(originally aired January 29, 2006)
Hey, another tepid episode! Although to be fair, aside from the terrible non-ending and the B-“plot,” this one actually isn’t too bad as a ramshackle Homer-Bart story. There are scenes between them that actually feel authentic as a father and son at odds with each other, but there are also others that don’t work at all. A catastrophic prank by Bart leaves Skinner urging Homer and Marge to send the boy to a rigorous reformation camp in Oregon. When Bart is unable to fly by himself, Homer is forced to drive him there, making him miss his trip to Vegas with his bar buddies. A highlight here is where Homer reflects on his miserable stasis in life (“I’m 38 years old, driving a crappy car with a son who doesn’t respect me, and I’m one Snickers Pie away from losing my foot to diabetes!”) It’s said out of rage, but it’s so unbelievably refreshing to see Homer lamenting his poor lot in life, rather than just giddily laughing at everything and being so upbeat all the time. Blissfully ignorant Homer is fun, just not for the entire runtime of an episode.

Homer and Bart bond over mocking a more loving father and son, which is another great, classic-feeling scene. But Bart tries to make his escape, leaving Homer to track him down, ending up almost plummeting off a cliff. This leads to a “hysterical” scene where Bart raises and lowers the fender of the car to mess with his dad, giving Homer mood whiplash, going from fawning and loving, to increasingly disturbing death threats (“I’m gonna double kill you! Then I’ll bury you in a shallow grave, dig you up and kill you again! That’s the beauty of a shallow grave!”) Homer dumps Bart off at the camp, feels guilty for it, then takes him back and drives away. Whatever. Back home, Marge holds a yard sale to unload her husband and son’s junk, but finds her biggest seller are expired pills. I could almost buy this if they kept up Marge’s naivety, but Snake openly says he’s buying illegal drugs, and Marge couldn’t be happier to sell them to him. Very out-of-character. The ending features Lisa returning home to find her parents are both incarcerated, and she sighs how she always figured the family would whittle down to just her. Not only is it an unsatisfying, unfunny ending, but it continues to paint the Simpson family as rickety and dysfunctional, where they used to be loving and close-knit despite their squabbles. This episode’s got some surprisingly good scenes in it, but the stupid shit kind of weighs it down.

Tidbits and Quotes
– Milhouse is another character that seems to becoming impossible to write for. He’s sort of like Marge, where they can’t write dialogue for a meek, out-of-touch character (“We can’t leave here without turning one little valve!” “Yeah! It’d be like going to Amsterdam and not taking a walking tour of famous doors!”) That would be slightly odd for Marge to say, but it’s even more out-of-place for a ten-year-old boy.
– There’s barely any story here, so there’s lots of sequences and jokes stretched to fill out the runtime. The steam filling up the school feels so long, and other gags like Flanders singing the colors of the dreamcoat and the aforementioned bit of Homer screaming at Bart just go on foreeeeeeeever.
– It’s sort of dumb as the explanation for why Bart is “no-fly,” but I love the flashback of Bart’s egregious transgression: removing his seat belt before the light went off upon landing (“Thanks a lot, 33C! Now we all have to go back to Minneapolis! And I’m very tired!”)
– The scene of Homer and Bart at the diner is honestly the best I’ve seen in years. It was so charming seeing those two enjoy each other’s company believably, by mocking others. It felt like when the family mocked Flanders’s note in “Dead Putters Society,” or the ending of “Saturdays of Thunder.”
– Why would Marge be selling the Mr. Plow jacket? She loves that thing. It just seems like more cramming in old references without really understanding what they mean.
– Smithers is buying estrogen! It’s funny because he’s a gay man, that means he wants to buy female drugs? (“It’s for a friend… who’s trapped in the body of another friend.”) Wait, does that mean he wants a sex change operation? What the fuck have they done to this character?
– Homer’s Vegas nightmare with the sexy Bart waitress is incredibly disturbing (“Hey Homer, you wanna eat my shorts?”) Burt Bacharach turning into Bart Bartabart is a pretty good gag though.

(originally aired January 8, 2006)
You might have noticed that first acts in later years have been becoming increasingly more tangential, having absolutely nothing to do with the main story. While they do present the opportunity for some good jokes or satire (which there have been neither of lately, but that’s besides the point), as a viewer, you feel a bit like your time has been wasted, that the writers couldn’t come up with a full enough story so they bullshitted for six minutes before actually kicking the plot off. This episode has, bar none, the worst unrelated first act in the entire series. Marge is incensed that a toll booth has been put up on a busy road, and instead opts to take the free alternative. To combat this, Quimby installs dividers on either side to block that route, which would already be enough, but also they also put in tire spikes on the street to lock everyone in. Why? You’re already boxed in as it is. Marge freaks out and slams into reverse, which causes an entire row of cars behind her to get rear-ended. It’s like the stupid shit in “See Homer Run,” there’s randomly like twenty cars bumper-to-bumper. So all the popped tires get thrown on the tire fire, which causes a greater amount of smoke to rise, so much so that it melts the ice caps of a nearby frosted mountain, revealing a frozen postman. What was he doing up there? Was he fucking flash-frozen? How are his letters still intact and not soggy and unreadable? This is the catalyst for the plot to start: the Simpsons receive a long lost letter. There are a billion ways they could have started this story, and this is the one they landed on. It’s baffling.

The main story just bored me more than anything. The letter is from an old lover of Homer’s mother, who believes that her child is actually his, leading Homer to think Abe might not be his real father. Homer tracks down the mystery man: wealthy treasure hunter Mason Fairbanks, voiced by Michael York. He’s a delightful old Brit who Homer immediately latches onto, tossing Abe aside like a sack of hot rocks. It’s actually not as cruel as it sounds, so I wasn’t annoyed, it was just kind of uninteresting. We know that Fairbanks isn’t his father, so the episode is meant to posit how Homer’s life would be different had he been raised by another person. Except it doesn’t do that at all, as instead, it ends with an undersea treasure salvaging where Homer nearly dies. The only thing that aggravated me here is that he has visions of his father in the past, depicting Abe as a great dad, which as we’ve seen, he wasn’t at all. Him playing around with Li’l Homer is fine and sweet, but the bit of him giving Homer all his money on his wedding day feels so phony (“I gave you everything, and it still wasn’t enough.”) Sure, this did actually happen in “Lisa’s First Word,” but emotionally it was handled so much more efficiently and they undercut it with a joke. Here, it’s just super sweet for its own sake. In the end, Abe reveals he’s the real father… God, whatever. How could an episode with such a startling in-universe reveal be so safe and boring?

Tidbits and Quotes
– Joe Frazier returns for a quick guest spot, which only makes me wish I was watching “Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?”
– “Voila! Which is French for ‘ta-da’!” “I’m trapped like the ‘L’ in a BLT!” These guys are really at a loss in writing dialogue for Marge. Every line makes me cringe a little bit.
– I can’t get over how fucking stupid the frozen mailman thing is. I could bitch about it for so much longer than I already did, but why bother? It’s one of the dumbest things ever done on this show.
– I definitely believe that Mona cheated on Abe, given the time period and how much of an ass he was, but it’s kind of uncomfortable to hear. I dunno, it’s like the bit from “D’oh-in’ in the Wind” where Seth and Munchie not-so-subtly admit they banged her to her own son.
– This episode would be remedied instantaneously by a DNA test. At first Abe refuses to take one, then by the end of act two, he instantly agrees to it. Plus there’s the fact that Homer basically looks like a non-wrinkled Grampa, as he demonstrates to the audience. Of course they’re related, you dolts.
– The dream sequence of Li’l Homer playing catch with a question mark is kind of cute. Then they break a window and an exclamation point comes out shaking its fist.
– Marge warns Homer not to get too emotionally invested, seeming very apprehensive about the whole thing. Next scene they’re all on Fairbanks’s boat yukking it up. Whatever.
– The treasure hunt is so uninteresting, like who cares? What is is supposed to mean, that Homer’s life would have been more exciting if this guy was his father? Is that what he wanted? I really don’t know.
– Homer’s new catchphrase seems to be a very looooong moan. They keep using the same one, but condense it when need be. It’s annoying every time. Every. Single. Time.

(originally aired December 18, 2005)
Oh boy, another anthology episode, and this time it’s a holiday edition! It’s quite… boring. I usually find these shows that insert our characters into famous stories rather lazy and uninspired, and even though only one of the three here is an adaptation, I still get that feeling anyway. The first tells the story of the very first Christmas, with the birth of Jesus Christ, here played by an adorable baby Bart. Marge is Mary, Homer is Joseph, other characters are… other characters. And there are jokes made. These segments are honestly just so uninteresting to me. You know the story they’re telling, so you’re just waiting for them to go through the motions. Maybe if they had some interesting religious commentary, or subverted the tale in some manner, but that would be too risky. Why take a chance in comedy when you can take the safe route?

The second segment is the best, in that it made me the least sleepy. Grampa spins a nonsense tale of being stuck on a deserted island with Mr. Burns after being shot down during World War II. They then accidentally shoot down Santa Claus on Christmas Eve, and must help him repair his sleigh. There’s a few lines here that are amusing, but just as many that aren’t. Moreover I enjoyed seeing a younger Abe and Burns, and hearing Dan Castellaneta and Harry Shearer off their typical autopilot making the characters sound sixty years younger was also nice to hear. The third segment is just a series of vignettes set to the Nutcracker Suite, the most glaring of which is a joyful montage of Moe’s many failed attempts at suicide. I had just chastised the show for not being ballsy, but in this instance it’s completely misdirected. As I’ve mentioned previously, any taboo topic can be turned into comedy, but the fact that being suicidal has become nothing more than a quirky character trait for Moe that they can joke about, it ultimately feels so completely dour and offensive. And it’s the gag that closes our show: he curses that a tracker trailer didn’t hit and kill him! Merry Christmas, everybody! A thoroughly forgettable holiday show.

Tidbits and Quotes
– Baby Bart causing miracles nodding his head a la I Dream of Jeannie, Homer and Skinner acting like the Three Stooges, all the bits from the first segment really fall flat. There’s only one moment that comes close to being amusingly self aware. Eddie questions the moral rightness of going in and slaughtering a baby, to which Wiggum responds, “Don’t worry, boys. No one will ever speak or write of this again.” That joke works. It’s similar to an earlier bit where the Archangel Lisa appears to explain Bart/Jesus’s life story to the disillusioned baby, but this line feels more organic. But how do they unnecessarily cap off the joke? Matthew is standing by, scroll in hand! “What a boffo beginning for my book!” See, just in case you’ve never heard of the fucking Bible, we’ll show a guy writing it! So see, the story will be written of, so what Wiggum said was funny! Get it! Get it?!
– The second segment has some chuckle-worthymoments in it, like the reindeer performing CPR on Santa, and a few good lines (“Donner! Blitzen!” “He’s German! That’s good eatin’!”)
– They lead into the singing in the third act by mentioning how the Nutcracker is in the public domain, so they don’t have to pay any royalties. Fair enough, but this show has utilized so many licensed songs they’ve had to pay for at this point, a good share of them only for a few seconds. Hell, in the next episode, they play Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” for what can’t be more than eight seconds. That must have cost them something, and added nothing to the episode.
– The final scene with Marge getting Homer a gift for him to give to her is kind of sweet. I guess. I’ve been lulled into a disillusioned stupor at this point, so I’ll take anything that isn’t Homer screaming or humiliating others.

(originally aired December 11, 2005)
Poor Sideshow Bob. After redeeming himself and being given a suitable farewell in season 8, Mike Scully and Al Jean dragged him back out and downgraded him to just be a generic evil villain who wants to kill the entire Simpson family because he’s evil. It’s the Mr. Burns complex: motivations are out the window, this character’s a bad guy so he does bad guy things. But this isn’t only a Bob show, it’s another travel show. The Simpsons are going to Italy! Burns buys himself a new European car, and needs someone to go overseas to ship it back to him. Not only does he choose Homer, he allows the entire family to go, for some reason. After the obligatory sight-seeing gags, the family ends up at a small Tuscan village, and is shocked to find Sideshow Bob is the mayor. The story of how Bob got there is actually pretty satisfying: he went to Europe to get a fresh start, and ended up being the toast of the town during wine season, able to crush a multitude of grapes with his gargantuan feet. Utilizing established character lore to comic effect? I’m shocked.

Bob’s got a great new life in Italy, a lovely wife and a kid, and in exchange for not exposing his criminal past, he welcomes the Simpsons to his village with open arms. He even fixes their car for them as well. You really feel good about Bob’s new lot in life, and are almost dreading the inevitable moment it comes crashing down and he reverts back to his boring murderous default. A drunk Lisa spills the beans about Bob’s past, and then she stumbles and rips off his suit, revealing his Springfield Prison orange jumpsuit. Why in the ever loving fuck would he be wearing that? Does it even matter? It’s times like these I feel the writers hold the audience in such contempt; they must realize how dumb this stuff is, but decide it’s good enough to air anyway. Bob swears revenge on the family, and inexplicably, his wife and son are on board too. The Simpsons hide out at the Coliseum where Krusty is performing Pagliacci. Bob and family move in for the kill, but Krusty drives away with the Simpsons and everything’s fine. How boring. I think there’s a lot of potential for Bob’s character, but if they’re just going to do the same old evil murder schtick, then why even fucking bother? Classic Simpsons acknowledged when certain characters or jokes were growing stale and put them to bed. New Simpsons then goes and jostles them awake to do the same old song and dance in place of new ideas.

Tidbits and Quotes
– Mr. Burns’s car breaks down in front of the school, and the kids taunt him. He gets out an old timey camera to take their pictures to remember them by for vengeance purposes, then falls asleep under the curtain. It’s funny because he’s old! Later we see Cletus and Brandine, where she comments how Cletus is the most wonderful husband and son she’s ever had. It’s funny because they’re inbred! I know I’ve mentioned this many times, but it’s such a bummer that secondary characters have been reduced to one type of joke. Once they’re on screen, you can pretty much call the gag immediately.
– Li’l Liberal Lisa arrives in Italy with a Canadian flag on her backpack (“Some people in Europe have the impression that America has made some stupid choices over the past… five years…”) Bush has been in office five years, get it? We’re saying his presidency is terrible, without actually saying it! Again, I’ll say this show is toothless for making these sort-of kind-of rips on the sitting President, where in the past the show had no problem ridiculing any specific target head-on.
– My lord, Bob’s wife’s voice is sexy. I mean, just look at her voice actress. Hachi machi. But unfortunately along with that, we have Tress MacNeille as Bob’s son, who is so annoying I just want to strangle that little fucker.
– I actually enjoy most of the second act. Bob’s new life is interesting and within his character, and it’s nice to see the high-minded, genteel side of him, as well as his buffoonish show business side when he clowns around playing soccer with the kids. The fact that it’s ruined at the end of the act when Bob must be forced back to villainy is so disheartening, and that it’s handled so stupidly and unbelievably is like pouring salt on the festering wound. Not even the American Dad ‘Plagiarismo Di Plagiarismo’ bit can quell my great annoyance. The show is definitely the lesser of three MacFarlane evils, but I’d much rather be watching it than this show.
– “I don’t wish to brag, but he’s evil at an eighth grade level.” Not only has Bob become a cartoonish villain, but he acknowledges himself as one.
– Another episode with no ending. Krusty drives in for no reason to save the Simpsons, and Bob and family just walk home, while we hear Tress MacNeille continually screeching as that damn kid.

(originally aired November 27, 2005)
Ah, a Marge episode. Strap yourself in for another exercise in banality. Marge is depressed that she doesn’t have any friends, then she finds some: a group of women called the Cheery Red Tomatoes. Then they do some activities together. Do any of them exhibit any signs of personality? Nope. Only one of them has lines or a name, the rest are just set dressing. Well, that’s not true. Rather than develop another character, they threw Agnes in there too for some reason. Upon her final initiation, Marge realizes the group is planning a heist on Burns Manor, to take the money that Burns had promised to a children’s hospital. They do the job, end up getting caught, Burns lets them go, and Marge is inexplicably out of the group. She reveals she snuck one of Burns’s Faberge eggs in her hair, to which Tammy the leader comments, “To be safe, sweetie, I don’t think we can ever see each other again.” Any reasoning for that? Nope. It’s not even a cop out ending. I don’t even know if I can call it an ending.

The main story is so boring… So is the side story, but it’s more bizarre. Lisa inquires about studying abroad, because of course a second grader can do that. To be approved to go to Italy, she must speak fluent Italian, because, again, eight-year-old American grade schoolers should be expected to be bilingual. She ends up getting a tutor, and is surprised to find it’s Milhouse, who speaks Italian thanks to spending summers in Europe with his grandmother. All of a sudden, he’s brazen and confident, taking Lisa to Little Italy so they can do another Godfather reference. Lisa starts falling for him, for some reason, until she finds him with another girl in his lap… yeah, I don’t even know what to make of all this. Is he acting like a big shot to impress Lisa? If that’s the case, then why was he with that girl in the end? Oh, who cares. There’s nothing worth getting upset about here, it’s just another complete waste of twenty minutes, time that could have been spent telling an interesting story with humor.

Tidbits and Quotes
– I just complained about Miss Springfield and the Crazy Cat Lady in the last episode, and here they are again! Of course Quimby has girls in cages in his office, that totally makes sense, and when Homer tells Marge he found her a friend, of course it’s the fucking Crazy Cat Lady.
– Marge is humiliated by Homer getting into a fight at the Easter egg hunt, but the silver lining is that Homer didn’t start it. Seeing Maggie isn’t getting any eggs, Homer helps out by stealing them from other children (“Peekaboo, I steal from you!”) It’s kind of sweet. Then the referee flat-out tackles him, and the brawl begins. Sure, Homer ends up taking it too far, but at least it’s a little victory for me that for once, Homer wasn’t the provocateur of violence.
– If anyone wants to explain that Sherri & Terri twin language bit to me, have at it. Is the joke that they’re twins? I’m not entirely sure.
– Lisa tries to learn Italian on cassette, but it has phrases like, “I plan to dump this body in the ocean.” She looks and sees it’s “Italian for Italian-Americans!” Because Italian-Americans are mobsters! Get it?
– Marge builds a kinship with the Tomatoes by bitching about Homer. Now, if I may do a quick compare & contrast, think back to “War of the Simpsons,” where we have a similar joke. Marge lists hours and hours of faults about Homer, so many that she grows hoarse, but they’re small, believable things, like that he chews with his mouth open and his long yellow toe nails. Here, Marge complains how Homer cut up her wedding dress to make a badminton net and how he’s a multiple felon. It’s not as funny when Homer’s made out to be this insane maniac rather than just a normal person.
– I guess it’s funny that Milhouse’s middle name is Mussolini. But why would his parents name him that?
– Skimming back through the episode, it seems one of the Tomatoes actually does have a line. And they all chant “Bare hair!” Alright then.
– Mr. Burns arranged an event at the Children’s Hospital, wrote out a check, all so he could announce that he was keeping it for himself and release the hounds on the crowd. This is more cartoon villain Burns from “Homer vs. Dignity,” humiliating and depriving others for his sick, perverted pleasure.

Brief aside, I gotta be honest, I’m kind of getting tired of doing this. The Jean era is really beating me down; these episodes are just getting more and more unremarkable, and a lot of my commentary feels redundant at this point. But I’m so very close to the end, so I might as well press forth. I want to finish seasons 17 and 18, and the movie, by the end of the year, then wrap everything up at the start of 2013. Big thanks to all who have been keeping up and reading all this, and glad to hear you’re enjoying it on some level. Just be thankful you don’t have to watch any of this.