Original airdate: December 16, 2012

The premise: Abe spins a tale from Homer’s youth to explain his ambivalence toward Santa’s Little Helper: li’l Homer had a boyhood dog he loved more than anything, until he was forced to give it away after he bit a young and ruthless Mr. Burns.

The reaction: I’ve mentioned before about the show’s inability to marry sentimental moments with biting humor, but this episode seemed to forget it was supposed to be funny. The entire episode is Abe telling this sob story about Homer and his dog, and it all builds into one big treacly, attempting-to-be-emotional scene after another. So as we see, since he was a baby, Homer was thick-as-thieves with his beloved dog Bongo. But at a lobbying event for the new power plant, the dog ends up biting Mr. Burns, who swears revenge on the mutt. I choose to disregard the floating continuity here; the plant was just opening in Homer’s senior year in “The Way We Was,” but it really doesn’t matter. This also happened right after Mona left Abe, so is Rita in the picture yet? Why is Abe working at a smokestack delivery company and not busing tables? Speaking of “Gone Abie Gone,” where that episode cracked the door open of re-interpreting young Abe Simpson as sympathetic, this one burst right through it. Abe sends the dog to a farm out of town to save him, and ends up working for Mr. Burns for a year training his hell hounds, all while his son is bitterly resentful for seemingly abandoning his best friend. Homer, of course, has a skewed memory of this, thinking of his dad as a cruel monster. Are all the flashbacks we’ve seen of Abe being a dick to Homer just from his skewed perspective of his youth? No, because that’s fucking dumb. We go from Homer tearfully saying goodbye to his dog, to Abe sad that his son hates him, to Homer revisiting the farm later to find the dog has bonded with a new owner, to the resolution of the story: a Christmas card of the dog sleeping with his old sweatshirt, showing he did still care. My God… it’s trying so, so hard to pull at your heartstrings, it ends up being just a big pile of bland, sterile mush.

Three items of note:
– We get a full scene of Homer playing a town-building game on his myPad, because I guess “A Tree Grows in Springfield” wasn’t enough. It almost feels like subtle cross-promotion for the Tapped Out game, which had released the year this aired.
– The flashback story also gives the show license to revisit other characters. We see Herman getting his arm ripped off, Wiggum and Eddie on patrol as dog catchers, then learn in one scene their plans to join the police force, and where Ralph’s name came from. In the present, Bart has a handy checklist of origin stories covered in a lame meta moment (“Boy, we’re filling in a lot of gaps here!”) Also, after Abe finishes his one year of service, Burns demands that he forever has to wear slippers and a bolo tie, so I guess the mystery of why Abe dresses like that has been solved? Weren’t these two in the war together, and Burns was a spineless coward?
– The episode was short again, so we get a minute-long vignette of Burns lamenting the Mitt Romney 2012 loss and the fiscal cliff for billionaires. Are these end tag bits going to be a common thing now? It feels weird framing Burns as a modern-day Republican, and I’m not really sure why. I guess since he always felt like a miserly boss from the 1920s, it’s odd to hear him talk about modern immigration reform and namedrop Marco Rubio.

One good line/moment: Nothing for this one. As I said, there weren’t really a lot of jokes in here to begin with, and what was there were attempts at being meta about the flashback, or Homer and his tablet again. Yawn.

Original airdate: December 9, 2012

The premise: In an attempt to feel young and hip, Homer takes a shining to a trendy new family straight out of Portland, but as tensions between the two families and their parenting styles arise, Springfield finds itself over-run by pretentious hipsters.

The reaction: When did making fun of hipsters become passe? It’s hard to tell how much of a time capsule this episode is, or if the show was late to the party as usual. Portlandia premiered in January 2011, so that’s a close window, I guess. Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein appear as the cool parents, with Patton Oswalt playing their 10-year-old son (I love Oswalt, but this has got to be the most egregious child-with-a-grown-ass-adult’s voice we’ve seen on the show yet.) The episode is filled to the brim with hipster jokes: their behavior, their weird, eclectic tastes, loads of gags that mostly fall flat. The main narrative thrust is Homer’s desire to seem like a cool dad, a la “Homerpalooza,” except where in that episode it was Homer encroaching into Bart and Lisa’s interests, here, Homer is just trying to emulate this Terrance guy completely separate from his kids. Bart and Lisa tagging along to the new hipster lifestyle is covered in, what else, a quick music montage. Ten seconds after that, Bart and Lisa are gushing about Korean film festivals and trendy art openings, so that’s covered! Things come to a head when the snide disaffected hipster youth T-Rex (that’s his name) takes one too many potshots at Homer being a poser and Bart attacks him, resulting in Terrance shunning Homer. After the act break, we see Homer is fuming in anger at Bart, but he’s immediately diffused when he learns what actually happened. Then Marge expresses her longstanding grievances, and he’s even more sympathetic. I guess Homer just never bothered to ask them, he was too busy cramming himself into skinny jeans and wearing a scarf soaked in sweat. Then the hipsters invade Springfield, the two families work together to stop a fire, and then the hipsters leave when Springfield is voted the coolest town in America, ergo, making it uncool. Meh. This episode’s left me pretty numb, but it wasn’t entirely terrible. Some of Homer’s eagerness to seem cool again felt genuine, as was Bart’s relationship with T-Rex, with the latter’s hesitance toward actually indulging and being a kid for once was enjoyable at the end. But it was all surrounded by the usual dumb nonsense that the show is always want to do.

Three items of note:
– Marge’s problem with their new neighbors stems from her aversion toward the new mom openly breastfeeding. She’s clearly uncomfortable with all the weird hipster shit she doesn’t understand, but it never actually goes anywhere where she grows or takes anything away from it. In the end, Marge is exposed (not that way) in a nursing mother’s circle for using formula, and then the moms try to abduct Maggie and nurse her themselves. It’s a gag, but it all feels very weird, but I’m sure it was worth it for those wonderful boob puns the writers came up with for Marge to say (“Holy aureole!” “You nipple Nazis!”)
– Visiting the hipster family’s home for the first time, Marge is perplexed by a The Onion newspaper on their coffee table. She reads a fake headline, thinks it’s real, then Cool Mom explains to her what The Onion is. It’s weird, it felt like a promo for a specific product wedged into the episode. The show also takes a swipe at The A.V. Club by showing their harsh movie reviews (The Wizard of Oz: D+, Citizen Kane: F), which I find very ironic, given how incredibly generous they’ve been in rating this show over the years. Most of their ratings hover around the B-range, no matter how critical the actual review may be.
– The episode ends with the hipsters high-tailing it out of Springfield after it’s been declared the coolest city in America. It seemed a little strange considering that even before the hipster take-over, we see Homer, the kids, and Terrance indulge in a lot of cool events in the montage: rock shows, roller derby, Mexican wrestling… they even take a trip to Protozoa Records, a “parody” of Amoeba Records in Hollywood, another example of the never-ending LA-ification of Springfield. As we’ve seen, Springfield is no longer a run-down shitbucket of a town. Now it’s full of trendy restaurants, nightclubs, outdoor promenades… why wouldn’t it be a cool, bustling place to live?

One good line/moment: Homer calling 911 to report a missing donut cart is the biggest moment in Chief Wiggum’s career. We immediately cut to the entire force on high alert, relentlessly scouring the city. It’s a really solid joke that I genuinely laughed at.

Original airdate: November 25, 2012

The premise: An unwavering funk washes over Homer, one that is swayed when he wins a new myPad in a raffle. When the tablet breaks, he resumes his despair, until a mysterious message of hope appears in his own backyard.

The reaction: This has got to be the emptiest episode I’ve seen yet. If I squint charitably, I can kind of see a through-line plot or theme, but it’s pretty damn thin. The first six minutes is Homer feeling depressed. Nothing specific, just life has got him down. It’s like Bart in “A Totally Fun Thing That Bart Will Never Do Again,” but that episode at least highlights his sense of ennui going through his repetitive dull life. Here, Homer’s just bummed for no real reason, which would be fine if the episode actually made a point about his listless nature. But everything changes when he gets his hands on a sweet, sweet myPad. There’s some actual ribbing of Steve Jobs and Apple, which I was surprised to see, especially given the love fest that was “MyPods and Boomsticks” (I guess since Jobs’s death, they feel less of a need to suck up?), but it’s largely overshadowed by four minutes worth of bits of Homer showing off how cool his new toy is. It literally is like the framework of a commercial: Homer’s life sucked, but now it’s awesome because he got an iPad! I mean, a myPad! The segments just kept going on and on, and reaching the halfway mark, I still had no clue what this episode was doing. When his beloved tablet breaks, Homer prays to God for… something? Which he receives in a seemingly holy message, “HOPE” written in sap on a tree in his backyard. From this point, it almost turns into “Lisa the Skeptic” where the whole town is inspired and gathers around the miracle tree, except there still doesn’t feel like any real direction. The miracle turns out to be a hoax, Marge convinces Homer that his feelings of hope were still real, and then it’s revealed that Homer forged the HOPE message himself. So his subconscious believed in him all along? What am I to take away from this episode? I honestly don’t know.

Three items of note:
– At the school fundraiser, we see Ned and Edna in a little scene together, I guess just to remind you they’re still together. I’m curious how many of those we have left. We also have Skinner watching sadly from afar. For God’s sakes, at this point we’re almost a decade since the episode where he left her at the altar, how many more sad, pathetic Skinner jokes does this show have in it?
– There’s so little meaning in this episode. Homer has this spiritual awakening, but we’re never clear on what exactly is going on in his fucking mind, other than HOPE. He hijacks Lovejoy’s sermon just to shout about hope, and then we get one of those The Lost Weekend parodies of Homer walking against black with signs around him, except they’re all things with the word “hope” in them. The Hope Diamond, Bob Hope Film Festival… I guess Homer is just invested in the word “hope”? What the fuck is happening?
– Since this episode had no story, they ran short. So to fill the last three minutes, we have “Logomania,” a toothless photocopy of the Academy Award winning short film Logorama. As I say time and again, these segments don’t count as parodies because they aren’t really riffing or subverting anything of the original source material. The thought process presumably went like this: the writers loved the short, they know the series has no shortage of fake brands, so they decided to just do their own version. It’s not even that creative; an underdog story of a shrimpy guy (Happy Little Elf) saving the damsel in distress (Malibu Stacey) from a monster (Funzo). And it especially suffers when you put it against the original short, which is just bursting at the seams with originality and creative uses for different brands and logos. If you haven’t seen it, you really should give it a watch. Part of me feels pretty depressed in thinking more people have probably seen this episode than the short film it was ripping off.

One good line/moment: The first minute or so of the rainy day I actually enjoyed. Homer’s nonsense dream was fun (“We’ll be right back after this word from oxygen, which Homer desperately needs to live!”). We also get a pretty fantastic gag of the church sign holding water and the letters floating, which I genuinely laughed out loud at.

Original airdate: November 18, 2012

The premise: Homer finds out his new bowling buddy Dan is actually Fat Tony’s accountant, and in Tony’s brief absence, he becomes a temporary mafia don. Meanwhile, Lisa adds more iron to her diet by taking up eating insects.

The reaction: There’s a moment two-thirds into the episode where Dan (voiced by Steve Carell) is having a crisis of conscience, that to truly succeed in business one must purge all human emotion, to justify himself in killing off some of Fat Tony’s gang to cut costs. He’s telling all this to Homer, who looks very uncomfortable watching this guy unravel before his eyes. This scene could have been written a little stronger (as with everything nowadays), but I like the idea of it, and the progression of this character: a meek, put-upon accountant becoming a cold, ruthless mafia don who regards the bottom line more than human life. Except the story is very thin and clumsy. I love Steve Carell so I was smiling through a lot of this episode, but there were also a couple of strange, random turns. One nonsensical pep talk from Moe about being a hardass boss changes Dan on a dime, and later on, he repeatedly flip flops from being nice and innocent to brandishing a gun and looking to shoot to kill. After his realization of his own bloodlust, Dan has Homer tie him up in the Simpson basement. Then a bunch of grasshoppers crawl over and inside his body for hours (more on that later). Then when he’s discovered, he immediately pulls a gun on Homer so he can escape. So there was no point to that creepy crawly trauma other than a feeble attempt to have some connection between the A and B plots, and to get Carell to scream a couple times. The ending involves Dan confronting Fat Tony’s goons, and Homer throwing him off killing them, which for some reason, Dan just moves onto the next one after a single inconvenience. And eventually he ends up working at a mall kiosk piercing ears. I feel like there was potential with this character, but things ended up coming out a bit muddled. Not as much as usual, but still muddled.

Three items of note:
– Boy oh boy, three boring Lisa B-plots in a row! Lisa passes out during a recital (no, this isn’t “Lisa’s Rival”), which leads to her needing to take iron pills to supplement her vegetarian diet. But the living dead comes to her aid in the form of Lunchlady Doris, with Tress MacNeille not even trying to match Doris Grau’s gravelly tone anymore. She informs Lisa that eating food made from insects is a sort of vegetarian gray area, so she joins a foodie society consisting of her, Professor Frink, Cookie Kwan, Herman and Old Jewish Man (did they just throw darts at that giant Simpsons cast poster to come up with this roster?) And yeah, it’s gross. Really gross. And there’s not much else to this story other than it’s gross. Lisa has a nightmare about the bugs telling her they’re living creatures that feel pain, which feels exactly like “Lisa the Vegetarian,” so she gives it all up. She had been keeping grasshoppers in a tank in the basement (which get loose and swarm Dan) and then she lets them out into the wild. And that’s the end. Lisa is such a boring character now. I mentioned “Rival” and “Vegetarian,” those episodes saw her run through a whole spectrum of emotions and they felt so real. Now Lisa stories involve her being a smug pseudo-intellectual in pursuing some cause, where she’s either moderately content, or shocked/disappointed by some kind of twist ending or reveal. Yawn.
– In a hollow act of nostalgia mining, the opening features the Pin Pals versus the Holy Rollers. Dan has replaced Otto, who hilariously has his head caught in the ball return because he’s high. The Holy Rollers, in place of Helen and the deceased Maude, we have the not-Bing-Crosby Parson, and Rabbi Krustofski. I feel like at this point, psycho Christian Flanders wouldn’t be comfortable having a Jew on his bowling team. Remember when he needed to “re-bless” his hand after shaking it with a Catholic?
– We see Louie eating a TV dinner in his apartment watching Jeopardy!, and we hear actual audio from the show with Alex Trebek, who gets credited as a guest voice at the end. It’s kind of weird to hear a real audio clip from another show in an episode. I feel like that has to have been done before, but I’m blanking on when. I’m sure someone will post it in the comments.

One good line/moment: There were a good handful here, honestly. Dan stabs a knife down on the table, just barely missing piercing Legs’s hand. He recoils in shock (“What’re yah doin’! I talk with that hand!”)

Original airdate: November 11, 2012

The premise: Homer and Marge discover Abe has gone missing from the retirement home, and learn new things about his past life over the course of their search. Meanwhile, Lisa becomes addicted to online poker.

The reaction: Haven’t they done this episode title before? Anyway, we haven’t had a good ol’ revisionist backstory in a while, so let’s dive right in. Sometime in Abe’s past, we learn he was a chipper bus boy and aspiring song writer at a trendy nightclub, with a beautiful headliner that had her eyes on him. Then later it’s revealed that this romance was occurring while Homer was alive, after Mona left him. The two eventually got married, but when Rita is called away to tour in Europe, Abe makes the decision to stay behind to tend to li’l Homer. So, multiple problems here. Tey make a joke about Homer being too brain damaged to remember all of this, but it seems like such a stretch. How long did their courtship last? Did it overlap with his marriage to Mona at all? But the biggest problem is this now super clean and sanitized portrayal of Abe Simpson. In past flashbacks, particularly in “Mother Simpson,” he was a sharp contrast to the vibrant and rebellious Mona, a no-nonsense stick-in-the-mud who drank, was inattentive to his wife, and scoffed at Joe Namath’s rebellious sideburns. Now he’s a chipper, idealistic thirty-something sucking face with a smoking hot lounge singer? Then they try and weave an emotional moment with Abe doing what’s best for his son and not leaving with Rita, but there’s really no reason Homer couldn’t have come along with him. It’s another example of the show’s complete inability to balance emotional moments with sharp humor. Like we saw with Homer’s sickeningly sweet speech to Marge at the fertility clinic last episode, it’s just cloying treacle with no edge to it. And why did Rita never try to track Abe down when she got back? They make a joke that she was a smackhead (SO EDGY!), but it’s clear she’s never gotten over him( for some reason) and she’s living in Springfield, why has she not opened a goddamn phone book and called him? The episode ends with Rita and Abe sitting at the piano singing their song, an irony-free ending that means nothing. What a waste.

Three items of note:
– The B-story involves Homer putting five grand of settlement money toward Lisa’s college fund, which he puts into an online poker site, which he repeats over and over to (non)comedic effect in an incredibly annoying and painful scene. This leads to Lisa becoming addicted to playing the game, growing and growing her pot. It just seems like one of the writers had played online poker once and figured that was good enough for a script. But this ain’t no “$pringfield,” the story is completely divorced from the A-plot, and its conclusion is nowhere near as real and honest. Lisa loses all her money to Sideshow Bob, but then it’s revealed that it was actually Bart using a fake avatar. Bart then explains that since the site found out they were underage, they took away all their winnings. How did they find that out? How did Bart get better at Lisa at poker? And why would he do this? After a brief pause, Bart sheepishly admits he felt sorry for his sister and wanted to help her. Lisa chimes in, “I have the ending for my memoir!” holding up a full script entitled “Surviving Bart.” What? It’s just more utter, utter nonsense.
– It continues to be stunning to me how awful the dialogue can be at times. Marge finds Rita’s phone number, holds the phone to her ear and starts prattling off her lines (“Did you know a man named Abe Simpson?”) Rita responds, “Know him? I’m married to him.” Marge gasps, says to Homer, “She’s married to your dad!” Homer’s response? “Woo-hoo! I get two Christmases!” It’s hard to get the feel of how stilted this all sounds in text, a lot of this show is characters explaining things with some attempts at jokes thrown in, but this is a prime example of it. Awkwardly pushing the plot forward, and a random, shoe-horned joke for Homer to give us a serviceable act break. Blegh.
– The lounge of the past is now a seedy biker bar, and for some reason, we see Meathook and Ramrod from “Take My Wife, Sleaze” are there. They don’t say anything, they’re just background characters, but I thought it was a little odd.

One good line/moment: I can’t really think of any for this one. Homer’s lawyer at the beginning had the same character design and similar voice to Victor, the hovercar dealer from Futurama, so his presence on screen gave me a brief contact high of a much, much, much more enjoyable experience.