Original airdate: April 13, 2014

The premise: Thirty years into the future, Bart is still dealing with the heartbreak from his divorce, Lisa struggles to deal with her husband Milhouse’s zombie disease, and Marge finally breaks up with Homer, who after years of being replaced with clones, is now reduced to just a floating head on a screen.

The reaction: I guess after the unusually strong positive response the last future episode received, it makes sense they would go back to that well one more time. So this is, what, the fifth future show? This one feels like a hodgepodge of elements we’ve already seen from the last two. Bart is a deadbeat dad living in the school, Lisa is still inexplicably with Milhouse, Homer and Marge break up again, none of this is new material. But before we get to the future, we’re one minute into our present day when Homer drops dead, and Professor Frink wheels into the funeral with a Homer clone. In present day. It’s glossed over quickly with a joke as to why the fuck Frink would have cloned Homer at all, then we get a hilarious montage of Homer dying or killing himself over and over and over again throughout the years, without explaining why Frink would bother creating new clones. So we get to the future, and everyone is more or less in the same place as we saw them in the last future episode. Bart’s still a big loser who can’t get over his ex-wife Jenda, so he goes to get his heartbreak wiped from his memory (so they’re ripping off an old episode where they ripped off a movie now?) Then he fucks a bunch of girls, because we needed to have that mental image, then he and Jenda get back together, and then they break up, both instances being incredibly simplistic and formulaic. Bart experiences a single moment of clarity around Jenda, and she instantly becomes putty in his arms, and then later she gets mad at him for not paying attention to when she’s talking, like all women do, am I right, guys?! So in the end, Bart accepts that he’s done with Jenda, a character we don’t really know or care about, and also Homer and Marge get back together because of course they do, all while we’re inundated with more half-baked, rejected Futurama jokes that the writers fished out of their trash bins. Bleh.

Three items of note:
– This is now the third episode where we’ve seen Jenda, Bart’s wife. You’d think after this much screen time, we would know a little bit about her. Likes, dislikes, personality quirks, why she fell in love with Bart to begin with… but no. Nothing. Can anyone tell me one goddamn thing about her? She rode a skateboard and was kind of like a cool kid in “Future Drama,” but here, she’s just a blank slate. And she’s voiced by Amy Poehler, who now, almost a decade after the first appearance of this character, is way too big a star to be slumming it with this shit.
– Homer’s robot body goes to Moe’s on its own and guzzles down beer. I guess they were gearing themselves up for that Futurama crossover early.
– Toward the ending, Bart and Lisa drunkenly tell each other their problems (y’know, like they did in the last future episode), and a drunk Marge appears out of nowhere to tell them the secret to a successful marriage or something. She then decides it’s stupid to stay mad at Homer for the billionth time because she knows she’s going to go crawling back eventually, so she downloads herself into the monitor with Homer, and gleefully allows him to devour her entire head, complete with Pac-Man sound effects. Bart and Lisa look on dumbfounded, as does Moe, who comments, “I can’t tell if that was love, suicide or a really boring video game.” It’s like he’s speaking for all of us. Especially that “really boring” part.

One good line/moment: Bart works for the Jurassic Park rip-off Cretaceous Park (“Now Correctly Named.”)

Original airdate: April 6, 2014

The premise: Lisa starts spending time with a little fat boy, which leads Marge to worry she might end up with an overweight loser of a partner just like she did. Meanwhile, Bart protects Snake from the cops, and he returns the favor by stealing a bunch of stuff for him, much to Mihouse’s jealousy.

The reaction: Just when I said last episode was the worst I’ve seen in terms of repetitive expository dialogue, here comes another hearty contender. It’s become yet another shortcoming of this show that I feel I have to stop bringing up again and again, it’s just what the series is now. “Tell, not show” is this show’s mantra now. Lisa meets this kid Lucas, an earnest failure who wants to be a competitive eater, and thankfully we have Lisa’s brain to tell us exactly what she’s feeling (“Aww, he’s sweet. …what am I doing? He’s just Ralph with a dream! But I’m sure I could totally change and fix him.”) What? So Lucas comes by the house and the two just kinda hang out, with Lisa seeming to barely tolerate him. Marge and her sisters are watching them in the backyard, with Patty and Selma taking swipes at his poor kid for being fat, and chiding Marge that her daughter’s going to end up with an obese tub of lard just like her, which felt incredibly mean-spirited and vindictive for them to say. Then the episode completely switches gears, leaving Lucas behind to become a Homer-Marge episode. Marge proposes Homer taking Lisa out to dinner to improve their relationship, and after Homer talks about all the things he wants to do, Marge replies, “Homer, you can’t just do the things you want to do!” This is later followed by Homer speaking more of the plot (“She might marry someone like me? You think that might be bad!”) The whole show is filled with people just saying what they’re thinking or currently doing or what they previously just did. Our ending involves Marge crashing Homer and Lisa’s dinner date to apologize. She takes him over to a corner of the restaurant, then removes off her coat to reveal a fancy, sexy dress, then stands over a convenient floor grate to have it billow further up her legs. I guess we’re supposed to forget that their daughter is a few feet away and can see all of this. Marge claims she sold her sewing machine to buy the dress, and Homer makes some kind of reference to Project Runway. I honestly do not understand what this is about. And this is our conclusion. What is this? This show is all about over explaining, but for this bit, I feel like it’s the opposite.

Three items of note:
– The B-story is just as inane. When Bart gets Chief Wiggum off of Snake’s trail, he repays him by stealing a bunch of stuff for him. The sympathetic angle played to Bart, and later Milhouse, is Snake’s excuse for robbing to be able to support his son. So was this all a lie? Is there some kind of parallel between Bart and Snake’s son, any repercussions to Snake favoring one over the other? Nah, not really. Milhouse gets jealous and turns Snake in, but then Bart ends up saving him. Except not really, he gets out by Wiggum and Lou’s (?) utter incompetence. Like more so than normal, to an insulting degree. The story just ends with Snake explaining what “suicide by cop” means, and then that’s it. I guess any conclusion is good enough, I guess.
– There’s a whole two minute sequence at the beginning explaining how Homer got stuck in a big playground coil. All I could think of is how It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia did the same gag, but realized it’s even funnier (and less time consuming) to just show a character in that predicament and not explain it.
– I thought the title “Luca$” would actually mean something, like the kid was rich, or something to do with money, but Luca$ is actually the kid’s would-be competition name. It’s weird that we got this and “Diggs” within the same season, two episodes named after new kid characters for no discernible reason other than didn’t want to bother coming up with any other title.

One good line/moment: There’s a running gag toward the end where Homer and Lisa’s daddy/daughter date is treated like a real date, like when Homer nervously calls his daughter with the guys at Moe’s egging him on, or later when Marge arrives, Homer treats her as if she were a jealous ex. That stuff starts to come across pretty weird, pretty quickly. But the sequence of Homer and Lisa at the restaurant having a good time and genuinely enjoying each other’s company was pretty adorable. Homer really wasn’t that buffoonish and insane this episode; he reacts understandably hurt at Marge’s insulting dig toward him, and puts 100% into his dinner with Lisa, which only serves to make Marge look like even more of a bitch for the way she acts.

Original airdate: March 30, 2014

The premise: An impassioned speech from Lisa about her father’s brief stint as a referee from eight seasons ago gets Homer tapped to work for FIFA at the World Cup in Brazil. During the season, he is pursued by local gangsters to fix the games, but he refuses, determined to stay in Lisa’s good graces.

The reaction: A major sports organization contacting Homer to work with them after seeing an online video… I guess if it worked nearly ten years ago (!) for “Homer and Ned’s Hail Mary Pass,” why not a second time? Though I would much rather be watching that episode. As dumb as both examples are, Homer being an obnoxious, crowd-pleasing ham brought on to teach professional athletes how to showboat actually has some coherent connective narrative tissue, rather than Lisa offhand mentioning her father calling her out once during a soccer match during a B-story in an episode nearly a decade old leading to Homer reffing the fucking World Cup. Without the context of “Marge Gamer,” this narrative leap makes even less sense. Lisa gives a speech on the fly about the nice things her dad has done for her, and him giving her a red card way back when is just one throwaway example. It’s not like she was espousing how honest and unflappable Homer is. But whatever, this is our insanely flimsy excuse to get the Simpsons to the World Cup, so maybe we can get some sweet cross-promotion with sports fans, just like their Olympics show a few seasons back. We also get the family back to Brazil, where we get a handful of callbacks to “Blame It On Lisa,” including reappearances from Teleboobies and the samba instructor. Does it count as fan service if they’re bringing back jokes from episodes that aren’t fondly remembered? Once they’re international, the beats of the story are presented so ham-fistedly, the worst we’ve seen yet. When the family is out to eat, Homer walks outside apropos of nothing so gangsters can randomly appear to offer him a bribe to rig the game. Then we get over a minute of a montage repeating over and over that Homer won’t play ball. After that, we get a scene where Bart unnecessarily tells Homer that he wasn’t Lisa’s first choice for her hero, with some just plain awful lines (“I’m just examining what kind of person I am and whether I should destroy your happiness forever.”) As usual, we don’t see Homer actually emote and get sad, instead they just keep expositing lines to do the work for them. Later, we get the exact same type of scene when Lisa appears to stop Homer from cheating, and then later again during the showdown with the gangsters, and them being saved by a completely ridiculous Chekov’s gun. It all feels like the minimum amount of effort to push a threadbare story along, with none of the humanity plugged in. Characters just say their lines explaining what’s currently happening, scene after scene after scene. It’s like watching an episode of Cliff Notes.

Three items of note:
– The opening act was pretty bad. There’s a school assembly that Skinner can’t get control over (remember when he actually ran the school with inflated authority? Wasn’t that a more admirable and humorous character quirk than spineless wuss?) featuring a fake Lincoln-Douglas debate. The joke is that they stay in character in trying to appeal to the kids, but repeatedly get heckled and have things thrown at them. Over and over again. After the fiasco, the school holds a contest to award the student with the best speech on who their hero is, sponsored by a sandwich chain so they can do a Jared Fogle “parody.” Forgetting the awkward in hindsight nature of this, it feels far too late to be doing Jared jokes. In fact, the show already did one in a Treehouse of Horror episode in 2005, so maybe this was an old discarded post-it someone found under a couch or something. Then the conflict is that Martin takes Lisa’s idea to do Marie Curie as his hero, which is revealed so laboriously slow. Is this supposed to be tense or something? And they play it up like Martin gave a fucking awesome presentation with the kids cheering and going nuts, that Lisa has to top that. What school is this? Then Lisa gives her stupid speech, and because we can’t tell from the writing that it’s supposed to be good, we get shots of the judges and the crowd confirming that they indeed do love it. Again, we can’t tell just from looking at the screen, we need to be told what we’re supposed to feel. As usual nowadays, it’s always tell, not show.
– This episode was the first official reveal of Lunchlady Doris being renamed to Lunchlady Dora through a headline in the school newspaper. When asked on Twitter whether this was just a typo, writer Michael Price replied, “The show introduced Lunchlady Dora after Doris Grau passed away. So we did the opposite of forget.” I’ve talked about this multiple times, and I believe the staff to be full of incredibly compassionate people, but this whole thing feels wrong to me. They retired her character for a decade, and then one day figured that enough time had passed, dusted her off, and brought in Tress MacNeille to do a half-baked imitation of Doris Grau, and went about their merry way. And I’ll say again, why not bring back Troy McClure and Lionel Hutz? What’s the difference between keeping them silent and bringing Doris/Dora back?
– There’s a quick joke that feels really vindictive to me: on the plane to Brazil, an old woman (later revealed to be the gangster’s mom for some reason) switches seats with Lisa so she can watch premium HBO. We then cut to a very quick shot of a screen displaying three shows, Hung, Bored to Death, and Enlightened. She lets out a disgruntled “Meehhhh!” and that’s it. What’s with this motivation-less dig on HBO? And, per usual, this show has lost all privileges to make fun of any other show on the air. You can’t take shots up when you’re at the critical bottom.

One good line/moment: This exchange from the gangsters was smirk-worthy (“We will get to him. We have our ways.” “Well, what other ways besides guns and money?” “We have two ways. Two very good ways.”)

Original airdate: March 23, 2014

The premise: When the sailboat painting above the couch is destroyed, Marge buys a replacement piece at the Van Houten’s yard sale. When they discover the painting is actually worth a fortune, Homer and Marge debate whether they should inform the Van Houtens, or keep the information to themselves.

The reaction: We start off with a five minute section (no opening theme this time) of Lisa wanting, then getting her own guinea pig, which is ultimately pointless other than being the reason the sailboat painting gets damaged. There’s a lot of that stuff here; later, Homer and Marge try to buy Milhouse’s silence with cartloads of toys when he overhears their plan to sell the expensive painting they bought from the Van Houtens, but that one minute is immediately wasted when the angry parents show up at the door after Milhouse squealed. They don’t even give him a funny line about what happened (something like “I’m sorry, Mr. S! I cracked!”) And of course, the episode is full of characters just recapping the story and their feelings over and over, especially Marge, who is the dissenting opinion of the whole painting fiasco, and never lets anyone forget it, again and again (“That painting has torn the town apart, destroyed Kirk and Luann’s marriage, and everyone’s very worried about Milhouse!” “That picture has brought out the worst in everyone!”) When the true ownership of the painting falls into question, Homer ventures to a tropical island off the coast of somewhere to find out the truth. He eventually discovers that the piece is actually a fake, painted on the island by a local artist, voiced by Max von Sydow, famous for his incredibly accurate fakes. He debates Lisa on why what he does is okay (“Beauty is beauty. My forgeries give pleasure to people all over the world. The only real question to ask about art, whether it’s in the Louvre, or on a freshman’s wall at Cal State Fullerton, is did it move you?”) This, accompanied with a montage of various peoples enjoying art in different ways, is actually kind of stirring. His whole scene, though full of more expository dialogue, I actually really enjoyed. It’s just too bad that the episode was never really about any of the things that he’s talking about.If the groundwork had been laid to lead to this ultimate meaning, it would have been more effective. But seeing the very ending, with Homer coming back to Marge with a new sailboat painting done by the forger, I thought that was nice. With that and the final end tag sequence of Sydow talking about the horrible locally brewed Stuppo, it was probably the best three minutes I’ve seen from this show in a long, long time. Too bad everything before it was as ramshackle as always.

Three items of note:
– As I’ve mentioned before, this show has a habit of taking something that has the potential to be funny, and then driving that shit into the fucking ground. The worst example I’ve seen yet is Lisa’s trip to the guinea pig rescue. With so many fuzzy friends to choose from, she goes on overload, approaching each one with childlike glee. It’s a really adorable performance by Yeardley Smith, and the scene seemed to have a final button with a Homer joke. But then it just keeps going… the same joke with Lisa going nonstop… still going as night falls, the family drives to the motel next door to stay the night for some reason, and then them returning in the morning, with Lisa never stopping for a second. They killed it. I actually was enjoying myself for a few wonderful seconds, which then was ruined when they dragged me through the cactus field for another forty seconds of the same extended joke.
– There’s a plot element involving the town being divided about the painting issue once the Van Houtens pay Kent Brockman to do a hatchet piece on Homer and Marge. Outside the auction, half the town are pro-Simpson, and the other half pro-Van Houten. But in the end, nothing really comes out of this. And again, if this was somehow turned into some kind of debate or something derived from the painting itself and how people were affected by it, or relating to something about the supposed real artist, it would have better set up the ending with the forgery and the discussion of art’s true authenticity. Instead, like the guinea pig opening, it just feels like more stuff to fill time.
– The Van Houtens are split when an old fling Kirk had when they were separated reappears, claiming she actually owns the painting. Luann is upset with Kirk, as he claimed he was never with anyone when they were apart. Fair enough, I guess, but she’s incredibly pissed at him, repeatedly smacking him with the auction paddle. I’m sure Luann got plenty of action during their separation, what’s the big deal? Later, Kirk is planted on the Simpson couch because of course he is, and then a scene later, we get a joke with a despondent Milhouse involving him playing DDR without the TV on, which we see right after Bart explains the entire joke beforehand. Kirk was just in that room, is Milhouse visiting his dad or Bart? Or both? Despite Marge’s outrage, the episode is barely concerned about the Van Houtens and their problems, as splitting up and getting back together again is basically their thing now. The show used to do it with Skinner and Krabappel, now it’s their turn. Kirk’s lying and Luann’s overcritical nature don’t really matter, as in the end, a family portrait is enough to keep them together for one more week. Yaaaaaay.

One good line/moment: Like I said, I do really like elements of the ending, even if they’re surrounded by garbage juice. I also like Homer’s constant protection of the precious painting: he buckles it in with two seat belts, he chains it to a chair at the dining room table, then brings it to the auction wrapped in bubble wrap.

Original airdate: March 16, 2014

The premise: Marge lets Abe, Jasper, and the Old Jewish Man stay with at the house after the retirement home gets shut down, but she grows worried when Homer starts to adapt their elderly lifestyle. Meanwhile, Bart is inducted as an honorary bully and gets into hot water at a late night bully summit.

The reaction: Homer reaps the perks of being old… “The Two Mrs. Nahasapeemapetilions,” anyone? Marge brings the three old men home, and the writers crack open their ancient tome of old people jokes and go to town. They take a whole bunch of pills! They eat bran and fart on the couch! They walk the mall for exercise! The humor is so baseline. We see a montage of Homer continuously resuscitating the old men’s hearts, followed by Lisa admonishing him for complaining about it (“Dad, did it ever occur to you that we’re learning how to take care of you when you’re older by watching the way you treat Grampa?” Sweet, sweet exposition.) This leads Homer to hang out with the old geezers and slowly become like them, worrying Marge. Where is this going? No matter, because the B-story creeps in and engulfs the entire last third of the episode. The side story starts with a poor street urchin Nelson bit of him being embarrassed having to wear his mother’s second-hand pink underwear, and Bart standing up for him. For this, he lets Bart join the bully inner circle, and they go to a creepy bully summit after hours at Krustyland. They have beef with this other kid, he tries to frame Bart for attacking their leader with a slingshot, and then they have to get out of dodge before the other bully groups beat them up. I knew this was a “parody” from the get-go, but it took a while to realize they were doing a take-off of The Warriors. I have never seen the film, so I had no fucking clue what was going on. Of course in the olden days, the show would utilize characters, entire scenes even, taken from classic movies and television, but they worked on their own within the show’s universe. You can watch “The Shinning” and enjoy and understand it completely without never seeing the source material, as I did when I was younger. But this is just insanity; this cabal of teenage bullies driving around in apocalypse tricked out buses and a radio station devoted to reporting on bully news… it’s just way too nonsensical and crazy. The rival bullies corner Bart and the others on the beach, and then finally, six minutes later, the A-story reappears with Homer and the old men walking and seeing the boys. Homer steps in, punches the main bully in the face, they all run off, Homer tells Bart, “Now let’s go home,” and then they do. And then that’s it. We get our now standard end tag of Homer and Marge making out, so I guess the Homer’s-getting-old problem just solved itself. But the three old men are still living there. What will happen with the Retirement Castle? Is Bart still a bully? I guess the writers have reached a point where they don’t even bother to reset. You know everything’s going to be back to normal by next episode, so why bother giving stories a resolution? Just have the two stories collide at the very end and call it a day. See you next week, you fucks!

Three items of note:
– There’s two weird orphaned references that felt a little weird. Homer waxes on about how Abe mistreats his own grandfather, to which Lisa incredulously asks, “Your grandpa’s alive?” Homer says yes. Then Lisa goes no further with this surprising revelation that she has a living great-grandfather she never knew about. I thought it was going to lead to something in the story, but of course it didn’t. Later on at the bully summit, Nelson is surprised to see his two former weaselly underlings from “Bart the General.” I certainly wasn’t expecting that, but I wasn’t surprised to hear them spout a lame joke and exist purely for fan service purposes.
– We get an Itchy & Scratchy episode, a “parody” of Downton Abbey. Didn’t the show already take their shot in the MacFarlane episode? This one in particular was especially gory, with the Itchys just brutalizing the Scratchys horribly and for no real reason. That could be the joke, but not when it’s just over and over and over again. In recent years when the show can get away with more graphic violence, it seems they’ve been pushing the shock level up more and more with these, but that’s not really why Itchy & Scratchy was funny. Plenty of the older cartoons had more elements to the humor, but nowadays, I guess we’re just meant to laugh at Scratchy’s bloody corpse as he’s mutilated, and that’s the only joke.
– Bart’s slingshot being a crucial part of the plot in the bully story got me to thinking about how antiquated it is. I’ve said before that as the show progressed through the decades, the characters never progressed with the times, leaving these old remnants of a 90s world in modern day, and they just don’t feel right. Entire characters start to feel bizarre and out-of-date, like Apu or Comic Book Guy. Give any fourth grader a slingshot nowadays, and most of them probably won’t know what the hell it is. But it’s one of Bart’s character hallmarks that you just can’t get rid of, even though it must feel completely alien to any kid watching now.

One good line/moment: As usual, the only humor I think is still fairly solid nowadays at sign gags. We got Count Branula cereal, and a sign hanging over Abe’s new bed for Neptune Outboard Motors (Three Pulls and You’re Off!)