or when Burns tells Homer to show his wife the time of her life, and his immediate response is, “We’re getting some drive-thru and we’re doing it twice!” to Marge’s bright smile. I love that sweet shit.
– I honestly don’t know what to make of the B-plot. The retirement home starts giving out new pills that make the old folks hallucinate elements from their past. Abe gets visions of Mona (I sure hope Glenn Close got a free sandwich or something from her frequent guest voice stamp card at this point), then he ends up running away into his full-blown sepia tone fantasy, until eventually Marge snaps him out of, using his grandchildren or something. I don’t know what the point of it was, or if there even was one. Just sweet, sweet time killer.
– Driving up to the planetarium, Homer and Marge explain what’s about to happen to the audience, because I guess they didn’t bother or forgot to show Frink actually formulating his plan (why give screen time to the star of your episode? That’s time better suited to a vestigial B-plot!) Homer then comments why they’re bothering to recap this information that they already know. Marge’s response? “I like talking to you.” Again, more wallpapering over shitty writing with self-aware meta bullshit. This show was making fun of this garbage over twenty years ago in “Bart’s Inner Child” when Homer explains events the family all knows driving to Brad Goodman’s seminar, capped with Bart’s killer line, “What an odd thing to say!” Now we’re here, and the show regularly pulls this shit because they don’t know how to write, but it’s fine, because if we recognize that it’s bad, then it’s funny! Sigh.

One good line/moment: I got nothing on this either. It isn’t helping that these last few reviews I’ve been writing a day or two after I watch the episode, so whatever fleeting okay moments there were, I’ve forgotten, and can’t find while skimming through the episode. What a tragedy.