(originally aired January 22, 1995)
First we had an episode about Bart’s birth how it affected Homer and Marge. Then we had one about Lisa. Now we get up to Maggie, and for the second time in one of these flashback shows, family story time comes as a result of the television being turned off. Homer semi-reluctantly spins the tale of how when he became completely out of debt, he quit his job at the plant and started his dream job: as a pin jockey at the Bowl-O-Rama. Meanwhile, Marge finds she’s pregnant once more, but is hesitant to tell her husband. Any time we see Homer actually content with his life, it’s a real pleasure, and here it’s ramped up to an incredibly heightened degree where he crows that his life is perfect the way it is exactly, only to make Marge want to further delay giving him the news.

The flashback episodes before this really hinged on the emotional aspect of the stories: Homer and Marge finding love, and the birth of two beautiful children. This is the first one that really goes more for the laughs, with Homer’s love affair with the bowling alley, and Patty and Selma’s desire to ruin his life, countered only that Homer is the thickest, most oblivious person on the planet. It’s almost like a more comedic version of “I Married Marge,” where Homer’s perfect man-child life is disturbed by another unexpected pregnancy. It’s all pretty jokey up until the very end where Homer once again must sacrifice his dreams for his family, literally crawling back to a life of joyless servitude at the power plant. Things take a turn for sweet at the end when Homer’s mountain of woe crumbles at the mere touch of his newborn baby girl’s little hand, turning him into a cooing father. Homer sheepishly waving hello to a minute-old Maggie is one of the sweetest moments of the entire series, followed by the hilarious bit where he mistakes her umbilical cord for a penis (“It’s a boy… and what a boy!”)

I always love these flashback shows because it shines light on how our characters came to be and the decisions and sacrifices they made to be where they are now. This one is a bit different; only taking place a year or two before the present, it feels a lot more like a normal episode, since everything looks the same (save Homer’s one extra hair). The theme of Homer’s doing right for his family is there, but as mentioned, it’s treading familiar flashback ground. This episode is largely for laughs, with lots of crazy Homer antics and obliviousness, but at its center is Homer’s eternal love toward Maggie. In later years, there’d be a lot of jokes about Homer forgetting about his baby’s existence, which I don’t know if I care for considering this episode and its super duper sweet ending. At the end of the day, Homer is a man who loves his children, and has sacrificed so much of his own happiness for their own good. He’s A-OK in my book.

Tidbits and Quotes
– I love “Knightboat,” and how adamantly Homer shoots down Bart and Lisa’s complaints about the contrived nature of the premise (“I will not hear another word against the boat.”)
– I always like Homer’s (or sometimes Marge’s) opening monologues before the start of the flashback shows. This one is particularly great (“It was a tumultuous time for our nation: the clear beverage craze gave us all a reason to live, the information superhighway showed the average person what some nerd thinks about Star Trek, and the domestication of the dog continued unabated.”) It’s like he couldn’t come up with a third thing, so he just threw in something totally at random.
– The flashback section starts silly off the bat with Homer’s fantasy retelling of how he saved the plant from terrorists. Also great is later when Bart messes with the memories and has his father’s head explode.
– Homer knows how to make an exit. After “trashing” Burns’ office, he uses his head like a bongo (Burns muses, “I should be resisting this, but I’m paralyzed with rage… and island rhythms.”) He rides a cart through the plant, still holding Burns, then tosses him off outside (“That’s for employing me for eight years!”) He drives across a small wooden bridge, and for good measure, lights it on fire.
– Making budget cuts, Homer announces to the family they’ll be getting regular toilet paper instead of the fancy quilted kind. Bart is so upset about this he gets up and punches the wall.
– I like how Homer and Marge have a nice romantic moment on top of each other on the beach, but they’re semi-sensible adults now, so a little excess sand in their undergarments makes them want to just go home. But not before Homer shoves a bit more down his pants. Also, very graphic sequence of a legion of Homer sperm entering Marge’s lady parts, and the one lucky specimen to pierce the egg.
– Great sequence showcasing the wastefulness of Barney’s Bowl-O-Rama: all knocked down pins are carted off and discarded, while one large tree is shaved down to make a single new pin to be put up for the next set.
– I like Bart’s logic regarding the gender of the new baby (“You know nothing about genetics, Lis. It goes boy, girl, boy, girl.”)
– Great, great play on a classic convention: it appears that Patty and Selma have called every single person in the phone booth to blab about Marge’s pregnancy, but really they only called Mr. Aaronson and Mr. Zykowski, the two biggest gossips in town, to spread the news for them.
– I love Homer’s exaggerated obliviousness toward people congratulating him on Marge’s pregnancy, the best of which being Moe’s incredibly direct, “Hey Homer! Way to get Marge pregnant!” Homer blindly responds, “This is getting very abstract, but thank you, I do enjoy working at the bowling alley.” Of course it’s only when Maude congratulates Homer on his new job that it finally resonates with him that Marge is pregnant.
– Continuity police! Ruth Powers is at the baby shower even though they hadn’t moved in until after Maggie was born. Also, they flashback to Homer’s reaction to Marge being pregnant with Bart in the Simpson house, but they hadn’t lived there yet. I sure how someone got fired for these blunders.
– I think Homer firing off shotgun rounds to arouse bowling interest is a bit too dumb, even for him, but I laugh every time (“My marketing plan attracted a record number of police and fire officials, but few stayed to bowl.“)
– Apparently Captain McAlister is a father. Yep. Never seen that kid ever again.
– There’s another real cute moment toward the end where Homer is lovingly fawning over his new baby, and Marge, exhausted from her birthing ordeal, gives a quiet sigh of contentment. Homer urges his wife, “Come on, Marge, show a little enthusiasm!”

(originally aired December 18, 1994)
Where we took a glimpse at Homer’s past in the last episode, here we take a look at Marge’s. We got into some heavy material by the end of “Grampa vs. Sexual Inadequacy,” seeing how psychologically damaging Abe was to little Homer, small bits that really let your mind wander as to how harsh Homer’s youth must have been. Here, we get even more horrible reminiscences about Marge’s childhood. I’ve talked before about Marge’s sad state of affairs, how she lives a life of eternal under-appreciation by her oafish husband. She’s a woman who’s permanently repressed, but most often of her own volition. Why is she like that? This episode gives us a bit more information, perhaps not as much as one would hope, but I’m of the mind that less is always more. The other elements surrounding the main Marge story aren’t quite as strong, but the emotional center of the episode is rock solid.

We start with Homer being banned from Moe’s and his fevered search to find a new dive bar to get wasted in. His last resort is a pilot’s bar, which gets him mistaken for a pilot himself and he ends up botches a take-off. What’s great with this is it’s not the expected stupid thing where Homer assumes the role of a pilot to avoid getting in trouble. He flat out admits he’s not a pilot, but no one believes him (“You fly boys crack me up!”) To keep the debacle hush-hush, Homer is offered free tickets for the family to anywhere in the US (except Alaska and Hawaii, the freak states). It’s when they finally get on the plane that Marge begins to have an anxiety attack and reveals her phobia of flying. It’s here we see how damaged a woman Marge really is: struck with a painful memory of her past, she converts into even more of a Stepford wife, continuously baking and working around the house, convincing everyone that everything is alright. There’s jokes shoehorned in around all of this, some of which work, but I’m pretty invested in the somewhat serious character stuff that some of it comes off distracting.

Marge ends up receiving counseling from psychologist Dr. Zweig, voiced by the great Anne Bancroft. There, we see a bit more of Marge’s past, at first not much more than we haven’t already seen. We know her sisters were bullies to her as a kid, as well as her mother teaching her to always bottle feelings and smile incessantly (“People know how good a mommy you have by the size of your smile.”) That scene in “Moaning Lisa” spoke such volumes, of how desperate for love and reassurance Jacqueline Bouvier must have been to instill such values on her daughter. Finally, we get to the source of Marge’s fear: the shocking childhood revelation that Marge’s father was not a pilot, but an airplane steward. It’s a hilariously stupid explanation, which is piled on more with multiple concurrent memories regarding terrifying airplane-related incidents (Zweig passes them off, “Yes, yes, it’s all a rich tapestry,”) but part of me wishes the story had been dealt with in a bit more serious manner. I love the dumbness of the ending, but it kind of reminded me of “$pringfield” where we have the joke of a serious problem swept under the rug, but that still leaves it a bit unsatisfying. Ultimately, I still like the episode for the devastating look at Marge’s past and present, and the jokes that managed to sneak their way past to make me laugh through the seriousness.

Tidbits and Quotes
– The opening is pretty funny, with the bar gang pulling very dangerous pranks on Moe, but Homer’s simple “unscrew the sugar jar” trick is going too far. I particularly love Barney’s prank: the episode starts and you see he’s wearing a new jacket with a flower in the lapel, so you think you know what’s coming. So when he asks Moe to smell it, following the deadly cobra in the cash register, you think maybe it’s got lemon juice or acid in it or something. But no, Barney just lights Moe’s apron on fire.
– I never watched Cheers so I can’t really comment on that whole scene. I know Fraiser Crane was there in the bar, but didn’t speak, perhaps because you would have thought maybe it was Sideshow Bob in disguise.
– I love the name of the lesbian bar, the She-She Lounge, and Homer’s slow realization… that it doesn’t have a fire exit. After his proclamation and swift exit, a woman going to the bar asks, “What was her problem?”
– Marge’s ramblings of her mother’s advice to be good and never complain are really serious signs of her emotional problems. While part of me likes how this is left to the imagination, I kind of wish they had explored it deeper and more seriously. I watch this show to laugh, but I could get into a bit more serious territory with characters I’ve grown attached to. Why not?
– I love the Alive parody, with the cheesy title drop, and the unseen gorging session (“Pass me another hunk of copilot.”)
– I like Homer’s insane paranoia of Marge going to therapy, that he’ll instantly be villainized, which would lead to a divorce. It’s a good running bit, but with all the other crazy stuff in this show, maybe a bit too much.
– Although I don’t know if I buy Marge having a Lost in Space dream, I love Dan Castellaneta doing Homer doing Dr. Smith (“As you well know, my back is a disaster area. Oh, the pain. Oh, the pain of it all!”)
– I like in the end how encouraging Homer is to Marge on her plane ride, and of course how it backfires when the plane fails to take off and lands in the water.

(originally aired November 27, 1994)
Mob mentality is definitely a running theme of the show, as we’ve seen in many episodes in the past from “Bart’s Inner Child” to “Bart’s Girlfriend,” where one single perception is spread across an entire populous, making whoever’s in the crosshairs of that viewpoint a living hell. In this episode, we take a look at the media and how it can play exactly the same role, and because of its pervasiveness can be even more damaging and confusing. Homer’s supposed indiscretions from this episode are pushed and exaggerated to extreme degrees through television, to the point that by the end of the show it starts to confuse and beat down even him. A man with a love affair with television now finds it to be not only his enemy, but his undoing (“Maybe TV is right. TV’s always right.”) It’s an interesting portrait of how words can really destroy a man. It’s also funny as hell too. And on rather risque subject matter too, but counterbalanced by its goofiness.

We have our opening set piece of Homer going apeshit with excitement at a candy convention, using Marge as a drug mule to stow away as many goodies as he can in her custom made giant overcoat. During reconnaissance, he notices a glaring omission in his candy haul: the ultra rare, one-of-a-kind gummy Venus di Milo. While dropping off the babysitter Ashley Grant, a righteous college feminist, he notices that the candy was on the passenger seat and is now stuck to her pants. He reaches and grabs it off, which of course is mistaken by Ashley to be a lust-filled grope. This leads to a group of young activists camping outside the Simpson house in protest of Homer’s actions, which later sparks an insane media circus. What works here is that Ashley is a bit of a feminist caricature, but she is not vilified. From her perspective, we see a truly craven Homer reaching for her ass, so we see where she gets off, but it’s also hilarious to us that we know it’s over a candy. The rarest of all gummies, which he then eats in three seconds.

It’s not long before the entire television landscape is riddled with anti-Homer programming, from daytime talk shows, Letterman’s Top 10, Channel Ocho, and so on. It’s such an insane exaggeration of this situation: all Homer supposedly did was grab a girl’s ass, and Kent Brockman is doing 24-hour surveillance of his house. Such dramatic viewpoints from TV starts to create conflict in the Simpson house, as Lisa and Bart start to get mixed thoughts against their father (“It’s just hard not to listen to TV. It’s spent so much more time raising us than you have.”) In a last ditch effort to clear his name, Homer gives a plea of innocence on public access, which nobody watches. But thankfully, we get a truly random conclusion of Willie coming to Homer’s aid, who reveals that he videotapes couples in cars in his spare time, which is made great because it does feel like something Willie would do (“I dinna come forward because in this country, it makes you look like a pervert, but every single Scottish person does it!”) The end also features a great turn-around where the sleazy journalism show does a defamatory report on Willie, which Homer is immediately swayed by, despite him clearing his name. Homer is as quick to judge as everyone was to him, and fails to see the connection (“Marge, my friend, I haven’t learned a thing.”) He’s made up with TV, and that’s as happy as an ending as we can get.

Tidbits and Quotes
– I like Apu’s polite nature toward Homer, who has opened up hundreds of chocolate bars to find the candy convention tickets (“Hey! I have asked you nicely not to mangle my merchandise. You leave me no choice but to… ask you nicely again.”)
– There’s so many great bits at the Candy Convention, starting with Homer’s urging to get there quick so he can meet the two surviving Musketeers. Paging Mr. Goodbar, the barricades holding out all the immense crowd, Frink’s super sour lemon ball, exposing the uselessness of wax lips, and Marge’s thwarted attempt to eat healthy (“You’re going to have to put some sugar on that celery or get out, ma’am.”) I love Homer’s incredible enthusiasm, it’s his absolute paradise (“I feel like a kid in some kind of a store!”) Also the final scene is great, with Homer testing the urban legend of combining soda with pop rocks to make his exciting escape (“See you in hell, candy boys!”) The result is an explosion that would fit in any action movie, complete with Homer attempting to outrun it.
– The bit with Bart and Lisa swimming around Marge’s engorged coat finding candy, with Marge giggling at being tickled by them, is a really sweet scene, ending with the coat giving way to an avalanche of candy spilling to the floor.
– I like how quick it takes for Ashley to be turned off by Homer (“Hey, could you take the wheel for a second? I have to scratch myself in two places at once.”) He speaks out of innocence, but it makes sense that she would desperately want to be anywhere but inside this car with this disgusting man.
– Amongst the protesters is one that looks suspiciously like Velma from Scooby-Doo. We also see Marge’s activist friend from “The Way We Was,” who seems to not have aged at all since the 70s.
– Homer defends himself to his wife (“Marge, I swear I didn’t touch her. You know how bashful I am; I can’t even say the word ‘titmouse’ without giggling like a schoolgirl!”) What’s refreshing is that Marge immediately believes him. A horrible sitcom would have the wife be distrusting, but here Marge knows better that Homer would never do something like that.
– I like the scene where Bart and Lisa are understandably confused about the mature accusations about their father. Homer explains it the best he can, comparing it to a postcard Grampa sent of an alligator biting a woman’s bottom (“We all thought it was hilarious. But it turns out we were wrong: that alligator was sexually harassing that woman.”) When Bart asks about the dog in the Coppertone ad, Homer admits that’s a bit of a gray area.
– Great montage of the protestors harassing Homer in his driveway, then on the highway, then at his work console (one of them yells, “We ain’t crazy about nuclear power either!”)
– The Rock Bottom stuff is absolutely fantastic, a terrific parody of sensationalist tabloid news. It’s specifically a parody of Hard Copy, but it’s great that so many years later, the reference to such programming still works completely. The Homer interview segment has got to be one of the funniest things in the entire series, with the clock in the background quickly changing with each cut, even though we saw Homer taping the footage in less than a minute. Then the clearly paused video frame of Homer zooming in, apparently attacking the host, followed by the quick disclaimer, “Dramatization may not have happened.”
– Out of options, Homer proposes the family start a new life under the sea, which leads to a great quick musical number riffing on The Little Mermaid with Homer eating all the cute sea life. Marge assures Homer that it’s not going to happen, to which Homer retorts, “Not with that attitude.”
– Great bit with Homer getting spooked coming out of the shower by a news copter outside the window, slipping and falling, bringing the shower curtain with him (“Simpson scandal update: Homer sleeps nude in an oxygen tent which he believes gives him sexual powers.”) Homer is annoyed by the report (“Hey! That’s a half-truth!”)
– The various TV bits blasting Homer are all hilarious, from “Gentle Ben,” hosted by the bear of the same name, and the FOX made-for-TV movie “Portrait of an Ass-Grabber” starring Dennis Franz as Homer Simpson.
– Seemingly at the end of the line, Homer muses about his station in life (“This is so depressing, my only hope is this homemade Prozac.” He taste tests it. “Needs more ice cream.”)
– The scrolling Rock Bottom confessions is some great freeze frame fodder, but I’ve neither the time nor the energy to look through them. Luckily, more obsessive nerds online have done it for me, and the writers surely thank them for it (one reads, “The people who are writing this have no life.”) I particularly like “Licking an electrical outlet will not turn you into a Mighty Morphin Power Ranger” and “Quayle is familiar with common bathroom procedures.”