Original airdate: October 6, 2013

The premise: “Oh, The Places You’ll D’oh!” is told in Seussian rhyme, starring Homer as the Fat in the Hat, who takes the kids out for a calamitous Halloween rampage. In “Dead and Shoulders,” a freak accident results in Bart’s decapitated head being attached onto Lisa’s shoulder. “Freaks No Geeks” takes place in a 1930s circus, where sideshow freak Moe is sweet on Marge the trapeze artist, while strongman Homer plots a scheme to steal his valuable emerald.

The reaction: I certainly wouldn’t consider Dr. Seuss very spooky, but the first segment is definitely the stand out. The designs and art direction of the Seussified Springfield is pretty neat and engaging to look at, and the rhyming prose remained pretty strong throughout the whole thing. I’m not exactly sure why Homer acted like a homicidal maniac, but I appreciate the rare use of satire in treating the Fat in the Hat like a dangerous child abductor. Also, Maggie is designed like Cindy Lou Who and that’s pretty freaking adorable. The second story is… whatever. If Futurama‘s “Put Your Head on My Shoulder” was six minutes long and had no jokes or narrative thrust, this is what you’d get. A big pet peeve of mine with these Halloween shows is that horrible violence or crazy shit happens with none of the characters even batting an eyelid in reaction. Bart’s head is (bloodlessly) cut clean off by his kite string, his head hits the grass, and he lets out a quiet exasperated sigh. It’s like he could barely muster the energy to care. Also, what happened to his body? I guess they just forgot about it. The third segment starts off okay. I like the sepia tone and the old time designs, and a few gags were chuckle-worthy, but when the actual plot kicks in, it’s just awful. Homer exposits his scheme out loud for the audience: he gets Marge to marry Moe, he’ll kill him, and then take his emerald ring. Next scene he walks into Marge’s trailer, asking, “Hey Marge, wanna marry Moe?” He gives a limp argument, blathers on about the ring Marge knows nothing about, and she just rolls over and agrees. Later, we get another scene in the trailer where Homer pours poison into Moe’s drink, and in similar fashion, Homer just yells his plan at Marge again in case people forgot. Then the story ends with the freaks killing Homer. And we get a random tag of him as a tarred and feathered limbless mound as the How I Met Your Mother theme plays. Boy, that show sure gives me the creeps.

Three items of note:
– I know I’ve mentioned this multiple times, but do they just hate Maggie Roswell or something? We get a scene from Miss Hoover, and the sound quality on her is just the worst it’s ever been. It sounds like they recorded her from under the couch or something.
– We get a wonderful scene of Skinner getting out of the car after being chewed out by Agnes for the umpteenth time, crumpling to the floor and rolling up into a ball. Agnes then berates him for having a panic attack and starts walloping him with her hand bag. Isn’t this great Halloween fun, everybody! This is just bizarre and depressing. Bipolar disorder, anxiety, depression… I believe any topic can be funny as long as it’s framed in the proper way, but as we’ve seen time and again from this show now, it really feels like the joke is just to laugh at the person. Martin is gay! The FBI agent last episode has a mental disorder! Skinner’s having an anxiety attack after decades of psychological torment! Let’s laugh at how broken he is!
– For the first time in years, Kang and Kodos actually cameo within a story rather than being isolated to their own cutaway or tagged on at the end. They’re one of the captives at Burns’s freak show (“Creatures from another galaxy!” “Actually, it’s more of a globular cluster!”) Then Burns drops a sheet over their domes, to their chagrin.

One good line/moment: The extended opening title sequence, directed by Guillermo del Toro, is the obvious pick. Although I do think it’s overly long and has way too much stuff going on, I still think it’s one of the coolest things to come out of the show in a long time. It’s clear del Toro just wanted to cram every single horror icon into one piece, including references to all of his movies. Personal highlights are the nuclear rod turning Homer into one of those horrific Blade vampires, Lisa jamming with all the iterations of the Phantom of the Opera through film history, and the pan-over prior to the Simpson house where it’s just a grab bag of all the monsters left on del Toro’s giant list.

Original airdate: September 29, 2013

The premise: Homer returns from a nuclear power convention acting strangely sedated, as well as refusing pork and beer. A concerned Lisa informs the FBI, believing her father has been brainwashed into enacting an attack on the power plant.

The reaction: For the show nowadays, a parody means just straight up recreating scenes from popular movies and TV shows shot-for-shot with a yellow coat of paint, desperately hoping some third-string entertainment news outlets will pump out a few articles about a Game of Thrones couch gag. Here, we have an episode based on the Showtime series Homeland, which I know next to nothing about. The show is filled with scenes and flashbacks and an entire character that I suppose were pulled right from the show, but with no context, I didn’t know what to make of them. Hell, the episode opens with a recreation of the Homeland opening title sequence, so having not seen the show, I already felt alienated. The plot is that Homer comes back from a convention acting really weird. He speaks in short, monotone sentences, and for unexplained reasons, he vehemently refuses pork chops and beer. Lisa is suspect, but Marge is none the wiser, loving her newly changed husband. I hate it when they write her this naive. She seriously has no concerns why Homer is acting so damn weird? From that point, it becomes another big mystery episode like “The Saga of Carl.” Why is Homer acting so weird? Why is he praying on a rug? What’s that strange device he’s bringing into the plant? Lisa corners him on it, and we finally get our laboriously torturous explanation that goes on for two whole minutes. Some eco-friendly activists kidnapped Homer, told him pigs don’t like being eaten, gave him a detox, and the strange device is to sabotage the power plant’s air ducts, rendering the facility unworkable. What a logical explanation! Except none of that accounts for why Homer was talking so weird and creepy through the entire second act. In the end, Burns gets the plant shut down by accident, but we get an end tag of it reopening because it has to. Similarly, a magic floating beer can appears to tempt Homer back to being his old self. What’s the point in making huge changes if you’re not going to bother resolving them in a meaningful way? Or at least in a funny way. But questions such at these are pretty futile to ask at this point.

Three items of note:
– We open on the breakfast table as Marge serves Bart cereal complete with multiple medications mixed in (including Focusyn, because do you remember that?) He then recites the Wizard of Oz quote about the isosceles triangle. Lisa points out that’s incorrect, and Bart retorts that he’s rehearsing his lines for the school play. It’s basically a repeat of the joke from “$pringfield,” except much more belabored, and not featuring Homer fishing Henry Kissinger’s glasses out of the toilet. Hell, that random joke even led into the plot with him wearing the glasses keeping him from getting fired.
– Kristen Wiig plays an FBI agent on the case, except she’s a complete maniac. I guess she’s supposed to be Claire Danes’s Homeland character, but I don’t know what to make of her. She seems spastic and incompetent, and she also takes bipolar medication, because mental disorders are hilarious! Is that from Homeland? Or just some thing they thought would be funny? 
– Lisa confronts Homer in the plant operations center, that requires a facial scan of Mr. Burns to enter. They make a joke how she got in thanks to Girl Scout cookies or whatever, but this show has a debilitating habit of characters just appearing wherever they need to be regardless of logic or reason. I’m supposed to just go with it, but honestly, how the hell did Lisa get in there? Because she had to, because plot resolution.

One good line/moment: Homer gets into the operations center himself by holding up a disgusting craggly looking fish with Burns’ distinctive silhouette. The joke is slightly diminished in that it cuts to a close-up shot of the fish after it’s scanned, in case you missed the gag somehow.

Original airdate: May 19, 2013

The premise: Marge accidentally signs up on an Ashley Madison-type dating site, and ends up connecting with an unhappily married man voiced by comedy darling Seth MacFarlane. She’s aggravated thinking Homer forgot their anniversary, but he, meanwhile, is busy reconstructing an old mall train from one of their greatest dates.

The reaction: Honestly, it feels like these premises are just getting thinner and thinner. It used to be that episodes would feature crazy twists and go off the rails, but now, so many of these feel like barely anything happens in them. We start with Marge wanting to order cupcakes for Homer’s anniversary off of DollyMadison.com, but she’s shocked when her sisters point out she’s actually on SassyMadison.com. We then see she’s already put in all of her personal information, as well as a photo, onto this dating site for married people. This is really what we’re supposed to go with? How fucking dumb is Marge? We see the giant logo on the laptop screen, with the slogan “Cheat, Stray, Love.” But whatever. I guess because she’s anal retentive, Marge responds to each message she gets personally, until the last one from Ben, who seems like a nice enough guy, who she continues to talk to. She ends up running into him at the supermarket, and then later goes for coffee, and then later has a cyber date with him watching the latest transparent “parody” “Upton Rectory,” airing on PBC. What could that be a take on? In every single scene, she just says over and over how she’s happily married, she doesn’t want to continue this any further, but then she does. But it’s not like she even acknowledges she’s on a slippery slope, or that she’s developing feelings for Ben or anything. It’s just “this can’t continue,” and then it does. Over and over. The plot mostly ends with her dumping him in her mind. No progression, no emotional arc for Marge, nothing. The entire episode she’s pissed at Homer for seemingly forgetting their upcoming anniversary, while he’s been working in secret restoring an old train from the upscale mall from their first anniversary date. That, too, has no stakes. At one point, Homer gets a call that the engine car is damaged, but then that’s it. Both plots have no conflicts; Marge exhibits no real feelings toward Ben and nothing happens, and Homer wants to fix the train, then he does. The episode culminates with the reveal of the train, as the whole family takes a ride. Homer asks his beloved, “Do you think we’ll last twenty-five years?” To camera, Bart cheekily replies, “Nothing should.” The writers know how ramshackle this show is. They must know. They must.

Three items of note:
– I’m no fan of Seth MacFarlane, but that being said though, I’m surprised they gave him such a bland, nothing role. It’s just his normal speaking voice he uses for Brian the dog, playing a character with no discernible personality. Then later they have him sing a crooning tune in Marge’s mind, because that’s a thing he always has to do (though to be fair, to me, his Sinatra-style singing is his strongest creative merit). Lisa Lampanelli also guest stars as his insufferable wife who barely gets any lines. Just throw those guest star names on the pile!
– The opening is pretty aggravating. It’s a flashback to nine years ago, with Homer, Marge and baby Bart taking a stroll in the fancy Springfield outdoor mall, the one we saw last season in the Facebook episode. Hadn’t it just opened in that show? It certainly doesn’t feel like a location from 2003, and as mentioned in that other review, it certainly doesn’t belong in a dumpy town like Springfield. They run into Ned Flanders, who Homer happily lets watch Bart. Now, in continuity, they hadn’t moved to Evergreen Terrace until about a year later, but whatever. We also see Squeaky Voiced Teen in this flashback, but my theory is that there are hundreds of clones of him throughout time, so that’s fine.
– The Sassy Madison commercial has a stylized UPA look to it, sort of, which they use again for a song at the end to kill more time. I guess they really loved how it looked, but it felt very bland to me. It reminded me of “The Saga of Carl” where Bart and Lisa watch a video about probability at a museum, which contained zero jokes. Commercial and film strip parodies used to be this show’s bread and butter, and they can’t even make those funny or entertaining anymore. Where are the funnies? That they rhymed “commercial” with “Herschel”?

One good line/moment: Nothing again. Normally I write these reviews quickly after I watch the episode, but I saw this and “Carl” a day ago, and scanning through both, I really couldn’t think of a thing. That’s a bad sign, right?

Original airdate: May 19, 2013

The premise: The gang at Moe’s wins the lottery, but when Carl mysteriously disappears with the winning ticket, Homer, Lenny and Moe must travel to his homeland of Iceland to uncover the mysteries of Carl’s past.

The reaction: I’ve always posited that the show could keep things fresh by exploring the lives of its endless parade of semi-regular characters, with or without the Simpson family making an appearance. The show’s been going on so long, why not try something different and take a risk like that? But as we’ve seen, the show has done the opposite, degrading the secondary and tertiary cast to one-dimensional shadows of their previous selves. But now, we have an episode focusing on Carl Carlson of all people. Was anyone clamoring to hear his backstory? But hey, this is what I wanted, right? He’s Icelandic, he’s got a past he wants to make right, I can get on board if this is interesting. But it isn’t. Half of the episode is focused on the mystery of finding out where Carl went and why, sitting and waiting as Homer and the gang find clues to track him down, all the while just repeating the same lines of dialogue about not knowing who Carl is and why would he betray them. When they finally get to Iceland and find Carl, he comes clean: he spent their winnings on a missing excerpt from an ancient text that he believes will clear up the besmirched name of his ancestors. Where did he buy this page from? We also never really see or hear anything from Carl’s parents, or about Carl’s past, if he was bullied or made fun of as a kid, or anything like that. This is an episode about Carl, but we really find out nothing about him. He’s remorseless about betraying his friends and stealing $150,000 from them because he doesn’t consider them friends (“We are just guys who sit next to each other at a bar, talking about… guy stuff!”) So that’s the excuse? This is especially weird after over a decade of portraying Lenny and Carl as inseparable life partners/secret lovers. Also, of the two, it always seemed Lenny as the more emotional one. I guess Carl just kept it bottled up after all these years. Whatever. Homer, Lenny and Moe take the page, discover it actually damns the Carlsons even more, and then win over the Icelanders by telling them of the many small kindnesses Carl has done for them. And that solves the conflict. And ultimately they learn nothing. Carl yearned for friendships where people actually get to know each other, but then the four just go back to sitting at the bar saying nothing. Nothing of value gained or lost, I guess.

Three items of note:
– Between this and “Whiskey Business,” in a supporting role, it seems that Marge just exists to parrot exposition and say lines to push the plot forward. At the dinner table with the guys talking about Carl, she repeats their jokes as she reinforces the story points in case you were falling in and out of consciousness while watching. Then later, they have Homer call her on Skype from Iceland because I guess they couldn’t think of another way to get plot points out.
– Homer, Lenny and Moe begin auditioning replacements for Carl. First up? Lou, who quickly realizes why he’s there and leaves in a huff. Going out the door, he passes the next candidate: Dr. Hibbert. Yay, racism! Ugh. Carl was never the “black friend,” he was just this guy Homer knew from work. But since every character has been simplified to their basest form, now his “blackness” is a thing we can make jokes about. I remember a “joke” from way back of Carl, Hibbert, Lou and Drederick Tatum, four very, very different characters, carpooling for some reason, and Homer driving by giving the black power salute. It’s funny because they’re black? It didn’t help that right after that scene, Moe yelled at a picture of Carl, saying he never wanted to see that “moolah-stealin’ jackpot thief” again, and for a second, I thought he said “moolie,” an Italian slur for a black person. What is this, Do the Right Thing?
– The middle portion of the episode with Homer, Lenny, Moe: Mystery Solvers is so fucking boring. They find out where Carl is, they go to his house and stake out in front, all while they say the same stupid shit in every damn scene wondering about Carl’s true nature and what they should do. All the dialogue just repeats. The next morning, they travel Carl by car in a long extended scene, then they chase him on foot in a long extended scene. Snoozeville.

One good line/moment: Can’t think of anything for this one.

Original airdate: May 12, 2013

The premise: Marge makes Bart take up piano, where he is instantly smitten by his teacher, leading him to fake his talents to get her more paying students. In exchange for the lessons, Marge agrees to teach her father how to drive. Meanwhile, Homer must deal with being fully bald when his two hairs finally fall out.

The reaction: Some of these episodes, halfway through, I really don’t know what’s going on in terms of what the drive of the story is or why I should care. Bart has the hots for his piano teacher, who wants more pupils so she can help her father’s business. So we see a montage of him improving his abilities, but then in a bait-and-switch, at a big school concert, we see that he in fact was just playing music from a CD player embedded in the piano. Seems like a pretty ritzy item for Springfield Elementary to have. He ejects the disc right on stage after the show, but I guess no one was looking, including Marge, who walks up behind him a second later. So the teacher gets a lot of new students from the exposure, but Bart seems bummed about it. He goes to his lesson with a gift, but is disappointed to find he has to wait his turn behind a bunch of other kids. “If I got you all these students, shouldn’t you be grateful?” he asks. What exactly is Bart expecting of her? It’s not like he’s asking her out or wanting to spend more time with her, that line is so strange. But that’s the last we see of her, as the plot switches to a Bart-Marge episode, where Marge signs Bart up to a junior talent show, Bart has to admit he’s a fraud, and then mend fences with his mother. Marge is furious with her son; we open act four with her washing dishes and smashing them on the floor as a genuinely saddened Bart walks in. Why is she this pissed off? The show opened with Skinner recommending to her that Bart take up an instrument to improve his behavior, which despite there being no reason why he would say this, is never brought up again. By the end, Marge apologizes, saying, “It was wrong of me to force my dreams on you.” What? Is that what this was about? That was never mentioned before, ever. It’s like they were trying to repeat the Marge-Lisa story from “Last Tap Dance in Springfield,” but a bunch of script pages went missing. Mother and son make up at the end, but I was never clear what the emotional stakes were other then, Bart lied. Who cares?

Three items of note:
-This episode is pretty packed on the guest star front. Piano teacher Zenya and her father are voiced by Jane Krakowski and Bill Hader, SNL darlings that aren’t quite as horribly wasted as we’ve seen in the past (*cough*TinaFey*cough*), but just don’t have anything to work with. Hader probably fares the best, but that’s probably because I’m a fan. He also gets the thankless job of having to close out the story; Marge forgives Bart when he tells her that all Russians succeed by cheating, and that he’s “a good boy.” Cue hug. Easy as that? Patrick Stewart shows up in the B-plot with Homer, which I don’t really have anything to talk about. He plays a bald co-worker who magically appears in the break room after Lenny and Carl leave, never introduces himself, and just waxes on about how amazing and sexy it is to be bald. And then he leaves. I was expecting the scene to end with Lenny and Carl looking in on Homer talking to himself. It’s like he was just an imaginary person in his mind. But he wasn’t, I guess. Finally, we have Justin Bieber, complete with an on-screen warning before his scene. Surely the most amateur of writers can come up with some kind of smirk-worthy material ripping into the Biebs, but I guess even that’s too hard. They have Bieber try to get into the kids talent show pageant and being denied (“That’s another twenty-five bucks we’ll never see! God!”) That’s it. Nine words. Why the fuck do they bother booking these mega stars and give them nothing to do?
– The bullies refrain from giving Bart a hard time for taking piano lessons when he says he’s got a crush on the teacher. This leads to a wonderful bit of dialogue with Martin (“I have a swim lesson with a gorgeous lifeguard!” “What gender?” “You’re not allowed to ask!”) Firstly, why in the fuck would a simple-minded bully ask “What gender?” And second, this is another in a slowly developing series of jokes of laughing at Martin for being a little gay kid. Like, why else are we supposed to think that line is funny? It’s just so weird and terrible.
– Helen Lovejoy stops Marge at the supermarket, who insults Marge by comparing her to Bart (“Isn’t it great having a musical genius in the family?”) Forget that she also backhands Lisa with that comment as well, but what is this scene about? Like, Bart’s got a talent, and Marge doesn’t? Is that why she’s so mad? Also, what the fuck is going on with Maggie Roswell’s phone connection? Like with Luann Van Houten, her sound quality is so off compared to everyone else.

One good line/moment: Another outsourced couch gag, this time from the folks at Robot Chicken. A big part why I really loved it is because all of the models were based on the old Playmates line of Simpsons toys, which I feverishly collected when I was younger. So it was cool recognizing all of them. They even used the Simpsons car and school bus vehicles too. I also loved the shot of seeing the Flanders toy blow up, it felt so real, because it literally was them blowing up a real toy. Robot Chicken is hit or miss for me, but I thought this was a really well done sequence.