Original airdate: March 4, 2012

The premise: Bart vents his frustration with his father through tagging a series of unflattering representations of him throughout the city. This creative spree comes to the attention of other street artists, who help arrange a solo show for Bart’s work.

The reaction: This episode almost feels like a checklist of a lot of the problems plaguing the show now. We start out with a couch gag themed after Game of Thrones, meaning they just re-did the Game of Thrones opening titles but with Springfield. That’s not a parody, it’s a re-creation, an extended tribute to this show that the staff loves. Referencing something does not make it entertaining or funny. This leads right into our opening set piece, set at Springfield’s very own Trader Joe’s named… Swapper Jack’s. I guess we’re supposed to laugh because we recognize what it is? Again, it’s just a re-creation. Those poor background artists work so hard on these elaborate new settings, all for the purpose of nothing, aside from a few pithy comments that don’t even come close to actual satire. It also rings as more SoCal-izing of Springfield. I know Trader Joe’s has spread nationwide, but I had never heard of one before coming to LA. But as for the actual story, Homer gets mad at Bart and forces him to sleep in a rabbit’s cage (don’t really feel like going into that further), and in retaliation, Bart makes a bunch of stencils to enact his revenge, a parody of the Andre the Giant “OBEY” image, but with Homer’s face reading “DOPE.” Then we have a montage, where we see the image is everywhere: coast guard flags, billboards, airplanes… two ten-year-olds manage to accomplish all this, somehow. Bart also apparently has some untapped art skills, as he throws some Banksy-esque graffiti pieces into the mix. This calls the attention of some of the most famous street artists, who immediately offer to host a gallery show of Bart’s work. So, it’s another “Simpson is an instant success” story; once a normal rambunctious kid with an “El Barto” street tag, now Bart is an extremely skilled and talented artist. By the end of the episode, Homer feels humiliated, and Bart makes it up to him by spray painting his car, exponentially increasing its value. So the conflict was solved by Bart’s exorbitant wealth and success! This show feels more like wish fulfillment than satire.

Three items of note:
– As evidenced by the title, there is an Apu story in here, which is barely even a plot, as it lasts all of three scenes. We start at Swapper Jack’s when Apu is offended overhearing Homer saying he’s going to do all his shopping here from now on. But Springfield has a grocery store; the Kwik-E-Mart has usually been when the Simpsons need to pick up stuff quick. This ultimately leads to Homer and Apu having a little fight with toothpick swords. The “joke” is that it’s treated super seriously and goes through the motions of a typical movie sword fight. But, really, what’s going on in the minds of our characters? Why are they doing this? Once Apu gets Homer pinned, then what? He’s going to stab him multiple times with that little sword? Eight minutes later is our next scene, where a disheveled Apu attempts to rob Swapper Jack’s, and new employee Snake talks him down. Clearly, this role-reversal is the only reason they did this. It might have been clever if it was set up at all. We don’t see the Kwik-E-Mart in financial crisis, or return to Swapper Jack’s at all since the opening, so it’s random and unexpected to just return there to continue this “plot.” Three minutes after that is our final scene: Apu is boarding up the Kwik-E-Mart when Manjula arrives to tell him Swapper Jack’s is going out of business for selling monkey meat. We don’t see that either. This “plot” is all just characters telling us things that happened. I’d say this story sounds way more interesting than the street art shit, but I’m sure if they devoted more screen time to it, I’d probably hate it just as much.
– We up our total guest star count some more with the street artists: Kenny Scharf, Robbie Conal, Ron English, and, with the most prominent role, Shepard Fairy. They show up, introduce themselves, talk about how cool street art is, and praise Bart for his work and offer him a show. Where’s the humor in all this? I loved Exit Through the Gift Shop, and honestly, if you’re a comedy writer and you can’t think of some solid jokes about the business and culture of street artists after watching that movie, you should probably be considering a new career. But as is the case with most guest stars now, their role is not to be mocked, or poke fun, or anything of any substance, but to show up because we love you and the work you do, and say a few lines that sort of kind of mildly rib you a little but not really. I was stunned that they actually influenced the plot slightly in having Shepard be an undercover cop, but they over-explain the joke, which was basically already made in his first scene about him being hypocritical. Also infuriating is Bart not knowing who Shepard is, despite his “DOPE” piece being a riff off his “OBEY” piece, which he cites by name in his introduction.
– Through the whole episode, Homer is painfully oblivious to the fact that it’s his face all over town. This is the sort of thing you’d play for laughs in one scene, not through the whole episode. They just keep stretching it out, to the point that Homer silences his own brain with beer to prevent him from hearing the truth. Then, with four or so minutes to go, Bart is woken up from a dream by his father strangling him, who has figured it out off-screen apparently. Then he’s sad that Bart doesn’t respect him, and the two have a limp make-up at the end. It’s more of the show just going through the motions of these emotional beats that start and stop with no build up or motivation. Homer’s angry, and then he just switches to sad.

One good line/moment: The art show turned out to be a police sting. Lou appears as a centaur pointing a bow and arrow at Bart, which is weird. But then as the scene progresses, we see that Eddie was the horse end, and he detaches to handcuff Bart. The fact that it just happened unmentioned was a nice little background joke.

Original airdate: February 19, 2012

The premise: Sick of their decades of obnoxious and costly escapades, the town of Springfield collectively agrees to banish the Simpson family, who find themselves a new home in the lawless outskirts known as the Outlands.

The reaction: As we pass by more and more meaningless milestones, it only becomes increasingly depressing that the percentage of actually decent episodes of the series as a whole shrinks more and more. These tentpole episodes are doubly saddening in that they sort of reflect the scope of what the show thinks it is at that moment, and it’s always extremely divergent from the classic series we once knew. A clear example is the impetus for this story, wherein the citizens of Springfield hold a secret meeting to discuss throwing the Simpson family out of town. Their reasoning? Homer’s drunken escapades and Bart’s pranks have cost them all a fortune, and they just can’t take it anymore. So, multiple issues here. First, Springfield has always been a mob mentality town. They’re all mush-brained idiots who we’ve seen many, many times have had their opinions swayed and caused mass destruction and chaos. There are alcoholic maniacs in town who are much more dangerous than Homer, and we’ve seen shenanigans the local bullies pull that are much worse than what Bart normally does. But none of that matters. We’ve seen over the years that the Simpson family, particularly Homer, have gone from normal residents of this jerkwater berg, to being town-wide hated pariahs. What possible reason would Cookie Kwan have to viciously hate this family? Or Sideshow Mel? Or Rabbi freaking Krustofski? But whatever. The Simpsons stumble upon the Outlands by way of a crazy person pulling a gun on them, and they decide to move there… for some reason. We barely see the Outlands to actually get a sense of what exactly the space is and why the family loves it there, because we get alternating jokes of them riding ATVs and motorbikes, and talking about coyotes stealing children and Maggie getting involved in knife fights. But the Outlands is so goddamn cool and popular that eventually all of Springfield decides to move there… for some reason. Again, we don’t even know what the fuck this place is, but by the end of the episode, Springfield is being rebuilt there. I dare say, this is a hundred times dumber than the ending of “Trash of the Titans”; as stupid as that was, at least it has a story and character motivation you could mostly follow. Like all episodes of this show now, this was a bunch of incomprehensible noise masquerading as a plot. And they end with a self-congratulatory card telling viewers to go outside for once before complaining on the Internet. Will do, guys, I already had my morning walk. Now that I’m back, I can say this episode was a piece of shit.

Three items of note:
– Flanders is the only person who arrives to come to the Simpson family’s defense. Quimby anticipated this would happen, so his rebuttal is to swing a gigantic wooden log down the aisle, hurtling the poor man out of the building and embedding him on a parked car outside. First off, if Quimby expected this, why not air the phony emergency warning that kept the Simpsons inside at the Flanders house too? And where is Mrs. Krabappel, Rod and Todd? And second, they’re throwing the Simpsons out for being violent and destructive, but it’s fine for the mayor to viciously attack an innocent man like that?
– WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange shows up in the Outlands, because why develop the people and culture at this awesome place that everyone ends up moving to when we could just insert another celebrity guest? He’s easily one of the worst performances we’ve seen from a guest star, but I guess I can’t blame him for that.
– There’s no funny scene or explanation of how Homer gets Marge into Springfield near the end, they’re just there, and we end with them having sex in their old bed. But the bullies show up to squat in the abandoned house, who then just disappear when Chief Wiggum and the entire town inexplicably show up. When Homer shouts that the Outlands is filled with “non-jerks,” everyone gasps, and Quimby mournfully admits that they are jerks. Apropos of absolutely nothing. Marge claims their new home is full of people who accept them, which we never saw, and she and Homer leave. Then all of the townspeople want to move to the Outlands for some reason. Homer rents a plane with a banner advertising it as “a great place to take drugs and shoot things.” Then we see they’re rebuilding Springfield there. There’s no connective logical tissue to any of this. Lisa, who previously enjoyed the serene quiet of being close to nature, is now frothing at the mouth to plug in her laptop and read her liberal op-eds. We then end on Skinner being the only one left in old Springfield, and Bart picking him up. “Come on, man, we wouldn’t leave you behind!” he calls to his best buddy. Sure, he runs him into a few buildings from a dangling rope, but this is the boy who envisioned snapping his principal in half with gigantic robot ants, so what’s this about?

One good line/moment: As pictured above, they re-do the opening title with “The Outlands,” which to me, plays as a hollow mimicry of “Cape Feare,” but the button at the end of it got a smirk out of me (“Ehh, I’m sick of watching fox.”)

Original airdate: February 12, 2012

The premise: Lisa falls for a boy named Nick, who seems to share her cultural and intellectual interests, until for some reason, he doesn’t. Meanwhile, Bart and Milhouse pull their own Mythbusters-style experiments regarding urban legends from the schoolyard.

The reaction: Is this season getting worse? These last few episodes have just been absolutely abysmal, and now we see they can’t even handle a simple childhood romance without bungling it. Lisa has a random run-in with a boy at a restaurant in a self-declarative “meet-cute,” but of course, self-acknowledgement isn’t an excuse for hacky writing. Nick, who I don’t believe gets a name until about halfway through, looks and feels a lot like Colin from the movie, but with even less personality. He constantly makes reference to Hemingway, he wears suits, and he speaks and acts like a faux-intellectual thirty-year-old man, so he’s the perfect complement to modern day Lisa: boring, pretentious, unfunny. There’s two major shit elements of this show to discuss, so let’s start with the Nick character. We don’t see a whole lot of him, but for the first two acts, he’s Mr. Suave, super cool and collected. But then, apropos of nothing, when Lisa takes him off to a romantic spot, he becomes nervous and unsure of himself. I complain a lot about things happening for no reason, but this has got to be the worst example yet. There is literally no explanation given for this change in personality. They could have easily played it off as this kid talking a big game, but the moment the girl takes any initiative, he becomes super shy. But it’s not even that; the goodbye line they give Nick makes no sense whatsoever (“Lisa, I’m sorry that God gave me this gift of lying to girls… for a little while. I’ll see yah.”) What the fuck does that mean? Going from baffling to aggravating is Marge’s behavior in the episode. From moment one we see her incredibly uncomfortable with Lisa liking a boy, because in this episode, she’s a co-dependent maniac who can’t let her children be happy. That’s not subtext, it’s just text (“I don’t want you to spend so much time with this boy! If you do, it’ll mean you’re a separate person from me!”) The end of the episode features Marge hellbent on ruining Lisa’s attempt of her first kiss, then when Nick inexplicably leaves, she gives her daughter a limp-wristed apology. They then turn it into an incredibly unearned sweet ending; Lisa wanted her kiss under a mulberry tree, because it’s supposed to connect the two people for life, so Marge kisses her forehead. So Marge gets what she wants despite her misguided and hurtful behavior throughout the episode. It’s like “The Food Wife” where her jealousy nearly got Homer killed and she learned nothing. I feel like this, “D’oh-cial Network” and “Rags to Riches” are like a unholy trifecta, three shit episodes in a row.

Three items of note:
– I don’t have much to say about the B-plot. It’s literally just Bart and Milhouse watching Mythbusters on TV (with a different name, but still guest starring the two guys) and recreating it on the playground. I was trying to think, has an episode done something like this before, based a plot around the kids emulating a specific movie or TV show like this? It feels like crappy cross-promotion, because they certainly don’t do anything close to actually parodying Mythbusters at all.
– There’s so many scenes I could bitch about, but one really stands out, one of the most tortured, laborious jokes in recent memory. We pan past Lard Lad Donuts and the Try-N-Save to this quaint looking French corner cafe. Lisa comments, “This place is great! If I cover my peripheral vision, I feel like I’m in France!” So, we already get the joke. We see all these commercial garbage establishments, and we also see the buildings behind Lisa are in slight disrepair, so we can see it’s a nice restaurant in a crappy, low-class area. But oh no, we can’t quit now, we could milk this for screen time. So we have a POV from Lisa where we see her hands covering the sides of her vision, so she’s staring right at Nick. We then pan left, back to center, right, back to center, left, center, right, center again, as we see violence and vagrancy going on on the side and alleyway of the restaurant. This whole thing is a very, very, very long twenty-five seconds, and wholly unnecessary given we got the joke before the bit even started. So terrible.
– The impetus for Lisa to run away for her grand romantic gesture is weird. Inspired by his granddaughter’s love for whatever reason, Abe tells her the old Greek tale of Pyramus and Thisbe, which Romeo & Juliet was partially based on, about two star-crossed lovers whose parents didn’t approve of their union. One odd note is we see two looming shadows over Lisa and Nick, but they’re of Homer and Flanders. First, it’s weird it’s not Marge, but through the episode, Lisa seems more concerned about Homer making her look foolish, and doesn’t really regard her mother’s horrible attitude much. Also, we never see Nick’s parents, as he seemed to be at the restaurant at the beginning all by himself. Is he a pod person? It would make his behavior make a bit more sense. Also, the fantasy sequence depicts the two of them older, like pre-teen age, and seeing them make out at the end felt uncomfortable. Chalk this one up as another example of the writers wanting to write these characters older.

One good line/moment: I’m stretching hard here. I liked the beginning with Homer and Bart at the fun zone, playing games and enjoying each other’s company. I like seeing those two get along in a believable, father-son way.

Original airdate: January 29, 2012

The premise: Moe’s bar rag (voiced by Jeremy Irons) waxes nostalgic on his past experiences throughout major events in history all around the world. Meanwhile, Milhouse breaks up with Bart for no reason.

The reaction: There’s been a lot of garbage nonsense this season, but this has got to be the most baffling of them all. I honestly don’t have a problem with the talking bar rag on its own, but the plot they do with it goes nowhere and has no real point. The rag tells stories of its past: being part of a tapestry created for a ruthless tyrant, being used by Michelangelo while painting the Sistine Chapel, being used as rag soup during the Great Depression… but at least half of the stories barely feature the rag, and some don’t even at all. The segments feel like cutting room floor material from an anthology episode, with Springfield residents filling in for historical characters (or fantasy characters, like the Arabian Nights segment. Real, fake, who cares?) Oh, and also there’s a Treehouse of Horror-level of violence featuring hangings and beheadings. But what’s the point of all this? The bar rag feels abused and mistreated, and that’s about it. Moe laments that the rag is his only friend, until the very end where we see that Marge inexplicably took the rag when he was sleeping in the backroom of the bar (how she got in, why Moe was sleeping there, who knows) and washed it for him. See, he’s got friends! Moe is the creepy bartender who has made countless untoward advances on her and who runs a bar that keeps her husband away from her and their children for days at a time, but it’s cool! It makes total sense for Marge to just steal and wash Moe’s filthy bar rag! Whatever. Then we have the Bart/Milhouse B-story, which is easily the most painful plot I’ve seen in a long time. Every word out of each character’s mouth feels so alien and out-of-character, and especially does not feel like dialogue coming from ten-year-olds. Their banter means nothing because the conflict arose from nothing. Each scene is just start and stop, and it all ends with Milhouse inexplicably summoning Drederick Tatum punching Bart in the arm off screen and the plot is over. Worse even still, the two plots don’t connect whatsoever, which feels especially jarring when we cut from the fantasy stuff back to the present over and over. And surely this could have tried to connect thematically? Maybe the bar rag was waxing on about relationships it had had in the past and lost, and how precious true friendship really is, and that tying in with Bart and Milhouse’s squabbles? But perhaps I’m asking way too much. This has got to be one of the worst episodes so far; with most shows I can at least strain to see the most basic story elements and the razor thing connective tissue feebly holding them together. I can’t see any of that here. I just can’t make sense of any of this fucking junk.

Three items of note:
– I suppose I should be thankful the episode abandoned reality right from the start, when a town hall meeting at Moe’s turned into a spontaneous dance party to Lionel Richie, with Richie himself actually there himself. And then Homer walks and dances on the ceiling. I guess this is funny because it’s like “Dancing on the Ceiling”? Ugh.
– No matter how hard I look, I just can’t find any kind of thematic thread with the historical stories. The first involves peasant Marge being possessed by demon wool (?) to work years on an elaborate tapestry, only to be burned alive in her home by King Burns, who then ends up being hung by said tapestry. Then there’s the Arabian Knights one where Sultan Nelson gets beheaded by his harem of girls. Then more death, despair, death, and lastly Homer climbing Everest with the cloth as a flag, which is stolen off his body by a Moe-faced yeti who gives it to his Moe-faced child. So, is the bar rag extremely jaded by the life its led that sopping up booze and blood at a bar isn’t so bad? Again, I wouldn’t have a problem with a talking rag as a concept if I even came close to understanding what the fuck the point of it was.
– The Bart/Milhouse story is so, so, so bad. The writing is awful enough, but it feels like it was recut and rewritten as well. The timing of their initial squabble feels weird. Bart makes a dig at Milhouse, and Milhouse laughs at it, and then he just stops and is immediately angry, beginning a long sequence of very un-Milhouse lines (“Not anymore. Friendship over.”) That line, and several others from these scenes, were definitely rewritten in post because the lip sync doesn’t match. I can’t even imagine how poor these scenes must have been before they scrambled to rewrite it. And again, Drederick Tatum just shows out of nowhere at the very end, willing to punch a child on Milhouse’s beck and call. Brilliant storytelling. Just brilliant.

One good line/moment: I got nothing for this one. Just wholly confusing and unpleasant from start to finish.