Original airdate: November 20, 2011

The premise: Lisa is shocked to find her favorite YA book series was actually a collaborative writing effort to rake in as much money from kids as possible through calculated market research. While she is determined to write a novel all on her own, Homer and Bart decide to form their own team to get in on this seemingly easy money scheme.

The reaction: This was a very strange one. Similar to the last episode, the show tries to be topical way too late in tackling the YA fantasy novel trend. We had a Twilight “parody” in the last Halloween episode, and that was too late too (South Park once again beats this show to the punch, with their vampire episode airing a month after the first Twilight hit theaters). But the episode isn’t really about skewering tropes of this type of fiction. Sure, it seems to be about that, with the whole conceit being that these books are carefully crafted and manufactured to hit as many buttons with young readers as possible, but the story doesn’t really go much further than just say what the tropes are and leave it at that. When the group gets together to brainstorm their story, the sequence is just like someone reading TV Tropes, but not actually doing any commentary on it. Speaking of the group, Homer and Bart band together a team to write their book in the show’s tribute to the Ocean’s movies, the third of which released in theaters four years prior to this episode. I guess they thought it was really funny when Dan Castellaneta and Nancy Cartwright did their cool back-and-forth repartee like from the movies, but in the world of the show, it’s just confusing. They keep referring to a botched job in Kansas City, but in-universe, what the fuck does that even mean? The two of them talk about the specifics of the “job” as if they’re seasoned professionals. Are they play-acting? Whatever. The ending involves them breaking into the publisher’s office to save their book; where we get a montage of them all effortless sneaking in, thwarting guards and such, and they use that Ocean’s music for the tenth time, I just shook my head. I feel like an asshole complaining about the same stuff over and over again, but this shit isn’t The Simpsons. The absurd but relatable experiences of a normal American family have been replaced with ridiculous and nonsensical farces like this. What’s the point of this episode? What are we supposed to gain, other than the writers like those Ocean’s movies? I haven’t a clue.

Three items of note:
– Lisa’s role in this story is very frustrating. The plot kicks off when she discovers the author of the Harry Po… Angelica Button books is a fake, they just used her likeness and made up a story for a fake author to help sell the book. I guess I’m really not sure what this whole conspiracy operation is supposed to be a commentary on. J.K. Rowling was living in poverty and submitted her books to publishers hundreds of times before it got accepted, but I don’t think that had anything to do with the book’s success. I just don’t get why Lisa is so upset about how supposedly this ruins the integrity of “real” authors. Then she just decides to write her own story, for no real reason. Then it becomes what feels like an inside joke from the writers on how Lisa continuously procrastinates and thinks highly of herself for being a writer, despite doing nothing. She ultimately comes across as annoying. By the end when she double-crosses the team, and then double-double-crosses them, I really didn’t care either way.
– Neil Gaiman guest stars in a pretty prominent role, working as the team’s errand boy, for some reason. Something I always love is when they give a role to a celebrity who’s not super well-known to the public, a character will just list their credits. Here, it’s done twice: Moe rattles off three of his biggest books, and then we see a standee of him in the book store with nine or so of his books on the rack. As bizarre and dumb as his role was, he was really the one good part of this; some of his lines were kind of amusing, and you could tell he was pretty tickled to be on the show.
– The team succeeds in their heist and they get a million dollars. A million dollars. But in the end, they’re devastated that the publisher rewrote their book to be more commercial. We get a long minute of them expressing their disappointment, and then, in case it wasn’t clear enough, Neil Gaiman spells everything out in case you didn’t get it. This episode is just endless tell, not show. It’s like the Robot Devil quote (“You can’t just have your characters announce how they feel! That makes me feel angry!”) And in the end, they never stick it to the publisher. The real book gets released and is a big hit, so the publisher rakes in the dough either way. So what was the point?

One good line/moment: Definitely Neil Gaiman trying to do an American accent (“Cheeseburgers! French fries! I’m all over that, pal!”)

Original airdate: November 13, 2011

The premise: In her attempt to be a fun mom, Marge takes Bart and Lisa to an Ethiopian restaurant and they really enjoy the food there. They start a food blog which becomes an enormous hit, while Homer becomes increasingly alienated from his new foodie family.

The reaction: Here’s the rule of thumb with these Simpson-becomes-instantly-successful episodes. You don’t need to see a character working on their craft or what they have to do to actually get famous. Why bother? That would waste too much time. And who needs explanations for why things are happening anyway? Just skip all that shit. In this episode, we have Marge, Bart and Lisa decide they want to start a food blog, and then we get a montage of them eating a whole bunch of food, being on the cover of magazines, their blog being a smash hit, and so forth. After that, they’re established and well-respected foodies. It’s just that easy. Bart can win multiple awards for an animated short he allegedly directed, Homer can sub in for Tommy Chong and be universally embraced, and Lisa can perform magic tricks from a decades-old veteran with the greatest of ease. It’s not worth complaining anymore at this point that the Simpsons were once treated as a normal upper-lower-middle class family, but this insta-fame shit just isn’t entertaining. If any character can effortlessly do anything, then what’s the point? The main thrust of the story is Marge finally feeling like the fun parent, and her wanting it to stay that way by keeping Homer out of the loop. Her jealousy-driven motivation is repeated at least four times through the whole episode, in case you were to forget after a couple minutes. This leads to an exciting finale where Marge gives Homer the wrong address to a new restaurant, and he winds out in a shootout at a meth den. Ultimately I didn’t feel that much sympathy for Marge considering how stupid her situation was. Homer felt bad that he was being left out of the family, Marge brings her into the fold, and then proceeds to have paranoid anxieties and nightmares about her husband co-opting this new passion and hogging the spotlight. Then she unintentionally almost gets him killed by lying to him. It felt extremely immature and senseless of Marge, but all is forgiven at the end, as always. This is definitely one of the worst episodes yet; when you have not one, but two subject matters just begging to be goofed on, and you instead turn it into a giant commercial for them, then what business do you have being a supposed satirical comedy show?

Three items of note:
– This episode is a prime example of the writers losing touch with the small town world of the series. Remember when we saw Homer open hundreds of Krusty Bars to get tickets to the candy expo? Now, not only does Springfield host its own E3, but Homer just happens to have VIP tickets without any explanation. Once they arrive, we get a twenty second panning shot of a whole bunch of sign gags they wrote (all subpar MAD Magazine-level name changes like Y-Box, Electronic Crafts, and of course, the new game system, the Funtendo Zii Zu), and on top of that, they have Bart read a bunch of funny acronyms. Forget that Lisa and Homer don’t really have much interest in games, this all feels born of the writers having attended E3 (as VIP guests, surely) and paying homage to the event, which ends up being a glorified advertisement rather than any kind of parody. The same goes for the whole rest of the episode; this isn’t so much of a send-up of foodie culture as it is a warm embrace of it. Instead of any kind of snarky commentary, it’s just scene after scene of Marge and the kids gushing about all this wonderful food (also, why the fuck is Bart into all of this? He and Lisa basically have interchangeable dialogue in the back half of the episode). And of course we get a bunch of celebrity chefs to add to our guest star list, and they can do their obligatory “let’s-lightly-rib-ourselves” lines. South Park did an episode about this subject matter a year prior to this and it’s lightyears ahead of this softball affair.
– When the car starts to smoke, Marge pulls off the highway into Little Ethiopia. She is terror-stricken, locking the doors and trying to reassure her kids. But the area doesn’t look run down or especially unsafe, it’s just like a little town with a bunch of foreign signage. That’s the act break, and when we return, we see the city block that previously appeared abandoned now has a whole bunch of normal looking people enjoying the night life. It struck me as very odd, I don’t know. I get they’re trying to make Marge into someone who never steps out of her comfort zone, but she ended up coming off as slightly racist. Maybe it’s just me. Also strange that Springfield has a Little Ethiopia district. I mean, we have seen Two Guys From Kabul, but as we see through the course of the episode, this isn’t Springfield anymore, since there are an endless amount of upscale and trendy restaurants covered by the food blog. Remember when Springfield was just a shitty little town? Yeah, me too.
– This is not a new observation, but the resolution of this episode really bugged the fuck out of me. Marge incapacitates the meth kingpin by chucking a ball of deconstructed apple pie down his throat (mighty fine aim she’s got there). That leads to him having a flashback to when he was a kid and the taste of his mother’s homemade apple pie. It’s a shot-for-shot recreation of the pivotal moment of Ratatouille (directed by show veteran Brad Bird) when humorless critic Anton Ego is won over by the eponymous dish. But, as I have said repeatedly in the past, this is not a parody. This is a reference. You’re just recreated a thing from a movie exactly, with no twist or added commentary or anything. I guess the joke is that it’s a guy who cooks meth who’s having this memory? It’s just lazy, lazy writing, and it happens all the time on this show now. Just terrible.

One good line/moment: The guest voices were all superfluous, showing up in Marge’s ultimately unnecessary dream (did we need to be informed once more that she’s jealous of Homer?), but the ending of it was kind of amusingly unexpected, with Gordon Ramsey exerting control and taking her dream away from her. Or maybe I was just thinking of Cartman impersonating Ramsey in that aforementioned South Park episode.

Original airdate: November 6, 2011

The premise: Bart enlists Martin’s help for a last minute science fair project: a robotic seal, which ends up serving as the ideal service pet for the downtrodden denizens of the retirement home. Meanwhile, Homer gets a new assistant, who makes short work out of exposing his lackluster work habits and getting him demoted to become her assistant.

The reaction: In the course of watching some of these episodes, I find myself at a bit of a loss. There are times where I’m not entirely sure if a plot has started, if it’s progressing, or where it’s going. So let’s try and break down this one. Bart is looking to out-shine Lisa at the science fair (see: “Duffless”) and, seeing Martin conveniently hanging from a tree out the back window, enlists his help (see: “Bart Gets An F.”) They end up creating a fully functional robot seal, which is totally plausible for a fourth-grader to make. Alright, fine, Martin’s a super genius, I’ll let them have it, but only if the plot actually went anywhere. It wins the science fair, and then by accident, the kids find that the robopet gives new life to senior citizens, in a treacly thirty-second sequence where we give a sob story to Jasper, the old man smiles at the seal, and then does a waltz with it. As I recalled at this point, the seal is based on a real-life therapy robot seal Paro, so this isn’t even an original idea, nor does the show actually do anything coming close to parody with it. A little over halfway through the episode, I’m still not sure where this is going. Then we’re introduced to our antagonists: from a shadowy board room, the head of the table literally introduces himself and what their organization does, like one would do. The funeral business is pissed that these codgers are living longer, thus costing them money, so they need to sabotage the seals. How? By switching two wires in its inner workings to turn them from docile to feral, as we set up earlier in the episode. Seriously? This was done as a dumb joke with the evil Krusty Doll (“Here’s your problem, someone set this thing to ‘evil'”), but here it’s a plot point? So Bart, with Martin silently tagging along, gets Professor Frink and the college nerds to help break them out of prison (why these robots are being held in a cell, I’ve no idea) and then bring them back to the Retirement Castle. And then they all dance. Including the funeral people, who I guess are fine that their plan was foiled. What a pointless outing.

Three items of note:
– The B-plot ultimately feels incredibly lazy. Homer is shocked to find he has a new assistant, Roz, voiced by Jane Lynch. I haven’t really seen much of Lynch outside of Wreck-It Ralph, but this is one goddamn waste of a character they saddled her with. She’s super nice and forgiving of Homer’s gross negligence, which is very suspect. This leads to her tattling on him to Burns, who shows up at the Simpson house to admonish and demote him. Think about that. Mr. Burns voluntarily went to a lowly employee’s house in the middle of the night just to say that. Terrible. So Roz is now Homer’s superior, and she forces him to do a bunch of time-consuming busywork and acts like a bully toward him. But why? What is her motivation? What is her goal? None of this is explained. By sheer coincidence, Flanders happened to have had a run-in with this woman, and remembers she went berserk when he tried to hug her. So our ending involves Homer crashing Roz getting an award at the plant and convincing Burns to hug her in gratitude, which again, he does willingly. Roz freaks out, folds Burns into a ball and chucks him across the stage, getting her fired. Why does she have this physical aversion? A bad breakup? Abused as a child? What? What? Fucking what. Roz is just a generic bitch-in-sheep’s-clothing, but how can you hang a story about someone with no rhyme or reason for their actions?
– This is the first time we’ve gotten Martin involved in a plot for a while, and of course, like every other character, he’s been degraded to his simplest, most one-dimensional form. It’s like the writers were incredibly tickled by his “Wang Computers” shirt many moons ago, so now almost every one-off joke with him in recent memory has been getting him to say “dirty” words in an academic context, like “homo” or “boner” or “faggot” (a joke they were so proud of, yet cowardly in that they put the actual definition of “faggot” on the screen so you would get it). In the first act, Martin basically acts like a generic nerd, saying stuff like “Heavens to Asimov!” That’s like some Big Bang Theory shit. After the science fair, he barely speaks at all. Even when they go get help from Frink and the nerds, his own people, he doesn’t get a line. Similar to the bullies in “Bart Stops to Smell the Roosevelts,” Martin is demoted to being Bart’s mute tagalong, because writing characters is too hard when you have a premise to limp to the finish line.
– Here’s a perfect example of a shitty scene in modern Simpsons. The kids are on the playground, when Martin approaches Bart. “So, partner, what’s next on the agenda?” Previous to this was the whole Jasper-bonding-with-robot-seal thing. Bart then stammers a bit, “Well, um…” As if he didn’t want to work with Martin anymore. But that never goes anywhere. Their relationship ultimately means nothing in this episode. Milhouse interrupts with a shirt featuring a photo he took of Bart sleeping, because I guess they thought it was funny to make him a creepy stalker? After he does his joke, a dodgeball bounces by, which leads Milhouse out of the scene, just in time for the camera to pan over to reveal Abe and Crazy Old Man standing there. I guess the school is fine with confused elderly men wandering around a playground full of children. They ask Bart and Martin for more seals, or heroin. Abe asks his grandson for heroin. And that’s it. Bravo, fellas, helluva scene.

One good line/moment: Nelson’s science fair booth “The Science of Why Are You Hitting Yourself?” features a box that, when opened, unleashes a boxing glove on a spring to hit some poor kid in the face. And from that we have a not-so-good moment: the neighboring booth is Jimbo’s, entitled “Pubes: Who’s Got ‘Em?” which features three candidates: Milhouse, Skinner, and Abe. I don’t want to know how Jimbo found out any of this information. What would Bart say if he walked by? “Hey Jimbo, just curious, how exactly did you verify that my grandfather has pubic hair?”

Original airdate: October 30, 2011

The premise: In “The Diving Bell and the Butterball,” Homer is left paralyzed by a spider bite, but finds he can still communicate through his flatulence. In “Dial ‘D’ for Diddly,” Flanders becomes a serial killer under the belief that God is giving him orders on who to rub out. In “In the Na’vi,” Bart goes native on Rigel 7 to infiltrate an alien race for their precious resources, that may or may not resemble a Hollywood film that was a phenomena for about six months before becoming culturally irrelevant.

The reaction: A problem that would plague modern day Halloween specials is at its worst here, as every single segment, including the opening, is a TV or film parody, none of which are of the horror variety. The opening and the first segment are allusions to 127 Hours and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, two independent film dramas that most of the regular viewing audience probably hasn’t seen. Having seen Hours and not having seen Bell, neither segment works at all. Why does Homer drive all the way to a canyon to eat candy? And who the hell thought it was a great idea to do an entire segment of Homer farting? And capped off with a now irrelevant Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark joke. How scathing! What does any of this have to do with Halloween? The middle story is the closest to actually being “scary,” with Flanders killing some of our regulars (boring and bloodlessly, I might add). But, again, if you haven’t seen Dexter, what would you make out of the section where they redo the opening titles? This section seemed very familiar, as it’s basically a five minute version of a twenty second joke from “Radio Bart” where Bart tricks Rod and Todd with his radio claiming he’s God, a bit which had more laughs in it than entire seasons of this show have now.  The final segment is the longest, a “parody” of the terrifying horror film Avatar, by which I mean it just retells most of the movie with some softball jokes when it can be bothered. The story of Avatar is so cliched, it couldn’t be easier to rip it apart, but the show can’t even do that right. Instead we get Tress MacNeille screaming as the Zoe Saldana alien, and a humorless action packed battle finale. This has gotta be the worst Halloween special yet.

Three items of note:
– They actually got Aron Ralston, whose story 127 Hours is based on, to do a voice in the opening as the 911 operator Homer calls when he’s stuck. But they don’t even give him a joke. I guess it’s supposed to be funny that he says help will be on the way in twenty minutes, but Homer can’t wait that long to eat candy. They seriously couldn’t think of anything better for him to say? No funny hold music or anything? Come on.
– For a segment all about Flanders murdering a bunch of people, the middle story is extremely tame. I never thought you could make a decapitation boring, but when Flanders cuts off Mr. Burns’ head, it’s just… dull. He slings a rock at Snake’s head (why Homer wanted him dead, who knows), and we get a little bit blood. It’s not like I’m thirsty for violence or anything, but Halloween shows used to be a little chilling, a little shocking. Now it’s just a venue for “modern” pop culture references that may or may not be Halloween related. We also get a Wile E. Coyote/Road Runner bit when Flanders drops a giant boulder on Patty and Selma. There’s no twist to this, they just reference the old Chuck Jones cartoons, and that’s it. And Flanders holds up a sign like the Coyote does. Remember Homer dropping the trampoline off the desert cliff in “Bart’s Inner Child”? Yeah, me too.
– It was pretty disconcerting to see a lot of screen time devoted to alien Bart having sex and impregnating the Grand Midwife… I mean, Tress MacNeille alien. I don’t think she actually had a name. I didn’t ever want to hear Bart shout, “I thought you were using birth control!” Also, I sure am glad we got Jackie Mason back as Rabbi Krustofski for one line commenting on the deflowering of a ten-year-old.

One good line/moment: I hated the shit out of this one, but I’ll admit I chuckled twice. First in the first segment where Homer goes to decorate the house (“Ah, Halloween, the one time of year where the squalor of our home works to our advantage!”) and second in the final segment with alien Bart post-coitus (“I can’t believe I’m getting combat pay for this!”)

Original airdate: October 2, 2011

The premise: Skinner passes the buck of reigning in an out-of-control Bart to Superintendent Chalmers, who proceeds to inflame the boy’s imagination with the great outdoors. After an incident at an impromptu field trip gets Chalmers fired, Bart and the other kids initiate a school lock down to save his job.

The reaction: I always felt that this show could never run out of fresh ideas because of the enormous cast. Who’s to say Smithers or Willie or even Sideshow Mel can’t carry a story all on their own? But every time the show would try to do this, it would always stubbornly hone the focus on a Simpson and the “star” became essentially an afterthought. A few seasons back I remember they tried to do a Krabappel show in “Bart Gets a Z,” which featured Bart convincing her to follow her dream of opening a muffin shop or something? It was a disaster. So, this episode actually tries to create a character out of Superintendent Chalmers, and while it adds in some potentially interesting ingredients, it never actually goes anywhere or does anything with them. Chalmers is tasked with actually getting Bart to give a shit about his education, which gives him hesitation. His first solo scene is him in the bathroom psyching himself up, having not been an educator in a long time, which actually was a successful scene, until they ruin it with a Family Guy-style cutaway of Chalmers in The Breakfast Club. He reaches Bart by teaching him about the rough-and-tumble life and times of Theodore Roosevelt (I remember Al Jean was puffing his chest out in interviews about how they finally had a president on the show, via archival audio of Roosevelt). We see a lot of Chalmers in this episode: he’s drinking scotch, he talks about missing his wife (whose urn we see in his home), but most of all, he believes in tough love, that boys shouldn’t be coddled, that they need to get some real life experience in the great outdoors to be “real” men, so he takes Bart, Milhouse and the bullies out to Springfield Forest. These are all really great touches, but unfortunately we never really get to see Chalmers in action with these beliefs. We see them arrive at the forest, then it’s the next day where we get a quick scene with Bart and Chalmers before Nelson falls down a cliff in a very awkwardly animated sequence. Even though he’s the superintendent, Chalmers didn’t bother to get permission slips and just took five kids to the woods, so he gets canned. This leads Bart to be invigorated and round up the other boys to stage a coup at the school to get Chalmers back. Jimbo, Nelson and the other bullies are reduced to props as Bart becomes their ringleader in the final act. Then the conflict just ends when during a police stand-off, Wiggum accidentally shoots the comptroller in the kneecap and he gives Chalmers his job back. I can give the show a little credit for attempting to inch forward with the characterization of a secondary character, but it didn’t go far enough to make this episode feel like it really showed a new side of him. It was close, but no cigar.

Three items of note:
– This episode features another guest star couch gag, this one courtesy of Ren & Stimpy creator and animation creep John K. While he’s clearly an incredibly talented artist, I’ve never been a fan of anything he’s produced post-Ren & Stimpy, and this couch gag is a clear example of his solo style. The designs of the family in a static image are kind of appealing, but in motion, they’re nearly indecipherable. Every part of a character’s body will react and gyrate so randomly and at such a quick speed that I can’t even tell what’s going on.
– There are two bits with Skinner in the first act I take issue with. The episode opens with a school auction, where Skinner is taken for a ride by an anonymous phone call, a wealthy British dowager who buys every single item tallying up to over a hundred grand. Whoever could this mysterious voice belong to? He and everyone else falls for this, and I’m not quite sure why. Isn’t Skinner in MENSA? He was never a dumb character. Later on, we see Skinner finally break with Chalmers, biting back from one of his insults that he’s lop-shouldered from being a POW in Vietnam. Again, I like the idea of Skinner finally reaching his tipping point, but it ultimately feels a little awkward. It also reminds me of previous instances of him reminiscing about ‘Nam. Finding his POW helmet at a swap meet for Skinner is like reuniting with an old friend. In one of the funniest monologues in the entire series, Skinner recalls his three years in a POW camp and the stew he survived on… and his torture of being unable to recreate it when he came home to the States. He had always been unusually upbeat recalling the horrors of war and that was always the subversive joke, so seeing him act so defensively about it like a real traumatized veteran feels weird and awkward. Also, given the floating timeline of the show, I guess Skinner fought in the war when he was a baby? Either that or Skinner is in his 60s now. Meh.
– The scene with Chalmers at his house with the boys is probably the best of the entire episode. With his glass of scotch, he armchair philosophizes his feelings about the infantilization of boys, trying to save these poor wimps and mold them into future manly men. Again, the episode really feels like it could be going somewhere with Chalmers’s behavior, but it just doesn’t stick with it. Their forest trip results in Nelson getting a bum arm, and his mother threatening to sue Chalmers, who, as mentioned before, did not get any permission slips. The scene in Skinner’s office is the antithesis of Chalmers’s philosophy on teaching, and they could have had him standing up for himself and remaining brazen in his viewpoints, but it looks like they just missed the opportunity. In absence of this, it just looks like Chalmers was a big dummy for not covering his ass. Also, Nelson’s mom’s lawyer looks and sounds exactly like Victor the hovercar dealer from Futurama.

One good line/moment: Like last episode, there actually was some good stuff in this one. The middle chunk of the show with Chalmers working with Bart and the other kids mostly works (“I thought teachers only went outdoors to smoke and cry.” “Son, have you ever seen a horse your father wasn’t betting on?”)