(originally aired March 4, 2007)
A musical episode… maybe? This one seems to be cut from similar cloth as “The President Wore Pearls,” in that it’s about self-righteous li’l Lisa fighting for an education related cause, and Skinner and Chalmers are inexplicably made villains who want to dissuade the hopes of the only student keeping their school accredited. The catalysts of the plot are Cletus’s children, who have been kept out of Springfield Elementary to prevent their grade point average from sinking to dire levels. Lisa is outraged, natch, and to get her off his back, Skinner suggests that she tutor them. I hesitate calling this show a musical because there’s not many songs, and half-way through, the format’s fourth wall is shattered. Lisa shows the kids the wondrous culture scene Springfield apparently has through song, a big music number that apparently happened in-universe, as it wows Krusty enough to get them on his show. So these kids have musical talent, apparently, and Krusty exploits them as Cletus reaps in all the cash. Then Lisa gets Brandine back from Iraq and the episode’s over. I don’t get two shits about Cletus’s kids, so what’s to care about?

There’s an egregious B-story here too, where Bart ends up at a psychologist after another of his outlandish pranks. However, Dr. Swanson is surprisingly effective, getting Bart to lower his guard through video games and foul Mad Libs to get him to admit his problems. And of course they all involve what a shitty father Homer is. After the school-mandated sessions are up, he finds himself crest-fallen, completely miserable and depressed about not being in therapy anymore. It’s really kind of disturbing. Marge agrees to pays for one more session, where Bart finally expresses his true feelings: his parents fight all the time because they had him at such a young age, so he causes mischief and gets in trouble so they can yell at him instead of each other. There’s this truly sour air that hangs over a lot of these new episodes, caused by a multitude of reasons, but one big one is the current dysfunctional nature of the Simpson family. At one time they were a relatively close, loving family who had their squabbles, but always looked out for each other. Now, Homer and Marge’s marriage is held together by a thread due to his asshole nature, and Bart and Lisa are walking basket cases because of it. It makes for a fun viewing experience when you’re deeply concerned and worried for your characters’ well-beings, and the show treats it in as callous a manner as possible. Once more, another garbage episode to chuck on the pile…

Tidbits and Quotes
– We start the show with Marge dreaming about James Patterson, who I guess got to the recording studio too late to get into “Moe’N’a Lisa,” so they threw him in here. It’s so lame, and only reminds me of the days of old with her dreams of Lee Majors and Jack Nicklaus.
– I actually enjoyed the first part of the episode with Bart’s prank. It felt very in-character, and I like the art shift with the Dark Stanley story, all monochromatic and cross-hatched, as well as Alf Clausen’s string theme for it.
– Cletus’s kids’s names: Whitney, Jitney, Dubya, Incest, Crystal Meth, International Harvester, and Birthday. I guess, this is funny? Why do they think this is funny?
– The show’s Grand Theft Auto surrogate, Death Kill City, is on-the-nose, but nowhere near Mapple or Funtendo Zii levels. The end of the game footage was slightly amusing (“You have destroyed all human life on Earth. Level one complete!”)
– More “great” gags: on every bill in his wallet, Homer’s given the President’s heads eyelashes and lipstick, with a word balloon reading, “I am Gay.” Hey, another gay slander! What’s the tally at now, nine?
– Here’s what aggravates me the most about this episode. Krusty exploits the kids on his show, making them perform a music number where they’re depicted as brainless hicks. So it’s meant to be that Krusty is caricaturing and denigrating them for being yokels… except everything in their song feels like a joke the show would normally make involving Cletus and Brandine. We see Lisa watching on TV, outraged (“This show just perpetuates the stereotype that all yokels are hicks!”) Yeah, the line itself is sort of a gag, but the thrust of the episode is still about Lisa getting Krusty to stop mocking the kids. Meanwhile the episode ends with Cletus believing his wife was in Iraq stopping 9/11, and that she sold his make-shift body armor for cigarettes. And naturally, future episodes will depict the two as ignorant as ever, making the “message” of this show, if I can even call it that, completely invalid.
– Lots of disposable celebrities appearances in this one. Meg Ryan is Dr. Swanson, in a basically nothing role that Pamela Hayden could have done just fine. Stephen Sondheim appears to have his name said out-loud and his ass kissed (“Complex harmonies… intricate lyrics… pithy observations on modern life…”), and Andy Dick and Peter Bogdanovich (who?!) appear to say one line. Way to give your guest stars meaningful parts, guys!

(originally aired February 18, 2007)
We’ve seen in a couple of prior episodes the bizarre phenomenon that in the past, all the citizens of Springfield all knew each other and seemed to be the same age as their younger selves. This episode cranks that up to eleven. Declan Desmond (Eric Idle again) returns as he presents a documentary he’s making, with footage of the kids of Springfield Elementary taken thirty-two years ago, and following certain people into the present. We get a good look at the playground: Lenny, Carl, Moe, Comic Book Guy, Sideshow Mel, Chief Wiggum, Kent Brockman, Professor Frink, Fat Tony… everyone went to the same school and all appear to be around the same age. It’s like I’m watching a spin-off, Simpsons Babies; I can’t take this shit seriously. We get some back story on Wiggum, Frink and the Crazy Cat Lady, except none of it is really interesting or funny. Then we get a look at Homer and Marge’s past, which completely clashes with what we’ve seen in prior episodes. We know they first met their senior year, but now it seems they got together when they were sixteen. At twenty-four, classic Homer was working his dream job at a mini-golf course and being truly grateful for being with the love of his life. Now he spends his time making erotic etchings and playing with Play-Doh. Which is more endearing to you?

The episode’s annoying enough, but the segments around the film confuse and aggravate me even further. Act one ends with Homer posing as a millionaire in front of a big mansion, much to Desmond’s disbelief. So, right away, we know he’s bullshitting, and we can assume he’s taken over Mr. Burns’s estate to make himself look like a big shot. And by the end of act two, he’s exposed. We find out he had tied Smithers up and locked him away for three days while the rest of the family went along with his charade for some reason. Desmond tries to track Homer down to find out why he lied to him, only to get an unusually irate Marge. When Desmond asks for an explanation, Marge has this to say: “A good man went through a lot of trouble just to impress you, and I went along with it because I love him to pieces, and you made him look like a fool!” Okay, so Homer broke into his employer’s estate, messed with his belongings and forcibly restrained his assistant, and you went along with it. Desmond exposed the lie, and Homer’s criminal actions, and she’s mad at him? Desmond feels guilty, and in the end, he makes a film that showcases the people of Springfield praising Homer for being a good guy for some reason. Marge then has a heartfelt reunion with Homer, even though it was clear that he was out to kill Desmond, since he’s a sociopath now. So it’s another episode where Homer can be an reckless asshole and break the law, but that’s a-OK because he’s such a great guy and everyone loves him. But why? Why? For fuck’s sake, why. We used to love Homer, but I absolutely hate this version of him. A deplorable episode in every respect, maybe one of the worst of the whole series.

Tidbits and Quotes
– I won’t even bother going into how old I think each character is. Of our regulars, I’d say there’s a wide age range, from mid-thirties to late-fifties, but here in the old footage, they’re all in elementary school together. Simpsons Babies!
– Krabappel and Snake are shown running through the halls in high school. What happened to them both being from out of town in “The Seemingly Never-Ending Story”? The episode won the fucking Emmy, you’d think you’d have given a shit about it to keep that stuff as canon. But honestly, who cares.
– Homer is now a complete brain dead moron, which means that young Homer must be even more intellectually stunted than that, not knowing what a camera is and giddily running in circles when Desmond squeezes a squeaky toy. Later on he uses it on adult Homer to attract his attention, to which he runs off in fear, almost as if it’s a traumatic trigger sound, which makes no sense at all.
– Homer seemingly created the condiment pen. I guess that’s a byproduct from his inventing days. I can’t imagine he couldn’t make a fair bit of money off of that thing. Also, he does the loud whisper thing not once, not twice, but three times in this episode. PLEASE STOP.
– Professor Frink invents time travel in this episode. Yep, in a non-Halloween show, a character travels back in time. What the fuck.
– So we find out the Crazy Cat Lady was a Yale scholar before she hit the bottle and became an insane lunatic. How depressing. It reminds me of the flashback in “Mr. Plow” where we see how one beer turns the intellectual Barney into the booze hound we know and love him as. In that scene, the jokes are multi-layered: one beer turns Barney insane, we get Homer’s commentary convincing him of it, and it’s based on him recalling all he’s done for his friend, by which he seems to mean, ruin his life. And while he’s a pathetic drunk, Barney is usually depicted as being pretty happy and is a character who we like. With Cat Lady’s back story, it’s a real downer, since it shows how she gradually became more and more impoverished and downtrodden before she became a homeless crazy person. Bareny’s turn after one beer was exaggeratedly funny, almost like Jekyll and Hyde, while here, Cat Lady’s transition feels too real and sad. Also she’s labeled as being eight years old in the old footage like everyone else, despite she looks in her sixties in modern day. Also, I don’t give two flipping shits about the Crazy Cat Lady’s back story. I hate her.
– Now, here’s a first, I’m going to use pictures to illustrate the laziness of the show, because this floored me. It’s the most glaring continuity error I’ve ever seen on this show. Check this out. Homer walks in, going to show off his new tattoo. He opens his shirt…
An insert shot, no more than two seconds. And then…
Amazing. Do they even test screen these episodes anymore?
– The only thing in the episode I liked was at the photography studio, where what appeared to be Captain McAllister turned out to be Disco Stu. At that point in the show, you were so used to seeing the younger characters, I just sighed and assumed it was him, so the bait-and-switch was a momentary breath of fresh air.
– The latter half of the episode infuriated me more and more as it went on. It ends with Marge bursting through Desmond’s studio, begging her husband not to kill him. So Homer’s this wonderful guy, but Marge legitimately believes that Homer is going to murder this man for no legitimate reason whatsoever. Homer assures her he’s not, and then multiple knives and axes fall out of his shirt. So yeah, he was going to kill him. That’s our wacky Homer! We all love him!

(originally aired February 11, 2007)
It’s time for a Bart to get another girlfriend voiced by a celebrity! What’s the gimmick this time? Sheeeeeeee’s pregnant! There’s two things here that are huge detriments to these kind of shows, this one in particular. But first, the road there: a fire started at Cletus’s farm trails its way to the entire town, because I guess all of Springfield is flammable and fire is now sentient. Bart ends up saving the day inadvertently riding a wagon powered by fire extinguishers, which I guess have enough retardant in them to engulf the entirety of the town-wide brush fire. For his good deed, Quimby offers Bart one wish, because I guess he’s a genie now, and he chooses to get his driver’s license. This leads to him driving to North Haverbrook and meeting an older girl Darcy. Who is Darcy? Who knows? I can’t give you a single personality trait of hers. Not one. The episode involves the two of them and their “relationship” heading to a serious place, but we know absolutely nothing about her. I once again point to Jessica Lovejoy: a one-off character like the rest, but with more character than all of Bart’s future lady friends put together.

Darcy wants to marry Bart, and soon admits it’s because she’s pregnant, hoping she could easily snag a surrogate father. So let’s figure this out: Darcy’s taller than Bart, but certainly short for a teenager, she may be fifteen, sixteen? And she thinks that Bart, this childish imp who can barely see over his own steering wheel, is around her age? It’s another instance of the writers wanting to make the kids older and develop young adult stories for them. Bart seriously considering marrying this girl and becoming a father? What happened to the kid who still believed in cooties and derided all “girly” behavior like love and kissing? Well, he’s still here, it’s just one scene he’ll be immature, and the next he’ll be making out with Darcy and contemplating married life. They want to have their cake and eat it too, except it just doesn’t work at all. We get a cop-out ending that really isn’t an ending at all where Darcy’s parents are a-OK with her pregnancy, and she and Bart’s relationship is over for some reason. Another complete waste of a good guest star. Why the fuck bother getting Natalie Portman if you give her absolutely nothing to do?

Tidbits and Quotes
– There’s also a B-story involving Lisa bluffing through Heritage Day claiming she’s descended from Native Americans, but it’s so unbelievably boring. That and it feels like a pathetic after school special about telling the truth. It all culminates in Lisa speaking at a big conference, where she ultimately admits she was lying, it’s as if she herself got tired of the plot and just wanted to end it. Nothing but worthless filler.
– They give a self-conscious nod with the “I’m flaming!” Smithers line, but like all of their fourth wall moments nowadays, it’s well after the show had beaten the joke into the ground, and I’m sure we’ll be seeing plenty more lazy Smithers gay jokes in the future.
– The recreation of the opening sequence with Bart driving the car is really more killing time, and it was done much better with heavy Bart in “The Heartbroke Kid.”
– Rather than meet Darcy early in act two and give her a character, we waste time by having Homer force Bart to drive him places. First up, he takes him to the gas station to fill up a sack of volleyballs to chuck over the prison fence, to “create chaos and confusion.” For what purpose? Is this a joke? And also, can we please, please retire the loud Homer whisper voice? I’m so fucking tired of it.
– How is Bart able to drive without some kind of a booster seat? He’s got a book underneath the pedal, but how can his short little legs reach it at all? Oh, who cares. The writers sure didn’t.
– What do we know about Utah? They’re polygamist weirdos! (“So, how many brides will you be marrying today, Mr. Simpson?” “Just one.” “Pfft. What’re you, gay?”) What do we know about pregnant women? They get mad cravings! The satire on this show used to be through the roof, and now it’s permanently stuck on the base level and seemingly content to be there.

(originally aired January 28, 2007)
Sigh… Another fucking anthology episode. The Rich Texan cuts Homer off and he swears revenge, sparking three stories with a theme of vengeance. Here once more, Homer’s “character” is cemented as an out-of-control blood thirsty wild man who should be locked away somewhere far away from Marge and the kids. First is the Count of Monte Cristo, which involves Moe stealing Marge away from Homer, which at this point we’ve seen twice already in these trilogy shows. The stories are different, but the character dynamics are all the same shit we’ve seen before, wrapped up in the most tired French jokes imaginable. The second is not a parody, just some nonsense where Milhouse gets a magic weapon to enact payback on the bullies. These episodes where characters randomly retell these famous stories are strange enough, and here we have Lisa telling this tale that she seemingly just made up on the spot. Lastly is Bartman, reenacting the Batman origin story, except it defies the source material since it involves Bart killing people. I won’t belabor these points further. These anthology episodes are just plain lazy, and I very much dislike them.

Tidbits and Quotes
– “Revenge never solves anything!” “Then what’s America doing in Iraq?” Great political commentary, guys!
– Burns for some reason helps Homer escape from prison, then admits he’s doing it because he sexually assaulted him several times as he slept. Because as established in “Strong Arms of the Ma,” rape is funny, right? So gay rape will be even funnier!
– The crazy Rube Goldberg killing machine at the end of the first segment is so random. What does this have to do with the story? Then Marge spells out the obvious moral, and we go back to reality to find Homer wasn’t paying attention and is still a sociopath. He’s tracking down this old man to beat him within an inch of his life, what else can I call him?
– So Homer admits to framing Maggie for shooting Mr. Burns, in basically yet another big middle finger to the fans. It’s this odd scorn where the writers are annoyed, seemingly angered that viewers care about this show and want it to be taken at least somewhat seriously, and then they give us episodes like this.
– The second segment is incredibly thin, clocking in at barely four minutes. Then it becomes almost like a Halloween show with decapitating Willie, which they comment on at the end, because we all know that if one points out their shitty writing, it completely absolves it, right?
– Speaking of… “Hey, jerk! Puns are lazy writing!” PLEASE STOP, YOU FUCKING HYPOCRITES.

(originally aired January 7, 2007)
Is six years too late to parody something as forgettable as The Perfect Storm? And do we even care to see it? Well, it doesn’t matter, ’cause here it is. This episode is kind of a big jumble of stuff leading to the back half with Homer out at sea, where we get “drama” and “tension” regarding whether he and the crew will survive. What do you fucking think? Things get rolling when we see old Bouvier home movies of young Marge at Barnacle Bay, a New England island of fun and fancy free. In a shocking display of unselfish generosity for once, Homer takes the whole family there, only to find the place is now a filthy, run-down shell of its former self. And so, with one step forward, we get twenty steps back as Homer vows to rebuild his wife’s childhood memories… by paying meth addicts to fix up a dilapidated carousel and forcing his children to manually power it from below the boardwalk. What a swell guy.

After accidentally setting fire to said boardwalk, Homer pays off his debt by assisting the local fishermen. Through painfully boring exposition, we find that the town used to rely on succulent “yum yum” fish, but they had driven them to near extinction. At least until dumbass Homer uses beer batter as bait and catches a whole slew of them. Then a storm hits. Then the ship sinks. Then everyone thinks they’re all dead. Then they show up and they’re not dead. Jesus. We as an audience know they’ll survive, but the characters should treat grave situations in a believable manner. “One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish” had everyone thinking Homer was going to die, and we believed it based on how people acted. Here, the ship is crawling up a humungous wave, and Homer, for no discernible reason, whips out a golf club, goes out on the bow and tees off. We also have li’l irritating activist Lisa shaming the locals for abusing their resources, and it ends with a big slap in the face as the town goes from overfishing to overlogging. So it’s not satisfying seeing Lisa act like such a pushy self-righteous know-it-all, but despite that, it’s also not satisfying seeing her ignored and her hopes diminished, because we still care about her, or at least who she used to be. So ultimately it’s an ending, and an episode, that satisfies no one. But of course, this is nothing new.

Tidbits and Quotes
– Seeing the Simpsons and Van Houtens fight at the outdoor movie event reminds me that a few episodes ago they showed Kirk at the Divorced Dad Picnic. I totally forgot that he and Luann had got back together. It seems the writers did too. I guess it’ll be like Barney’s sobriety, Kirk and Luann’s relationship will wax and wane depending on what joke they need. Fuck continuity.
– “While you’re watching this quiet riot, I’ll be slipping these religious pamphlets on your windshields!” Every time Flanders appears on screen, I dislike him more and more. These characters I once loved are now becoming the subject of hate. It’s really uncomfortable.
– The silent film goes on foreeeeevver, and none of it is funny. Then Patty and Selma show the home movies, which also feels wrong. They love their vacation slides, but they’re also very private people. Would they really be eager to screen their private moments to the entire town?
– “This is the most disgusting place we’ve ever gone!” “What about Brazil?” “After Brazil.” Some of the shots the show takes now kind of seem unnecessarily mean. They made the Brazil episode, basically painting the country as a complete shithole, people got upset because of the poor portrayal, and now this is the show’s response, “Well, fuck you, guys, your country is garbage.” When New Orleans got upset about the song in “A Streetcar Named Marge,” they had the chalkboard gag, “I Will Not Defame New Orleans.” It wasn’t the show falling to its knees and pathetically apologizing, but it was an amusing nod that this was all in good fun. Here, the attacks are just mean-spirited.
– We are at the point where nearly every scene contains something annoying. Homer eats the disgusting fish, including one of its sharp spikes. He’s seriously dumb enough to serve the crew bait, and to continue to think it’s Opposite Day. And the scene where he clubs the fish to death without batting an eye… it felt really sad. I mean, “Whacking Day,” this ain’t.
– “The Carnival of the Animals” is used so often in this show, and it is forever tainted because of it. Well, not really. I’ll always remember that piece of music, and this episode will fade into obscurity in my memory soon enough.