Original airdate: April 11, 2021

The premise: Mr. Burns’ latest impulse desire to be beloved leads to the creation of a new plant-based burger joint, which wins the hearts of the whole town, even the most discriminating Lisa. However, Burns’ burgers turn out to be not what they appear to be.

The reaction: Usually we have to wait a few seasons between these awful “Burns wants to be loved” episodes, but lucky us, we got two of them in one year! And man, does this make “Undercover Burns” look a lot better. I’m sure I mentioned it back then, but these premises are complete non-starters for me. You’re going to need to give me some real incentive to convince me that Burns gives even one iota of a fuck what the common folk think of him, but per usual, he just pathetically mewls after realizing people were ready to celebrate his death. The real Burns would order death squads outside his hospital room to dispose of the riffraff, but here, he literally tries to pull the plug on himself in defeat. In response, Smithers offers him one last shot at a redeemed legacy: inspired by Burns’ newfound love of Krusty Burgers, he has Professor Frink engineer the most delicious meat-free burger ever conceived, leading Burns to start the X-Cell-Ent burger shop. The entire town is won over by this, more than willing to overlook all the horrible shit Burns has done by opening a restaurant (a newspaper headline literally reads, “Lifetime of Evil Completely Forgotten.”) Even Lisa seems way too eager to embrace Burns immediately, hugging him after her first bite of the new burger, along with the other Simpsons. So Burns got what he wanted, but it doesn’t actually matter. The episode can’t decide whether Burns wants the affection of others or not. He orders Smithers to dispose of the throngs of well wishers outside of his house (with rubber bullets if necessary), then the very next scene, he sighs, “It’s so wonderful being liked!” He’s finally allowed access to the Beloved Billionaires Club, with Warren Buffett and Bill Gates (really fucking debatable how “likable” they are), but not Mark Zuckerberg, who gets a limp dick takedown scene, made even more pathetic since they graciously allowed him to a guest voice ten years ago.

We’re halfway through the episode now and I still don’t know what the plot is or where it’s going. Inevitably, Burns’ burgers will have some nefarious secret and he’ll be brought down for it, but he had no involvement in this plan at all, it was basically all Smithers’ doing. So when Lisa discovers that the plants being used for the burgers are all endangered, I don’t even know if Burns knew about it or not. Hell, why doesn’t she go ask her good friend Professor Frink who was hired to make the burger in the first place? Never mind, he appeared once to give Burns the burger and then disappeared. Lisa confronts Burns about it, randomly showing up at the Beloved Billionaires Club, and later beating Burns back to his mansion (by teleporting, I guess), but Burns doesn’t seem to give a shit or even know what she’s talking about. Then the episode becomes about Homer being the one to expose Burns. Earlier in the episode, he appeared in a commercial for the restaurant, but then the episode continued with no mention of it. Homer has a nightmare co-mingling with other fast food mascots, fearing he’s sold his soul, but I never got the impression Homer was the face of X-Cell-Ent. It felt like he was barely in the episode at all. When we get to the end and Homer struggles with admitting the truth and breaking his NDA, it feels like it means nothing, because it does. Burns snaps back to reveling in his evilness, and nothing of value was gained. This oddly feels like the worst episode of the season solely due to the “not-giving-a-shit” level of the writing being so high. It was like the ghost of a “Burns tries to be good” story with no real plot progression or character motivation, with those replaced by stale material about vegan food (it tastes bad!) As for Burns, literally the only jokes they can do with him anymore are joke about how frail and old he is. Him salivating over a Krusty Burger grossly dehydrates his whole face. He apparently only weighs 14 pounds. Ingesting one bubble of champagne causes him to float to the ceiling of his office like a parade balloon. I’d say kill the poor old man off already, but these characters have all be shambling corpses for about two decades now, so what’s the point?

Three items of note:
– In the absence of an actual plot, there’s vague hints at different subplots. Krusty finds it difficult to compete with Burns, finding Krusty Burger in dire straits, much to Bart’s dismay (“Oh, jeez, my hero’s a loser!”) Putting aside the fact that Krusty’s empire isn’t entirely based on his shitty fast food chain, this plot tease is just that: a tease. Krusty reappears at the very end at Burns’ press conference fiasco to celebrate his good fortune (“I won by doing nothing!”) Meanwhile, Marge accidentally purchases stock in X-Cell-Ent, and upon getting a good return on investment, she becomes obsessed with monitoring the stock. She’s a compulsive gambler, but I guess she’s just playing one stock? Lisa reacts in horror at her mother being a shareholder, but it doesn’t really matter, it’s all just time killing in an episode that could care less about weaving an actual story.
– Reference time! Right before we see Bart, Lisa and Milhouse biking to Burns’ processing plant, we see the Stranger Things kids ride by, being unknowingly pursued by a biking Demagorgon, as a Stranger Thing-esque music motif plays. Later on, we hold on a shot of Bart biking as three empty bikes roll by him followed by Demagorgon riding by, clearly having eaten the kids. It’s the most shameless insert-reference-here I’ve seen in a long time, made even more egregious that they literally did an entire Treehouse of Horror segment about Stranger Things last season. Also, at Burns’ plant, we see not-Anton Chigurh from No Country For Old Men with his bolt stunner “murdering” plants with it. This character appeared way back in an episode from 2009, which at least was within the window of relevancy of that movie being out. I feel like he popped up again at some point too, but here, it’s just so baffling, a random appearance of a character from a 14-year-old movie. It’s no different than a shitty Family Guy gag.
– The episode gets its mileage out of depicting Simpson-ized versions of fast food mascots, first in randomly displaying portraits of Burns dressed as Colonel Sanders, Wendy and so on in his office at the start of act two, then later the mascots appearing in Homer’s mascot. A crooning Mac Tonight serves as the narrator of the story (sort of), a long-dead mascot whose only claim to fame now is being co-opted by the online alt-right to the point that the Anti-Defamation League has “Moon Man” classified as a hate symbol. I guess that’s another issue with having a crew of 55-and-older legacy writers: not only are the references dated, but they might also have adapted all-new meaning in new mediums you’re not aware of.

1. Lard of the Dance

• I like the detail that Krusty is chomping a fat cigar on his own speak-and-say toy.
• Why exactly didn’t Homer eat all the bacon himself rather than give it to the dog? Also, he tells Bart it’s time to give the mutt “another squeezin’,” which I don’t know how else to interpret but the two of them wringing the dog’s vomit and/or shit out of him so he can eat more.
• So, this episode strongly feels like a spiritual sequel to “Lisa’s Rival” with incredibly similar A and B stories. I remember back in “Rival,” Homer’s ridiculous sugar business felt like an early dry run for his wackier Scully-era schemes, saved only by some great quotes and moments. Homer’s grease plan is equally inane here, with an even greater spotlight shone on how fruitless it is as a business, and what feels like much more screen time devoted to it than Homer’s B-story in “Rival.” Also, Homer pulls Bart out of school right away and Marge apparently has no problem with it? The running gag of Bart actually missing school I guess is supposed to be ridiculous, but it ended up ringing kind of sad by the end (“So, this is your school?” “It used to be.”) I’m also not a fan of any time Bart acts more like Homer’s sidekick than his son, which will happen quite a bit going forward.
• I really like how Alex is always portrayed as kind to Lisa, but that kindness almost makes Lisa feel worse about herself being left behind. Alex saying she can use the earrings she bought her for her dolls is meant as a light joke, but it just unintentionally digs the knife of insecurity into Lisa more. I really like the majority of the A-story, and Alex, while maybe being a little too caricatured, is a pretty solid character.
• Hilarious read from Homer of “My God, you’re greasy…”
• Tremendous sign gag that took me dozens of watches to get: Donner’s Party Supplies (Winter Sale Madness!)
• As if Homer’s wacky B-plot and Marge’s absence as the voice-of-reason weren’t enough, we get a scene where she directly encourages Homer’s bullshit (“My poor Homey. Couldn’t you try some other far-out money-making scheme?”) It’s kind of strange, as up to this point, there haven’t been a whole lot of these kinds of stories, so this feels less like lampshade hanging and more like a terrifying new affirmation of who Homer is now. Pair this with his dumbass risk-taking speech at the end of “Lost Our Lisa” and you get Jerkass Homer.
• I love Nelson’s TED talk about huckleberries, and his stumbling cover when Skinner walks by (“Uh, so anyway, I kicked the guy’s ass!”)
• Late into season 10, we get Milhouse’s immortal line, “Everything’s coming up Milhouse,” but I think “There’s plenty of Milhouse to go around!” is much funnier.
• I like Marge’s feeble attempt to try and cheer Lisa up, knowing in her heart that her advice is flimsy at best (“Mom, you can’t possibly believe that.” “I have to, honey.”)
• I really love the animation of the lights cascading over Lisa’s face as she sits there annoyed. The sound design is so great too, with the hot music starting and stopping abruptly with the extra loud slam of the door.
  
• The Homer pain parade starts in full force by the end, with him getting his face stuck in the suction tube and being pummeled in the face and strangled by Willie, on top of that weird bulging eye thing. I guess these extended scenes of violence made the writers crack up, but I don’t get it. Homer getting hurt either has to be really quick, or if it’s extended, it needs some other added layer to it. It can’t just be, hey, let’s watch this guy in pain for thirty seconds.
• Despite Homer’s extended torture at the end, I appreciate how naturally the two plots converged at the end. The stupid grease business proved to be the perfect conduit for the kids to start acting like kids again, and for Nelson to unwittingly call Luigi an ethnic slur (“Here comes a greaseball!” “Hey! Luigi bring-a you kids-a free pizza! Why do you hafta make-a the fun, huh?”)
• Simpsons Archive retro review: “A surprisingly good remake of ‘Lisa’s Rival,’ in many ways more realistic than the original, and with a far superior subplot. Executive Producer Mike Scully and his staff really seem to have hit their stride in the latter half of the 5F episodes: hopefully this winning streak will continue as season 10 officially begins in a month.”
  

2. The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace

• The episode barely begins and Homer stops his car in the middle of the highway (causing a collision of a helpless driver at the end of the scene), wanders across traffic and picks up the roadside telephone thinking he’s talking to Marge. Not a great start.
• Homer having a midlife crisis isn’t a bad idea for a premise. I like how despondent and morose he gets, like when he lists off his only three memories (“Standing in line for a movie, having a key made, and sitting here talking to you. Thirty-eight years and that’s all I have to show for it!”) The idea can even work in recalling all of Homer’s past achievements like going into space or being in a famous band, shining a light on all of these crazy things that have happened to him, but since the series is episodic, none of them actually really meant anything to Homer, since the series doesn’t really have continuity. Maybe it might get too meta, but it sure beats the nonsense that follows.
• The family somehow was able to get William Daniels to do a special greeting for Homer as KITT the Knight Rider car, but considering the show had been off the air over a decade, I can believe that they could have somehow convinced Daniels to do it, especially since it’s just a voice recording. It’s not like later where they would just present “Weird Al” Yankovic in person at the drop of a hat.
• Homer’s Edison obsession is boring from the start. I get it’s supposed to be funny that he’s hyper-focused on it and annoying everybody, but that shouldn’t also include the audience. Homer the Edison expert isn’t humorous or interesting in any way, which should have been the first sign to not make an entire episode about it.
• At least in this episode, as opposed to “Lard of the Dance,” there’s a conversation about why Homer isn’t at work that’s actually funny (“I suppose if this doesn’t work out, you can always go back to the plant.” “Not the way I quit.”)
• Homer’s inventions are mostly believable that he could actually have made them, but none of them are particularly funny for all the screen time devoted to them. Act two is just him attempting to think of ideas in scene after scene, and then showing off the four inventions, the only highlight for me being the Everything’s Okay alarm.
• This shot of the family embracing Homer for his extra legged chair has always stuck out to me. The rest of the family are starting to be held hostage by Homer’s insane whims, devoting his entire life (and the family’s financial security) into whatever bizarre flight of fancy captures him that week, regardless of how much money (if any) it’ll bring in. Marge delicately trying to tell Homer his inventions are fucking garbage is such a strange scene, and then later, her and the kids heaping on praise for his chair invention feels even weirder, like they’re overcompensating for the shit situation they’re in. Like I said before, the show has now become the Wacky Homer Adventures, guest starring the rest of the family.
  
• “But I thought you loved Edison!” “Oh, the hell with him!” That’s one way to shift story gears, I guess…
• The Edison tour guide has the best lines in the entire show, teasing the tour about the room with Edison’s preserved brain (“Ordinarily, folks, tour groups are not allowed to see it. And of course, today will be no exception,”) and ending the tour through Edison’s boyhood gift shop.
• Despite the episode starting off with Homer worrying about having a fulfilling life, the resolution involves him squashing his beef with Edison, which had literally just been introduced a few minutes earlier. Solid writing.
• How exactly did the Edison museum never notice the extra legs on the chair? And if they found the electric hammer on the table, why would they assume it was another Edison invention that just magically appeared? And why would those two mild-to-impractical inventions make Edison’s estate millions? Oh who cares…
• Simpsons Archive retro review: “If you people want plot, go watch a drama or something. This episode was simply PACKED with laughs, and Homer’s inspiration and contempt for Edison, at different parts of the episode respectively, pretty much had me rolling on the floor laughing! I didn’t really get bored once during the episode, and considering the fact that Simpsons can still be funny with some intelligent humor while shows like South Park continue to spew out juvenile garbage, this is a good indication of things to come for this season.”

3. Bart the Mother

• Is the “Who’s Who Among American Elementary School Students” a parody of something? I get that it’s an empty scam that Marge is tricked by, but there’s not really anything else to it. Just felt like a lot of back-and-forth between the family over it for it to be just a misfired joke.
• The Family Fun Center is a set piece that the show would have had a field day with in its heyday, but here, we’re left with long, laugh-less scenes at the go-kart track and Homer getting incessantly hit with balls at the batting cage. Even the arcade machine titles feel uninspired (Shark Bait, Pack Rat Returns). The only joke I laughed at was Milhouse inexplicably catching on fire after Nelson shoves his kart out of the way.
• The entire ending of act one with Nelson taunting Bart feels exactly like an after-school special about peer pressure. It sucks, as we end on an interminable slow push-in on Bart’s sad face after he shoots the bird. The gag where he purposely tries to miss but hits the bird anyway because of the crooked sight feels like it would be a great joke on an Adult Swim show, like someone trying to miss on purpose but ends up shooting and killing a guy, but it doesn’t quite work here.
• This really is the bad version of “Marge Be Not Proud.” I won’t deny “Proud” has shades of after-school special in it, but it still feels grounded in a relatable scenario and is littered with an abundance of jokes. Also, Bart’s guilt over lying to Marge is relegated to the last act. Here, both acts two and three feature an over-emotional Bart tending to the eggs (in one of the most boring montages in series history) and whimpering about his beloved lizard babies. Marge, meanwhile, feels incredibly vindictive and heartless compared to her portrayal in “Proud.” There, discovering Bart’s theft causes her to shut down emotionally, adopting a more hands-off approach to Bart, pulling back from her over-mothering. It’s a bit of a chilly distance, but it never feels antagonistic. Here, Marge is at her wit’s end, straight-up raging at Bart (“Do what you want. You wanna play with little hoodlums? Fine. Have fun killing things.”) For her to reach this extreme point, it feels like you’d need a full two acts to get her this fed up with Bart, but this happens at the very beginning of act two. It just doesn’t work at all.
• Troy McClure makes his final appearance, and he’s easily the highlight in this sorry affair, from referencing one of his greatest film titles (Man vs. Nature: The Road to Victory), to his careless treatment of the mother bird (“One thing mother blue jay can’t defend against is a set of steel tongs!”) The film ends with an enormous shit-eating grin to the camera, and what better final image could you possibly have for this character? Farewell, sweet prince.
  
• Did I mention Bart caring for the eggs is boring? Jeez Louise…
• Skinner’s sadistic treatment of the lizards (going to chop their heads off with the paper cutter, butchering them with a power drill) is incredibly bizarre. And I guess Marge and Bart entrust that this random bird watcher’s club is the utmost authority of what to do with the lizards by law? It’s dumb.
• Bart cries over the lizards because he loves the dumb animals, as he spells out the easily picked up connection between he and Marge. This episode is trying so hard to elicit a reaction, and man is it failing.
• Lisa ends the episode pointing out the irony that the plot started with Bart feeling guilty about killing a bird, and now he feels nothing about the plague of lizards killing hundreds of them. Bart replies by fighting with her over who gets to sit in the front seat. If that isn’t an admission that this episode was pointless, I don’t know what is. Did David Cohen rush this script out in a half hour before bolting out the door after hearing Futurama got the green light?
• Simpsons Archive retro review: “This episode really entertained me. Ah, to see Homer try to challenge an inanimate pitching machine and be pelted repeatedly was pretty good, even though it was repeatedly shown in the promos. Other highlights included Troy McClure’s last appearance, the basement running gag, Bart’s bird tribunal fantasy, and Apu’s Bolivian donut flashback. In all, there was really nothing bad about this episode. I give this episode an A-, and I’m betting on continuing improvement for the tenth season.”

4. Treehouse of Horror IX

• I’m kind of surprised they never did the alternate opening title sooner where everyone horribly dies on their way home. The Freddy and Jason cameos are also very nice; since Treehouse of Horror had become a Halloween institution at this point, it felt like the old school tipping their hats to the new.
• Troy McClure was originally going to be the host of “World’s Deadliest Executions,” but he was replaced by Ed McMahon after Phil Hartman’s untimely death. Wikipedia claims that the sequence with McClure was fully animated, but Hartman never recorded his lines, but that doesn’t really make any sense since they always record all the dialogue before animation production begins (the claim also has no source, so it’s most likely bullshit.) McMahon is great in the role though, with his joyful “Hey-yooo!” following Snake’s death to the audience’s applause being a real highlight. 
• The scene at Dr. Nick’s is great. I love the brief pause before Dr. Nick punches Homer in the face and injects himself with the sedative. Hank Azaria’s drowsy performance as Nick gets to work with a pizza cutter is so funny.
• Everything about Moe’s death scene is great, with his reaction to Homer/Snake walking in (“You’re looking unusually focused this morning,”) the reveal that his earlier requested Penicill-Os cereal is actually real, and Kent Brockman’s report of his demise (“Filthy old bartender Moe Syzslak has watered down his last highball.”)
• During this rewatch, I found myself a little less enchanted by the running gag of Homer strangling Bart, but goddamn did I laugh at Homer punching Bart in the face in attempting to hurt Snake’s hair. The strangling bit worked best if it were in response to a particularly scathing line from Bart, or if there was some other layer to the joke, and here, Homer attempting to save Bart by directly hurting him is pretty wonderfully twisted, especially with how loud the punch sounds are.
• Hysterical timing on Bart slamming the door on Hobo Homer’s harmonica song. I don’t even care that there’s rarely ever a kitchen door there, it was worth the cheat.
• The second segment is easily the weakest. It just seems like they didn’t have any real ideas outside of putting Bart and Lisa in an Itchy & Scratchy episode. It’s like a premise I’d expect to see in a Nickelodeon cartoon or something, especially the bit with Bart drawing the eject button.
• “My eyes! My beautiful eyes!” RIP Regis.
• I love that act three is just peppered with great moments in male insecurity, first when Homer first reacts that Marge “mated” with Kang, he starts to bawl, then immediately inquires, “Was he better than me?” Then, when Kang “breeds” Marge with the ray gun and Marge comments that it was awfully quick, Kang instinctively defends, ”What are you implying?”
• The Jerry Springer scene certainly feels like a time capsule. He’s got a daytime courtroom show now, Judge Jerry. But it definitely works within the story and is still very funny. I’m also a fan of any time the show kills a celebrity, especially in the completely off-hand way the characters mention it (“I can’t believe it. Jerry Springer didn’t solve our conflict.” “And now he’s dead.”)
• Big thumbs up for the Simpson family goading Kang and Kodos into destroying every American politician. It’s even more wonderful a fantasy now than it was then!
• Simpsons Archive retro review: “This was a good episode. I found myself thinking at some points about how uncreative the writing was, but on the whole, it wasn’t too bad. I think that I may have even laughed once (I don’t usually laugh at *anything*, even The Simpsons).”

5. When You Dish Upon a Star

• I really like the look of Homer’s Yogi dream, but the ending with him viciously mauling Ned feels wrong. I think back on “Homer the Heretic” where Homer envisions lying back on a hammock chortling as Ned’s house burns down and how that felt like a bit of a sour joke. It just feels like there’s a difference between wishing someone would die, and wishing someone would die by your own hand. Thankfully, Homer parking his car over Ned in the sand is a much better gag (“Is that my muffler?”)
• Homer’s parasailing speech about wanting to soar higher than any other man, or whatever the hell he’s talking about, set to grand, soaring music is so bizarre. It’s setting up the punchline of the rope detaching, I get it, but it feels like another weird new mantra of Homer’s of wanting to achieve greatness as a new hyper-active character, a far cry from the lazy, fat oaf he used to be.
• When Homer puts his arms around Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger, another small part of the show died instantly (he even does it again with Basinger and Ron Howard.) Homer immediately acts like these mega stars are like old friends from high school, but also reveres them to an extent and eagerly offers to be their assistant for absolutely no reason. It’s just so awful. Meanwhile, Baldwin and Basinger are quick to consider Homer their friend, even going so far as to feel bad when they fire him. Why? It almost feels like Homer’s popularity outside the show seeping into this episode.
• The casting of Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger has always felt weird in my head, since their power couple status stems from an era of Hollywood I don’t have a strong familiarity with. Never mind the two divorced a few years after this aired, but I have no real knowledge of those two being humongous stars. This seemed like it was on the cusp of Basinger’s career kind of fading, with 8 Mile being her only big notable role post 2000 (at least from what jumps out to me after a brief Wikipedia reading.) She had recently just won an Oscar for L.A. Confidential, as displayed in the episode, in a pretty nauseating scene (I refer once again to Krusty’s “caviar soaked soak garters” line.) Meanwhile, Alec Baldwin the leading man is completely lost on me, as I’m predominately familiar with his post-30 Rock career playing supporting character roles that are more or less different permutations of Jack Donaghy (or as a Boss Baby) and his awful Trump impression on SNL. It doesn’t really matter though, since neither of them have any real character in this episode. They could have been played by anybody, since the whole point is that they’re celebrities and are there to be worshipped. It feels so antithetical to what the series once was.
• How often is Homer over the celebrity home? It’s unclear how much time goes by, but it feels like it has to be at least a couple weeks. There’s never any explanation given to the family where he’s been when he’s playing badminton and going to old West towns with his new celebrity buddies. 
• I don’t know why Krusty and Sideshow Mel are amongst the gawkers flocking to the celebrity house. Did they just forget that they’re celebrities themselves?
• Man, the ending of act two is just terrible. ”Homer, how could you?” Kim Basinger says, hurt. “You betrayed our confidence. I just don’t think we can be friends anymore.” Oh, boo hoo. Am I supposed to feel sad that Homer is being cast out by Hollywood millionaires?
• Act three opens with Homer obnoxiously play-acting like a Hollywood bigshot, turning his nose up at sloppy Joes and just generally being an asshole to his family. Then, after Lisa reminds him the celebrities were the ones that fired him, over one line of dialogue, he turns on a dime, and now he’s angry at celebrities and fucking hates them. It’s just so bad.
• Judge Snyder’s ruling about Homer not being within 500 miles of any celebrity is stupid, given how many hundreds more he’d rub elbows with in the future. But who cares, this episode sucks ass.
• Simpsons Archive retro review: “I, like most people have become disillusioned by The Simpsons in recent seasons; it just isn’t very funny anymore. Tonight’s episode however, totally blew me away. It was HI-larious! The writing was top-notch, the guest stars actually had a part in the story, and everyone was in character. An incredible comeback for my once-again favorite show!”

6. D’oh-in’ in the Wind

• The episode opens with no one at the plant being able to open Burns’ jar of pickles. Then Burns films a recruitment film. Then Homer inexplicably wants to be an actor and starts filling out a Screen Actor’s Guild application. Then the family wants to know Homer’s middle name. Boy, the storytelling is just as strong as ever!
• Abe in a suit in a chair protesting at Woodstock is pretty perfect (I always laugh at his read “Bring on Sha-na-na!”) 
• Mona being into free love definitely seems to make sense for her character, and is another bit I was completely clueless about watching as a kid (I love Abe’s complete ignorance at Seth and Munchie’s admission to screwing his wife.)
• The reveal of Homer “Jay” Simpson is pretty clever, and the mural Mona painted is pretty sweet, but the Mona connection sadly disappears after the first act. I wish the episode had been more connected to her, like Homer wanting to live up to the ideals his mother believed in or something. Instead, his embracing of the hippie lifestyle feels more broad and tenuous than anything he’s really passionate about.
• Homer watching the Bob Hope hippie special is a syndication cut, and really, it should have just been completely cut, period. You basically get the joke right away when Homer calls Hope the “master” of hippiedom, and then the skit just goes on and on and on.
• Of the six episodes of the season so far, three have involved Homer getting a new job or interest, where we get scenes of him proceeding to just annoy the shit out of people with his new specific passion. At least in this episode, it’s more bearable and believable that Homer would be into being a dirty, lazy hippie rather than him pretending he’s a great inventor or akin to a Hollywood celebrity.
• Homer’s urge to “freak out squares” involves putting on silly outfits and yelling stuff out at people while driving by. Seth and Munchie don’t say a word during these scenes, because it would distract from Homer’s insane ramblings about nothing.
• I at least appreciate that Homer tries to make things right by Seth and Munchie after completely fucking them over, and the twist of accidentally using their “special” crops to complete the order is a pretty good one.
• George Carlin doesn’t have the meatiest role for being one of the great comedy legends (having to share billing with Martin Mull, a comedian I barely know anything about), but his stone-cold serious read of “This man does not represent us” at the end still makes me laugh.
• Homer getting shot with the flower is another in a series of instances where him getting hurt is personally satisfying. His Jerkass levels were relatively low this episode, but his complete dedication to being a hippie never felt like it rang true, so him lecturing the police about peace, love and happiness felt more annoying than earnest, and by that point, I was ready for the episode to end. Wiggum couldn’t have pulled that trigger fast enough.
• Simpsons Archive retro review: “Another Season Ten classic! Homer as a hippie did not disappoint, and the hallucination scene was just CLASSIC! And who’d have thought that ‘Homer J. Simpson’ could be his full name, after all? This is a great season so far!”

20. The Trouble with Trillions

• At some point every New Year’s Eve night, I’ll think, “Will this horrible year never end?” The opening scene is fantastic; I love the added touch that the Jebediah statue is already TP’d as the townspeople gather to count down. Also a favorite is the snippet we hear of Krusty’s drunken rendition of “Auld Lang Syne.”
• Ned doing his taxes on January 1st (complete with a fistful of mints) is very in-character, as is his explanation of what taxes are for to his son (“Policemen, trees, sunshine, and let’s not forget the folks who just don’t feel like working, God bless ’em!”)
• I really like the reveal that Marge is the artist behind the sailboat painting above the couch, and her saying she painted it for Homer is a very sweet detail (I wouldn’t be surprised if in a few seasons, we get an entire terrible episode about the story behind it.) The ending of the scene of Marge hanging the painting back on the wall, lamenting the waste of her talent, is cut in syndication, and maybe better off. It’s kind of a bummer.
• Homer is in full invincible stupid mode in his frantic rush to the post office, which sucks, but this piece of animation is ironically fantastic. It looks like the totaled car gets smashed flat; whoever was in there is most certainly dead.
  
• The reveal of the second IRS agent behind the swivel chair, followed by the first agent sitting and turning back around is a wonderfully stupid gag.
• The IRS uses Homer to spy on the gang at Moe’s, but they never say that they suspect anyone there. Did they have a target in mind, or did they just assume maybe we could arrest one of these idiot’s buddies? Also, Charlie is dressed identically to Homer with a white collared shirt and blue pants, that’s kind of weird.
• Milhouse posing in the photo booth shirtless is so great; Pamela Hayden nails his awkward and embarrassed “My… my shirt fell off” when he’s exposed.
• The whole trillion dollar bill scandal is kind of stupid when you think about it for more than five seconds. The government let Mr. Burns abscond with a literal trillion dollars for over fifty years without any substantial investigation? Plus, it’s revealed that he keeps the damn bill in his wallet, so they could have confronted and arrested him at any time. Why did they need a big dope like Homer to handle this seemingly very important, half-a-century-old assignment?
• Burns just letting Homer into his home feels off to me. They make a joke out of it, with him wanting to hurt Homer in some way before he leaves, but his feeble concessions to him (“I’ll get you a towel,”) while kind of funny, aren’t worth defanging him like this. Also, the Hall of Burns is really stupid. Why would he have these elaborate museum-quality dioramas in his private home that no one ever visits?
• I’m all for an episode that’s critiquing worthless government spending, but this episode is such a giant mess that I don’t even know if it’s supposed to have a point or not. Burns makes a speech about thinking for yourself and not letting the government control you, and then the act break is Homer giggling about making one of the unconscious IRS agents touch the other’s ass. Great writing, guys.
• People rightfully point out how out-of-character Lisa’s “screw college, we got dune buggies!” bit is, but even weirder is Marge, for some reason, assuming they would be keeping the trillion dollars?
• I love the rear IRS agent’s expression after the other comments, “They’ll be back. They’ll miss American TV.”
  
• The third act is pretty terrible, basically tanking an episode that was already careening off a cliff. There’s some good bits with Castro, but the road there wasn’t worth it. There’s also way too much of dumb oblivious Burns (settling for being Vice President after Homer “calls” it first, not remembering he’s flying the plane).
• Simpsons Archive retro review: “A pretty funny episode! The plot meandered, but at least that’s better than last week’s jumpy episode. It was fun to see a good Burns/Smithers episode again. Also amusing was the kids’ reaction to getting a trillion dollars (Lisa doesn’t need college after all!) A nice, if not perfect romp.”

21. Girly Edition

• The opening with Krusty and Lindsey Naegle is so solid. Krusty attesting to Itchy & Scratchy’s educational value (“What don’t they learn? Don’t trust mice, cats are made of glass…”), the set-up of the Mattel and Mars Bar Quick-Energy Choco-bot Hour (“That’s barely legal as it is,”) Krusty outlining his show (“There’s a monologue, those idiot puppets, Krusty’s nap time, the second monologue, Paul Harvey, Senor Papino… I tell you, it’s the tightest three hours and ten minutes on TV!”)
• I like how we see the small splats of creamed corn against the school window representing Willie’s shack exploding. It feels more creative and shows some restraint from making the event more bombastic… as well as not needing to animate it, which was probably a plus.
• Lindsey Naegle would be dulled and overused in future seasons, but she’s at her strongest in this episode (maybe second to “The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show.”) Her rambling off all her showbiz buzzwords, then not understanding Lisa’s simple turn of phrase (“Let’s be honest, Bart’s not exactly the brightest penny in the fountain.” “In English, Lisa?”) is just excellent.
• The Mojo B-plot feels like a crazy Homer story, but it never gets too off-the-wall, considering the most extreme thing Homer does with the monkey is get it to steal donuts for him, which is appropriate for him. Also great is Marge’s consistent horror at this filthy monkey being in her house, and her irritation at Homer that just grows and grows throughout the episode.
• The best section of this episode is the look into Kent Brockman’s human interest stories (“They tug at the heart and fog the mind.”) Him on the carousel pausing as it goes around (“This is Kent Brockman…..  reporting”) always makes me laugh. I also like how we see Bart attempt to mimic Brockman’s tone and some of his phrasings as he does his own imitation special reporting.
• I have no idea why the hell Burns and Smithers are in bean bag chairs, but this scene still cracks me up (“Smithers… do you think maybe my power plant killed those ducks?” “There’s no ‘maybe’ about it, sir.” “…excellent.”)
  
• Oh my, the Crazy Cat Lady. Great in her first appearance, terrible in every other one.
• The obese Mojo struggling to breathe is pretty disconcerting, but still funny.
• Milhouse’s report about discreetly discarding urine-soaked bed sheets is great, but it’s compounded and made even funnier when Bart observes the “soiled mattresses” at the dump and we quickly cut back to a guilt-ridden Milhouse.
• I love Willie’s incredibly loud and shocked “WHAT?!” at Lisa telling him Bart’s his son. I also love that Lisa saves the day by channeling her own version of Bart/Kent’s empty schmaltz reporting, and she’s smart enough to come up with one completely off the cuff (“That little hellraiser is the spawn of every shrieking commercial, every brain-rotting soda pop, every teacher who cares less about young minds than about cashing their big, fat paychecks. No, Bart’s not to blame.  You can’t create a monster and then whine when he stomps on a few buildings!  I’m Lisa Simpson.”)
• Simpsons Archive retro review: “While there were a few things in the episode which were quite funny; all of it is lost for me in the absolutely inexcusable behavior of Lisa… this was like watching PTA Disbands all over again. I have always had a soft spot for Lisa Simpson, and to see this episode was very disheartening… This wasn’t Lisa Simpson; this was someone who acted cold-hearted, egoistic, and downright selfish. Whoever wrote this episode needs a serious slap in the face… I don’t think anyone should be allowed to write for the Simpsons unless you know how the characters are supposed to act; this was horrible, and it totally ruined what I thought was an otherwise decent episode.”

22. Trash of the Titans

• The opening few minutes is easily the best stuff in the episode: Costington’s concocting a bullshit holiday to increase their profits even further (I’d love to hear more about Christmas 2), and Marge eating up the idea of “Love Day” feels very appropriate. I also love Homer’s ridiculous disappointment at getting the “wrong” bear (“They didn’t have Lord Huggington?”)
  
• The scenario of Homer and the kids prolonging taking out the trash for as long as possible is excellent (Bart stapling the banana peel to the pile is a great gag), but then that snowballs after Homer pisses off the garbagemen to them living in increasing levels of filth. It goes on way longer than Marge would reasonably be able to tolerate, as rancid trash covers the interior and exterior of their house. It feels like an instance where the writer’s room came up with a bunch of gags (Marge tossing bacon outside to distract the rats, her talking about the crazy lady who lives in their trash pile), forsaking any realism that Marge would put up with any of this. She may be generally submissive, but she most definitely would have written that forged apology after the first scene.
  
• The poison pill of this episode is Homer, who acts like an absolute maniac from the moment he storms into Ray Patterson’s office. He rants and raves about standing up for the little guy, “rattling a few cages,” but for the entire episode, I have absolutely no idea what his motivation or wants are, and I don’t think he does either. It’s just supposed to be funny that he’s a directionless lunatic? The episode even acknowledges it with the “Local Nut at it Again” subheadline in the newspaper starting act two. Homer’s confusing, intolerable behavior for the entire runtime makes this episode the worst of season 9 for me (excluding “All Singing, All Dancing.”)
• Continuing that, Homer waltzing on stage with U2 without a care in the world feels like a big turning point. He has absolutely no qualms about breaking into a rock show, attacking the female technician backstage, and addressing the crowd under the belief they’ll be thrilled to see him. The scene also ends with the very first instance of me enjoying Homer getting hurt because it felt like satisfying karma to an asshole character, as he gets beat up by U2’s goons.
• The best gag in the episode is actually at the U2 show, where the crowd is going nuts, except for Otto, who is still seated and shouting, “Sit down! You’re ruining it for everyone!” I grew to love that line even more the year I went to Comic-Con and attended the Steven Universe panel, where the crowd full-on cheered almost every few minutes. It got to be kind of annoying, as the panelists could have actually talked more if they didn’t have to constantly stop for the crowd to keep going nuts, and I felt exactly like Otto in that moment.
• More than halfway into the episode, Homer actually gets some fucking direction with his “Can’t Someone Else Do It?” campaign slogan. I like the idea of it, directly appealing to a lazy populous with grandiose claims of hired hands doing all your dirty work for you, but Homer’s attitude just sours everything it touches. “The Garbageman Can” thankfully comes off unscathed, one of the last classic songs of the series. It’s a real showstopper that I only wish was in an episode that wasn’t shit.
• Homer cutting Patterson’s brakes is his first attempted murder of the series, and sadly would not be his last.
• “Simpson, the American people have never tolerated incompetence in their government officials.” Just gets funnier each passing year!
• When we get to the third act, the episode really starts to feel like the Wacky Homer Adventures, guest starring the rest of the family, a template that would follow through the rest of the Mike Scully years and beyond. The scene where they’re at home and Homer interrupts Lisa’s explanation about sanitation work (“Wait, shut up! I have an idea!”) and runs out the door, leaving the family just sitting them, looking around vacantly is a pretty telling moment.
• I can’t really get all that upset about the reality-breaking ending of moving the entire town. I actually would have embraced a crazy ending like this if it were tacked on the end of an episode that actually tried to be about something.
• Simpsons Archive retro review: “I’m starting to wonder why I bother reviewing these anymore. Mike Scully rightfully held this episode until now, and the high-quality animation and extra attention to detail given to it because it was the 200th are the only things that can compliment it enough. I’ll soon be quoting everything like crazy so watch out… everyone with 14.4kb modems thank me for my short review. (A+)”

23. King of the Hill

• McBain fights the CommieNazis in his last great appearance. I also like that Homer crosses paths with Rainier in a believable fashion (of course he’d be the only one in Springfield using an all-night gym) and Rainier’s motivational insults are great too (“Go past the max! Master your ass!”)
• Lovejoy’s exasperated “Just play the damn game, Ned!” always makes me laugh.
• A reliable classic era story motivator was Homer wanting to regain the love of his kids or make them proud of him, and this episode holds that firm from the beginning. Him embarrassing himself during the capture-the-flag game is just devastating enough for Homer to actually feel ashamed of it (him wailing on the floor covered in deviled eggs definitely seems scar-worthy for Bart) and I like how this motivates Homer through the rest of the episode.
• The tub of ice cream with miniature pies looks pretty damn good to me right now.
• I am incapable of seeing a sign for a gym and not thinking it’s pronounced “guy-m.”
• I appreciate the restraint of showing that Homer has gotten fitter, but is not like absolutely ripped. The scene of him daring the family to find any flab, only for them to find a whole bunch of soft spots, much to his chagrin, is pretty adorable. Only two months of working out at night and he’s certainly built up his arm muscles, but he’s not a bodybuilder, unlike a handful of future episodes where he got completely roided out at the drop of a hat if the plot required him to (“Homer the Whopper” comes to mind.) 
• I don’t know why they cast Brendan Fraser and Steven Weber together as the Powersauce reps, but their repartee with each other is very good. The product itself is a great send-up on “diet” bars as nutritional substitutes (unleashing the awesome power of apples!) and Fraser and Weber play the perfect energetic corporate shills. I like later in act three when they actually break their facades to warn Homer not to climb the mountain alone, and then immediately throw him under the bus with faux-seriousness in broadcasting that Homer has switched to their market competitor (the Vita-Peach Health Log), absolving themselves of any wrongdoing or bad press.
• Those flapjacks in a can look really good too. If you had a little slot on the bottom to separate the syrup so they didn’t got soggy… man, that sounds delicious.
• Homer getting assistance from the sherpas not only makes the insane idea of him scaling a gigantic mountain a little more believable, but they also provide some of the best lines of the episode (“I foresaw your death last night.” “Stop saying that!”) I also like their absolute glee at being dismissed by Homer, and their hitchhiking inexplicably in front of the Simpson house, just so the family could see them outside and realize that Homer is fucked.
• I don’t know if I ever registered this before, but it’s odd that Abe’s rambling stories are usually complete bullshit, but him climbing up the mountain (and falling 8,000 feet?) is apparently true, as Homer finds the frozen body of his “buddy” McAllister. Abe’s failure is meant to mirror Homer’s, but before that point, it was just a nonsense story, so any emotional impact isn’t really felt. But no matter, McAllister’s last words (“Tell my wife my last thoughts were of her… blinding and torturing Abe Simpson”) and the grim finale of Homer using the frozen body as a sled are more than worth the trouble.
• Homer using the Simpson flag from the church picnic game in place of the Powersauce one is a pretty sweet detail, making the story feel like it’s coming full circle. The entire top half of the mountain collapsing is pretty ridiculous, but I don’t know how else you’d get Homer to have his moment of triumph. It’s a little rickety, but the Homer-Bart emotional through-line works surprisingly well, especially for a show this deep into season 9.
• Simpsons Archive retro review: “This episode seemed to play upon the viewer’s emotions more than usual. I think the communazi’s death was one of the most graphic scenes I’ve seen on the Simpons. Also, the closing of act I was big on emotional content. Lastly, the victorious ending. This almost seemed like a WWF match with its emotional choreography! I think that’s especially potent for those of us that see similarities between Homer and ourselves. Anyway, the whole ep ended up being a real watchable pick-me-up, due primarily to the emotional content. The amount of hilarity was kept to a minimum, which i suppose is needed in order to have a real emotional response from your audience. Here’s hoping for something crazy next week…”

24. Lost Our Lisa

• I’m sure my wife wishes that teacher conference day was as much fun as it’s shown here. Also very nice of them to invite Willie along with them.
• Bart and Milhouse just show up at the power plant to bug Homer about getting super glue, just because, I guess. They couldn’t have gotten the glue some other way? Also, why is Bart allowed to wander around the entire town on his day off but Lisa is forbidden to take the bus by herself? Maybe Marge thought Bart was just at Milhouse’s house, but with no line explaining that, it reads kind of weird to me.
• I really like Lisa playing Homer like a fiddle in order to get his “permission” to take the bus, inflating her request to a limousine and acting faux-disappointed in Homer delicately downgrading her. Lisa hanging up on her father in the middle of him saying he loves her is a perfect capper to the scene.
• The two flocks of geese flying at each other is a stupid gag I love; the pan over revealing the second flock, and one of the poor birds nosediving out of the sky during the fight, it’s so funny.
• When offered a ride in the back of Cletus’s pick-up truck full of roadkill, Lisa holds back vomit and squeals as she flees the scene. I assume it’s Yeardley Smith vocalizing while clasping her hands to her mouth, but the sound has always sounded like a baby cry to me. Does anyone else hear that?
• Dr. Hibbert’s frightening button applicator feels a little too silly for a “serious” doctor like him to use, but I love his incredibly severe insistence that “it had to be terror sweat!”
• My goodness does the episode plunge into the abyss when Homer goes after Lisa. The end of act two into act three has Homer and Lisa frantically looking for each other with a whole lot of suspenseful music in place of any humor. And then we get Homer in the cherry picker, and man… not only isn’t it funny, but it’s a very early example of Homer-getting-hurt being used as a humor crutch for the writers. He scrapes his skull against a low bridge, he smashes through an entire wooden dock neck-first, and finally, a fucking drawbridge closes on his head. Homer fell down a goddamn gorge (twice!) in “Bart the Daredevil,” and not only was he horrifically injured and hospital-bound, there’s multiple layers as to why the scene is funny outside of him getting hurt (he skateboarded over it himself to “teach Bart a lesson,” the absurdity that the “lesson” would even work, his cockiness in thinking he would make it.) Here, Homer experiences a cavalcade of serious injuries for no reason, then walks away scot free with a tire mark on his cranium and a smile on his face. How far we have fallen.
• Despite the episode seeming to have blown its wad with the endless cherry picker scene, we still have Homer’s soapbox about taking stupid risks, because that makes total sense for his character (”Me, I’m a risk taker! That’s why I have so many adventures!”) This characterization isn’t even consistent in this very episode: Homer was wary about Lisa taking the bus at the beginning of the episode, and he runs off scared for his daughter’s safety after Lenny and Carl worry him about it. Where was Captain Wacky then? But there’s even more doom lurking behind that quote. “Homer’s Enemy” cast a spotlight on Homer, the not-so-average Joe, and how many crazy escapades he’s gotten into over eight seasons. It effectively breaks the character to some extent, and it feels like some of the writers took that as permission to just go for broke on not only Homer getting up to crazy shenanigans, but for him to just flat-out admit it too. This is Homer now, and this scene is his new mission statement. And it fucking sucks.
• Boredom continues with the museum break-in. There’s just so much of it played for suspense with barely any jokes. Homer can’t even break open the stupid orb without needing a pointless sequence of all of the rope pylons tipping over as Lisa gasps in horror. This episode and “Trash of the Titans,” both at the tail end of season 9, are the biggest terrible omens for things to come: over-dramatic action and/or suspense sequences, knee-jerk character changes, forced sentimentality, and Homer the human punching bag/sentient asshole.
• Simpsons Archive retro review: “A pleasant surprise which makes Season Nine better than Season Eight, in that it’s the first episode I’ve given an A to since Season Seven’s finale, ‘Summer of 4’2.’ A realistically troubling situation for both Lisa and Homer when Lisa’s natural immaturity gets her lost in Springfield. Most of the humor is woven well into the story, too, which is rare. Not to mention everyone is in character for once, and the episode deals primarily with the family–and not the entire town. Act Three’s change of pace feels more like a story progression and less a jump from one thing to a completely unrelated other. All and all, an outstanding effort, especially for the waning ninth season.”

25. Natural Born Kissers

• The opening where Homer discovers Frank Grimes’ funeral program feels like yet another season 9 warning sign. As I talked about in “Homer’s Enemy,” that episode works only within its own vacuum, but multiple episodes past this point feature casual mentions of Frank Grimes where Homer continues acting like an inconsiderate dick, the biggest offender being “The Great Louse Detective,” where he acts like a braindead dope in front of Grimes’s own illegitimate son. Homer sleeping through Grimes’s funeral was a dark button on a subversive, but isolated story, but him not recognizing the man who killed himself right in front of him makes him seem like a sociopath.
• Up, Up and Buffet is a neat set piece, the perfect polar opposite to Homer and Marge’s intended romantic evening. The valet attendants manually shaking the restaurant to dip the wings feels like a classic Simpsons bit.
• There’s something I noticed in the scene where Homer and Marge soberly look out the plane window at the happy romantic couple at the Gilded Truffle. It feels like the character design standards shifted during the Mike Scully years where new characters were designed with slightly more detail and features more akin to actual humans than bug-eyed, simplified cartoon characters. Just look how different the dining couple looks compared to Homer and Marge. This issue would continue up through the present, as the Simpson family and other Springfield residents would look weirdly out-of-place against celebrity guests and one-off characters, like they were plucked from two different series.
  
• I really love how we see Homer not close the freezer door, but they don’t highlight the moment, so you might not totally connect it with what happens the next morning. Moments of restraint like this are incredibly rare in episodes nowadays.
• Great use of “Spanish Flea” during the divorce radio commercial.
• “Hey, are they pulling the plug on anybody today?” “Nope, everybody’s paid up!”
• I absolutely love Bart’s pirate dream with the practical pirate suggesting they use their gold to buy things they like, which immediately gets him shot. It’s a syndication cut, but I wish they’d kept that bit and cut it off at the captain showing the map carved on a cracker, definitely not as good of a joke.
• I love Marge’s read of “Hey! Look at that!” when Homer takes his shirt off trying to get the magic going. You can really hear the strained attempt at enthusiasm in Kavner’s voice.
• Much appreciated continuity at Homer and Marge acknowledging the windmill as their old love nest, and story-wise, it makes sense that their undoing as adults would occur at the same place they acted like reckless, carefree kids (“We drank so much that night!” “Yeah, I thought Bart would be born a dimwit!”)
• Even though it’s basically cribbed from a joke from The Critic, I still enjoy the Casablanca alternate ending, especially with the “The End?” end card (“Wasn’t it great? And the question mark leaves the door open for a sequel.”) But why exactly was it buried in Springfield? I guess the Crazy Old Man had all the reels in his possession when he moved to Springfield, attempted to bury some of them but then just gave up? Ah, who cares.
• It’s kind of weird that Homer knows Gil’s name when he bumps into him, but it’s a pretty solid scene, with Gil so desperate for a sale he doesn’t bat an eyelash at his potential customer’s nudity.
• Most of act there is kind of a slog, with Homer and Marge scurrying across town, then into the hot air balloon, with plenty of suspense music. Also a lot of Homer getting hurt, which is throughout the whole episode (the avalanche of silverware falling on him at Up, Up and Buffet was pretty excessive), but the bit of Homer hanging from the balloon and Marge causing him to get torched with flames that come out of absolutely nowhere is pretty damn stupid. There’s no actual joke there other than him getting inexplicably hurt. The pastor at the crystal cathedral and Sideshow Mel’s “Look at that blimp! He’s hanging from a balloon!” deserve kudos, but that’s about it.
• Simpsons Archive retro review: “I have mixed feelings about this one. While it’s a very funny episode, with an appealing plot, I would prefer it if this episode had never happened. Running around town naked and having sex in public is a road I hoped the Simpsons would never go down. Such a ridiculous idea.”

Season 9 episodes I would pluck from the scrap heap: “The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson,” “The Cartridge Family,” “Bart Star,” “The Joy of Sect,” “Lisa the Simpson,” “Simpson Tide,” “Girly Edition,” “King of the Hill”

Original airdate: March 28, 2021

The premise: On an overnight field trip aboard a battleship, Marge gets stuck with Sarah Wiggum, who turns out to be more of a kindred spirit than she expected. But it turns out Sarah has a secret past, as two of her former partners-in-crime come back to get their due, throwing Marge into an elaborate jewelry heist at the lavish Gen Gala.

The reaction: Sarah Wiggum is a non-character. Like a lot of the wives on this show, she was born in the grand cartoon tradition of men being paired up with female doppelgängers of themselves (as well as the grand cartoon tradition of largely male writing staffs being largely uninterested in writing female characters.) Like Minnie Mouse and Daisy Duck before her, Sarah was Chief Wiggum’s portly, dutiful wife, with Pamela Hayden doing her best Wiggum impression for the few instances they gave her dialogue. There are some secondary characters I can see potential in getting their own episode, but this was certainly an out-of-left-field choice. The episode certainly acknowledges it, as it’s revealed that soft-spoken Sarah is actually a lively charmer (now voiced by Megan Mullally) with a secret past, running with a girl gang of thieves in Shelbyville before her partners got arrested. Both Marge and Chief Wiggum incredulously ask, “Sarah Wiggum, who are you?” just to drill that point home. Sarah has basically no characteristics to build off of, so she’s effectively a brand new character, and then when her two former partners kidnap her and Marge, it becomes a series of dialogues and backstories between these three new characters and their past lives of crime and their new plan to get revenge on their fourth partner who double crossed them, who is revealed to be Lindsay Naegle. It reminded me a little of the Hallmark Christmas episode this season, where the lead character was Ellie Kemper and how weird that felt since we had no emotional investment in her. Here, there’s some thread of Marge relating to Sarah as an overlooked housewife, but that angle is underplayed against all of the elaborate heist planning, complete with on-screen graphics and energetic music. The final act called to mind “The Book Job,” the episode where Homer, Bart and others planned an Ocean’s 11 style heist to get their YA novel back from some evil publishing guy or something (in an episode also show-run by Matt Selman, so the man’s already repeating himself ten years later.) Here, influence is clearly taken from the all-female Ocean’s 8, which also involved a heist at a museum gala, but this episode makes the same fumbling as “The Book Job,” in that it recreates the tone and feel of those movies without subverting them at all or having any fun with the tropes and trappings. There’s barely any jokes to be had during the heist, nor do I really give a shit about what’s going on. How can I? Why should I care at all about this reinvented Sarah Wiggum or her betrayal by Lindsay Naegle, who is a gag character at best? I guess there are some that just find an Oceans heist to be interesting by itself? I mean, I believe “The Book Job” was looked on favorably by a decent number of current fans, so maybe they’ll view this episode with a similar fondness. For me, I just could not give a shit. We get a few sidebars of Homer and Clancy frantically searching for their wives, nailing down the point over and over that they don’t know anything about them. Half the episode was either an exposition dump or planning and executing the heist flawlessly, it didn’t even feel like I was watching a Simpsons episode at all. What is this show trying to be anymore?

Three items of note:
– Guest star round-up, I guess: it certainly would have been nice to give Pamela Hayden a starring role in an episode, but why do that when you can stunt-cast? Megan Mullally sounds like a less shrill, breathier Gayle from Bob’s Burgers, not really attempting to emulate Hayden’s Sarah voice at all. Nick Offerman makes a brief appearance (I guess they figured since they got Mullally, they’d bring her husband in too) to reprise his beloved character, that captain guy from that episode where Homer and Bart got in a right? “The Wreck of the Relationship,” it was called? It sucked ass, that’s all I remember. Bob Seger voices himself at the concert Homer and Chief Wiggum go to after saddling their wives with field trip duty. When they go backstage, Seger browbeats them, telling them they need to be good marital partners, and the joke is that he’s inserting his song titles into his dialogue. Hysterical. In re-casting news, gay stereotype Julio is now voiced by Tony Rodriguez, who does a podcast or something. He already had a new voice a couple episodes ago, why did they change it? And why didn’t they just throw away that fucking awful character and be done with it? At the start of the episode, Marge is excited to watch the Gen Gala and make catty remarks at the outfits (“I have firm commitments from several A-level gays!”) We see the grouping later and it’s all the usual suspects: Patty and Selma, Smithers, Julio and his partner, Patty’s ex-girlfriend… All our gay characters hang out together because they’re gay, and gay people are all friends because they’re gay.
– They attempt to do some continuity building with a flashback showing Sarah distracting a young security guard Clancy to perform a heist, but she ends up sleeping with him. Her friends end up arrested, and since she was the getaway driver, Sarah blames herself for the whole thing. But it turns out it wasn’t her fault, Lindsay Naegle betrayed them, but if Sarah held onto so much guilt because of this, would she really have wanted to see Clancy again? She believes she ruined her friends’ lives because of this man, but she then married him and lived life as an obedient housewife for fifteen-plus years? Oh, whatever. I recall an early Al Jean episode where Clancy and Sarah are slow dancing, and he comments, “You look as pretty as the day I arrested you!” to which Sarah blushes. That moment is more charming and cute than anything we see in this entire episode.
– Marge saves the day at the end by pulling some fabric to cause Lindsay Naegle to trip at the top of the gala stairs. She elaborately tumbles down the stairs, flopping comically from left to right, bouncing over a dozen times as she plummets to the bottom. I really don’t know why it was done so excessively, but it felt strange and weirdly uncomfortable. It would be overkill if it were Homer, but this is just watching some poor woman flail around in incredible pain for twenty seconds. Are we supposed to feel vindicated that she’s getting her just desserts? Why should I care that Naegle betrayed three characters we literally just met and don’t care that much about? She ends up being framed for a bunch of other thefts, and we get on-screen text reading “The Double Revenge That You Didn’t See Coming But Now You’re Like What!?!?” Again, it feels like they’re banking hard on us giving a shit about this story. Or is the joke that they’re observing that twists happen in movies?

14. Das Bus

• Homer cheering for a 5pm bedtime definitely hits harder watching in my 30s than last time in my 20s.
• “You’ve seen the movie, now meet a real-life Noah! Only this Noah has been accused of killing two of every animal! Coming up next on AM Springfield!”
• I don’t know if I ever really processed the joke of Milhouse reading out old Polish jokes as “facts,” like their submarine with the screen door. It’s certainly something I never understood as a kid watching this, I thought he was just saying a bunch of weird stuff.
• The Model U.N. banner is pretty excellent.
  
• Homer’s B-plot isn’t terrible, only because it barely feels like a story and more of just some stupid thing we keep cutting back to, helped by some pretty excellent quotes (“I think I’ll make myself… vice president. No, wait! Junior vice president!” “Oooh, they have the Internet on computers now!”)
• It’s unclear where the bus crashed off the bridge, but how far away is this island from land? The bus gets caught up by a small tidal wave, sinks, then we see the kids crawling onto the island. A cutaway back to Homer and Marge talking about the kids would have at least implied somewhat of a passage of time.
  
• Nelson gets two solid lines in response to Bart’s grandiose plans for island living: him asking how many monkey butlers there will be, and his excitement at Bart saying they’ll find some wine for the older kids (“Delicious wine?”)
• No matter how many time I watch this episode, I still hear Sherri (or Terri’s) line, “I’m so hungry, I could eat at Arby’s” as “I could eat an army.” It’s probably because that’s what I heard it as for so many viewings, but the “bys” section sounds so soft and muted. It think if they bumped up the volume of the final syllable a bit more, it would be so much clearer.
• Bart’s underwater adventure to get the sunken cooler feels like a big time killer. Very nice music, very nice animation, but this is a show that used to cram as many gags into twenty-two minutes as possible, and here we have a thirty-second sequence that all culminates in a blowfish biting Bart in the butt. Feels like a waste of good real estate.
• Exactly how did Homer get an online banner ad without even having a computer? Oh, who cares. The Comic Book Guy scene is maybe one of his best, impatiently waiting for his Star Trek pornography to load, complaining “Oh, hurry up, I am a busy man!” before taking a healthy gulp of his jumbo soda.
• It’s interesting watching Bill Gates’s appearance having just seen the new episode with J.J. Abrams, it’s a very stark compare and contrast. Gates (not voicing himself) shows up at Homer’s house, not knowing a damn thing about his business, or even caring that it’s not even a business at all, figuring the easier thing for him is to “buy them out,” meaning have his nerd goons smash the joint up (“Oh, I didn’t get rich by writing a lot of checks!”) Scathing, satirical, a truly excellent Simpsons moment attacking the rich and powerful. Compare this to J.J. Abrams (voicing himself), who is depicted as a visionary filmmaking genius who wins over everybody in the end, subject only to the lightest of ribbings about him specializing in reboots and found footage movies. Dramatically different approaches.
• I’ve seen this episode so many times in syndication, I have an unflinching degree of nostalgia for it, but there’s an awful lot of dead space in the island story where it’s mostly just straight plot with some jokes peppered in. I think they were so devoted to following the Lord of the Flies template that they forgot to subvert it in any meaningful way. Bits like Nelson pummeling Milhouse in the cage and Milhouse being deadweight to Bart and Lisa in the chase are good, but the back half of the episode with the mystery of “the monster” is pretty boring, bordering on feeling like a Saturday morning cartoon.
• Simpsons Archive retro review: “’Das Bus’ shows that you can have surreal setups, yet still maintain the characterization and ‘human-ness’ that makes ‘The Simpsons’ special. The civilized children’s slide into primitive behavior was generally funny, and didn’t violate anything we knew about their characters. A subplot detailing Homer’s attempts to enter the Internet business provides some good contrast and a few laughs. This show aired on creator Matt Groening’s birthday. It would make a pretty good present, indeed.”

15. The Last Temptation of Krust

• “What do we need church shoes for? Jesus wore sandals.” “Well, maybe if he had better arch support, they wouldn’t have caught him.”
• Gil working at the shoe store is less “desperate older employee holding on by a thread” like he was in “Realty Bites,” and more just a sad old man with a bad back. Not his best appearance. 
• The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was making Jay Leno appear like a likable, everyman guy in this episode, though he still does brag about his “acres of cars” that he loves so much. The other guest comedians are harmless set dressing who don’t really add or take away anything specifically. On that note comes a major problem with this episode, and with all movies/TV shows about stand-up comedy: the performed jokes are never really funny, so you just sit there as you’re watching an audience applaud looking as dumb as Homer (“I get jokes!” is a very quotable line.) In terms of depicting comedy, bad jokes are easy, because it’s all about the audience’s reaction and the behavior of the performer (see: Krusty’s flapping dickey, and the amazing pan of the stunned audience.) But when it’s “good” comedy like the opening comedians, as well as Krusty’s reimagining of himself as a George Carlin-type comic, the jokes never hit right. The third act felt like the writers were coming up with routines inspired by Carlin, but not really satirizing his type of humor.
• “Dog Kills Cat, Self” is a wonderfully dark newspaper headline.
• The scene of Lisa translating each line of the Spanish movie for Marge is kind of weird. It’s like someone came up with the joke concept of an annoyed movie translator, and they decided to just slap it onto Lisa because she’s smart, but I don’t expect an eight-year-old, not even Lisa, to be able to understand full dialogue in a foreign language.
• Bart finding Krusty on the Flanderses lawn after his bender feels like a believable way to get a Simpson back into the story, unlike future Krusty episodes where Bart and Lisa will just show up at Krustylu Studios for little to no reason at all. My favorite scene is Krusty coming face to face with all the garbage licensed products in Bart’s room, when it finally dawns on him how he’s sold himself out in exchange for his dignity and relevance as a performer. It’s really well done and funny, I almost wish it was put into a stronger episode.
• The classic line that’s run through my head the most times watching decades of new episodes has been Krusty’s attempt at relatable comedy (“You mean like when your lazy butler washes your sock garters and they’re still covered with shmutz?”) As Springfield slowly morphed into Los Angeles, Jr. and the Simpsons found themselves recurring instant successes in lavish scenarios, that quote would instantly come to mind.
• “Bart’s Comedy Jam” is an excellent scene, starting with Bart’s impression of his mother (Nancy Cartwright having fun mimicking Julie Kavner), much to the adorable enjoyment of Homer and Lisa. Krusty feebly tries his hand at observational humor, but falls flat (“Two cent stamps… pizza pie’s very hot these days… can’t open pickle jars… no mail on Sundays…”) I also love Bart repeating his excuse about the acoustics being bad, only to be rudely cut off by Krusty. A consistent in this episode is the classic relationship of Bart’s undying allegiance to his childhood hero, and Krusty barely giving a shit about his biggest fan.
• When (or if) the show actually announces it’s ending, I will be incredibly disappointed if a reporter doesn’t ask, “Why now? Why not twenty years ago?”
• A nice detail I don’t think I’ve noticed before, Bart’s voice has a little bit of echo on it while sitting in the incredibly spacious Canyonero.
• There’s a bunch of good, even great, moments in this episode, but it could have been a complete dud and still been saved by the Canyonero ending. Just the perfect fake ad for the obnoxiously large and questionably safe SUV (“Top of the line in utility sports! Unexplained fires are a matter for the courts!”)
• Simpsons Archive retro review: “A dismal effort. Joke after joke failed to make me laugh, with all those comedians up there you’d think something would. Celebrity cameos do nothing for me, and neither does stand-up type of humor. A very weak outing in a very weak season… something has to change.”

16. Dumbbell Indemnity

• Homer just completely destroying the water heater while trying to fix it is not a great moment. There are plenty of past examples of Homer being as stupid, if not more so, but this is Scully-era Homer stupidity where it’s more aggressive and destructive, in this case, flooding the entire house, then scurrying off to Moe’s to let Marge deal with it (what a guy!) To be fair, the animation of the flooding water cascading over the house looks fantastic.
• Rene appears to be the first in an incredibly long line of guest girlfriend/boyfriend characters on the show to have absolutely no personality. She’s a nice girl who likes Moe… because that’s what the plot of the episode is. No quirks, no backstory, no specific wants or desires, she’s just a plot device for the Homer/Moe story. It’s made all the more eyebrow-raising as she’s voiced by Helen Hunt, Hank Azaria’s then-girlfriend, so maybe the writers were hesitant to make her anything but the sweetest, blandest woman ever? She also gets introduced running a flower cart at night, which is never referred to again and makes no sense. It reminded me of one of the last episodes of Futurama where Zoidberg started dating a woman who ran a flower cart, but that actually played into the episode; she has no sense of smell, so Zoidberg’s horrific odor doesn’t offend her.
• “Bring us the finest food you’ve got, stuffed with the second finest.” “Excellent, sir. Lobster stuffed with tacos.”
• This episode also brings us our first glimpse at softened Moe, which has been a favorite with writers over the past twenty years, and it just doesn’t work. I remember liking “Moe Baby Blues” okay, but I feel like if I rewatched it, I’d be less charitable. I’m fine with depicting Moe as more sympathetic and less of a psychopath, but he still needs to be funny or interesting, and most of the time, he’s not, he’s just sad and pathetic. 
• I like that Lou is already noticeably buzzed before the cruise even starts.
• Moe’s car flies off the cliff, then it sinks, then it falls down an underwater cliff, falling, falling… man, is it boring.
• I winced when Homer tearfully said that he and Moe were best friends. His best friend originally was Barney, but that relationship has more or less faded at this point. He hangs out with Lenny and Carl all day at work and at the bar. I’ve repeated over and over why Moe and Marge should never, ever be on good terms with each other, but I also don’t like how close Homer and Moe end up becoming either. Homer can be deluded enough into thinking Moe’s a good friend of his, but I enjoy Moe the best when he’s a crass, manipulative reprobate, not the surly jerk with a heart of gold they would eventually turn him into. I guess it’s personal preference, but I just find Moe funnier and more interesting in the former characterization than the latter. As for this new Homer-Moe relationship, it’s like “The Homer They Fall” creaked the door open, and “Dumbbell Indemnity” bum-rushed its way in.
• Moe goes to talk to Homer in the alleyway of the jail, which just happens to have a window there. Meanwhile, Rene is just standing there on the sidewalk waiting for Moe to come back, I guess not particularly caring what he was doing in the alley or who he was talking to. Homer’s jail window also becomes a huge cheat because for the rest of the scene, the window is now right up against the corner of the jail so Moe can see him from across the street.
• Rene is such a non-character, she doesn’t even create the conflict of the episode. Moe inexplicably feels the need to spend as much money as possible on this woman, but she doesn’t seem to be a woman who enjoys the fancy things at all, evidenced by her initially turning down Moe’s suggested trip to Hawaii (“Let’s just get a can of poi and eat it in the tub.”) That’s all fine, as the episode could be about Moe’s incredible insecurities making him think he needs to spend, spend, spend to hold onto this woman, but that idea isn’t evident or fleshed out in the episode at all.
• The ending kind of sucks, Moe and Homer fighting in the burning bar. Then Barney comes out of the bathroom, I guess being oblivious to everything, carries Moe and Homer’s bodies out, then passes out from smoke inhalation just so he doesn’t have to be in the scene anymore. Meh.
• Simpsons Archive retro review: “This was the episode I KNEW the current staff could do! Instead of the forced references and vain attempts at Simpsonesqueness other episodes this season had fallen back on, this had what the show should always be: A funny, fast-paced, decent plot with tons of originality and classic Homer. For the first time since ‘The Cartridge Family,’ I don’t need to give an episode the benefit of the doubt!”

17. Lisa the Simpson

• Great snappy piece of animation of the vacuum sealed lunch. The squash and stretch of Milhouse’s face and Lisa’s hair points is just lovely.
  
• I like that the Picto-Puzzle is on screen enough times that you might be able to solve it yourself. It’s also the perfect catalyst to throw Lisa off her game, a deceptively easy brain teaser, one of those things that would finally click with you after spending hours on it and kicking yourself for not thinking of the simple answer sooner. Ralph figuring it out before her just pours salt into the wound (“I don’t need a hint, Ralph!” ”But you’re suffering!”)
• The exterior shot of the school as both the kids and teachers run out overjoyed at the final bell is so great, and made even better when you see the next day, the kids and teachers walking back in together, depressed about another school day.
• Homer’s innocent giddiness at the nudie pens is a nice little scene, and an effective joke to carry over the time lapse before he and Apu discover Jasper in the freezer.
• Marge cutting Abe’s hair is such a great scene. This show used to thrive on showing believable moments of a not-very-well-off family, and Marge cutting her ornery father-in-law’s hair (using the kitchen tablecloth as a bib, a wonderful little touch) is a great example, even better with two characters who don’t directly interact that much. The ending of Marge “accidentally” nipping the back of Abe’s head after he insults her cooking is a great passive aggressive moment.
• Although not his final appearance, “Someone’s in the Kitchen with DNA” feels like Troy McClure’s swan song. Each joke is a slam dunk: Troy taking off his hazmat suit, causing the other scientists to flee, two of the greatest “you may remember me” film titles ever (“Alice Doesn’t Live Anymore” and “Mommy, What’s Wrong With That Man’s Face?”) and of course, his dumbstruck look when little Billy asks him a simple question, hard-cutting to the end card.
• The Freak-E-Mart is the perfect B-plot for this episode, a breezy, dumb-but-not-too-dumb story to offset Lisa’s tale of introspective woe. Jasper freezing himself is kind of outlandish, but nothing too crazy that I can’t go along with it. The different cheap exhibits Apu puts up are great (Haunted Cash Machine: Dispenses Images of Dead Presidents) and the conclusion of Jasper awakening in the “future” is so good (“Moon Pie? What a time to be alive.”)
• The dramatic lighting and staging of Lisa joining Bart and Homer in front of the TV is beautiful. It really drives home the weight of Lisa’s resignation.
  
• “When Buildings Collapse” and “When Surgery Goes Wrong” almost sound too much like actual programs that FOX would air in the late 90s.
• The montage of Lisa indulging in enlightened pleasures before her “dumbening” is perfectly emblematic of the world of the show. Each one of her interactions is coated with cynicism: the art gallery guard who admits to forging the painting, the petulant music critic (“You have to listen to the notes she’s not playing.” “Pfft. I can do that at home,”) and finally the violinist who serves Lisa a cliche line about sharing your specialness with the world, but it was actually her trying to gas Lisa up to get her to buy one of her tapes. If this scene were done in a season 32 episode, it would most definitely have been played straight, this fellow musician dispensing heartfelt advice at the emotional climax of the story.
• Jeez. Either Sanjay’s tucking himself, or he ain’t packing much.
  
• This has got to be like the twentieth or so time I’ve seen this, and I just realized that Lisa getting on TV via an editorial reply was set up earlier with an editorial reply interrupting “When Buildings Collapse.” They didn’t need to connect those two dots, but they did anyway.
• The station director letting Lisa go off script (“Let her speak. I’m trying to get fired”) is another joke that I love that would never have happened in a season 32 equivalent scene.
• I love all the vocal variants Dan Castellaneta does for all the Simpson men. The “Simpson gene is true” ending is a bit silly, but it feels like a suitable backhanded payoff, where Lisa’s future is cleared but Bart is doomed to failure (“a spectacular failure!”) I think this is my favorite episode of season 9, with “City of New York” a close second. I do not consider it a coincidence these are both Oakley/Weinstein shows.
• Simpsons Archive retro review: “An interesting expansion on the theory that failure is familial for Simpsons, but too general and simplistically off-the-mark in the ending. The subplot was a major drag, having no relation at all to the main plot, and being incredibly stupid, mediocre and far-fetched. Another minus is Bart’s ‘dance on her grave’ line, indicating that Ned Goldreyer could use work (namely pre-fifth season work), but is on the right track somewhat more than other writers have been. I appreciate his goal to tell a story rather than to clutter a story with inappropriate or idiotic gags that try too hard.”

18. This Little Wiggy

• Milhouse and Nelson’s fantasies off of Robbie the Automaton’s commercial feel like lesser versions of these kinds of childish dreams we’ve seen before. Milhouse touches a star and it disintegrates his arm, which feels more like a Bart fantasy, and Nelson’s really interested in the Three Stooges? This feels around the point where older references were starting to grow a little stale. Did kids in the late 90s even know who the Three Stooges were? Were they still being rerun on stations kids watched back then?
• The Knowledgeum is a fun set piece, definitely the strongest stuff in the whole episode. Troy McClure gives a great intro on the moving walkway; I like his casual mentioning of your car may be subject to repeated break-ins much to Homer’s panic, but it’s kind of a slightly lesser version of the similar joke in “Lisa the Vegetarian,” without the expert pay-off of the Simpson car pulling up the driveway with a busted back window with no further mention.
• Bart runs off to “toss the virtual salad,” which feels like a pretty raw entendre for him to make. It’s one thing if they had him do a general sex joke or a boner joke, but this is a ten-year-old talking about eating ass. Is there any other slang definition for “tossing salad” that I don’t know about?
• There’s a sweet little moment when Martin takes a picture of Frink’s visible computer demonstration, and Frink gets visibly bashful about it.
• In this episode all about Ralph, he basically has no real agency in the story and just wanders about until he accidentally moves the plot forward. We’re a long ways from “I Love Lisa” where he was just this dim, oblivious kid still capable of actual emotions. This episode firmly establishes the “new” Ralph, a literal mentally challenged child whose dialogue is 80% desperate one-liner attempts at making the next “I bent my Wookie” or “Me fail English?” There have been a few later attempts to try and give Ralph a bit more to do (he had actual sentences of dialogue recently in “Wad Goals,”) but they come off really bizarre given how he’s basically been reduced to a prop character over a decade. You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube, fellas, you’re stuck with what you made.
• I really like the kernel of an idea of this episode about being stuck with an undesirable or embarrassing playmate as a kid, where Bart butts heads with Marge about being forced to hang out with Ralph. The episode doesn’t go anywhere particularly interesting with that idea, but it is there!
• “Videotaping this crime spree is the best idea we ever had!” For all the stupid “Simpsons predicted it!” “theories” that went viral over the past year, this Jimbo line feels like an appropriate analogue for the January 6th Capitol riots. A joke about stupid, short-sighted teenage shenanigans translates perfectly to stupid, short-sighted, alt-right, fame-hungry dullards.
• There’s some subtle depth to Chief Wiggum in this episode and his feelings toward Ralph, like when he almost sarcastically tells Marge, yeah, it would be nice if Ralph had some friends. He fully cops to his son having special needs and no one really wanting to be around him, and he feels bad about it, but has kind of run out of ideas of what to do. Later, when he sees Ralph and Bart playing together, his excitement over Ralph’s first friend is really endearing.
• When Bart and Ralph run into the bullies at night, this average episode takes a big nosedive. Bart giving into peer pressure with the bullies and turning away a crying Ralph feels like cliche after school special material played completely straight. I can buy Bart standing up to Ralph getting mercilessly bullied, but when it gets to the point that he actually considers Ralph a friend, it’s just too much. Them exploring the penitentiary is boring and overly drawn out, and the grand finale of saving Quimby from the active electric chair is equally as dull, especially since they have not one but two scenes of Quimby explaining how dumb the ending is, telling his staff to not help him despite how “realistic” his convulsions are. Lisa fires a rocket with a note at the penitentiary… like, even if it did actually work, not only is the plan to fire at this building way in the distance, but were they banking on it going through the exact window where the execution room was? Is there even a window in that room? Oh, who cares.
• Simpsons Archive retro review: “Can somebody please remind me why I’ve ever been  disappointed with this season? This was amazing. Nothing OOC, plenty of original, inspired gags and every member of OFF had a respectable amount of time. The plot seemed to change dramatically in the last few seconds of the first act, but it took me until second viewing to even notice. Looking back at my past few reviews, I’ve begun to realize I love this season! As of this episode, I’m raising my standards for an A.”

19. Simpson Tide

• The Planet of the Donuts is a pretty good opening dream. I also appreciate it ending right when Homer gets eaten by the monster donut; I feel like a modern episode would include some unfunny button on that scene, but instead, it got out when the going was good.
• Homer dropping a donut into the reactor (via a post office mail slot, no less) is just stupid enough that I can go along with it. I also like what we see of the aftermath that the cooling towers are on fire; I doubt that that’s very realistic, but it seemed like a believable disaster that would be worth Homer getting fired over.
• The Navy commercial is fantastic, just the perfect sales pitch that would appeal to Homer: getting drunk and doing fuck all for your country.
• The man at the recruitment office is a familiar extra, it’s the “Just Stamp the Ticket” man from “When Flanders Failed”! I don’t know if I ever noticed that. He gets a one-scene wonder as Homer attempts to answer the one crossed-off application question, much to his horror. Hey, have I brought up Dankmus recently?
• I like that during basic training, Homer is more lovable buffoon than aggravating maniac (“You like me, but I don’t like you!” “Well, maybe you’d like me if you got to know me!”) Endearing touches like that stand out in a silly premise like this. Similarly, a ridiculous gag like a gigantic untethered ship going over a waterfall is balanced by Homer actually making a competent knot but forgetting to tie it to the ship, not him completely forgetting, or worse, having a blind active hand in the accident.
• It really feels like this episode has one of the earliest “Starbucks are everywhere” jokes. When did those explode in popularity? My only frame of reference is a Lewis Black routine about “the end of the universe” being somewhere in Texas, where he saw a Starbucks across from another Starbucks, a performance recorded in 2001, while this episode aired in 1998.
• The earring subplot is fine as is. It’s not really much of a “plot,” really, but I like that Homer’s annoyance at Bart’s earring runs throughout the show, and pretty effortlessly comes back by the end to be the lynchpin to save the day.
• It’s so dumb, but I still like the “In the Navy” scene (although throwing Smithers in felt pushing it too far), if only because they just up and drown the Village People. They weren’t actually guest stars, but it’s nice to see one of the last big celebrity fuck-yous before we get deeper into the Mike Scully era and we get *NSYNC magically arriving on their speedboat to heroically save the day.
• I like that they clearly establish that Captain Tenille is not only a partially oblivious old man who projects onto people, but he might actually be physically ill on top of it (“Maybe it’s the saltwater in my veins, or the nitrogen bubbles in my brain…”) as an explanation as to why the fuck he would leave Homer in charge of the sub.
• “I told him that photo would come back to haunt him.”
  
• I absolutely love that Skinner brought Terri up with her sister on stage only to tell her to fuck off, we’re only saving one of you. That’s some good school administrator cruelty.
• This episode is undeniably ridiculous, and Homer the naval captain is no less crazy and ridiculous than any of his future professions, but this episode feels like it strikes the right loose tone that it doesn’t feel out-of-reach outlandish, considering the climax is Homer plugging a pin-sized hole on the ship. Him magically knowing how to say “It’s my first day” in penguin is acceptable since I like the scene as a callback to the opening. We also get a joke explanation as to why the hell Homer wasn’t arrested, as all of the commanding officers in charge of indicting her are actually in the middle of their own indictments, getting him off the hook (“You can’t spell ‘dishonorable’ without ‘honorable.’’)
• Simpsons Archive retro review: “I just want to say that I think ‘Simpson Tide’ was great… for an episode of ‘The Critic.’ It epitomizes the worst episodes of ‘The Simpsons:’ fast-paced gags, sophomoric humor, discontinuity, little or no ironic commentary, and a tacked-on plot which just serves as a set-up for quickie sight jokes. But the worst sin of all is the fact that the gags in this show were unfunny! All-in-all a very dissatisfying episode with a couple of genuinely funny bits. And to think I missed last week’s Ralph Wiggum episode only to see this clunker!”