A Brief Retrospective of The Simpsons' Golden Age

Before I begin this video, I am first going to talk a little bit about the video itself. I don't normally do this before my content, but considering the length of this retrospective, I saw it fitting to do so. If you want to skip ahead to the actual retrospective, there are timestamps to do so in the description. I began my work reviewing the Simpsons almost 9 months ago, as of the date this video is being published, knowing it would take a long time and, in consideration of my other obligations, I opted to split the review into shorter segments which could be uploaded a single month at a time, time themselves spaced a bit apart to prevent myself from being burned out on one show. So this video is really just the culmination of about four months of actual work, roughly 538 hours of logged working time, and nearly 30 years of fandom, of course.

Over several months of working on this and other videos, my skills at sound design and editing and the like have improved—at least I'd like to hope so—and this has the unintended consequence that the first parts of this video are of a lower quality than the latter sections. So if you are immediately turned off by the sound or tone or quality of my voice once the first season retrospective begins, don't worry, it will get better after a few hours. You are probably considering leaving a comment along the lines of pointing out that this video is not, in fact, brief, but I want to insist that this video title is only partly a misnomer. Each episode gets between 2 and 4 minutes of retrospective each, which, relative to other episode analyses and reviews, genuinely is brief. The only thing that makes this video long is the sheer number of brief reviews crammed into one.

That said, because I go episode to episode, there are plenty of easy break points. I do not intend for any person to watch this whole video in one sitting; I certainly didn't create it that way. I also do not intend for anybody to, well, watch the video. It amounts to little more than a slideshow with my recorded analysis in the background. The intended viewing experience is on your phone, or a second monitor, or another tab while you give most of your focus to something else. You can probably get a good game of Civilization in before the video is through. Through? How do you talk about The Simpsons? How do you talk about a show that has stood like a monolith over the entire genre of animation, if not the shared culture of the entire world? A show whose titular family is more recognizable than many world leaders? A show whose influence on television is so thorough that multiple common narrative devices now derive their names from its characters? A show that has contributed multiple words to the English language, rigging the dictionary as much as other legends like William Shakespeare or Dr. Seuss? Or maybe that's not the correct question to ask.

Rather than asking how to talk about The Simpsons, it might be better to ask how it's possible not to talk about The Simpsons. It's permeated culture so thoroughly that terms derived from its characters and events have become the standard by which we gauge other works. The steady simplification of a character in a long-running show—call it "Flanderization"—or an episodic gag designed to keep viewers engaged during a show's theme song—call that a "couch gag"—does your show take place in an unnamed town meant to serve as a stand-in for anywhere? You're pulling a Springfield. The "Are We There Yet?" bit, "cheese-eating surrender monkeys," "a wizard did it," "stupid sexy Flanders"—The Simpsons isn't just a major part of culture, but it's a major part of the meta around that culture. The TV Tropes page that lists tropes named after The Simpsons is longer than the page describing many individual works. So, to better understand something as well-received and beloved as The Simpsons is also to better understand culture and the people surrounding it. It's practically a lesson in current events and history to see how a show like this approaches a topic and then satirizes it. Because to so easily capture the hearts and attention of so many Western viewers, the show has to have something universal to it, something that causes all of us to see ourselves in the characters and innocent setting without being so generic as to come across as bland and uninteresting. Just the opposite, in fact.

Because reviewing all 33 seasons in a single video would likely take me so long that a 34th would be out by the time I finish, I'm going to be splitting this video up into multiple parts, which themselves will come out non-consecutively so I don't burn out on the concept. This video will be split into individual episode retrospectives, which themselves are split into three sections: recap, review, and wrap-up. Recap is a short retelling of the events of the episode; review is a general detailing of my opinions on the episode as well as some context for those opinions; wrap-up is for anything I couldn't find another place for. One last thing before we begin: due to its long-running status and the changing landscape of culture over the several decades the show has been running for, The Simpsons deals with a variety of issues, including substance abuse, suicide, sexual assault, talking dogs, and various flavors of bigotry. While I make strong attempts in this script to sanitize my language for an easier viewing experience, neither I nor the show stray away from discussion on these topics, and as such, listener discretion is advised.

The Simpsons shorts. The Simpsons began life as a sketch hastily produced in the waiting room of TV producer James L. Brooks's office. Matt Groening originally planned on pitching shorts for his comic series *Life in Hell*, but when he realized on the spot that doing so would require him to lose the license to what was, at the time, his life's work, he instead created crude sketches of his family with only a few alterations and sent that off instead. The concept was approved, and 48 one-minute episodes were aired over the following three seasons of *Tracy Ullman's* sketch show. As much as I'd like to individually review each one, it would probably take more time to recap the shorts than it would to simply watch them on their own, and since this is a retrospective on the evolution of the show over the years, it's thankfully not necessary to go to such an extent. The initial art style was very rough; Groening sent simple drawings to the animation team with the assumption that they would be cleaned up in post, but the animator simply drew over his sketches exactly. George Meyer came up with the idea to make the family yellow-skinned, a decision meant to make the family stand out to people who were rapidly flipping through channels, much for the same reason that taxis are yellow, so they too stand out among cars on a busy street. These combined to give the show the iconic cartoonish look that popped out in a way that brought viewers in, while the relatability of the family's dysfunction is what kept audiences engaged. And, of course, the one major change to The Simpsons that many other shows had yet to adopt was the fact that the lines were recorded in sessions with all the voice cast present. This gave the lines a much more natural delivery and allowed for the voice talent to put in much more personality to their characters. For example, while Dan Castellaneta originally portrayed Homer as similar to actor Walter Matthau, he later gave the character a much more distinct personality which we're familiar with today.

Content-wise, the family only vaguely resembles the one we collectively grew up with. Bart is, as always, up to antics of various kinds, but these tend to be much more pedestrian than what we know him for—think trying to get out of church or stealing a cookie from a cookie jar more so than chopping the head off of a statue. Homer is defined much more by his anger, but this anger is almost always directed at Bart, who is ostensibly the main character, at the expense of everybody else. Lisa and Marge get very little in terms of agency and are mostly just accessories to stories submitted into plots when necessary. Only Maggie really stays unchanged between these shorts and the show proper, even if there is quite a bit more slapstick at her expense.

Season 1. Even from the first season, The Simpsons has always been an icon of counterculture, specifically made in response to what Groening referred to as "mainstream trash shows" where families loved each other and a tight moral was taught at the end of each episode. The way the show ultimately presented itself adhered rather closely to this formula in that most episodes would end with the family ultimately doing some sort of act where they prove that they really do love each other after all. In fact, structurally, The Simpsons is not very different from any other sitcoms of its era when reduced down to its core elements. The primary way by which it separates itself is through how those stories are told. The Simpsons aren't a family that has it all by any standard, and their struggles tend to be much more relatable as a result. Many episodes revolve around some kind of financial hardship or social issue where a Simpson doesn't fit into polite society in some way. Homer has a dead-end job; Marge is dissatisfied with her domestic life; Lisa's intelligence is being wasted; Maggie is growing up in the middle of all this dysfunction; and Bart—well, we love Bart. And then, with all of this struggle, the family comes together at the end of each day and argues and fights. It's far from the wholesome values and feel-good narratives that define the 1980s, but those were never truly meant to represent the average American family, just the typical one. Because every single family is weird and a misfit for our world; nobody's family is normal; we all just pretend to be that way around others. And so, to see a show airing that pulled back the curtain and showed off just how grim the regular lifestyle glorified by the media could be meant that, for the first time in a long while, Americans got to realize that no, their dysfunction didn't make them wrong; it was the concept of conformity that forced them into feeling that way, and that's not a bad thing by any means, especially when there's just enough love to keep the family afloat from plot to plot. Just because Homer strangles Bart every few episodes doesn't mean that he doesn't love the boy just as much as we can fight with our siblings, just as much as we fight for them.

Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire. The Simpsons are preparing for Christmas with all the traditions associated, but there's a hitch when it's time for the Christmas shopping, as Homer didn't receive his bonus that year, and Marge had to spend much of their savings removing a tattoo Bart got. But, without the heart to tell his wife and his family about their dire financial straits, made worse by Marge's judgmental sisters being present, Homer decides to do everything in his power to make sure that the family gets a proper Christmas, down to working as a mall Santa and even getting convinced to gamble what meager earnings he's gotten. But his bets on the dog track don't pay off, and he winds up penniless until the dog, he bet on, Scrambles, over having been abandoned for losing one too many times. When Homer realizes the dog is a loser just like him, he decides to give the mutt a home, and Christmas is saved. Financial troubles are a central theme of many of the episodes of The Simpsons, even from its inception, and to set an episode about money during the biggest spending season also helps to reinforce one of the show's primary themes: that of the commodification of feel-good stories that required a show like The Simpsons to come along and satirize what we've been conditioned to expect. The idea of a TV family that always consumes as much as is healthy was starting to have a genuine straining effect on people's perceptions of their lives. We even see Homer lamenting that his next-door neighbor, Ned Flanders, has a better—and, of course, more expensive—Christmas display than he does. When the end-all example of success is how much money you can waste showing off that success, there will be an urge to overspend on appearances while neglecting what really matters. Originally meant to be the eighth episode of a season that began airing in Fall 1989, many of the episodes were sent back due to animation errors, and the show was postponed, with this Christmas special being the first episode to air instead of the intended order. This is why Santa's Little Helper doesn't appear in later episodes before being triumphantly brought back. But, for a show like The Simpsons, it's not a big damaging factor to lack a proper introduction episode in the way that many other sitcoms might have. Picking up in media res is fine, as the Simpsons are a stand-in for America; you don't need to be introduced to your own family, and you don't need to be introduced to the [Music] Simpsons.

Bart the Genius. After cheating on an IQ test, Bart is labeled a genius by the school system, and, combined with an enthusiasm to get him out of his hair, Principal Skinner has the boy reassigned to another school, one that can better accommodate his genius. Feeling guilty that they never quite encouraged Bart the way they thought he needed, Marge and Homer make a more active effort to find family activities that can nurture Bart's intellect. He enjoys the resulting quality time with his family and looks forward to the gifted school where he's promised freedom from things like grades and expectations, but he predictably fails to acclimate to the new environment and finds that his old friends no longer want to spend time with him either. Realizing that the gifted school was not the easy life he imagined it to be, Bart admits to his fraud and is soon transferred back, much to the anger of Homer. It's a bit shocking how universal it is to feel as though the education system has left you behind. No matter your circle, you'll find anecdotes about schools doing too little to prepare students for life's problems or doing too much and failing to retain interest. The fact that schools seem to leave behind so many children is, I think, more indicative of a failure to measure success than anything else. We try so hard to apply some sort of objective standard to childhood development, with no accommodations for any sort of deviant, that we end up creating something so generic that no one sane could possibly conform to it. The only thing a test in school measures is your ability to take tests. This episode introduces us to the opening sequence that would later become nearly as iconic as the show it was preceding. As with most shows, it was a means of cutting animation-related costs by recycling footage, though Lisa's sax solo, Bart's chalkboard punishment, and the now immortalized couch gag give each opening a little bit more variation to retain viewer attention. We also see an imagination spot from Bart, a look into his head as his overactive imagination extrapolates a situation to an extreme point. This was something that remained from the initial Tracy Ullman sketches and is something that continues on for seasons to come, alongside such other staples as Lisa's unappreciated genius and Maggie's unnoticed genius.

Homer's Odyssey. Homer tries to show off to Bart on the latter's school field trip to the nuclear plant but accidentally causes yet another accident, resulting in his termination. After failing to bounce back, he goes to a local bridge to drown himself, only to instead get appalled by the lack of a stop sign, which almost gets his concerned family injured when they rush out to stop him. This fury turns righteous, and he goes on a crusade to improve the safety of the town, a crusade that culminates in him homing in on the biggest threat to everybody's well-being: the nuclear plant. Fearing the crowd of followers Homer has gathered, Mr. Burns invites his former employee back with a new job as safety inspector, on the condition that he tells the crowd that the plant is safe. Wanting to provide for his family again, he reluctantly accepts, only to be shocked by the crowd's cheers as they view his crusade as coming to a fitting end. Another financially driven episode: Homer loses his job and ability to support his family, forcing Marge to take on a demeaning job and crushing his dignity as he sinks to stealing Bart's piggy bank for beer money. Because, despite all of his failures throughout his life, Homer has always succeeded where it really mattered: as a provider. The amount of respect he gets from those around him, be they friend or family, varies wildly, but the fact that they've got a roof over their head and a man willing to do anything to keep it there is one thing that he's always been very consistent on. Homer loses not only his ability to provide shelter for his family but the basic level of security that comes as a part of that. When he steals Bart's money, he sinks to a low beneath a man who simply cannot provide, becoming a leech on their happiness instead. And so, he's able to find some purpose to his life again through community work, making his city safer and not only protecting his family but everybody else's. If he can't be a provider, he can at least serve some small role as a guardian. And, in the end, it's this single-minded determination to retain some level of dignity as a man that gets him his own job back. Mr. Burns is shocked by Homer's respect for all things safety-related and that he's willing to put his own paycheck behind his ideals, but it's not really the concept of safety that Homer cared about, but his dignity—something that, while still negotiable, at the very least has a higher price than anything else.

There's No Disgrace Like Home. The Simpson family embarrasses themselves in front of Mr. Burns at a work function, causing Homer to lament at his family's poor behavior compared to how he thinks they should act. After failing to get them in line himself, he soon sees a solution on TV: to sign the family up for group therapy. It's costly and requires Homer to pawn the television set to afford it, but once they're sat down for their session, chaos breaks out, and soon Dr. Marvin Monroe is forced to eject the family as they're scaring off his other customers. He refunds double their money as per his ad, and The Simpsons celebrate that they're going to buy a much nicer TV with their dysfunction money. You can tell that this was a very early episode: Bart and Lisa are equally hellion compared to their later diverging behaviors; Marge is a shrew; and Homer ends up being the voice of reason. Seeing Homer pawn the TV set is enough of a shock to a later-season viewer that something is amiss with these characters, and that something is their lacking development over the early installments. Homer and Bart were the main characters, obviously, so as Bart was M. Groening himself, and as the family was based on his own, and Homer was the main character who most closely resembled his own life. It took some time for anybody else to receive development, but when they did, the show was able to branch out significantly more in what sort of stories it could tell and eventually managed to surpass the bounds of realism entirely. But that's not to say that this episode exists purely within the realm of realism either. There's a certain sense of exaggeration to everything that happens: Mr. Burns is cartoonishly self-centered and megalomaniacal (granted, he is a cartoon character), and the therapy style of Dr. Marvin Monroe is something out of a pseudoscientific health magazine. And yet, while these exaggerations give the show a sense of grandeur to plots that are still rather civilian, they're all derived from very real and very relatable character traits and aspects of society. Maybe we've never beaten our family members with a metal bar, but we've certainly all fought before, and maybe if you embarrass your family at a social function, there's some implications for your standing in that social circle, but it's uncommon that your boss would fire you over something so petty. And so, I think this summarizes The Simpsons as a whole: Springfield is an insane town full of exaggerations and satires of our society, but sometimes seeing something blown up to be larger than life is the only way we can truly recognize it for what it is.

Bart the General. Bart defends Lisa from a bully, only for that bully to be a friend of Nelson Muntz, the head bully in the schoolyard. Nelson beats up Bart repeatedly, with various Simpsons giving him input on how to repel the assaults, but his lesson in outreach from Marge is too optimistic to be useful, and his self-defense lessons from Homer prove too ineffective. Lisa suggests he go to Grandpa Simpson for advice on toughness, and he redirects him to an old war buddy, Herman. Herman teaches Bart how to lead men, and Bart is able to rally the victims of Nelson's bullying into a military unit that's able to fight back. A very Bart-centric storyline, indicative of the early style of the show where Bart was the main character before the ensemble cast gained more of the spotlight. This episode doesn't really stand out in any meaningful way; the charm The Simpsons would later have, insofar as its subversive—

Nature and satirization isn't really present yet, and this episode plays out like more of a schoolyard fantasy than a sitcom plot. That said, there are still quite a few decent jams at mainstream television that still make it clever enough to stand among the rest of the show. After a lengthy bit involving Homer teaching Bart to aim for the quote "Family Jewels," we get to a scene where Grandpa Simpson serves as a mark to exemplify many of the showrunner's gripes with the modern media landscape. That explicitly calls out this language because, at the time, an episode like "Bart the General" was actually pretty subversive. The level of violence, themes of warfare, and the language used was something rare to see in post-Hays Code era network television and managed to stir up some controversy. So, while early Simpsons is very tamed by our standards, it's less indicative of the show becoming watered down as it goes on, but rather our standards becoming more accepting of media that might offend.

Moaning Lisa: Lisa lands herself in a depressive funk, too sad to argue with her family or participate in school. Marge tries to pass on knowledge from her childhood to Lisa: to force yourself to smile and repress your feelings of sadness. But this hardly helps. What does aid her search for meaning is when she hears the sounds of Bleeding Gums Murphy, a passing jazz man who jams with her to help with self-expression. But Marge worries about the influence of strange musicians and tries to reinforce her lessons to her daughter, telling Lisa to continue forcing down her emotions, until Marge sees the stifling mentality of her daughter's peers and teachers. In the end, she tells Lisa it's okay to be sad, that her family won't think any less of her for it, and then they all go out to watch Bleeding Gums perform live. In the B plot, Homer can't beat Bart in a video game, so he takes lessons from a child.

If any character best represents what it means to be a Simpson, it's Lisa: the one who never fit in with the rest of the world, who seems to be too self-aware for her own good; the one whose interests and personality caused her to stand out among her peers and become derided for that. In a show that captured what it really meant to be an outsider among a sitcom-commodified society, Lisa is the character who best encapsulates what it feels like to be the only sane person in an insane world, and then to feel like you're the crazy one. Although perhaps that's an inaccurate statement; it isn't that the world is crazy and you're insane, it's that the world is insane but pretending that it's not. And so, being the weird one should mean that you fit in even better, when the opposite happens instead. Everybody who's crazy is crazy in a different way, so it can feel like you are the outsider no matter what. But the truth is that all of the random people you encountered who seem to have it together are just really good at faking it. Get talking to any normal person out there, and you'll soon find that they're just as weird as you are, just in a different way that you might not recognize at first. And so, Lisa learns to express herself through music because there's no way for a misfit to make connections with another person if they don't, and she manages to find her niche as well as her happiness.

The Call of the Simpsons: Jealous of the Flanders' new RV, Homer takes his family to buy a bigger and better one, but they end up getting whatever's in their price range instead. This turns out to be a piece of junk that Homer ends up driving off of a cliff in the wilderness, leaving the family stranded in the middle of the woods. But not wanting to admit defeat, Homer takes Bart with him to find civilization, while Marge and Lisa stay behind to make camp. And Maggie gets abducted by bears. But Homer and Bart wind up even more lost than before, and when Homer loses his clothes, gets stung by bees, and covered in mud, a local wildlife videographer discovers him, and the footage convinces America that Bigfoot is real. Park Rangers soon find the rest of the family, and Homer is taken in to be examined before scientists conclude that he's either a very dimwitted man or a brilliant beast. This is another of the old-school cutesy episodes, the type that has the same appeal as series like Charlie Brown, where you're meant to watch the family and point out how similar the antics of the characters are to some loved one you know. Isn't it funny how Homer refuses to ask for directions? Aren't his ape-like behaviors similar to insert monkeyish relative here? Wasn't it cute when Maggie gave her pacifier to the bear? It's the type of humor and substance one might expect to see in an email chain suburban moms send back and forth to each other. But simple episodes like this provide a broader appeal to the show and let the Simpsons reach more of the family, certainly a contributing factor to its longevity. Ultimately, though, this episode comes across as one of the weakest of the season. The three plot threads all seem to exist independently of each other, as though one were setting up the next, but to no real climax. They could have done an episode on the family taking an RV trip, or being lost in the woods, or Homer being mistaken for a scientific anomaly, but in the end, it comes across as not knowing which bit worked best and resulting in none of them truly standing out.

The Telltale Head: The story begins in medias res with Homer and Bart running from an angry mob while carrying the head of the Statue of Jebediah Springfield. Before the mob can disembowel them both, Bart pleads to tell his story, and the episode flashes back to the previous Sunday where Homer listens to a football game during church while Bart bothers the Sunday school teacher with annoying questions. After church, Bart decides to see a movie and is peer-pressured into a crime spree by a group of miscreants, hoping to impress his new friends. Bart gets the idea into his head to vandalize the statue of the town's founder, but when this doesn't earn the respect of anybody but rather the hatred of the entire town, he begins to feel guilty about the entire thing and soon rushes to return the head, only for the story to catch up to him. In the end, though, the angry mob is pacified enough to forgive him, and all ends well.

Possibly the most iconic early episode of The Simpsons, "The Telltale Head" is a combination of that slice-of-life aesthetic, cynical sarcasm, and a feel-good ending that makes up many of the greatest moments of the show's run. Bart vandalizing a beloved statue in an attempt to fit in is such a human story, and that act of acting out to fit in is something that we can all empathize with. Who hasn't acted out for attention as a child? And in the end, the crowd is able to understand why Bart did what he did and realize that the whole incident has not only made them appreciate the statue more but also brought them closer together in their hatred of him, of course. This all goes with the lampshading of Homer as he mentions in the episode's final line that not all lynch mobs are this nice. This episode not only marks one of the early glimpses of the show's future potential but also introduces so many different Springfield denizens that will become a part of the larger cast in the future. The trio of Dolph, Kerney, and Jimbo make their first appearance here, serving the typical role of bully/negative influence for Bart. Crusty appears for the first time outside of the Krusty the Clown shorts, standing alongside Sideshow Bob. Reverend Lovejoy, too, gets to make a hypocritical sermon, as is his typical usage in the show; he preaches the evils of gambling while the sign outside the church advertises a bingo night, Monte Carlo night, and a trip to Reno. Although that's admittedly something that I got out of the complete guide to seasons 1 through 8, as my copy is the old standard definition one, and so some of the gags I mentioned don't appear legible.

Life on the Fast Lane: It's Marge's birthday, but Homer has forgotten to buy a gift; made worse when the last-minute gift he does get her is a bowling ball with Homer's name engraved on it. Marge sees through his excuses and deduces that the ball was a gift for himself. So, out of spite, she decides to learn to bowl. While learning, she eventually meets a man named Jock who tries to seduce her under the guise of teaching her the sport. Meanwhile, Homer tries to keep his kids happy as Marge spends more and more time out bowling before he eventually falls into a depressive slump over his failing marriage. But when a final gesture of kindness reaches Marge, she realizes the mistakes she's making, and the two finally make up.

If financial struggles are the most common driving factor behind the Simpsons' plot lines, marriage troubles are a close second. The tumultuous and, at times, questionable nature of Marge and Homer's union is a constant source of drama from which plots can be derived. The fact that the relationship is one that isn't always happy or peaceful only adds to the relatability that made early Simpsons so culturally resonant. So many sitcoms had to have domestic relationships pan out all right, no matter what; no matter what arguments occurred, everything wrapped up nicely in the end. But in The Simpsons, that was rarely the case. Just because Homer and Marge argue and then make up doesn't mean that the issue is completely gone and behind them. Even if Homer is an inconsiderate gift-giver at times, a few good actions won't make that all better, but neither will a single bad one. Marge is heavily tempted to cheat on Homer in this episode, but in the end, she refuses, not only because she's trying to set a better example for her kids and sees her overcompensation, but because she doesn't want to be on the same level as him. Two wrongs won't make a right, and in the end, one wrong doesn't necessarily make a relationship worth throwing away. Because while Homer might not be the best person for Marge, he's far from the worst, and so she decides to take charge and let the high points of their relationship define it rather than the worst.

Homer's Night Out: Bart buys a spy camera off of a magazine and uses it to take subtle snapshots of various members of the Simpson household, culminating in him taking a picture of Homer dancing with Princess Kashmir during a stag party. The image goes 1990s viral and soon finds its way into everybody's radar. But this has disastrous consequences for Homer's marriage. When Marge confronts him over the picture, he's kicked out for the night and spends the next several hours being lauded as a ladies' man, but he just wants his relationship back. And so, Marge demands that Homer set a better example for Bart by taking him to meet this Princess Kashmir and showing him how she isn't just an object to ogle but a real person. Unfortunately, Homer's timing is off, and he ends up on stage at a burlesque performance. But after a bit of dancing, he comes to his senses and gives an impassioned speech on respecting women that results in everything returning to normal.

One of the most defining traits of early Homer Simpson is the fact that, although he's a thoroughly flawed character, he constantly makes efforts to fix his issues, even if it does take some extreme circumstances to get to the point where he admits that he has a problem. So, while Homer may set a bad example for his son by neglecting Marge's interests when birthday shopping or getting too crazy at a bachelor party, when he realizes the consequences of his actions, he always goes out of his way to ensure that he's fixed whatever wrong he's created. This is, I think, the fundamental difference between past iterations of Homer and what later-season detractors would eventually call "jerkass Homer," because it isn't as though he was once a shining beacon of morality who steadily became a sociopath. It was that he began feeling less and less remorse for his actions, or rather it's safer to say that what remorse he does feel comes across as insincere. We can only see Homer mess up and then fix the mess so many times before it starts to become an issue that he's no longer learning from his past mistakes. How many times does he need to almost cheat on his wife before we realize that the apology at the end of the episode is forced only in the interest of keeping the status quo intact? And while his behavior surely does change between seasons depending on who's in the writer's room, there's only so much that can be added to the greater scope of his character before any future morals or lessons become diluted.

The Crepes of Wrath: After crippling his father and blowing up Principal Skinner's mother, the Simpson parents agreed to send Bart on an exchange program, if not to teach him some worldliness and respect, at the very least to get him out of their hair for a few months. He's sent to France, while the Simpson family gets an Albanian boy named Adil. Adil quickly becomes a beloved member of the Simpson family, helping out around the house, debating with Lisa, and even taking a keen interest in Homer's work at the nuclear plant, which, of course, turns out to be a ploy to get pictures of the reactors and send them back home to his hostile nation. Meanwhile, Bart is worked ragged by his adopted family who treat him like a slave and give his lucky red head to the donkey. When he catches them putting antifreeze in the wine, Bart runs into town where he encounters an officer of the law and, in perfect French, manages to report the deeds of the criminals.

This is another episode that puts Bart's intelligence into the spotlight. While he's a slacker in many ways, he also shows a proficiency for learning French incredibly quickly, despite the principle believing he would behave otherwise. This, coupled with an episode like "Moaning Lisa," shows how a vague system of education can let down so many students by not properly pandering to particular needs. Bart is clearly gifted; he just puts his energy into less practical uses like pranks and hinks rather than attempting to learn anything through class. Lisa, likewise, has a very different approach to knowledge that, while more useful for retaining information than the way schools intend for her to do, is equally stifled by the environment of education. This is probably the episode of The Simpsons that aged the fastest. Albania was under communist rule at the time of its airing, but only eight months later shifted power away from the system villainized in this episode. Today, Albania is a part of NATO and is therefore an ally of the US. It's not as though an episode is made worse by being dated in this way, though. Part of the appeal of early Simpsons is the ability to take a glimpse into older pop culture and to see how we were those decades ago. So, while the actual content of the episode might have become irrelevant, the general Zeitgeist around the time period is still preserved like an artifact in a museum.

Krusty Gets Busted: While shopping for a visit from Patty and Selma, Homer witnesses Bart's hero, Krusty the Clown, robbing a convenience store. The story circulates the news cycle, and Bart is devastated at the news as they recount Krusty's career, his rise, and his fall. But Bart doesn't lose faith in the clown and asks Krusty's help in getting to the bottom of the mystery of who framed Krusty. They're able to conclude from archived footage and the CCTV tapes that Krusty couldn't have done it but don't have a suspect in mind until the Simpsons kids are placed on the air of the Sideshow Bob show, where Krusty's former assistant has turned the old show into a spectacle of culture. There, Bart pieces the last few bits of the puzzle together and announces to the live audience that it was Sideshow Bob who framed the clown. Bob is arrested, and Bart gets validation for never giving up on his hero.

This episode is our introduction to the world of Krusty and Sideshow Bob, two characters who would later go on to receive a remarkable amount of attention from the showrunners as they independently get a series of plot lines and development that manage to expand the show's world and area of satirization. Krusty subplots are nearly always about the media cycle and the effect of fame on an individual. Even here, we see how the news is able to spin a story into a grand public spectacle that turns so much of society against their former idol. And, as per usual, it's the Simpson family bred in the countercultural push back against the topic. Because while newscasters represent the normal side of the world tearing into one of their own, Bart still holds fast to his convictions, surprisingly one of the only people with the morals to do so, even if those morals are a bit tainted by his unwillingness to accept the situation. And, on the other hand, we also get to see one of the most accomplished and beloved of the regular guest stars on the show as Kelsey Grammer steals every single scene with his portrayal of Sideshow Bob. Bob himself is the aerodynamic counterpart to Krusty, the high-society sort of individual who, like The Simpsons, also seems to want to separate himself from the lowest common denominator of society, just in the opposite direction. In this way, Bob and Bart make excellent counterparts to one another: while Bob is a member of the counter-G movement of intellectuals who view themselves as above the rest of the world, Bart is the type who exists in parallel to society, not fitting in due to his different philosophies and behavior rather than taste and culture.

Some Enchanted Evening: Marge gets the idea that she's underappreciated from a talk show radio therapist, as well as the fact that she is underappreciated. And when Homer hears her call in, he turns to Moe for advice, where he gets an idea of his own: to wine and dine her to rekindle their relationship. While out, they hire a babysitter for their kids, though they don't get the luxury of being choosy with the sitter and end up with Miss Spots, the current alias of the fugitive from the law, also known as the Babysitter Bandit. Bart and Lisa find out from a late-night crime show that their sitter is a criminal, and they work together with Maggie to apprehend her. But when Homer and Marge come home early from their night out with concerns after the phone isn't answered, Homer ends up untying the sitter and letting her go just before the police arrive.

This episode was originally intended to air first, but when it was sent back from the Korean animation studio, the showrunners found a considerable number of errors that resulted in a firmer hand being used to check for poor-quality animation throughout the rest of the season. This forced the series to be delayed enough that the Christmas special ended up airing first. It's a pretty common point of trivia that this episode's overly detailed animation is a sort of malicious compliance to the constant complaints about the low quality during the first several iterations. Originally, at the end of this episode, it was meant to be revealed that Marge had a pair of large bunny ears underneath her hair, a reference to "Grin's Life and Hell" series, but this was cut from the episode and from later seasons in favor of a more down-to-earth style. Likewise, Homer was originally meant to be Krusty the Clown moonlighting as the TV personality to create a sort of dramatic irony where Bart would disrespect his father at home while looking up to him on television. But in spite of the many cut plots, the season ultimately concluded on a much higher note than anybody expected, especially so given the troubled production, and The Simpsons was quickly catapulted into common culture. "Some Enchanted Evening" exists as the final weird Simpsons episode, the last point in time where the show still had corners to be ironed out and designs to solidify.

As season 1 ended, the experimental phase of writing and design did too. Season 2, the first season of The Simpsons, was only a slight departure from the original sketch comedies of the Tracey Ullman era: one-minute segments designed to introduce an idea, crack a few jokes, and then wrap themselves up. And in the early seasons, we can see this DNA remains. Most episodes are structured as a series of one-minute gag sketches with only a loose structure keeping them coherent, going scene by scene through season 1 will show you about a dozen one-minute bits with the occasional scene to connect the other threads in a logical way. But as the show developed, the writer's room began to evolve on this idea, giving the show a more coherent through line as well as introducing more independent B and sometimes C plots. But those original sketch comedy roots remained, giving the humor a distinct feeling that most other shows were never quite able to capture, and I think this is what makes The Simpsons so quotable to this day. Season 1 had a tumultuous start, many episodes getting sent back to be reanimated, and the show getting a myriad of complaints from teachers and concerned parents over the content as well.

As the fact that the cast was far from ideal in terms of role models, despite how many young students were looking up to them, Bart Simpson t-shirts were banned for many grade schools, and there were calls to tone down the content. Considering the cartoonist style was attracting the attention of children, but part of the original contract with Fox included a clause to give Groening complete creative control over the series, meaning executive meddling had to be kept to a minimum. Although it's unknown just how much the network would have actually interfered with the show, that gave it as much success as *The Simpsons*, especially because the controversies were surely acting as a fantastic form of early viral advertising.

Much of the early DNA of *The Simpsons* was derived from Groening's early work on *Life in Hell*, a series which primarily focused on the artist venting his frustrations with his life. These gripes continued on to make many of the early shorts from *The Tracey Ullman Show*, up through the early seasons, much more relatable to audiences as they were able to relate to the petty inconveniences of the cast and laugh at their mutual disdain for the frivolous nonsense that made up modern culture. But as *The Simpsons* grew bigger, so too did the ambition behind the show, and soon the plots began to take on a much less plausible tone. While the series was always grounded in realism, we start to see a lot less of the sitcom things the family was used to and a lot more jumping over gorges and three-eyed fish.

As the show came more into its own, Bart gets an F after failing a book report due to not having read the book. Bart is warned of a major exam coming up and that it will affect his future, but when he slacks off at home instead of studying and fails yet again, a parent-teacher conference is called where the suggestion to have Bart repeat the fourth grade is floated. This serves as a wake-up call, and Bart declares his intention to study properly. He fails yet again, but prays for another opportunity, something that is granted when a sudden snow day occurs. Not wanting to waste this miracle, Bart spends the whole night forcing himself to read, slapping himself to stay awake, and when the day of the test finally comes, he finds that he has failed it once again. He bursts into tears, lamenting that he really tried this time and still managed not to succeed. Although a last-minute analogy involving applied history gives his teacher, Miss Krabappel, enough of an excuse to give Bart a few pity points that prevent him from being held back.

This is one of the most important episodes of the show for Bart's development as a character and portrayal as a human being because, while he managed a reputation outside the world of *The Simpsons* as a larger-than-life mimetic figure, within the world, there needed to be some sort of grounding plot to humanize the boy. He exuded the aura of a slacker, the type who is too cool for school, and yet this is really just a defense mechanism to avoid the inevitable rejection by the more polite sectors of society. None of the major characters of *The Simpsons* fit into what society expects of them, and so, in Bart's case, he acts as though he doesn't care. But not caring is a difficult thing to do when an entire world seems to be locked off to you purely because of who you are as a person, and in this case, his unfamiliarity with the normal world causes issues when he's told he has to repeat the fourth grade. So Bart is forced to study, to return to that which he has so far rejected, and he fails.

It's fitting that the ancillary plot to this episode revolves around Martin, a character who has likewise been rejected by society, learning to fit in with the other bad kids and soon finding a sense of acceptance similar to what Bart had before. To compare the two's journeys would imply that Bart, if he were as accomplished as his peers, could easily achieve a similar level of success, but years of resentment and inactivity will make you ill-adjusted to that world, as Bart learns harshly in this episode. In "Simpson and Delilah," Homer tries a miracle breakthrough in hair growth called "Deoil," though it's too expensive to buy outright, so he has to charge it to his company insurance policy. It works, and he soon finds himself happier and more easily getting along with those around him. This new attitude also attracts the attention of Mr. Burns, who promotes Homer to Junior Executive with all of the money and perks that come with the title. He hires a new assistant, Carl, who helps him continue in his upward trajectory. But the new attention from Burns is making Mr. Smithers jealous, and the former right-hand man looks for dirt on the newly-promoted Simpson. Discovering his frivolous insurance claim, Homer loses his hair and nearly loses his job too, but Carl gives him a pep talk that all the recent greatness was a part of him all along, and he never needed the full head of hair to achieve it. Though the rest of the world doesn't see it that way, and soon Homer is reduced to his old bald loser self, only getting his old job back out of pity as Mr. Burns too struggled with male pattern baldness.

A very Simpson-esque plot where a typical sitcom cliché is set up, exaggerated, and then deconstructed as it clashes against a world not as prepared to let things resolve happily just because a family hugged in the end. Of course, the intended lesson is that Homer never needed the hair to regain his confidence and that it was all something that he had all along. But since all his promotions and accolades were merely the result of the rest of the world making a shallow observation, of course, it would all go away just as easily. We're conditioned to expect a happy ending where Homer exerts a newly learned confidence, and we're actually given just that. It's not just the character arcs that are inverted; it's the world's reaction to these arcs too. Homer maintains a high level of confidence, but the nuclear plant executives still turn their back on him regardless, showing just how indifferent society is to deeper character growth.

This is the first real experience *The Simpsons* writers have shown with a gay character, although, to their own insistence, Carl was never explicitly written as homosexual. While the guest star, Harvey Fierstein, is an open advocate for LGBT rights, Groening is recorded as stating that the character of Carl is, quote, "whatever the audience wants him to be." Despite being one of the earliest instances of homosexuality on television, it still manages to come across as more tasteful than many future failures would achieve by not reducing a character to their gayness in exception of anything else. Future episodes, most notably "Homer's Phobia," would approach the topic in a similar, albeit much less closeted, way. But the episode "Simpson and Delilah" shows that it wasn't just about waiting until it was more socially acceptable to approach the issue but being proactive in the pursuit of that equality.

"Treehouse of Horror I," a series of short vignettes told with the framing device of Bart and Lisa exchanging scary stories in their treehouse while Homer listens in. The first is a parody of the Amityville horror; *The Simpsons* moving into a house possessed by the vengeful spirits from an Indian burial ground. After the voices convinced the family to attack each other with knives, Marge grows angry and demands the house to parlay with them; ultimately, it decides to vanish into nothingness rather than continue living with the Simpsons. The second is a parody of the science fiction story "To Serve Man" and its later *Twilight Zone* counterpart. It introduces us to the Relians, who abduct *The Simpsons* from their home and prepare to transport them to their home planet of Riel 4. But Lisa grows suspicious of their motives and discovers a cookbook called "How to Cook Humans," which is later revealed to actually be titled "How to Cook for 40 Humans." The Relians, disgusted by the mistrusting nature of the family, dropped the Simpsons off back at home, denying them an existence in Paradise. In the third tale, Lisa reads Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Raven," with various members of the Simpson household taking the roles of the characters within, reading their lines and internal monologues—a segment that you probably watched in your grade school English class. The Treehouse of Horror segments have been a staple of *The Simpsons* for nearly as long as the show has been around, and even from the very early stages, we can see that they've always been an excuse for the writers to exercise their parody muscles. Because while *The Simpsons* has always been a stylistic parody of so many other genres, this is the first opportunity to make an outright homage to various other media works.

"Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish." After a story breaks about a three-eyed fish swimming in one of the nuclear waste depositories near the Springfield Nuclear Plant, there are calls to shut down the plant after it fails several inspections, lamenting the heavy cost of meeting the bare minimum safety standards. Mr. Burns is sobbing in his car when Homer accidentally puts the idea into his head to run for governor so that the standards can be relaxed. He hires a crack team of media manipulators to skyrocket through the polls by telling Americans what they want to hear, and this causes a rift in the Simpson family household as they tear themselves between Burns and the incumbent. This culminates in a publicity stunt where Burns dines with the Simpson family to appeal more to the common voter, which backfires when Marge serves the three-eyed fish from before as the main course. Burns chokes on the fish, chokes in the polls, and smashes up a few things before storming off. We saw a glimpse of this in the previous episode with the "Raven" parody section, but the one thing that *The Simpsons* excels at is taking a higher-concept storytelling device and simplifying it so that a general audience can understand and appreciate them. Whether it's a mid-19th-century poem on the inevitability of grief or a modern retelling of *Citizen Kane*, *The Simpsons* is able to dumb down just about anything to the point that even a child can pick up on the general idea. And so this leads to an increase in culture by serving as a kicking-off point for young, curious viewers. I mentioned in the last episode's review that many grade-school English classes viewed *The Treehouse of Horror I* segment for fun, but there's a very good reason as to why it's accessible in this way. *The Simpsons* has always managed to have a much deeper meaning to its otherwise very basic comedic premises and, as a result, is something that a wide range of viewers can find enjoyment in.

It's funny and a bit depressing how little this episode has aged, despite airing back in 1990. At the forefront are environmental concerns, political corruption, and how our desire to consume lies at the center of it all. And a cute three-eyed fish named Blinky can guide us through these issues as we watch the cast themselves navigate the murky waters. How many families debated issues in just the same way we saw Lisa and Homer discuss their beliefs? And how much of common society do we see in the town of Springfield, and how easily manipulated they are by the grand speeches and posturing by a man who wants nothing more than for them to vote against their own self-interest so that he might continue to poison them for his own economic gain? It's almost a bit reassuring to see that these issues were present in the minds of Americans over three decades ago, as if to see that no, the world's not getting worse; it's just as stupid as it's always been.

"Dancing Homer." Homer tells the barflies at Moe's Tavern a story of his rise and fall as the mascot of the Springfield Isotopes, the local minor league baseball team. It starts with him on a company baseball night, sitting next to Mr. Burns and getting drunk enough to start making a public spectacle of himself. But the laughs and cheers of the enthusiastic crowd are enough to get the Isotopes out of a long losing streak, and soon he's offered a part-time job dancing in the dugouts to keep the crowds interested. This culminates in a big break to Capital City where Homer is able to take his "Dancin' Homer" act to the big leagues. After his family packs up and makes the big move, he's nervous about performing in front of a much larger crowd. These nerves are justified when he's eventually given a completely lukewarm reception at the major league game and soon goes back to Springfield in failure. Although his friends seem to love the story of his fall, so it's not all bad.

There exists a concept of a *Simpsons* "golden age," a period of time where the show was at its comedic and cultural peak, marked by the persistence in everything the show has called for today. And while debate exists online as to whether season 2 is included in that label, there's no doubt that this episode stands among the show's peak, at least stylistically. We get some properly quotable moments, such as Homer's declaration that a baseball ticket gives him the right and the duty to make an ass of himself, and the bizarre throwaway humor that would mark many of the peak seasons' gags, such as the existence of the "ex-wives" section at the baseball game. This episode also explores what made *The Simpsons* so culturally resonant with a certain self-awareness that's rarely seen even today. Marge calling out the absurdity of a Simpson on a t-shirt plays into the Bart mania that had gripped the nation at the time of the episode's airing. And the episode wraps up with Homer pontificating on how a story of a person's humiliation and failure can cause that person to become more endearing in the eye of the audience. His popularity with the barflies at Moe's mirrors the popularity of *The Simpsons* with Western audiences. We don't tune in to watch the story of a success, having everything we could never have, but to see an everyman squander the opportunity in a way that the average person can relate to.

"Dead Putting Society." Homer gets into a spat with Ned Flanders over his perception that the Flanders have everything nicer than the Simpsons. Hoping not to have a feud between the two, Ned attempts to reconcile the situation, but the Simpson family scorns this peace offering, and Homer challenges Ned to a miniature golf competition between their sons, fighting as a proxy for their dispute. Homer tries to force Bart to master the mini-art of mini-golf, but as he's a bad teacher, Lisa offers her services instead. Meanwhile, the feud between Ned and Homer heats up, and they up the ante so that the loser must mow the winner's lawn in his wife's Sunday dress. Lisa ends up giving Bart the mental edge that he needs to win, and the competition comes to a close draw. But rather than carrying on their father's feud, they instead agree to call the attorney, and due to some specific wording, both Homer and Ned end up performing the punishment. There exists within the Baby Boomer generation a weird obsession with simultaneously fitting into society as much as possible while also standing out more than anyone else. Being different is bad, but being better is okay; in fact, being better than your neighbor is the only way to possibly differentiate yourself from them without being looked down upon. It's as though a trophy exists as the ultimate sign of conformity—a "most fit in" award. This is why that generation feels a general disdain towards the idea of a participation trophy. How are you supposed to be better than somebody without also putting someone else down? One aspect of *The Simpsons* explored in this episode is the generational split between Bart and Homer, also mirrored in Todd and Ned—that conformity for the sake of conformity and fitting in are valued differently between the two generations. While a Baby Boomer might want to have a house just like everyone else's but bigger, a car like everyone else's but faster, and a job like everyone else's but richer, the generation to follow them was much less interested in physical things that mark their accomplishments and were much less likely to put stock in a reminder of their accomplishments compared to the accomplishment itself. So, for example, a photo of a vacation rather than a souvenir.

"Bart vs. Thanksgiving." The Simpson family celebrates Thanksgiving, bringing everybody together and having Lisa create a commemorative cornucopia. But Bart ends up throwing the centerpiece into the fireplace and, rather than apologize for the destruction, decides to run away from home. While on the streets, he looks for a way to get a free meal, eventually donating blood and passing out on the street. He's awoken by a couple of homeless men who take him to a local shelter where they receive a free meal, and Bart ends up on a late-night guilt-trip story on the news. He eventually returns home, climbing up to the roof as he still can't bring himself to apologize until Lisa joins him up there and asks him to reconsider. The two make up, and Homer and Marge are relieved that they raise their kids well. After all, the culture clash within the Simpson household is one indicative of the two broader appeals of the show, as well as the potential for clashing between the two. While Lisa is an underappreciated overachiever, Bart is the overappreciated underachiever. Their feud comes down to a failure to appreciate one another. While Bart has always received the unconditional love of his parents no matter how little he accomplishes, Lisa feels overshadowed due to receiving the same attention despite doing so much more. It can feel like there's less love going her way despite the extra needs her extra effort demands, and so it's difficult for Lisa to put herself into the shoes of her older brother when he fails to understand why her crafts mean so much to her. Not that I think that this episode did an altogether great job of really showing off either side of this conflict; Bart was more or less entirely in the wrong in this situation, and yet we're expected to show some sort of sympathy for a boy who destroyed something and then refused to show any sort of remorse. And while he does show the early signs of guilt, it's far too little too late. Bart believes that he'll be over-punished for his misdeeds and apologizing is an acceptance of that fact, and while this can be chalked up to his overactive imagination, it's also equally indicative of a lack of maturity over interpersonal issues. But on the counterpoint, Bart is also a child.

"Bart the Daredevil." The Simpson family plans to attend a monster truck rally, but due to watching Lisa's recital beforehand, they show up late and their car is wrecked when Homer drives onto the pitch. But more importantly than that, Bart gets inspired by the acts of Captain Lance Murdoch, a local daredevil, and decides to pursue a career in death defiance. He gets fame among the neighborhood kids for a while before ultimately seeking a greater thrill, jumping Springfield Gorge. His parents try to talk him out of it, but Bart refuses to listen, so Homer ultimately takes it upon himself to jump the gorge in Bart's stead, if only to show him how stupid the idea is. This plan works, and Bart agrees never to risk his life pointlessly. But when Homer slips down the gorge by mistake, he winds up attempting to jump anyway, not once but twice. Bart mania swept through the Western world practically overnight. The massive success of *The Simpsons* led to a deluge of schoolchildren desperately wanting to be more like their idol—a down-on-his-luck elementary schooler who nonetheless managed crazy adventures in a sitting, just like their hometown. This impressionability gave the writers an opportunity as much as a responsibility to give a proper lesson to children as they would surely imitate anything they saw him do on television. But rather than simply trying to make Bart into a more upstanding moral character, they went for the other extreme, so as not to sell out. Bart became louder, prouder, and his stunts began to defy reality. After all, while kids may mimic his pranks and attitude, there was no way they'd be dumb enough to jump off a cliff just because a cartoon character did it. At a certain point, the lack of common sense has to be blamed on the parents, and this shift away from realism ended up paying off for the series. Many of the larger-than-life set-piece moments of *The Simpsons* managed to become just as popular as the heartfelt relatability of the first season. And all of this was presented in a way so as not to harm the other extreme. *The Simpsons* may get into insane, wacky antics, but at the end of the day, they're still human; their faults are just like ours, and their ambitions are the same; they merely have the opportunity to express those ambitions in more unique ways. We may not ever get the chance to jump a gorge on our skateboards, but we will certainly have an opportunity to make a public spectacle of ourselves for the entertainment of others.

"Itchy & Scratchy & Marge." Maggie hits Homer in the head with a hammer after getting the idea from an episode of *Itchy & Scratchy*. Realizing this, Marge starts a letter-writing campaign to reduce the amount of violence in cartoons. Despite the director of...

Aan scratchy Studios, believing that “one screwball cannot make a difference,” she persists and eventually gathers the attention of more and more concerned parents. Who eventually have enough of an impact on the “Crusty the Clown” show’s ratings that the writers cave and remove violence from their cartoons.

Unsatisfied with the lack of conflict in their shows, the children of Springfield go outside and partake in wholesome activities, with even Maggie beginning to take after the Kinder, gentler TV characters. But when Michelangelo’s David tours Springfield, the usual group of protesters tries to have Marge lead them in blocking the lewd statue from being shown in their museums. But Marge doesn’t oppose the statue, and soon, soon the world moves on.

Trevor crusading is The Simpsons’ art. Can anything with the express purpose of selling ad space on a right-wing News Network really be considered high art? Or is there something inherent to capitalist structure that prevents anything made to be consumed from entering the realm of art? If so, does that make the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel “not art,” as it was painted on commission? The purpose of art is to stimulate the senses and force us to think about our relationship to the rest of the world. It’s a means of seeing things through a perspective we may never be able to experience ourselves, and an appreciation of art can make us more well-rounded, thoughtful as a society. So if all of that is true of a TV show, can we then consider it artistry? And if we can’t, have I wasted my entire life talking about TV shows? It’s more likely than I’d like to think.

Ultimately, this episode’s narrative takes a strong anti-cartoon stance. When cartoons lose their comedic source, the children are shown to be nicer, more sociable, and better adjusted to the world. We get the impression that cartoons are some sort of evil influence on children, and this is, of course, all granted a major sense of irony in that it’s a moral talk to us by a cartoon itself. And so the messaging of this episode is something that we’re meant to take a more nuanced view on, purely because of the medium through which the message is relayed. If you think my videos are art, let me know in the comments below. If you don’t, there’s a good chance you’ve told me already.

Bart gets hit by a car. Bart is struck by Mr. Burns’s car while out on his skateboard. The injuries he sustains are minor, but Lionel Hutz, a shyster lawyer, notices the potential for a big payout and coaches The Simpsons on how to play up Bart’s injuries so they can sue Mr. Burns for a bigger payout. The case makes it to court, and the jury seems to be siding heavily on the side of the Simpsons. So Burns parlays with the family in the hopes of settling out of court. But when Homer’s greed gets the better of him and he demands a higher payout, which causes Marge’s conscience to hit a tipping point, she eventually points out her dislike for the shady lawyers and quack doctors. Mr. Burns overhears this point and formulates a new strategy to attack the Simpson family at their weakest point: Marge’s sense of decency. His plan works, and the Simpson family loses the suit. Homer visits Moe in a depressed stupor, upset that his wife cost him such a large sum of money. But in the end, he can’t stay mad at her, and the two make up.

The Simpsons have always portrayed a negative relationship between financial well-being and sense of morality. Far from the starving artist or the noble working class, there’s a sense that practically any sudden acclamation of wealth is something inherently immoral to have. Mr. Burns is the richest man in Springfield, and he’s constantly portrayed as a cartoonish villain, as if the only way you could possibly get that much money is by forgoing any sense of morals. Good people don’t get rich, and we see the same temptation is given to the Simpson family as they get an opportunity to become rich if only they would lie to a courtroom to defraud a man as wicked as he is of his wealth. And so the conflict of this episode is less a battle between the classes and more so a battle between the ideology of wealth. But more important than any of that, this episode marks the first appearance of a fan-favorite character and guest star in Lionel Hutz, and his re-Phil Hartman. Hutz appears as a stereotype of the dirty lawyer willing to do just about anything for a case, and allowing the writers to poke fun at the immoral potential of the legal system through his antics. He’s the perfect example of a Simpsons side character, able to perform absurd actions that would never exist in the real world but could, and as such he is a spiritual incarnation of the show’s philosophy as a whole: to exaggerate the mundane in order to draw better satire out of it.

One fish, two fish, blowfish, bluish. Wanting to try something outside their usual routine, the Simpson family goes to a sushi restaurant. Homer ends up eating just about everything on the menu, including fugu, or poison blowfish. The chefs have reason to believe it was improperly prepared, however, and Homer is soon told that he may have 24 hours to live. So he makes a bucket list: a series of things he wants to do before he dies. This includes things like a final goodbye to each of his children, telling off his boss, and making peace with his father. But due to a series of unforeseen developments, such as his father wanting to make up for lost time and him getting arrested, Homer ends up rushing the last of his list. But he makes it home in time for one last goodbye with Marge before he retires to the living room to pass peacefully. In the end, though, Homer survives the fish and vows to live every day to the fullest, although in practice this doesn’t really change much.

One of the most character-centric Homer episodes of the show, having him think he’s going to die makes him spill out the deepest desires in his heart as he makes a literal list of things that are the most important to him. Despite his many flaws, Homer is still the type of person to care deeply about those around him, with most of the items on his list being about his relationships with others rather than simply naming experiences he’s never done before. In Homer’s mind, his legacy exists in his children and the people around him: how they perceived him as a person and his enduring memory in their minds. Thematically, this episode also plays with the idea of mundanity and comfort zones. The entire plot is prompted by a desire to change things up, and the bulk of the main story is about Homer trying to do all of the things he never would have because he assumed there would be more time to do so. It calls into question why he never did those things in the first place. Although there is a cut ending to this episode where Homer attends Flanders’s barbecue when all of the people he annoyed over the last 22 hours return to give him a piece of their mind. This was ultimately cut for budgetary and time concerns, and so the ending is instead reused footage from “Moaning Lisa.”

The way we were, when the television goes out. The Simpsons family passes the time together by listening to their parents tell the story of how they met back in high school. Marge received attention after reading some feminist literature and starting a protest at the front entrance. There she met Homer for the first time, as he was in for general. Homer tries to get to know Marge better by sharing a common interest and ends up faking that he needs French lessons as she’s a tutor for that subject. Over the course of the evening, the two fall for each other, and soon Homer asks Marge to the prom, which she agrees to—at least until Homer reveals the ruse that he’s not in French and merely tricked Marge into spending time with him. Upset that he lied to her and also made her stay up too late the night before a debate meet, she storms off and eventually goes to the prom with Artie Ziff, a local brainiac instead. But Artie turns out to be too handsy for Marge’s taste, and in the end she decides to go back with the more genuinely wholesome Homer.

The cliché of “fat guy, hot wife” is something that’s been a part of the sitcom genre dating back before The Simpsons ever aired. There’s this pervasive idea that just because a guy is fat, bald, stupid, and lazy, he won’t be prevented from finding love with an ideal housewife as long as he’s nice enough to her. Partially, this is a trope due to the fact that the stupid dad archetype of fiction is routinely able to get much more development as the writers flesh out his character more and more as the show runs, whereas his wife often serves a purely supporting role and doesn’t get the same amount of attention. And so we quickly learned not to judge the man of the house, as there’s so much more to him than what appears on the surface. But the woman of the house doesn’t get that same level of depth and therefore has to be much more surface-level appealing. I’ll say that The Simpsons is guilty of this cliché in its earlier seasons to the same extent as the shows it parodies and borrows from. So many of the episodes so far have focused on Bart or Homer, and we’ve only seen a sparse amount of attention given to Lisa, with this episode being one of the only Marge-centric episodes of the first two seasons. And while part of this can be attributed to the fact that the writer team is going to be writing what they know, one might expect that they noticed this trend and poke fun at it much in the same way if they’ve done with so many other tropes. It’s not a major complaint, and the character dynamics still work fine, and in fact The Simpsons still manages to stand above its contemporary programming during this time period. But this is an observation I’m making nonetheless.

Homer versus Lisa and the eighth commandment. Homer gets an illegal cable hookup, allowing the Simpson family to watch dozens of channels for free. They all enjoy the newfound shows to watch until Lisa gets scared over a lesson on the Ten Commandments from church, thinking that if her family continues to steal cable their souls will be damned to hell. She declares her intention to non-violently protest the offending technology in their household by publicly refusing to view it herself. This guilt starts to spread to Marge and Homer just as a grand spectacle fight is announced on cable: Watson versus Tatum. And Homer has invited everybody he knows. In the end, the guilt over stealing is too much for Homer to bear, and he joins Lisa in her protest alongside the rest of the family, cutting the cable as soon as the fight is over.

The split in the family during this episode is one down the lines of morality. In order from most to least moral, we have Lisa, Marge, Homer, and then Bart. And I suppose Maggie would be somewhere in the middle, depending on impressionability. Bart is the last to oppose the act of stealing cable and even makes a scheme to profit off of it, showing other kids the “Top Hat Channel” after being expressly forbidden from watching it by Homer. Homer is slow to come around and is the original reason the family stole cable in the first place, but he’s able to eventually be guilted into the right course of action not only by Lisa’s protest but by seeing the kind of influence he’s having on Bart. Marge is quick to feel the same sense of guilt and shame as Lisa and is even the first to make an active effort to fix her behavior in the form of two measly, stinking grapes. And this leads us to Lisa’s sense of morality. While she knew at first that there was some moral opposition to Homer’s act of theft, it still took a bit of prodding before she really began to act on those ideals. Comparing this to later seasons, Lisa is still developing her sense of justice and fairness. It usually takes some outside influence before she decides to start soapboxing at first, but as the series progresses she becomes much more assertive in declaring what actions she finds reprehensible. To make it more interesting, her typical source of knowledge on the world is her father, Homer. So to see her oppose him as she takes the high ground in so many issues is an interesting implementation of how she’s developing despite her family rather than because of them.

Principal Charming. Lamenting her life of celibacy after the wedding of a co-worker, Selma requests the help of the Simpson family in finding her a husband. So Homer spends the day searching for a suitable match for her before settling on Principal Skinner. He makes a plan for the two to meet over dinner but accidentally introduces Patty to the man instead, and it’s a quick match as the two both hate all of the same things. As they grow closer and closer together, Skinner becomes nicer and nicer, eventually overlooking many of Bart’s antics as he’s too happy to care. And Selma grows more and more resentful of her sister’s happiness, becoming less optimistic about her own relationship prospects before eventually settling for Barney. But when Patty realizes that her sister’s happiness is her own, she breaks things off with Skinner so the two twins can spend their lives together again.

The lovelorn antics of the ancillary cast of The Simpsons is nearly as fleshed out as the romantic lives of Homer and Marge. Often these are used as a means of telling love stories that don’t involve the happily married or otherwise. To tell a story of two adults figuring out whether or not to settle, you need a new set of characters entirely. But the Simpsons writers instead prefer to use existing, established cast members for this purpose, and this has the end result of giving a sense of history to the world. When Bart gets in trouble at school, it isn’t just a stern principal archetype telling him off, but a stern principal who has suffered a heartbreak and has a strained relationship with his mother. Because The Simpsons uses their established characters for these roles, these roles get to be reshaped to the characters rather than the other way around, and as such they come across as that much more relatable because it’s happening to somebody we’ve grown used to seeing. There’s an interesting development in Skinner’s personality as a result of his relationship with Patty in that he becomes a much nicer person to the students, much to the detriment of rule of law at Springfield Elementary. It calls into question whether Skinner was nicer because he was in love or because he had an outlet for his negative feelings with Patty, who rebelled equally in putting others down. Likewise, Patty seems to be multiple times nicer—though it’s hard to tell because zero times anything is still zero—as she opens up to Skinner. But this is The Simpsons, so in the end Patty returns to her love in Selma, and Skinner returns to his love in Springfield Elementary School.

Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? After a heart attack scare, Abraham Simpson decides to tell Homer about the fact that he has a younger half-brother, born out of wedlock and sent to an adoption agency before Homer was born. So Homer tracks down his long-lost brother, only to learn that the man, Herbert Powell, is a multi-millionaire owner of a car company. The company isn’t doing well as it’s losing more and more ground to the Japanese because of a lack of appeal to the average American. So in Homer, an average American comes along. Herbert sees an opportunity to have a car designed by his target audience, and so he gives free reign to the Simpsons to design whatever he wants. At first, the engineers ignore his advice and continue on with their design without him, but after Herb gives him a pep talk, Homer reasserts himself and designs the car the way he wants to, which ends up being a monstrosity that not only barely works but costs $882,000 (which is $180,000 in today’s money) due to having invested so much into the design. His company gets bought out by the Japanese, and Herb is sent penniless on a bus into the sunset.

While this episode presents Homer as an average American, the truth is that he’s really an exaggeration of average American traits: an extreme version of the flaws the writers wanted to satirize, used as a point from which to make observations. But it tracks that Herb would make the mistake of thinking otherwise, as he’s the type of person to have never had any sort of strong relationship to family or even other people. So missing the point in assuming his brother represents the country ends up being the mistake that brings the downfall of his company, as rather than creating a car for an American, he creates a car for a stereotype of one. Herb is introduced as an anti-Homer: he’s assertive and strong-willed, as well as willing to get in people’s faces when he needs them to do something, compared to the more spineless and depressive Homer. Herb is also a much more ambitious man, always trying to figure out something that nobody else can see and having worked his way up from nothing to the top. Homer’s life started out as average and is, for its time, still the average that you would expect out of television. And so the major difference between the two is a function not only of intelligence but assertiveness. That Homer is less willing to push people around to get his way is perhaps why he’s gotten along better than his brother in regards to his social connections and his family.

Bart’s dog gets an F. When Lisa is home sick with the mumps, Marge decides it’s a good time to introduce her to her birthright: an heirloom quilt passed down the generations. Homer gets a new pair of shoes out of jealousy of the Flanders’s, and Santa’s Little Helper destroys them both, which forces the Simpson family to decide that perhaps he should be given away unless he’s able to learn something in obedience school. But as Bart refuses to hurt Santa’s Little Helper as discipline, the dog doesn’t learn anything, and after a few more incidents it’s decided that he will have to be rehomed. Bart spends one last evening playing with the dog, only for Santa’s Little Helper to finally respond to kindness, and so the family doesn’t give him away in the end.

The Simpsons’ pets have always existed as background elements: no more characters than the house or the furniture. And so we now get an episode around developing Santa’s Little Helper not only as a character but as a Simpson. He’s the incarnation of everything we notice about our neighbors’ dogs: namely, we only really notice when their pets are misbehaving or otherwise inconveniencing us. When a pet behaves itself, it gets a few scritches before being forgotten about, much as Snowball II and Santa’s Little Helper routinely are in episodes where the plot doesn’t require them. One other thing brought up in this episode is Marge’s affinity for quilting, with a memorable gag of her abusing her finger to show off the talent. But this is the first we ever really get to see of it, as well as the heirloom quilt, which has now only come into existence. It’s not as though introducing one-off concepts in this way is an inherently bad thing; The Simpsons does this all the time. But the more concerning aspect of this introduction is that we’re learning so much about Marge, who has yet to get an episode focusing on her, during an episode about the family dog. Santa’s Little Helper got a spotlight episode before Marge did.

Old Money. Abraham Simpson meets and falls in love with Beatrice B. Simmons, and the two begin to spend more and more time together. But when Homer drags his father away from the retirement home on Bea’s birthday, she passes away, and Abe is left to mourn her loss. He’s given $16,000 as an inheritance and decides to spend it on himself rather than on the son who took him from the last moment in his beloved’s life. But this doesn’t bring him any happiness until the ghost of Bea visits him and tells him to share the wealth, making others as happy as he made her. So he hears petitioners from Springfield who all ask for a share of the cash until eventually Lisa convinces him to give it to a charitable cause. But realizing that the amount of money he got is not nearly enough to help everybody who needs it, Abe Simpson takes it gambling and, thanks to Homer for stopping him from making a few unwise bets, walks away with enough to renovate the Springfield Retirement Castle, giving a sense of dignity to all of the residents.

This is one of the first episodes of the show to follow the loose style that the later seasons would solidify into a staple of the series, where A plots and B plots are distanced by time rather than cuts between scenes, and the first act may tell a completely different story than the second or third. In this way, many Simpsons episodes feel like several shorts connected by plot threads rather than one continuous story as one may see in other contemporary shows. As such, when an episode begins, there’s no way to tell how it—

Will it end? Or what elements of the story are going to continue being relevant by the story's conclusion? Much like in real life, "Old Money" is an episode that deals with a theme that gets brought up in *The Simpsons* on occasion: the way that the elderly are treated by society.

In a world where so many people define themselves by their role in a household or their career, what happens to an empty nester who's also retired? If, from a cultural standpoint, they no longer contribute to the larger capitalist systems in the country, then do they even exist? Often, the elderly are forgotten about or left to fend for themselves, with their needs being statistically too small to be worth consideration. After all, what kind of strategy is it to divert resources towards people who won't be around much longer anyway? And, of course, as we turn our backs on the elderly, they'll end up turning their backs on us too. This is a lesson that both Homer and Abe learned. As it's Homer's wisdom to stop gambling that Abe was unwilling to listen to because he internalized that message. In the end, the amount of dignity one deserves has nothing to do with their age, and everybody is better off for having learned that.

Brush with greatness: Homer gets stuck in a water slide due to his weight and vows to start dieting and exercising seriously. While searching for his weights, he comes across an old painting of Ringo Starr that Marge made in high school. She recounts the story of how she lost the love of painting due to an uncaring art teacher, but Lisa encourages Marge to apply to a community college art class. While there, a painting she made of Homer asleep on the couch wins an award. This catches the attention of Mr. Burns, who needs a portrait of himself to be unveiled at a new wing of the Art Museum he's funding, and he hires her for her ability to find inner beauty in her subjects. But Mr. Burns's nasty attitude as he poses for her makes it difficult for Marge to find any sort of beauty in the man, and she eventually loses the drive to paint once again. But when an extremely belated reply from Ringo Starr reaches Marge, where he praises her artistic abilities, she is reinvigorated and eventually paints a portrait of Burns in the nude. She justifies her decision by saying that it was done to show how, despite his horrible personality, he's still a frail old man and is as human as any of us.

An interesting parallel is drawn between Marge and Lisa in this episode, in that Lisa's affinity for music was crushed by a close-minded teacher before being reinvigorated by Bleeding Gums Murphy, just as Marge's old affinity for painting was, due to another unsupportive adult. But ultimately, Marge's return to her passion is something a bit more optimistic, in that she eventually finds a support network from her family and later her idol, whereas Lisa needs to look outside her household to find somebody able and willing to inspire her. But this episode does take a connection between the two and build on what we saw from this back in "Moaning Lisa." Marge's adolescence was a time where she never received the support that she wanted from those around her, and seeing Lisa get the same upbringing she recognizes as bad for her, stands up for her daughter in a way that now makes much more sense to us as viewers. This is the first real Marge episode we've gotten in the show so far, at least an episode that doesn't focus on Marge in terms of her relationship to another character. It does a great job of showing her sense of conviction, not just in standing up to somebody who wrongs her, but in tolerating them up to that point. It's because of her more immediately forgiving nature that she's able to get away with her outburst without ever seeming as though she's being off-putting or overstepping any sort of boundary. It's an implementation of the concept of "turn the other cheek." If she's wronged, Marge is quick to forgive, but only once and only if she's the offended party.

Lisa's substitute, Miss Hoover, Lisa's second-grade teacher, is on an extended leave of absence, and so a substitute teacher, Mr. Bergstrom, takes over. He proves to be everything Lisa has ever wanted out of the public school system: willing to engage with every student, resistant to the vices that ruin so many other Springfieldian nights, and not afraid of his own emotions. But when Miss Hoover returns and Mr. Bergstrom leaves to go to another school, Lisa wonders if there will ever be another person who understands her on the same level. She's convinced her father will never live up to that same reputation. But after she loses her temper at Homer's lack of ambition, Homer eventually acknowledges that he won't be able to become the person Lisa wants him to be, but he's still going to try his best.

Meanwhile, Bart runs for student body president against Martin, and his campaign starts off promising due to his charismatic lead over the other boy. But his message of "voting is lame" works too well, and he eventually loses the election. Although Homer, in the end, convinces Bart that a bunch of responsibilities with none of the prestige to go with them isn't really worth lamenting the loss of.

With all of the mental and emotional failings of Homer, it's a safe assumption that Lisa is growing up without a positive male role model, and so she latches on to the first gentle man she meets in Springfield. So, having met an adult that exemplifies everything she wants to be, Lisa gets a new reason to live, as she's now convinced that there is, in fact, a place in the world in the future for people like her. Because one of Lisa's greatest fears is the idea that she might grow up to be like everybody else. Her intelligence is never properly challenged by those around her, and she's constantly faced with a lack of stimulation, making her depressed and angsty, as though her gifts are not an asset to an increasingly dumbed-down world. And, of course, this is the message the episode ends up sending. Homer is meant to be a representation of middle-class American men; his role within *The Simpsons* mirroring the socially perceived role of the modern American father. Because it's believed that being able to communicate in a healthy way with your daughter isn't very masculine, so Homer can't get along well with Lisa without compromising some part of his identity. Mr. Bergstrom represents a rejection of those standards, unbothered by the ridicule of society in favor of living the way he wants to, and as such, he's able to have a much healthier relationship with Lisa than Homer ever could. But in the end, Homer does manage to grow beyond his old self—not just a representation of Homer's desire to improve, but society's slow rejection of typical masculine ideals.

"The War of the Simpsons": The Simpson family throws a house party where Homer gets extremely drunk and makes a fool of himself by acting profane. So Marge decides to sign the two of them up for a couple's retreat in order to repair their marriage—something Homer objects to until he realizes it will be held at a common fishing spot. Rather than putting forth a good faith effort to engage with Reverend Lovejoy's counseling, Homer sneaks off in the morning to go fishing, hoping to catch General Sherman, a nickname given to a giant catfish that lives near the retreat site. He succeeds in catching the giant fish, but when Marge confronts him about abandoning her for recreation, he declares that the marriage is more important to him than a fish and lets General Sherman, as well as a shot at fame and a legacy, go free. Meanwhile, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie are being taken care of by Grandpa Simpson, though they take advantage of his feebleness to do whatever they want to and throw a party. In the end, they see him crying over his failure to maintain control and feel guilty enough to clean up the house, only for Abe to reveal that he was fake crying in order to guilt-trip them into behaving.

The idea of a grand romantic gesture is one that has been a staple of romantic comedies and sitcoms for as long as those genres have existed—the means of showing one big deed that can undo years of neglect in a relationship in order to prove to the audience that the couple belongs together. But while this is a standard in television, it's far from a proper way to handle a real relationship. Media in the following decades would take a much closer look at this sort of trope, but I don't think that any show has ever told it better than *BoJack Horseman*'s episode "Free Churro." Years of pop cultural inundation have given us a skewed vision of what a healthy relationship is supposed to look like, when the truth has always been very boring: a good romance is one where you can do absolutely nothing with someone else and still find the time fulfilling. But a couple lying in bed together showing each other random memes they saw on their phone doesn't make for very compelling television. In fact, this might play into why these relationships are presented in the way that they are in the first place: a relationship that's held together by sporadic grand moments will never be one that's truly healthy, and so the need for more and more grand moments will arise to continue the cycle. The underlying problem can't get fixed because there wouldn't be any more show if it was.

"Three Men and a Comic Book": At a comic convention, Bart finds a seller with a copy of Radioactive Man number one, and so he makes it his new goal in life to possess that comic book. But despite all the various odd jobs he works over the next few days, he isn't anywhere close to being able to afford it until Martin and Milhouse end up in the store at the same time, and Bart agrees to split the cost of the book between the trio. They managed to buy the book and read it in Bart's treehouse, but when it's time to go their separate ways, nobody can decide who gets the privilege of taking the book home with them. In the end, the boys spend the night in the treehouse, growing increasingly paranoid with each other as they assume that the other two are trying to steal their prize. It isn't until a scuffle turns violent that Bart has to decide between saving Milhouse from a fall or saving the book from being blown away, and he chooses the former. In the end, the book is destroyed, and the three lament having lost everything because they couldn't share one thing.

This episode does well. Implematic of *The Simpsons* as a whole is the way it teaches false morals, or to clarify how the lessons taught in this episode subvert the typical implementation of lessons learned from media in general. Bart is supposed to learn the value of hard work after a series of degrading jobs that lead to him finally being able to afford the comic book he wants, but instead, he works hard, suffers through it, and winds up hardly any better off than he was at the start. After the comic book is destroyed, the three boys lament its destruction and that they could have had partial ownership if they had only trusted each other enough to share, but they come to this conclusion without some sort of "hugging it out," instead being more annoyed that the universe stole their kick justice than anything. This episode also leads into the nerdier side of culture—the communal capitalist childhood so many of the era shared: growing up, all reading the same comic books, watching the same cartoons, and living similar enough lives that nostalgia became a massive marketable force. But far from exclusively appraising this sort of geekdom, it instead derides it as something that should be limited to the imaginations of children and the occasional excursion. We're meant to put ourselves in Bart's shoes as an excited child eager to learn the origins of his favorite superhero, but get too into the culture surrounding it, and you become the aptly named Comic Book Guy—an obese neckbeard whose only close company is that of children.

"Blood Feud": Mr. Burns collapses from hypothermia and needs a blood transfusion to survive, but since he has double O negative blood, a very rare blood type, the only one able to help him is Bart Simpson. Sensing the potential for a grand reward, Homer encourages Bart to donate to his boss, and soon Mr. Burns makes a full recovery. He writes a card for the Simpson family and moves on with his life to write a memoir of his struggle and recovery. But Homer is annoyed at the lack of a tangible reward, and so he and Bart write a strongly worded letter insulting the old man. Marge convinces Homer not to stoop to the level of sending it, but Bart delivers the letter anyway. And when Mr. Burns reads it and sees how Homer really feels about him, decides to have him fired and beaten to a pulp. But Mr. Smithers is able to make Mr. Burns see the error in his ways, and he changes his mind, buying the Simpson family a giant oil head.

The final lines of this episode and the final exchange of the season is perhaps the best summary of the approach to writing it that the *Simpson* staff has: no lessons, no morals, no feel-good endings; it's just a bunch of stuff that happened. "A show about nothing" was a refreshing change of pace in a media landscape inundated with sappy stories about togetherness that ultimately no real family would ever be able to relate to. And while *The Simpsons* is far from the first show to reject typical Hays Code clichés, it was the first to strike the precise chord needed to garner the attention of America by featuring characters that just about anybody alive could relate to. "Blood Feud" is ultimately a tale about the completely different lives led by the two halves of Springfield. Burns is rich enough that money is hardly a thought in his head when it comes to a reward, but for the Simpson family, it's enough to motivate practically every action in this episode. Homer and Bart's letter to Mr. Burns is driven by anger directed towards their lack of a proper reward for what they perceive as a deed well done, even if the motivation for that deed wasn't as pure as they have pretended it was. And yet, it isn't as though that rage ended up being a completely destructive force. If they hadn't tried for revenge against Mr. Burns for the perceived slight, then they would have gotten nothing. But because they did, there was a reward after all—just one that's so functionally useless and encumbering that they may as well have gotten nothing. And so there really is no moral to this episode, just a bunch of mishaps that occur to people desperately trying to seek meaning in a world that doesn't care about what they feel they deserve.

Season 3: Within only two seasons, *The Simpsons* was able to become a total cultural icon, the family becoming one of the most well-known, not only on television but in stores and advertising. While the first season was an overnight success, the second is what catapulted the show into the minds not only of TV watchers but the rest of the world as well. It grew to the point that other brands were beginning to attach themselves to the fictional family to promote themselves rather than the other way around. Season 3 began a trend where celebrity guest stars appeared on the show, not merely as a bit appearance but as themselves and playing a role in the plot. And while this is a trend that would later be derided as indicative of the show's decline in quality, for now, it wasn't played out so much that audiences saw it as a gimmick. Season 3 also saw a shift in staff. The duo of Al Jean and Mike Reiss were brought on as showrunners, replacing the existing trio of Matt Groening, James L. Brooks, and Sam Simon. These members would still have a role on the show, but they took a backseat to allow others the spotlight. These new showrunners were already veterans of the show, having contributed to many of the more emotional episodes. Although to say that an individual wrote an episode of *The Simpsons* is a bit of a misnomer; the writer credited with the episode is typically just the person to have thought up the episode's plot and created a rough draft, while the actual episode is written in a more collaborative method involving all the writing staff. The third season ultimately marked a shift in the way that *The Simpsons* told its stories; the down-to-earth realism being done away with for larger plot beats with more grandeur, rather than the Simpson family dealing with a problem many people in the audience may relate to or have experienced themselves. Season 3 and on would show a more deranged side to Springfield; plots were exciting and involved more locations and more people, even the occasional celebrity, but the core of the show—the emotion behind the family—was something that remained unchanged, no matter what the universe felt like throwing at *The Simpsons*.

"Stark Raving Dad": After Bart puts his red hat in with Homer's white clothing, the clothes are dyed pink, and he stands out at work, which prompts the power plant to perform a psychological evaluation that winds up with Homer in a mental institution. While there, he meets a man who introduces himself as Michael Jackson, despite being a large, overweight white guy. After Marge is able to get her husband out of the institution, Homer invites his former roommate to his house for a few days as thanks for helping him to get through the rough experience. But Bart, excited at meeting Michael Jackson, tells Milhouse, and soon the whole city waits to meet the musical legend, only to be let down when they find out it's not the real Jackson. In the end, for real or not, Michael helps Bart to write a song for Lisa to celebrate her birthday, and all is well, at least within the Simpson family. Michael reveals that he's really an impersonator named Leon Kompowsky, who realized that impersonating Jackson made him easier to like, and he leaves with his work done.

It's going to be impossible to discuss this episode without also bringing up the later controversy surrounding it, as well as the decision to pull it from later edition DVD releases and streaming platforms. As I've mentioned before, *The Simpsons* is a show that serves well as a time capsule—a representation of the cultural landscape of its time. I don't think that at the time there was an ill intention with this episode, even if the context of Bart and Jackson staying up all night together becomes muddied with new information being made available. Michael Jackson has been dead for over a decade; continuing to air the episode arguably cannot cause any harm, but on the other hand, may also be considered disrespectful to victims, not only of his own abuse but of anybody else who's been manipulated by the wealthy and powerful. In the end, while I don't think the decision to make the episode totally verboten is the right one, I don't think that there is a correct option, and so airing on the side of caution is the better choice than any alternative. But for the time it was released, "Stark Raving Dad" managed to be a perfectly serviceable episode—one that shows off a combination of the many strengths of *The Simpsons*. The plot is split into two: one following the brother-sister conflict between Bart and Lisa, while the other side of the plot makes some poignant social commentary of what we consider to be outsider behavior. Homer is considered some sort of deviant for wearing a pink shirt, and Leon is considered insane for impersonating a celebrity, no matter how many people's days are brightened by his impressions. The way Jackson was incorporated into the episode was well navigated; while he himself is a big draw to the episode's appeal, the main story is fundamentally about the emotional relationships of the Simpson family, combined with just enough social commentary to keep it relevant. It's a strong start to a strong season.

"Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington": Due to Homer's new-found love of reading, Lisa gets the idea to enter an essay contest where the winner gets an all-expenses-paid trip to Washington, D.C., America's capital. She writes a patriotic essay inspired by the natural beauty of the country and wins the first round of the contest, advancing to the next phase and allowing the Simpson family to travel with her. They get up to their typical antics until Lisa encounters a dirty deal being done at one of the lesser-trafficked monuments that shakes her faith in democracy. So she rewrites her essay to be less crowd-pleasing and more cynical of the entire system, calling out the corruption that she saw and decrying the systems that would allow that sort of finance. Her essay shocks the audience but also motivates a Senate page to report the incident, and within just a few hours, the congressman in question is arrested, proving that the system works.

Lisa has always served as a sort of creator's soapbox—the character who is a stand-in for what sort of messages the writers want in plain text. Her personality has always leaned towards questioning authority and coming up with a system of morality that's distinct from what polite society tolerates, and season 3 is when that sense of self becomes activism rather than staying a simple observer to the world, reacting.

To what other characters do, say, and think? Lisa has become the type to go out of her way to denounce or praise certain behaviors and then to act on her own words. But this isn't just a change in the way Lisa is behaving; rather, it's a change in the way the Simpsons have engaged with the world.

In the first two seasons, the Simpson family felt small; they were merely a part of a much larger world, and whenever something happened, they would be in the center of the conflict. Now, they tend to be more assertive, with episode plots happening less in spite of the Simpsons and more so because of them. Before, things happened at them; now, things happen to them. And so the change in Lisa's personality is merely a logical response to a subtle shift in the writing style that gives more agency to the characters. Their wants and desires start to play a much larger role in grander play, and as such, the characters have to come across as much stronger so those plots can be initiated realistically in the first place.

When Flanders failed—Ned Flanders quits his job in order to start the Leftorium, a store that specializes in left-handed tools and appliances—still in his perpetual state of envy, Homer wishes for his neighbor's downfall; that Ned will go bankrupt as his store goes under. As the days go on, nobody actually shops at Ned's store, and he's forced to take more and more desperate measures to stay afloat. Before finally, Homer feels guilty enough to take matters into his own hands; he calls up every left-handed person he knows and, in a massive word-of-mouth campaign, attracts attention to the store that, in the end, causes the Leftorium to become a success.

In the B plot, Bart lies about going to a karate class and pretends to have learned the touch of death, which he uses to bully Lisa. But when she's being harassed by the schoolyard bullies, Lisa tries to get Bart to defend her, only for him to receive comeuppance instead. The actual pace of this episode is remarkably slow. Ned's failure takes up several redundant scenes to show off his business hemorrhaging money and Homer slowly transitioning from gloating in Ned's misery to lamenting for his neighbor's loss. And the B plot of the episode involving Bart's fib only gets started up in the second act, concluding rather abruptly in the third. But far from this detracting from the episode's overall quality, it is instead a means to allow more of the episode's focus to be on character interactions and humor. The multiple scenes of Ned selling off more and more allow the episode to spread out the buildup to the finale. Homer steadily meeting people who have a demand for something left-handed that's not currently being met. This also means more opportunities to contrast the behavior of Homer and his now-enemy Ned. And this one-sided animosity is actually something that's pretty new. While Homer has never been a big fan of Ned's, the outright hatred is something that we've only seen once before in "Dead Putting Society." But that was a mutual argument between the two that, while still started by Homer, was also a two-person ordeal. Here, Homer still seems to have that previous level of hatred, only without the buildup to why their relationship has reached that point. It might be the earliest glimpse at the flanderization of characters in The Simpsons, and ironically, it's in an episode where Flanders's faith is barely even brought up. Ultimately, this episode has a few faults, but none that distract majorly from the overall appeal of the episode, and in fact, many of them only add to the best parts of it by pulling other distracting elements away.

Bart the Murderer: After a particularly bad day at school, Bart finds himself inside of a local Mafia hangout. But rather than having him shot, he instead impresses them with a few accurate horse race guesses and his ability to mix a decent Manhattan. They give him a part-time job doing odd work and paying extremely well, enough that they're able to assuage the family's concerns over the character of his associates. But after Bart winds up late due to Principal Skinner keeping him after school, they ask to speak with the man, only for Skinner to go missing the next day. Bart becomes consumed with guilt over the thought that he may have had his principal killed, made worse when his associates are arrested and they all conspire to pin the blame for their airing on him. But before he can be sent away, Skinner himself arrives and reveals the truth—that he was never killed, merely trapped beneath a stack of newspapers for the last week. In the end, Bart is let off the hook, and he renounces the life of a mobster.

Within two seasons, we've seen Bart's antics progress from beheading a statue to jumping a gorge to being tried for murder. As The Simpsons has reached out to further and further places, the scale of what the characters could and did do also expanded. The show is able to stay fresh by one-upping its previous iterations but never manages to lose the audience due to the show holding fast enough to restraint—that the plot never becomes grand for the sake of grandeur. Bart is tried for murder, but this is still an episode about a boy getting in over his head. Like "The Telltale Head," we ultimately have an episode about a boy's attention-seeking behavior as he searches for some sort of place where he can fit in. And so scaling from a delinquent to a daredevil to a death row inmate comes across less like the writers trying to one-up themselves and more as a logical scaling of what Bart would search for next.

Another revisited theme this episode deals with is the media frenzy surrounding a specific character. It's reminiscent of the episode "Krusty Gets Busted," as we see the news fall for its own exaggerations as they play into the media cycle of fear in order to oversell a story. But rather than the victim of the news smelling blood in the water being a fictional celebrity, it is instead focused on a Simpson themselves. This means that we're able to take a much more nuanced look at the effect that sort of infamy can have on the person at the center of it all, rather than the outsider's perspective that we received earlier. And of course, Bart is a character who has danced closest to this sort of delinquent lifestyle, and as such, his view on this world is the scariest, as this is the most likely future for him.

Homer Defined: The nuclear power plant undergoes a potential core meltdown, only to be saved at the last minute by Homer's blind guessing at what his actual job is supposed to be. For averting the disaster, he's allotted as a hero by the whole city, but none of the praise rings true as he knows it's all based on a lie. This culminates in Homer being sent to the Shelbyville plant to give a speech on keeping calm under pressure. But when the other plant also undergoes a meltdown, Homer once again saves the day by blindly guessing at what he's supposed to do. His secret revealed, the respect he once received is gone, and the world begins to laugh at him instead of worship him.

In the B plot, Milhouse doesn't invite Bart to his birthday party as his mother, Luanne, doesn't want the two boys to be friends, as Bart is a bad influence. But Marge speaks with the boy's mother and convinces her that it's better for both of them, as they don't have anybody else.

Homer, in this episode, is defined by his dumb luck. Homer, in the series proper, is defined by his dumb luck. He's consistently shown to be a man of below-average intelligence and rarely goes out of his way to improve, prove himself, or work at something until his back is against the wall. Despite this, he has an easy and high-paying job, a loving family, and enough leisure time to pursue a frankly absurd number of other hobbies. So for him to prevent a nuclear meltdown with the same dumb luck completely reads for his character. This dumb luck is something that's come about as a necessary aspect of his character, however. Throughout the whole show, Homer routinely gets into a lot of trouble and needs to go above and beyond to get out of said trouble. But how can he get out of these messes so consistently without also making himself unrelatable to audiences? And so he needs to have that level of luck to make him into a character that interesting things can happen to without also coming across as superhuman. This episode's B plot plays into the fears and anxieties of many mothers across America. Just as Luanne worries about Bart's influence on her son, so many authority figures wondered the same thing about their children: Could watching Bart's antics set a bad example for their own children after all? In the previous episode, he wound up on trial for murder; maybe he's not the ideal role model for America's youth. But on the other hand, if a child is so enamored by Bart Simpson, it's likely that they're spending a lot of time around the television instead of their other friends and family members. So in the end, why try to limit your child's exposure to the world of The Simpsons when it's clear that that's all that they have?

Like Father, Like Clown: Krusty the Clown has dinner with the Simpson family and, after saying grace, reveals that he's not only Jewish but estranged from his hardcore religious father. He tells them about how the appeal of clowning kept drawing him in despite his father's disapproval, and when the ruse was finally revealed, he was kicked out of the house, never to see his dad again. Recalling these memories starts to make him depressed to the point where he can't even laugh on his show, and eventually, Bart and Lisa decide to mobilize in order to reunite the family. But Rabbi Hyman Krustofsky is sharp, and all of their attempts to quote scripture at him fail to convince him to reunite—that is, until they find a quote from Sammy Davis Jr., a Jewish entertainer, that convinces the rabbi that perhaps he's been too quick to judge. In the end, Krusty reunites with his father during a live show, and they sing the crowd into the credits.

The concept for this episode comes from the 1927 film The Jazz Singer, where a son decides to become a musician instead of a rabbi, and his father threatens to disown him, prompting the son to perform in blackface in order to hide his identity. In this episode, it's clown face instead, but the emotional point of the episode remains the same: A son must choose between family and career. Although in the original movie, this plot comes to a head when the rabbi becomes ill and The Jazz Singer must decide whether to perform on opening night or reconcile with his father. Of course, this sort of plot is not the kind of thing that has a large role for the Simpson family to perform, and so minor changes needed to occur in order to not only allow for a potential guest star to return but for audiences to recognize their favorite characters. While the line is told as a joke, Lisa's quote—"A man who envies our family is a man who needs help"—is actually rather ironic considering the ironic realism that would later be brought to the show in episodes like "Homer's Enemy." Because while the Simpson family is made up of a series of exaggerations of the worst traits of modern families, in order for all of these traits to be present in the first place, there has to be at least some sort of connection between the cast. They might not get along, but at least they're together enough that they can fight in the first place. And so anybody who lacks the family ties that the Simpsons have would surely be jealous, even of a dysfunctional family.

Treehouse of Horror II: A second Treehouse of Horror segment, this one with the same concept as the first, only with the framing device changed to the Simpson family having individual nightmares after eating too much Halloween candy. The first segment is based on the W.W. Jacobs story "The Monkey's Paw." Homer buys a monkey's paw that grants wishes but with ironic twists. The first real wish is that the Simpson family becomes rich and famous, their fame becoming bloated and America resenting the needless advertising they're attached to. Lisa then wishes for world peace, but Kang and Kodos discover that the Earth is now vulnerable to invasion, and they conquer the planet with crude weaponry. Finally, Homer gets a turkey sandwich, and it's a little dry. Frustrated with the failures and humanity being enslaved by aliens, Homer gives the paw to Ned, who immediately undoes the invasion by inventing the board with the nail through it and then sprucing up his house. The second segment is a retelling of The Twilight Zone tale "It's a Good Life," where a spoiled 10-year-old, played by Bart, has the power to read people's minds and punish them for thinking unhappy thoughts. But rather than the typical ending, we instead have a Jack-in-the-box Homer reconcile with his son, and the two rediscover their familial love with one another, which leads to Bart waking up in his bed, horrified. In the final story, Homer dreams that his brain is removed by Mr. Burns and placed into the body of a worker robot, but the robot inherits his work ethic and refuses to do anything. So Burns and Smithers undo the experiment, only for the robot to crush Burns and force some emergency surgery. In the end, his head is grafted onto Smithers's body, and the episode ends ambiguously as to whether it was a nightmare or reality.

Lisa's Pony: After Homer neglects to get Lisa a new reed for her saxophone the night of a recital to go drinking at Moe's instead, she refuses to forgive him. Homer goes through old baby videos of Lisa's various childhood firsts, only to realize that he's never paid any attention to her and concludes that she can't love him because he's never been there to be loved. And so he formulates a plan to win back Lisa's affection, buying her the pony she's always been asking for. But ponies aren't cheap, and soon Homer is forced to work a second job to afford the new pet, working at the Kwik-E-Mart from midnight to 8:00 a.m. The new work schedule leaves him no time to spend with his daughter and slowly erodes his physical and mental health until eventually, he can't keep the jobs a secret from his kids any longer. In the end, Lisa decides to give up the pony because the only big animal she can love is her dad.

Homer has never been a good parent to Lisa. While his job is able to keep a roof over her head and food on her plate, this is only what's required. As a father, to be a dad requires the ability to be a proper role model as well as a provider, and this is where Homer fails. And so the logical conclusion as to how he can be both is by playing up one end of the deal. He may not be able to spend time with her properly, but he can double down on his work, exhausting himself as a replacement for human affection, as that's the style of caretaking that he knows. But of course, replacing one kind of love with another won't fix the original issue, and at best, Lisa's desire for a positive male role model will only be transferred to a love of her pony, Princess. In the end, this episode's messaging is a little bit muddied. Homer tries to win back Lisa's affection with a grand gesture of apology, but that doesn't work. It gives an implication that she's tired of being let down in a thousand little ways, only for some big deal to be made out of how much he really loves his daughter, as though it undoes everything else. But then Homer makes another grand gesture in the end, and everything is back to normal. I suppose there is some sense made in how long it takes Lisa to even notice that Homer has been exhausting himself working to afford her pony; after all, he was never there for her before, so why should she notice that he's staying out all night after the fact? There could have been an alternate version of this episode where Lisa learns about Homer's second job earlier, only to decide not to forgive him at first as she resents the fact that he would rather spend eight hours a night working than a few hours a week trying to get to know her.

Saturdays of Thunder: Homer takes a fatherhood aptitude test at the insistence of Patty and Selma, only to get the lowest score possible. So he decides to help Bart create a Soapbox Derby racer, and they enter their work into a local race. Their vehicle doesn't even finish, but the winner, Martin, crashes and fractures his arm, leaving him unable to race in the next round. But out of a mutual desire not to see Nelson win, Bart agrees to race in Martin's car rather than the one he and Homer worked on together. Heartbroken by this, Homer mopes around at his house while Bart prepares for the big race. But on the day of the race, he retakes the aptitude test and manages a perfect score, his time with the boy being enough to put him above the threshold. Realizing that he should support his son no matter what, Homer cheers Bart on at the race, and the two manage to win.

Homer and Bart are very similar characters, with Bart taking after Homer whether he wants to or not. The issue is with the amount of respect the boy has for his father. Homer is incompetent in many ways and lazy in others; no matter how much his heart is in the right place, Bart resents his similarities to his father and tries to act in his own way and often makes attempts to antagonize the man in order to prove something about his own independence. But ultimately, the two get along well when they're forced to. Something that Bart shows conflicted feelings on throughout the show as well as during this episode. And so most of the time, it comes down to an aspect of convenience. When Bart thinks his best chance at winning lies with ignoring his father's help, he ignores it; but when he does win with Homer's emotional support, the two still celebrate together. Ultimately, this episode is one of the weaker season 3 episodes, as its plotline plays out in a very conventional way—the good guy wins in the end after sharing an emotional moment with the family member. The primary reason this episode doesn't read like a typical Simpsons episode is because it really isn't taking much of its plots from movies such as *Days of Thunder* and *The Natural*. While there's still some sort of that Simpsons charm that makes it stand out from the works of parodies, there isn't quite enough to carry the episode beyond anything other than homage.

Flaming Moe's: Hoping to get out of the house during Lisa's sleepover, Homer goes to Moe's Tavern. Since the tavern is out of beer, he instead tries out a recipe Homer came up with called a Flaming Homer. But the drink proves popular, and Moe decides to rebrand it as a Flaming Moe's, stealing the glory from his friend. As time goes on, the drink as well as Moe's Tavern becomes more and more popular, with Moe able to expand his staff and attract the attention of celebrities and the upper crust of Springfield. But after turning down multiple offers to sell the drink for millions, Moe eventually feels enough guilt to cave in and split the profits with his old friend. But this comes at around the same time that Homer goes crazy out of spite and reveals the recipe to the entire crowd, making the offer to sell worthless. In the end, the whole town is overrun with imitators, and Homer and Moe make up, sharing one more Flaming Homer together.

It's not uncommon to see a trope in media where a character receives a sudden windfall and becomes a worse person as a result. Even earlier episodes of The Simpsons have touched on this sort of plotline, but here we see an interesting inversion of that trope. Moe steals the drink from Homer at the very beginning of the episode before he gets rich off the idea. As the episode goes on and he becomes richer, he maintains the same general personality he's always had. While it's true his success is based on a lie at Homer's expense, this isn't a new trait he was coming from the start; instead, it's Homer who becomes jaded and angry as a result of Moe's wealth and fortune, jealous of the fact that his former friend is profiting off of his idea. So money still corrupts in this plotline, just not in the typical way. Though this is sort of a Simpsons staple by this point, a major complaint of the later seasons of The Simpsons is the fact that the celebrity cameos were too self-indulgent and distracted from the episode itself, and I think that contrasting later seasons with this episode is a great point from which to start examining the change. There's a deluge of pop culture references in this episode, from the *Cheers* parody to an outright appearance by Aerosmith, but these are far from the central focus of the episode. And without the pop culture, the story wouldn't only work but could also work unchanged from its current iteration. The celebrity appearances are purely fluff, never the point of the episode.

Despite what the advertising might say, Burns, for calendar craftwork, or Burns, sells the plant, feeling as though the plant is holding him back from living a fuller life. Burns decides to sell the Springfield nuclear power plant. Around the same time, Homer sells his stock in the plant for $25, right before the announcement is made. When a group of German investors declare their intention to buy, the value of the stock skyrockets, leaving Homer as the only power plant employee not to receive a large bonus. Burns sells, and the plant falls into new hands who try to run the place more efficiently and fire Homer, as he doesn't really do anything.

But Burns fails to find any happiness in the life of a retiree. And after a run-in with Homer at Moe's, where the ex-employee tells off his former boss, Burns realizes that the residents of Springfield no longer fear him. And there's no point in being rich if you can't terrorize others with it. Coupled with the Germans struggling to fix all of the flagrant safety issues while staying profitable, Burns buys back the plant, giving Homer his job back, if only so he can one day get revenge.

There's an interesting take on continuity and wealth in this episode. While many episodes in the past have centered around the Simpson family and money, they ultimately never go anywhere. As should the family receive a large windfall, there would have to be some moment that addresses it being lost; otherwise, there would be some confusion as to whether the episode was non-canon or where the money went. And while later seasons would ultimately eschew the premise of continuity altogether, by this point there was still a small emphasis on keeping things regular. So the Simpson family can't receive a large amount of money, but side characters can get a few thousand, and ultimately Mr. Burns is able to receive several million dollars with no real change to anybody—not even the town of Springfield—which all adds a sense of irony to the entire plot.

During the 80s and 90s, there was a fear across the US of foreign investors buying out domestic businesses and improving things by firing much of the staff in pursuit of optimization—that their desire to increase profitability could hurt blue-collar workers. But throughout The Simpsons, it was regularly shown that the biggest threat to the people of Springfield's livelihoods comes from within. This episode was originally meant to have a group of Japanese investors buy out the plant, but the showrunners thought that that might be too predictable and potentially in bad taste should there be a major buyout in the near future or recent past.

I Married Marge: Marge goes to the doctor due to a pregnancy scare, and while she's out, Homer regales his children—at least the ones whose attention he can hold—with the story of how Marge's first pregnancy scare caused their marriage. Homer was working at a mini-golf course, which didn't pay well but was enough to stay afloat. But since his pay couldn't support a family, he went out to search for a new job at the nuclear plant, but without the skills to work there, he's rejected. And soon, all of the things they bought for Bart are repossessed as the family falls further and further into debt. Not wanting to let Marge down anymore, Homer vows not to return until he's employed enough to pay for all of them. But Marge refuses to let Homer go at it alone, and after a brief separation, they reunite and pronounce their love for each other once again. Newly invigorated by the support of his wife, Homer marches into Burns's office and demands a job, claiming that he'll be the greatest suck-up he possibly can. And his vigor impresses Burns enough to give him the career he has now.

So much of Homer's life is reactive; he's the type of person who rarely changes anything about himself until he's forced to by circumstances outside his control. The greatest ambition he has is sleeping in on the weekends and getting seconds of dessert. And this is a necessary part of his character, as any more would make him unrelatable to the average viewer. As Homer is an amalgamation of American wants and desires, he can only want things that America as a whole wants: temporary happiness, consumption, and being better than your neighbors. As such, Homer never goes out of his way to try to get something that the audience themselves wouldn't also want. And as such, his life is a series of reactions to various aspects of our world and our cultural problems. And yet it's not as though Homer is an entirely uninteresting person with only selfish motivations. Consistent to his character is the fact that he loves his family, and he loves Marge. Many of his greatest moments are things he does in order to maintain his relationships or, at the very least, the status quo. As such, The Simpsons is a show that's able to expand upon the typical lack of continuity in modern sitcoms by enforcing it through its character motivations. Homer wants nothing more than to have the Simpsons continue.

[Music] on Radio: Bart receives a radio set for his birthday, and despite not liking the present at first, a change of heart comes around to it when he realizes its potential for pulling pranks. One such prank is to drop the radio into a well and then to remotely convince people nearby that there's a little boy named Timo Tul trapped inside. This mobilizes the whole city into formulating a rescue effort for him, including several celebrities who write a song for him, and the entire well situation is turned into a public spectacle. That is, until Bart realizes that he left a label with his name on the radio and that soon the whole town might find out it was a prank and that he was the culprit. So he makes an attempt to retrieve the radio, only to fall into the well himself. And when the police find out it was just a prank, decide to call off the whole rescue operation. It isn't until Homer tries to dig Bart out himself that the rest of the city realizes their moral error and starts digging again, this time managing to get to the bottom and retrieve Bart.

This episode is based on the real-world story of Baby Jessica McClure, a girl who fell down a well in 1987 and had a large media parade around her rescue, as well as the story of Floyd Collins, who had a literal fairground constructed around his rescue attempt, similar to what we saw in this episode. As is typical of The Simpsons, we get to see the worst aspects of a rescue effort like this played out and paraded: the people attaching themselves to the rescue for the sake of personal glory and publicity, as well as those who might only use the event as a means of promoting their own solution at the expense of a more practical effort. And of course, the entire thing blows over just as quickly as it begins when the attention of the nation wains and moves on to some other story. In the end, the town of Springfield is criticized for only doing the right thing when the right thing is also the popular thing to do. In this episode, Bart receives some sort of karmic justice for his history of pranks and harm done to his community, but rather than a moral being taught about the righteousness of the whole situation, we instead watch as the town turns their backs on him, willing to make two wrongs occur rather than to take the high road. When Homer starts digging, this shames the rest of the city into action, as they see at least one person do the right thing, even if it's not the easy thing to do, in response to being victimized by a prank. So in the end, the people of Springfield want to do the right thing at first because they want to look good and ultimately end up doing the right thing to avoid looking bad.

Lisa the Greek: Lisa is upset that Homer never takes an interest in what she's doing, so Marge suggests reaching out to him instead. She decides to watch football with Homer, only for the duo to learn that Lisa has an uncanny ability in picking the right teams. So Homer begins betting on games and spending more and more time with his daughter, dubbing Sundays as "daddy-daughter day." But when Homer stops making plans with Lisa the week after the Super Bowl, Lisa realizes that she was only being used by him to win money and not because he cared about her. She makes one final prediction on the game but admits that her judgment may be too clouded by anger to accurately predict and that she may subconsciously be trying to make Homer fail. In the end, the team she originally bet on comes out on top, revealing that she truly loved her father all along. Lisa ends up with a genuine love of football by the midpoint of this episode, spurred on by a love of her father at the time that they're spending together. During this moment, she also begins to justify the act of gambling as it's also a vehicle for their togetherness. But her perception of all that changes as her perception of her father does. At first, gambling is a victimless crime; her participation justified as it's doing more good than harm and letting her spend time with her father. But as her love of Homer fades, she starts to acknowledge the wickedness in gambling, fearing for her future should she continue down that path and continue spending time with her father. The trivia people also like to point out about this episode is that the prediction Lisa made regarding the Super Bowl came true, with Washington coming out on top the following year. The episode was redubbed with the Dallas Cowboys; once again, Lisa's prediction was accurate. It would have been an interesting bit of tradition had The Simpsons continuously aired this episode prior to the Super Bowl every year, with the names of the teams being tweaked to predict the outcome annually. But perhaps Fox didn't want to draw any more attention to a rival network, or the copyright behind the NFL proved to be too much of a hassle to deal with.

Homer Alone: Marge has a nervous breakdown and blocks traffic on the Springfield Bridge, leading to her decision to take a vacation on her own so she can unwind away from the family. Bart and Lisa are dropped off at Patty and Selma's, where they're horrified at the lifestyle of their aunts. Homer is left alone with Maggie, but after a few hours of failing to take care of her, the baby runs away, seeking her mother. Homer searches fruitlessly for her, but Maggie is eventually brought back by the police. In the end, Marge manages to learn to relax on her own terms while she's away, and eventually, the family is reunited, with the Simpsons hoping that Marge never leaves again. This episode feels like a spiritual successor to "The Call of the Simpsons," and that it's less about following a plot and more about putting multiple characters into an unfamiliar situation and seeing how they react to it. It's very sitcom in this way, as none of the plots really build up to some conclusion other than the Simpson family needs Marge, which is something that was plainly clear from the beginning anyway. This episode differentiates itself by being much later in the series, where the Simpson family has received two seasons of development and therefore can have reactions to the plot that are more character-driven than the simple satirization marks they were before. And so Homer, who is normally very food-motivated, can turn down an omelet to search for Maggie in order to show off how concerned he is, or how Bart and Lisa typically feud over everything but show mutual fear and rely on each other to get through the time they spend with their aunts. And of course, Marge finally being able to stand up for herself and demand excessive room service at Rancho Relaxo means much more after seeing her behave more passively throughout the rest of the show.

Bart the Lover: Bart smashes the fish tank in his CL classroom during a yo-yo craze and gets a month's worth of detention for this. While there, he discovers that Edna Krabappel, his teacher, has put out a personal ad seeking a relationship, and so he makes a fake persona and responds. She falls in love with the fake person Bart created, and the two correspond for a while before Bart finishes off the prank by standing her up on a date. But when he sees her crying alone in a restaurant, he realizes that he's done something wrong and turns to his family for help letting her down easily. They managed to write a letter that says very little but just enough that Edna isn't heartbroken, and all ends well. In the B plot, Ned Flanders tries to track down the source of Todd's recent potty mouth and finds that Homer's attempts at building a doghouse have corrupted his son. So Homer sets up a swear jar at Marge's advice, and soon Homer's swearing is enough to simply purchase a doghouse outright. The nonsense humor of The Simpsons is on display at its best in this episode; the entire zinc movie being totally unrelated to the plot and existing purely to establish a later scene. Often, The Simpsons will use an opening completely unrelated to the rest of the episode in order to set up the rest of the plot, with the intro rarely contributing to anything except occasionally a character conflict. Bart is upset that his yo-yo was confiscated—the yo-yo itself being the thing to kick off both Bart's detention and discovery of Edna's personal ad—but then never comes back again. The style helps to lend credence to the believability of the plot and character journeys. Real life doesn't follow story beats; it's just a bunch of stuff that happens. Because the meat of the story is something that doesn't get introduced until partway through, it becomes more believable that the random emotional moments are a natural progression of events. The swear jar in this episode was a plotline introduced as a response to criticism of the show's strong language—that children who watched the show were swearing because they saw television characters doing it—and so we have the plotline that responds directly to this play out as a dispute between The Simpsons and the Flanders: the family you're meant to relate to versus the family you're meant to aspire to. One of the highlights of this episode, ironically, comes from Homer in his post-swearing mindset: "Fiddle-dee-dee, that'll require a tetanus shot"—a staunch proof that the showrunners didn't need strong language to produce a gag and that Homer's potty mouth was a much more conscious decision.

Homer at the Bat: The Springfield nuclear power plant employees sign up for the softball league at the insistence of Homer, who reveals a secret weapon of his that turns out to be a bat he carved himself, able to easily hit home runs. The boys from the plant are able to go on a massive winning streak that takes them all the way to the finals against the Shelbyville plant. But when Mr. Burns makes a bet with the owner of the other plant, he also decides to give temporary jobs to nine major league players who will serve as ringers to beat out the rival team. The men who carry the team to victory are annoyed at their sudden replacement, but in the end, all but one of their replacements are somehow incapacitated, with everybody but Homer getting back their original roles. But during the final pitch of the game, Homer is brought to bat instead of Darryl Strawberry, due to Mr. Burns's managerial incompetence, and Homer ends up being struck by the pitch, which gives the team the walk they needed to win. This episode is completely pointless; nearly everything about it serves no purpose but to crack a few jokes, and it's everything that makes The Simpsons so great. As a result, the ultimate goal of the softball game is so Mr. Burns can win $1 million that he can then toss onto the pile. The celebrities are brought in only to be one by one picked off by the town of Springfield so the original team can play as they would have anyway. And even the multiple celebrity guest stars are added to the show's cast with no real reason for them to be there. You don't have to know anything about baseball or softball to get any of the jokes, and the actual fates each player undergoes has nothing at all to do with who they are as people. The writers could have easily come up with a series of fictional athletes or parodies of actual players and told the exact same jokes, but somehow that wouldn't have been as funny. It's the fact that these total non sequitur jokes are told about real people that makes the humor work as well as it does. It's as if to say that no target is too high up for The Simpsons, that they have to be treated with the dignity of making their appearance in the show matter nothing. We do is ever so important as to lose sight of who we are deep down, and the fact that this episode takes such a sardonic look at the way we elevate celebrities helps to drive that fact home.

Separate Vocations: Springfield Elementary School has its students take a career aptitude test. Bart is given the future career of police officer, while Lisa is given the career of homemaker. Distraught that the school believes she'll never amount to any more than a housewife, Lisa begins skipping band practice and hanging out with delinquents. And after a few days of misbehavior, gets the idea in her head to steal all of the teachers' editions of the textbooks, leaving the staff completely unprepared to teach. Meanwhile, Bart is taken on a ride-along with two officers where he becomes enthralled with the life of catching criminals. And after getting caught by Skinner, assisting the police is given the role of hall monitor so he can catch the school's various miscreants. But these two plots come to a head when Bart catches Lisa with the stolen books and has to decide whether or not to turn her in. In the end, he takes the blame for the crime as he believes that Lisa has too much potential to throw it away, and she is re-motivated to start living her life as she was. In a subversion of the typical Bart and Lisa stories, this one shows the two characters switching roles within the schools as they adopt a lifestyle they believe might fit them, but all they switch are the roles, not necessarily lives. Bart doesn't adopt the intelligence of Lisa, instead maintaining his craftiness and ability to outsmart authority to his advantage, thinking of ways that misbehaving students might think and using his own experience to get an edge over the rest of his classmates. Meanwhile, Lisa maintains her intellect despite her rebellious streak, giving her a sardonic sort of smart mouth that makes an even more effective prankster than Bart ever could have been, driving the school into chaos with just a single evening's detention. In the end, these titular separate vocations just go to show that the direction of the Simpson family's life is headed in is a collection of active choices they've made out of the desire to fit in, to what sort of support they're receiving from those around them. Lisa only acts out because she thinks she doesn't have a future, but having Bart remind her that he still thinks highly of her chances is all it takes to have her snap out of her rebellious streak. Likewise, Bart only acts out because that's the best way for him to get attention, but upon realizing that he can get the same reaction from people by holding authority over them, he changes his life without changing who he is.

Dog of Death: The town of Springfield is obsessed with lottery fever, daydreaming of what they'll do should they win. Naturally, nobody relevant wins, but the family gathering around to see the results being pulled also allows them to witness Santa's Little Helper collapse from a twisted stomach. The surgery to untwist it will cost a large sum of money, but the family all tightens their belt in order to afford to save their dog. The surgery is a success, but the weeks afterwards are tough, and everybody wonders if it was worthwhile to cut back on their standard of living to save Santa's Little Helper. And eventually, the resentment turns to neglect as the dog escapes and wanders into the night. He's found by a dog pound who then sells him to Mr. Burns, who then trains him as an attack dog. But when Bart shows up at Burns's mansion to ask if he's seen the dog, Burns releases the hounds, and after remembering Bart, the family is reunited with their beloved pet. Santa's Little Helper isn't just an often-forgotten part of The Simpsons, but is often a forgotten part of The Simpsons—that's The Simpsons with a capital T the second time. It's difficult to say if he's underutilized in the show or if there really isn't much of a place for a dog in the realm of satire, because while each Simpson can serve as a stand-in for some aspect of Western society, it's difficult for an animal to represent much other than itself. And so if most people don't view their pets as any more important than, say, fork chop night, The Simpsons surely won't either. But that's not to say that Santa's Little Helper exists as a character in a vacuum; as with most of the rest of the cast, he can serve as a spring for comparison to other characters as they're compared to...

Each other in their relationships. Strangely enough, this episode also features another underutilized character in the exact same fashion: Grandpa Simpson. He appears in the First Act to misdiagnose Santa's Little Helper's death and then disappears for the remainder of the episode. It's not as though the showrunners were likely trying to say anything by this inclusion, though; it's more likely that this is simply me reaching too far to find something to talk about in a Santa's Little Helper episode.

Colonel [Music] Homer: After Marge snaps at Homer for being obnoxious during a movie, he rides his car into the night to find some place away from her and winds up in a hillbilly bar where he hears the country singing of a barmaid named Lene Lumpkin. Enamored with her songs, he decides to have her single recorded, and soon her music hits the airwaves, where it's beloved by enough people to get her a syndicated television deal. But as Homer spends more and more time and the Simpson family's money on Lene's career, Marge begins to worry about Homer's fidelity. These worries turn out to be valid when Lene comes on to her new manager, but in the end, Homer resists the advances and goes back to his wife and kids.

The Sister episode to "Life on the Fast Lane," "Colonel Homer" is an episode where, after an argument about their marriage, Homer finds solace in another person who seems to understand him on a level better than his own wife. He spends the rest of the episode relying more and more on this other person while Marge stays at home worrying about the future of the couple before, ultimately, there's one last temptation that Homer resists, and they go back to the good thing they had going. Basically the same plot, but with the characters flipped. The differences, then, are what make this episode stand out. For example, while Marge was willing to go along with the infidelity suggested by Jock from an early point, Homer never consciously agreed to a more involved relationship with Lene; he was simply too oblivious to make a more obvious sign against it. And so, while Marge's emotional journey back to Homer covered more ground, Homer's had the more consistent high road. Or did it? Because it's one thing to actively try to hurt a person you're in a relationship with, only to change your mind before doing permanent damage; it's another thing to be so unresponsive to your loved one's concerns that you risk that level of damage in the first place through sheer negligence. In the end, both stories have an "all's well that ends well" wrap-up, and the couple is too relieved to be back with one another to ask questions of the sanctity of their marriage in the first place.

"Black Widower": Selma introduces her new boyfriend to the Simpson family: Sideshow Bob. He recounts how the two met as part of a prison pen pal program and fell in love, with the two of them beginning to date as soon as he was released from jail. But rather than trying to immediately get his revenge on Bart, Sideshow Bob convinces the Simpsons that he is a changed man, no longer obsessed with Bart and instead trying to truly live his life normally. But Bart doesn't stop distrusting him, despite all the setbacks and makeups that his relationship with Selma has, including him openly badmouthing MacGyver. But Bart begins to fear for Selma's safety when a few things about the video diaries she's sending back don't add up, and eventually, he's correct in assuming that Sideshow Bob hasn't changed, as the entire honeymoon was really just an excuse to murder her to collect inheritance. Another episode that serves as a thematic follow-up to a season 1 episode; this time, it's "Crusty Gets Busted" that we see built upon. In the original episode, Bart was able to keep his faith in his idols and solve the mystery because he remained a loyal fan, and this time it was his unshakable mistrust of Bob that allowed him to remain vigilant enough to solve the mystery. This episode also builds on the relationship between Bart and Bob in that it establishes more open hostility between the two of them. It could have been possible for this episode to serve as a typical failed love story between Selma and another man, with Bart at first apprehensive over Bob's motivation, but by showing by the third act that the former Sideshow clown can't be trusted, it means that his next appearance also comes with a threatening aura to it, as Bob must be up to no good. We also get to see how the Simpsons recognizes its canon. Often, canon comes back in the form of quick callbacks, simple glimpses at a background element to remind the audience of an earlier episode or plot point without drawing too much attention away from what's happening in the moment. But this episode requires the prerequisite knowledge of Bart and Bob's relationship in order to have their rivalry make sense, and so we see a flashback to the events of the previous episode that also serves to establish the character dynamic between the two. It's not only the build-off from the first Sideshow Bob episode either, but also a follow-up to Selma's relationship woes as seen in "Principal Charming."

"The Auto Show": Bart and Milhouse attend a Spinal Tap concert where Bart gets the idea into his head to be a rock star. He gets a guitar from his parents and takes it onto the bus where Otto rocks out for long enough that the students wind up late, so he speeds to make up for the lost time and ends up crashing afterwards. It's revealed that he has no license, and he's fired from his job as bus driver, with Principal Skinner filling in for him. He tries to retake the test but fails, and so he's forced to live with the Simpson family for a while until he can pass again, not that he makes any serious efforts to do so. It isn't until his antics annoy the rest of the family that he's eventually kicked out, and so he has to take the test again. This time, however, he actually wants to pass so he can rub it into Homer's face when he succeeds. And when he says as much out loud, Patty Bouvier lets him pass, as she hates Homer as much as Otto does. Otto has always served as an example of what Bart Simpson might become should he continue down the path of slackerdom instead of straightening out, and while there's always been some idea of what the bus-driving bomb might entail, this episode shows us a closer look at Bart's future, much to the horror of Marge and Homer. But one character who doesn't seem to mind this glimpse is Bart himself. Throughout the episode, he's the only Simpson not to find anything annoying in the antics of the unemployed metalhead. Bart stays supportive of Otto until the very end, and it's that support that ends up getting Otto the motivation to get his job back—that and a healthy amount of shared resentment for Homer. So there's a question of how much of a failure Bart can really wind up as, so long as there are people out there willing to give him second chances as he needs them and supporting him in whatever goals he sets his mind to. Future episodes of The Simpsons will take a look into these potential futures, everything ranging from nepotism to heartwarming stories of overcoming adversity. And while it's possible that Bart might become a flounder and failure without a more stern figure in his life to straighten him out, the fact that he ultimately does have the support of a loving family is the fundamental difference between him and a character like Otto.

Bart's friend falls in love after a magic eight-ball predicts that Bart and Milhouse will stop being friends. A new transfer student named Samantha joins their class, and Milhouse quickly falls in love, no longer spending time with Bart. He tries to maintain the friendship but fails for a time until learning that Samantha's father forbids her from talking with boys, so Bart tattles on their time together, and soon Milhouse is separated from his loved one. Racked with guilt, Bart eventually confesses to the breakup, and the two boys fight it out before ultimately deciding not to let the bad blood between them stay. Meanwhile, Lisa grows concerned over Homer's obesity and convinces him to listen to a set of subliminal weight-loss tapes. Although the company sends him a vocabulary tape instead, Homer's newfound elocution creates a tumultuous standard within the Simpsons abode before he concludes that the device has no effect on his rotund form or willpower, and he smashes the tape and goes back to not being able to do words good.

This episode and "Bart the Lover" both show the introduction to subplots involving Bart's attempts at understanding romance, or rather, a lack of that understanding. While Lisa routinely gets to have schoolyard crushes or take notice of boys, Bart was very adverse to the other gender for much of the show's early run. Here, he only really starts to have subplots involving romance in the later seasons. For now, he's like every other 10-year-old boy of the time, stereotyped by an aversion to cooties and all things feminine. As such, he routinely shows a failure to comprehend the severity of the relationships that others have. Bart will pull a prank by catfishing a classmate and not realize until later how much that sort of antic might hurt her, or he'll tear apart Milhouse's relationship to get his friend back, not realizing how much that love meant to him. But how much does this environment affect his view on relationships? Bart turns to Lisa for advice during this episode, despite her being the younger sibling, so there's a clear recognition of the idea that she's matured faster than him. Is this some inherent aspect of gender, or is the more likely culprit the fact that Bart has received much less pushback from the parents and authority figures in his life, and that he's never really had to mature in the way that Lisa did? The Simpsons, as a show, never really elaborates on this topic until much later in its run, and even then, often takes an immature and childlike approach to how Bart interacts with girls—age-reflective of his actual age. Perhaps if Bart were aged up to be 13 instead, we could have gotten a much different view of the Simpson family's dynamic surrounding romance, but for now, it's a topic that doesn't even get breached.

"Brother, Can You Spare Two [Music] Dimes?" When it's discovered during the plant physical that Homer is completely sterile, Mr. Burns creates a phony award with a cash prize of $2,000 in order to trick Homer into signing away his right to sue. This catches the attention of Herb Powell from the season 2 episode "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou," who is now homeless after Homer ruined his company and their relationship during the previous season. Herb arrives at the Simpson family's house in order to ask them for that money, and despite each member of the family wanting to spend it on something different, they agree to give it to him so he can create a prototype version of a baby translator. The translator is a success, and Herb is a rich man again, able to buy the Simpsons family the things they wanted as well as rekindling his relationship with Homer. While earlier episodes have shown off the divide between the upper and middle class of America, this is the first to take a much closer look at the very bottom of American society through the lens of characters that we know. But instead of looking at systemic failures that lead to a number of people falling through the social safety net, it instead posits that each person suffering is just a grand idea away from pulling themselves up by their bootstraps—an interesting point to take after so commonly showing off how Mr. Burns and the rest of the hyper-rich in the country are out-of-touch, if not downright evil characters who live off the misery of others. But perhaps this is meant to take a closer comparison between the wealth of Homer and that of his polar opposite in Herb: the slacker who has received everything versus the hardworking man who came from nothing twice. And this relationship ends up forming a rift between the two in the future—not an interesting rift that can create future drama, but rather a rift wherein this is the final appearance of Herb Powell in the entire series. He's mentioned later in the form of meta-jokes about how he's never coming back, which draws attention to his lacking return. And the major reason he doesn't make a comeback of this sort ultimately comes down to the fact that the rags-to-riches and riches-to-rags plots have already been exhausted. There's nothing interesting to examine about the two brothers with a good relationship and a lot of money between them without just retreading old ground, and so this is the last we see of Homer's long-lost half-brother.

Season 4: Season 3 can be considered an experimental season of television in the sense that many of the plots and locations grew more bizarre than before. The Simpsons had established itself as a show that wasn't afraid to hold a mirror to the world, not by reflecting the mundanity of everyday experiences, but the absurdity. As the show has established itself as a staple of television for its frank look at the modern Western family, all that was required of the showrunners to continue in this direction was that they maintain a strong connection to the more character-driven plots, and then they'd be in the clear to get away with practically anything, so long as they remembered those roots. Set pieces got grander, and the familiar became less so. Instead of characters going camping and ending up on a disastrous vacation, they make the news for overthrowing the comically brutal conditions of a summer camp before declaring tribal law. But it's never such an absurd thing that the audience views it as having gone too far or stretching the limits of believability. As long as Homer acts like Homer, he can be anywhere and do anything without acting out of character; he's become a vessel for absurdity rather than its conduit, being swept along with whatever the universe throws at it without directly starting off that plot, because anything that happens can easily be waved off as societal.

Season 4 is also when the first hints of a Simpsons movie began to circulate in rumor. There was a proposal to capitalize on the show's massive success by spreading to different mediums. The Simpsons had already obtained arcade machines, merchandising deals, and a myriad of crossovers, so it seemed like the next logical step was to put America's Family on the big screen. But this was perhaps a half-implemented idea proposed too late, as the only real suggestions we have so far as to what the movie might be is that the episode "Camp Crusty" was proposed as a potential script, implying that that episode was already written and the movie idea was more of a floater than a genuine pitch.

"Camp Crusty": It's the last day of school. Bart and Lisa were both promised that they'd be allowed to attend Camp Crusty over the summer if they received at least a C average. While Lisa is able to pass with relative ease, Bart does not make it, although Homer admits that he doesn't really want the boy hanging around the house for six weeks anyway, so he allows them both to go regardless. But as it turns out, Camp Crusty has the same seal of quality as the rest of the Krusty label: barely functional, if not outright hostile to its user base. But their letters home are assumed to be creative embellishments on Lisa's part by Marge and Homer, who have found themselves in the best condition of their lives without the kids to run them ragged. The children are terrorized by the camp counselors for the duration, with Bart only holding on to sanity with his misguided belief that Krusty will eventually show up to make everything better. But when the head counselor tries to pass Barney off as the TV show clown, Bart snaps and leads the kids in an active rebellion against the camp. The chaos draws the attention of the media and the report both causes Homer's health to return to how it was before while also making Krusty himself show up to right the wrong by taking the children to Tijuana.

Season 4 starts out with very little fanfare, heading directly into the next set of episodes proper, as though there were never a break to begin with. Although this is likely more due to the fact that this episode is really a season 3 episode, being the last one produced, although the second to last aired before Gracie Films would move its domestic animation from Klasky-Csupo to Film Roman. Not that this distinction matters much anyway. The plot stretches rather thin in the middle, largely being put on the sidelines in order to have a few rapid gags about the poor condition of the camp, no different than many other Simpsons episodes have done before and will continue to do later. Perhaps this is also telling of the fact that this episode was ultimately dropped from a potential outline for the plot of The Simpsons Movie. The reason for this was the fact that the showrunners were struggling to stretch the plot out to 90 minutes—not a surprise, as Simpsons plots tend to only take up half their usual 22 minutes, with the rest being comedic padding. This is the formula that's given the TV family its iconic status, and a stretch to 90 minutes would have had to be something more thoroughly planned to properly fit the silver screen.

"A Streetcar Named [Music] Marge": Marge auditions for a position in a play—a musical rendition of A Streetcar Named Desire. Homer is unreceptive to her dream, and she ultimately doesn't get the part of Blanche DuBois that she tried out for—that is, until the play's director overhears her dejectedly talking to Homer on the phone and realizes the potential. Though this is something that isn't completely evident at first, as Marge has spent so much time living and putting up with Homer that she's merely collapsed under the weight of expectation. But when Homer annoys her during a rehearsal, Marge discovers a new hidden talent as a method actor and is able to put on a riveting performance—one that causes Homer to nearly grow introspective as to his role within his wife's life. In the end, his feelings on the play end up serving as a stand-in for an apology for his personality, and the two repair the strain on their relationship. Meanwhile, Maggie is dropped off at the I.R.S. Rand School for Tots, where she plans and executes a daring heist to retrieve her pacifier.

This episode, when contrasted with the previous, shows two different sides of The Simpsons in terms of how stories tend to develop. "Camp Crusty" was an unrealistic twist on a realistic setup: the kids go to a summer camp (mundane) and wind up taking over and creating a tribal government (insane). In "A Streetcar Named Marge," Marge auditions for a play, and the play winds up going off without much of a hitch. Characters behave as real people would, and the plot never takes a turn for the unpredictable. As a result, "Streetcar" winds up being a much more character-driven episode, whereas "Camp Crusty" is an episode more about the town of Springfield instead—or maybe that's backwards. Perhaps the reason that this episode was played much more straight is because it was character-driven from the outset, and so this is how The Simpsons is able to stay as fresh as it does by seamlessly alternating between rambunctious craziness, cultural satire, and more heartfelt character plots while keeping the audience on its toes enough that you never know precisely what you'll get. Plots never grow tiring, and interest remains high moving forward. The subplot involving Maggie, though, is something that is utterly classic Simpsons. Her "sniper baby" personality is a wordless homage to The Great Escape, watches like something out of the first season's most iconic set pieces, and it's interesting to see how the show can stay so close to its roots while also continuing to stay relevant.

"Homer the Heretic": On a particularly miserable day, Homer decides that he would rather stay home than go to church. His family leaves him and has an awful time as the doors freeze shut in the heater room, but Homer enjoys his lazy Sunday and proclaims that he's not going to church the following Sunday either. Various religious leaders, as well as his family from Springfield, try to recruit him/convince him to return, but Homer refuses all of them. But that Sunday, a cigar catches fire in his house, and the home is quickly engulfed in flames, trapping Homer inside. It's up to everybody who wasn't at church that Sunday to save him, and upon their success, he realizes that despite ignoring them, the faithful community still acted to save his body, even if they couldn't save his soul. In the end, Homer decides to go back to church, becoming just as active a Christian as he was before. In spite of the general skepticism that The Simpsons writers tend to have for organized religion, the show itself rarely portrays faith as an inherently negative thing. Flanders is a better person than Homer, and this is largely viewed as both a cause and effect of his faith. Church is mentioned by Marge as something she has an obligation to her family to send them to, and in the end, it's every other religious community acting together that resolves the danger in this episode—a showing of community unity. The way this episode is structured gives an opportunity for the writers to make jokes about other religions in a way…

That makes sense around the context rather than being a random jab at a potentially sensitive topic. This, combined with the fact that Homer is being used as a mouthpiece for these observations while serving as the bad guy in the plot, means that they receive the license to say whatever they want but not too much scrutiny levied at them for being crude or insensitive, as they can abandon responsibility due to Homer's behavior not being condoned by the narrative. It's this sort of structure that requires the quote "jerk-ass Homer" personality that shines through in various episodes moving forward, as it allows the writers to give the audience a more candid look at negative social perceptions of their subject of satirization through the lens of an archetypical ugly American.

Lisa, the Beauty Queen: After receiving an unflattering caricature drawing of herself, Lisa begins to feel self-conscious about her looks. So, Homer enters her in the Little Miss Springfield pageant with the hopes of making her feel better about herself. Although Lisa doesn't appreciate being entered against her will, the family comes together to boost her confidence and chances of winning, ultimately granting her runner-up. But when the real Little Miss Springfield is incapacitated, Lisa takes over her duties, which include location opening and being the newest corporate shill for Laramy cigarettes—she's pushed to indoctrinate young smokers. She appreciates her new position for a while, but soon the guilt of getting kids addicted to nicotine weighs on her, and she rejects the position, calling out corruption and injustice anytime she gets an audience. This draws the eye of Springfield's elite, who discovered that Homer filled out her application wrong, and they fire her from the position. But rather than being upset, Lisa is instead glad she was able to make a small difference and, of course, get that self-esteem boost that she needed all along.

Lisa has often served as a creator's soapbox, existing to point out the injustices in the world and put a more defined defamation against anything that the showrunners don't want to risk leaving up to interpretation. But far from purely existing as a conduit for this sort of moralizing, Lisa is, at the end of it all, a little girl. She still has the same worries and anxieties you would expect of someone her age to have, and this episode best shows off the dichotomy between these two parts of her psyche. Lisa is absolutely the kind of character to denounce the high societal expectations based on young girls, but that doesn't mean that she's immune to the pressures purely because she's aware of them. Through this episode, Lisa undergoes an arc—feeling depressed about her anxiety and slowly overcoming the obstacle, not due to the proof that she's able to win a beauty pageant, but from the fact that her family was able to rally around her. Her worries about her physical appearance are all but gone by the time the pageant comes around, so it was never a question of objective beauty standards but the confidence of the people you care about vouching for your better qualities, and it's these qualities Lisa then defaults to after she does, in the end, obtain the position of Little Miss Springfield.

Treehouse of Horror III: The Simpson family are hosting a Halloween party, but due to Homer eating the entertainment for the night, they decide to go around telling ghost stories instead. The first is Lisa's "Clown Without Pity." Homer forgets to buy Bart a birthday present, and so, in his rush, he winds up entering a store of cursed objects and purchasing a talking, crusty doll. Bart loves the gift, but the gift doesn't love Homer and repeatedly says it's going to kill him. Despite his efforts to warn his family or dispose of the doll, it winds up attacking him, and so Marge has to call a support line, who simply turns the doll from evil to good. The next story is Grandpa Simpson's "King Homer," a retelling of the 1933 King Kong with that classic Simpsons parody style, but instead of King Homer climbing a building with his captive Marge, he simply collapses from exhaustion one story in, ultimately marrying her instead of continuing to eat people. Finally, Bart tells his story, "Dial Z for Zombies." After being made to read a book for a report in class, Bart comes across an occult title in the library's occult section. He decides to show off his new book by resurrecting Lisa's pet Snowball first, but he accidentally uses the wrong spell and resurrects all the dead in Springfield instead. The family fights for their survival before ultimately deciding that they have to make their way back to the library to learn to undo the spell. They make it, with Homer shooting a few townsfolk along the way, and everything is put back to the way it was, with the Simpson family glad they didn't become mindless zombies as they stare wide-eyed at the television—Itchy & Scratchy.

The Movie: Homer and Marge attend parent-teacher night, where Homer is praised for his handling of Lisa's education while Marge gets the short end of the stick and is told about Bart's repeated behavioral issues. At the advice of Miss Krabappel, the parents decide that they need to be more strong-willed when punishing Bart, sticking to it instead of caving after he pretends to have learned his lesson. They fail for a while, but when Maggie steals the family car due to Bart neglecting to watch her, Homer decides to ban Bart from seeing the cultural event of the generation: The Itchy & Scratchy Movie. Bart is convinced his parents will cave like they always do, but as the time goes on and everybody else can't stop talking about how great it was, he slowly realizes that Homer and Marge really mean it this time. The episode ends with a cut to the future with Bart as a Supreme Court Justice walking alongside an elderly Homer, who finally decides that the boy's learned his lesson, and the two watch the rerun of the movie together.

Bart mania swept through the nation during the airing of the last few seasons, and this season was hardly different. The Simpsons were still a cultural icon, and school teachers were just as annoyed as every boy under 13 wouldn't stop saying, "Don't have a cow, man!" But far from kneeling to the complaints of those who had to put up with it the most, The Simpsons writing staff responded in an unsurprising way: If your kid is annoying, it's hardly their fault. Bart's behavior here isn't blamed on television or society; it's Marge and Homer never sticking to discipline. And so, if you have the time to write to the network complaining about the subject matter on display, you also have the time to change the channel when your kids are watching.

Bart's future has always been something ambiguous, as he's meant to represent American children in general—specifically how Gen X would grow and develop. At the time, it was easy to look at society through a glass half-empty perspective and assume that the future was doomed, but The Simpsons manages to take a more nuanced view than a simple good-bad decision. Because while Bart is shown to be a slacker with very little positive future, Homer was never shown to be especially promising either, and things have turned out all right for him—not good, not bad, but all right.

Marge gets a job: When the Simpson household sinks due to a foundation issue, Marge has to get a job to continue to support the family so they can pay to have it fixed. She winds up working at the nuclear power plant and is quickly noticed by Mr. Burns. Burns tries to seduce her, listening to her suggestions and kidnapping Tom Jones to perform for her, but when he finds out that she's married, the love turns to hatred, and he fires her. The Simpsons try to sue, but the plant's lawyers are too threatening for any attorney to bother, and Marge prepares to slink away dejected. But Homer refuses to leave without an apology, and Mr. Burns realizes that he loves her too, so he decides not to fire Homer as well, letting him keep the job for Marge's sake. In the B plot, Bart fakes getting sick to get out of a test, but after a few bouts of lying, eventually winds up getting attacked by a loose wolf while retaking it. But Mrs. Krabappel doesn't believe his cries for help, which lasts until Willie wrestles the animal into submission.

Following up on a theme from last episode, this season is, in general, much less willing to let Bart off the hook for any of his misbehavior. Earlier seasons have taken a similar approach to plots of realistic consequences for actions, but they've always hidden behind a veneer of schmaltz. If Bart faces consequences, we see him learn from them and eventually come out with a happy ending due to the lesson learned. Now, the happy ending is much less of a guarantee. While he might become a Supreme Court Justice for internalizing the lessons on his own, not doing so will cause that lesson to be taught in a much more extreme manner. But as for characters not learning lessons, Mr. Burns's unrequited crush and ensuing harassment of Marge is something that, while portrayed as the wrong thing to do, is still not something he faces many consequences for. His high-priced lawyers can prevent a lawsuit, and the worst thing that happens is a stern talking-to from Homer that results in him giving Marge a holiday anyway. He even gets away with kidnapping and threatening Tom Jones, with it all played off as a joke, much in the same way that his other actions are viewed as non-threatening purely because he has too much money to come across as wanting for anything.

New Kid on the Block: The Windfields, next-door neighbors to The Simpsons, move out of the neighborhood, leaving the house next door vacant. As Homer steals their expired medications, Bart and Lisa use the opportunity to mess around in the basement, where they meet their new neighbors, the Powers family—specifically Laura Powers, a teenage girl who quickly falls for Bart. She and Bart share much of the same crude humor as one another, her regular babysitting of the kids causing him to become more and more infatuated. But when Laura announces that she's dating Jimbo, one of the school bullies, Bart is heartbroken, which inspires him to use his prank phone call habit to lure a knife-wielding Moe to show off that Jimbo isn't so tough after all. This occurs as Homer sues a seafood restaurant for claiming to serve all-you-can-eat despite Homer being kicked out for his appetite. They sue, which causes the restaurant owner, Captain McAllister, to agree to a deal where Homer is reimbursed with food so long as he serves as an attraction for the restaurant. The Simpsons make for bad neighbors; this is the reason the Windfields move out, and the reason nobody wants to move in except for the Powers family, who don't appear to have the luxury of being choosy. But this ends up being a boon to Bart, as the only type of person who could tolerate being near his family is the type of person who would raise a child with similar interests. And yet it's also this similar rebelliousness streak that causes Laura to fall for Jimbo, who really is just an older, slightly more rebellious Bart. But in his role as such, Jimbo would have the same insecurities as Bart while claiming to be a rebel. Both have the softer side to them that they attempt to cover up with their antics—something that makes confessing to Laura difficult and something that causes him to miss out on his chance with her. So calling a knife-wielding maniac to humble a competition is something that Bart knows to do as a result of accepting his own flaws, even if the narrative never makes him answer for them. The rest of this episode is more standard Simpsons fare: Homer makes a lawsuit that would be frivolous to the average American, but it's still the type of thing that could be true to the point that you might believe it if it were a newspaper headline with no attached article.

Mr. Plow: Homer wrecks both family cars in a heavy snowstorm, which causes the Simpson family to go shopping for a new one. Homer impulse purchases a snowplow, using it to plow driveways as the titular Mr. Plow and receiving the love and attention of the snow-laden town of Springfield. But when Barney is inspired by Homer's new-found success to start his own snowplow business as the Plow King, stealing all of Homer's customer base and leaving the two former friends in a feud when their competition turns less friendly, Homer decides to call in a fake job to Barney's business, leading him up to the top of Springfield's most precarious mountain. But when this winds up trapping the guy beneath the blizzard, Homer regrets his actions and rushes to save his friend. In the end, the two are reunited, and they resolve to run their business together instead of being at one another's throats, just in time for an unseasonal heat wave to melt all the snow and leave the two without their jobs.

There seems to be a direct relationship between the heartfelt episodes of The Simpsons and the sillier ones. Perhaps the antics being larger than life can detract and distract from the relatability that makes the heartwarming scenes of togetherness work so well, or maybe it's a result of the different approaches when outlining episodes. Again, The Simpsons is written by a room of writers rather than individual credits; those only exist for whoever pinned the initial outline. Either way, you can usually tell what they're going for by gauging the number and proliferation of celebrity guest stars. The moment Adam West showed up playing himself, you should be able to tell that this episode isn't meant to take itself completely seriously. That Homer's business can be intruded on by Barney of all people is perhaps a sign that it was doomed to fail from the start. If a drunkard like him can take over the area with a monopoly, then perhaps there was a reason that the town of Springfield was underserved in the first place. That the two idiots can make it big and then fail immediately afterward…

Lisa's First Word: While trying to get Maggie to say her first word, the Simpson family becomes curious as to Lisa's first word, and so Marge regales them the tale. The Simpson family was living in a small apartment together when their second pregnancy was discovered, so they moved to a bigger house that would fit all four of them, though this annoys Bart, who preferred their own home. What also annoys him is the fact that his old life as the baby gets taken from him, as his old crib is reused for Lisa, and he starts to be viewed as less important than his new sibling. After several attempts to get rid of his sister, he finally decides to run away from the lack of attention, only for Lisa to, at the last second, call out to him—her first word being "Bart." Meanwhile, Krusty runs a promotional campaign for free burgers, financially ruined by the Soviet boycott of the Olympic Games. Another flashback episode, this one is also written by Jeff Martin, as he had done "I Married Marge" in the past. Flashback episodes have always been a means of taking a particular year and poking fun at major news stories that occurred then, such as a subplot involving the Olympics and lines like Lisa's college fund being saved in Lincoln Savings and Loan. Despite these gags, the episode ran short, requiring inclusions such as the Itchy & Scratchy segment as well as the extended opening sequence. The pacing ultimately works itself out to the point that the whole episode builds up to a single moment that occurs at the very end, but that's fine because this episode is only one of the heartwarming character pieces. On the surface level, it's meant to be an episode about Bart and Lisa's relationship, but as the latter is an infant child, we instead get a series of set pieces involving Bart's slow annoyance with this new life that has little to do with the character whose name is in the episode's title. At the end, we hear that Lisa's first word was "Bart," due to the girl's love for her older brother, and yet that love is never really something shown to the audience. We get several scenes of Bart slowly being driven mad by his sister and conspiring to get her out of the picture, but we don't get a lot from Lisa's perspective—something that could have not only padded the episode to a usual runtime but also made the ending that much more satisfying in its payoff.

Homer's Triple Bypass: Homer's bad eating habits catch up to him, and he starts to suffer increasingly frequent heart murmurs, which culminates in a full-on heart attack when he gets verbally assaulted by Mr. Burns, winding him up in the hospital. Dr. Hibbert warns him that he may not survive the next incident and advises a bypass surgery, but the Simpson family cannot afford it at its high price point, and they're forced to make do with hoping for the best. That is, until they learn of the services of Dr. Nick Riviera, a local quack who will do any surgery for cheap. His inexperience makes the success of the surgery an unsure thing, and as the days go on, the family becomes more and more nervous about his chances. But Lisa takes to researching the latest medical breakthroughs in order to assuage her fears of whether the surgery is survivable, and this ends up paying off as she is able to guide Dr. Nick through the procedure. Homer survives, and the family gets a happy ending. This episode makes a spiritual homage to the season 2 episode "One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish," where Homer likewise tries to make peace with his impending death. In both plots, he makes an attempt to settle affairs while likewise leaving his children out of it for as long as possible, hoping their last memories of him can be positive instead of full of dread. It's fitting for his character that when things are pushed to an extreme point, his last few moments are spent trying to get a life insurance policy for the family and making sure they don't wind up bankrupted by medical debt. This episode is starkly American to a depressing degree. Homer is given a heart attack through stress and diet—a combination of fatty foods, traffic congestion, and a tyrant for a boss—all made worse by the US healthcare system, as he is a stand-in for the average American citizen. It's expected that his downfall would be a conglomeration of the worst parts of our lives, and yet, in the same way that his personality winds up hospitalizing him, his closeness to his family is what saves the day, as Lisa is able to use her curiosity to guide the surgery to success. If the things that he does wrong are what hurt him, then it's the things that he does right that save him.

Marge vs. the Monorail: When Mr. Burns is fined for illegally dumping nuclear waste, the town of Springfield has to come together to decide what to spend the money on. They plan on repairing Main Street until Lyle Lanley, a con man, convinces the town to build a large monorail with the money. But Marge has concerns with the construction, especially when Homer is declared to be the monorail's conductor despite his lack of formal training. When she snoops a bit, she discovers that Lyle is planning on cutting as many corners as possible and running off with the money, so she heads to one of the other towns he's constructed a monorail in to find someone more familiar with the issues who can help to prevent disaster. But the efforts are too late, as the monorail has already taken off and is running rampant through its tracks with no functioning brakes. But some quick thinking by Homer is able to anchor the speeding car to a giant donut, and the day is saved, with Springfield never committing another folly again. Mostly structurally, this episode is divided into two parts: one following Marge's attempts to learn more about and disarm the monorail, and the other to tell a series of gags related to Springfield's incompetence at handling the new construction. There's very little plot progression in the latter part, and most of the synopsis I gave was related to a section of the episode that got disproportionately little screen time. But this is typical of The Simpsons' silly episode formula, and this is probably one of the least serious episodes that the show has, as well as one of the most highly rated. "Marge vs. the Monorail" best represents the Conan O'Brien era of The Simpsons, as it is defined by its absurd, non-sequitur humor, blasé references to pop culture, and the in-your-face exaggerations of society that make characters appear like the larger-than-life stereotypes that come out of retelling family stories time and time again. The town of Springfield falls for a scam, but their general incompetence when it comes to everything prevents them from realizing that corners are being cut, and the result essentially writes itself.

Selma's Choice: The Bouviers attend the funeral of Great Aunt Gladys, who, among other things, leaves the advice to Patty and Selma not to die alone and marry before it's too late. This causes Selma to grow worried that she's running out of time, and so she turns to video dating and later artificial insemination to finally follow her dream of raising a child. But that weekend, Homer and Marge plan on taking their children to Dove Gardens as a family, but when Homer eats a moldy sandwich, he gets too sick to go with the kids.

And so they decide to give Selma a chance to practice raising children by going in their stead. This results in failure, as Bart gets arrested by park security and Lisa grows delirious from drinking ride water on a dare. In the end, Selma realizes that she's no good at taking care of human children and decides to adopt Jubjub, Gladys' pet iguana instead.

Patty and Selma have been shown before as the type to enjoy their leisure time more than their time spent with family. And while it isn't as though they're the type to actively resent spending time with relatives, those sort of relationships can be shown to tie them down in a way that's not considered worth it. This isn't something exclusive to the twins either. Homer and Marge get a day away from their children and very quickly reinvigorate their love life, getting along much in the same way that they did during Camp Crusty. And so it comes down to a split decision: between the desire to live freely and live for others. Is the satisfaction of raising a miniature you greater than the potentially missed satisfaction from your social life without them? In Selma's case, the answer is different than in Marge's.

It isn't as though Selma actually fails to raise the children in an overwhelming way either. Bart and Lisa get into hygiene, not unlike the kind of trouble they'd have found if they traveled with their parents. It's less about Selma's failure to control them as it is her failure to control herself when they behave in a way that's more or less inevitable.

Brother from the same Planet: When Homer forgets to pick up Bart from a soccer practice, the boy gets tired of his father's neglect and hires a big brother from a nonprofit for troubled children. Tom, Bart's new caretaker, is a much better person and companion than Homer ever was, something that Bart plays up by telling lies about how awful his father is. This makes Homer, as he realizes that his son no longer cares about or looks up to him, so he decides to get revenge on his son by adopting a little brother from the same charity: one Pepe. The two spoiled their proxy family member out of spite before eventually the four wind up at Marine World during a sponsored event. Remembering the horrible things Bart claims Homer has done, Tom attacks the man, and he and Homer end up fighting through downtown. But Bart is impressed by his father's dirty tactics, and they bond over Homer teaching his son how to fight like a wimp.

In the B plot, Lisa gets addicted to a Corey hotline to the point of racking up an expensive phone bill and eventually getting into trouble at school. So Marge stays up with her overnight to help her detox from the Coreys. Homer and Bart have never been especially nice to one another but have overall maintained a functional, if not ideal, relationship over the years. It's a bit telling that in their replacements for one another, they put on fake personalities to try to maintain that one. Bart doesn't act like Bart around Tom, pretending to be a person a bit more well-liked. Pepe likewise, Homer pretends to be the proper parental figure in Pepe's life, as if to show off to Bart that he could be a nice person if Bart were more willing to play along. But these relationships are doomed if they're based off lies of people pretending to be who they're not; certainly much more doomed than that of Pepe and Tom, as we see at the end of the episode.

Tom was originally meant to be played by Tom Cruise, as the writers were told he was interested in a guest star spot. But despite filling the script with references to his movies, he turned down the role, and it was taken by Phil Hartman instead. The Ren and Stimpy parody went off better though, as it was actually penned by a layout artist from the show and so managed to keep with the original style perfectly. I love [Music] Lisa.

When Ralph doesn't get a single Valentine gift, Lisa takes pity on him and quickly drops a card off on his desk. This causes him to become infatuated with her to the point that he follows her around, being persistent in showing off his affection. But Lisa doesn't reciprocate these feelings and wants to let him down easily, complicated when the Crusty 29th anniversary show occurs and he offers her tickets to witness it live. While there, he continues to embarrass her through association, and she snaps, telling him off in front of the entire audience. Ralph feels humiliated by this, but instead of sulking, he puts his angst into his performance as George Washington in the school's President's Day play, impressing the audience and eventually inspiring Lisa to put their relationship into healthier territory.

Ralph Wiggum was revealed to be the son of Clancy Wiggum in this episode, which also marked his beginning as somewhat of a breakout character among the cast of Springfield Elementary. He's been in the background once or twice before but has never really had a settled-upon characterization until this point, with a few early scenes showing him eating crayons or gluing his head to his shoulder to establish what his permanent personality would be moving forward. As the show moved on for more tightly written plots and into looser territory with extra space for gags and cutaways, characters like Ralph developed as a means of filling in some of these promised blank spaces in later scripts, his dim wit becoming just as iconic as the general character of the town of Springfield that it represents.

Despite the divergence from many contemporary sitcoms, The Simpsons has always taken a very similar approach to the happily ever afters of many other romance plots, where people find true love in the end of the episode by sticking to it and following other platitudes similar to what we hear from Chief Wiggum. But this episode doesn't have that sort of idealistic optimism; yet it still maintains a similar level of satisfaction to the finale. Ralph doesn't end up with Lisa, and Lisa doesn't completely cut Ralph off as a social connection, but the spirit of compromise manages to get a good, though not perfect, conclusion.

Duffless: When Homer gets pulled over for a DUI and loses his license, Marge challenges him to quit drinking beer for a month. He agrees but is constantly tempted by the alcohol-centric world around him. As time goes on, however, Homer begins to lose weight, have more energy, and overall, he's enjoying a quality of life he didn't have before. Although when he succeeds at making it through the month, he still wants to go back to his own life, and yet seeing all the butterflies convinces him that maybe it's for the best if he doesn't relapse immediately, and he goes for a bike ride with Marge instead.

In the B plot, Lisa genetically modifies a giant tomato for her science fair project, which Bart throws at Principal Skinner. So to get back at her brother, she decides to compare his intelligence to that of a hamster for her project instead. When he learns of Lisa's plan to humiliate him, he decides to apply himself at the science fair in a people-pleasing way and creates an exhibit that steals the attention away from Lisa's project. As willing as this season is to put comedic exaggerations to Homer's antics, such as getting kicked out of the Krusty Burger, it's equally willing to show the more realistic side to his lifestyle, such as in Homer's triple bypass. This episode is when Homer's alcoholism begins to have a more detrimental effect on his health as well as his relationships. Marge is shown to be visibly upset by his continued drinking, and yet it's a recognition of this discomfort that encourages him to, in the end, decide not to go back to the way things were. The Simpsons is willing now to take a look not just into American society but American people as well. We're a nation obsessed with drinking, so what does that mean for our health?

The B plot of this episode deals with revenge. Lisa wants vengeance against Bart for destroying her science fair project, so she plans on embarrassing him in front of the school. But when Bart learns of the plot, he changes the script on her by drawing attention away from the exhibit in the first place. This plays out as though it's going to be a moral lesson on why revenge is bad, as it appears like a plan to get revenge for Lisa's revenge will set off a vicious cycle. But instead, we get a situation where the whole conflict is avoided. Lisa doesn't drag Bart's name through the mud, as nobody pays attention to the conflict. Now, whether this was a conscious decision on Bart's part is likely not the case.

Last Exit to Springfield: The Springfield Nuclear Plant is in search of a new union representative, trying to find somebody to negotiate against Mr. Burns on what their new contract should be. The plan is to accept a keg of beer at their meetings in exchange for their dental plan. But when Homer realizes that he'll have to pay for Lisa's braces if the union loses dental, he denounces the new contract, which motivates the workers to elect him head of the union. Unfortunately, or fortunately, Homer doesn't really understand what his responsibilities are, and he winds up vastly misinterpreting Burns's attempts at bribery, which Burns interprets as masterful negotiation tactics. Ultimately, Homer ends up accidentally encouraging the union to strike, which causes the town of Springfield to lose power. But this doesn't discourage anybody, and the union continues their protest until Burns caves and accepts renewing the old one on the condition that Homer steps down from his position as Union president.

This episode is perhaps the best at showing both the down-to-earth human struggles of the Simpson family while still maintaining the factious satire that the series is best known for, all without either their theme interfering with the other. The Simpson family is threatened with the loss of their dental plan, a financial fear that anybody can relate to, and yet the means through which they get it back is fraught with humor and pop culture references in a way that comes across as so absurd that it's a genuine shock that it can still be relatable. As long as stories are still human, they can go in any direction, and so Homer can spin around on the floor like a top after negotiating the contract without taking away from how much we're rooting for him. This episode combines the biting, relevant satire that the show is capable of with the low-brow referential humor that enabled any audience to enjoy its writing and combined enough elements from daily life that anyone viewing it could relate to the experience. It's the type of thing that a pretentious YouTube video essay writer can enjoy just as much as a media-illiterate average type, bringing the whole country closer together as we get that not much really is different between us.

So it's come to this: a Simpsons clip show. Bart is seeking an April Fool's prank to get back at Homer and ultimately concludes that the best option is to shake up a beer using industrial equipment so it will explode in his face. This works too well, and Homer winds up in the hospital. While there, the Simpson family reminisce on all the various moments through their lives that have tested them in the same way. The rest of the plot is Homer relearning things, such as how to walk, before ultimately recovering to strangle Bart. For a more thorough retelling of this episode's plot, rewatch this series from the beginning. This is a clip show, with the main plot largely existing to facilitate flashbacks using recycled footage, although some of the footage is unseen, such as the newly revealed footage of Homer falling down the cliff from Bart the Daredevil. That said, this episode doesn't say much about the show overall that hasn't been said before and was likely made to cheaply and quickly produce an episode.

The front is upset with the low quality of recent Itchy & Scratchy episodes. Bart and Lisa decide that they should write their own and submit it to the studio. But when it's rejected, they decide to include Abraham Simpson's name on the script instead of their own so the letter won't be ignored for being from children. This works, and the episode airs, which encourages Itchy & Scratchy Studios to hire Grandpa Simpson as a writer full-time. Bart and Lisa continue penning up episodes under his name, and they're soon nominated for an award. But when the episode plays during the awards show, Abe uses the podium to denounce the cartoon as disgusting and retires from his so-called career then and there.

In the B plot, Homer and Marge attend their high school reunion, where Homer wins several gag awards. But they're all taken away from him when it's revealed that he never finished high school. So he attends night school to obtain a GED and, after a while, graduate properly to get back his "Most Improved Odor" award. Word: if you can't laugh at yourself, then you don't really deserve to laugh at anybody else. And The Simpsons writers understand this well enough that they can devote an entire episode to making fun of the process of cartoon writing, whether that's a dig at Ren & Stimpy, whose writer John K has integrated the show before, or a dig at network executives who have also tried to limit and restrain the show, or a dig at themselves, who have probably been the harshest of anybody towards The Simpsons. A majority of this episode is dedicated to pointing out the absurdity of the behind-the-scenes while also using the opportunity to make a few other gags about the process of cartooning itself. While the subject matter is brought up in this way, it manages to contain more meta-elements than the previous episode, and that was a clip show. It's fitting that we also get a series of segments involving Krusty during this episode, not only because he's adjacent to the Itchy & Scratchy shorts themselves but because he's a TV personality within The Simpsons much in the same way that The Simpsons are TV personalities within our world. So showing off Krusty as a troubled, egotistic individual will always be a joke told at the expense of anybody whose work ends up on television.

Whacking Day: After stealing Groundskeeper Willy's tractor and running over Superintendent Chalmers, Bart is expelled from Springfield Elementary. After a few failed attempts at enrolling him elsewhere, Marge then decides to homeschool Bart herself. This works, as Bart is soon enthralled by a book Marge read as a child, and he finds a newfound love of reading. Meanwhile, Whacking Day is occurring, a holiday where all the snakes in Springfield are lured into the town center and beaten with blunt instruments. Lisa is disgusted by this practice but is outnumbered by the Springfield denizens who enjoy it, that is, until she and Bart devise a plan to lure all the snakes into their house with the low baritone of Barry White. When the mob follows them there, she reveals the truth that Whacking Day was a sham holiday invented to beat up the Irish.

For Effective Independent Learning, Bart is invited back to Springfield Elementary, and everything returns to normal. It's interesting that Bart becomes a model student the moment he's out of Springfield Elementary. It only took one good book and a bit of extra attention for him to really shine in terms of his own education. Although this isn't a new idea in The Simpsons, Bart has been shown to have a hidden intellect before, whether it's learning fringe through exposure or piecing together one of Sideshow Bob's schemes. It's a bit telling that in the impersonal, one-size-fits-all approach to education, Bart would get left behind when he's just as capable as Lisa is when it comes to using his head. But nothing ever gets challenged in the town of Springfield, just as much as things aren't challenged in the real world. Even if a system is known to leave many of its participants behind, people are resistant to change when it comes to things that could improve society, just as Springfield itself resists challenges to their tradition of Whacking Day. It's easier for problem students to be swept under the rug, and it's easier for the dark moments of history to be erased. But it's more challenging to wonder why things are the way they are and convince others, as well as yourself, that things could be better.

Marge in [Music] Chains: When a flu strain from Osaka enters the town of Springfield, the whole Simpson family, save for Marge, needs taken care of. In the stress of the moment, Marge accidentally forgets to pay for a bottle of bourbon at the Kwik-E-Mart and is arrested for theft. Her attorney, Lionel Hutz, botches the defense, on top of the entire town turning on Marge as more and more rumors begin to spread about her behavior. Ultimately, she winds up in prison, although she enjoys the time there as she doesn't have to cook or clean up after herself. But while she's away, the Simpson family struggles to keep the house clean without her. Worse still is that the Springfield bake sale can't raise enough money without Marge's contributions to construct a statue of Lincoln as they wanted, and they're forced to settle for a lesser president: Jimmy Carter. His unveiling causes the town to riot, and all of Springfield falls into chaos, only fixed when Marge Simpson is released from jail, and all ends well.

The plot retreads much of the same ground we've already seen covered in episodes like "Homer Alone," where Marge spends time away due to stress and the Simpson family ends up collapsing without her presence. But this episode takes that plot from earlier and increases the stakes and scale by having Marge's absence not only affecting the family but the entire town. It's the kind of thing that plays into season 4's overall insistence on exaggerating the familiar satirization of the previous seasons. It still has just enough of a barrier between satire and absurdity so as not to commit to any potentially controversial topics like the US justice system. And of course, the riot is caused by Springfield's enragement over a statue of who has to be one of the least offensive US presidents. But what this episode is primarily remembered for these days is the quote predictions that it made about the future: the whole town is shut down by a virus, a swarm of murder hornets riding in the streets, and a barely functional, over-engineered juicer. This follows in the trend of "The Simpsons Did It," where major news stories are often dismissed by internet comedians as simply rehashing plots from The Simpsons. Of course, when a show runs for as long as The Simpsons has, it's only natural that certain bits would wind up predating real events. We know the show is borrowed from the real world enough that the reverse would be inevitable.

Krusty Gets Cancelled: A viral advertisement for Gabbo attracts the intrigue of the town of Springfield, which is ultimately revealed to be a kid show involving a puppet airing opposite Krusty the Clown. Gabbo begins stealing ratings from an increasingly desperate Krusty before eventually the clown is dropped from the network for poor ratings. He sulks for a while, but when Bart sabotages Gabbo's reputation by hot-miking a negative remark about Springfield's children after a show, the opportunity arises for Krusty to make a comeback. So he gathers up all of the celebrity acquaintances he's connected with throughout the years and plans a big special, with the Simpson family helping him to get in shape for his red debut. The special goes off without a hitch, and Krusty is once again the biggest name in television—oh, except for Johnny Carson.

A fan theory revolving around Krusty the Clown that I quite enjoy is something that gets played with a bit in this episode. The general idea is that Krusty the Clown is not trying to host a kid's show. Clown's TV host spells out a favor in the early 60s, so the only people who would really get why he was hosting a kid's show in the 90s are those who grew up during that time. He regularly throws tantrums on air and accidentally lets slip all of his gambling habits and other vices. That is to say, Krusty the Clown is a terrible clown on purpose. It's all part of the character that he's built up for a decades-long career. That's why he can tell a joke that bombs but then give genuine comedy advice when it's necessary, as well as why so many celebrities are willing to associate with him despite his outward failings. Krusty the Clown is funny in-universe for the same reason he's funny outside The Simpsons universe. But he'd see celebrity guest stars that also bring to light the other side of this episode's appeal. The big names attached to the show are practically a gag in and of themselves. That The Simpsons is such a large hit that they can get practically anyone to appear as themselves is something that, at the time, was considered a sign of its health and cultural relevance. It's not until years later that this same phenomenon would become a sign of the show's decline in quality, although this was still a concern at the time. Julie Kavner as well as Harry Shearer were opposed to the number of celebrity guest stars in this episode, believing it to be tasteless and unnecessary, leading to Marge's voice being completely absent from this episode.

Season 5: Season 5 marks the departure of the original Simpsons team and is represented by the last bits of relatability being erased from the on-paper plots. While The Simpsons would still have many things that are down-to-earth just as before, this is the point where the consensus…

Finally, shifted that there shouldn't be a requirement for plots to be human; the characters can go anywhere, do anything, and there's no need to worry about sharks being jumped, as the original showrunners lost their attachments to anything resembling a legacy. This isn't to say that this is an inherently bad thing, though.

Ordinarily, "Jumping the Shark" is a term used to define the moment where a show ceases to be relatable to its audience or when the writers ran out of ideas for the show. Jumping the Shark often signifies when the quality of writing is no longer what it once was and that all of the original interest has waned completely. If the writers have exhausted their ideas, then the show is forced to take significantly higher stakes in lieu of whatever made it so great in the first place. And I think that, as of season 5, it's safe to say that The Simpsons has run out of things for the every family of America to do. And as they did so, they were forced to reinvent The Simpsons, nearly conceptually. No longer are we getting the greeting card SMS of earlier seasons and the stories of your hometown here, but instead, the show has become a referential parody of itself. And this is perhaps why The Simpsons has stayed culturally relevant for so long. It began as a refreshing change of pace from the typical sitcom formula, but when that change became the norm, The Simpsons had to adapt in order to stay one step ahead. So instead of satirizing America, why not satirize The Simpsons?

Homer's barbershop quartet at the Springfield Swap Meet: Bart and Lisa stumble upon an old record with their dad's face on it, and so he regales them the tale of the time that he was a member of a barbershop quartet called the B Sharps. It began with him, Chief Wiggum, Principal Skinner, and aoo, all singing together at Moe's Tavern, when they're scouted by an agent who requires them to drop Wiggum and find someone new. They auditioned for a while, but eventually learned that Barney has a great voice when they find him on the bathroom floor of Moe's. In spite of Chief Wiggum's attempts to get back at the band, they catapult to stardom with their hit "Baby on Board," which Homer writes, inspired by Lisa. But this newfound fame causes Homer to spend more time away from Marge than he's comfortable with, and she worries that he won't be around to raise their two children. This, combined with the band's slow downfall as barbershop fades from the spotlight, eventually causes the group to disband and the story to catch up to the modern day. But after reliving the memories, Homer calls up his former companions, and they perform one last concert together on the roof of Moe's.

The B Sharps are an homage to The Beatles, with many of the references in this episode being to that particular band; everything from their career starting at the Cavern Club to many of the defining moments, including an album that referenced the John Lennon "more popular than Jesus" quote, is some sort of reference to the band's various highlights and lowlights. Barney replacing Wiggum references the protest about Ringo replacing Pete Best, and of course, the rooftop concert at the end of the episode was by The Beatles as well, just with a bit less tear-gassing. And yet, all of these references seem to come at the expense of some of the show's continuity. Santa's Little Helper tries to bury the fake Homer's head in the flashback, but the Simpson family didn't get a dog until the first season. Homer is shown to be bald in the album art despite having hair, albeit a receding hairline, in the episode. And there are pictures of a fully grown Bart and Lisa in the background of the master bedroom, despite, again, the episode being a flashback. And while most of this is extreme picking, it goes to show that a later complaint about The Simpsons forgetting its own continuity isn't something exclusive to the later seasons.

Cape Fear: Bart receives a series of threatening letters detailing his own death and tries to track down who it is that may be trying to kill him. It turns out to be none other than Sideshow Bob, who has recently had a parole hearing that lets him out of prison and back into the streets of Springfield, where he makes his intentions to gut the boy known. So the Simpson family enters the witness relocation program, and they move to Terror Lake, getting a new life and a new houseboat. But Sideshow Bob follows them to their new home and manages to corner Bart with the rest of the family incapacitated. With some quick thinking, Bart convinces Bob to sing the score of the HMS Pinafore as a last request, which buys enough time for the houseboat to drift back to Springfield, where Bob is once again put behind bars. This episode contains many references to horror movies, from Bob staying in the Bates Motel to multiple visual references of the methods of pop culture killers, but the primary thing referenced in this episode is The Simpsons itself. Bob is a recurring villain, with his multiple appearances in the show being one of the few consistent sources of continuity throughout the show. And while episodes involving him often begin and end with Bob being in jail, they still play off of earlier knowledge of previous episodes to understand fully what kind of dynamic exists between the two. Sideshow Bob can best be described as an affable villain; he's the type who doesn't put much effort into appearing as the bad guy in anything that he does, unless that thing is killing Bart, then he becomes a full-on menace, getting (not quite) German tattoos and writing letters in his own blood. But if Bart were not a threat, Sideshow Bob would likely behave as any other member of polite society might, his murderous tendencies being nothing but a thought in the back of his mind.

Homer Goes to College: After botching a surprise inspection, Homer is made to go back to college to get the degree that his job requires. He's looking forward to the opportunity, expecting it to be like a lewd college comedy, but when he arrives, is horrified to learn that the stereotype of the party college was grossly exaggerated, especially when you're studying nuclear physics. He fails his classes, and the dean recommends that he get tutoring from some of the smarter students, or nerds. Homer befriends the nerds, but after realizing what they are, decides to teach them everything he knows about partying hard. But this backfires when one of their pranks gets the boys expelled. With nowhere else to go, the Simpson family allows the nerds to stay with them, only for their habits to annoy the family to the point that Homer has to come up with a zanier scheme to get the boys back in the dean's good graces. But when this fails, the dean simply accepts them anyway, as he believed he was too harsh on them before. The day of the final exam comes, and despite Homer's last-minute cramming, he fails the test anyway. But the nerds owe him a favor, and they hack into the grading system to change his grade to a passing one, which angers Marge, and she demands he go back to college for real.

The Simpsons started out as a parody of typical domestic comedy formulas, parting tropes, but then showing off a more realistic consequence to the antics of the characters. Springfield was the type of town that enabled and even encouraged this sort of behavior for a while, but the parody aspects of The Simpsons began to grow stale once the real-world equivalence fell out of favor. Homer's idea of what college should be like are incompatible with the actual college experience, much in the same way that the type of media parody in the first four seasons was no longer mainstream enough for the stylistic parody to make sense. And so The Simpsons began moving on from that earlier style, adapting to a changing culture by attempting to stay one step ahead and making fun of itself. This episode comes across as very forced, but in a way that makes sense for the plot's development. Homer and Burns's attempts to get the former into college all come up short, yet Homer is simply given an admission anyway. Homer's attempts to get the nerds a wild and crazy college life backfires, and his attempts to get them back in the dean's good graces backfire as well, with the dean simply deciding to give the group what they want. In this way, all of the scheming and hygiene one would expect from a comedy get subverted, but rather than the subversion coming at the end of the gag, it appears exclusively in the middle.

Rosebud: Mr. Burns begins losing sleep over the memory of his lost childhood teddy bear, Bobo. In spite of all the things he has, he doesn't feel complete without it, so he puts out advertisements searching for the toy, which happens to end up in the possession of Maggie Simpson. The Simpson family plans on giving him the toy in exchange for a large sum of money, but when the elderly man comes to their house to plan the exchange, Maggie refuses to give the toy away. And so Homer decides that the happiness of his youngest daughter is more valuable than any amount of money that Burns could give to them. But Mr. Burns refuses to accept this outcome, and after a few failed attempts at burglary, decides to take over every TV channel and divert every delivery of beer into Springfield in order to turn the townsfolk against Homer. But when this fails, he ultimately decides to give the bear a goodbye, telling Maggie to love the bear as much as he once did. And with this show of affection, Maggie finally decides to give the bear away for free. Less subtext and more plain text is the fact that Bobo is meant to represent Mr. Burns's lost childhood innocence, which comes around to be the reason that he's so hesitant to simply force the toy away from Maggie. To strip away that innocence from another through a cruel action wouldn't bring back what it is that he's searching for, and so Bobo can only be obtained through legitimate means; otherwise, the bear represents nothing. This episode is ultimately more of a Mr. Burns episode than it is about any of The Simpsons in particular. While Homer is the one with the most agency among the family, and Maggie is the one who ultimately serves as a roadblock to the episode wrapping up earlier, Mr. Burns is the one to undergo an arc and is the only one who gets a majority of the decision-making moments in the episode. Fitting in that it's a lengthy homage to Citizen Kane, the third homage episode of a season that were only four episodes into.

Treehouse of Horror IV: Bart guides the audience through a museum that he claims is haunted, each painting serving as a window into some twisted story, or maybe they just threw something together with vampires. The first tale is "The Devil and Homer Simpson." Homer daydreams for too long and misses out on the last donut at work. When he announced out loud that he'd sell his soul for a donut, the devil, Ned Flanders, appears and offers to facilitate the exchange. And although Homer thinks he's outsmarted the devil for a bit by not finishing the snack, his sleepwalking gets the better of him, and he soon finishes the forbidden donut. He's taken to a hellish court after an evening in the Underworld, and the devil selects the jury. But despite the incompetence of their hired lawyer, Marge finds an old wedding photo with the message on the back where Homer pledges her his eternal soul. In the end, the jury decrees that Homer's soul wasn't his to give away, and the deal with the Devil is void. So Flanders curses Homer to wear the donut as his head for eternity.

The second short is "Terror at 5 1/2 ft." Bart has a nightmare about a bus crash and fears going to school that day. Despite Lisa's attempts to assuage him, he soon finds that his fears are valid when a gremlin appears on the side of the bus, tearing at the mechanics. His pleas to stop the bus fall on deaf ears, as every time he convinces people to look outside, the gremlin is gone. Ultimately, Bart takes matters into his own hands by opening the bus window and attacking the gremlin himself, which gets him taken to an asylum once the bus arrives at its destination. Despite the clear damage to the side of the bus, they still decide his behavior was unwarranted and haul him off anyway, with the gremlin following.

The third story is "Bart Simpson's Dracula." Mr. Burns invites the family to his mansion in Pennsylvania during a slew of bloody killings. Lisa is wary of potential dangers, a weariness that's warranted when Mr. Burns does indeed capture and turn Bart into a member of his undead army. When Homer learns of Bart becoming a vampire, he decides to live out the American dream and kill his boss, breaking into the mansion and stabbing Burns to death. But it turns out that he wasn't, in fact, the head vampire; that honor was Marge's, as she has a life outside the house. The episode ends with a homage to Charlie Brown's Christmas special, Marge on the lamb.

When Homer gets both of his arms stuck in vending machines, he can't take Marge to the ballet like he promised, so Marge goes with Ruth Powers, their next-door neighbor from last season instead. The two have a great time together, prompting Marge to want to go out with her again the next night. Homer grows jealous of his wife's new social life and decides to enjoy timeout as well, leaving the kids to be taken care of by Lionel Hutz. But Homer can't find anything enjoyable to do and ends up hitching a ride home from Chief Wiggum, who happens upon Marge and Ruth on the highway where he moves to pull them over. Ruth reveals that the car is stolen, and a chase begins, with Marge initially hoping not to get involved but ultimately doing a bit of soul-searching that leads her back to her new friend. In the end, an impassioned apology from Homer causes Marge to realize that she doesn't need to abandon her old life for a new one, and Ruth accepts her fate.

Ruth Powers doesn't play a significant role in any plot for several seasons after this, her part in the show slowly fading with time as she becomes mostly irrelevant. Many other Simpsons characters evolve from background assets to one-off gags to full-blown personas as more plots are written with them in mind to fill the positions, but Ruth Powers never makes the cut. This is likely because her niche as the bitter ex-wife to an unmet and unnamed husband is something that there just isn't much of a demand for, considering that there are already two much more developed characters that can be used for single-woman plots in Selma and Miss Kople. So Ruth gets sidelined, not because she's uninteresting, but because she's not distinct. This episode deals with Homer's insecurities that Marge may become a character distinct from the Simpson household as she spends more and more time away from it. It's not exactly in plain text that this is his anxiety, but the fact that Marge is such a non-character despite having so many appearances in the show up to this point is something that would eventually need some attention brought to it, and this episode is the first to do so. That doesn't just point out that she's stressed due to her housewife responsibilities. While the conclusion is ultimately that she should be grateful for the relationship she has, this isn't much of a surprise as character development is something that, by now, is established to get in the way of continuity.

Bart's Inner Child Acting on Impulse: Homer gets a trampoline and charges children from the neighborhood to play on it, but this causes a series of injuries, just as Marge anticipated that it would, and Homer is forced to get rid of the play thing. But after doing so, he points out that Marge shuts down any fun thing he tries to do and that she's a bit of a nag, something corroborated by their children. She goes to her sisters to unwind and is given the advice to see a self-help guru named Brad Goodman. They attend a seminar where Bart starts to heckle the man, but rather than being annoyed, he views Bart's antics as a sign of an emotionally healthy young man and praises Marge and Homer's parenting style. He then tells the town of Springfield that they should act more like Bart, and they begin to live a carefree, rebellious lifestyle. Bart gets upset that his slacker identity has been co-opted around the time that Springfield throws a "Do What You Feel" festival, but this festival turns into a Rube Goldberg machine of disaster, and the whole incident is blamed on Bart, who barely escapes unscathed. In the end, Lisa points out that self-improvement is a slow process achievable by anyone, a lesson that's ignored for The Simpsons to watch TV.

Bart Mania took over the Western world so quickly that it's hardly a surprise that a show satirizing Western culture would eventually be forced to take a stab at it to be relevant. This is one of the most meta episodes of the show, and that's including clip show episodes. Be like boy takes the town of Springfield, and much in the same way that The Simpsons rose to popularity, the effect was largely the same. Those who were annoyed by the trend overtaking everything else in culture were quick to place the blame on the inspiration for the behavior rather than those doing it, and The Simpsons came under scrutiny from people who couldn't be bothered to police what their children consumed. This episode also briefly touches on Bart's anxiety that he's lost a part of who he is when the whole town starts to imitate him, as Lisa points out, defining yourself by rebellion only works when your actions are genuinely going against the grain of society. Once counterculture becomes culture, you cease to stand out and have to either accept conformity or seek to reinvent yourself, much in the same way that The Simpsons started out as a denouncement of pop culture schlock; it soon became the standard as other shows started to imitate the style, and The Simpsons was forced to metamorphosize in order to stay as relevant as it wanted to.

Boy Scouts in the Hood: Bart and Milhouse receive a $20 bill through an act of God and Homer's incompetence, which they use to buy an all-syrup squishy, sending them on a bender throughout the town of Springfield. The next morning, Bart wakes up in the uniform of the Junior Campers. He plans on quitting the next day, but when he learns that the Junior Campers can get out of school and carry a knife around, he decides to stick around to see what other benefits it might have. This culminates in a father-son rafting trip where Homer and Bart get paired up with the Flanders'. Homer later gets the group lost at sea, and his continued ineptitude makes a situation worse and worse until they're out of food and fresh water, with a hole in the raft. But Homer's nose saves the day when he smells hamburgers in the distance, and they come across a crusty burger store in an oil rig.

Homer's intelligence is something that varies widely throughout the show, something even lampshaded by the writers themselves in later seasons. While he's never been shown to be especially intelligent, his stupidity increases steadily as the episodes go on and eventually gets to the point of absurdity. At first, Homer was meant to be an everyman, to stand in for the typical American. As such, he was often meant to be just slightly dumber than the average viewer, as is typical of the trope. Things would be explained to him as often as it would to the audience, and he could never be one step ahead of the people watching at home. But this aspect of his character got exaggerated as time went on and writers turned over, and eventually, we got the Homer that we see in the 2020s. As early as now, while it's Homer's brain that gets the boys into the rough situation, therein it's a stomach that gets him out of it. Like many plots before this, is one where a character's actions are forgiven due to some last-second actions that act as a redemption, meaning that all is well with the initial harm being forgiven due to everything having a happy ending. In this situation, though, Homer ruining the rafting trip is actually something that Bart anticipates from the outset, as if Homer putting the family in life-or-death situations is something so common that it's to be expected. In this case, the act of saving them is actually something that put Homer karmically ahead due to acting better than expected, a telling sign of his steadily decreasing competence that this is now the norm.

The Last Temptation of Homer: Due to a variety of labor law violations, Burns is forced to hire a female employee. The role is filled by Mindy Simmons, who has a degree in engineering or something, but more importantly, she seems to be an exact match for Homer, who quickly grows infatuated with her. He tries to ignore her and to prove that the attraction is purely physical, but this only makes the two fall for each other even more. Soon they're sent on a company trip to represent the plant at an energy summit where they get plenty of time alone together. Homer fears that he's going to be tempted to cheat on...

Marge, but in the end, he resists that urge by calling Marge into Capital City instead. In the B plot, Bart realizes that he may have a vision problem, and so Marge takes him to the doctor for a pair of prescription glasses. While there, he's also fitted with a variety of medical devices that turn him into the stereotypical nerd, drawing the attention of the schoolyard bullies. After two weeks are over and he no longer needs the devices, he triumphantly returns to school, only to get beaten up anyway. This episode briefly posits that Bart's behavior issues and lacking grades are a result of an undiagnosed vision problem, despite earlier in the episode showing, once again, that he's great at applying himself to things like subtle pranks or his various other forms of mischief. But this aspect isn't given too much credence, especially considering that he's never shown performing in class again while his vision is corrected to prove that statement one way or another. And yet, that whole discussion is irrelevant to the kids of Springfield Elementary anyway, as they bully Bart purely for his physical appearance rather than any aspect of his personality. Then, once he's back to normal, he still gets beaten up; this time because he tempted fate and made himself stand out.

The A plot of this episode deals with Homer being afraid that he may wind up being unfaithful to Marge, a huge departure from a recent episode with similar themes, "Colonel Homer." In that episode, he was close to unfaithfulness without realizing the hurt it caused for his wife, but here he resists the temptation due to that very same potential. It's interesting that while Homer is getting dumber every season, he seems to at least be slightly more aware of the feelings of his significant other. If you can't replicate the plots you once could, the writers are aware that they can substitute them out for more relatability.

In "Springfield or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Legalized Gambling," in order to reverse an economic downturn in Springfield, the town agrees to legalize gambling. Mr. Burns opens a casino, and soon the entire town is enthralled with giving away even more of their money to him. Homer gets a job at a table, though his inability to count makes him one of the most popular dealers. Marge gets addicted to gambling, neglecting her responsibilities to her family, such as Lisa, who has to attend a school pageant in a Florida costume made by Homer and Bart, who opens his own casino in his treehouse. After Homer realizes how much their household is falling apart without Marge, he convinces her that her gambling is causing issues, and she agrees to stop. Meanwhile, Mr. Burns grows increasingly alienated and paranoid of germs as more and more people visit the casino.

In terms of actual plot, this episode runs extremely thin. It's as if the concept was "Springfield gets a casino," run with that for 22 minutes. It's as though there was hardly any attempt to tell a story at all. Marge slowly abandons her family for gambling but only needs Homer to run in and point out that fact to her to get her to stop; his previous attempts at doing so all foiled by him getting distracted by something else. Mr. Burns slowly becomes more jaded and paranoid as the episode progresses, but this isn't really prompted by anything; it's more so to reference Howard Hughes, and it's a plot point that gets resolved very quickly because he misses his old job, and Mr. Burns's casino doesn't even get wrapped up. The story ends with Robert Goulet performing while it's at the height of its popularity. And yet, in spite of all of that, this episode is still one of the most well-regarded of the Oakley Weinstein era.

The actual plot of many of the more absurd Simpsons episodes ultimately doesn't matter. It doesn't take some grand manipulation to pry the family apart in order to have a heartwarming reunion at the end; it can be a minor contrivance, and the effect is still the same. Likewise with humor; so long as there's the bare minimum of story to provide context, The Simpsons doesn't need a plot to carry any of its jokes.

"Homer the Vigilante." A string of robberies occurs in the town of Springfield, and the police are powerless to figure out who the culprit is. Upon a wave of paranoia, Homer and a few of his neighbors form a neighborhood watch, gathering their firearms and preparing to patrol the neighborhood for safety. But rather than actually making any progress on catching the cat burglar, they instead terrorize the regular townsfolk and go mad with power. Eventually, the thief announces his intentions to steal a priceless gem from the Springfield Museum, which prompts the watch to guard it overnight, though this is to no success as the gem is stolen anyway. But Kamp Krusty happens to witness the burglary happening and tattles on the thief, Malloy, a new member of the retirement community. He's arrested after returning all the stolen items but reveals that the money he's made over several years is stashed away in Springfield itself, causing a mad dash to find it, during which he escapes from the unguarded cell.

A major theme throughout this episode is set up within the narrative as a sort of anti-ageist crusade: that the elderly aren't simply bystanders, too useless to be of any help to the communities in which they live. Though this messaging is actually pretty flimsy, as there's not really any point to the actual experience of the elderly that helps to solve the mystery in the end or give an edge to Malloy, except maybe the fact that he can use his age as a refuge from scrutiny—that nobody might suspect an old man of outsmarting the entire town. But the real messaging behind this episode comes down more to waves of panic and how these can cause much more harm than whatever the source of that panic is. The neighborhood watch commits far more crime than they actually stop, and the sense of panic that's overwhelmed Springfield is only made worse by their power-hungry patrols. In the end, the mob is a bigger threat to safety in the community than the actual cat burglar, and this is something that gets weaponized when Malloy uses the townsfolk's greed as a distraction to escape.

"Bart Gets Famous." Bart's class goes to a box factory—a field trip so boring that Bart sneaks out and heads to a Channel 6 lot across the street. He wanders around backstage and manages to fumble his way into an assistant position with Krusty the Clown. He's excited about the spot at first, but mistreatment by the cast members and the constant working hours cause him to get disillusioned with the work—that is, until Bart is pulled on stage for a quick spot in a sketch where he knocks over the scenery and says, "I didn't do it." This catapults him into fame as the "I didn't do it" kid, and he soon becomes one of the most famous breakout characters in the country. But just as quickly as his fame starts to wear him out, he falls out of popular culture, and before long, Bart is kicked out of show business, returning to his own life.

The brevity of Bart's tenure in the show business perhaps shows a potential insecurity that The Simpsons writing staff has about their very similar role in pop culture. His fame comes from a flash-in-the-pan sort of popularity—the kind of thing that gets a lot of attention in a very short amount of time and disappears just as quickly. It's not as though Bart is in a particularly unique case; this sort of thing appears very often in culture, and they've all faded from time. So when Krusty props up Bart's fame for a quick buck, he has to know that it's a temporary fad—the kind of thing you need to capitalize on while it's still profitable. He knew from the beginning that Bart's career wouldn't last, and maybe this is something that The Simpsons feared would happen to them as soon as they stopped bringing in revenue for Fox. Bart tries to reinvent himself to prove that he's more than a single catchphrase, but the world doesn't care; they're not looking for a variety act—there are already so many of those. They want the cheap laugh and then to move on. We see the same thing occurring in the writing staff as we see on the screen; so much of the staff has turned over in between seasons that the newcomers surely had to be a bit unsure whether they'd be able to live up to the enormous hype placed onto their work or if the original staff was leaving because they recognized that it was no longer there.

"Homer and Apu." After Homer gets food poisoning twice from the Kwik-E-Mart, he calls into a consumer protection hotline, where he's given an opportunity to wear a hidden camera to catch Apu in the act of selling expired goods. When this works, Apu is fired from his job and replaced by Hollywood actor James Woods. Rather than letting himself feel down about the incident, Apu decides to apologize for poisoning Homer in the first place by living with the Simpson family and improving their quality of life. But he can't find real fulfillment there, and so he and Homer make the trek to the CEO of Kwik-E-Mart to ask for his job back. When this too fails, he returns to his original workplace just as it's being robbed. When Apu takes a bullet for James Woods, the latter is so grateful that he decides to pull some strings and get Apu his old career back.

It's interesting to note that in this episode, Apu was fired for poisoning Homer and price gouging the rest of Springfield for years—something that makes his downfall seem inevitable in some way. And yet, a character like Mr. Burns doing the same thing for decades is shown as just another ordinary part of life in Springfield and thus in America. Had Apu been just a little bit richer, he could have continued on with his misdeeds, avoiding liability for his actions for as long as he could afford the team of lawyers to cover himself. But at the end of the day, the ironic part about the entire situation is the fact that unlike the nuclear plant, the people of Springfield have more choice in avoiding shopping at Kwik-E-Mart. There are other grocery stores shown in this episode and throughout the rest of the show, but the Simpson family chooses to continue patronizing the very store that's been harming them, putting a bit of the impetus for their harm on themselves. And so the irony comes from the fact that if you can choose who's poisoning you, you get the option to fire back, but if the choice is made for you, you're powerless.

"Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy." Feeling like he's too old for society, Abe Simpson decides to give the family their inheritance early so that he might live to see them enjoy it. They immediately blow him off to go spend the money, which makes Grandpa realize that nobody likes him due to his age. He resolves to get back into the real world by getting a job, only for the pace of the work and technology involved to baffle him and leave him behind even further. Eventually, Abe realizes that he doesn't belong in the working world, but rather he should be on the other side, complaining with the rest of the old folks. In the A plot, Lisa buys the new talking Malibu Stacy doll, only to be disgusted by the aggressive stereotypes she spouts. So Lisa tracks down the reclusive founder of Malibu Stacy, Stacy Lovell, with the plan to create their own line of dolls that's more socially progressive. But the corporation behind the dolls tries to sabotage their new line, fearing it may turn their target audience less consumerist, and they release a new mainline entry to direct attention away from Lisa's line.

As willing as The Simpsons has always been to point out the absurdities in everyday life, the show was far from offering genuine solutions to what it complained about, much in the same vein as the shows it riffed on. Often, when a show portrays a societal issue, the issue is merely setting or a background element, and the navigation of that issue is about adaptation or seeking help from those closest to you. And while these are realistic and relatable goals to strive for, The Simpsons takes it one step beyond and actively challenges these ideals by proposing not so much a solution to a societal issue but positing that solution should be strived for in the first place. It isn't just a matter of Lisa trying to find her own way in a society that increasingly tries to commodify stereotypes, but that she's challenging the fact that this sort of societal norm exists in the first place. Back in the 90s, this was a more controversial idea than it is now, and it's actually very reassuring to see that an episode like this has aged poorly, purely in the sense that Lisa would no longer be viewed as an outcast for trying to fight against gender norms.

"Deep Space Homer." When Homer loses "Employee of the Week" to an inanimate carbon rod, he starts to feel as though he doesn't get enough respect at work or at home. At around the same time, NASA fears losing its funding due to poor public interest in space travel, so they come up with the gimmick of sending a blue-collar worker into space in order to drum up more interest. And they narrow their search to Homer and Barney after the former makes an angry call into their HQ. The total alcohol ban inside NASA grounds causes Barney to become the ideal astronaut, but he's ultimately not chosen due to a relapse at the last minute, with Homer going in his stead. The launch is successful at first, but due to an incident involving a smuggled bag of chips and a broken ant farm, the equipment is damaged, and later the hatch is broken open, leaving the crew aboard at risk of burning up during re-entry. But Homer accidentally holds it shut within an inanimate carbon rod, and the rod holds, giving it glory upon the ship's return.

Homer traveling into space was the internal moment that The Simpsons, quote, "jumped the shark" in terms of what plots were capable of doing. The last vestige of old Simpsons disappeared as soon as the relatable everyman main character was sent into space—something which no average American would ever realistically view themselves as being able to achieve. While plots have always been a bit larger than life in order to slyly appeal narratively, this is the point where plots started to be separate from real life altogether. The only thread connecting The Simpsons to its roots were the character moments, but even these start to fade once the setting is obscured enough from the audience. It's not as though you can't have deeply personal stories in an alien setting; this episode references Star Trek multiple times, a series famous for doing just that. But it was clear that the humanity of the cast was no longer the primary appeal of the show. Once again, I have to clarify that this is not a bad thing; many of the greatest all-time episodes of The Simpsons are still in its future from this point, but these are episodes made following the show's complete restructuring of itself.

"Homer Loves Flanders." After trying and failing to get tickets to a football game, Homer begrudgingly goes with Ned Flanders and winds up having a great time. Following this, he declares Ned Flanders to be his best friend and begins actively trying to spend more and more time with him. But Homer's personality is just as obsessive as always, and he begins to get on Ned's nerves, made worse when the families go on a weekend trip together where Homer starts a food fight and trashes Ned's car. So Ned starts trying to avoid Homer in public, only to end up getting pulled over for speeding in front of the whole congregation. His reputation ruined, he finds himself unable to face going to church and dealing with further scrutiny from the other churchgoers. But an impassioned speech defending Ned's best qualities from Homer causes the town of Springfield to realize their wrongs, and the two go back to being friends, only for Homer to forget the entire thing the next week.

The point of this episode is inverting the typical Ned-Homer dynamic by having Homer become obsessed with loving his neighbor instead of the inexplicable hatred. Though a total inversion isn't quite the end result, because while Ned does start to become the more reviled of the two by the community, this is still largely outward appearance. Homer is praised for his charity work, even though he was only trying to get out of helping the poor, and Ned is viewed as being hopped up on goofballs, even though he was just rattled from Homer's antics. Their personalities stay the same, but society views them differently anyway, and this is because of Homer latching onto Ned in a more public way than before. All of this to show that Homer is a worse person to have as a friend than as an enemy, because being Homer's enemy doesn't come with an especially large number of downsides due to Homer's general incompetence when it comes to inflicting harm on others. The only thing that protects the groups he dislikes is his apathy, but when he loves somebody or something, he spends much more time around them to the point that they can actively suffer from association. Homer is a magnetic force for negativity, and the only way to avoid it is for him to avoid you.

"Bart Gets an Elephant." Bart wins a radio call-in show with the choice of either receiving $10,000 or an elephant. But rather than taking the money as everybody expected him to do, he accepts the gag prize, which the radio DJs don't have. After a series of angry letters and pressure from their parent company, they finally oblige and drop the elephant off at the Simpsons' front door, only for the family to rapidly realize that they cannot take care of an elephant. Despite this, Bart still loves his pet elephant, naming it Stampy and sleeping outside with him as the bills pile up. Homer is forced to accept they need to give Stampy away, and the choice comes down to an ivory dealer or an animal sanctuary. Homer wants to sell to the dealer due to the sanctuary being a nonprofit and offering no money, so Bart releases Stampy into the town where the elephant stomps around for a while before ultimately winding up at the Springfield tar pits, longing to return to its kind. In the end, the elephant saves Homer's life, enough to convince him to give the elephant away.

This episode's plot comes from a real event where a contestant on The Price is Right turned down a $4,000 prize for an elephant—something the studio later gave to them. All the Simpsons did is adjust the figure for inflation and add a few follow-up scenes to show why the comedic story is a bad idea in the first place—something plain to see just from hearing the outline once. This is par for the course as far as comedic plot lines go; nothing especially extreme needs to happen when the episode starts off with an absurd premise, and the legwork of getting to that point can be expedited when you're pulling from headlines, as believability is something culture has taken care of for you. This episode ultimately had to have a pretty short plot; not too much can happen with the conceit of "Bart gets an elephant" that the title doesn't already make clear. Over half the plot involving the elephant is the family trying to figure out the best way to get rid of it, and the first third of the episode is a plot about the family cleaning the house with no later connection to the rest of the story. It makes sense; it's hard to characterize an animal of that size, made more difficult by the fact that it's guaranteed not to last until the end of the episode.

"Burns's Heir." After a near-death experience, Mr. Burns seeks out an heir to leave his fortune to and ideally to train as his adoptive son. The whole town of Springfield comes out to audition, but none of them make the cut—that is, until Bart begins throwing rocks through the windows of Mr. Burns's mansion, and the man realizes that Bart will make for an ideal heir after all. He spends the next few days spoiling the boy, giving him whatever he wants, and soon Bart no longer wishes to spend time with his real family. The Simpsons attempt to win back Bart, but none of their attempts succeed, despite Bart's steadily becoming more and more disillusioned with life under Mr. Burns. Eventually, he gives in entirely to the man's influence, and so the head of the nuclear plant has the boy fire his own father as a test of loyalty, but Bart can't go through with it and he dumps Burns instead, reuniting with the Simpsons at last.

Throughout his life, Mr. Burns has always chosen the pursuit of money and power over anything else, including social connections and any sense of community. In this episode, he offers Bart a glimpse into a similar world to what he has, giving the boy a chance to forsake his social connections for wealth. The temptation works for a time, giving Burns the satisfaction of having purchased love. But the only type of love he can buy isn't the love of himself but a love of his things and the wealth behind them. This is to Mr. Burns indistinguishable from the real thing, as he himself has only ever valued a person for their financials and looks down upon anyone whose wealth doesn't...

Match his own, but just as much as his fails to buy him happiness. The thing that wealth attracts won't patch up the holes missing in his life, and he ends the episode doomed to the same isolation as he had to start with. The Simpson family goes through an opposite arc. They at first want a share of Mr. Burns's wealth; even Lisa goes on stage to argue her case, when she's often the moral compass of the cast. But by the end of the episode, they realize that no amount of wealth comes out to a fair amount for the affection of their son, and they desperately try to get Bart back—efforts which were pointless, as he returned on his own in his own time. Just tying together how much the morals of this episode reflect one another. Sweet Seymour Skinner's badass [Music] song.

When Bart is searching for a last-minute object for show-and-tell, he settles on bringing Santa's Little Helper to school. The dog is a hit, but when it's time to return to class, he leaves SLH in a closet, where the dog eventually smells the cafeteria and sneaks into the vents. The ensuing property damage results in a surprise visit from Superintendent Chalmers, who reacts to a greased Scotsman by firing Skinner. He's replaced by Ned Flanders, who goes too easy on the children, and chaos breaks out in the classrooms, all because of Bart's actions. But instead of feeling ecstatic at the firing of his mortal enemy, Bart instead feels a sense of guilt that Seymour lost his job, with the former principal rejoining the Army as it was the only other place where he felt he belonged. Bart eventually realizes that he needs Skinner back in his life as a rival and gets Ned fired by showing Chalmers that he's trying to pre-in school. Skinner gets his job back, and the duo return to their old ways.

The 100th episode of The Simpsons—an arbitrary milestone that wasn't even originally meant to be this episode. The 100th episode produced wouldn't be until "Lisa's Rival," which doesn't air until season 6. But this episode was chosen to be the 100th in syndication as it heavily featured Bart, the most popular character at the time. Advertisements were run promising that this would be Bart's greatest prank yet—a sign of how misunderstood the show could still manage to be with executives. And of course, the chalkboard gag from this episode shows the staff's real opinions on the overall milestone. When episodes are made in overlapping schedules, it's difficult to really pin down a feeling for an individual work, as they all seem to blend together. For all the fanfare surrounding "Sweet Seymour Skinner's Badass" song, very little of it was internal, and why should it be? This episode plays its plots like any other episode of the same era, rather than a more straightforward story being told about a what-if character in a situation. The showrunners were prepared to begin asking questions about the very structure of the show, putting character dynamics in the spotlight and stressing their relationships to see what changes to the dynamic worked and what they said about those relationships. As it turns out, Bart and Seymour work well as polar opposites—something now as clear to the audience as it always has been for the writers.

The Boy Who Knew Too Much. Bart decides to play hookie one day, enjoying the pleasant weather and skipping out on some of the school's more obnoxious policies. But Principal Skinner tracks him down and chases him to the highway, where Bart takes refuge in the convertible of Freddy Quimby, the miscreant nephew of Mayor Quimby. There, he sneaks into the back rooms of the socialite's 18th birthday party, where he witnesses an argument between the waiter and Freddy, resulting in the waiter being maimed. A trial is held to account for the guilt of Freddy in the assault case, with Bart being the only potential witness, but he's afraid to confess as he had been playing hookie that day and doesn't want to get into trouble. The jury, as well as the court of public opinion, is holding Freddy Quimby guilty, safe for Homer, who is intentionally deadlocking the jury in order to get a free hotel room. And as the guilt weighs more and more heavily on Bart, he eventually decides to testify to Freddy's innocence—that the waiter was injured through an accident and the Quimby did nothing wrong. This episode combines the typical moral conundrum that would be common to see in sitcoms of the era with that extra little bit of Simpson style that simultaneously adds complexity to the situation while also vastly lowering the stakes. Freddy Quimby is the type of person that everybody in Springfield was assumed to be guilty from the outset—surely the type of person who's guilty in spirit if not action. And this is usually something you see presented from the other side of the country's wealth gap. In the movie *12 Angry Men*, you have a young man accused of a crime and assumed to be guilty due to his position at the bottom of the social hierarchy; here, the same hatred is given looking up than it would be looking down, and maybe there's something to be said for the clear comparison this episode tries to draw between Freddy and Bart. Freddy brags about getting his girl, his car, and his wealth from dropping out of the fourth grade—the exact line that finally convinces Bart to skip school. The antics of the socialite are perhaps meant to be put into the same framing as Bart's common misbehavior, and so this episode has Bart vouching for the innocence of a future version of himself rather than a stranger; albeit this future vision is one where he lives a lifestyle that the real Bart can never know.

Lady Bouvier's Lover. Realizing how lonely Jacqueline Bouvier and Abraham Simpson are during Maggie's first birthday party, Marge decides to get the two of them out together so they can enjoy a regular social life. But this works too well, and the two single elders fall in love. They go out together for a while, but soon Miss Bouvier is swept away by Montgomery Burns, who is able to win her over with his wealth, as she's looking for a person who can provide. But Mr. Burns is a cruel and spiteful person, something which gives Marge's mother a bit of hesitation when it comes to marrying. And on the day of the wedding, Abe Simpson crashes the event. He pleads for Jacqueline to reconsider her marriage, and she agrees that she doesn't want to become Miss Monty Burns, nor does she want to marry Grandpa Simpson, which is good enough for him. In the B plot, Bart buys an original cell from Itchy and Scratchy for $350 of Homer's money, but when he's upset by the end result, he simply extorts Mr. Burns for the cash to pay Homer back. It's a bit interesting the way that the elderly and The Simpsons are always portrayed as perpetually complaining about the way the world is, while simultaneously the show itself is inherently about airing very similar complaints about the state of the world. The denigration the show tends to show toward the elderly is a bit hypocritical in this way, as though the way that Abraham Simpson complains is somehow lesser than the typical satire the show has. But an episode like this, humanizing the older cast of the show, can help to downplay some of that hypocrisy by showing the deeper needs and desires of many of the show's regular characters. Giving Grandpa Simpson and Grandma Bouvier a bit of extra depth helps to pull them just a bit further from being one-note gags and into the realm of relevance, making all that they say just a bit more good-natured. And then fundamentally what The Simpsons' relevance comes down to: as much as it makes fun of so many elements of our society, it never does so in a way that looks down on anyone. While they can laugh in the face of the absurd elements of our culture, it always comes across as laughing with America instead of at it. To show that they're able to humanize a group respectfully just as easily as they can taunt that same group, it makes the last all feel a bit more deserved.

Secrets of a Successful Marriage. When Homer is called slow by both his friends and family, he takes the advice of Marge to attend adult education classes in order to remedy the situation. But while there, he notices the amount of respect that teachers receive and comes up with the idea to teach a course on the secrets of a successful marriage. But due to not really knowing why his marriage works, he ends up only being able to hold the attention of his class by revealing secrets about his own marriage instead. This gossip spreads across the town, culminating in Homer's class sitting in on a family dinner, causing Marge to kick everybody out, including Homer. Homer moves into Bart's treehouse in the meantime while he makes multiple attempts to win her back. But the thing that wins her over in the end isn't some secret thing he can give her, but rather complete and total dependence on her for survival. Marge takes Homer back, with the latter knowing that he can't afford to live without her. Perhaps one of the greatest subversions that The Simpsons has ever made in terms of the typical clichés of domestic comedies comes in the ending to this episode. Homer is ultimately unable to come up with anything to give him the typical happy ending that an audience would normally expect, getting the episodic inclusion instead through his own sense of inferiority. While most shows would have some sappy romantic inclusion, this episode ends with a sad display from its main character, followed by an implication that Marge is going to remain in the unhappy situation that caused her to separate from Homer in the first place. Because of course, the conclusion of this episode will be forgotten about—it's The Simpsons. There's no continuity, there's no learning, there's no progression. If Homer claims to have learned anything about his marriage, it'll be forgotten about the next time it's convenient to do so for the plot. The only question raised here is about why Marge stays with Homer in the first place, and this all comes down to the fact that Homer is more of a character than Marge is. The Simpsons is this show about the worst traits and aspects of Western society, and so the more often a character is given stuff to do, the more negative traits they get to show. Marge comes across as a better person than Homer purely because we see her less; in this case, her morality is saved by being in the background.

Season 6. Season 5 had a rather abrupt ending due to the 1994 Northridge earthquake, something that damaged Film Roman studio and required production to continue at a satellite facility. This had the result of delaying production by about a month and pushing a few of the episodes originally intended for season 5 to be aired as an early part of season 6, as well as another clip show episode intended to fill out missing airtime. But following a recovery, The Simpsons went right back into its previous stride, continuing on in the same direction following a tumultuous fifth season full of restaffing and shifting direction. While the previous season can be considered a time of shark jumping and over-the-top set pieces, season 6 brought the show back down to earth while keeping those same lofty ideals. Homer won't go to space this season, but that doesn't mean that the domestic antics won't have the same absurd vibes. Season 6 perhaps shows a better mastery at handling the iconic American family. The previous season's grand comedy kept the show afloat with pushing the envelope of how far The Simpsons could possibly go while keeping things interesting, but now that the writers have a better understanding of what they're doing, such things aren't needed. If we want the Simpson family to have one of their classic adventures, there's no need to take them to space to make a memorable moment. A majority of season 6 takes place within the town of Springfield itself, the plots dealing with more interpersonal issues than before and pushing the limits of the characters rather than those of the world. As a result, the following season is able to stand out as one of the most canon-establishing seasons since the very first. Our look into the lives of The Simpsons beginning to reflect less on America and more on The Simpsons.

Bart of Darkness. On a particularly hot summer day, the Simpsons' kids are teased with a pool mobile, which causes Bart and Lisa to pressure Homer into buying a swimming pool. After assembling it in their backyard, Bart and Lisa quickly become the most popular kids in the neighborhood as every child nearby comes over to swim. But Bart breaks his leg falling from his treehouse and has to spend the summer in a cast, his friends ignoring him in favor of the pool. Meanwhile, Lisa is too distracted by her newfound popularity to spend time with Bart, and so she gives him a telescope out of pity, which Bart uses to spy on his neighbors. But while doing this, he notices Ned Flanders acting suspicious, as if he had just murdered his wife. Lisa loses her popularity to Martin after the latter gets his own pool installed, and so she ends up with plenty of time to assist Bart's investigation, resulting in her getting trapped in the attic of the suspected murderer. But as it turns out, Ned didn't murder his wife, but rather overwatered her ficus plant, and Bart caught him destroying the evidence. As Bart spends more and more time in his room, unable to enjoy his summer break with the rest of the children, he becomes more and more jaded until eventually seeking out other sources of entertainment. And with Crusty running reruns, he's forced to come up with his own stories. This starts out as an affinity for writing plays, which Lisa teases him for, but as this fails to satisfy him, he turns instead to coming up with stories about real people, namely Ned Flanders. This boredom, combined with his imagination, causes him to seek out adversity where there is none, and Bart accuses an innocent man of murdering his wife. And while this would normally be the type of thing dismissed by others as being implausible, everyone else is too busy with the same distractions that once held Bart's attention to talk him out of his own head, especially Lisa, who, after a short taste of popularity, turns off her brain in an attempt to better fit in with others—something that likely causes her to cease being logical when riled up by the same forces that caused Bart to go off the deep end [Music] himself.

Lisa's Rival. A new student arrives in Lisa's class: Allison Taylor. She's better at saxophone, smarter, and skipped a grade, making her younger than Lisa as well. So the Simpsons try to compete with this new student, one-upping her in things like band auditions, but fails to compete with her. Her next plan is to befriend Allison, but when she arrives at the girl's house and sees her better trophies and better family, Lisa grows jealous and is able to be convinced by Bart to sabotage her at the diorama rama. Lisa swaps Allison's display with the much worse one in order to finally get her vengeance, but the guilt of doing so takes over, and Lisa reveals the ruse, only for neither Lisa nor Allison to win when Principal Skinner is impressed by Ralph's display of mint-condition Star Wars collectibles. In the B plot, Homer finds an overturned truck of sugar and steals a load for himself. He tries and fails to sell it door-to-door before eventually the mound of sugar in the backyard melts during a rainstorm. Allison is a fundamental threat to who Lisa is as a person, due to being a better version of herself. When you define yourself by a set of characteristics, seeing somebody else hitting all those same requirements can make you feel as though you're not good enough by your own standards, and these are really the only ones that matter. Emotionally healthy people don't try to gauge their success by metrics they don't care about. Lisa doesn't care about whether she's popular, but she does care about her intellect. But when somebody outperforms you in the areas where you put the most effort into, even a well-adjusted person can feel inadequate. But it isn't as though Lisa really has too much to worry about. While her visit to the Taylor family's house makes her even more concerned about the gaps between the two of them, it really should have had the opposite effect. Allison's father helps to support her intellectually and has no doubt afforded his daughter plenty of opportunities to succeed that were never available to Lisa, whose father spent the entire episode trying to sell loose sugar with broken bits of glass inside. And so it would have suited her psyche better not to compare her current status to Allison, but her trajectory. After all, being at the top is less impressive if you were born there.

Another Simpsons clip show. Marge fears that the romance has gone out of her love life and that this may spread to the children, who could grow up without an example of true romance. So she gathers the family around the kitchen table to relive the memories of past romances, with the Simpson family realizing just how much of their love seems to end in failure and heartbreak. But just when the story seemed to take a turn for the most depressing, Homer and Marge recall the one relationship they got right: their marriage. A second clip show, this one differentiating itself from the previous ones by focusing on a specific topic of the family's lives: their love. This reflects the general direction that season 6 takes, focusing much more heavily on internal character struggles and having a few more love-themed episodes down the way. But as always, clip show episodes don't tell us much that you can't already gleam by rewinding this video from the start.

Itchy & Scratchy Land. Hearing about a discount on ticket prices, The Simpsons family goes to Itchy & Scratchy Land for their vacation. After a road trip, they arrive, and Marge is terrified by the violence there, wondering what kind of impact it might have on her kids when she just wanted them to have wholesome fun together. The group goes their separate ways, with Homer and Bart getting arrested while Marge becomes embarrassed by association. But when the animatronics from the park begin to malfunction, the whole space is evacuated, safe for the Simpson family. They're attacked, when Homer realizes that flash photography shorts their circuits, allowing a means of fighting back. In the end, the family takes out the robot horde, and Marge is convinced that they really did get the togetherness that she had been seeking from the beginning. As much as The Simpsons is willing to take a closer look at the psyches this season, the tradition of set-piece episodes hasn't gone anywhere, as this one comes along with an extremely sparse plot, largely used for filler scenes and one-off gags about what if the Simpsons but in an amusement park. And yet this is the type of thing that made the show so great in the first place, as families can watch the show and point out exaggerations of their own antics as they appear on screen. And so for an episode like this to recapture that season one sort of charm might be the real sign that The Simpsons is back on track, despite the overhaul of their team of writers. The animators working on this episode have mentioned that it was one of their favorites to produce, despite also being the hardest. The shots of violence were as enjoyable to create as they were for the audience to watch, and the physicality of it becomes a bit gratuitous at a certain point, something mirroring Marge's opinion on the park as a whole. Because for all the violence that you see in this show, it's only really reflecting the world surrounding it; if there wasn't such a demand, it wouldn't be there. And every Itchy & Scratchy cartoon reflects a very real demand for physical comedy as existent in our world as it is in the world of The Simpsons.

Sideshow Bob Roberts. After using a local right-wing talk host to start a grassroots political campaign for his freedom, Sideshow Bob is able to leave Springfield prison and re-enter society, where he's then selected as the new mayoral candidate to run against Quimby. And despite the Simpson family helping Quimby's campaign, Bob is able to use his skills as an entertainer to win over the hearts of Springfield and the election. Once mayor, he enacts a plan to demolish the Simpson family's house using eminent domain, rendering them homeless as a means of getting back at Bart. But Lisa questions the validity of the election results and begins to search for answers, only to meet with a disguised Smithers, who directs them to a name that can reveal the truth behind Bob's election win. This name turns out to be found in the cemetery, as the Springfield Republican party was using the names of the dead to gather additional votes for themselves. So Bart and Lisa challenged the results directly, luring Bob into a trap, telling him that he's not smart enough to have pulled the gambit off on his own, which he responds to with an admission of his own guilt in masterminding the entire thing. Bob is rearrested, and the Simpson family gets to keep their house. Every time Sideshow Bob returns, his plan to get back at Bart becomes slightly more elaborate and less stabby-stabby, and yet in doing so, his menace becomes even greater.

Framing Crusty for a robbery by posing as the man was a clever, yet roundabout way of getting his own spotlight. Something like committing massive election fraud in order to demolish the Simpson family's home, or tracking the family to another town to slay his nemesis with nobody around, around, is something with a bit less plain motivation and more of a lust for power. It comes across as being the type of thing that's no longer just about Bart, and his actions become grander in scale while still being very personal. Because most people who get to positions of power would have greater motivations for doing so than crushing a single enemy, it's so very cartoonish to make as elaborate a plan as this solely for one boy.

Some of the most overtly political writing the show has had so far comes from this episode, although it's not something altogether unexpected from The Simpsons. The show has never played close to its chest when it comes to revealing their political leanings, and you can only riff on modern culture for so long before it starts to become apparent what parts of modernity you have the most issues with. The awkward part comes from the fact the showrunners are now promoting Quimby as the lesser of two evils, when he serves as a stand-in for corrupt politicians for so many seasons. It's a somewhat depressing state of affairs when elections come down to selecting which self-interested maniac you want in charge, but also something that I bet many Americans had an issue with seeing on television during such an apolitical era as the [Music] mid-90s.

Treehouse of Horror V: The [Music] Shining. Mr. Burns hires the Simpson family to look after his remote lodge over the winter, cutting the cable and confiscating all the beer to ensure honest work from the group. While there, it's learned by Groundskeeper Willie that Bart has the Shining—a royalty-free reference to *The Shining*—and can contact him telepathically. With no TV and no beer, Homer starts to something something, and he's haunted by Moe, who convinces him to kill his family. Bart contacts Willie, but he's quickly incapacitated, so The Simpsons flee into the snow where they come across a portable television that he dropped, and the sight of TV's warm glow is enough to cool Homer's urge to kill. Time and punch punishment. Homer breaks the toaster, and his attempts to fix it turn the device into a time machine. He's sent backwards to the age of dinosaurs, where he accidentally messes with the flow of time, and when he returns to the present, learns that the world is controlled by Ned Flanders. So Homer goes back and forth again, every trip revealing some new horrifying twist on what the present reality looks like. He ultimately ends up in a world just like the one he started in, but with his family having lizard tongues, which is close enough to normal for Homer to accept.

Nightmare Cafeteria. Faced with an overcrowding issue in the school, as well as a lack of funding for cafeteria food, Principal Skinner comes up with a common-sense solution: eating students whenever they get sent to detention. The teachers become engorged with the new meals and soon eat away most of the student body, ultimately winding down to just a handful of students: Bart, Lisa, and Milhouse. They try to make a break for it, but end up trapped atop a giant blender and fall inside, only for Bart to wake up as it was all a nightmare, and the only thing to worry about is a fog that turns people inside out.

Bart's [Music] Girlfriend. Bart meets Jessica Lovejoy, the daughter of the minister, back from boarding school. He quickly falls in love with her, but can't seem to get her attention no matter how well he behaves. But when Jessica catches him getting detention, she starts to notice him more, and Bart realizes that the two of them have the same bad personality. The two spend more and more time together, with Bart slowly realizing that Jessica's definition of misbehavior is too extreme for his tastes, but he stays with her due to infatuation, and soon winds up framed for stealing the collection money at church. His reputation ruined, Bart realizes he can't turn Jessica in as she's the minister's daughter and has a positive reputation. But Lisa hears of Bart's situation and comes to his aid, revealing the crime to the whole church. As it turns out, the whole situation was a cry for attention from Jessica, although Lovejoy refuses to listen. In the end, Bart claims to have learned a lesson from the experience, though only in his words.

Bart tries to reinvent himself twice during this episode: first, to become a better person outwardly, getting positive attention so he might impress Jessica. This ends up failing as he can't continue living while repressing a part of who he is. And later, he tries to become a visibly worse person, which likewise fails as he's still failing to stay true to himself. And yet, Bart still makes this mistake despite himself, failing to learn from his own experiences, believing that if he just stays dishonest for a while longer, he'll soon see Jessica mellow out, and the two can live together with a much less hectic experience. Bart believes he can change a person, despite having earlier in the episode suffered withdrawal for trying to change himself. But not as difficult as changing who a person is, is to change who a person is believed to be. But Bart struggles with becoming a better person just as much as becoming a worse one. But the town of Springfield has no issue believing the latter change. People have a good view of Jessica and are willing to ignore her culpability in a crime, pinning it on Bart purely because it seems like something he would do. It's not surprising that Reverend Lovejoy would try to overlook the evidence against his daughter. At the end of the episode, as while it's easy to find out that the person is wrong, it's much harder to admit that you yourself were the one wrong.

Lisa on Ice. Lisa learns that she's failing gym class and is offered the chance to get a passing grade as long as she takes up a pee-wee sports team. She struggles to find a sport she's competent at, all the while noticing the extra attention that Bart is getting for his performance on a local hockey team. Then, during an argument with her brother, it's learned that she's a competent goalie, and she's picked up for a team. Lisa's defensive skills help launch the team to victory, and the situation is reversed, with Bart ending up with less attention as Homer starts to give more and more attention to his daughter instead. The two teams eventually end up playing against one another, with the whole town of Springfield fired up to see the sibling rivalry play out on the ice. But when the game comes down to a final penalty shot, Bart and Lisa realize that they love each other too much to fight, and they call the game a draw and they skate off together while the rest of the town riots. This episode shows the town of Springfield with an obsession with violence, regardless of where that violence is directed or why, and it's this desire to see bloodshed that drives the conflict between Bart and Lisa rather than any sort of organically appearing issue between the two. While the two siblings were content with their different ways in life, it wasn't until outside forces pushed them against one another that they began to push back. But these external forces can only push so hard before Bart and Lisa both realize that there's no true bad blood between them. They don't hate each other; they were only told that they must in order to drive up interest in seeing them fight. And so it's this episode's ultimate lesson that's not so much one of rejecting violence as it is a lesson in knowing where that urge is coming from. Are you really the one at the center of your conflict, or is there another party pushing you towards hurting yourself and others for their benefit? The town of Springfield has no stake in the Simpsons' relationship and therefore it doesn't care if it's damaged in their desire to see a fight. But Bart and Lisa know each other better than anyone and are able to overcome the outside pressure by remembering that.

Homer Badman. Homer and Marge go to a candy convention, leaving the kids with a local grad student as a babysitter. While there, Homer steals and then misplaces a gummy Venus de Milo, which winds up on the car seat as Homer is dropping off the sitter. It gets stuck to her rear, and Homer attempts to remove it, resulting in him being labeled as a sexual harasser. As more and more protests surround his house, the media picks up on the story, and it spirals into a national incident. The Simpson family's attempts to clear their name don't get enough attention to make a difference, at least not until Groundskeeper Willie reveals that he had been secretly filming couples that night and caught Homer dropping the babysitter off. The footage clears his name, and Homer resolves never to fight against TV again. An episode that serves as a sort of spiritual followup to the previous one, where once again the mob refuses to take a person's feelings into consideration in order to be enraged and get a story from the experience. In this case, it's a media frenzy, getting fired up more and more as people reject the truth and favor what comes across as most interesting. Homer's pleas for common sense in defense of his innocence are ignored because the story of nothing happened doesn't sell ad space very well. The truth has no place on a for-profit medium when entertaining lies sell so much better. And so this is how fake news can spread and proliferate. People are willing to listen to lies as long as they're entertaining enough. But what this episode also calls back to is Season 1's "Homer's Night Out," where a similar theme is shown off. Homer goes pre-internet viral after a photo of him dancing with a woman is spread around the city. In that episode, he gets a reputation as a ladies' man for his actions, yet here he's given a much worse rep for similar actions. And while framing makes up a big deal, it's interesting to see how the public's perception of the perverted has changed in the six years that The Simpsons had aired up to this point that it's reasonable for an angry mob to form where once there was a mob of praise heaped instead.

Grandpa vs. Sexual Inadequacy. Homer and Marge are struggling to keep their love life active with the stresses of their children among other concerns. Their attempts to revitalize it fail until Grandpa Simpson hears of their struggle and comes up with a formula to re-energize Homer. This works, and Marge gives Homer the idea to bottle the formula and sell it. So Homer and Abe travel the countryside selling Simpson and Son's revitalizing tonic. While on their road trip, they come across the house Homer was raised in as a child, and the two relive old memories, only for Homer to realize that Abe was never a very good father. They argue on the way home, which leads to Homer cutting Abe out of his life and resolving to spend more time with his kids, who at the moment are too busy trying to piece together where only adults have gone, unaware of the effects of the tonic. But Homer's attempts to fix his relationship with his kids are all too smothering, and he laments that he can't be a good father as he never had an example of one. But while having a revelation about how much his dad did for him, he accidentally burns down the old house. Around the same time, Abe also burns down the house, lamenting his own failures. The father-son duo rekindled their relationship in front of the kindling remains of the old house. Homer admits that his father's failure to raise him better wound up with him as a failure as well—something that ages a bit worse every year—but also something that explains a bit about his own mentality with his life. Because, for all intents and purposes, Homer is a very successful individual: he has a two-story house, a steady job, and a loving family. All of this despite growing up in the countryside with very little to his name. And while he still has the occasional trouble with family, these are things overcome by the end of a 22-minute stretch—less so in the case of this episode where his issues in bed were overcome because of Grandpa Simpson. So this episode comes down not just to Homer failing to realize the good thing he had in his relationship to his father, but by extension, the good things he had in his life in general as he notices the various ways he has it well. He comes down to realizing just how and why things got that way, and Abe Simpson realizes that perhaps Homer was right in his observations and that he could have done a better job. Because, like his son, he's also going to wish for more than what he's currently done.

Fear of Flying. Homer is banned from Moe's and tries to find a replacement bar to drink in, only to wind up at a bar specifically for pilots. When he imitates a pilot and winds up crashing a plane, the airline gives the family free tickets in exchange for keeping the story to themselves. They're excited to use them, only for Marge to reveal that she has a fear of flying and cannot go on planes. Homer tries to help her overcome this fear without therapy, as he fears that a therapist will drive her away from their marriage. But when Homer's attempts fail, he begrudgingly accepts paying for sessions. Marge tries to relive childhood moments, eventually coming back to her father, who she believed was a pilot growing up, until one fateful day where she boarded a plane and saw him working as a steward. But rather than making a big deal out of this, Marge's therapist instead remarks that the man was a trailblazer, tearing down gender norms and paving the way for equality. This change in perspective helps Marge to overcome her fear of flight, and the family is finally able to board a plane again. In keeping with the Season 6 pattern of new writers diving deeper into old characters, this episode serves as one of the first to really take a closer look at Marge's history, establishing more and more about her character in a way that was never really satisfied in the earlier seasons. And yet, this new approach to character still manages to pay homage to just enough of the old content that it makes a fitting addition to the Simpsons canon. Marge's life was never easy, even as a child. Finding encouragement for anything she did was hard as her sisters and relatives were rarely kind to her. This has re-established itself in her mind as an aversion to praise—that all the things she does for other people shouldn't manifest any sort of acknowledgement, and that her role is to exist in the background as any attention is negative attention. It's only by having a family that respects her that she was finally able to feel any recognition for her actions, but even this is too little too late. Marge refuses to accept any sort of therapy, less because she doesn't believe she needs it and more because she doesn't want to create a hassle for anybody with her own needs—something that she begins to unlearn in this episode.

Homer the Great. Homer is frustrated with his job, traffic, and life in general, made worse when he sees others close to him enjoying things that seem a limits to him. But when Lenny leaks that these things are the result of their participation in a secret society called the Stone Cutters, he seeks a way to join. Learning that Grandpa Simpson was a member, he's admitted by blood. Finally happy that he's found acceptance with the group, he turns his life around, only to accidentally destroy a sacred artifact of theirs, ending up stripped as a punishment. But when the Stone Cutters see a unique birthmark, they realize that he's a chosen one in their order, propelling him to the top rank and making the whole organization under his control. He's even happier now with everything he could possibly want being given to him. But this is a fleeting happiness as he no longer has a motivation to work towards anything. So, at Lisa's advice, Homer begins to use his influence for good, making the Stone Cutters become more active in the community as a force for positive change. But the old members view this as Homer going mad with power, and they all leave together, forming the Society of No Homers. In the end, Homer has lost everything but takes some solace in the fact that he's still a Simpson. It's interesting to note that Homer is a misfit within the town of Springfield, in spite of what he represents. Homer is meant to be the average American, and Springfield is meant to represent the average American town. The Simpsons was able to propel itself into cultural icon status through these two merits, and yet Homer doesn't belong to any sort of acceptable social circle. This then reflects the way that everybody else must feel: not belonging anywhere and constantly seeking out societal approval. And yet, when Homer does achieve this approval, he still wants more, making it a self-fulfilling sort of mentality. Americans have a feeling of being lost due to the fact that even when we're found, we want more. Homer begins the episode as a Simpson and only learns to appreciate that fact once he's had more and then lost it—a reframing of what he's made through comparison. He wasn't happy as a Stone Cutter, so how could he be happy anywhere else? And the answer is not to seek happiness from others but to achieve it internally.

Maggie Makes Three. While looking through the family photo album, Bart and Lisa start to question why there aren't any pictures of Maggie compared to either of them. So Homer regales the tale of when Maggie was born. He had just paid off his debts working at the nuclear plant and was finally able to quit that soul-crushing job to follow his dream, working at the bowling alley. But when he and Marge are celebrating his new career move, the two wind up with an unwanted pregnancy. Marge is hesitant to tell Homer as it would crush his dreams of financial freedom, but word gets out anyway, and Homer is soon forced to find some compromise to keep his dream job while also supporting his new family. But this compromise doesn't exist, and soon Homer has to quit his bowling alley work to crawl back to the nuclear plant. Mr. Burns gives him a demotivating plaque saying, "Don't forget you are here forever," and so Homer tells his children that all the photos of Maggie are in the place where he needs them the most, covering the plaque to remind him why he's really at the plant. The Simpsons family has always somewhat represented a lost aspect of the American dream—that you could have everything you ever wanted out of life without being miserable for it. Because fundamentally, the purpose of work is to stop working. Everybody who's employed eventually dreams of the day they can retire; few people ever really want to work for work's sake. It's just a means to an end; that end is achieving some amount of financial freedom so you can focus on doing what you really want to do, even if it doesn't pay well. But that's not a great way to plan your life. It's the same story we tell ourselves over and over again: my life will start once I graduate high school; my life will start when I finish college; my life will start when I can get steadier work; my life will start when I retire. Eventually, you're bed-bound and unable to do all the things you plan to do, realizing that the last several decades of living were the real thing. And so Homer has to accept that in this episode: living your life doesn't begin at some arbitrary amount of wealth, but it began years and years ago, and waiting on things to change will only force you to waste what little time you have. So instead of living for himself by working at a bowling alley, Homer begins to do it for her.

Bart's Comet. Bart pranks Principal Skinner's weather balloon, earning him the punishment of assisting with the man's amateur astrology. But while out there, Bart discovers a comet and reports it to Springfield's astronomers, getting it named after him. But when it's later discovered that the comet is on a direct collision course for the town of Springfield, they make an attempt to blast it out of the sky, which destroys the only bridge out. The town's folk begin to panic, and the Simpson family makes their way to Flanders' fallout shelter. But they're not the only ones with this idea, and soon the rest of Springfield shows up at their door asking for entry. Not wanting to turn people away, Ned accepts everybody, only to learn that the door can't shut as it's too crowded. So they come up with a system to decide who will be kicked out, agreeing that there won't be a need for left-handed stores in the new Springfield, and Ned is forced away. But the town's folk remaining begin feeling more and more guilty that they doomed him, and one by one they leave to join him. In the end, the comet enters the atmosphere, only to burn out from the town's layer of pollution and harmlessly collapse on the now-empty shelter. This is about as optimistic an ending as.

As The Simpsons can get the whole town coming together to win a moral victory, despite knowing it could mean their own debts. While it takes an apocalyptic event to make this come about, it's still a heartwarming story about the town—meant to represent America—that no matter how messed up things get and how much we're at each other's throats, we'll always do the right thing once we're pushed into a corner. But how far can those intentions really go when they're the result of such an extreme circumstance? It's nice to know that your neighbors might be on your side if push comes to shove, but for the rest of the time, it's hardly balanced out, considering that people can be cruel enough to each other to make that worst-case scenario occur in the first place. Had Springfield been a bit more proactive in working together, then they wouldn't have been pushed into a situation with this level of guilt levied towards them in the first place. So while this episode has a happy ending, it's worthwhile to ask if the strife leading to that point was worth it.

Homie the Clown, Krusty the Clown, goes broke and has to open up a clown college to pay off some of his debt. When Homer is inspecting billboards on new billboard day, he sees the ad for this college and decides to enroll, despite the confusion from his family. But after weeks of work, he graduates and begins the life of a professional clown. But this doesn't go especially well, as the new career path exhausts him until he realizes that imitating Krusty gets him the celebrity treatment everywhere he goes. Homer exploits this newfound knowledge for a while until the real Krusty gets into trouble with the mafia, who kidnap Homer thinking he's the clown they're looking for. Homer is held at gunpoint and made to perform a trick for his life, which he fails at. But when the real Krusty shows up as well, both clowns have to perform it together. Krusty's clowning skills combined with Homer's end up impressing the Italian stereotype enough that they're set free, and the episode ends with Krusty paying off his debt.

It's common trivia that in The Simpsons' early production, Homer was planned to be Krusty the Clown. This, alongside other oddities such as Marge's hair concealing bunny ears, were scrapped to make a more believable family dynamic than Homer moonlighting as a TV show host. But as The Simpsons developed over the years, that down-to-earth realism started to fade out. Soon it became a bit of an oddity that Homer couldn't be a clown for realism's sake, but he could easily travel to space without raising eyebrows. And so an episode like this comes in, bringing the dropped plot point to a full circle and showing off just how much has changed conceptually about the Simpson family since the initial pitch. Homer was meant to be Krusty the Clown as a sort of irony that Bart would idolize the TV show host while disrespecting his father at home—a statement about the disparity between a person's public persona and their private life. We often adore those we see in the media, despite also knowing that these personalities are carefully curated. You don't like a celebrity; you like the character that their agents have crafted. And Bart only likes Homer when he's entertaining—a sort of traumatic irony to the audience who would be in the know. And yet this sort of family relationship is no longer needed. Bart may openly disrespect his father, but at the end of many episodes, he's shown to go along with Homer's wants and wishes subconsciously. The family still loves each other in the same way that you would see on a TV sitcom; it's just that this love is earned through character strife instead of assumed.

Bart vs. Australia. Curious to see if the Coriolis effect is true or not, Bart phones various locations in the southern hemisphere in order to ask which way their toilets turn. In the process, he winds up giving a $900 collect call to an Australian family who take the matter up with their local government, all the way to the Prime Minister. This turns into an international incident where Bart is forced to give an apology on Australian soil—something which the Simpson family views as an opportunity for a family vacation. While there, they take in a bit of the local culture before Bart is brought in front of the Prime Minister himself, only to learn that the US State Department sold him out and that he'll be booted as punishment. But Homer refuses to let his son, and by extension his country, be treated this way, and they flee back to the US Embassy. But once there, Bart decides that he needs to do the right thing and face his punishment, which is just a front to moon all of Australia before the family flees the country, leaving it to be destroyed by the invasive bullfrogs that Bart introduced.

The Simpsons are a very well-traveled family, with the concept of a travelogue episode beginning to take footing around this time. Moving forwards, the Simpson family would be brought to some foreign location in order to make a couple jabs at the culture there about once per season. Famously, the writing staff never bothers to make the episodes at all accurate. This isn't to say that they don't research; these episodes often involve a large amount of study before they're written, with the research the writers do largely being thrown out in favor of including whatever is funniest for the script. And yet the travelogue episode is something that's managed to produce many of the most internationally remembered moments in show history. There was a real push at one time for Australia to rename their currency the "dollaridoo" in homage to this episode, among the other misnomer quotes from this episode supplanting the existing interpretation in pop culture. But this isn't purely due to the effect that The Simpsons have had on society; Australia itself has embraced their culture of [ __ ] posting and elevated it to an art form, not unlike what this episode portrays it as. There's something to be said for a show that spends so much time making fun of America and being loved domestically for it, for it to be able to share some of that ribbing with another country and to receive the same heroic treatment, with Bart vs. Australia becoming as much of an Australian cultural icon as the boot.

Homer vs. Patty and Selma. Homer loses a bunch of money investing in pumpkin futures and has to come up with a way to make it back. But he can't find anybody willing to give him a loan and in desperation turns to Patty and Selma, who lend him the money for his next mortgage payment. But they use the knowledge of Homer's financial troubles as blackmail against him, demeaning him every chance they get until Marge eventually finds out. Homer tries to come up with a different way to pay them back and begins driving a limousine as a chauffeur. But he can't get his license without Patty and Selma's approval at the DMV, and they're eager to fail him on the driving test. But when the twins are caught smoking in a government building, Homer takes the fall for them. And with this kind act, Marge convinces them to call off the debt. In the B plot, Bart takes ballet at school as it was the only athletics class with availability. He hates the new art form at first, but once he finds that he's good at it, starts to embrace the dance in front of students at an assembly, albeit in a mask to hide his embarrassment about the subject. But despite being praised by the audience, once he unmasks himself, they still choose to beat him up.

The animosity between Homer and the Bouvier twins is one of the more commonly explored dynamics in The Simpsons, up there with Homer vs. Ned Flanders, Homer vs. Mr. Burns, Homer vs. Homer. It's a connecting thread of this episode's A plot. Half the episode seems to want to tell a story of Homer being blackmailed, and the other half is about Homer driving a chauffeured car. But this whole thing is framed by his relationship to his sisters-in-law, and this is a relationship driven by a constant attack on Homer's insecurity. Patty and Selma fundamentally hate Homer because they believe that Marge could and should have done better than him—something that Homer also worries about on occasion. So when Patty or Selma denigrates Homer, they're also reinforcing a belief that he himself has been trying to dispel his whole marriage. The B plot of this episode has Bart fear that he won't be accepted at school due to being in ballet, but upon realizing that so long as he's good at it he'll be adored, he starts to accept himself, but only because he thinks others will as well. This turns out not to be the case, as the acceptance of others can be fickle and even misleading, and so personal life satisfaction should not be derived from what others think of you.

A Star is Burns. In order to reverse a belief that Springfield has no culture, the town decides to hold a film festival organized by Marge Simpson. While looking for film critics to add to the panel of judges, she decides on a few local Springfield units as well as Jay Sherman from The Critic. Jay stays with the Simpsons family in the days leading up to the festival, but his wit and celebrity give him preferential treatment from Marge in the movie judging, causing Homer to have a fit that's remedied by Marge including him as a judge. The day of the film festival comes, and the town has all submitted their own videos to compete, including Mr. Burns, who has additionally bribed half the judges to give himself an edge over the competition. But Marge and Jay believe that Barney's movie is the best, leaving it at a deadlock to be broken up by Homer. After a bit of soul-searching, he decides to side with Marge and favor the more cultured movie.

The Critic ran for two seasons, with the last few episodes of its second season being aired on the Fox network, this episode being the one to promote the move. Despite the slight uptake in ratings from The Simpsons' cross-promotion, the series was eventually taken off the air after only two months on the network, leaving this episode as one of the final vestiges of the show's cultural influence. The Critic was often viewed as a companion show to The Simpsons, with Al Jean and Mike Reiss as showrunners and some of the voice cast coming over as well. But despite these easy comparisons, there were some who didn't like the comparisons and liked the idea of a crossover promotion even less. Matt Groening wanted the shows to be as culturally far apart as possible, preferring that his creation have nothing to do with The Critic. He even went to the extreme of ensuring that his name would not be listed on the credits of this episode. Time has vindicated these beliefs; not only did The Simpsons far outlast The Critic, but later complaints about The Simpsons cited celebrity obsession as a mark of its later downfall, and it's clear to see by now that this cameo problem is beginning to take on a less appealing form than before.

Lisa's [Music] Wedding. While at a Renaissance fair, Lisa comes across a self-proclaimed psychic who offers to tell the story of Lisa's first love. It takes place in the far-off distant year of 2010. Lisa is attending a high-end university when she grows annoyed with a man named Hugh Parkfield, but after spending some more time with him, the two learn how much they have in common and fall in love. Lisa visits Hugh's family in England, where she's impressed by their manners and politeness, but this only makes her more hesitant to introduce her new fiancé to her family, as she's rightfully afraid of the impression that they'll make. Hugh tries to grin and bear the Simpson style, but on the day of the wedding tells Lisa that he has no intention of ever seeing them again, insulting her hometown in the process. And so Lisa calls the wedding off, with Hugh returning home, and the two never seeing each other again. Back in the present, Lisa reunites with Homer with a newfound appreciation for her family.

Lisa has always had a complicated relationship with the rest of her family. At once, she both loves where she's from while hating that she's from there. Her family and hometown both represent a series of missed opportunities in her youth that held her back from a much higher potential as a human being, and yet it's dismissed potential that's also responsible for her success in life. Because it's one thing to be born into a wealthy family and to become refined like them; it's another to come from nothing and to become something. This flashback shows several characters' future jobs and lives, with nearly all of them having made some dramatic change except for Homer and Marge. So for Lisa to not only have a much better life but for that better life to be something expected is a truer sign of her abilities than anything else. And these flash-forward episodes also show us just how many expected futures for America there are, just as much as they predict them for Springfield. Many of the more corrupt individuals have some sort of karmic future, and the honest types have been given promotions. It's not a surprise to see Bart at the controls of a wrecking ball or for Patty and Selma to still be single. And while it's still a ways off that we'll begin to see some of the stranger aspects of The Simpsons' floating timeline, it's still a fascinating glimpse into what the past thought the present might look like.

Two Dozen and One Greyhounds. Santa's Little Helper has far too much energy for the Simpson family to handle, so they try to find some way to tire him out, only for the dog to escape and run to the Greyhound track where the family originally found him. There, he falls in love with another racer—she's the fastest—who was sent home with the Simpson family as they lose their racing spirit once they're in love. The family takes care of the two dogs for a while when one afternoon she's the fastest gives birth to a litter of 25 puppies. The family struggles to raise this many dogs, and eventually, it's decided that they need to give them away. But the puppies don't like being separated, and so they need to find somebody who will adopt all 25, with only Mr. Burns volunteering. But Bart and Lisa are skeptical of his motives and sneak into his manor where they learn of his plans to make a tuxedo out of all but one of the animals, as he enjoys when that dog stands on its hind legs. But before Mr. Burns can kill the dogs, Bart holds socks over the litter, causing them all to stand up and for Mr. Burns to relent, vowing to never wear another animal who can perform a neat trick.

As much as the Simpson family is a family, some of its members are more important than others in terms of the grand narrative, slightly underselling the narrative of their unity. Santa's Little Helper, Snowball II, and to a lesser extent Maggie, are the often-forgotten-about Simpsons. You can even tell that in some episodes the writers forget that they're supposed to be there. But on the occasions that Santa's Little Helper is remembered, he's just as much of a Simpson as anyone else, his non-Euclidean geometry coming out on occasion as well as ample ability to make pop culture references when needed. And of course, even if a dog can't talk, he can still facilitate commentary from other characters. Mr. Burns is shown as needlessly cruel in this episode. While he's always been a bad person, his scheming has never been something so overt. You got the impression in earlier seasons that Mr. Burns at least thought his actions were justified by some sort of social Darwinist pretense, but now he's just a bad guy for the sake of being a bad guy. And while this adds to The Simpsons' charm, it's still something that can damage the show's story moving forward if it's in too large of a dose.

The PTA Disbands. With the equipment at Springfield Elementary falling apart, Miss Krabappel starts to grow furious with how cheap Skinner is when it comes to maintaining the bare minimum at the school. But he can't raise salaries or replace equipment with the budget constantly being slashed, leading to increasing conflict between the two. Realizing the potential for a teacher strike, Bart eggs the two factions on until the teachers walk out. The PTA gets together to try to resolve this strike but fails, and starts to bring in people from the neighborhood to teach in the meantime. This results in Lisa getting a subpar education while Bart drives all the substitutes mad to the point of quitting. But the next substitute for his class turns out to be Marge, and unable to prank his own mother, he starts to get teased by the other students to the point of finally wishing to resolve the strike. So Bart and Lisa lock Principal Skinner and Miss Krabappel in Skinner's office together, which gives the duo the idea to add more money to the budget by combining the school with the prison, ending the strike.

A lot of what makes some of the early Simpsons jokes work so well is the subtle social commentary that's involved in the punchlines. Things like them trying to learn for free work because of how commodified certain social services are, with people arguing vehemently against their funding while still hoping to reap the benefits of the system. The general state of Springfield is at once a comedic setpiece while also being a representation of America without the social services needed to keep the country in order. In the end, the comparison between a for-profit prison system and a funding-less education system is drawn, with the implication of what these students' life trajectories will be. And another thing that makes a Simpsons work is how the social commentary attaches itself to the characters. While Miss Krabappel might be a person in her own right, she also represents the pink-collar careers of America and how they're often overlooked by people who assume that they're meant for non-breadwinning domestic types, as well as Skinner, who is shown to be a person genuinely passionate about his role in the public school system while also being the individual at the center of the budget pressure. This conflict is humanized in a way that makes it come across like nobody is in the wrong except for the mob's refusal to compromise.

Round Springfield. Bart eats a box of Krusty-Os and consumes a jagged metal Krusty-O in the process. This causes his appendix to become inflamed, necessitating its removal. While the Simpson family is in the hospital for his surgery, Lisa comes across Bleeding Gums Murphy, and the two have a short reunion where he gives her his saxophone before a recital that evening. Lisa plays in the recital and is able to perform well enough to steal the show, only to return to the jazzman and discover that he passed away during the performance. Distraught over his passing, Lisa tries to honor his memory by playing one of his albums on the radio, but the album in question is too pricey for her to afford until Bart gets his payment from a class-action suit against Krusty the Clown regarding the contents of his cereal. Bart buys the album for his sister as she was the only one to believe him when he said he was sick. Lisa brings it to a jazz station, and a freak lightning storm causes the record to be amplified across Springfield, letting the whole town enjoy his legacy one last time.

Prior to the creation of this episode, The Simpsons writers planned to kill off a character to create something emotional, as there hadn't been any major character deaths prior to this point. One of the leading options was Marge's mother, but as her character is closely tied to a character with less development, they chose Bleeding Gums Murphy instead, which also gives a chance for Lisa to learn to emotionally cope with the loss of one of her idols. This loss is coped with through a final expression of his music—the idea that creators never truly die as long as their works still exist in the public consciousness. As long as Lisa continues to be inspired by his works, Bleeding Gums Murphy can never truly die. Fitting for this episode is when Bleeding Gums mentions that the life of a jazzman was a sad and lonely one until he met Lisa, as though his whole life led up to one good relationship—a few short years that make the whole life worth living. Lisa frets that she may not be able to give a proper sendoff to the man until Bart gives her the means to do so—an extension of the bond the two musicians shared, now expressed through family. It isn't just music that Bleeding Gums Murphy will leave as his legacy, but a part of his soul will reside with Lisa, surfacing every time she expresses herself.

The Springfield [Music] Connection. After stopping a scammer downtown, Marge begins to seek more and more thrills from her boring daily life, so she enters the police station and asks for a job. After a bit of training, she's given the position and begins to enjoy her new career, although the amount of corruption gives her some hesitancy. Meanwhile, Homer is fearing that his position as the man…

Of the house is being overtaken by his wife, and he refuses to take Marge's new role seriously. Made worse when Homer is arrested for harassing Marge while she's on duty, as time goes on, Marge begins to lament the way people are treating her, acting suspicious of her motives and cutting off contact. Eventually, on one of Homer's poker nights, Herman sneaks off to sell some counterfeit jeans, which Marge catches him doing. And after a chase, the counterfeiter is arrested, but the Springfield police take the jeans for themselves, leaving too little evidence behind to actually arrest the man, and he's set free. Which is the last straw for Marge, and she leaves the police force.

The Springfield police force is a common punch line in the town of Springfield, largely serving as an ineffective, if not downright malicious, group that fails to prevent any of the higher-skill plots from occurring. It's not very interesting to watch a side character investigate a wrongdoing as much as it is to see Bart or Lisa foil the plans of Sideshow Bob. And so the police are often ignored when it comes to plots that involve any sort of legal stakes. It's the same reason Lionel Hutz is often chosen as the family's lawyer; if a competent lawyer could end the plot quickly, he'll be brought on board to ensure things stay interesting. But then this leads to a dynamic between the town of Springfield and their law enforcement: the people are suspicious of the police and hesitant to come to them for any assistance, as they know that Wiggum is unlikely to aid them. So why deal with the reduced amount of freedom around the place if there's no guarantee of safety? The tragedy of Springfield is not only its incompetent police force but that one good cop can't undo the social damage caused by dozens of bad ones.

Lemon of Troy: Marge lectures B about his lack of talent and pride, which causes him to rethink his relationship to Springfield and gain a new appreciation of its landscape. But a group from Shelbyville starts to agitate him, which escalates to the group stealing the lemon tree from the hill that divides the two cities. So Bart gathers a group of his friends to infiltrate Shelbyville and track it down, with the plan to steal it back. But when their parents learn that their son is missing, they gather the other parents of the missing children and follow them into Shelbyville to search for the lost kids. The two groups reconvene at the same time that they find the missing tree, trapped inside of a car impound lot. They use Flanders's RV to infiltrate the lot and steal the tree back, only narrowly escaping with the fruit. In the end, the kids celebrate the retrieval of their town's legacy, while the Shelbyvilians claim victory as well over the banishment of a haunted tree.

Shelbyville is meant to represent the other town that practically everybody learns about growing up; the arbitrary rivalry that schools, universities, and states always love playing up. Most have a marketing campaign to sell tickets to sporting events; it's a sort of pseudo-nationalism used to excite people over arbitrary borders that they wouldn't have cared about otherwise. And this episode plays a lot with the absurdity of that concept. Even the Shelbyvilians are designed to resemble specific Springfield denizens, further driving home that fact that they have much more in common than not. But the harshest arguments tend to come up between very similar locations and groups over increasingly trivial concerns. And this episode gets as much mileage as possible out of the absurdity of the whole conflict, from showing Lisa running across the dreaded Shel-B border multiple times to the initial disagreement that founded the twin cities in the first place. As much as Springfield represents America, Shelbyville represents America as well, and nobody hates America quite as much as Americans from a slightly different part of the country.

Who Shot Mr. Burns? Part One: While burying the school hamster, groundskeeper Willie strikes oil beneath the school, and so Springfield Elementary becomes rich. They use this opportunity to begin buying the things they could never afford, expanding the music program, hiring new staff, and finally lifting the city's education system out of squalor. But Mr. Burns grows envious of the school's newfound fortune and slant drills the well before the elementary school gets the chance to, causing them to not only cut back their budget but redo staff further to pay for the construction of the well. But not wanting to stop there, he also declares his intentions of blocking out the sun over the town of Springfield, forcing them to consume more power from his energy monopoly. Smithers, disgusted by Burns's new low, announces his displeasure and gets fired for it. The well itself blasts into the Simpsons family's treehouse, wounding Santa's Little Helper; Moe's Tavern is flooded with toxic fumes, shutting it down and giving Barney no place to drink. The unregulated drilling creates a sinkhole beneath the retirement castle, destroying a Simpsons home, and Mr. Burns still can't remember Homer's name. With every single person in the town against him, a meeting is held where Burns taunts them one last time before activating his sun block and wandering into the eternal darkness. But when he rounds a corner, he gets into a scuffle with an unseen assailant, and a gunshot rings out. Mr. Burns collapses on the sundial, and everybody wonders who shot Mr. Burns. For the season six finale, the writing staff wanted to have a major event episode, something that would have higher stakes than usual and could potentially change the dynamic of the show moving forward. Sweepstakes and contests were held for fans to submit their guesses, and there's even a viral image of a sign in Vegas showing gambling odds for each member of the major cast. Although this is likely a promotion more so than an actual table of odds, as gambling on the outcome of predetermined events was not legal there at the time. Famously, the writers wanted to ensure that the mystery was just that—a real mystery—and so special care was given to leave hints around the episode, necessitating the use of freeze-frame techniques to view them. These include things like nameplates for W.C. More, Skinner, and Moe Sylac, driving the theory that Mr. Burns fell on the sundial in an intentional manner to point to who it was that shot him. A majority of this episode is dedicated to showing reasons why the citizens of Springfield would want Burns dead that expand beyond his typical villainy because, if it's left to the more traditional devices, the question would be raised as to why nobody shot him before. What's especially interesting is the way that the town of Springfield will be driven to the mental state that they're prepared to kill, stroking guns into town hall and lecturing on why he deserves to die, all of this without anybody acting out of character to facilitate this change. It makes sense that Bart loves his dog and would want to defend him; the two have been together since episode one. It makes sense that Smithers would want to stop Burns, as he's always been the man's moral compass. And it makes sense that Homer would want him to remember his name, as Mr. Burns has always forgotten it. America would have to wait another four months to learn who the culprit was, as will you, as I work on the next part of this retrospective, or you know, just Google it.

Season 7: The Simpsons, at first, was a show that reacted to America, a show about the viewers at home who are watching it. It detailed events in our lives in a more succinct way than many other shows of its ilk had managed by refusing to allow things to end in a sappy, happy manner. They argued, they fought, they were violent, they were cruel, but they were loving, valuable, and their stories mattered, if only to themselves. So much of TV had presented us with a version of how things could be or ought to be, a means of escapism so that we could distract ourselves from the parts of reality that were less palatable. But then The Simpsons came along, and rather than straying away from these aspects, embraced them. It showed a sign of America that was ugly, loud, stupid, but realistic, and it helped us to get a better idea of the real world. In this way, we can tolerate the worst parts of our society much more easily if we see them more often. Something about watching America's family live through our own struggles made them feel much more real and that we weren't the abnormal ones for being, well, abnormal; that we're all of us strange, and thus none of us are. But once this idea became normalized, then what? By season seven, the radical shifted media caused by the Simpson family had had an effect on the rest of the media landscape. It was no longer a novel idea to show dysfunction on television and presented as normal. So many other shows imitated the formula that it forced the original to evolve or get left behind. The Simpsons went from counterculture to culture, but being culture comes with its own set of unique challenges and opportunities, and The Simpsons writing staff was more than ready to embrace this shift as he started making plots that were no longer about America and started to make plots that were about The Simpsons.

Who Shot Mr. Burns? Part Two: Awakening from a drunken stupor, when Smithers tries to recall his whereabouts the previous night, only to remember firing a gun before blacking out, he turns himself into the police, who arrest him for last season's crime. Only for a comment that he made, that was borrowed from an episode of Pardon the Zinger, to exonerate him. So the police turned to DNA evidence that finds Simpsons' DNA on Burns's suit. And when Mr. Burns awakens saying Homer's name and nothing else, they move in to arrest the man. But it's later revealed that, because Homer Simpson is the only thing the old man can say, on top of Lisa piecing together the final bits of evidence to prove that it wasn't him, there's a rush to the hospital where the whole town enters and hears the true story straight from Mr. Burns's mouth: he was shot by Maggie Simpson while trying to steal candy from a baby. Wiggum realizes that no state, other than maybe Texas, would ever find a baby guilty of murder, and the episode ends on that bizarre note. The question posed by this episode's title was one that permeated discussion in the burgeoning online discourse surrounding the show. Guesses in speculation on the true culprit gave way to discussion on the series in general, and these fanboys evolved into the current iteration of Simpsons enjoyers as seen today, believing wholeheartedly that the show sucks now and that it was better. The age-old internet pop culture observation that, as long as there's a season two, any show is always worse than it used to be. In the end, the sweepstakes held to reward anybody who could successfully guess who shot Mr. Burns ended with no proper answer, only a single account of a college student who used their student email to guess that it was Maggie, only to have the email address expire before they could be contacted. As such contest rules dictated that the winner would be randomly selected from other participants, though only the cash prize was rewarded rather than the promise to be included in an episode. This is perhaps the most fitting way that the reward could have been paid out, considering the show of its origin. The Simpsons was never the type of show to reward things in a karmic fashion, nor would it ever have the people get what they deserve. Just as the true contest winner faded anonymously into obscurity while some random got the cash, just as Mr. Burns ultimately fails to get justice at the culprit was a baby. The plot lines that exist in the real world are rarely such convenient three-act structures that end in a satisfying way.

Radioactive Man: The movie for Radioactive Man is setting up production, and they've chosen Springfield as their location, scouting local talent for a Fallout Boy. Bart auditions for the role but is an inch too short to play the character and it's instead given to Milhouse. But show business isn't all it had appeared to be, and soon the boy grows disenfranchised with the entire ordeal, ultimately deciding to give up the fame and fortune to run away. The whole town looks for him, with some trying to circumvent the need for the child actor, but it's Bart and later Mickey Rooney who find him and try to convince the Fallout Boy to return, but they fail, and soon production is shut down, not just because of the missing actor but because of the series of new taxes and price gouging that followed the Showbiz Teamsters latched on to the project. Milhouse ultimately winds up with the role and later disillusions a Fallout Boy. In this episode, despite Bart also auditioning purely because Bart had already received his stint in the business during season five's episode, Bart gets famous. Had he been an inch taller, this episode would have been a pure rehash of an earlier plotline, with the only distinction being the separate B plot about the greed of Springfield making it opposed to the supposed nastiness of a more corporate city. These two opposite plots create a sense of irony in the fact that Milhouse of Springfield dislikes how fake everything surrounding the movie production is, while the town of Springfield ends up being the thing to drive away Hollywood. And while the latter plot is presented almost entirely in a tongue-in-cheek manner, it still compares these differing values that Springfield and America are both just as corrupt as one another, and the only thing that makes Hollywood any worse is the population density. And this perhaps is the reason that both Bart and Mickey failed to get Milhouse to return to his job; he resented the shallow life he had fled, only for another symptom of that life to try to convince him to return, alongside his friend who was only following him in an attempt to suck up and take some of the hollow reality he discovered for himself. Was it that Hollywood corrupted America, or was that America demanded that Hollywood corrupt them? If one reflects the other, then how can the two worlds really exist diametrically?

Home Sweet Homediddly-Dum-Doodily: While Homer and Marge are out on a spa day, Bart is infested with headlice, Lisa's shoes are stolen, and Maggie is unattended by Grandpa Simpson, which leads the school to send Child Protective Services to the Simpson household to investigate. Their findings are grim, and they decide to confiscate the Simpson children so they can grow up in a more caring environment, namely the Flanders'. Homer and Marge are heartbroken over their failure as parents and attempt to pass a parenting course so they can have their family back. But as they're studying, Maggie starts to get turned into a Flanders, as she has the least experience being a Simpson. This comes to a head when Ned finds out the Simpson kids were never baptized, so he takes Bart, Lisa, and Maggie to the Springfield River to do the deed himself. But Homer arrives just in time, taking the holy water for his kids, and the family is reunited. The Flanders family began their run in the show as an opposition to The Simpsons; they existed as the family next door who seemed to have everything together effortlessly, living the high life while Homer and Co. struggled to maintain what they thought life to have been. This episode ends up bringing back hints of that initial dynamic as expounded upon over six seasons of building it up. While The Simpsons were initially just a typical, if not average, American family, they've now become a satire of one, a parity of all the worst aspects. The Flanders have evolved in tandem, becoming more and more extreme in their goodliness to continue to serve as a foil. So when all the worst parts of America are combined into a single family at a low crest in their typical wavering standard, that then can be drawn in comparison to how society thinks the world should be represented, in this episode by the assumptions made by the Child Protective Services, the Simpson family has their children taken away and given to good parents, Ned and Maude. This is the type of treatment that one would expect given the situation, but only if it were applied to the rules of the real world. While it's simple to assume logical reactions to the Simpson antics, the characters and setting have changed to the point where it almost appears as an injustice purely due to how much the setting has diverged from [Music].

Bart Sells His Soul: During a discussion on morals between Bart and Milhouse, Bart posits that the soul does not exist, so Milhouse has him back up his claim by selling his own soul for $5. But after a series of unexplainable and bizarre events, Bart starts to fear for his life without a soul and eventually turns to Milhouse to get it back. But Milhouse refuses to sell, causing Bart to go on the prowl for a spare one, eventually winding up back at Milhouse's grandmother's, only to learn it's been sold. He tracks it through multiple buyers before eventually fearing that it's lost forever, and just as he resorts to prayer, Lisa returns with the slip of paper, which Bart then eats. In the B plot, Moe decides to rebrand the bar as a family restaurant, only to lose his temper around the constant atmosphere of children, and eventually, he gives up on the dream and brings Moe back to his dank, dark self. For all the bizarre circumstances the Simpson family manages to get themselves into, one thing always remains a constant: that the emotional core of any particular episode will still remain as something resonant with its audience. Bart sells his soul, something which we all know is just an abstract concept that no piece of paper can possibly retain, and yet with all the craziness you can expect in a typical episode, it's hardly a stretch to assume that one can, in fact, lose a soul by selling it literally to a third party. The world begins to react to his newfound loss in a tangible way. So many other shows would have resorted to some logical answer or had the changes merely be a self-fulfilling result of a change in temperament or outlook, but in The Simpsons, doors stop opening, and animals turn hostile. Bart, with no soul, winds up desperate and harried by the situation, nearly attacking Ralph and almost appearing as feral. And this is a result we could have expected to come first: that the fear in his conscious mind would cause his collapse in sociality, and then for the universe to react accordingly. But the episode instead creates a stronger moral by going for a much less realistic interpretation of events, interestingly the exact opposite of the formula that made the show so popular in the first place, and here the episode is elevated as a result.

Lisa the Vegetarian: After an enlightening trip to the petting zoo, Lisa begins to develop a guilty consciousness regarding her and her family's consumption of meat. She declares a boycott of the various animal products that are consumed, not just as food but in schools for dissections, which starts to attract the derision of her peers and the faculty. This comes to a head when Homer, jealous of Ned Flanders's barbecue, decides to host his own on an even grander scale. Lisa decides to steal the roast pig main dish and throw it into the river, which causes an argument between the two, resulting in her leaving home. While away, she finally snaps from all the constant societal pressure and eats a hot dog from Kwik-E-Mart, but Apu reveals that this is a tofu dog, as he himself is against eating meat. He invites her to a rooftop garden where Paul and Linda McCartney reveal that they too are vegetarians and that Apu is a vegan. The episode ends with the moral about not trying to force societal change that encourages Lisa to go back to Homer. Lisa's environmentalism comes from a place of loving animals, her vegetarianism being a result of guilt for the harm inflicted upon them at the hands of a careless industry. She conflates America's obsession with eating meat with the propaganda of industrial interests and fears the mass scale of unnecessary harm that it causes hourly. This, among the other various reasons for not wanting to eat meat, comes across as perhaps the most naive, at least compared to other concerns like environmental ones, but it is something that fits her character. Lisa Simpson is the type of person who really does care about the world outside of herself, which puts her in stark contrast not only to the rest of the world but to the Simpson family itself. In this way, Lisa is a Simpson among The Simpsons, and it was this episode that would finally give a more concrete distinction to her character that would continue on to define her for years to come. It's the example of flanderization: that is, to develop a character around a specific trait that can benefit the character at the center of it all, a new aspect to her that can summarize so much else in her personality in such a way that this newfound character trait seems like something that ought to have been introduced a long time ago and is added to the series with so much simplicity that it's hard to remember a time when she was an avid carnivore.

Treehouse of Horror VI: The first segment of the episode is Attack of the 50-Foot Isopod: Homer steals the giant

Donut from the lard lad donut shop on the same night as an ion storm and the giant corporate mascots wake up to destroy Springfield. After some ensuing panic, Marge ultimately convinces Homer to give up the giant donut for the sake of saving the day, but this doesn't work, and the town continues to take damage. That is, until Lisa notices a logo in a footprint that leads her to the origins of all the ads, and there she learns that commercials don't have any power if you simply ignore them. So she helps to perform a jingle alongside Paul Anka to convince the town of Springfield to simply ignore the mascots until they return to their inanimate cell.

The next segment is Nightmare on Evergreen Terrace. Bart gets attacked by Groundskeeper Willie in his dream, only to wake up the next day with scars from his nocturnal injury. The other kids at school all report similar attacks at night, and after Martin is killed while resting in class, they demand answers. So Homer and Marge tell them of a PTA meeting where, due to the constant budget cuts to safety and Homer ignoring some good advice, the groundskeeper was maimed by their negligence, vowing to get his revenge by attacking their children in their dreams. So Bart and Lisa ultimately create a plan to confront him once and for all, and with the help of Maggie, eventually succeed in neutralizing the threat.

The final segment is Homer Cubed. While trying to hide from a visit with Patty and Selma, Homer discovers a portal behind the bookshelf. He climbs in, only to find himself in the third dimension, lost and afraid. A few other Springfield unites come together to try to resolve the issue, but ultimately they're powerless to do much. Soon, Homer accidentally tears open a hole in reality, and despite Bart's efforts to save him, he's launched into the real world, though he finds an erotic cakery and decides that maybe it's not so bad.

King-Sized Homer. While trying to get out of mandatory company calisthenics, Homer learns that he could qualify for disability if he gained 61 more pounds. So, with Bart's help, he starts eating even more than usual, to the point that he gets the extra weight plus an additional buffer. The nuclear plant sets up a remote workstation for him, and he begins to live his dream of working from home. But Marge is concerned over the potential health detriment to his new lifestyle, as well as other physical concerns, and Homer starts to wonder if his new fat life is worth it. This comes to a head when his boredom and relaxed attitude results in a failure to vent nuclear waste, something that can now only be done manually. He rushes to the plant to turn the necessary valve, only to break the ladder and fall in, but his wide stature causes him to simply plug the hole instead of falling inside, and the Chernobyl situation is de-escalated to a mere 3-mile island. In the end, Homer decides to lose the weight for Marge's sake, and Mr. Burns pays for the liposuction. It's interesting to see how much societal view of obesity has changed since 1995 and also how little is really different as we've shifted from the age of supermodels into the age of thin fluenc. Homer has always been overweight as a parody of the voracious appetites of Americans, but here just a little bit of extra prodding is all it takes for him to go from typical to disgusting. It's as if Americans don't really mind having a mirror held up to them as long as that mirror doesn't exaggerate too much. And while fat jokes have always been levied towards Homer Simpson, it's a bit telling that here the writers actually tried to tone down the negative perception of king-sized Homer. They made an active effort not to show Homer eating anything once he hit his target weight, even if a few gags did slip through, as the writers didn't want to dehumanize the guy too much. A fat man overeating is comical; an obese man overeating is tragic, and this is where the distinction lies. Once a person's weight deviates too far from the normal range, their physical appearance begins to define them in lieu of everything and anything else. We go from laughing with Homer Simpson to laughing at Homer Simpson to nobody laughing at all.

Mother Simpson. Homer fakes his own death to get out of cleaning the highway at a work function, but when various townsfolk come over to offer their condolences and the power in Homer's name gets cut, Marge demands that Homer goes to Town Hall to set the record straight. While he's there, he learns that his mother is still alive and that Abe Simpson was lying when he said she was dead. As it turns out, Mona Simpson is in town as she assumed her son had died due to the newspaper reports. The two spent the next few days catching up on the lost years, with Lisa even happy to have some positive connection to the rest of her lineage. But she starts to grow suspicious of her new grandmother when Bart finds a series of fake driver's licenses, and they demand answers, as does Homer, who's wondering why his mother left in the first place. So Mona reveals the truth: she had to flee Springfield after an attack on Mr. Burns's biological warfare lab resulted in her getting caught and ID'd by the Springfield police. She spent the next 27 years running away from her past but is finally ready to settle down in Springfield again, until Mr. Burns recognizes her and sends the FBI to hunt her down. So Mona flees the city once more, although this time she's able to say a proper goodbye to her son. Mona Simpson exists as a sort of missing link between generations of the Simpson family. We only know so much about their past while knowing a lot about their future, and Mona Simpson's personality as a rebellious free spirit, or a free-spirited rebel, makes a lot of the existing puzzle pieces fit together. This is something said plainly in the episode itself, as Lisa praises her new positive female role model. It's clear that the messy and awkward Homer could have only come from a household of conflicting ideals, not conforming to any one side of politics or personality, as he's an amalgamation of so many other ideologies in America. And so Mona's inclusion feels like something that could have been easily planned from the start of the show purely because she fits into the existing hole in the archetypal spectrum of America. And maybe this is where the show running for seven years fits into the picture. It's possible we would have had a totally different Mona Simpson if she had been included from earlier in the show run, a character built up from the lived experiences of aging rather than somebody more design-driven, a character whose entry into the show is a reaction to the culture surrounding it rather than a reflection. It's a type of masterful emotional writing that has defined the greatest parts of the show's run, that it's not just able to represent America on a surface level but to fit in on ideological terms. As America becomes more complex, so too does the cast of The Simpsons.

Sidow Bob's Last Gleaming. Sidow Bob declares his intentions to continue his social crusades, this time targeting the medium of television. He targets an air show that the Springwood minimum security prison is set to clean up at to escape, then using his acting abilities mimics the voice and mannerisms of a colonel to sneak into a storage room and commander a nuclear device. He then interrupts the show to decry television and demands all TV be eliminated from the city lest he detonate his bomb, leveling Springfield. The city government caves to his demands, all except for Crusty, who drives out to the Springfield Badlands to use the emergency broadcast system to stay on the air. Enraged by this, Bob sets off the bomb, which turns out to be a dud. So instead, he kidnaps Bart and steals the Wright brothers' craft with the intention to fly kamikaze-style into the civil defense shed from where Crusty is hosting his show. After a very low-speed chase, the plane crashes harmlessly into the side of the building, and Bob is arrested once more. The Simpsons has always been the type of show to bite the hand that feeds it. They get away with this not only because of the freedom of expression negotiated in the show's earlier years but due to how self-aware much of the criticisms are. Having a villain be portrayed as an intellectual while much of the town he terrorizes are marked as barely literate, then having him go on a rant against the very medium on which the show is hosted could come across as entirely tone-deaf if not pulled off well, but the writing staff of The Simpsons is consistently able to present arguments and opinions in such a way that they can use humor to deflect any potential arguments of a bad faith message, helped by the fact that they're always willing to poke fun at themselves just as much as at everyone else. Saob Bob has a point in his crusade against television, despite it really being a very personal vendetta. The medium was always associated with a sort of brain rot in society, but then again, almost every recently popular medium does the exact same thing. When writing first became proliferated, it was viewed as the death of memorization and that students would fail to truly learn anything that they could look up, or old essays on why newspapers were causing people to become asocial as everybody would simply read in public spaces rather than communicating. Even today, a very similar discussion is occurring about the role of social media on society and the development of people's minds, and there's still some valid fears that despite all the potential to expand what we can learn, there's just as much a risk of the technology being misused. Although I'm aware of the potential irony of calling out the use of social media and the internet on this [Music] platform.

The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular. Troy McClure introduces the annual Simpsons clip show, this time featuring content including new scenes, old scenes, and some stuff that they just made up. This clip show only exists as the network had been demanding that the show have one per season, so the show runners decided to give into the demands in as tongue-in-cheek a way as possible. They poke fun at the entire concept, having the special mark a completely arbitrary number of 138 and making a majority of the jokes at their own expense, vicariously striking at the network itself as they were the ones demanding the special. Questions nobody asked are answered in ways that don't make any sense. The writing staff creates crude and offensive caricatures of themselves. Sam Simon even redid his own gag when he wasn't satisfied with how easily he got off in the original bit, and there are jokes that not only didn't make it onto the air but arguably shouldn't have. The whole thing even struggles to take itself seriously, with the writers including gags at the format on its own. The entire episode ends by summing up the real appeal of The Simpsons: hardcore nudity.

Marge Be Not Proud. Bart desperately wants a new game, Bone Storm, but Marge refuses to buy it for him due to the price and its violent content. So he enters the Try 'n' Save on his own and, after a bit of prodding from his friends, decides to simply steal the game. But he's caught by the store security who tells him that if he ever returns he'll be sent to juvenile hall. The next day, Marge takes the whole family back to the same Try 'n' Save for their family photos, unaware that Bart is banned from the store. He gets caught with the security footage being played in front of the whole store, as well as Marge herself. Disappointed in her son, she starts to wonder if perhaps she's coddling him too much and stops babying him as much as she used to. But Bart interprets this as his mother no longer loving him because of his crime. So in defiance, he returns to the Try 'n' Save from before, sneaking something from the store back home while hiding it from Marge. Thinking that he's shoplifted again, she demands to see what it is, only for the object to be a better photo of Bart than the one he ruined earlier, reinvigorating Marge to want to spoil her son once again. The most obvious mirror to this episode comes from the season 1 episode, "The Telltale Head," in which Bart is pressured by his friends into committing an act of vandalism. Here he's instead pressured into shoplifting, although the episode then diverges from the earlier story by focusing less on Bart's guilt over the actual crime and more on Bart's guilt over hurting his mother's feelings. She loses trust in her son, thinking that he's grown out of his childhood innocence before she realized it, as now he's making bad moral decisions on a much higher level than a child would. So by focusing on the character aspects of Bart's crime, it takes on a different context. The episode is one about Marge's relationship to her son rather than Bart's relationship to himself, and yet it still carries a few tinges of the latter. It isn't stealing Bone Storm that Bart feels guilty about; it's the effect that act had on Marge, and that gets to him. And this episode draws more focus to this relationship by comparing it to Homer's reaction. He remains rather nonchalant, serving as comic relief to the story, while Marge gets to have the character moments. In the end, the emotional core of The Simpsons has evolved by drawing more attention to the inter-character dynamics rather than the societal ones, something accomplished by having characters worthy of this level of depth.

Team Homer. When business is slow, Homer and Moe go to the Bowl-a-Rama for the evening, only to learn that they can't play that night without a team. So they grab Apu and Otto, who happen to be standing nearby, and form the Pin Pals. Although there's still the question of the $500 registration fee, which Homer gets from a high-on-ether Mr. Burns, the Pin Pals managed to use team-based cheers to root each other on to success, resulting in their ranking shooting up to the top of the leaderboards. That is, until Mr. Burns comes to and questions the check in his name, so he goes to the Pin Pals and demands that they allow him to join. Not wanting to let down his boss, Homer agrees, but Mr. Burns is terrible at this sport, nearly costing them the league. Although at the last minute, Burns finally manages to knock over two pins, resulting in a victory that the Kudin snatches for himself in the end. In the B plot, a crude t-shirt Bart wears to class results in an anti-homework riot that makes Principal Skinner enact uniforms to break the student spirits. These work for a while until it's learned that they're not waterproof and the colors bleed into a rainbow that reminds the students of their oppressed youthful rebellion. Just as quickly as the Pin Pals are supported by Mr. Burns, they lose their team to his whims, a lesson in sponsorships and how you don't truly own anything when someone else is the one paying for it. Though this is done in a relaxed enough way without too much attention called to it to really draw a comparison, at least not one made on purpose. But if I did want to look too far into this episode anyway, I could make an argument that Mr. Burns here represents the Fox network while the remainder of the Pin Pals are the showrunners trying to express themselves in a way that pleases the demand of their financial backers while also creating a bowling game good enough to be proud of. Bart and Lisa get a plotline about conformity in this episode, and sticking to that theme well, Bart gets molded into the rest of the student body around the halfway point, about the same time that the uniforms are introduced. It's an interesting thematic development that the characters whose actions caused the introduction of the conformity-enforcing uniforms stops being a central player as he becomes just another face in the crowd. Maybe there's a joke about the kids seeing a single rainbow and immediately being indoctrinated into disobeying authority, but I've already made one big leap of logic in this episode retrospective, so I'll end the subject here.

Two Bad Neighbors. Homer is working the crowd at the Springfield garage sale when new neighbors move in across the street, stealing his thunder. These neighbors turn out to be George and Barbara Bush, the former president and first lady. They're welcome to the neighborhood, yet warned about the presence of the Simpson family, who are considered less than kind. This is proven when Bart arrives across the street and begins to mess with things around the house. Despite Barbara's approval of the boy, George is infuriated, which comes to a head when Bart destroys the former president's memoirs. So he spanks Bart as a form of punishment before sending him home, and this causes Homer to become enraged, demanding justice for the insult to his parenting. The feud between the neighbors turns left and less civil, ultimately resulting in a fist fight between Homer and George Bush that ends when Barbara demands he apologize. In the end, the Bush family moves out as George believes that the neighborhood brought out the worst in him, and Homer soon meets the new neighbor, former President Gerald Ford. Famously, George H.W. Bush once mentioned in a speech that the typical American family ought to behave more like the Waltons and less like The Simpsons. His campaign at the time made a big focus on American Family Values, which also led to a series of bafflingly out-of-touch statements from Dan Quayle. There was this idea that the moral fiber of the country had degraded purely due to adapting to more fundamental cultural changes, and this episode was meant to reflect that concept rather than any sort of political charge, according to the showrunners. The episode was not a political attack but a personal one because, for all his posturing on being good and upstanding and moral, Bush is then portrayed as a crutchy old man, the kind to lament that children no longer play outside anymore but also shoot at a child for riding his bike. The feud with the Bushes was, by this point, 2 years old and not really in the public's consciousness anymore, so the episode was less about the family arguing against an individual and more of a spat against the idea of a real person being placed into the world in which the show took place in. It's an acknowledgment that the show's satire has to be all-inclusive, deviating from the real world to make points about it, a concept that would later come back in the season 8 episode, "Homer's Enemy."

Scenes from the Class Struggle in Springfield. While shopping for a new television, Marge and Lisa find a heavily discounted Chanel suit, which Marge begins wearing out despite not having anywhere classy enough to justify the style. While at the Kwik-E-Mart, she encounters an old high school acquaintance who invites her and her family to a country club. Marge wears her new dress there and manages to leave a great first impression. Meanwhile, Homer begins warming up to the game of golf, impressing Mr. Burns with his natural talent and getting challenged to a game. But both Homer and Mr. Burns discover that Smithers has been cheating on Burns's behalf, and Homer threatens to tell until Burns promises to support Marge's new socialite lifestyle. As the family is repeatedly invited back, Marge struggles to refit and redo the single nice article of clothing she owns until it's eventually destroyed by the sewing machine. So she spends a ton of money buying a brand new Chanel suit to impress her new friends, hoping to get a sponsorship for membership at the club. Yet when she sees how little her family enjoys the new Marge created by the affluent lifestyle, she decides to reject it, and they eat together at Krusty Burger. This is the first episode of The Simpsons to be both written and directed by a woman and, as a result, has a few feminine touches that add a much-needed breadth of humanity to a show that's seen quite a bit of absurdity, distracting from the more down-to-earth and human moments that endear the TV family to our hearts. It continues an ongoing season 7 trend of expanding the cast by giving Marge and Lisa a much more active role in many of the show's stories instead of constantly being the Bart and Homer show. So, in turn, plots managed to stay fresh at a time in the show's run where many other long-runners have started to lose steam. The Simpsons began as a satire on the American dream, the idea that absolutely anybody had the chance to become affluent and comfortable as long as they were willing to work for it. The idol rich and their negative predisposition to the Simpson family shows how dead this idea was in the minds of many of those who had even achieved it. No amount of hard-earned money could ever make up for the fact that you weren't born into the lifestyle of those who had already known wealth. And even though Marge and Homer do eventually receive their sponsorships from those who initially scorned them, they end up rejecting it as they knew there would be a constant demand to prove themselves in the eyes of the rest of the world rather than a laissez-faire acceptance of who they were naturally.

Bart gets a checkbook and devises a plan to receive Crusty's autograph by having him sign a check. Only to receive a stamp from a Cayman Islands holding account, which ousts him as a tax fraud. He's fined a hefty amount, and his assets are seized by the IRS, resulting in 40 years of garnished wages that make him live the life of an everyday man. So he crashes his plane into a mountain, dying in the blaze—or so everybody believes.

Bart holds out that the TV clown is still alive, as he keeps claiming to have seen him in various places. And although this is initially believed to be the result of his grieving, guilty conscience, he eventually finds more evidence that Crusty has faked his death and changed his name to Rory B. Bellows. Bart and Lisa confront the man at the Springfield docks and see through his story of being a humble scrap iron salvager, eventually managing to convince him to return as they know he can't stand the life of an average man, being drawn to the inflated sense of self-worth. In the end, Crusty fakes Rory's death to use the hefty life insurance policy to fund his return.

This episode has all the trappings of a heartwarming story of a broken celebrity relearning their love of entertainment and could have easily done that. But as this is a Simpsons, what we got instead was an irreverent parody of that sort of sappy story. It—it wasn't the love of his career that brought Crusty back into the spotlight, but a love of being better than other people. Something that was also highlighted in the Act 2 low point when his complaints about his condition had less to do with losing his belongings than it did with losing the respect that came with them. A typical sitcom would have used a plot of this kind to humanize its celebrity class, but this episode instead embraces the worst parts of its characters and comes across as more true as a result. Although there still are a couple of traces of this original level of emotional resonance remaining. For one, the desire for Bart to save Crusty's career again comes from a more character-driven aspect—that being his guilt over causing the whole ordeal. If Bart had instead tried to bring Crusty back on the air because he was bored of the IRS's replacement for his broadcast, it would have given a different dynamic to the episode—that of horrible people helping out horrible people for selfish motivations. But instead, Bart's inner goodness and Crusty's inner wickedness create a comparison between how we, as a society, accept different personality traits in one another based off status. It's okay to be nasty as long as you're rich, but if a poor man mistreats someone else, it's just off-putting.

Lisa, the iconoclast, while writing a report on Jebediah Springfield for Springfield's bicentennial, Lisa discovers a written confession by the man that he's lived a life of infamy as a former pirate who changed his name and resented the town of Springfield. But when she uses Homer's new position as the town crier to tell people about it, she is shunned and hated by the town's folk who refuse to hear the truth about the man. But in the confessions, he mentions having a silver tongue. Lisa goes to the town hall to convince the board to dig up his grave; if they find the tongue, it proves that she's right. But after exhuming his grave site, they find no tongue, and the town celebrations continue as normal. That is, until Lisa gets a prophetic dream from George Washington that she's on the right track, and she continues her search, which reveals that the confession was written on a torn piece of Washington's presidential portrait he had taken after a failed robbery attempt, and that the town's historian had stolen the tongue to cover this up. But after being confronted by Lisa, he accepts the truth and takes her to the bicentennial parade so she can tell the whole town. Yet when she sees the level of pride that everybody is showing, Lisa finds that she lacks the heartlessness to ruin that and lies about Jebediah's greatness. After all, it's hardly a secret that the history of the United States is much different than the standard patriotic myth that gets told commonly in our nation's schools. The accepted, polished history leaves out much of the nuance, and an attempt to try and hold our founding fathers to modern standards. Yet the historical truth includes details that make our history seem much less deterministic. There's an idea that through sheer happenstance the good guys have won every single conflict in history, and that all the evidence suggests that it could not have happened any other way. And when you argue that this isn't the case, it comes across as unpatriotic—that you hate your country for daring to suggest that it could be somewhat improved. But Lisa ultimately decides against revealing the truth to the town's folk, as the truth, by this point, has long since become irrelevant to the myth. Retelling lies to make the country look better can cause lasting damage when these lies are used to justify continued wrong behavior today, as if to say that our founding fathers would approve of these injustices. But if those lies are instead used to justify positivity, then shouldn't there be some value in the end? It really comes down to whether history is being used as a tool for good or ill—whether or not to rewrite it to be more accurate. If a comforting lie is what it takes to bring out the best in people, then maybe it's better not to know the whole truth.

Homer, the Smithers. Mr. Smithers has a nervous breakdown after failing to prevent Lenny from giving Burns a thumbs-up after an employee excursion and is ordered by his boss to go on a mandatory vacation. Not wanting to be permanently replaced by his temporary replacement, he tries to find the least competent employee at the power plant to do his duties and selects Homer Simpson. Homer predictably fails at everything until Mr. Burns's constant nagging gets on his nerves enough that he snaps, assaulting his boss in his office. But when Homer returns to apologize, he finds that Burns is cowering in his presence and demands that Homer not help him, becoming self-reliant in the process. Smithers returns from his trip to find that Mr. Burns no longer needs him, and Burns fires his former assistant, which results in Smithers desperately trying to find new work. Feeling guilty, Homer tries to help Smithers get his old job back, but when he ruins the attempt, Smithers attacks him, and their scuffle pushes Burns out of a third-story window. Now completely dependent on others while recovering, Mr. Burns rehires Smithers.

Some character dynamics are self-fulfilling in the sense that Mr. Burns has hired Smithers to help him out with these responsibilities, becoming more and more encompassing as he's dependent on to perform them. This sort of dynamic shift is one of the contributing factors to the flanderization of characters, like a straight man in a comedic duo, allowing the other character's wackiness to become exaggerated, leading to a simplification of who both of them are. So long as there's an enabler, the behavior will continue to deteriorate. But just as much as this can be a crutch for a writing staff, it can also become a tool if the creators are aware of the influence. Knowing that Mr. Burns has become more and more dependent on Smithers, not just for performing daily tasks but for carrying the other half of a comedic duo, the writers can exploit this to create a character exploration. What happens when you take away half of this pairing? Who can fill the role of the other half, and how will their character differences change the other? We get to understand Mr. Burns a lot better by seeing him standing alone, and it's a bit of a shame that there wasn't quite as much development from Smithers as he too got some time in the spotlight.

The Day the Violence Died. When the Itchy and Scratchy 75th Anniversary parade crosses through Bumtown, Bart discovers Chester J. Lampwick, the original creator of Itchy, as well as the concept of cartoon violence, who has the original film reel to prove it. But the reel is destroyed by the Springfield Elementary School projector, and they're left with no proof about their case until Bart recalls seeing an original cell from the assumed creator, Roger Myers, at the comic book guy's store and retrieves it with a signature proving that Itchy was stolen from Chester. The court orders a restitution payment that bankrupts Itchy and Scratchy studio, and the cartoon goes—goes off the air. But eager to get their favorite show back, Bart and Lisa come up with a plan to save the show, only to learn that two similarly looking doppelgangers of themselves have already done so.

The early history of American animation is rife with similar stories of infringement and borrowing various ideas. It was the Wild West of copyright law, and very little was established in the way of protections for creators in this budding medium. As such, whichever creatives managed to get their foot in the door early managed to get enough of an upper hand to rewrite laws to their whims. Even today, copyright law is largely dictated by a certain large Mouse, as the corporation has the financial means to lobby for legislature in its own favor. Once you are big enough, it becomes less cost-effective to innovate than it does to legislate. By the midpoint of this episode, legal justice has been achieved, the law has been upheld, and the little guy was able to get his victory from the jaws of a large, faceless corporation. And yet this is portrayed as a negative thing due to the perspective we have. Bart and Lisa are personally inconvenienced by their actions, and Roger Meyers Jr., despite being an off-putting kind of guy, is also left destitute. And so some unseen solution winds up manifesting. Itchy and Scratchy Studios gets a big government check, and the cycle of lawsuits comes around to save the day. There's not really a moral to any of this, as all of the moral actions wound up making things worse, with a surly bum getting a solid gold house and refusing to come out of his self-created hermitage. But that's a standard solution in The Simpsons by this point.

A Fish Called Selma. When Troy McClure, the washed-up movie star, gets pulled over for reckless driving, he learns that he has to get his license updated. And not wanting to wear prescription lenses, he bribes Selma with a date to get the license approved. But when paparazzi snaps him out with a human female, it quashes certain rumors about his personal life and reinvigorates his career with new roles to his name. His agent suggests marrying her, and despite divulging to Homer that the entire marriage is a sham to prop up his professional life, he goes along with it, making Selma into Mrs. McClure. She learns that the marriage is fake from Troy himself, but he convinces her that as long as it allows her to live a cushy life as a celebrity wife, it shouldn't matter. That is, until his agent suggests that the two have a child together to bolster his image as a family man. Selma refuses to go along with this and declares her intention to divorce Troy, as bringing a child into a loveless marriage is something that she views as immoral to do, whereas the marriage itself was a victimless sham. Selma's desperation as a single woman has caused many PLS before, but she's always chosen to be true to herself instead of ramping up any relationship before it gets serious. However, this relationship makes it the furthest because it was never serious. While she is at first enamored with the life she's being offered, the marriage never really has a firm emotional connection between the two—the very thing that has caused Selma before to call it off, feeling as though she's losing a part of herself to a person other than Patty. Once Troy and Selma get closer in an official capacity, she keeps going along with the new life because it's still very much her own; she's not actually a Mrs. McClure in any sense of the word except legally. But while Selma herself might be content with this arrangement, she still understands that it's far from ideal—an awkward place to be against your will. But as long as she's okay with it, then no harm is done. This hesitation though manifests when McClure suggests a child with her—a child who has no say in the matter. In the end, while Selma is okay with selling out her ideals for a shot at living the good life—not as though she had much else to go on—she still recognizes that it's a very careful balancing act between misery and isolation, and one that perhaps she won't always be able to navigate for both herself and a potential child.

Bart on the Road. On Take Your Kids to Work Day at Springfield Elementary, Bart is sent to the DMV with Patty and Selma, where he gets unattended access to the driver's license machine and prints out a fake ID for himself. Bart, Milhouse, Nelson, and Martin use the fake ID and Martin's recently acquired money from the stock market to fund a spring break road trip, where they settle on a destination: the Knoxville World's Fair. But they arrive 14 years too late, finding that the fair is no longer there, and worse, the car gets smashed by the sun. Around the same time, they run out of money, so Bart gets a job as a corer to try to make his way home to Springfield without his parents finding out. But when this doesn't work, he turns to Lisa for help. Lisa, meanwhile, has been spending several days at work with Homer ever since the two spent Take Your Kids to Work Day together, and upon learning of Bart's predicament, convinces Homer to order a replacement console for the nuclear plant so the boys can sneak home aboard the cargo. In general, the less of an episode of The Simpsons says about anything, the more outlandish its plot is likely to be. Bart getting a fake ID and driving his friends across the country, then later traveling across the world as a corer, is the type of thing that diverges from the more down-to-earth stories that The Simpsons was known for during the more sentimental episodes. But it would be tiring for every single episode to have some dire plot line with a sappy and happy ending, so episodes like this one that celebrate the absurdity of its cast exist to break up monotony. Is what I would have said had this episode not also included one of the more realistic plot lines that the show's ever had. Homer and Lisa bonding over their new friendship at the plant is something that could have easily happened in a live-action show, and it stands in stark contrast to the road trip. A plot the two converge at the end with Lisa's experiences in a more realistic setting able to come up with a way to get Bart not only back to Springfield but back to reality.

22 Short Films About Springfield. While spitting on cars, Bart and Milhouse wonder aloud what kind of stories the other citizens of Springfield experience in the average day. We cut to Apu, who is convinced by his brother to close the store for 5 minutes so he can relax. During this time, he gets drunk, makes out with a woman, and falls into the pool. Lisa gets gum in her hair, with Marge trying various solutions to remove it, though she mostly just gets more in there until the whole town weighs in on the issue. Mr. Smithers is stung by a bee, but through some effort, Mr. Burns is able to ridicule him into pedaling himself to a hospital before they both collapse. In that hospital, Dr. Nick is able to diffuse a situation where Abe Simpson is demanding a quack doctor to cure his hypochondria. It cuts to Moe's, where Snake robs the tavern while Moe traps himself behind bulletproof glass. At Principal Skinner's house, Chalmers arrives for an unforgettable luncheon, but the roast that Skinner had prepared is ruined by being overcooked. Rather than admitting his error, he doubles down on the lunch by preparing to sneak out through the window, purchasing fast food from Krusty Burger and disguising it as his own. Although when Chalmers catches him crawling through the window, Skinner pretends he was merely stretching. Additionally, the smoke coming from the oven is actually steam from steamed clams. When Skinner returns with the burgers, Chalmers is confused as he believed that they were having steamed clams, to which Skinner corrects him by saying that he actually said "steamed hams," what he calls hamburgers. When Chalmers tries to point out how similar these steamed hams are to Krusty Burgers, Skinner struggles for another way out before the house catches fire. Once again, Skinner lies to the superintendent by claiming that these are merely the northern lights. In the end, Chalmers is impressed by the steamed hams, with no idea how terribly things had gone behind the scenes. Homer accidentally locks Maggie in a newspaper stand and, running out of change, simply takes the stand home with him. The Springfield police force reenacts a scene from Pulp Fiction, then another scene. After a chase, Snake hits Wiggum after his robbery from earlier. The Bumblebee Man recounts his horrible workday to his wife before accidentally destroying his house in an accident involving oranges. Reverend Lovejoy teaches his dog to do its business on Ned Flanders's lawn, which Flanders catches him in the act of. Cletus, the slack-jawed yokel, finds a pair of boots on a power line but returns them when his wife, Brandine, mentions they would scuff the floor in her job interview. Milhouse gets involved in the Pulp Fiction reenactment when he has to stop somewhere to use the bathroom, accidentally freeing the hostages when he knocks out Herman. Lisa finally gets her hair fixed, but Nelson laughs at her anyway before turning his attention to a large man in a tiny car who reacts to the taunt by forcing Nelson to march through the center of town with his pants around his ankles. In the end, Bart and Milhouse agree that everybody in Springfield does, in fact, have an interesting story; there's just not enough time for all of them. Such as Professor Frink, who was running late due to a monkey stealing his glasses, and Abe Simpson and his grumbling grandson.

The Curse of the Flying Hellfish. Abe Simpson embarrasses Bart with his tall tales during Grandparents Day at Springfield Elementary, and after realizing nobody believes his stories, sits alone in his room where he learns that a member of his old military unit has died, leaving only him and Mr. Burns alive. As it turns out, the two are the sole remaining members of a unit, with the final surviving member being the one who will obtain a collection of paintings stolen by the unit during World War II. Abe tries to hide from an assassin hired by Mr. Burns in the Simpson household, and when Mr. Burns shows up by bringing down a section of wall, Bart finally believes the stories. So the two use a pair of keys Bart pick-pocketed off of Burns to obtain the location to the treasure. But Burns is a step ahead of them and robs the duo at gunpoint, tossing Bart into a safe and pushing it into the ocean. But after Abe saves Bart's life, the duo are renewed to go after Monty, ultimately catching up and dismissing him from the unit. In the end, Bart and his grandpa don't get to sell the paintings as the US State Department arrives and repossesses them, returning them to their original owner's grandson.

This episode takes a tonal departure away from the rest of the show leading up to this point, but only partially. While it still retains a lot of the silliness that defines the show, it manages to capture the character moments not solely through relatable emotional beats but by putting these characters through high-stakes action that brings them closer together. And while this is basically the plot to every single summer blockbuster since the concept originated, The Simpsons is able to show off its range and variety by including elements of this fashion. It's a testament to the flexibility of typical Western television tropes that that this sort of thing can occur without coming across as jarring. The episode itself almost feels like the plot to a movie, in large part due to the number of story beats that are directly borrowed from old World War II films, but also because of how the story develops and then wraps itself up. There's no irreverent or sardonic reaction to Abe's rediscovered military training; Bart genuinely finds a newfound respect for the man in a sappy inversion of what audiences have come to expect from the show. In fact, the episode even touches on this in a meta way, with everybody refusing to believe Abe Simpson's stories, much in the same way one would assume The Simpsons itself is unable to tell this sort of tale.

Much Apu About Nothing. When a bear walks down Evergreen Terrace, the citizens of Springfield demand the city do something about it, so a bear patrol is funded to keep them out of town. But the tax increase to pay for this patrol causes the citizens to grow even more resentful, and they demand a tax cut. So Mayor Quimby weasels out of responsibility by blaming the tax hike on immigrants. Proposition 24 is made to drive out every illegal immigrant in the town of Springfield, and there's a frenzy of support for it. Although when The Simpsons learn that Apu has been living in America with an expired visa, they change their minds and start…

A brainstorming session to keep their family friend around, settling on an amnesty clause to allow Apu to take a citizenship test. He spends the night studying with Homer and eventually manages to prove his knowledge of the country—while enough to stay despite the law passing anyway. The family celebrates a victory; that everything turned out all right, at least for the people that they care about. This episode best represents the American spirit of climbing the social ladder up to the American dream, then pulling it up behind you the moment you finish taking advantage of all the support systems that got you to a better way of life. You turn around to decry them as a negative thing. It's the reason that a country founded by people leaving for better opportunities also has such a strong social movement of cutting those opportunities off from the rest of the world—that others may not fit into the culture that we ourselves just learned how to navigate, because if they do, they might start to demand the same destructive economic policies that we ourselves just asked for.

So many characters in the cast of *The Simpsons* are characterized by some kind of one-note crazy stereotype about who they are. Here, we're shown Apu trying to reject this label on himself, gaining citizenship in an effort to legitimize his claims of fitting in, but it ultimately results in a fear that he's forgotten who he is; that to be an American is to give up being—as that's the only way to get acceptance. But so many of the other characters in the show are viewed as crazy or eccentric regardless of their citizenship status. It's only an issue to act out if you're not already part of the in-group, but once you get into the club, you're free to do whatever you want without scrutiny. This episode ends up deriving much of its memorability less from the social issues it tackles and more from the emotional issues it reflects.

Homerpalooza: When the Springfield Elementary bus is destroyed, Homer has to carpool Bart, Lisa, and a few of their classmates to school. But while driving them around, he embarrasses his kids with his out-of-date music taste. He goes to a record store to try and catch up with the recent trends, but only proves how out of touch he is with the current state of things. So, in an attempt to fit in, he buys Bart and Lisa tickets to a music festival, but he continues to prove how detached he is from the younger generation until an accident involving Peter Frampton's inflatable pig launches a projectile at his stomach, which he absorbs without harm. Impressed by his iron stomach, the festival producer offers him a job in the traveling freak show, which Homer accepts in a bid to impress the millennial generation. This works, and Bart starts to idolize his father again, but Homer learns that if he takes one more cannonball to the stomach, he may die—right before he's set to perform in Springfield. When the show begins, he dives out of the way at the last second, losing his job as a performer, although he doesn't mind because he no longer craves the acceptance of others. When I first started to watch *The Simpsons*, I was about Bart's age; today, I'm about the same age as Homer. But even back in season 7, the show had managed to obtain the label of "long-running" from the culture surrounding it, and this had started reflecting in the appeal of the older episodes. For the first time, the showrunners had to face the fact that their show could be considered nostalgic, or that the early seasons reflected an America that no longer existed. This episode reflects the fear of the writers through the way Homer himself begins to show some anxiety over his taste being outdated; that despite, or rather because of, not doing anything differently, society began evolving to the point that he was no longer with it. *The Simpsons*, like Homer Simpson, have then adapted to this change by refusing to do so. There's immense pressure to keep the show relevant and appeal to shifting demographics, but at this point, the showrunners rejected the idea—between the options of sticking to their guns and keeping the show stagnant (as that is what gave them their initial popularity) versus innovating to appeal to the new largest demographic. They've chosen to simply write episodes that they feel need to be written and to put a bit of trust into their own competence as scriptwriters and producers. And considering the still fondly remembered status of season 7, this strategy has more than paid off.

Summer of 4 Ft. 2: Lisa laments that nobody signed her yearbook on the last day of school. And upon learning that the Simpson family will be staying at the Flanders' beach house over the summer, laments that she has no friend to bring along. So she decides to reinvent her identity in order to make new friends as a new person. This plan works, with the new look getting her the attention of some cool kids her age, in spite of her real personality. Bart becomes jealous as he attempts to wow them, yet only comes across as trying too hard, while Lisa is able to impress them with her knowledge of marine life and other tidbits of scientific information. But when Bart can't stand to see his sister being the popular one, he shows her new friends the old Lisa, revealing all the nerdy accolades she received from the previous year in the yearbook. Lisa runs away in shame and spends the next day feuding with Bart, but when their fighting leads her back home, she finds her new friends surrounding the family car, attaching seashells as a momento of their time together. In the end, Bart apologizes to Lisa by having all her summer friends sign her yearbook, and the family returns to Springfield, finning off the seagull that the shells attracted. It's a very common narrative moral to say that the best way to find happiness is to be yourself, but Lisa has always enjoyed some level of self-expression in her hobbies and her ability to speak her mind—not winning many friends in the process. So, rather than trying to be herself, she attempts to be anybody but herself and makes new friends, enjoying a newfound popularity that she's never had before. And while so many other shows would have some predictable twist where her friends turn out not to be all they came across as, or at least elements that she doesn't fit in by pretending to be something she isn't, *The Simpsons* takes these lessons a step further by taking a step back. It's actually very difficult not to be yourself; even if you put on a totally phony personality, you'll eventually slip and let out who you really are. This false facade can only hold out for so long, and just as Lisa did in this episode, you'll soon revert back to who you actually are. It wasn't so much that Lisa was convincing the new kids that she was somebody she wasn't; it was that Lisa convinced herself that she was somebody else. Her love of science and knowledge of people came to her advantage, and the fact that she could come across as a genuine person despite hiding so much of herself is actually a much more relatable personality trait than anything else that could have been in this episode. It's not about what you like; it's about what you are like.

Season 8: Season 7 was the first season with the new showrunners of Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein—two creators I've covered before in the show *Mission Hill*, who have provided many scripts for *The Simpsons* up to this point. The show had notably changed hands in this fashion roughly every other season up to this point, and in doing so, we typically got one season where the new guys adapted to the changes they needed to—from writing to running—then a follow-up season where they've established themselves well enough to start to put a more personal spin on the work. Season 7 was characterized by an increase in the number of character-driven plot lines that took real-world situations and applied *Simpsons* caricatures to them to create a relatable situation for the audience—much in the same way that the episodes written by the duo were defined by their realism from the cast and absurdism from the setting. But moving into season 8, Oakley and Weinstein got more comfortable to the point of letting some of that inhibition go. Moving forward, we'll start to see many plots that don't care for realism in favor of wacky absurdist humor and situations that subvert our expectations of what comedy needs to look like. This will go on to give us many of the most iconic set pieces of *The Simpsons*, though there's a notable decline in the frequency in which we start to see the sappy or romantic stories of our favorite family. But that's not to say that they're gone either. Season 7 and 8 are so incredibly alike in everything but tone, where there could not be a starker difference.

Treehouse of Horror VII: The Thing and I: Bart and Lisa hear a series of strange noises coming from the attic, and their inquiries to their parents yield no straight answers. So they investigate the noises themselves, only to find some strange creature shrouded by shadow who escaped behind them. When they warn their parents, Marge calls over Dr. Hibbert, and the truth is revealed: Bart was born with a conjoined twin, and that twin turned out to be evil. So they chained him up in the attic and pretended they had no other son. As they all go their separate ways to hunt down the escaped Hugo, Bart is left alone, where his twin reveals himself as well as his plan to re-conjoin the two. But Hibbert returns and knocks out Hugo, lamenting his evil twin theory until discovering that the two were swapped—Bart was the evil twin all along. So the Simpson family simply swaps the two, with Hugo at the dinner table and Bart in the attic.

Genesis Tub: Bart chokes Lisa with static electricity while she's running a science experiment on one of her teeth. The following day, she discovers a primitive race of people living in the mold surrounding the tooth, and that these people are rapidly developing through the stages of civilization. But when Bart discovers the experiment, he starts crushing their buildings with his finger, which the people react to by creating a space program to attack Lisa's brother. He vows vengeance at the same time that Lisa's petri dish creates a device to allow them to shrink Lisa to their size, where it's revealed that they worship her as a god. But as the tech to change her back doesn't exist, she's trapped there while Bart receives her prize for winning the science fair, and Lisa resigns herself to being…

[Music] Worried Citizen: Kang and Kodos abduct Homer to demand that he takes them to the leader of Earth. Though as it's an election year, he's not sure who that will be, so Kang and Kodos simply decide to kidnap both Bill Clinton and Bob Dole, impersonating them so they can rule over the Earth—or at least America. Though in the realm of '90s television, there's not much of a distinction. Despite their odd mannerisms, the facade is maintained thoroughly until Homer is able to make it back to Washington to reveal the ruse. But since it's a two-party system, the American public elects Kang as their leader, who immediately enslaves the…

[Music] Planet.

You Only Move Twice: Homer is offered a new job at the Globex Corporation, which owns a planned community that appeals to the family much more than Springfield does. But once they arrive, each member soon learns that Cypress Creek is not all it's cracked up to be. Marge is bored with the house's automation, as it gives her nothing to do; Lisa is allergic to everything; and Bart is put into a remedial class. Only Homer seems to be enjoying his new life, as his work managing a team that's overseeing a nuclear reactor's construction is giving him praise from his eccentric new boss, Hank Scorpio. Unbeknownst to Homer, Hank is actually a supervillain using the reactor to power a doomsday device. And when he approaches his boss about his family's issues, Hank is disappointed but ultimately agrees to let his employee go. In the end, the Simpson family returns to Springfield as Hank takes over the east coast of the U.S., rewarding Homer for all his hard work by giving him ownership of the Denver Broncos. A silly episode that's mostly carried by the charisma of its central character, Hank Scorpio, who serves as a parallel to Montgomery Burns. In fact, most of the issues the Simpson family faces in their new setting are just recontextualizations of the issues that they faced in their original hometown. Bart is held behind in a classroom that doesn't give him proper mental stimulation, although it's not like Springfield Elementary was really doing him any more favors. Lisa's allergic to everything outside, but the environment of Springfield was one characterized by three-eyed fish and a permanently burning tire fire. Marge struggles to find purpose outside of being a homemaker—also an issue she's faced for the last seven years that the show's been on the air. Even Homer, who fails to realize how evil his boss is, is going through the same thing he's been doing before—being praised for his work without really understanding what it is he's supposed to be doing was effectively his job description before—all while he works for a cartoonish supervillain plotting the destruction of the world for his personal gain. All that changes between Cypress Creek and Springfield is the expectation of greatness. They realize that their lives aren't any better, despite the fact that they were supposed to be. At least in Springfield, they could relax by knowing they were doomed.

The Homer They Fall: When Bart's new belt is stolen by a group of bullies, Homer tries to stand up to their parents to get it back, but only ends up being attacked by the three of them. However, Moe notices Homer being struck by the men without falling over and recognizes his potential as a boxer, developing a strategy for Homer to simply stand still until the other guy tires himself out. He enters the realm of boxing and works his way up the ranks, revitalizing Moe's old career as a former boxer himself, until an old acquaintance of Moe's, Lucious Sweet, approaches and offers a big career move for him: Homer will fight the heavyweight champion, Drederick Tatum, in order to celebrate his return from incarceration. Marge is concerned that Homer will be killed and expresses her opinions to Moe, who knows the possibility exists but is more concerned with his own career to care—that is, until the match begins and it's clear that Homer's strategy of tiring out his opponent won't work against a real professional. Moe, realizing his error, steals a giant fan and swoops in from the skies to save his friend, flying off into the night with nothing left of his career but a $100,000 check and a flying machine. Despite starting out with a focus on Homer, this episode is about Moe Szyslak more than anybody else, developing his backstory and history as well as providing some context about why he views the world the way he does. It's not uncommon for a more sleazy or villainous character to get some development later in a series that provides an explanation for their behavior in this way, but these often come with some sort of sympathizing—a justification for that person's mistrustful nature or disdain for others. In this situation, though, it doesn't try to explain why Moe is the way that he is, just giving backstory that shows that he's always been this way. While the episode itself takes a largely humorous approach to this sort of character development, it still expands a lot of what we know about the guy. Even if he's a bad person, he can still have some moments of guilt that push him into doing the right thing. It's not like Moe reforms or becomes good, merely that there's a bit of good underneath it all that's just waiting for a moment to show itself. Moe goes from trying to relive his glory days vicariously through Homer, only to end up instead living his best life as himself.

Moe Burns, Baby: While returning from a trip to the cider mill, the Simpson family comes across a hitchhiker who turns out to be Mr. Burns's long-lost son, Larry Burns, on his way to Springfield to reunite with his father. They pick him up and drop him off at Burns's mansion, where the old man regales his son the tale of his birth and how he lost him. But once Mr. Burns tries to take Larry along with him to various high-society events, the guy annoys everybody with his odd and antic behavior, until soon Mr. Burns is forced to accept that his son is a disappointment. Hoping to win back his father's affections, Larry inspires Homer to fake a kidnapping so they can force a confession of love out of the man, but this fails as the police surround them to force an end. Ultimately, Homer and Larry confessed that the entire thing was faked and that Larry only wanted his father's love, to which Mr. Burns replies that he's incapable of that, and then everyone has a party for no reason. Larry Burns is played by Rodney Dangerfield, and if you don't know that, then this episode loses a significant amount of its appeal. So much of the runtime is dedicated to referencing his old bits and overall style of humor, in exception to almost everything else. And while Dangerfield is funny enough to carry the episode, it's still somewhat of a concerning sign that *The Simpsons*, even during its peak, had to be carried by a celebrity guest star to produce an episode. As time goes on and more and more of the new audience of *The Simpsons* doesn't recognize Dangerfield from *Caddyshack* or *The Ed Sullivan Show*, this episode starts to age worse and worse, until it's a character-centric episode, just like the previous one, only focusing on a brand new character who doesn't make any follow-up appearances, instead of Moe. The overuse of its celebrity guest stars has been a concern in *The Simpsons* since episodes like "Krusty Gets Cancelled," so it's not as though this is the first episode symptomatic of the complaint levied towards the later seasons and their obsession with the guest cast, but it does show a shifting sign following something like last season's "Homerpalooza," where the bands were mostly one-off gags instead of the main focus. Overall, the episode is good, but for older audience members, it's great.

Bart After Dark: Bart wrecks a valuable gargoyle while trying to retrieve a model plane from the roof of a mysterious house. And with no Marge or Lisa for moral guidance, Homer is convinced the best option to teach the boy some respect is to have him work in the house to pay off the damages. But this house turns out to be a burlesque house run by its proprietor, Belle. Bart quickly adapts to his new job, meeting so many of the various clientele for a while before eventually Principal Skinner comes inside, immediately complaining to Homer alongside the other moral busybodies, just in time for Marge to return from cleaning beaches with Lisa. She's enraged and begins to demand that the house be torn down, eventually shaming the citizens of Springfield into joining her. But Homer comes to the aid of Belle, and soon a whole musical number is performed that convinces everybody to keep the house intact, although Marge ends up accidentally destroying the house anyway when she attempts a counter-song. Everybody loves smut; people who talk about how much they hate it tend to be the ones who look at the most depraved among the genre, however, and this shame manifests as a righteous anger. If you can constantly stay on the offensive, nobody will ever question you and force you to defend your own actions and desires. This is as true in the real world as it is in Springfield, and *The Simpsons* is able to avoid making any broad sweeping judgments, ironically by generalizing the entire town in this fashion. The whole finale starts because of Principal Skinner getting caught with his pants down—metaphorically and very nearly literally. As a result, Marge Simpson in this episode appears as the crazy one; she's the only person in all of Springfield who doesn't have some deeply-pined-up shame that allows for easy emotional manipulation. Her and Homer, who stays on the side of Belle even through the anti-smut fervor sweeping everyone else, the family represents either end of the extreme: somebody so confident in their morality that they're unwilling to compromise with a person who doesn't share their interests—basically, the shameless Homer versus the capital-R righteous Marge. But instead of the typical cliché of pitting dark and light extremes against one another to let the good shine more brightly, it's the dark that instead receives a spotlight, as this episode posits that the world might be a better place if we all simply allowed others to mind their own business.

A Milhouse Divided: Tired of her family gorging themselves around the TV, Marge decides to throw a nice dinner party for their neighbors. But during the evening, Luann and Kirk get into an argument that results in the two divorcing. Marge feels guilty over causing this to happen, despite Homer's assurances that she's not at fault. Over the next few days, the two check up on their divorced friends, and while Luann is taking the divorce very well, Kirk is broken up over it, lamenting that he took his marriage for granted. This causes Homer to panic as…

His marriage to Marge is barely any better than Kirk's was before it collapsed, so he tries to smother Marge with attention to prove that he loves her. But when this fails, he starts to reminisce on his wedding and how disappointing it was before deciding that Marge deserves a fresh start. In the end, Homer files for divorce so he can remarry the love of his life with a proper start this time.

Earlier episodes of The Simpsons have drawn attention to the failings in the marriage of Homer and Marge, with Homer attempting some grand romantic gesture in order to undo years of mistreatment. And while that's a common trope in both contemporary media and even earlier episodes of The Simpsons, this episode is the one that finally builds off of it, fitting for the show's deconstruction of many existing tropes. Homer understands that he cannot undo years of neglect with a few tickets to an opera or feigned interest in his wife, so he excuses the entire concept of a grand gesture and vows a new start in the most transparent way possible—literally divorcing and remarrying Marge while stating that he doesn't want a half-asset like they do on television.

This is put into contrast with Kirk and Luann's relationship. While Kirk is lamenting the loss of his wife, he's also trying to show off how well-adjusted he is without her, lying not only to himself but everyone else as well. It isn't until a few days of misery have passed that he finally realizes what a mistake he's made and asks for a second chance, as well as forgiveness. But by then, it's too late, whereas Homer asked for a second chance before wearing out the goodwill of his first one, making all the difference.

Lisa's date with Nelson. During his detention, Lisa gets detention herself for disrupting class, during which Nelson assists her and passing the time faster. This causes her to suspect that there may be a nice person somewhere deep down beneath his cruel exterior. So Lisa announces her newly discovered crush on Nelson to the guy, and he goes along with it. After a few dates, though, Lisa starts to suspect that she may have been wrong about him, though a few words from Marge convince her to give it another try. And soon she finds that he is a changed man, at least outwardly. When his friends convince him to go back to his old ways and throw expired food at Principal Skinner's house, he lies about his involvement and hides out with Lisa for an alibi. But when she discovers that he lied to her, she realizes that he can't actually change and that she was foolish to try.

In the B-plot, Homer finds an auto-dialer and starts to spam-call Springfield, only for the police to track him down and force him to call everyone to apologize, which he does using the repaired auto-dialer. Lisa has always been the most emotionally open character of the main cast of The Simpsons, the one person who has the perfect combination of optimism and naiveté to believe that there's some good in everybody. Whether it's trusting that the people at Homer's BBQ will happily eat gazpacho to save the animals as she would have, or that a stereotype like Nelson has some inner character depth that no one else has ever taken the time to try to see, because by this point in the show, so many characters of the cast have received enough development that they've stopped growing. There are hundreds of characters in the ensemble cast, so if there's a desire for a specific archetype to appear in a plot that demands it, the writers already have a character to choose from. This is why Flanderization occurs, but also how it can be circumvented. If we need a character to develop beyond their limited scope, it can happen as a response to another character's story. Each citizen of Springfield is a note on a piano, and there are millions of combinations you can make to form a chord. And as each note is played in tandem with another, you start to view each one in a new light.

Hurricane Neddy. A hurricane is blowing into Springfield, and the whole town panics as they're hopelessly unprepared, all but Ned Flanders whose family is completely ready for anything. The storm passes by, and miraculously everybody comes out unscathed except the Flanders', whose house is demolished. Ned lives in a shelter for a few days, walking the empty halls of the church as he asks God why he was targeted if he had always been a good Christian. Miraculously, though, the whole town of Springfield comes together to rebuild the Flanders' house from scratch, despite their inexperience. Naturally, the house is unlivable, and it falls apart under its own weight. Disturbed, Ned finally snaps and tears into various members of the repair team, telling them off before institutionalizing himself. A psychologist, Dr. Foster, who once worked with Ned in the past, learns of his former patient's institutionalization and rushes over to reveal his history: that Ned was once a hellion of a child with beat-nick parents who, through a rigorous course of spankings, was straightened out, though this left him unable to express anger, releasing a string of "dly doodes" instead. Finally, they're able to bring in Homer to the hospital to annoy Ned, and his frustrating behaviors finally allow him to express his disdain for his parents, granting him his freedom, despite threatening to run down people with his car.

From its inception, The Simpsons has always been a show about the fundamental absurdity behind much of the fantasy surrounding concepts like the American Dream—that the ideals that were espoused on television were not only outdated but never really true aspects of everyday life for anyone outside of a small selection of the upper-middle-class suburbanites. And yet, in spite of all the deconstruction the show managed over nearly a decade leading up to this point, there was always one exception to the rule: Ned Flanders. He was the American that The Simpsons was trying to tear down—eternally positive to a fault, always willing to do the right thing, and taking a strong moral lesson from any negative situation. If the show denounced an idea as being too optimistic, Ned was there to prove that maybe it was just a curse of cynicism making that dream seem dead. Anybody willing to look at the positive aspects of things was also able to find those positive aspects much more easily. This episode had to take a nearly supernatural hammer to this characterization to finally break it and then doubled down by stating that Ned was always repressed and crazy even from the beginning. It's almost like the writers finding a flaw in their ideology and then setting out to prove that we're all equally crazy—that only the same people are even worse.

El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Jomer (The Mysterious Journey of Our Homer). The Simpson family goes to a chili cook-off, despite Marge's attempts to prevent Homer from learning about it as she fears he'll get drunk as he does every year and embarrass them all. So Homer promises not to drink any beer, a promise that appears to be broken when he attempts to cool down his tongue following a particularly spicy Guatemalan Insanity pepper. Embarrassed by his failure to stomach the spice, he coats his tongue in wax in order to attempt to eat it again, this time succeeding and eating several. But the peppers don't sit well, and Homer starts to hallucinate, running off into the sunset. He undergoes a spiritual experience where a spirit guide in the form of a coyote tells him he has to search for his soulmate. Homer assumes that his soulmate is Marge, which the coyote calls into question, and soon he starts to fear that it might not be her, especially so when the following morning Marge is furious with Homer for breaking the promise he made the previous day. So Homer attempts to find his real soulmate, but in his failures soon winds up at a lighthouse where he plots to intentionally crash a ship by removing the light source. But Marge tracks him down using her knowledge of the man formed over several years of intimacy, and they managed to narrowly avoid a collision while once again professing their love for one another. Homer assumes that his soulmate is Marge until the coyote, voiced by Johnny Cash, warns him that she may potentially not be. This forces him onto a spiritual journey, or a second one, where he attempts to find the true love of his life, ultimately leading back to his wife. It's an episode that builds upon themes from earlier in the season about taking a relationship for granted. This episode is a test of faith for Homer's relationship with Marge—that only by calling into question these things can we reaffirm if they're true. Can loving really be a thing that you do passively? This episode was initially pitched as early as season 3, but the showrunners at the time ultimately shot down the idea as being too weird for The Simpsons as it was a more down-to-earth show. However, years of pushing boundaries and, of course, a change in staff allowed the concept to be revisited in a way that didn't contradict the tone surrounding the episode itself. The animations during the sequence were inspired by the works of Carlos Cena and are worthy of being put on a Roger Dean album cover—something that still makes them stand out among the rest of the show's visual style, but only just enough to call attention without creating too much of a shock to the audience. It's a testament to the show's evolution that an episode that departs so far from the typical visual style can simultaneously call into question the aspect of the very structure of the [Music] show.

The Springfield Files. The episode is introduced by Leonard Nimoy, who tells us that the following tale is a lie. It starts with Homer Simpson stumbling home drunk one evening when he comes across a glowing green creature in the woods, terrifying him as he runs home. When he tries to tell his friends and family, nobody believes him, and his delusions become the center of mockery. Then Agents Mulder and Scully from The X-Files arrive to verify his claims of an alien, though they can't get any definitive proof from the guy and ultimately conclude that he's faking it. But Bart believes his father, and so the two set out the following Friday to get proof of the alien's existence, which they do in the form of 3 seconds of shaky, grainy footage. Though this is enough to convince the entire town to come out the next week to see the alien for himself, and he reappears, only for Lisa to shine a flashlight on the creature, revealing that it was merely Mr. Burns, delirious from a series of medical procedures that allow him to cheat death for another week. This is another crossover episode in a similar vein to "A Star is Burns," which brings in characters from another series to promote each other. But unlike the earlier crossover event episodes, this one stands out by not focusing too heavily on the fact that it has guest stars. Mulder and Scully only play a role in the story during the second act, with their third-act appearance being in a crowd shot. In this way, it still manages to be an episode of The Simpsons about The Simpsons, and so Matt Groening left his name in the credits as it wasn't viewed as a 22-minute ad for another show. The town of Springfield gets caught up in the fervor of catching an alien, but only once they see footage of it on television. Hearing it from Homer doesn't hold their attention until he has some kind of video—as flimsily met as that standard of proof is. It's television that convinces them rather than the words of their neighbor, showing how quickly the medium can gain control over the mob's beliefs. Just as it takes very little for the mob to turn on the alien, their attendance to the reveal starting as a curiosity and becoming violent in the end. This episode is about mob mentality—one man can't convince us of anything, but if others are doing it, opinions are more easily swayed.

The Twisted World of Marge Simpson. Marge is kicked from the Springfield Investor Group for not being enough of a risk-taker, so she attends a franchise fair in order to find a new business to buy so she can compete against the group that expelled her. But the pretzel wagon, the franchise she purchases, continuously fails to get off of its feet through a combination of direct competition from Krusty and other various acts of Springfield. Demotived, Marge is about to give up on her dreams when Homer turns to the one place he knows of to get her the extra business: the mob. The Mafia demolishes her competition, intimidating them out of town so the pretzel wagon can flourish. But when it comes time for them to collect, Homer refuses to pay up, and soon Marge is made aware of their involvement in her business. Ultimately, they refuse to be intimidated and try to stand their ground, only for the Investorettes to arrive at the Simpsons' front door with the Yakuza, and the ensuing mob fight fixes all of their issues. Marge's self-worth in this episode comes from a financial place—that despite all she does for her loved ones, her value as a person is less because of the fact that she's failed to monetize this ability. The small business owner values that define middle-class suburban American life are here shown to be as cutthroat as the larger businesses that control the cities and the penthouses, just with much less of the wealth and respect one normally would have gotten. You suffer just as much for lesser potential, and everyone is just as willing to draw blood in the ensuing fights. Homer is willing to put the family in danger by associating with the mob in order to salvage Marge's self-worth from her failed business venture—something that wouldn't have been necessary if her hobby as a baker wasn't threatened with the overhanging desire to monetize, and this itself was only spurred on by the other investors demanding more from their returns than she was comfortable risking. In the end, it's hard to get by doing anything casually in a world that constantly questions why you would want to devote so much time of your day to something that's not part of a grind-set mentality. It's baffling to some to simply enjoy yourself in a world where we have competition drilled into our heads so consistently.

Mountain of Madness. Hoping to improve employee teamwork following a botched fire drill, Mr. Burns has the plant employees head to Mount Useful for a treacherous hike through the snow, with the last duo to arrive at the cabin being fired. Burns is paired with Homer, despite his assurances to Mr. Smithers that the pairings were rigged, and Smithers is left by himself with the Simpson kids tagging along as Homer didn't realize that employees were not supposed to bring their families. Burns insists that he and Homer cheat by using a horseless sleigh to arrive at the finish cabin before any of the others. But while relaxing together, they inadvertently cause multiple avalanches which leave the cabin buried underneath several feet of snow. It's not until hours later that the rest of the employees realize that Burns and Homer aren't arriving at what they assumed was the finish line that anybody is aware that there was an issue. Meanwhile, Homer and Mr. Burns grow increasingly paranoid of each other while trapped, eventually breaking into a scuffle where the propane tank is struck, and the ensuing rocket house rescues the duo. This was one of the first episodes to really develop Lenny and Carl as a duo. Even at this point in the show, the two constantly being paired up together was being referenced, but their dynamic was always that of two background characters who happen to be in the same place at the same time, both more interested in whatever third person was holding their attention. This is the point where the two started interacting directly with each other out of anything other than happenstance—well, at least not from a meta perspective—the point where they stop being fellow barflies or employees at the plant and start to be represented as Lenny and Carl. The other pairings in the episode also play a bit with the new dynamics. Bart and Lisa had rarely interacted with Waylon Smithers up to this point for anything that wasn't directly plot-related. Here, the characters are given some time to just be themselves and see what sort of dynamic might appear. We also see a similar thing occur as Homer and Burns are put together in both a relaxing and a stressful situation—something only hinted at in "Homer the Smithers," where Burns's involvement was as more of a plot device than a person. The episode's more absurd humor and setting give way for dynamics to be explored rather than anything more individually driven.

Simpsoncalifragilisticexpialidocious. The Simpson family begins to notice that Marge is losing her hair, and when she goes to Dr. Hibbert for a diagnosis, he deduces that she's losing it due to stress. So they decide to hire a nanny in order to reduce the workload on Marge, and after a few trials that end poorly, wind up with a Miss Sherri Bobbins, a royalty-free version of Mary Poppins. She uses the power of music to help the Simpson family around the house, showing them new ways to live and compromising to reach solutions to things like cleaning up after themselves. After a while, it's her time to leave them behind. Before she can make it past the driveway, they're at each other's throats once again, so Sherri resigns herself to continue working until they can resolve their issues, which the Simpson family doesn't seem too interested in doing. Ultimately, she cracks under the pressure, and out of guilt, The Simpsons sing a song about how they don't care to improve. Satisfied that she's done as much as she can, Sherri leaves the family before getting sucked into a plane's engine. This episode structures itself as a musical in the same vein as the property that it parodies, giving the parody an aspect much deeper than a mere surface-level comparison. And while The Simpsons cast singing most of their motives is a novel idea, the execution ultimately comes across as somewhat stilted, possibly intentionally so, as the songs start to become something that even the family themselves grow sick of. The episode ultimately concludes with the lesson that the Simpson family has no interest in self-improvement and that Sherri was wrong to have even tried, even if that attempt was still appreciated. It ends up underpinning the core message of the first act of the episode, which would have been more damning for the plot if, again, the episode wasn't just an excuse to do a few musicals. Between these and the episode's ample other pop culture references made as the family sitting around the television at multiple points, this is one of at least the Simpsons episodes of The Simpsons so far where so many of the other episodes with very little involvement from the family at least use other established Springfield denizens in their place. Here, the focus seems to be on the culture being referenced instead of the family doing the referencing—where America once saw themselves on television, now they only see more television.

The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show. The ratings for Itchy & Scratchy are going down the drain, so the writers form a focus group to find out what's wrong with the show, and Lisa informs them that after so many years, the characters and jokes are getting stale. So to combat this, a new character is introduced to the show: Poochie. He's every 90s stereotype rolled into one, and a new voice for the character is chosen to be Homer Simpson after he insults the director during his interview on the day of his unveiling. Audiences hate Poochie to the point that the show is even worse received than before, so the writers make the decision to kill him off. But Homer refuses to voice the lines where his character dies and writes in his own where he pleads to the audience to give the character a second chance and that they got off on the wrong foot. The writers listening in are moved by his statement, and when the following episode airs, it's revealed that they simply dubbed over all the lines poorly and wrote him out anyway. The removal of the character is so well-received that Itchy & Scratchy is celebrated once again, and Homer laments not asking for any creative control or money. After eight seasons, it's almost unheard of for a television show to maintain any level of quality, especially not one that has as much to live up to as The Simpsons. Every complaint leveled towards the show today has been brought up even since the early days, and this is a response to those sorts of comments, not only from "fans" of the show but from executives wanting to wrestle creative control of the property away from the writers and towards what focus groups and committees may have wanted. Because fundamentally, nobody is going to know the cast of characters as well as the writers themselves, and often giving the crowd exactly what they want is a fast route towards disappointing them—something that finishes out this episode as Bart and Lisa praised the removal of Poochie only to not watch the show anyway. It's a creative conflict that's been seen time and time again through history—to name a non-television example, one only has to look at New Coke. Focus groups and taste tests showed that the flavor was better received than its old version, but many in the actual demographic hated the change, losing the hardcore 12-pack-a-day crowd as well as those who viewed the soft drink as a cultural icon.

Drink as a product of American culture. In the end, it was the return to the original formula that was able to salvage the brand in a bid that executives claimed they weren't smart enough to mastermind, nor stupid enough to try.

Homer phobia when Bart destroys the gas main. The Simpsons have to sell some old antiques to afford to have it replaced, and while at the collectible store, they meet John. John easily gets along with the Simpson family, finding a kitschy value in their simple American lives. When they invite him over and Homer expresses his fondness for the man, until Marge reveals to her husband that the man is gay. Terrified, Homer starts to feel the worst, that spending time around a homosexual may cause Bart to become infected in some sort and become gay himself. And when Bart starts to wear Hawaiian shirts and drag, Homer decides that it's time to straighten the boy out. But his attempts to show Bart manly things all end up backfiring, until he gets the idea from Barney and Moe to take the boy hunting. Hopefully, killing something will work, but unable to find any deer in the wild, they instead go to a reindeer enclosure and encourage Bart to shoot a caged animal. But the reindeer grow restless around the men and surround Homer, who uses his body to shield Bart from their charging, until ultimately Jon shows up to scare the deer off with a robotic Santa. In the end, Homer tells Bart that he doesn't care how he turns out, and Lisa informs Bart what was really going through Homer's head over the episode.

Homosexuality is often conflated with a lack of masculinity, with either one being at once a cause and/or effect of the other. It was not uncommon in the past for manly excursions to be made in an attempt to toughen up young boys under the assumption that it would make them straight; that sexuality is a learned behavior and masculinity, as well as heterosexuality, is a social construct. Ironically enough, when the truth of this situation is that it's a self-fulfilling set of stereotypes, boys are told from a young age that they have to be manly and that nothing is less manly than being gay. Once they learn to accept that they're gay later in life, this becomes an almost liberating feeling where there's now zero social pressure to conform or perform masculinity, though some pressure to conform will still persist. And as such, there's a stereotype of the flaming homosexual, when that's just the logical conclusion of a man who's no longer pretending to be something that he's not. This is a stigma that's faded over the last few years, especially I've noticed in Gen Z, that there's barely a desire to pretend to be macho anymore, and rather than an immense pressure for men to be men, men can now be themselves. It's as John says in this episode, his preferred term is not gay, or fruit, or queer, but [Music].

John's brother, from another series, Sideshow Bob, is released from prison on a work-release program, gaining employment as the manager of a dam construction project under his brother, Cecil. It's revealed that Cecil is resentful of Bob for ruining his audition to become Crusty's sidekick by getting the part himself, though he claims he's over that. Bart refuses to believe that Bob has reformed, however, and sets out to prove this claim by stalking Bob at every chance, something that doesn't make his work alongside incompetent staff any easier. Finally, Bart and Lisa sneak out and find a briefcase containing $15 million in Bob's trailer, which they consider proof that Bob is embezzling money. Though when he corners them inside the dam later, it's revealed that Cecil was actually the mastermind behind the plot and that he skimmed on concrete with plans to blow up the dam, destroying the evidence and pinning the blame on his brother. Bart has to get over his anxiety surrounding Bob in order to work together with him to escape, and the trio then confront Cecil atop the dam, with Bart saving Bob's life later and the two making up their differences. Despite this, Bob is still arrested alongside his brother.

The Simpsons is a show that parodies the formulaic monotony that makes up so many other contemporary shows and yet is also one that's guilty of reusing many of its own plot beats on occasion. This is explored during this episode, from awkward dialogue where Bob has to explain the plot of every episode he's been in so far to Bart refusing to believe that their dynamic is capable of changing, all the way to the police arresting him at the end of the episode even though he did nothing wrong. That's just the way we expect a Sideshow Bob episode to go, and it's the way that it does. The distinction this time is that the audience has their expectations subverted explicitly by playing the episode's ending completely straight. We got what we were expecting, and nobody could have expected that, as the episode calls attention to multiple times. The voice of Cecil is played by David Hyde Pierce, who voices one half of a pair of brothers alongside Kelsey Grammer in the show Frasier. Their dynamic is carried over into The Simpsons, creating a series of well-read and highbrow jokes that are rarely ever seen in a show like this; a new dynamic where two outcasts are finally able to share a scene with an intellectual equal. Sideshow Bob is a great, if not a bit overused by this point, character, and to give him a moment in the spotlight rather than as a purely antagonistic force helps to keep his personality within The Simpsons fresh.

My sister, my sitter. Marge and Homer wish to attend a gala at the Springfield Squidport, and they need a babysitter for their kids while they're out. As Lisa has been babysitting many of the kids of Springfield in recent days to much success, they decide to leave the house with her in charge of Bart. But Bart is furious that his younger sister is the one put in charge of him, so he decides to take matters into his own hands by being as frustrating as possible. Bart gives Maggie caffeine and makes a series of calls to the house that result in a crowd gathering. Later, when Bart is refusing to go to his room, he trips and falls down the stairs, dislocating his arm in the process. But rather than accepting any medical attention, he doubles down on his injuries, knocking himself unconscious to make Lisa look bad. But as the hospital won't send anybody out to the Simpson household again that night, she resorts to loading Bart into a wheelbarrow and walking him to a clinic. But when that's full, she tries taking him to the hospital, only for Bart to fall out of the wheelbarrow when Lisa stopped by the police. He lands in the mud near the harbor where Homer, Marge, and the rest of Springfield sees how poorly she's been treating her brother. Though ultimately this results in very little as she continues to get babysitter jobs from the very people who saw the wheelbarrow incident.

This episode explores dynamics in things like babysitting; how even if your kids are mature enough to watch others, they can still fail to be a proper caretaker if their authority is not recognized by each other. This episode adds a layer to this relationship by having Lisa, the younger of the two, be the one that Marge and Homer put in charge. There's anger from Bart, not only because he has to listen to his little sister, but because his parents have deemed that she's more worthy of the position; that he's not mature enough for the responsibility, so it's been passed on to the next in line, which is also somewhat tragic for Lisa, despite how excited she is for the opportunity to show off how responsible she is. This comes with an expectation as well, that her childhood is effectively cut short due to Bart's inability to behave himself. Of course, rather than trying to disprove this dynamic by showing off that it's unwarranted, Bart doubles down by playing up the expectation, or lack thereof, that his parents have placed on him; a scorched-earth response to not getting his way.

Homer versus the 18th Amendment. When Bart gets publicly drunk at a St. Patrick's Day parade, some of the moral busybodies of Springfield start to demand a law regarding a ban on alcohol. But it's shortly thereafter discovered that Springfield already has a 200-year-old Prohibition law that hasn't been getting enforced, so liquor is banned in Springfield. Though Wiggum is less than intent on actually upholding the law until he's caught drinking, and so he gets replaced by someone who will. That somebody is Rex Banner, a 1920s policeman stereotype who immediately begins shutting down all the imports with his unbribable ways. But Homer comes up with a scheme to smuggle new liquor into the city through bowling balls connected to Moe's Tavern through a series of underground pipes. Although this only lasts for a while before the buried beer barrels he's been sourcing from run dry, and soon he begins to make his own alcohol. But after a combination of exploding distilleries and seeing a down on his luck Wiggum, Homer is encouraged to turn himself in to bring things back to normal. Though before he can be punished, it's discovered that the 200-year-old prohibition law was actually repealed 199 years ago.

This episode parodies The Untouchables with Homer as the kingpin in order to get a much less serious reaction from audiences and to keep things light-hearted, as by now we know that he's too simple-minded for the dirtier side of mob business, with the Springfield Mafia themselves being written out of the major plot in order to make a more character-focused story. Homer ultimately continues his beer-baron business after running out of supplies, less out of a love of beer and more because he enjoyed the thrill of circumventing the law, like Breaking Bad but a decade earlier and a decade sillier. Unlike the other show, this episode goes to great lengths to ensure that the tone stays bright throughout, almost intentionally poking fun at the gritty aesthetics one might expect from media depictions of a caper and robber story versus what we got. Homer takes his circumvention of the law about as seriously as we do, and it's only Rex Banner, as well as Lisa, who view the events as potentially harmful. Ironic considering that Lisa's never really shied away from breaking a law that she views as unjust as a form of protest. And while there's a stark difference between the typical civil disobedience and Homer's more ego-driven approach, this episode doesn't get near enough to any sort of moralizing on it either way.

Grade school confidential. Miss Krabappel and Seymour Skinner are bored at Martin's birthday party and, being the only adults there, talk to each other, where they learn of just how much the two have in common. They hide from Seymour's mother inside of a playhouse, and the two begin to make out, which Bart catches them doing. He's about to tell everybody in school when he's called away to Skinner's office and bribed with a deletion of his personal record to keep the secret. But being the only other person in the know, he's soon dragged between the two as a middleman for all their romance, which leaves Bart exhausted and humiliated in front of his classmates. So he reveals the affair to the school, and the children rush home to give exaggerated accounts of events to their parents, who then react by demanding that the duo be fired. But Bart, seeing how listless Skinner is after he revealed the affair, tells the man to stand up for himself, and so the three barricade themselves inside the school. Eventually, Skinner steps out to calm the crowd where he reveals that the version of events the town knows are exaggerated, and everyone agrees to let the two keep their jobs and their love. At the end of the episode, Edna and Seymour tell Bart that they're breaking up and that they'll be announcing as such in the future, though this is quickly revealed to be a ruse to allow the two to continue dating in secret with much less public scrutiny against them. Because in the town of Springfield, rumors get spread to an unreasonable extent as people desperately search for some sort of intriguing story. So long as the two are still in a relationship, there will be some kind of rumor being spread about them, whether there's any drama or not. Whether an event sounds interesting is often more valuable to the public than whether or not it is. But the relationship between Edna and Skinner is interesting, just not in the zesty, exaggerated way that many would want it to be. Both characters are past their prime in terms of who's available to them for various reasons. Miss Krabappel has been far too long with various pursuits to the point that she started to wonder if the high standards are worth it. Meanwhile, Skinner has been repressed for so long that his standards are non-existent; not as in zero, but as in null. The two meeting comes across less like they're settling and more like they're exploring new options; a person they've never thought about before in that way.

The K9 Mutiny. Bart signs up for a credit card in Santa's Little Helper's name and, upon its arrival, starts to splurge on a series of purchases, including one specialty bred and trained collie which he names Latty. Latty quickly becomes the favorite animal among the family, to the detriment of Santa's Little Helper, who starts to get less and less attention. Eventually, the repo men show up to repossess all the things Bart bought with the card, and when they try to take back the $1,200 dog, Bart claims Santa's Little Helper is the one they want. But he soon starts to feel guilty over this, especially when the high demands of Latty make him give the dog away to the police force. When the Simpson family learns that Bart gave away both dogs, they're not too disturbed as Santa's Little Helper was destructive and Latty's gone to a better home. But Bart, being the only one to love Santa's Little Helper, becomes determined to get his dog back, and he tracks the mutt to the home of a blind man. After a failed attempt at breaking in and stealing the dog, the two decides that it's best for Santa's Little Helper to decide on his own, and he chooses Bart. Bart wants to do something to cheer the man up, but then the police arrive with Latty and the dog sniffs out drugs in the man's pocket.

In an earlier season, we saw an episode about the Simpson family losing their dog and immediately regretting the loss to the point of trying to get him back. Here, a similar plot beat is used, just to a different effect. When Santa's Little Helper is put away in a kennel, a lie by Bart, but they don't know that, nobody is especially annoyed or upset with the loss. Bart himself is even quick to give him away, recognizing his objectively lower value to everybody. But the guilt of this act, combined with Bart's realization that Santa's Little Helper is thoroughly unloved by all who surround him, and this contributes to his desire to get his dog back. When this is complicated by Santa's Little Helper becoming the companion of a blind man, Bart only briefly hesitates to get him back; he's still far too guilty over everything that's happened to confront the man head-on, even with a lie, and so he goes for a stealthy approach purely to avoid having to answer for what he's done. Bart has a belief that as long as he can pretend he never messed up, the mistake will cease to exist, but he's eventually forced to confront his actions. And while the blind man isn't shown to be an especially sympathetic character, gloating in parts, when he's briefly captured, it's not about the guilt of stealing a dog from a blind man, but the fact that this guilt is stacked upon so many other mistakes. In the end, Bart only finds happiness by leaving the whole situation behind, going home with his companion and not involving himself in a series of wrong decisions any longer.

The Old Man and the Lisa. When Mr. Burns gives a speech to Lisa's Junior Achievers Club, she points out that he's not actually as wealthy as he claims to be, which prompts him to check on his stockholdings, only to learn that he's lost much of his pre-Great Depression holdings. So he takes on a misguided investment strategy that his team of yes-men lawyers approve of and wind up completely broke, losing his mansion and his plant with nothing to his name and no experience in middle-class society. Burns is quickly committed to the retirement castle where he meets Lisa as she's searching for something to recycle. Realizing her confrontational ways are the opposite of the attitudes of his previous advisors, he begs Lisa to assist him in rebuilding his corporate empire, which she agrees to do on the condition that he only do so in a socially conscious way. So Mr. Burns creates a recycling empire, building bit by bit until he's able to open a large-scale plant with Lisa's name on it. But as she's being given a tour, Lisa learns that the plant also produces a slurry from a massive conveyor belt that feeds off of local sea life, and that Mr. Burns is even more destructive when he's trying to do good. In the end, he sells the new plant and repurchases the old one to get his previous life back. When he offers Lisa her share of the profits, she rejects the offer, which gives Homer a heart attack.

Through this episode, there's a prevailing idea that Mr. Burns, despite his behavior, is not actually an evil force in the town of Springfield, but rather that he's the type to fill a role that exists. His business, since is lacking with all his money being lost due to his combination of poor asking for financial advice and poor asset management, it's not as if he was some genius businessman, simply a moderately wealthy person who could inherit a money-making machine in the nuclear plant. And his return to power comes in much the same way; his new industry simply filled a niche in the economy that would have had to be filled anyway, just being in the right place at the right time while also being the lowest bidder. It's not as though his wickedness is something inherent to himself, but that society was looking for somebody to be evil, and he molded himself into that shape. When Burns first starts working with Lisa, he's able to be enterprising and socially conscious of his actions, but this only takes him so far. It's not until he finds demand for pig food, dynamite, and various other industries that he reveals his true nature because there's always a desire to run things as cheaply as possible, and when finances are being considered, dignity is far too cost-prohibitive.

In Marge We Trust. Reverend Lovejoy's sermons are failing to hold the attention of the parishioners, so Marge takes to volunteering in order to make the church a more interesting place. She learns that Lovejoy was once a more active minister who cared about everybody but slowly became more and more jaded as Ned Flanders repeatedly called in with much more minor questions. So Marge takes over answering the phone as the "listen lady," and she's soon much more popular than Lovejoy ever was, which results in him losing the hearts of the churchgoers. But when Marge gives Ned some bad advice on how to handle a group of teenagers, he's chased out of town, and it's up to her and Lovejoy to save him. The Reverend drives a train through the zoo to save Ned when the latter is chased into a baboon enclosure, and his recounting of how he fought off the primates reinvigorates the church audience. In the B plot, Homer discovers a box of Japanese detergent with his face on it and investigates where it might have come from, ultimately learning that it was mere coincidence when a manufacturer combined their logos with a fishery.

Despite how sarcastic and left-leaning The Simpsons has always been, one thing it still treats with a level of respect is religion in general. While it occasionally mocks organized religion, as well as the various leaders of the faith who might not have the best interests of their parishioners in mind, the actual act of worship is never viewed with the smug irreverence that would define a lot of the atheist movement of the late 2000s and early 2010s. Reverend Lovejoy is meant to be less of a cynic's take on the church and more of an exhausted man trying and failing to live up to the conservative idealism of the 1950s and 60s. Thematically in line with the rest of the show, and Marge ends up following in a similar arc to Reverend Timothy Lovejoy; she begins to feel overwhelmed from the constant demands of Springfield as they want her advice, and when she gives a bad bit of advice to Ned, cannot handle the associated guilt. Had she been continued to be tested in this way, a sense of burnout would have been inevitable, but it's not as though this brief amount of work was all for nothing; she was able to inspire Lovejoy to find a refreshed sense of passion for his work. So even though Marge's tenure as the "listen lady" was short, its impact was still lasting throughout the way it helped another person.

Homer's enemy. After seeing the story of Frank Grimes, a man who came from nothing to get a degree in nuclear physics, Burns decides to hire the man as Executive Vice President, only to forget about this the next day and put him next to

Homer Frank is the model employee, keeping his station clean and working diligently, which puts him in stark contrast with Homer, who's comparatively lazy and self-destructive. Frank admonishes his coworker, so Homer decides to invite him to his house to repair the rift in their relationship. But when Frank arrives at the Simpson household, he's astonished by the size of the place, as well as all of the various grand achievements of Homer through the years. But worse than the perception that Homer hasn't earned any of his wealth is the fact that nobody in Springfield seems to mind. So Frank comes up with a plan to humiliate Homer by entering him into a contest for children, which Homer then wins despite his clear lack of abilities. In response, Frank goes mad, acting out and claiming that he can get away with it because he's Homer Simpson, that is, until he grabs some exposed wires and passes away.

In the B plot, Bart buys a foreclosed factory for a dollar and hires Milhouse to work there, mostly just messing around with the rickety equipment. But when the factory falls down under its own weight, the two boys quickly move on.

The Simpsons originally started as a deconstruction of many of the tropes taken for granted by writers of TV sitcoms during the 50s and 60s, the television that a generation of children grew up on, then being re-examined through the lenses of an adult who is living in a very different world than the ones they were promised as a child. In this incarnation, Homer was the adult who failed to live up to his imagination, disappointed in reality while still trying to piece together as much of the shattered American Dream as he could find. But after eight years on the air and another paradigm shift from culture, the show had changed. Homer went from living in the '80s while dreaming of the 60s to living in the '90s and dreaming of the '80s; from living in the present to living in—well, still in the present—and so his earlier role is now played by Frank Grimes. Grimes is the man who did everything he was supposed to; he followed all the steps to live out the dream that so many were promised and got nothing for it, but Homer did. Homer once lamented his lack of a place in society but is now one of the most interesting individuals in the world through nothing but his persistence in existing. Homer's enemy, as the episode's title brings up, is not Frank Grimes, but Homer himself. The character exists as a portal from the past looking into the present and resenting what he sees with a hatred that can only be properly levied towards the self.

The Simpson spin-off showcase. Troy McClure introduces a series of fake spin-offs made to fill gaps in Fox's network schedule. The first is Chief Wiggum PI, set in New Orleans after Wiggum gets fired from the Springfield police force for massive corruption and takes old, swampy native Seymour Skinner with him. Wiggum finds that he has a new enemy by the name of Big Daddy, who kidnaps Ralph. The duo searched for the boy for a while before getting involved in an airboat chase, which results in getting Ralph back, though Big Daddy gets away to menace them again next week. Then comes The Love Medic Grandpa, a spin-off where Abe Simpson gets his soul trapped inside of Moe's Love Tester machine and begins to give the guy advice on romance. It works for a while when Moe is able to score a date with the woman who comes into the bar after her car breaks down, but as he's nervous about the date, he brings the machine along with him. But when Grandpa is attacked by teenagers, he gives some bad advice that ruins the date, until Moe comes forward with the truth and the woman's pleased enough with the amount of effort that he's put in. Finally, is The Simpson Family Smile Time Variety Hour, a series of short sketches and musical numbers featuring the Simpson family, as well as many of the side characters, but not Lisa, as she abstains from the absurdity of it all. The episode concludes with Troy McClure revealing bits of information about season 9, including off-the-wall magical powers, crazy weddings, and multiple new characters.

The longer a show runs for, the less it'll have in common with the original premise, as well as its initial tone. This is often made worse by a show's success, as there will be pressure from networks to replicate that success without oversaturating their own market. Spin-offs have been suggested for The Simpsons before, with the showrunners rejecting the idea, and in this episode, the whole premise is mocked in a way that's reminiscent of The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show.

The Secret War of Lisa Simpson. Bart pulls a prank involving a series of megaphones that breaks every glass window in Springfield, so his parents ship him off to military school. While touring the facilities, Lisa is impressed by the sense of discipline, as well the challenge of the class is there, and as she hasn't properly been challenged by Springfield Elementary in years, decides to enroll as well. But the other students at Ramblewood don't take too kindly to having a female contemporary, and they plot to haze Bart and Lisa into quitting. But both kids managed to weather the hazing, and Bart is soon accepted as one of them, though they continue to neglect Lisa, which Bart is later rubbed into doing as well, due to wanting to fit in. She's nearly ready to give up after the commandant introduces The Eliminator, a rope course that must be navigated to graduate, but Bart agrees to help her train in secret. On the day of the final, the entire class is booing Lisa as she struggles with the course, until Bart goes against the crowd and begins encouraging her. After she succeeds, the rest of the students declare that they'll make the siblings' life a living hell for the rest of the semester, though graduation is in 3 hours. In the end, Lisa gets a medal for satisfactory completion of the second grade, and the Simpson children are rewarded with a trip to the dentist.

Lisa is typically defined by two things: the first is her complete lack of close friends, as she isolates herself from the low-brow Springfieldian masses due to her intellectual pursuits; the second is that intellect and the consistent way in which she's never properly challenged in life. These two create a sort of feedback where she never gets a real challenge, nor is there someone around to support her, even if she finally did. In this episode, Lisa finally receives what she wants out of the education system, only to quickly become overwhelmed by the difficulty, made worse when her brother abandons her for popularity. If Lisa had been challenged before, she likely would have failed, as she doesn't have anybody else to support her, and vice versa in that pursuit. And here the two character traits are shown again, as the presence of one brings out the absence of another. But Lisa finally getting the difficult school life she always had wanted is a wasted plotline on this episode; we never really get to see her shine intellectually, despite this being her initial complaint at the episode start. It would have been more interesting had Lisa been more in control through the episode, only to regret the extra difficulty as it leads to no more life satisfaction than what she had had before. Instead, Ramblewood Military School is more of a collection of physical challenges, with the episode focusing on Bart and Lisa's relationship instead of Lisa's inner struggles, and the for of these two aspects is something that eight seasons in is pretty overplayed, with this episode in particular adding nothing new to the formula.

Season 9. Season 8 was the last full season run by Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein, with Mike Scully taking over, although a few hold-out episodes from the previous seasons would still air. Season 9 also marks the first point in time where modern critics of the show view the "golden age" as having ended, though many others still insist that this age would continue on through at least season 12, the last season run mostly by Scully. The most notable change from season 8 comes from the number of episodes that focus less on the Simpson family and more on an individual character, often from the non-Simpson cast, instead, with a Simpson only appearing for a supporting role. It's still part of an existing trend to separate the family to do more solo plots and to see how individual actors behave without the others, yet here it becomes a much more concerned with developing these characters' past lives and giving an amount of depth to them. To the hardcore fan base, this is often viewed as being dishonest to the show's initial appeal. These characters began their lives as caricatures of modern American life, so to give them backstories and unique motivations separates them from that role as a point of satire. It also forces a recontextualization of their past actions: if the characters have this sort of emotional baggage from the beginning, does this make the earlier episodes worse somehow for not referencing it, or does it make the current episode appear as thoughtless for making things up? But The Simpsons has been running for nearly a decade by this point in its history, so for the characters to repeatedly perform these roles to poke fun at modern life would eventually get old. You can only bring up stereotypes so many times before they stop to be funny, or worse, they stop being accurate. Society moves on, and the mirror held up to that society ought to change as well. So to prevent the show from becoming an artifact, something had to change, and change is rarely met with kindness.

The City of New York versus Homer Simpson. When Barney is the designated driver at Moe's, he slowly loses control of himself after Duff Man shows up to celebrate the drink, until he takes Homer's car and vanishes with it. Two months later, Homer receives a letter in the mail from the city of New York stating that his car is parked illegally in the city and that he must retrieve it within 72 hours. So The Simpsons go to New York City. Despite Homer's insistence that the city is a putrid hellhole, he learns that the car is parked between the World Trade Center buildings and is instructed to wait there for a traffic cop to arrive. But as he's waiting, he drinks too much crab juice and cough syrup that he has to use the restroom all the way at the top of the towers, missing his scheduled time. Eventually, Homer gets frustrated and simply tries to drive away with the boot still attached, destroying it and most of his car with a jackhammer before picking up his family, who have been having a great time viewing the sights and sounds. The episode ends with an enraged Homer driving home as the rest of the Simpsons wonder if they'll get to visit again.

Homer goes into the city of New York with the preconception of what the city will be like, and everything that happens there only strengthens his beliefs, despite the fact that so many of the things that go wrong are his own fault, or at least issues that he exacerbated that would have happened in Springfield anyway. New York didn't destroy the family car; Homer did. It's like having one bad thing happen to you and letting it ruin your whole day, only the bad thing that happened was just the expectation of negativity. Marge, Bart, and Lisa don't have some negative preconception of the city and are able to enjoy it because they're mentally prepared to look on the bright side of things. The elephant in the script is that this episode was pulled following the September 11th terror attacks, in much of the West, being brought back in a semi-censored form after a few years had passed. It wasn't something done out of any outcry or demand but was a preemptive move to prevent any potential backlash before it could occur while the showrunners decided on what to do moving forward. And while the episode is now available in more or less its original formatting, this is still representative of the way that The Simpsons would deal with controversies moving forward, always airing very far on the side of caution.

The Principal and the Pauper. To celebrate 20 years of being the principal of Springfield Elementary, a surprise party is held for Seymour Skinner. But the festivities attract the attention of a mysterious man who enters the building and claims he's Seymour Skinner, something that the school principal corroborates. He elaborates on the story that his name was once Armen Tarian, and he was an orphan street punk who was made to join the Army during Vietnam after a crime spree. Once there, he met the real Seymour Skinner and, upon hearing his dream of being an elementary school principal, decided he had a future after all. But when Seymour was presumed killed in action, he adopted the man's persona and began living as him. But as the real Skinner is back, Tarian leaves Springfield behind to resume living as a street punk once more. But both men quickly realize that their new lives are not the ones for them, and with a bit of prodding from the town's folk, switch identities back. After all of this happens, Judge Snider deems that anybody who mentions the true identity of Seymour Skinner in the future will be punished with torture, a reference to the enforced status quo that many shows, especially The Simpsons, often used in their episodes. Even if there's not some big contrivance to bring everything back to the way it was at the end of the episode, the show will still reset to its neutral state, with only a few exceptions. Ironically, the relationship between Edna and Seymour was one such development. It's the kind of thing that's practically a necessity in any long-running show that wants to keep things consistent. If the show's narrative develops, then there's a pressure to either reinvent itself every few seasons or risk feeling like every character's journey feeling like a treadmill, or worse, a risk that the show begins to reach for new developments in the way of a trashy telenovela. But this episode was, even at the time, very poorly received. Critics mentioned it was as if viewers were being punished for paying attention or caring about the characters. It's not as though this is the first time a development in characters has been factiously retconned at the end of an episode, merely the first time it's been done to this scale and the first time so much attention was called to it. It's not so much that viewers are punished for paying attention as it is that the show is making fun of the audience for being willing to suspend their disbelief, something that's typically a show of good faith from a viewer.

Lisa's Sax. When Lisa's sax is playing a noise, Homer tells Bart to stop her, which results in the instrument being destroyed by traffic. Lamenting that she's had the saxophone for as long as she can remember, Homer regales the story of how she got it in the first place. It begins as Bart is attending his first day at Springfield Elementary, though he's struggling to fit in and becomes depressed as a result. But while meeting with the school counselor, he learns that Lisa is gifted and encourages Homer and Marge to enroll her in a private preschool. But the preschool costs far too much for them to afford, and Homer struggles to find some other way to encourage Lisa's intelligence. Eventually, he comes across a music store and notices that the instruments might be a decent means of supporting her, though he has to use the family's air conditioner fund to pay for it. Meanwhile, Bart meets Milhouse and, after making the boy laugh milk out of his nose, finds a passion as the class clown, despite Skinner's annoyance with him. In the end, the episode returns to the present day, and Homer buys Lisa a new saxophone, once again with the AC fund. Both Bart and Lisa are shown as being unable to find some kind of fulfillment in this episode, with both coming across different means of self-expression to cope with that: Bart with his humor and Lisa with her music. This is the sort of message that's been expressed through the series since the first season, and the only difference this episode has is the timetable, as it shows the origins of character traits that we already know exist. So the true appeal of this episode is akin to the appeal of any flashback sequence, in seeing the characters navigate an earlier time and an earlier country. While we get to see a few of the characters we know at a younger age, but this then is when the episode really starts to get into what's interesting. It's a flashback episode to Bart as a 5-year-old, taking place 5 years before the current year, which is 1997 for anybody counting. In 1992, The Simpsons was on the air with Bart attending Springfield Elementary as a fourth grader. This is the first flashback to take place after the show started airing, and the world shown begins to reflect the floating timeline of The Simpsons, that the setting always takes place in the current year, with the past moving around to adapt to this. And while this episode doesn't have any grand historical set pieces that are grounded to a specific date, this fact only makes it an easier introduction to such a feature of The Simpsons.

Treehouse of Horror VIII. The Hga Man. After Mayor Quimby makes some negative comments about the French, they retaliate by firing a nuclear missile at the town. It strikes while Homer is shopping around for a bunker, and the bunker he was looking at shields him from the blast. Now the last man in Springfield, he begins roaming around doing whatever he wants until a mob of mutated Springfieldites comes upon him, trying to kill him to create a mutant utopia. Homer flees the mob and returns home, where he learns that the lead in the paint of his house shielded his family from the blast as well. The mutants are moved by the scene of Homer reuniting with his family and decide that perhaps they can live in harmony after all, and then Marge kills them.

Fly vs. Fly. Homer purchases a matter transporter from a garage sale and uses it lazily around the house, telling the rest of the family not to play around with it. Bart wants to use the transporter, and after noticing it combining the DNA of Snowball and Santa's Little Helper, comes up with the idea to combine his DNA with a fly by entering at the same time. The rest of the Simpson family come across the fly with Bart's body and accept him as their new son. Meanwhile, Bart tries to get their attention as his head on a fly's body. Ultimately, only Lisa is able to notice. When the fly Bart catches them conspiring to remove him, he attacks Lisa, only to be pushed into the transporter again. In the end, Homer picks up an axe and decides to do what he should have done a long time ago and asks Bart for messing with his machine.

Easy Big Koven. The town of Springfield in the year 1649 is burning random accused women of witchcraft. When they start to run out of women to burn, Marge pleads with them for some sort of sanity, so they accuse her of being a witch and throw her off a cliff. Marge responds by flying away, proving that they were right about her. She goes back to her sisters' coven, where the trio comes up with the idea to eat the village's children. But when Ned Flanders offers gingerbread children instead of real ones, the witches simply decide to go door-to-door exploiting people for candy, and this explains the origins of Halloween and trick-or-treating.

The Cartridge Family. After a routine soccer riot causes Marge to fear for the family's safety, Homer decides to protect them by purchasing a gun. Marge is disturbed by the presence of a firearm in the house and implores Homer to get rid of it, but he compromises by taking her to an NRA meeting to convince her it's a good idea. But when this fails, and Homer also refuses to get rid of the gun on top of lying about the fact that he would, she takes the kids and leaves them to stay in a motel instead. Homer hosts an NRA get-together at his house, where the rest of the members are horrified at the nonchalant way in which he uses his gun for everything, revoking his membership and kicking him out of his own house. Realizing that the protection the gun provides isn't worth it if he has no family to protect, Homer finally tracks down Marge and swears he's disposed of the firearm for good. But when he pulls it out during a robbery and Marge realizes he lied again, he gives it to her to dispose of personally, which, after seeing herself holding it, she decides not to.

The gun argument in the US has a lot of facets to it, but this episode largely focuses on the more psychological of them. Homer feels powerful when carrying a firearm, and it starts to become a part of his view of himself to own one; his value as a person as viewed by Homer is attached to a tool that he owns, and as such it's not really about protecting his family or his rights, but rather his ego. It's a bit like an oversized pickup truck, where some people need one for their work to haul equipment and others need one to carry their ego. Some people use a gun to shoot wildlife attacking their...

Garden others use theirs to take selfies with it. We even see that split in this episode: Between the way Homer uses his gun and the way that Marge or the rest of the NRA uses theirs. While Lenny alludes to a sort of Neighborhood Watch program that the Springfield gun owners have formed, Homer wants his more so for the fantasy of keeping his family safe than to actually protect them, seen when his idea of safe storage is the vegetable crisper. His idea of gun ownership is one made out of emotion rather than logic, but then again, most of Homer's decisions are made this way.

Bart stars because of his weight gain. Homer and Marge sign up Bart for a peewee football team coached by Flanders. Though Ned quits the job after being heckled by Homer, despite his winning record. Once Homer takes charge, he starts trying to drill fundamentals into his son with a tough love approach. But when Marge reminds him of how little affection he used to receive from Abe Simpson, Homer changes his mind and puts Bart in as quarterback, despite Nelson carrying the team in the position. Bart continuously lets down the team, eventually attempting to fake an injury to get out of the role. When this doesn't work, he quits. Homer soon realizes his error and decides to ask Bart to come back in a role that he's more comfortable in, and the team begins to win once more. But on the championship game's final play, the police show up to arrest Nelson, so Bart takes the quarterback's place in the police car, posing as the delinquent. In the end, Bart is put in jail, and Joe Namath teaches the audience about vapor lock. [Music]

This episode hits all of the standard plot beats that a father coaching son sports story tends to reach for: Homer trying to live vicariously through his son, Homer being too tough on him, Homer not being tough enough, Bart trying to live outside his father's influence, and so on. It then plays with many of these expectations, not only by rapidly bouncing between the tropes but by subverting them. Just as the audience starts to expect a specific follow-up, a famous football player, by coincidence, happens upon a troubled young athlete, only to walk away right before giving him the advice that would have sent the story into its latter half of the third act. Bart is ready to take everything he's learned to heart to make the game-winning play, only to instead get arrested, so the real star can take over. And this episode also refuses to give a straightforward happy ending. Instead of Bart becoming a talented quarterback with the Power of Love or family, Homer's acceptance is instead an acceptance of the boy's mediocrity. Joe Namath ends the episode by acting as though he's about to teach an important lesson on sportsmanship or believing in oneself, but talks about his car instead. And Homer never gets over his own father's inability to parent properly, airing on the opposite side of his own trauma and then finding a middle ground not in encouragement but in irreverence.

The two Mrs. Nasapletons. After a bachelor auction involving the men of Springfield reveals that Apu is actually very desirable, he begins to live up his single life, only to be interrupted by a letter from his mother that the time for his arranged marriage has come. Not wanting to marry a woman he doesn't know, Apu decides to fake that he's married. And when his mother arrives to confirm the marriage, he claims, at Homer's behest, that Marge is his wife. The two pretend to be married for a while to keep up the ruse, while Homer stays at the nursing home with his father, enjoying his pampering. But when Homer returns home and Apu's mother sees him and Marge in a bed, the truth comes out, partially too, because Marge was sick of pretending. So the arranged marriage is back on, as Apu resents his ending bachelorhood. But on the day of his wedding, Apu meets Manjula, and the two hit it off immediately. They met, marry. Despite Homer's attempts to stop the wedding, understanding that because they live in America, they can simply get divorced if it doesn't work out.

As is typical of The Simpsons, the writers did a significant amount of research for this episode in order to portray a Hindu wedding as accurately as possible, only to ignore a lot of it because it didn't make decent comedy material—at least not the type of comedy that The Simpsons is generally known for. As a largely satirical series, it's a prerequisite to have a thorough understanding of a culture before you can really critique it. Knowing a lot about the way Americans think and act makes it possible to poke fun at that culture in a way that contributes to a conversation. But in an episode that draws heavily from a culture that the writers have to do research on in the first place, it's a lot more difficult to produce humor that's not just poking fun at surface-level characteristics. And so a lot of the jokes in this episode come at the expense of Homer, since that's all that can really be done without being more insensitive than you are funny. You can't really satirize a culture of another nation if you know very little about it, so the jokes are all about the lack of foreign knowledge that other characters have, jokes like Bart asking about the bindi or Homer pretending to be Ganesha.

Lisa, the skeptic. While returning home from a free motorboat scam, the Simpson family comes across the site of a new mall being built atop an old archaeological dig site. Lisa goes in to complain to the construction foreman, and he decides to allow Lisa to dig there as a publicity stunt. So Springfield Elementary sets up a dig site where Lisa finds bones that appear to be an angel skeleton. Homer steals the angel and sets it up in his garage, where he charges others to see it and buy angel merchandise. But Lisa remains skeptical, trying to convince the town that the angel must have a rational explanation behind it. But when she can't provide one, they form a mob and burn down many of the scientific buildings of Springfield. Eventually, she decides to destroy the angel to end the madness, only to find it missing, and the Springfield police accuse her of theft and take her to trial. But when the angel reappears and foretells the end, the whole town begins to panic, only for sundown to arrive and the angel to direct them all to the opening of the new mall, exploiting their fear for publicity.

While the clear theme in this episode is the debate between science and religion, the focus comes down much less to any sort of legal or spiritual argument and is instead an episode about the psychology of such a debate. While the town of Springfield is characterized as rowdy and ignorant about matters of science, coming out of faith, Marge's conversation with Lisa shows a much more reasonable side. Against reason, people really do need something to believe in, whether it makes sense to do so or not. And while the call of some social justice calling is enough for some, others want a less tangible dream to occupy themselves. It's not as though faith is an inherently negative thing, but this faith can be exploited—any kind can. The whole ordeal turns out to be a publicity stunt, no different than a megachurch pastor who spends funds on a boat or a phony charity raising money for themselves while stating they're helping the less fortunate. And so Lisa gets a bit vindicated at the end of the episode because all of the people who had blind faith in the angel round up, accepting the publicity stunt at face value, and only Lisa, who remained skeptical the longest, was as offended by the exploitation as she should have been. In the end, it's best to keep a skeptical mind of everything—not so much over the existential questions posited, but rather over trying to consider who it is that might benefit from your belief.

Realty bites. Homer takes Marge to a police auction where he buys a fancy sports car without consulting her. When she refuses to ride with him until he agrees to drive safely, she's dropped off in front of a house being sold by Lionel Hutz, who gives Marge the idea to take up realty herself. She studies for and passes the exam, only to then struggle to sell any houses to Springfield as she's too honest to cover up the various issues with the homes. But when her family tries to reassure her that she doesn't have to be successful at business to impress them, on top of Lionel informing her that she'll be fired if she doesn't close in her first week, Marge is invigorated to lie, which she immediately does by selling a murder house to the Flanders. But despite all the PRI she's getting for selling the difficult property, Marge feels guilty over lying and goes to check up on the family, where, after a scare, she reveals the truth. Meanwhile, Homer is enjoying his new car, but Snake, the previous owner, gets upset by mistreatment of his vehicle and tries to steal it back. Eventually, they're involved in a fight atop the moving car, which then collides with the house just as Marge is talking to Ned. In the end, the house is destroyed, and Marge loses her job, collecting an unemployment check.

This episode draws comparisons to the "Twisted World of Marge Simpson" in that Marge pursues a new career to stave off feelings of boredom and a lack of fulfillment. But in that episode, her motives were different from now. Marge feels like there's a lack of pressure on her to succeed, which only motivates her further in order to prove that the lack of expectations from her family were unfounded. But this success ends up arriving only after she sells out her ideals, whereas in the pretzel episode, her involvement with the mob was as a result of Homer going behind her back. Here, she sells out of her own accord. It's ultimately of her own volition that she takes back her sense of morality from the realty industry as well. What this episode also marks is one of the final voiced appearances of Lionel Hutz or Troy McClure, recorded only a few months before his death. But in his place, we have the introduction of Gil Gunderson as well as Cookie Kwan, two Springfield denizens who would go on to become recurring members of the ensemble cast. It's a bit fitting that in his final major appearance, Hutz has finally managed to succeed in at least some business venture, but we can only ever speculate as to what kind of plots we may have gotten revolving around his foray into real estate.

Miracle on Evergreen Terrace. The Simpson family are preparing for Christmas, with Bart planning to wake up early so he can open his presents first. But when he's playing with the new toy, he accidentally starts an electrical fire which destroys the tree as well as all of the presents. But when the Simpson family is asked about what happened, Bart lies and claims they were robbed. The local news picks up the robbery story, and when it gets out, the whole town comes together to donate what they have to help out the family. But after Homer spends the money on a new car and immediately crashes it, Bart reveals the truth that he was the one who destroyed the Christmas tree. And when Kent Brockman comes around for a follow-up story, the destroyed tree is discovered after the family lied about it, and the town turns against the family once more. Tired of being outcast, the Simpson family tries to come up with some sort of strategy to pay back Springfield, only to discover that no one's mad at them anymore because he simply robbed the Simpsons while they were out.

This is an anti-Christmas episode, taking many of the common Christmas episode tropes and subverting them for no sake other than to have them subverted. It's common for the show to have episodes in this vein, largely to poke fun at a trend or social convention, but here the convention is Christmas cheer of some sort. It's such a wide-net cast over culture that the episode then struggles to really say or do anything with this satire, if it can be called that. The show itself even began with a Christmas episode and has had plenty of them in the past, to the point that having an anti-Christmas of this kind doesn't really add anything to their history. Some of the jokes are even reused from years past, and then tonally the episode doesn't even manage some level of consistency. At first, it appears to have the trappings of a heartwarming story of a town coming together, but with the underpaintings of Bart's guilt over lying about the tree that set up for a more moralistic tale. But it never gets the time to hold on to this part as the follow-up news story occurs just after then, and it becomes an episode that takes on too many themes at once and manages to come up short in [Music] everything.

All singing, all dancing. When the Simpson family accidentally runs a musical Western, Homer expresses his disdain for musical numbers in general, but Marge and Lisa remind him of all the time he's broken into song in the past. In musical form, the episode flashes back to various songs throughout the show's run up to this point, interspersed with cuts to the present where Snake breaks in to try to shoot the family, leaving when he realizes he has no ammo, then returning later just as the singing is stopped. In the end, the episode concludes that the only thing worse than the show breaking into song randomly is when a long-running series does a clip show.

Bart Carney. The Simpson family goes to a traveling carnival where Homer is grifted by the Carneys during the ring toss. After Bart wrecks the main attraction of the carnival, the owner demands that he work there to pay off the damage, and Homer volunteers to work as well. They're put in charge of the ring toss scheme from before. After learning a bit about the Carney code, where members of the traveling crew help each other out, but after Homer fails to pay a bribe to Chief Wiggum, the stand is shut down, and the Cuddar family is put out of a home, so Homer volunteers his house as a place for them to stay—a kindness which the Carneys repay with tickets to a glass-bottom boat. When The Simpsons return from the trip, they find that the Carneys have changed the locks and moved in—something which Wiggum refuses to fix, remembering Homer's failure to bribe him before. After staying in the treehouse for a night, Homer comes up with a plan to win the house back with the same ring toss, but before he can throw the first ring, he simply runs in the house and shuts the door behind him, outwitting the Carneys.

The Simpsons as a show has never really strived for political correctness. The writers are always willing to poke fun at every side of a part of Western culture equally in order to make jokes wherever possible. Here, we see Homer striving to become a Carney and enjoying the simple life of a traveling grifter. And while there are plenty of gags about the comparison of his expectations to the reality, more of these come down to simple bits at the expense of the newly introduced characters' credibilities. And while Homer getting scammed in the first act plays nicely into him getting scammed again at the end of the third, this is the only real thematic callback across the episode. The introduction has nothing to do with the rest of act one as the family explores the carnival. This goes on to have very little to do with the domestic second act about The Simpsons failing to fit in behind the scenes and the Carneys failing to fit in with the Simpson family. And all of this leads to a third act where an out-of-character expression of intelligence from Homer saves the family's house. Homer is stupider than usual in this episode, but rather than the finale making it seem like he's finally learned a bit from his experiences, it instead feels as though he's tricked the Carneys out of nowhere. The whole episode fails to really be cohesive enough for the payoffs to come across as connected to the setups.

The Joy of Sect. Homer receives a religious pamphlet at the airport and heads to a free getaway at their compound. Though this new relig is quickly revealed to be a cult, Homer is more or less immune to their programming due to his simple-minded nature. Yet, after a weekend, he's soon reprogrammed into a member of the Movementarians, under the leadership of the leader. He signs his family up for the cult, and they move over, with Bart being reprogrammed quickly and Lisa being lured with the promise of good grades. But Marge resists the cult, and she breaks free of the compound, heading to Reverend Lovejoy to formulate a plan to get her family back. She, Groundskeeper Willie, Ned Flanders, and Lovejoy kidnap the Simpson family and deprogram them with material goods and beer. But the Movementarians and lawyers break in and take back Homer, who appears to have resisted the deprogramming—that is, until he arrives back at the compound to reveal that the leader is a phony, who responds by trying to escape on a flying machine before crash-landing on Cletus's property. In the end, the Simpson family celebrates that they can think for themselves again as they all sit around and mindlessly watch Fox.

This episode draws plenty of real-world comparisons to existing cults, even to its detriment, as a few aspects of the episode needed to be changed shortly before release to prevent any comparisons to Heaven's Gate, as well as attempting to ensure they wouldn't receive any other sort of litigious claims of any other similarity. Because the manner in which many cults retain their authority over others is by stringing along those friendly to them while threatening those who don't cooperate through legal means or otherwise, so to create an episode that intentionally draws this sort of attention is a tricky thing to write. But through a combination of humor and vagueness, The Simpsons is able to successfully navigate this murky area, depicting the Movementarians as so obviously incompetent in their brainwashing that any particular group that claims a similarity to their own is only making themselves look bad. And while this does make a real-world comparison harder to connect to, the episode gets more mileage out of trying to entertain than to educate, and so the whole thing works out regardless.

Dos Bus. On their way to a Model UN meeting, the school bus crashes in a mango-related incident, sinking to the bottom of the sea and stranding the kids of Springfield Elementary on an island. Their early attempts at gathering food fail until Bart is able to retrieve the cooler from the crashed bus, at which point Lisa urges them to ration the food as much as possible. But the next morning, all the food is discovered missing, and Milhouse is the prime suspect for having taken it. He claims it was a monster that ate the food, and despite nobody believing that story, he's still found innocent of any wrongdoing. But dissatisfied with that outcome, Nelson rallies the other kids into attacking Bart, Lisa, and Milhouse for their attempts at retaining order, and the trio is chased into a cave where the monster reveals itself as a boar. They capture and eat the boar and manage to finally create a functional society, though this and their rescue happens off-screen. In the B plot, Homer learns that you can make money on the internet and sets up a home business. Despite the business not actually doing anything, it's still bought out by Bill Gates, who simply trashes Homer's home office.

The most obvious comparison this episode draws is one to Lord of the Flies, one of those books that every American kid had to read in high school. Lord of the Flies itself is a book that draws inspiration from The Coral Island, a book about a group of children who wash upon an island only to create a functional society, not unlike the one Bart had imagined. But when William Golding read that book and scoffed at the depiction of rule of law and religious fundamentals teaching a group of British boarding school children to create a functioning society, he made his own about what would really happen given the circumstances. To The Simpsons in this manner might actually be the best adaptation of Lord of the Flies, given the cultural recontextualization that both stories have made. Homer's internet business, despite being a very minuscule B plot to the episode, has managed to age incredibly well, given that it was able to successfully predict and satirize the dot-com bubble over 2 years before it happened—a business that does nothing profitable, with some association to computers, whose whole purpose is to get bought out by a larger firm. For a more modern comparison, one only needs to look at the number of cash-flow-negative businesses with blockchain or NFT or AI in their PR that aim to get big on hype alone so the founders can bail as soon as the money dries up.

The Last Temptation of Krusty. The Simpson family attends a comedy night that Krusty is performing at, despite many comedy legends believing he was dead or washed up. But he sets bombs, proving the comedians right about the washed-up part. When Bart takes in the clown following a bender, Krusty realizes that he spent so long churning out low-quality products that he's fallen behind the comedy trends. With the help of Bart and Jay…

Leno, he revamps his set only to once again fail and announce his retirement. But as he's complaining about the modern state of comedy, he begins to get laughs again. This encourages him to get back into the business with a much less conformist set, fit for the 21st century. But when his return attracts the attention of a few corporate types who try to convince him to sell out once more, despite turning the offer down at first, he caves and becomes his own self as he drives off in his new Canyon Arrow.

As critical of society as *The Simpsons* has always been, the show recognizes itself as a product of the very thing it ridicules. Krusty makes a stand-up routine in the style of George Carlin—anti-consumerist, anti-capitalist, and anti-corporate—but ends up selling out with his routine anyway. And while Krusty has the shamelessness to include his promotion in his act itself, it still makes very little difference. *The Simpsons* can criticize consumerism all at once and still wind up being placed in between ads for oversized SUVs when this episode airs on television. It's still not uncommon to see a real truck commercial play immediately following the fake one. Because ultimately, how anti-something can a person, or show, or entity really be when surrounded by that something? *The Simpsons* was written for television, which is basically just a box that plays ads, with the show itself being something to keep you around between ad breaks. And while it's easy to point fun at a person making anti-capitalist rants from their iPhone, it's also important to recognize when there's not really another option. In this case, Krusty isn't so much a selfish and greedy person as he is a person in a selfish and greedy industry. He's not so much the cause of his own selling out as he is a product of it, merely filling a void that someone else would have filled had he not come along. And so the very least a show like *The Simpsons* can do is recognize the inevitability of it all and do whatever little rebellions that it can.

Dumbbell Indemnity. While hiding out at Moe's, Homer learns that Moe is resentful of everyone else for having loving families. So he goes out to get Moe a date, and the two meet a flower vendor named Renee, who seems smitten with the bartender. The two begin dating for a while, with Moe pulling out all the stops to make sure she wants for nothing. But when he begins to run out of money, he schemes with Homer to have his friend destroy his car for the insurance. But when Homer is caught in the act, he gets arrested, and Moe doesn't want to bail him out, as he plans on using the money on his new girlfriend instead. Though when he starts to feel guilty over this, he confesses the scheme to Renee and suggests that the two fake their deaths to run away together—something that disgusts her, and she leaves him. But when Homer manages to escape from prison, she heads to Moe's, which is currently burning down as Moe accidentally started a fire in his fake death scheme. In the end, the two are rescued by Barney, and Homer agrees to let Moe use his house—at a bar—until the tavern can be rebuilt. [Music] Another Moe episode in the vein of "The Homer They Fall," this one too using Moe's relationship with Homer as a vehicle to explore Moe's character and develop him a bit further. But unlike that episode, which focused on his past catching up to and controlling his present, here we have Moe's present being affected by his future, or rather lack of one. Going from a former boxer—something also brought up in this episode—to a bar owner to what he assumes will be a lonely death, Moe's life is on a clear downward trajectory with very little to look forward to. But upon meeting Renee, he suddenly has something to live for, something worth throwing away his present to achieve. He's willing to destroy his car and put his friend in legal danger in the process, all to maintain a relationship with someone he barely knows and who, in turn, barely knows him. Moe throwing Homer under the bus is not only a proof of his conviction for Renee but also a telling trait about his mentality and a revelation on the type of person he's been all along. So when Renee learns who the person she's dating really is, she breaks things off with him. Maybe this is a telling sign that the relationship never would have worked out, or perhaps that he had been focusing on the wrong aspects of it. Either way, everything Moe was afraid of ended up coming true, as he was too focused on the "what" that he forgot the "how" or [Music] "why."

Lisa the Simpson. After failing at a brain teaser at lunch, Lisa begins to worry that she's losing her intelligence. When she speaks to Grandpa Simpson, he tells her about the Simpson Gene, a gene that causes members of the family to steadily become stupider over time. She tries to find some way to stave this off, but ultimately realizes that there's no helping your DNA, and she begins to try to fit in with Homer and Bart as an imbecile. Lisa attempts to give her brain one last joyride, going out to a museum and a jazz show where she gets the inspiration to share her gift with the world while she still can. But when her televised plea is heard by Marge and Homer, they get the idea to disprove the Simpson Gene Theory by rounding up every Simpson in the area and having them tell her about themselves. This only reinforces the idea, however, as the other Simpson men are equally failures, until Marge starts to ask the Simpson women, all of whom have found success. In the end, Lisa realizes that the Simpson Gene only affects the Y chromosome and that she's not doomed to failure, solving the brain teaser from before. In the B plot, Jasper freezes himself in the Kwik-E-Mart and becomes an attraction for the store, which rebrands as a curiosity museum. The plot of Lisa failing to get the intellectual stimulation she needs is a well-trodden one by this point, one of the main staples of any Lisa-centric story. This one touches on the existing story and extrapolates into the future, as it's revealed that she's doomed to become common no matter what kind of upbringing she gets. And yet the episode sees Lisa miss out on its central message from the very beginning. When she asks Marge for advice, her mother informs her that she's not stupid, just having a bad day and letting it get to her. This winds up explaining all the intellectual failings from earlier, as well as foreshadowing the fact that the women of the family are immune to this sort of failing. Lisa has always taken more after Marge than Homer, and had she asked for a woman's advice instead of the advice of only men, she could have put that anxiety to rest much sooner. But maybe Lisa's worries were more valid than she may have known. Perhaps it's not so much that the men of the Simpson family are less intelligent, but that the men of the Simpson family have less pressure on them to be that way. If there's an expectation that you're going to grow up stupid placed on you, then you're more likely to turn out that way, way just because you'll want to become the person that you're expected to be. And Lisa continued to believe that she was doomed to stupidity, then she would have ended up that way, genes or not. It's not about her actual intelligence so much as it's about whether she gets the chance to use it.

This Little Wiggy. During a trip to the Springfield Kwik-E-Mart, Bart observes Ralph getting picked on by the bullies, and Marge gets the idea that Ralph needs a real friend. So she sets up a play date between Bart and Ralph. Bart's annoyed that the other boy keeps getting his things all sticky, so he tries to take him to the Wiggum house, where he learns that since his father is the police chief, they have the entire closet full of police supplies, and this includes the police master key, capable of opening any lock in Springfield. Bart and Ralph go on a spree that night, entering toy stores and bakeries at will before they're noticed by the bullies from before, who pressure Bart into letting them use the key as well. They head into the condemned penitentiary, where Bart abandons Ralph for his new friends, only for them to immediately denounce him and throw the key inside the building. But as they're retrieving it, they also turn on the electric chair to melt a figurine. The next day, Mayor Quimby has a press conference that involves strapping himself into the chair for a mock execution, unaware that it's activated. So with some quick thinking by Lisa, they attach a warning to a rocket and fire it towards the press conference. It misses, although the rocket lands in Burns's office at the nuclear plant and causes him to discover that the penitentiary has been getting free power, which he shuts off. A rehashing of two plot archetypes—Bart being pressured into misbehaving alongside a Simpson befriending someone unsavory out of pity—this episode focuses more on the aspect of Bart taking advantage of his new friend to do things unrelated to that friend themselves. He has no real interest in Ralph as a person and even continues to view him as unpleasant to be around, but it's more than eager to take advantage of his kindness. In contrast to Season 4's "I Love Lisa," even taking advantage of Ralph felt unpalatable to Lisa. By building on existing character interactions in this way, the episode is able to put the audience in a slightly different perspective to build up the intricacies in these interactions more effectively. For one, we get to see Bart on the opposite side of the dynamic that we usually see him during these kinds of stories. Instead of the standard tale of Bart acting out to try to impress some older kids, here Bart is the older kid pressuring someone else to behave the way he does, and we still see the other bullies in this episode serving their typical role, as if to make this comparison even more obvious, as well as to show the immediate futility of trying so hard to impress others by acting out.

Simpson Tide. After getting fired from the nuclear plant for putting a donut in the reactor, Homer decides to join the Naval Reserve for a seemingly easy job that can give back to the country. Moe, Apu, and Barney all decide to join alongside him, and the four make their way through basic training. Meanwhile, Bart sees the popularity gained by Milhouse when the latter gets an earring and decides to get one for himself. But when he arrives at school, he sees that everyone else has one. Homer confiscates the earring. When it's time for him to be shipped off for war games, in which he's placed into a nuclear submarine due to his experience as a nuclear technician, after impressing the ship's Captain, Homer is temporarily put in charge while he tries to dislodge an obstruction in one of the torpedo shoots. But when the war games ramp up, Homer fires off the torpedo containing the captain, putting him in charge for good. His incompetence causes the ship to veer far off course into Russian waters, where it's assumed that he's trying to defect. But after using Bart's earring to plug a leak, the sub is able to surface, and Homer claims his mistakes were due to it being his first day. In the end, the officers in charge of the court-martial are all indicted on unrelated charges, and Homer gets off with a dishonorable discharge. As the seasons of *The Simpsons* go on, there's more and more of a trend towards episodes that completely skew canon, not so much in the sense of episodes like the Treehouse of Horror segments, but episodes that don't even bother attempting to resolve anything in a way that resets the continuity. Homer loses his job at the start of the episode and doesn't get it back at the end, but by this point, it doesn't matter. We know he'll be a technician at the nuclear plant at the start of the next episode anyway. So the point of trying to write in a scene where he gets his old job back is more or less a formality that only gets in the way of writing setpiece humor. And setpiece humor is another trend that this episode moves more and more towards as it goes on. Fewer gags derived from character reactions to the plot and more gags from characters reacting to where the plot takes place or some ancillary aspect of events. Here, the bit is Homer joins the Navy, and the episode proceeds to include jokes that need the new setting to make sense. It's an aspect of the show that takes a much more thorough approach to humor at the expense of the other things that made *The Simpsons* popular in the first place.

The Trouble with Trillions. When Homer mails in a faulty tax return, he's nailed by the IRS for fraud and made to wear a wire in order to snitch on his friends. After an early success, the government sends him to investigate Mr. Burns and his alleged theft of a $1 trillion bill that was meant for post-World War II relief. But when he sneaks inside the mansion, Burns confuses him for a journalist and gives him a tour where he shows off the trillion before getting nabbed by agents. But as he's being dragged away, he shouts about his rights, and Homer is motivated to come to his defense. Burns and Homer pick up Mr. Smithers and make a run for it, hoping to find an island where they can settle to make their own country. The trio lands in Cuba, where Burns is befriended by Fidel Castro, up until Castro steals the bill from Burns and kicks them out. In the end, they decide to return to America as Burns declares his intentions to bribe whatever jury they put him in front of. This episode is all about how those with power abuse those who don't. Homer is forced to go along with what the US government wants out of the penalty of jail time after his bad tax return, then later he's tricked into believing that going along with Burns's theft of the trillion-dollar bill is also a sort of justice. Burns claims that he'll do better with the money than the government could possibly do, yet we know from past events that his version of "better" means better for himself. Yet after being mistreated at the hands of the government for most of the episode, Homer is willing to go along with a person who's arguably much worse, out of a mixed desire for revenge and wanting control. Yet seeking control here only means that his life is taken out of the hands of the government and put instead at the mercy of the highest bidder, Mr. Burns. It's an inevitability that the rich would soon consolidate power, and here we see that exemplified as Mr. Burns feuds with the government over possession of wealth. The rich and the powerful are in a constant fight over who gets to control the average Homer, as a stand-in for the everyday American, as they know that any amount of power they cede will inevitably be taken by the other side. And the question is never raised as to why the typical American never gets a say in this, except for by Lisa, but even then, this only occurs at the very beginning of the episode, quickly being forgotten about as soon as she learns they may become as rich as Burns.

Girly Edition. After getting a skateboard confiscated by Groundskeeper Willie, Bart destroys his shed in retaliation. Around the same time, Homer notices Apu has a helper monkey and decides to get one for himself, who he names Mojo. But after Mojo begins to affect Homer's lifestyle, he becomes out of shape and struggles to breathe. So at Marge's request, he returns the monkey for rehabilitation elsewhere. Lisa is selected for a kid's news segment to keep Krusty on the air by having a portion of his content be considered educational. But Bart demands to be let on the show as well, quickly stealing the spotlight as he gets promoted to co-anchor. But when Lisa complains that Bart is too stupid to be a journalist, he gets the idea from Kent Brockman to do a sappy human-interest story that will steal the spotlight further. After failing to meet Bart on his own level, Lisa instead decides to reveal that Bart isn't the caring person he's pretending to be by sending him to a live report on a recently homeless immigrant, Groundskeeper Willie. But after exposing Bart, Willie tries attacking him, and Lisa rushes to his aid. In the end, they decide to combine their talents—Lisa's integrity and Bart's charisma—to make a better news show, only to get canceled shortly afterward. It's a standard Simpsons plot by this point for Lisa's intelligence to be unrecognized for its value, but episodes like this still manage to stand out by not retreading old ground but recontextualizing it. Lisa is happy about the opportunity to finally get to use her gifts in a positive way, only for once again those gifts to be squandered in favor of somebody who's more capable of talking to the town of Springfield on their own level. Intelligence is wasted in a world with no one around to share it with, and this episode briefly pauses to note that that sort of person is rapidly dying out, though it does try to end with a more positive note. After their feud, Bart and Lisa realize that they'd both be better off if they worked with each other instead of fighting. Bart only leaned into human interest because he had his intelligence insulted by Lisa and was setting out to prove her wrong. Lisa tried to stoop to Bart's level but failed, also an attempt at getting some credibility on the air. But rather than the smart and stupid sides of America existing at odds with one another, the combination of very high-brow entertainment and something more personal can instead coexist as a way to make something educational more palatable to a general audience, not unlike what *The Simpsons* itself does.

Trash of the Titans. Homer gets into a fight with the garbage men who stop picking up the family's trash. He tries holding out instead of apologizing until Marge finally decides to apologize while forging his signature. When Homer learns of this, he heads to City Hall to resend the apology, where he meets Springfield sanitation commissioner Ray Patterson. There, he decides to run for public office to become the new garbage man, but his campaign fails as Springfield is content with its current service. So he changes his strategy to one of crazy promises, which wins over the town, and he gets elected. But while trying to keep those crazy promises, he goes way over budget, and the town's garbage men are about to go on strike. That is, until Homer gets the idea to have other cities pay Springfield to store their garbage in the abandoned mines, in order to solve the budget issue. But when garbage starts to spew out of the ground, Homer's voted out of his role. Though since Ray Patterson refuses to come back and fix the issue, Springfield simply moves to a town over 5 miles away. "Trash of the Titans" was chosen as the show's 200th episode due to encompassing so much of what made *The Simpsons* great. The political satire of the whole town coming together under a series of crazy promises, despite being content with the way things were, especially rings through every single election season. The fervor of always wanting more out of life is a cornerstone of the American dream, with the people of Springfield demanding more, even if it doesn't make sense to do so. And the episode has even been used to draw direct real-world arguments, in the case where the Toronto City Council held a vote to use their abandoned mining site to store garbage, with the episode being shown and the resulting vote ending against the proposal. The episode itself also contains multiple big draws from outside the script itself. U2 makes a guest appearance as themselves, as a staple of mid-season *Simpsons* directing, not to mention Steve Martin as Roy Patterson, giving the episode both a popular band and a popular actor to its credits. The musical number draws inspiration from *The Candyman*, also granting this episode a big setpiece for further memorability. Ultimately, this episode serves as a proper cap to 200 episodes of a cultural icon, with more planning going into its celebration than the 100th, but also a portend of the next 100 episodes to come.

King of the Hill. When Homer's obesity embarrasses Bart during a church picnic, he vows to get in shape so as not to be an embarrassment to his son. He starts going to a gym, where he begins a routine that involves eating almost nothing but Power Sauce bars. After a few months, the company that makes the bars is searching for someone to climb Springfield's tallest mountain, Murderhorn, and they select Homer in order to fabricate a story about an average Joe becoming fit after eating their product. And the story is meant to be a fake, as the Power Sauce representatives hired two Sherpas to drag Homer's sleeping bag up the mountain each night in order to fabricate progress. But when Homer learns about this, he sends the other men...

Home so he can climb the mountain on his own, only to give up when he reaches a plateau that contains the corpse of C.W. McAllister, who Grandpa Simpson claimed betrayed him during his old, failed attempt of the mountain years ago. But when he puts down a Simpson flag, he causes an avalanche that brings the top of the mountain down to his level, succeeding in what he set out to do before riding McAllister's body down the summit.

Homer gets taken advantage of in this episode by a group of executives attempting to co-opt his story for their own financial gain. His desire to impress Bart leaves him in a state where he's vulnerable enough to fall for their assurances that the climb is possible, despite Wolfcastle, who's been working out much longer than him, turning it down as impossible. The executives are more than willing to make the situation out to be worse than possible by deceiving him into thinking that he's more capable than the reality of the situation, with no concern for whether he can survive the environment there, due to his inflated ego. Much in the same way that companies that market their food as healthy often just sell sugar water or corn syrup with green or minimalist packaging, the only health benefits being completely coincidental. But this is a type of story that's played out again and again: the corporation taking advantage of a person being self-conscious to sell a product or idea. Even within the Simpson's, the plot is so overplayed that many of the characters reacting to it do so in a tongue-and-cheek way. Rather than assuring his father that there's no need to risk his life to impress him, Bart thinks Homer's attempt at climbing the mountain is cool. And when Homer declares that he intends to lose weight, Marge's reaction is a sarcastic, "Sure, you will." The only subversiveness in this episode comes from the fact that Homer actually does succeed—something that's nice to see after so many decades of failure—but also something tainted by the earlier sardonic attitude. We know that at the end of the episode, this accomplishment, Homer's muscles, and so on will all be done away with, lost.

Lisa, Bart, and Milhouse head to a joke shop on a day off of school, where Bart buys a collection of novelty face accessories. But as they're not adhesive enough to stay attached to his face, he asks Homer for a stronger glue, which works too well, as he can no longer remove them. So Marge has to take him to Dr. Hibbert to have them removed, making her unable to go with Lisa to the museum's final day of their Isis exhibit. But Lisa wants to go anyway and gets Homer's permission to head out alone. Though when she takes the wrong bus, she ends up in the middle of nowhere and has to walk home. Around this time, Homer realizes that Lisa is unattended and rushes out of work to find her, which he does after commandeering a cherry picker on the way home. Lisa laments that she should have never taken the risk of traveling alone, but Homer insists that risks are what make life worth living, and he resolves to take her to the exhibit despite the museum being closed. They break in, and Homer accidentally knocks an orb off of a pedestal, where it opens up to reveal a music box. Homer and Lisa being the only two people to have heard its song in 4,000 years. It's clear that, for her portrayal relative to the rest of the cast, Lisa is the favorite character of the Simpsons' writing staff. She's routinely the most in tune to what the writers themselves want to say with their episodes, and while she can come across as a bit of a soapbox at her worst, she still represents the show as a whole rather well in that her characterization is the only one that's not played negatively or for satirical purposes. That said, she is still a little girl, and an episode like this puts that into context with the rest of her intelligence. While Lisa's interest in things like mummies and reading set her above the rest of her family, that intelligence is only as deep as the books she reads. Lisa lacks the street smarts to make that knowledge worth much, and so this is where her relationship to the rest of the cast comes in. Lisa might struggle on her own, but when her polar opposite, Homer, steps into the picture, a much better synthesis is formed. Lisa is smart but often fails to relate to or connect with other people; Homer is dumb but has little trouble fitting in with others, and in the best case, the two can combine to make Lisa's message reach the whole world instead of those who just already want to hear it. The Simpsons, the show, deals with this in much the same way: there's a much deeper level of social commentary in many of the scripts that never would have reached an audience if we didn't also find the humor and relatability surrounding it.

Natural Born Kissers: Homer and Marge are trying to celebrate their anniversary together, but as Bart and Lisa come along, they're stuck in a tacky kids' restaurant, which does them no favors that night as they're trying to get intimate but failing to find the right mood. But the next day, as they're returning a freezer motor that burned out, the family car gets stuck in the mud, and Marge and Homer take shelter in a barn when it starts to rain. The farmer who owns the barn begins hunting for the intruders but fails to find the couple, and this risk ends up being the thing that the couple had been searching for. So Homer and Marge go to the mini-golf course where Bart was conceived to recapture that feeling, only for the golfers to end up investigating the blockage at the windmill. The couple flees from the search party and winds up at a used car lot where, after being cornered by police, they steal a hot air balloon to return home. But neither of them knows how to operate it, and in the end, Marge lands in the middle of a football field, with the two giving up on staying hidden. While this is going on, Bart and Lisa use Abe Simpson's old mind detector to search for treasure and come across a copy of a cut, happy ending for Casablanca. But when the old studio executive who tried and failed to approve it sees them watching it, he simply pays them $20 to bury the terrible film reel.

Homer and Marge's marriage, as of this episode, is something that has gone on for less time than The Simpsons has gone on the air, and by this point in time, both entities are struggling to find some sort of spark which they originally had. You can only live the same domestic lifestyle for so many years before it gets less exciting, and you can only run the same show for so long before it gets boring, purely on the account of having done every plot it makes sense to do. So in both situations, the same answer is posited: risk. The way to keep a show interesting after so many years is to take a risk, to do something that might turn out badly, just for the sake of having done it. Season 9, and to an extent the later seasons, are seasons marked by a few extremes in its stories: Homer joins a cult, climbs a mountain, finds out the principal is an imposter, commits insurance fraud, and runs for public office. And some of these episodes are among the most fondly remembered of the show's entire run, while others are viewed with disdain as though they represent the show's massive decline in quality. But like the Bart and Lisa B plot, if Casablanca had had an ending that pleased everybody, it wouldn't be a fondly remembered movie. Risks are a necessary part of a long-running anything, and moving forward, The Simpsons would take significantly more risks than before, which is admirable, even if some of these risks don't pay off.

Season 10: Season 10 began with Mike Scully as showrunner, who was quoted as saying that his goal with the show was to, quote, "not screw it up" for about a decade. It was a dominating force in American culture, lampooning so many cultural staples in a way that caused the rest of the media market to follow, swaying in whatever direction Bartmania took them. But staying ahead of the curve for so long is a monumental task; most great shows only managed to last a few seasons before they start to peter out, and The Simpsons has been going on for much longer. So for the main goal of the season to shift to not messing up a good thing is a sign that the well of ideas was running dry—or was it? Because The Simpsons still managed to stay relevant with critics and audiences alike for several years after the retrospective upon decline of the show. Ratings were high; it viewers lent for less popular shows to boost their ratings. The Simpsons was still a juggernaut on the small screen, so why are the complaints there, or rather, why were they there? The Simpsons were a leader for so long, but the rest of television had started to catch up. Many of the ironies baked into the show weren't really valid any longer; the stereotypical television family no longer existed in the public's memory the way that it did in the late 80s. So when asked to think about a modern American household, one might imagine the Simpson family themselves. So what are they even parodying anymore? The heartfelt moments and emotional core of the show had given out to wacky, absurdist humor and large set pieces. These had existed for years leading up to the point, but only now was the novelty wearing off. A guest star back in an earlier season might be looked upon with interest, but now it reads of a cheap grab for attention. The characters themselves don't seem to be who they once were either. The sane everyman who tried and failed to keep his family in line was now the root cause of most of their antics. The era of jerkass is upon us, as his antics go from accidentally mean-spirited to intentionally mean-spirited, and while this shows more intentionality from the writers, what they're doing on purpose is perhaps something that misses the original point that people fell in love with in the first place—not as though returning there was even an option anymore.

Lord of the Dance: While at the Kwik-E-Mart, Homer learns that you can make money selling grease, so he stops going to work to fry out as much as he can. But his profit margins are too small, so he needs to look for a bigger score. He ropes Bart into helping him take the grease from Crusty Burger but is muscled out of the business by the established guys. Once he starts to mope, Bart gives him the idea to do one final grease heist at Springfield Elementary. Meanwhile, Lisa is told to introduce a new student to the rest of the school, who goes by the name of Alex Whitney. But Alex is cool and mature, at least compared to Lisa, impressing the other students with her taste, her pierced ears, and cell phone. For a while, Lisa begins to worry that she's being left behind as all of her friends start to behave more like adults and less like kids, which peaks around the time that the school hosts a dance and everyone has a date but Lisa. She sits outside the gym taking tickets and lamenting her lack of maturity and popularity until Skinner has to run off to help his mother and she's made to chaperone, where Lisa learns that none of the kids are actually dancing together as they're, well, kids. Homer and Bart's grease heist is caught by Willie, who was saving the grease for his retirement, and he fights Homer for the grease back, causing the air ducts to burst over the dance. The children are showered in grease and begin to throw clumps of it at each other, remembering how fun it is to act like a kid. Both the A and B plots of this episode have a small thematic tie to one another in the sense that Lisa and Bart are both upset about missing out on their childhoods. Bart is sad that Homer keeps dragging him away from school to get caught up in his grease trap, while Lisa feels like all her peers are growing up without her, pressuring her to move away from childish things like dolls and apples. Both characters have a similar thought process regarding their desire to be childlike but with opposite ones: Lisa wants to fit in with the others by behaving more adult, and Bart wants to fit in with others by acting more like a kid. The episode ends with both equally involved in the grease fight, though, so the superior option is shown to be what's winning out. Homer sells grease in this episode, which, in addition to making me say "grease" so often it doesn't sound like a word or musical anymore, also doesn't involve a single mention of his job at the nuclear plant. He's had so many zany schemes to make money by now that the showrunners don't even have to bring up the fact that he's missing work, and his absence there can even be lampshaded. Marge suggests raising emus instead of going back to work to support the family, which is what she would have done in any earlier season.

The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace: Homer realizes that half his life is over and goes into a crisis about having never accomplished anything. His family tries to cheer him up with a home movie, but the topic is changed to the many inventions of Thomas Edison, giving Homer the idea to become an inventor so that he might leave some kind of legacy. He quits his job and begins to invent things, though inspiration is slow for a while. He eventually comes up with a few terrible ideas, like an out-of-control electric hammer, and when Marge tells him that his ideas are no good, he returns to his previous slump, only to then attach some extra legs to the back of his chair to prevent falling over, which gives him the admiration of the others. He's proud of his invention until he notices an old photo of Edison in which he's using the very same invention. So Homer and Bart go to the Edison Museum in order to smash the chair before it can be discovered. While they're there, however, Homer notices that Edison idolized Da Vinci much in the same way that he had been idolizing Edison and concludes that the two are similar enough not to justify a rivalry. Though upon returning home, Homer's dropped electric hammer, as well as the chair legs, are found, and Edison is given the credit once again, enraging a jealous Homer. A point is raised in this episode about Homer's legacy: that despite all the myriad places he's traveled to, the people that he's met, and the influence he's had, somehow he still manages to be everyman culturally. For a man with this varied a life as him, he somehow has never managed to let any of those accomplishments define him. It's not Homer's lack of deeds but a lack of real recognition for those deeds. How important is it to your legacy that you've been to outer space if hardly anyone remembers you having done it? But Homer's attempts to define himself don't end up working as he starts to simply mimic another man instead of building himself into something unique, and this is the same reason all of his other antics don't give him any sort of notice: they weren't really his. Homer goes to space, but that's alongside somebody else as part of a promotional stunt; he becomes a heavyweight boxer, but that was more of a one-off episode. Every time he does something impressive, it's always some secondary aspect of an alternative goal. He doesn't set out to achieve greatness for greatness' sake, and this is why, in the end, he's able to relate to Edison so much: his motivation was the same as the man who he looked up to, and that's just as important to one's vision of themselves as whatever they do with that motivation.

Bart the Mother: Nelson gets a BB gun as a prize from the arcade, and Bart asks if he can come over to shoot it. Though Marge forbids him from doing so, he sneaks out anyway and heads to Nelson's, where the boy tempts him into firing at a bird, which he hits and kills. Marge learns of this and, upon seeing the dead bird, decides she's given up on scolding him. Though Bart feels guilty over the killing and decides to take it upon himself to raise the eggs left behind by the mother. He spends the next several days in his treehouse monitoring their health, and Marge is satisfied about his desire to try to repair some of the damage. But when the eggs finally hatch, two small lizards come out of the shells, later identified by the bird-watching community of Springfield as an invasive species notable for sneaking into birds' nests and replacing the eggs with their own. The bird watchers try to destroy the lizards before they can decimate the bird population, but Marge encourages Bart to make a run for it, and he escapes to the roof where the lizards glide down to safety. A few weeks later, the pigeon population is wiped out completely, and Bart is recognized for his role in helping to reduce the pest population. After this, Lisa points out how Bart felt guilty for killing one bird but didn't seem to mind when thousands were eaten by his actions. While the narrative portrays this as a punchline, the real reason is personal responsibility. Bart felt guilty because he personally shot the first bird, and the two eggs left behind would be an indirect response to that action. But the birds dying as an indirect response to his actions isn't a big deal because the action itself was a good deed. Shooting a bird is bad; a negative result of a negative action is bad. But saving the lizards was good; a negative result of a positive action is much easier to compartmentalize. And of course, Bart also felt a personal attachment to the lizards and the first bird, which is the way that Marge felt about her son. They're not just bird-eating lizards; they're his bird-eating lizards. It's much easier to forgive the actions of someone or something that you're close to compared to the actions of an unrelated party. Marge is quicker to denounce Nelson than she is to denounce Bart, but in the end, it's Bart's attachment to the lizards, in spite of him learning of their true nature, that makes Marge remember that Bart is her son, well-behaved or not. And so the episode ends with the two learning from each other.

Treehouse of Horror IX: Hell to Pay: Bart is witnessed to the arrest of Snake, who is executed for smoking inside the Kwik-E-Mart. He vows revenge on every witness there before getting the chair, with his organs being harvested for transplant. This includes his hair, which is being grafted onto Homer's bald head. But that night, the hair begins to control Homer's actions as he sets out to kill Apu, then Moe. Bart realizes that he's next, so Homer vows to defend him, only to board them both up inside Bart's room. The hair then causes Homer to try attacking Bart with a hammer until Bart is able to get through to his father, imploring him to choose his son over his hair. In the end, Homer tears off the implant, and the police show up to shoot the hair dead.

The Terror of Tiny Toon: Marge doesn't want Bart and Lisa to watch violent Halloween cartoons and confiscates the batteries out of the remote. While searching for more, Bart comes across a plutonium sample from Homer's toolbox and puts it inside the remote, causing it to glow mysteriously, then zapping the siblings inside of the television, where Itchy and Scratchy grow upset at being laughed at, so they attack the Simpsons in various cartoonish ways. Eventually, Homer comes across the show and changes the channel around before ultimately saving the two by ejecting them. Itchy and Scratchy escape the television to finish the job, only for the duo to be too small to cause any harm, and they're adopted as pets.

Starship Poopers: Maggie starts to grow sharp baby teeth and sprout tentacle legs before using her pacifier to send a signal to Kang and Kodos. Realizing that their child has left the larval stage, they return to Earth, where Marge reveals that years ago she was abducted by aliens who impregnated her with alien technology. Homer and Kang fight over Maggie for a bit until Bart suggests that they settle it on Jerry Springer. But when the audience starts to side with Homer over Kang being a deadbeat, he starts to zap them, and the conflict isn't solved in the end. Homer and Marge refuse to give up Maggie, so Kang and Kodos decide to retaliate by destroying every politician in Washington—something the Simpson family isn't eager to stop.

When You Dish Upon a Star: The Simpson family heads to the local lake where, after a hang-gliding accident, Homer winds up crashing in through the roof of a getaway owned by Kim Basinger and Alec Baldwin. They're hiding out in Springfield as it's secluded from paparazzi and the spotlight, and the two implore Homer to keep their location a secret, which he does in exchange for being their new personal assistant for a while. This arrangement works, with Ron Howard joining in later, but Homer eventually tells the guys at Moe's about their hideaway, and soon the whole town.

Mobs the house. Alec, Kim, and Ron decide not to let Homer work for them anymore, and he retaliates by opening a museum out of all the stuff they left in his car, while also trash-talking celebrities to the patrons. But the celebrities realized that they were too harsh on him and move in to apologize, only to see what Homer is doing with their stuff and getting into a high-speed chase. When Ron Howard is injured in the chase, the matter is settled in court, where Homer is forced to stay 500 miles away from any celebrity in the future.

One of the persistent criticisms of The Simpsons' later seasons is the fact that the show relies so heavily on guest stars who play themselves in situations where their celebrity is the appeal of the episode, instead of just a guest appearance. And this has been a concern since as early as "Crusty Gets Cancelled" back in season 4, as well as something that isn't a natural law yet, with "Lard of the Dance" at the start of this season featuring Lisa Kudrow as Alex in a role that was elevated by some of her additions. In an episode like this, though, the celebrities could have been exchanged for anyone famous enough to have paparazzi concerns, and the plot still would have worked. It's one of those things that cemented The Simpsons as no longer being a parody of pop culture, but a product.

Though there's still some retained aspects of the original plan for the Simpson family here from the outset, Matt Groening had noticed a distinct lack of television on television itself for a nation so obsessed with the small screen. The characters we idolized rarely watched any themselves, so Homer and his family were meant to take many of their lessons in ideology from TV to better portray a layman in this country. And this persists in Homer's celebrity obsession; he engages with enough culture to idolize those who create it, but this then results in the show missing some of its original intention. It was meant to parody the content that people were consuming, but not the actors starring in it; a condemnation of mainstream television is meant as an insult to the writers, not the actors.

Doan in the wind. Homer fills out an actor's guild form after starring in a recruitment film for the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant, but realizes that he doesn't know what that Jay, his middle name, stands for. So he and his father set out to the commune where Mona Simpson used to go when she was tired of living with Abe, where they meet Seth and Munchie, two hippies who have lived there since she still visited. After learning his middle name is Jay, Homer decides to become a hippie, just the way his mother would have wanted, but his idea of being a hippie comes largely from old pop culture, and he doesn't get along with Seth or Munchie, who reveal that their commune actually houses a machine that mass-produces a health drink. He convinces them to go on one more freak-out together, but while out they learn that Homer's frisbee destroyed their next shipment. He decides to make it up to them by working through the night bottling a new batch, but picks from their personal garden of peyote to do so. When the police arrive at the commune to arrest them for drugging the town, Homer tries to convince the police to stand down, only to get a flower shot in his face.

This episode is a less than affectionate parody of the ideals of the '60s and the ways in which those ideals have slowly degraded over the years, watered down until they're only a surface-level homage to what they once were. But it also raises the point that these ideals have never really been a solidified ideology or completely united in what the movement was supposed to stand for. Most people, Homer included, have a secondhand version of the '60s in their heads, one that mostly comes from pop cultural representations of the era or Hollywood's watered-down visions. So rather than saying that the '60s are dead, this episode posits that they were never really alive in the first place. This ties in well with the general pop culture obsession that the later seasons have, while also giving a bit of justification for why that obsession formed in the first place. Between George Carlin and Martin Mull playing the commune hippies and the myriad other references made to media of the era, this episode seems to draw more of its parody from the subject matter than the characters through whom we explored it. Even then, it's really just Homer who has some involvement, and all he knows of the '60s is taken from old TV archives. As a result, it remains disconnected from The Simpsons as a show, and the overplayed drug jokes don't do it any favors towards making it seem like this episode was about 20 years too late to be satire.

Lisa gets an A. Homer shoves Lisa into a freezer in the search for good ice cream flavors, and she catches a cold. But after staying home from school and playing video games all day, she decides to fake continuing symptoms until Marge finally forces her back, where she realizes that she hasn't studied for an upcoming test. She turns to Bart, who directs her to Nelson, who sells test answers to her. Lisa gets an A++, the highest grade she's ever gotten, and the accolade ends up getting the school's GPA up to the minimum state standard to qualify for a funding grant. But Lisa's guilty conscience weighs on her, and she tries to confess to Skinner and Chalmers about the fraud, only for them to encourage her to go along with the lie as the school really needs the funding. In the end, she confesses her cheating to the comptroller, who rewards her honesty by giving Springfield Elementary the check anyway, only for the real comptroller to show up afterward while Skinner and Chalmers celebrate the fake bit, knowing that Lisa was going to squeal. Meanwhile, Homer buys a lobster and names it Pinchy, hoping to fatten the crustacean up enough that he can eat it, but he starts to adore Pinchy and keeps it as a pet rather than eating it, only to accidentally cook him while trying to give the lobster a hot bath.

Lisa does a bad thing in this episode but gets rewarded for it in the end; not only rewarded, but the entire school gets rewarded as well. It's a win-win, everyone involved except her conscience, as she doesn't like the idea of receiving any praise for cheating on a test, though she didn't take issue with cheating on the test in the first place upon realizing she would have failed otherwise. The real issue comes down not to the cheating but the praise she got for doing so. If she gets an A, she wants it to be earned, as Lisa's sense of self-worth is derived from her intelligence, and that's what pushed her to cheat in the first place, but it's also the thing that made her regret the action. But then this episode raises a more utilitarian question about the ethics of her action. Springfield Elementary is a massively underfunded school, to the point that the students are actively suffering from the effects of its dilapidation, so the extra funding would go a long way towards giving some sort of social equity to the Springfield children there, and surely that's something much more valuable than the personal feelings of a single student. It's a bit selfish for Lisa to decide to doom the school to irrelevancy by confessing to the fraud, but it was also a little selfish to cheat in the first place as well.

Homer Simpson in kidney trouble. Homer and his family go out to a ghost town for the day but accidentally end up taking Grandpa Simpson, too. When their car breaks down in front of the retirement castle, Abe drinks several bottles of Sara Pilla while he's there and has to go to the bathroom on the car ride back, but Homer refuses to stop, and his kidneys explode. Homer volunteers to donate one of his to his father, but over the next few days starts to become more and more afraid of the operation, until the second thoughts win out, and he runs away from the responsibility. Homer winds up on a boat full of wayward souls who all have some kind of story about why they've run away, but when he shares his, they're disgusted. In the end, Homer tries to return but chickens out again until he's hit by a car that fell off a truck while he's having his bones reset. The hospital simply takes the kidney from him and puts it into Grandpa, which Homer is upset about until he remembers that he can take one from Bart.

As far as plot density goes, this is one of the more sparse episodes. A majority of the first act is dedicated to an explanation of why Grandpa Simpson was in the car and needed to stop in the first place, and most of the third act is about Homer changing his mind again and again. This is a trend that The Simpsons has been following for some time, but this season is when it really starts to become more pronounced. In a few years, it's likely for the first act of an episode to be completely unrelated to the main plot of the story, but this is in lieu of one of the things I've complained about before—that being the episodes which serve exclusively as set pieces where the story seems tacked on to the beginning and end to try to justify why that set piece exists within the narrative. What this trend does show, however, is a gap in the writing that could have been filled. This episode is, in general, about the relationship between Homer and his father, how he regrets not being closer to the man and has to go to an extreme length to renew that relationship. So instead of a disconnected plot about a Wild West harlot, there could have been more time spent on Homer and Abraham arguing in the first act. This then would have made the conceit of the episode more consistent, but in a show that's retread ground like so frequently, maybe it's for the best that they at least attempt something different to avoid comparisons to themselves.

Mayored to the Mob. The Simpson family goes to a sci-fi con where Mark Hamill gets swarmed by an angry mob of nerds, so Homer gets to nerd-bashing where he saves the actor and the mayor as well. Quimby fires his bodyguards then hires Homer to protect him afterward, and after a short stint in bodyguard training school, he begins his new career. Homer and Quimby go through Springfield collecting bribe money from various businesses until he stumbles upon Fat Tony and the mafia's illegal rat-milking business, which is used to provide milk for Springfield Elementary. Homer is disgusted and expresses this feeling to Quimby, accidentally knocking him out of a window and making the mayor promise to ascend the rat milk deal in exchange for his life. But Fat Tony swears his revenge and makes public threats about it later. While out on the town, the mob makes an attempt on Quimby's life, which is thwarted by Homer with some assistance from Hamill, though as he's fighting one mobster, Tony simply pummels Quimby behind his back. In the end, Homer carries Mark Hamill into the horizon while kicking paparazzi out of the way.

This episode is, on the surface, just as decent as any of the Golden Age Simpsons episodes. It's got a celebrity attached to it, but their role is minor and not expected to carry the plot by itself. It has a few of the show's more memorable jokes—between "You promised me, dog," or "Hire and use the forks"—and of course, it's an opportunity for the show's writers to put Homer in a new job, but that's about it. The new situation is just there as a set piece; there's nothing about it that generates some sort of satire about bodyguarding or the people who require it, just a few gags about Quimby being corrupt that we've seen again and again. Homer's motivation for taking the job is flimsy at best; he just likes punching nerds, though that's not what he's promised upon starting. So when comparing a season 10 episode to an episode from an earlier season, it's as if the later episodes pay lip service to what made the series great initially, without any of the deeper meaning behind it all. The satire is either not there, or it's become characterization instead. Quimby was once meant to poke fun at real-world politicians but has slowly developed an identity of his own, to the point that when he does something corrupt, instead of invoking the image of the real world, it only invokes the image of Springfield.

Viva Ned Flanders. Following the destruction of the Mr. Burns Casino, Homer goes to a car wash where he sees Ned paying with a senior citizen's card. He tries to shame Ned for pretending to be elderly at church, but Ned reveals that he really is 60 years old and that he keeps his youthful looks by avoiding all temptation. But when the church congregation seems more confused than praiseful of these lifestyle choices, he realizes that perhaps he's too straight-laced. So Ned goes to Homer Simpson to learn how to live freely. Homer has Ned sign up for a program that will teach him to live impulsively, that involves the two going gambling, and since Mr. Burns's Casino has been demolished, they go to Vegas instead. While there, Homer pressures Ned into doing crazy things until eventually the two wake up in a trashed hotel room where they learned they've married two cocktail waitresses named Amber and Ginger. The next morning, they're debating what they should do about the marriages when Homer suggests running away, but the various celebrities of Vegas don't take well to this idea and simply kick the men out of the city, with Amber and Ginger marrying someone else.

Ned Flanders started out as the anti-Homer, someone who actually represented all of the ideals that The Simpsons set out to parody while making the Simpson family look worse by comparison. Homer's jealous mind prevents him from making friends with a person who would, in any other situation, be the ideal guy to live next door to him. Being a foil was a core part of the early seasons, with Homer's antics often getting started out of jealousy out of how much better Ned had it. But Homer doesn't need help doing stupid things anymore, and in a twist of irony, Ned is now the one jealous of Homer and hoping to do something stupid, spurred on by his antics. And so we receive an episode that plays with the antiquated trope of Vegas as a city of sin and vice, though since the collapse of the mob's control over the city and a subsequent takeover by corporate interests, Vegas became a much more family-friendly place where marrying a stripper on an impulse was now something you would only pretend to do. There's a sense of irony in the fact that Ned was a man living in the past, unable to go crazy, trying to go crazy at the advice of Homer by heading to a city that was really only sinful in the past. That The Simpsons itself is now slightly out of touch with tropes based on what the writers remembered about pop culture, something that is now different from reality.

Wild Bart's can't be broken. The Simpson family attends an Isotopes game where Homer talks about how much he hates the team, only for six months to pass and the Isotopes make it to the finals where they win. Homer and his friends from Moe's drive around town celebrating, where they tear up Springfield Elementary. In response to this, Chief Wiggum imposes a curfew on all the children of Springfield. The kids are upset about the curfew and decide to sneak out to watch a horror movie at the drive-in, but they're caught in the act and forced to clean as a punishment. But while cleaning, they formulate a plan to get back at the adults using a similar method to the tactics used by the children from the horror movie, setting up a pirate radio station and revealing the secrets about the adults in town until the curfew is removed. But the pirate radio station is tracked down, and there's a confrontation between the adults and children in the form of a musical number. The number ends when the elderly arrive angry because they're trying to sleep, and the episode ends with a new curfew imposed on anybody under 70.

There's a lot of retaliatory action in this episode, with an implication that most of what went wrong was simply an escalation of earlier events. The only reason the police enforce a curfew is because they failed at better preventative measures of protecting the school or figuring out who really did it. The only reason the kids want to sneak out en masse is because they were under curfew in the first place, and the only reason the kids started the pirate radio station is because they felt the punishment for sneaking out was too harsh. And in the end, the adults of Springfield get a comeuppance as the elderly overreacted in their musical number. But the episode itself is another example of a totally disconnected A, B, and C plot. It's as though the writers wanted to do an episode about rowdy baseball fans but only had so much to say, wanted to do a pirate radio episode with only so many ideas, and that there was only so much to be done with jokes about the curfew. By now, the topical satire's relevance has started to become tapped out after nine seasons. What is there to write about that hasn't either been done already or is too recent to really have an accurate or nuanced depiction of both sides, other than smaller issues that can't fill out a whole episode?

Sunday, Cruddy Sunday. Homer meets a travel agent named Wally Kogen while the two are waiting at a tire shop. After being scammed, they go to a bar together, and Wally reveals that he's a travel agent who can get Homer a bus to the Super Bowl if he can get enough friends to fill it, which he manages to do. So the men of Springfield leave to go to the Super Bowl, only to arrive at the front gate and learn that the tickets Wally has are fake. So Homer leads them in simply breaking into the stadium, though they're put in the stadium cell for doing so. Eventually, Dolly Parton comes by, and Wally convinces her to free the group, where they storm one of the skyboxes, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who kicks them out, chasing them into the locker room of the winning team, the Denver Broncos. They celebrate with the team until it's time to go home, with the episode ending with commentary from Pat Summerall and John Madden. Meanwhile, Marge and Lisa paint eggs with a craft, get endorsed by Vincent Price.

This is one of the most pop-culture-packed episodes of The Simpsons to air thus far, and like most episodes with celebrity guests, it barely leaves any room for plot or even humor. Many of the punch lines come from one-off bits by real people who have far too little screen time to make a lasting impact, and each celebrity cameo comes across as a waste of time, made worse by the rapid succession in which they arrive. This episode originally aired after Super Bowl XXXIII and was meant to be animated with a quick enough turnaround to have the references be recent, something joked about in the episode itself with characters covering their mouths to drop team names. It shows just how much importance there is with nuance and trying to depict any part of pop culture. To simply have a thing appear does not make a very decent depiction unless there's something relevant to be said about that thing, and relevance requires more time and effort put into the addition than whatever surface-level acknowledgement you might receive with the cameo.

Homer to the Max. The Simpson family discovers a new show, Police Cops, with a character named Homer Simpson, a smooth-talking, suave hero. Homer enjoys the minor amount of fame associated with having a famous name until the next episode of the show airs, where Homer Simpson has been changed into a bumbling idiot. He starts to feel embarrassed by the whole town constantly expecting him to act stupid, so he sues the network, only for that to fail, and then changes his name to Max Power instead. Max Power begins to live his life with a newfound confidence as he introduces himself all over again to people who start to treat him with respect. One of these people is Trent Steel, a successful businessman who invites Homer to a party full of upper-class Springfieldians. Max and Marge attend this garden party, only to learn that it was an effort by Trent to get people involved in this protest of the city chopping down a redwood forest, and Max gets dragged along with them. But while trying to evade the police, he ends up chopping down his tree with his chains, and the whole forest comes crashing down with it. That night, he returns home, where he reveals that he has changed his name back to Homer Simpson.

The change of Homer Simpson from an audience-pleasing protagonist to a bumbling sidekick who was meant to be laughed at is a bit of self-awareness by the show's writers. Homer himself was once the TV everyman, meant to serve as the voice of reason among his family, but as Lisa points out, early installments in a TV series are often experimental, and many things can be changed from a pilot to later installments. It's not...

As though Homer became Dumber because the writers were actively trying to make him a fool, but that they were simply following in the footsteps of earlier episodes, as well as audience demand. Homer being an idiot made more sense for the plots they wanted to write, which themselves were merely things audiences like to see. The town of Springfield follows Homer around to watch him do stupid stuff, as that's now the expectation that they have of the guy. And maybe the fact that Homer wanted to change his name to Max represents a desire by the showrunners themselves to reinvent the show's dynamics. Having a stupid lead will eventually run out of steam once audience members stop relating to the guy, but with the way the cast has been developing, it might be too much work to reverse that trend in a way that makes it worth doing. As ultimately, Max Power's new life turns out not to be what he was expecting, and he soon wishes to return to being Homer Simpson.

[Music]

I'm with [Music] Cupid. Marge goes to the Quicky Mart to buy some supplies for a school project, and while there, Apu invites her out as payback for the Simpson family hosting his wedding. But on the night of the dinner, Apu and Manjula end up arguing over the fact that Apu works too many hours and doesn't spend time at home with her, something based on a lie he told about typical American work ethic. So to make it up to her, Apu plans seven romantic surprises leading up to Valentine's Day, something that she loves, although it makes the rest of Springfield's women jealous. And these jealous women end up complaining to their husbands, who look bad in comparison. But rather than trying to reach up to Apu's level, they instead plan a sabotage of his final gift—a love note written in the sky. Homer gets into a brawl with the skywriter that winds up destroying his tank before the message finishes, with all the women of Springfield interpreting the note as being for them. In the end, the plane drops Homer through a patch of roses and into the backyard, where Marge is pleased that Homer has finally done something romantic for her.

There have been plenty of romance episodes before about Homer not doing enough for Marge, and here this failure is something extended to the rest of Springfield's men as well. As Springfield is a stand-in for America, this episode then exists to show the disparity between American work ethic in both romance and other fields. Apu, being a foreigner, is the standout among the cast of The Simpsons as he actually loves his wife and actually loves his work. This draws the anger of every man in the USA; they view it as an attack on their culture to care, that seeing true romance might raise the bar of what's expected of them. The Simpsons started out as a parody of modern American sitcoms, but has by now become a parody of nothing; these sitcoms stopped being made. The average contemporary wasn't about family dramas but about singles, and the families we saw on television all resembled the realism of The Simpsons. So this new normal is something that the show has to deal with now that the parody is reality. New conflicts can crop up as the writers get to show an exception that used to be the rule coming into conflict with the rule that was once an exception. Homer Simpson went from the opposite of television to the standard for television, and Springfield can now come into conflict with what it used to be.

Marge Simpson in screaming yellow Honkers. Marge struggles to drive the family home after a school event due to not being assertive enough, and they're cut off by Crusty and his Canyonero, which inspires Homer to go out and buy his own SUV, but he gets the F model and is too embarrassed to drive what he considers a woman's car, leaving the SUV with Marge instead. With the newfound sense of power behind the wheel, Marge begins to drive more recklessly, eventually developing road rage and getting pulled over for reckless driving. But even after taking a mandatory anger management course, she continues to drive aggressively, which results in crashing into the prison and letting a bunch of convicts escape; her license being destroyed afterwards. But later on at the zoo, Homer starts a stampede which sets a group of rhinos loose, and Marge's SUV, as the only thing big enough to corral them back into the zoo, she agrees, but only because her family is in danger, and the day is saved when she exploits the vehicle's tendency to flip over and explode. American cars are as big as American everything—televisions, houses, and egos—and this episode shows through Marge how some of these are connected. She's an overly considerate driver when she's on the same level as everyone else, but once her car is bigger, her sense of self-importance grows with it, and of course, as the cars get bigger and bigger, the desire to compete with others grows, creating a feedback loop where a guy like Homer can decide to buy an oversized vehicle because his ego was telling him to. But as objects continue to grow, some things do not scale. This episode makes fun of the way that oversized vehicles that are supposedly safer for their passengers are usually just as dangerous, if not more so, than the smaller cars. The excuse of wanting to be safe in a crash wears thinner and thinner as the real motivation of wanting to feel big gets uncovered. But despite how anti-SUV this episode starts out as, the ending comes across as a bit hypocritical when it tries to make everything end on a happy note because of Marge's new destructive behavior. You see, it's actually a good thing that the Canyonero explodes so easily, and it's a good thing that she was driving around in something that could scare off a rhino. The episode sends a mixed message in its attempt to wrap up the story.

Make Room for Lisa. Bart and Lisa go to the Smithsonian Museum as it's Lisa's turn to pick what the family does that day. Homer complains the entire time and eventually winds up desecrating the Bill of Rights, which, due to being owned by a telecom company now, is something that has to be repaid for. The debt is paid by having a tower installed on the roof of the Simpson home, with the electronics being put into Lisa's room. She has to live with Bart during this period, and he does everything that he can to annoy his sister, which eventually causes her to have stomach pains, resulting in a visit to the doctor's office where Hibbert suggests a few natural remedies to help her to relax. So Homer begrudgingly takes her to a natural pharmacy where they find sensory deprivation chambers, and Lisa convinces Homer to sign them up for two hours. Homer's tank is repossessed while he's still inside, where it travels around the city before winding up back in the store. Meanwhile, Lisa is able to start imagining herself as other people, eventually getting a chance to see the world from her father's perspective. In the end, they travel together to a demolition derby, with Lisa just glad to spend some time with family.

In the B plot, Marge starts to hear the town's gossip when the baby monitor picks up signal from the cell tower, and Bart decides to prank her by making her believe a criminal is breaking into the house. The "Homer doesn't love Lisa enough" plot has been done before in episodes like "Lost Our Lisa" and "Lisa's Pony," with the same conclusion every time: Homer's love for his family is merely something that they can't recognize. Just because the way Lisa wants to spend her time with her father doesn't overlap with the way he wants to show affection doesn't mean that the affection is not there. Lisa wants a deeper conversation between the two, which shared learning experiences to bring them together, but Homer is a type who values the more visceral experiences; he wants to see something blow up next to someone he likes. But again, this is a plot that is being retread; we've seen the two argue and disagree before, but the arguments were over smaller, more realistic things like Homer forgetting to buy a read before a concert. As the show has gotten older, the antics have ramped up, so we get the same "they really do love each other" kind of solutions to much bigger problems, and the suspension of disbelief that goes along with these answers has to stretch further and further. It's been ten seasons, and we know that the next time the plot requires it, the two will be at each other's throats once more. The solutions aren't going to be permanent, nor are they becoming justification enough to be solutions, though this sort of plot ages worse every time it gets [Music] reintroduced.

Maximum Homer Drive. The Simpson family goes to the Slaughterhouse, a new steak restaurant in Springfield, where Homer meets Red, a trucker who challenges him to a steak-eating contest. Homer loses, but Red ends up dying of beef poisoning afterwards. And after learning that he won't make his delivery on time, Homer decides to take on the mantle of truck driver to deliver it for him. Bart comes along too, and the father and son spend the next few days on the road until Homer falls asleep at the wheel and learns that the truck can drive itself; in fact, every truck can. A huge scam that all the truck drivers in America are in on. The other truckers make Homer promise to keep it a secret, and although he agrees, he can't help but blab about it until word gets back to the rest of the industry, and they band together to run Homer off the road. But Homer is able to make an accidental jump over their blockade, and he earns their respect as he delivers the cargo on time.

In the B plot, Marge and Lisa want to have their own fun and buy a new doorbell, only for it to ring continuously with neither of them able to turn it off until Seymour Ding-Dong, an expert, comes by and whips it into shape. For an episode that's innocent by today's standards, Maximum Homer Drive actually had a lot of trouble getting past censors. A few scenes had to be cut or toned down, such as the early scenes involving Mr. Burns having cows put down being reduced to an offscreen thud. The mention of beef poisoning was almost removed as well due to fears of disparaging the beef industry, and the scene of Homer downing two bottles of pills gave the censors some issues, though this was ultimately left in. But what the rest of the episode deals with is another story of Homer getting involved in a new world, struggling to find acceptance at first, and ultimately winning over the crowd despite his lack of experience. The world of trucking is viewed as one of the ultimate manly professions in America, with imagery of the frontier days of American folklore and the Wild West. This is what pulls Homer and Bart to the road trip in the first place, as well as why their fight against the other truckers becomes personal. It's not just that they're attacking his skills as a driver, but his masculinity itself. And this conflict starts out from a steak-eating contest that Homer loses, with an underdog theme pervading the entire [Music] episode.

Simpsons' Bible Stories. During a particularly hot Easter sermon, Reverend Lovejoy is upset about Homer putting a chocolate bunny into the collection basket and decides to read the Bible from the beginning. While reading, the Simpson family falls asleep, and each one dreams of a different Bible story. Marge dreams that she and Homer are Eve and Adam in the Garden of Paradise, while Ned Flanders plays the role of God. But when Homer eats forbidden apples and convinces Marge to do the same, Ned grows upset and expels Marge from Eden. Homer feels guilty about getting her thrown out and decides to help her sneak back in, killing a unicorn in the process. When Ned learns of this, he throws both of them out, and the short ends with the two wondering how long God could possibly hold a grudge.

The next story is Lisa's, from the perspective of Springfield Elementary being slaves to the Pharaoh Skinner. Milhouse is Moses, and Lisa has to continuously encourage him to demand freedom, with the two creating the plagues themselves. After getting punished for insolence, Skinner has them thrown into the pyramids, though they escape due to the shoddy craftsmanship and climb to freedom, where they encourage the other Jews to escape by flushing at once to temporarily drain the sea. The next short has Homer as King Solomon ruling over a pie dispute between Lenny and Carl by splitting the pie in half and eating both himself. Then Bart becomes King David, who is overthrown by Goliath's son, Goliath 2, played by Nelson. He is exiled to the wilderness, where Ralph seeks vengeance for him, only to die in the process. So Bart trains with the sheep before returning to climb the Tower of Babel himself so he can face the new king, Goliath 2, pouring burning oil down his throat. But this fails to do it, and Ralph ends up defeating Goliath 2 with his own tombstone, having faked his death. In the end, the people are furious with Bart as Goliath 2 was a good king, and Bart is arrested. Finally, the Simpson family wakes up only to find the church empty as the Rapture is occurring outside. They see the Flanders ascending to Heaven while a portal to Hell opens up in front of them, with Homer running downstairs because he smells barbecue.

Mom and Pop Art. Homer tries to install a new barbecue pit in the backyard, only to fail at masonry and create a mess instead. While trying to dispose of it, he gets noticed by Astrid Weller, a Springfield artist, who insists that the wagon is a work of Outsider Art, and she has it displayed at the Springfield Lou, where it's purchased by Mr. Burns. Excited to start a career as a professional artist, Homer starts to channel his rage into more pieces, only for the Springfield art community to reject his new works for being too similar to his old ones. He feels upset that he's lost his touch and tries to seek consolation from Marge, who is angry that her dream of being an artist has been co-opted by Homer, and the two go to a museum to learn what real art is. While there, Homer has many hallucinations about various periods of art history and comes up with a new idea: to flood Springfield as a groundbreaking exhibit. The town comes together to enjoy the temporary flood while Marge paints the scene from the roof as the two bond over their mutual appreciation of the arts.

In this episode, Homer's artistic ambitions are fueled by rage, the emotion that he channels into his work and what others in the art community connect to. But once he gets this recognition, it's difficult to produce anything new as that rage is a one-note and shallow emotion, something difficult to conjure up at a moment's notice. Because he tried to force it, his second batch of works lacks the appeal of his first, and he loses his position in the art community. It's only when he sneaks out to flood the town that he finds acceptance again, despite announcing to Springfield that he's responsible for the flood. The enjoyment people get is on the merits of the water instead. So the real thing that caused people to dislike Homer's expressions comes down to the fact that he was trying to create something for his own sake. His barbecue pit was something he did at Marge's behest; the flood was something that Marge inspired too. But the random exhibitions in the second act of the episode were things that he did for himself, that he might become noticed for his talents. The art community is shown to be fickle and a bit snobbish; their attention is something that can't be held for long and likely isn't worth trying to hold that long either. But for Homer to create art inspired by the people closest to him will always be much more personal, as those are the relationships that define his life.

The Old Man and the Sea Student. The Olympic planning committee intends to have the games held in Springfield, and all the Springfield units are contributing in some way, with Homer creating a spring mascot for the town. But when Bart does a culturally insensitive comedy routine in front of the committee, they resend the offer, and Principal Skinner punishes all the students with community service. Bart is made to volunteer at the Springfield Retirement Castle, where he sees the monotonous routine that the old folks live every day, and he decides to do something to spice up their lives by taking them out on the town, winding up on a boat tour. But their boat is hit by Mr. Burns's yacht, and it begins to sink to the bottom of the ocean, only to wind up bouncing back as they land on a large pile of springs. Homer bought 1,000 springs for the Olympics, only to struggle to sell them once the Olympics were taken away, so they simply flushed them all down the toilet.

This episode makes an interesting statement on how society treats the elderly. While it raises the point that many old people are simply pushed aside and forgotten about, it also makes the counterpoint that this isn't something done against their will but as part of their own demand. At a certain age, you start to find a routine to settle into, partially because of the physical limitations of your body, but also because you've tried enough to know what you like. Bart, being young, doesn't understand why someone would enjoy the monotony of doing the same things at the same time every day and ends up clashing with what the retirement home residents really want. But it's not as though the opposite extreme was ideal either, because while the Springfield Retirement Castle enjoys their routine, they still follow Bart out of their assisted living facilities anyway to go seek out some sort of adventure, something they take to easily during a montage. So Bart and Lisa both reflect different opinions on how the old folks of Springfield ought to be treated, each one on the opposite end of the spectrum, though nobody ever asked the elderly themselves, who have found their happy medium and didn't need quite as much coddling as they were [Music] getting.

Monty Can't Buy Me Love. While on a family walk, the Simpsons come across the grand opening of the Fortune Mega-Store, a large mall run by a billionaire named Arthur Fortune. The residents of Springfield love the mall, and they love its owner even more when he arrives and throws out free money. But when Mr. Burns comes across the event, he grows angry that nobody in town likes him as much as the other billionaires, so he recruits the help of Homer Simpson to be more likable, mimicking the stunts of other wealthy people to no success. So he decides to do something no other rich man has done and deliver the Loch Ness Monster to the town of Springfield. He recruits Groundskeeper Willie and Professor Frink to assist, but their search finds no results. So Mr. Burns decides to simply drain the lake. Once drained, he finds the monster and overpowers it offscreen, then transports it back to Springfield. But while Nessie is on display, the flash of the camera causes him to go mad—Burns, that is—and he knocks over the lights, causing a fire. In the end, Homer tells Mr. Burns that being loved is too hard, and Burns decides it's better to be feared instead.

Burns has always had an abrasive personality, the kind of person who's hard to like, and he's been a commentary on the type of faceless, soulless wealthy elite whose wealth gets them to control and stay in power. And of course, wealthy. He has an oppressive grip on Springfield and has even resorted to super-villain tactics at times. But over the years, he's developed further and further away from being a stereotype and has become a character in his own right. Mr. Burns went from a symbol of something to a symbol of himself. With this developing character focus, he's becoming more divorced from his original role as the owner of the power plant. In fact, we've seen very little of the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant at all this season, not just because Homer doesn't go to work as much as he used to, but because there's less to do as the show's points of satire have shifted. And so Mr. Burns starts to move out of his mansion and into the spotlight, but not without some difficulty. Years of existing as a face to the faceless have made him unapproachable. So to become a character, there first has to be a decision as to who Mr. Burns really is, and in this episode, he decides that his unveiling ought not to be a face but who he really was deep down: the same unlikable guy all [Music] along.

They Saved Lisa's [Music] Brain. After a gross-out competition and a riot, Lisa writes an open letter to Springfield in the newspaper regarding the town's conduct. At first, it appears as though nobody has read it until she receives a letter asking her to come to a specific address, where she's inducted into Mensa. She enjoys the feeling of belonging that comes with her new circle of friends, whose intellects can match her own, but still feels as though the group doesn't belong in Springfield due to the rest of the town's folk being too dimwitted. So they go to the local government for a bit of justice, only for Mayor Quimby to skip town.

Leaving them in charge as per the town charter, Mina proceeds to control Springfield with new, efficient reforms that are meant to make the city more intellectual. But the group starts to push their personal ideologies, and soon infighting causes the town to mob them while they're arguing over who is smarter—an argument which is ended by Steven Hawking, who rescues Lisa from the mob.

In the B plot, Homer gets an erotic photo session from the grow-out contest and hopes to do something exciting for March with it, only for her to be more enthralled with what the photographer did with their basement. This episode has Springfield run by a geniocracy, ruled by intelligence. We've seen how dysfunctional Springfield has been in the past, with the implication that it's a town run by morons, populated by morons, and ideal for that type. But the point is then raised that just because somebody is intelligent, it doesn't necessarily imply that they're the most fit to lead. There are different ways in which a person can be talented, and just because somebody is good at memorizing trivia or inventing or treating the various maladies found within Springfield, they aren't guaranteed to be the type of leader that others would want to follow. It's one type of intelligence to figure out what's best for people, but it's a completely different skill set to convince them that it's good for them—like getting a child to eat their vegetables. And so this episode gets some mileage from pointing out this distinction between a smart leader and a good one. Springfield's intellectual elite mostly talk about how much better they are than others, then talk about how much better they are than each other. They have a smug and condescending attitude towards their peers, as they believe that they must be in charge for the pro rolls his own sake. But they're just as incompetent as Quimby before them, if not more so, because Quimby was at least able to offer some consistency to life—a thing that most groups of people will always prefer over change, even if it's ostensibly for the better.

30 minutes over Tokyo: Homer loses the family's vacation money through a combination of poor investing and a robbery by Snake. So they attend a seminar on how to save money by cutting back on expenses and following money-saving tricks, such as picking up flights cheaply from Nosh shows. Following this advice, they end up on a plane to Tokyo for a vacation in Japan. The family is enthralled with the various gadgets and fancy toilets, as well as the Japanese take on American culture. But when Homer throws the emperor into a bin full of sumo thongs and gets arrested, Marge has to use most of their money on bail; the rest blows away in the wind when Homer folds it into an origami crane with no help from the embassy. They're forced to get jobs at a seafood concern, where they learn of a game show that might be their ticket to get home. The challenges on the game show are sadistic and mostly just a means of abusing Homer, culminating in a challenge over a volcano. But when the family falls inside, it's revealed to be a fake, and Homer tells off the crowd before taking the tickets and leaving. In the end, they're mildly inconvenienced by a Kaiju attack as they return to Springfield. This episode pokes fun at Japanese culture as understood by Americans in the late '90s, while still keeping the plot grounded around the Simpson family by largely highlighting the differences between the two cultures instead of simply making jokes at one side's expense. There was a two-way eagerness between the nations; the Japanese were quick to adopt American culture as a sign of their growing prominence in the global marketplace, whereas Americans were fascinated by the small scale of the tech and how advanced the nation appeared to be. This isn't so much an episode about Japan as it is an episode about the way America views Japan. But more than any of that, it's an episode about The Simpsons going to a place—name one of the series staples by now and a more staunch tradition moving forward. Lisa even drops the earlier phrase word for word—a responsibility that would later be given to Homer so as to make a better lead-in card for commercials in filler. The episode appears near the end of the season, meaning that it aired in May, which is when many networks priced their ads for the following year. So big pulls like a travel episode or celebrity guest star were put in late-season slots in order to make the show appear all around more valuable.

Season 11: The previous season had a much different vibe to many of the episodes, despite how similar they were to what came before. The overall propensity for absurd set pieces has been a part of The Simpsons for years by now and was part of the season's remembered the most fondly. The guest stars, as numerous as ever, even if a bit more fanfare was given to their arrival than before. But nonetheless, season 10 felt different from the other seasons, despite the showrunner's attempts to keep the boat from rocking. So season 11 was the point in which it was decided that a bit of change couldn't hurt—in fact, it was an inevitability. You can't keep making the same show forever, not just because it's a bad idea, but because it's an impossible one. So rather than trying to fight change, the writers were now embracing it. This season introduces many now long-running gags to the franchise, as well as being one of the most meme-late in so far—not just inside jokes among the community, but things that non-Simpsons fans would recognize as a result. Much of the schmaltz of the early seasons of The Simpsons is gone. This change is one done not only because of the original spark being gone, but out of a desire to reinvent the show and push what boundaries it could. Mulan gives birth to octuplets, Barney goes sober, and Maude Flanders is killed off—all three changes made because the earlier characterizations lacked anything new or original to do with them, much in the same way that the early echoes of that Simpsons charm had worn off. Needless to say, the attempt at reinventing The Simpsons was a success; it's just a matter of how well and intentionally this change is interpreted by fans to be.

Beyond Blunderdome: Homer crashes an electric car that he was test driving to get a free gift, and later learns that the gift was tickets to a movie screening—the movie being a remake of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington starring Mel Gibson. The audience all love the movie except for Homer, who is partially upset over Marge swooning over the actor, and so he leaves the only negative review. Mel reads this review and takes it personally that Homer is the only man among Springfield willing to tell the truth, so he hires Homer Simpson to retouch the movie to appeal to a wider audience, only for Homer to suggest an action-packed, explosion-filled romp. The studio executives who see the improved version hate it and try to destroy the film reel, but Homer refuses to accept this and takes the film, running away with Mel to get it to the moviegoing public. After a chase through Hollywood, they're eventually successful at stopping the execs and get the film out there, and it is hated by everybody. Realizing Homer was not the film critic he had thought, Mel kicks Homer out of his limo and drives away. At one point, Homer was meant to be the everyman type of character; his wants and desires represented what the average American wanted and desired. He was a stand-in for real America in order to be relatable to the audience. Here he gets to retouch a movie to make it more palatable, only to ruin it with his changes, as the mainstream audience changes their opinions to hatred. It's a situation where the studio executives in mainstream America are the ones who are right, while Homer is shown as being out of touch and wrong to only think of explosions and fight scenes. The original intent behind the development of The Simpsons was to denigrate the mainstream trash that typically appeared in pop culture, to provide a more realistic alternative that looked down on what it was surrounded by. But now the main character of The Simpsons is an out-of-touch relic of a less intellectual era who just wants a simple, stupid thrill, and he's able to get the attention of an equally out-of-touch celebrity type who thinks that audiences only like him because they're told what to watch and think. The age of jerk-ass Homer has begun.

Brother's Little Helper: When Bart destroys the school gym during a fire safety seminar at the school, Principal Skinner gives Marge and Homer an ultimatum: to either have him expelled or placed onto a new medication named Focusin. These meds give him greater attention in class and cut back on his behavioral issues for a while, getting on Lisa's nerves but helping to organize things for Marge and Homer. However, he soon starts to become weird and jaded, placing coat hangers around his room and talking about a conspiracy involving Major League Baseball. And when the researchers who put him on the meds talk about easing him off of them, he downs several pills and steals a tank. Bart drives the tank through the city to the horror of the adults and cheers of the children until he eventually fires, hitting an MLB satellite and exposing the surveillance to the whole town. But they're distracted by Mark McGwire hitting a few dingers, and the whole incident is forgotten about. This episode was written about the overprescription of psycho-stimulants in the U.S., with an attempt at explaining the potential hazards that could present themselves down the line. What was at one time a simple behavioral issue of Bart lashing out against incompetent authority is now diagnosed as a mental disorder, with the prescription thrown at the problem instead of any other proposed solution. These prescriptions were often things that came about as a result of various groups not wanting to take the blame for their child's misbehavior. Overcrowded schools were simply looking for a way to keep the large class sizes more manageable and were eager to recommend that their students be kept quiet with drug doses, while the parents were quick to accept these diagnoses as a means of deflecting responsibility for their lack of parenting. After all, if your child has a behavioral issue, it's not your fault that they're mentally unwell. But to reject the pills means to accept that your child is healthy and that the parents simply didn't raise them right. So many are quick to overprescribe the easy remedy to their issues, which in the end can ultimately only hurt the children themselves, especially those who legitimately had a need for the meds.

Guess Who's Coming to Criticize Dinner: While on a school trip to the Springfield Chopper, the local newspaper, Homer stumbles into the retirement party of their food critic and eats all the farewell desserts, which gives the head editor the idea to have Homer do a trial run as their food critic. His first attempted criticism fails until he recruits the help of Lisa, at which point his application is accepted, and Homer becomes a full-time restaurant critic. His constant rave reviews cause the whole town of Springfield to become overweight due to never badmouthing a meal, until the other critics start to encourage him to be more well-critical. So Homer begins to write exclusively negative reviews, which draws the anger of local restaurant owners, as well as Lisa, who quits as his assistant reviewer—an issue as she wrote a majority of the reviews. The restaurant owners of Springfield unite to assassinate Homer with a poisoned éclair at a food festival—a plot which Bart overhears and warns the rest of the family about. Lisa is able to stop Homer from eating the poison food just in time, and they avoid the attempt on his life, only to get rushed by an angry mob at the end of the episode anyway. Homer, a guy who loves food, becomes a food critic, and he proceeds to share that love of food with everyone who reads the newspaper. This criticism ends up being subpar, as critics are meant to have more varied opinions; then everything is good if nothing ever scores below seven thumbs up, then a high rating doesn't really mean anything. You need to have a few negative reviews to give variety to your scores in order for those scores to represent a proper spectrum of taste. He then gets his criticism criticized and decides to air in the opposite direction—now everything is bad, and this has the same issue: if everything is bad, then nothing is, and those negative ratings don't really mean anything if everyone gets one. When a low score is a 1 out of 10 or a high score is a 10 out of 10, then a proper review doesn't mean much of anything. But these two extremes are not shown as equal. When Homer is giving away high scores to everything he eats, the people who read his reviews share in his joy; everybody starts to overeat, and everybody starts to gain weight until they look like Homer does. But his constant negative scores also create a feeling of resentment. Homer's negative outlook becomes infectious, and the restaurant owners take enough offense to try to poison him. The best thing to do as a critic is to be unbiased, and in this episode, we see that failing; the next best thing is to be too nice.

Treehouse of Horror X: The 10th Treehouse of Horror segment, introduced by Krusty and Kotos. I Know What You Diddly-Itly Did: While driving through the fog, the Simpson family runs over Ned Flanders. They panic over what to do and settle on faking a real death for him, attending the funeral, and pretending to have had nothing to do with the murder. This works for a while until somebody starts to write "I Know What You Did" around their house while stalking them. The family runs for it, eventually being caught up to by the stalker, who reveals himself as Ned Flanders. As it turns out, he was a werewolf and had planned on mauling the Simpsons, attacking Homer once he finished explaining his story. Desperately Seeking Zena: Bart and Lisa are attending a Halloween candy inspection when the machine malfunctions and blasts them with radiation, giving Lisa super strength and Bart stretchiness. Their story continues when the Collector, played by Comic Book Guy, kidnaps Lucy Lawless and displays her in his collection of other celebrities with the intention of forcing her to marry him. Bart and Lisa, now Stretch Dude and Clobber Girl, move out to rescue her, only to be stopped by the Collector's phaser before he lowers them slowly into a vat of loose sight. But Lucy makes up a fake story to distract the Collector before grabbing his lips and pummeling him, dropping him into the loose sight and rescuing Bart and Lisa before they fly off into the sunset. Life's a Glitch, and Then You Die: It's New Year's 1999, and Homer has neglected to make the computer's Y2K compliant. When the year turns over, all of the electronics on Earth get infected through Springfield and begin to attack people while malfunctioning. The Simpson family participates in the downfall of society before finding a secret letter from Crusty about a project to evacuate all of Earth's top intellectuals and athletes to start a new civilization on Mars. Lisa is on board, taking Marge with her, and Homer and Bart are left behind until they find another celebrity-full rocket and run on board, only to quickly realize that it's full of Earth's annoying celebrities who are being launched into the Sun. But rather than waiting for the sun to incinerate them, they simply eject into the vacuum of space where they explode in peace.

EI EI EI Do: After watching a cheesy Zorro movie and mimicking a glove slap from it, Homer starts to notice how easy it is to use the threat of a duel to bully people into giving him what he wants. He carries a glove around and slaps people to get his way until he hits a southern gentleman who accepts the offer. Terrified of fighting in a duel for real, Homer and his family pack up and flee to the countryside to live in the old Simpson place. But Homer's attempts to grow anything in the soil go terribly until he gets the idea to use plutonium from the nuclear plant to accelerate the process. The glowing fields produce a hybrid of tomatoes and tobacco, which Homer calls Tomacco, and its addictive qualities make it a fast seller. Laramy Cigarettes offers to buy the rights to the tobacco plant, but Homer is convinced by his family not to sell but to hold out for more. This offer is rejected, and the family is later set upon by animals who have eaten all the crops in a rabidly trying to get the last Tomacco plant. When he tries to ditch it to get the animals away, a Laramy executive takes it, though the helicopter therein crashes when a crazed sheep stows away. In the end, the Simpson family returns home, where the southern gentleman is still waiting, and Homer gets shot. This episode includes the subtle sign gag of Snead's Feed and Seed (formerly Chuck's) in the background of one shot—something that has sparked intense debate among the fans as to the intention behind the sign, whether it was a body joke or not. It was confirmed after years of discussion by writer Ian Maxtone-Graham that the joke was indeed intentional, this joke being derived from the fact that the name Snead's Feed and Seed involves multiple words rhyming with the -eed scheme. But as the sign states that the store was formerly Chuck's, this gives the implication that the store was once called Chuck's Feed and Seed, the joke being that the words didn't rhyme until the store changed ownership. On a more serious note, this episode is about the way Homer's greed and ego are connected. He is at first hurt emotionally by his failure to follow through on the duel; the family living in hiding is a result of his lack of backbone. But later he struggles to support his family due to his inability to grow anything out of the land surrounding the farm. This, combined with the insult from the other ranchers, makes his later success go straight to his head. He's finally tasted a bit of wealth and immediately starts to hold out for more, completely ignoring any of the moral issues with allowing the tobacco companies to sell to children because of his creation. The highs of his emotional state reflect the highs from the start of the episode during the glove-slapping plot, and like that story, this one also ends with Homer giving it up for his own safety.

Hello Gutter, Hello Fodder: Homer goes to the bowling alley with his work buddies and bowls a perfect game, winning him the admiration of the whole town. But after a few weeks of trying to play up his fame, he starts to realize that the greatest accomplishment of his life is old news and that he's become a has-been, struggling with a midlife crisis. He tries to jump off of Springfield's tallest building, only to be saved at the last moment by Otto and find a new lease on life, which he dedicates to his children. But as Bart and Lisa are too hard for him to get along with, he turns to Maggie as a parenting outlet. But Maggie doesn't trust him enough for activities like swimming together until Homer starts to drown in the ocean, and it's up to her to save his life. In the end, Homer is relieved that Maggie still loves him, and he takes her out bowling, where she bowls a perfect game. This episode has echoes of the previous season's "The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace" in that Homer has a crisis over not accomplishing anything with his life and seeking out some sort of outlet for his attention. In that episode, he fears having not done anything worth remembering, but here he's done something notable only for everybody else to move on. As a result, Homer wants to turn not to continued fame but to consistent fame; he seeks out somebody who will continue to recognize him as great instead of forgetting about it all within a few days—someone who has to remember him: Maggie Simpson. Maggie herself is referred to as the Forgotten Simpson, a self-aware poke at the fact that she had very little to do over the years. The Simpson family was meant to be average in every way—a nuclear family with 2.3 children. Maggie is that .3, but she's much less of a character than that; the show can go entire episodes without giving her a single line because what really is there to do with the baby? Even this episode isn't really a Maggie plot line until its third act; it takes Homer a while to even remember she exists, and all of her appearances up to that point are non sequiturs to the ongoing plot. The character here is attached to Homer's in that what she wants doesn't matter, both narratively and to him; only the effect that she has on others.

Eight Misbehavin': When Apu sees Maggie and the rest of the Simpson family while out shopping, he and Manjula finally agree to have a baby together. But their attempts at conception come up short, with the couple recruiting Homer's help to conceive. After nine months, Manjula finally gives birth to eight healthy babies, as multiple people had been giving her fertility treatments all at once. At first, there's an outpouring of support for the family, but this dries up when a Shelbyville couple gives birth to nine babies.

Corporate sponsors pull out, leaving Apu and Manjula to race the children without help after being run ragged for a few days. A man named Larry Kidill arrives at the front door and offers to completely financially support the babies in exchange for their appearance in a zoo exhibit. Then, the Hasapupa Petons agreed to this at first, but after seeing the tacky performance their babies have to be a part of, he decides to team up with Homer to break them out, getting out of the contract by having Homer ride a tricycle through a group of pythons.

This episode is a story primarily about Apu and Manjula, with the Simpson family only being brought in to draw contrast between the ways in which the two families approach raising their kids. For Marge and Homer, their kids came about as a surprise, a wrench thrown into what otherwise would have been a disable life, but Apu and Manjula had their kids on purpose and are equally shown to be struggling to raise them compared to what they had expected would happen. And while this is mostly shown to be a result of being octuplets, the same general exhaustion could have been applied to triplets or twins, really. It sort of Dooms a majority of these babies to irrelevance, as even one baby, Maggie, is shown to be often forgotten about in writing plots for the whole family, like we saw in the previous episode. So once more, the children are used as plot devices in order to explore the emotional journey of the parents of those children. Apu and Manjula are willing to allow their kids to grow up in a zoo, something that would be appalling to a typical parent unless they had gone several days without proper sleep. But once they see the performance their children are being put through and having a comparison made to a life in show business, then a Hasapupa Petalon family changes their mind and has to break the kids out, with no real resolution to the plot point of how to take care of their eight kids other than perhaps a greater appreciation for having them back.

Take my wife, Sas. The Simpson family goes to a 50s-style diner where Homer and Marge win a dance competition with the grand prize of a motorcycle. He has Bart teach him how to ride it and then decides to start a motorcycle gang with his friends, named the Hell Satans. They drive around the town terrorizing the police and getting into trouble until a photo Homer put in a cycling magazine attracts the attention of another gang, also called the Hell Satans, who decide to crash at the Simpson household for a few days, with the police unwilling to help. Homer cowers for the time until the gang leaves, taking Marge with them as she had cooked and cleaned for them while they were there. So Homer sets out to get his wife back, taking his motorcycle out to track the Hell Satans down. When he arrives, he starts to fight them, but Marge has taught them to renounce their violent ways, and the gangsters refuse to fight back until the lead, Meat Hook, challenges Homer to single combat, a fight Homer wins with the assistance of Marge. In the end, Homer and Marge ride off into the sunset, leaving the reformed biker gang behind.

This episode starts and ends with Homer's love for his wife, Marge. At first, they dance together in a way that's able to beat out all the other couples in order to get the motorcycle that started the whole mess. Then, it's his desire to get Marge back that wraps up the episode. In an earlier season, this would have been a much more sappy episode about how much the couple means to each other; Homer's love of Marge would have been a more pronounced trait. But here, love takes a backseat to motorcycle fights and biker wars. Even the dance sequence at the beginning is more of a shot at the 50s than it is about the couple. There's a clear trend in these seasons to try to avoid the feel-good endings that were occasionally present in the earlier episodes. In fact, the last few seasons have tried to avoid endings entirely. Homer's motorcycle is nowhere to be seen in following episodes, and if a plot point remains unresolved, having it reoccur would only be an Easter egg instead of any sort of continuity. I stated before that you can only have an episode end with the family hugging it out so many times before it starts to become apparent that their newfound love will be forgotten about the next time it's convenient for the plot, and the writers have begun to accept this, pushing the limits of the audience's suspension of disbelief in a direction further from reality and more towards, well, The Simpsons.

The grift of the Magi. Bart breaks his coccyx and needs to use a wheelchair for a while, which highlights the lack of wheelchair ramps in Springfield Elementary. Overhearing this, Fat Tony has his mobsters construct an elaborate system of ramps around the school, which fall apart almost instantly. Then, he charges Skinner more money than the school has, resulting in its closure. They try to get someone to fund the school to no success until Kid First Industries steps in and buys it out. But the new school curriculum isn't about teaching but instead using the children to collect marketing data to produce a new toy named Funzo. Lisa tries to warn the others about Funzo and its competition-eliminating ways but can't present any evidence, so she and Bart recruit Homer into taking matters into their own hands and going door-to-door to destroy every single Funzo in Springfield. They're stopped by Gary Coleman after throwing the bag into the Springfield tire fire, but after a thoughtful discussion, they agree to disagree, and Christmas is saved by Moe and Mr. Burns, who each went through offscreen character journeys.

This episode lampoons the commercialization of the holiday season, between jokes about Krusty's nondenominational special and a toy company using media hype to shill their latest product, as well as the means through which these holiday crazes can spread to other aspects of life, such as Kid First Industries using schools to collect market data for their product lines, itself based on real-world events, including some companies trying to put advertisements in school textbooks. The desire to squeeze profit out of everything is what sets up this episode. Skinner doesn't comply with the ADA because there's just not enough money to do so, and in between the lack of funding for schools and the excess of wealth in certain industries, it's inevitable that one would take over the other. The choice to have this episode take place surrounding the Christmas holiday also shows an earlier example of this; the holiday season itself is one of those things that has long since been overrun by the desire for more money. It's to the point where most Christmas traditions are simply a means of selling a product passed off as something with more history. This episode then concludes with a series of existing holiday special tropes being thrown at the viewer in rapid succession, each one more contrived than the last, in order to fully drive home just how commoditized the whole season is. A Christmas episode that parodies Christmas episodes, not by simply regurgitating the tropes, but examining why they're there in the first place.

Little Big Mom. Homer finds his impulse-purchased skis while Marge is attempting to clean out the attic and decides to take the whole family skiing. But Marge is afraid of heights and decides to stay indoors where it's safe, only for a clock to fall on her leg, breaking it. She is shipped off to the hospital to recover, and Lisa volunteers to keep the house clean, but Bart and Homer don't do their share of the chores, and she gets the idea from a hallucinated Lucille Ball to fake leprosy on her family, ideally convincing Bart and Homer that they have to clean up a bit better. But instead of cleaning the house, they run to the Flanders' and get sent to a leper colony in Hawaii. Meanwhile, Marge is let out of the hospital despite her attempts to extend her stay, only to find her boys missing. But when they track down Bart and Homer, Lisa and Marge learn that the two knew their sores were fake and are simply putting up with the excruciating skin grafts to score a free Hawaiian vacation.

There have been a few episodes before about the family house going down the dump without Marge around, and this episode mostly retreads that old ground. The difference here comes from the ending and motivations. Normally, Marge realizes how much her family really needs her and returns to her duties in order to feel some sense of purpose once again, but that gets shot down by the midpoint of this episode as Marge starts to enjoy being pampered and injected with morphine, something that gets reflected in the way that Homer and Bart both enjoy their time off. Though there is a distinction given in that Marge deserves the vacation and only has to put up with hospitals, whereas Bart and Homer have to put up with electric needles to get their time off because they were more or less already taking their days free from responsibility. The other major difference comes from Lisa, who serves as the mom of the household for a few days of under-appreciation. Her eagerness to take over Marge's duties fits in with her character's existing ego that she can do anything that anybody else can do, and we see that Lisa does handle the actual housework more or less as well as Marge does. The only difference is that she can't put up with the lack of appreciation from Bart and Homer. Marge would never stoop to the level of a childish prank to try to scare Bart and Homer straight, but considering the positive ending of the episode, one wonders if perhaps she ought to have considered doing so before.

Fate of Homer. Homer gets a bucket stuck on his head while trying to play a prank on Springfield University's Dean. After he gets trapped in a fundraiser, unable to see, he accidentally drives the family to a faith healer who starts to remedy the various problems of the Springfield unit, eventually convincing Bart to remove the bucket from Homer's head. This causes Bart to think that he has healing powers, so he opens up his own, more exciting church service. But in the fervor, he tries to heal Milhouse's sight, only for Milhouse to wander into the street and get hit by a car, which makes Bart realize he doesn't have powers after all. Meanwhile, Homer is trying to create a homecoming float for the rivalry game between Springfield U and A&M but gets too drunk at the game and drives out late, running over the team's star player. Fat Tony threatens Homer as he had a large bet on the game, and Homer convinces Bart to use his healing powers to fix the guy's leg. In the end, he's able to make the game-winning kick, but only because the leg came off, though Dr. Hibbert is confident that he can reattach it.

Bart becomes a faith healer in this episode, having given into the hype surrounding the stage and musical numbers. Generally, faith healing is really done through a sense of adrenaline; being up on stage and having people sing loudly causes your brain to focus on things other than your limp or your chronic pain, etc. And Lisa here gives the scientific explanation that the miracle was performed due to heat from the lights, but Bart isn't interested in science when he's still riding the emotional high of being the center of attention. This high then gets pulled out from under him when he sees Milhouse get hurt, the reality hitting him as hard as the truck that hit Milhouse. From a writing standpoint, this episode is much more connected than many earlier ones. The A and B plots of the episodes are often standalone, maybe starting out from the same central point but then resolving independently of one another. But Bart's faith-healing journey both starts out from and ends at Homer's plot about his homecoming float; two injuries at home are caused that Bart has put in the position of fixing. It's the same formula as before, just resolved in a much more efficient way that elevates both stories as a result.

The Mansion Family. After winning an award for being the oldest man in Springfield, Mr. Burns decides he should live more cautiously and goes to the Mayo Clinic for a checkup. While he's gone, he leaves the Simpson family in charge of watching his house. They start to live large as though the house were their own, in spite of Marge's concerns, which eventually culminate in Homer deciding he should throw one big party. Once he realizes that that billionaire lifestyle is only temporary, but as it's a Sunday, he can't buy alcohol until 2 p.m., so he simply takes Mr. Burns's yacht out to international waters where the partygoers can break whatever laws they want to. They have a party just outside the buoy line, taunting the Coast Guard before being captured by pirates who robbed the party before throwing everyone overboard and stealing the boat, leaving Homer and the rest to float home on the corpses of the others. Meanwhile, Mr. Burns learns that his body is so sickly that all of the diseases cancel out, and on this news, returns home to learn about what happened to his boat and knife-fighting monkey.

The three acts of this episode start out with Homer wishing he had a more interesting or noteworthy life, then having that lifestyle and enjoying it enough to try to latch on, and then realizing that he's in over his head but not learning anything from the result. This makes sense considering that we've had multiple episodes about Homer's lack of fulfillment from his life up to this point. He always learns a lesson about motivation or family and then immediately forgets it the next time the writers use his midlife crisis as motivation for a plot. So why not skip the credits and have Homer forget his lesson before they even roll? It isn't as though having an episode retreading common ground even dooms the episode to being irrelevant either. Normally, having an episode's plot be too similar to an earlier one causes it to have to fight an uphill battle; what can the writer say that they haven't said already? But here, Homer wishes he were rich, then gets to act rich, and then the episode is beloved because of the humor and the silliness between the buzz around Lenny drinking time and the monkey knife fight. This is one of the most memeable episodes since the Golden Age, and it's proof that the showrunners' experiment with shifting the show's focus in the 11th season is paying off.

Saddlesore Galactica. The Simpson family goes to the state fair to watch Lisa participate in an elementary school band competition, only to lose to Ogdenville because of their band's use of glow sticks. She views it as a travesty but gets ignored when the Simpsons see a horse named Duncan who is being forced to dive. They rescue the horse, only for the cost to be too high, and it's decided that he has to earn his keep; Duncan being entered into horse racing. He's too afraid of the other horses at first until Bart and Homer give him a makeover and attitude adjustment. With Duncan now furious and intimidating the other horses into losing, but before the Springfield Triple Crown, the jockeys kidnap Homer, revealing themselves to be of a subterranean race, and they threaten him to throw the race or have his brain eaten. But not wanting to let Bart down, Homer refuses the offer, and Duncan wins anyway, with the Simpsons simply fighting off the angry jockeys. In the B plot, Lisa tries to write to President Clinton about the band contest despite Marge warning her that she may end up disappointed if he doesn't respond. But at the end of the episode, Clinton arrives at the Simpson household and overturns the results, teaching Lisa that if you don't get your way, just complain and complain until you do.

Season 11 started a departure from the earlier standards as established by The Simpsons that came about as a result of plots that had started to become overplayed. There was a desire to keep the show fresh without alienating fans of the earlier style, which put the writers in an awkward position where they had to either choose to go down with the ship or jump overboard and try something new. This episode is when they firmly decided on the latter, even going so far as to use Comic Book Guy as a straw man to argue that the change is for the better. Who cares if they're retreading old ground or if the episode plots become similar? The writers certainly don't, and perhaps it's better to ignore comparisons to the early seasons. The Simpsons is practically a different show by this point that only happens to use the same cast as before, and when it's viewed from that context, it's a lot easier to find the positive things being done. Instead of some moral lesson being taught or the family coming together in the end, we have episodes ending on a lesson about complaining until you get your way, as if the writers are daring internet critics to show their disapproval with the new direction. Realism is completely done away with; underground jockey societies and horses who understand English being written into scripts with no regard for whether you tend to suspend your disbelief. It's a comedy show first and foremost, so listen to the gags instead of trying to find some deeper meaning.

Alone Again, Natura-Diddly. The Simpson family are at a bird sanctuary when Lisa notices it's been paved over for a racetrack, so they attend a rally instead, where they come across the Flanders'. After watching a few crashes, the staff comes out with t-shirt cannons to fire into the crowd, and Homer beckons them to fire towards him, only to duck out of the way at the last second and have the barrage of t-shirts hit Maude instead, launching her over the side of the stadium and to her death. The whole town comes out to support Ned over the loss of his wife, Homer most of all, and when he sees how distraught Ned is despite his genuine assistance, he decides that the guy needs to get back into the dating pool, so he makes a dating video for his neighbor. But after going on a few random dates, Ned still isn't convinced there's anyone out there for him, and he decides to renounce his faith. Though this renouncement doesn't last, and he returns to church anyway, where he hears a song by a Christian rock band led by Rachel Jordan, who Ned bonds with in the parking lot. The whole experience causes him to rediscover his love of God before the episode ends.

It's interesting that in a season so content to change up the way that The Simpsons is structured, in an episode with the most radical shift in permanent dynamic, they would also make so many callbacks. The funeral service for Maude Flanders makes multiple references to developments within the cast while also prodding at the fourth wall over how much of a tertiary character she was. It also points out how much of a jerk Homer has developed into; that the shift to the so-called "jerkass Homer" over the years is something that the writers are fully aware of and able to reign in at a moment's notice. Another thematic callback is the fact that this episode has a proper resolution to its plots; remember the previous episode ended with the Simpson family adopting a champion racehorse alongside zero expectations that that horse would ever appear again from the audience. Of course, the real reason for Maude's departure from the show is twofold. Maggie Roswell was the original voice of Maude, though she was replaced during the last season after expressing concern over not being paid enough by Fox for the multiple cross-country trips needed to record her lines. The writers have spent the whole season trying to shake up The Simpsons' formula through various means, so a pay dispute with one of the voice cast resulted in an opportunity to continue on with that trend. The end result is a shakeup of Ned Flanders, a character so far detached from his initial persona that the word for this devolution is named after him.

Missionary: Impossible. Upset at a donation drive interrupting a show on PBS, Homer makes a phony pledge of $10,000 to get back to watching TV, only for PBS to show up to collect on his promise. When he doesn't have the money, he runs to the church to hide out, and Reverend Lovejoy sends him on a missionary trip to get away until the heat dies down. He arrives on an island in Micronesia where he's bored out of his mind with no TV, no beer, and no couch. But after licking a few hallucinogenic frogs for inspiration and hearing how Ned Flanders is jealous of his faith, he decides to introduce the natives to modern amenities such as gambling and alcohol. But this backfires predictably as they begin to riot and attack each other, so Homer decides to repent by finishing construction of a chapel. But when ringing the bell to inaugurate its completion, he causes an avalanche which turns into an earthquake, splitting the ground open as the chapel is enveloped by lava. Just when it appears that Homer is about to burn, the episode is interrupted by a Fox pledge drive, which Bart donates to to save the network again. Structurally, this episode's first act is just a means of getting Homer into an involuntary missionary work to establish the major setpiece; poking fun at public broadcasting is just an extra opportunity that the showrunners didn't want.

To pass up on, and as a show of good faith, sort of, they end the episode the same way it began. This time, making fun of themselves and their own home network in a way that The Simpsons wouldn't have gotten away with if they weren't the biggest cash cow on Fox. But the core of the episode remains hung up on the disparity between Homer's work and his actual knowledge of religion. He's had multiple episodes before that show how important and unimportant his faith is to him. Homer wants his family to go to church, to be raised right, even if something he himself finds tedious. And here he has to make the same decision with the natives to whom he's expected to preach. But unlike the early seasons, Homer is at first hesitant to actually impart a positive social lesson; his desires are more about remedying his own boredom, and he projects the way he feels onto the others. Despite all of this, he does understand the value of a faithful upbringing and how his lack of piety has corrupted the Micronesian people, giving the episode a more standard Simpsons ending. Homer might not know a lot about his religion, but he's still a good Christian because he comes back to it in the end.

Pigmoon: The Simpson family goes to the Duff Days beer festival, where Moe is participating in a bartending competition, which he wins. His prize is to have his photo placed in the upcoming Duff calendar, but due to his appearance, the company places a series of stickers over his face, realizing that he's unattractive. Moe is convinced to go under the knife for plastic surgery, and when he returns, he's now conventionally attractive. Homer and Moe go on a spree to get revenge on all the people who rejected him for being ugly, which ends with him returning to the set of a soap opera he was turned down from decades ago. They give him the part, and he starts to play the role of Tad Winlow, giving him the fame and recognition that he always wanted. But when he gets an advanced script and learns that his character will be killed off, Homer and Moe go live on the air to spoil all of the upcoming twists, only for the producers to reveal that his death was a dream sequence, and he was never going to lose his job. But he gets fired, and as he's leaving, has his face crushed by a falling set, which results in his face returning to normal, the episode ending before he can finish pointing out how unlikely that is. Moe is ugly. This is one of the most consistent character points to him, that he's not only unconventionally attractive aesthetically, but that he's got a personality that matches this, and his history as an actor, something also touched upon in this episode. It's not uncommon for media works to have a bell curve scale of attractiveness to personality: the better a person looks, the crer they are; the uglier they are, the crer they are. The only nice people on television are the average-looking ones—at least average for TV. Even on TV, the ugly people tend to be above average-looking to stay palatable enough to run commercials next to. Here we see Moe become conventionally attractive without changing any part of his personality. All it takes for him to become accepted by the rest of the world. It's standard for The Simpsons to parody the sort of moralizing one would expect in a contemporary show. The people writing an episode with the lesson of "looks don't matter" will still cast a good-looking guy to say that in front of the camera, so here looks are all that matter, from the beginning of the episode with the bartending contests to the very end with Moe losing his career because his face was crushed. What's also standard for The Simpsons by this point are the disconnected B plots, such as Bart and Lisa chasing a balloon—a plot so irrelevant I didn't even include it in the recap—and episodes with non-endings. Moe points out just how unlikely it was that the TV set would crush his face in just the right way to revert everything to the status quo—a finale that would work if it were done once a season, but that's overplayed by this point in time.

Bart to the Future: The Simpson family stops by an Indian casino after their vacation is cut short, and Bart sneaks into a back room. While there, the manager has a chat with him about how his future might turn out if he continues to sneak into places and shows him a vision in the fire: 30 years into the future, Bart is an unemployed loser who's banned, with Ralph getting him booed out of seafood restaurants. And when he gets evicted for not paying rent, he decides to mooch off of Lisa, who is the president of the United States. She's busy worrying about a budget crunch that is forcing her to raise taxes, and despite trying to use some softer language to let the hike appear more palatable, Bart reveals the truth anyway, plummeting her approval rating. Later on, she tries to send Bart away on an errand while meeting with the world leaders that the US owes money to, only for Bart to realize what's going on and to show up unannounced, using his skills at weaseling out of debt collectors' grasp to buy the country a bit more time. Elsewhere, Homer looks for Lincoln's very treasure, only to find a note denoting the hearts of Americans as the real gold, which he hates. This is another future episode, one that shows a prediction of where the Simpson family will be in 30 years, and that we all know to be false purely because the characters have aged. And while the year 2030 is still a ways off, there are still enough retro-futurist touches and let us know just how off the mark the writers were. Phones are still shown as being the corded devices they were in the year the episode was made, alongside other speculative tech like personal holograms and electronic food. But other predictions have aged better. Arguably, the episode was produced during Donald Trump's third-party run in the 2000 election, the writing staff deciding that it would be a good bit to have him succeed in the future just before the country goes bankrupt. As an episode on its own, Bart to the Future spends far too much time misanticipating the future to have any decent bits land. The plot is very thin, and there's hardly any time to show the development of characters over the intervening decades, or perhaps at the grin sign that the characters won't develop over the next three decades. It's not as though we've seen major developments from them in several years anyway. Future episodes are a curiosity during the time they're produced but age more and more poorly over the years until the remaining sentimental value comes from its use as a time capsule of how naive we once were.

Days of Wine and Dozes: Homer goes to Moe to lay low after lighting the yard on fire, and there the guy shows Barney footage of him embarrassing himself at his birthday party—something he doesn't remember doing. Realizing that he doesn't have anyone's respect, Barney decides to sober up so he can use the helicopter piloting lessons he got from Moe as a gag gift. Moe is upset about losing his best customer, so he tries to groom Homer into becoming the new Barney. This causes Homer to take out his frustrations on Barney for abandoning him, with the two's friendship coming into question when there's no alcohol involved. Meanwhile, Bart and Lisa are trying to get a good photo of Springfield for a phone book to win a contest and find an old camera, but while trying to get a good overhead shot, a discarded light bulb causes a forest fire, trapping the siblings. So Barney takes his first solo helicopter flight with Homer tagging along, drinking all the beer that's tempting his friend. In the end, they rescue the Simpsons from the mountain, and Bart and Lisa return home to find that one of the old baby photos of them on the camera reel won the contest instead. In terms of the social hierarchy of the Moe regulars, Barney is at the very bottom, with Homer barely above him, being only the second least respected person there. Homer is able to ignore all the jabs at his expense because he at least has Barney to look down upon. But after sobering up, Barney becomes a more respectable, straight-laced person, leaving Homer alone at the bottom. Only then does he realize how degrading his position is, but still, he falls into his old habits of taking out his frustration on Barney instead of looking inward to improve himself above his station. But all of that ends up cheapening Barney's journey. Struggling to kick an addiction is hard enough without the fact that you might lose friends, even if the only thing you had in common with those friends was your substance abuse. Of course, to say that Homer and Co. were Barney's friends is even a bit of a stretch, as his presence was mostly tolerated due to making the others look better. So to lose a toxical relationship like that is a positive change, though it still comes with the pain of having nobody around to turn to. It's only when Homer drinks the beer in the helicopter that Barney realizes that he can still continue to be friends with Homer without getting drunk together, and this gives him the motivation to fly solo, kill the alligator, and run.

Homer takes a magazine quiz that gives him 3 years to live and begins to panic over his impending death, staying up all night and slowly going crazy from insomnia. Once his lack of sanity makes Mr. Burns look bad during an inspection, the family is prescribed a vacation to relax, and they head to Florida, only to learn that they arrived during spring break. Despite Marge's attempts to get Homer to stay in bed, he still goes out to party with the others, though through drunkenness he's able to sleep off the insomnia anyway. But the next morning, spring break is over, and Homer is upset over not being able to party any longer, so he rinses an airboat and sails it recklessly to compensate, running over the town's mascot, a gator named Captain and Jack. The family runs from the law but gets hit by a train in the pursuit, which drags their car into the wilderness. After working at a diner for a bit, they're taken back to jail, where the inmates serve at a ball held by the judge. Their escape attempt fails, only for Captain Jack to arrive at the party, exonerating the Simpson family, though they're still banned from the state of Florida. As The Simpsons has gone on, the plot structure of episodes has become much more rapid. It's common for an episode to begin with a set piece that only gets about 3 or 4 minutes of gags before moving on to a different story altogether. This episode comes across as a chain of these early set pieces: Homer gives People magazine quizzes, has a crisis of death, goes crazy mentally, goes crazy on spring break, kills an alligator, runs from the law, works at a diner, runs from the law again, and finally returns home with no lesson or moral learned. This type of episode says so many things without saying anything. To borrow a quote from season 2, it's just a bunch of stuff that happened, with so many disconnected plots. This episode struggles to really say or do anything. The celebrity guest stars don't stick around long enough to leave too much of an impression; none of the scenes last long enough to make any sort of satire of an issue. It's not enough to simply include something in the show and call it satirization or parody unless that thing is given enough justification or nuance to come across as anything other than a cheap attention grab, which is all this episode is in the end.

Last Tap Dance in Springfield: The Simpson family goes to the mall so Homer can get an eye checkup while Marge buys some camping supplies for Bart for his upcoming trip. While out, she and Lisa see an advertisement for a dance movie and they watch it together, inspiring Lisa to take dancing lessons. But her teacher, former child star Little Vicky, doesn't offer much in the way of instruction, and Lisa gets left behind the rest of the class. Before her recital, she learns that she's been demoted to curtain puller, and overhearing this, Professor offers her a pair of self-dancing shoes. But on the day of the recital, her shoes react to the performance, and she begins to dance on stage, which Little Vicky takes as a challenge and starts trying to upstage her. After a round of applause, the shoes begin to dance out of control, only to be stopped by Homer. In the B plot, B and Milhouse decide against spending a week at camp, and as their families think they're out of town, they hide out in the mall instead. But their gallivanting through the closed stores causes the mall's owner to think there's a giant rat loose, and the police show up with the mountain lion to hunt it down. Little Vicky from this episode is portrayed as the type of person to live vicariously through others in an attempt to offset her own fading relevance—not so much in the sense that she wants her success to continue through her pupils, but the recognition for that success. It's the reason she pushes the less talented Lisa aside for an amateur performance and why she's so upset about potentially being out-tapped by a child. Ordinarily, a teacher should be thrilled that one of their students has surpassed them, as it means that they're very good at their job, but that's assuming their motives for teaching really were to pass on their talent. Aside from that, this episode seems to have an aborted plot about Homer's eyes crusting over, as if the one joke they could make was expanded and it was forgotten about afterwards. B and Milhouse staying at the mall was also something that didn't get very much elaboration; the plot even cuts off once the jokes run out with an acknowledgment from Chief Wiggum when he decides it's too much effort to get the lion back in its crate. These plots seem to exist purely to give the characters something to do in between moments from Lisa's storyline and could have been done away with in order to spend more time focusing on the character-driven aspects of her story. But without their removal, it gives the episode some whiplash that doesn't justify itself.

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Marge: Otto proposes to his girlfriend Becky, who accepts. Bart volunteers the Simpson household to host, as they still have the leftovers from Apu's wedding. But while preparing, Marge convinces Becky that she shouldn't tolerate some of Otto's more obnoxious habits, and she ends up leaving him at the altar with nowhere to stay. Bart once again volunteers the Simpson home, and they get a new temporary housemate. But Becky seems to be a better Marge, improving on her cooking, getting along with Lisa, and helping Bart on his school projects. And after a conversation with Patty and Selma, Marge is convinced that Becky intends to usurp her role in the house. After a series of misunderstandings, Marge ends up attacking Becky in an ice cream parlor and is arrested, with a trial held to determine whether she's insane. Marge flees from the trial and hides from the police for a time, eventually returning home to apologize, only for one more misunderstanding to occur, where she realizes that perhaps she was too quick to judge. One of the biggest issues Marge finds herself facing in this episode is stagnation. She fears that her life is too repetitive and lacks any glamour, and this is why her family is quick to adopt a new woman as their positive female role model. Becky will paint with Lisa while Marge is folding socks; she'll take Homer out for ice cream while Marge just nags at him. And through this whole season, we've seen this behavior pattern consistently: Marge is mostly in The Simpsons to be a damper on the fun of the other characters. If/when Homer does something crazy, Marge typically tells him off for doing so, and she rarely gets to be the instigator of any plot line unless the plot starts as a reaction to her nagging. So this isn't just an episode about Marge not being cool in-universe, but outside The Simpsons as well. Each character gets to have something to do, to make a punch line or a set piece, but Marge was left behind when the show started to stray away from realism. Maybe this is just a product of the show's time, that female characters in the mainstream sitcoms that The Simpsons parody always played supporting roles. But since the parody aspects have moved to a broader and more modern cultural aspect, this part of her character starts to seem archaic. She's still the same Marge from an era of the show that has long since been done away with.

Behind the Laughter: A behind-the-scenes look at the almost entirely fictional story of the creation and downfall of The Simpsons—how it started out as Homer complaining about television and the fact that he believed he could do better, then submitting a pilot to Fox through Marge's connections—all the way to the family feuding behind the scenes as various cast members suffered from drug issues, ballooning production costs, tax evasion, and ultimately had to break up after a spat at a state fair. In the end, it's Willie Nelson who was able to trick them into getting back together for one last gig before the show returned to the airways, only for Homer to suggest canceling it due to a lack of ideas. This episode is told in a mockumentary format, using the very same assets from VH1's Behind the Music, the show allowing the graphics package to be reused when the episode pitch was run by them. Like so many deep-dive shows, it gave a sensationalized version of events with extreme exaggerations of the various problems that plagued the show—at least the fictionalized version of it. The characters are portrayed as actors playing themselves, and the cast is just a collection of random Springfield inites doing the same. It's interesting how the writers chose to portray their own show in comparison to the way the show itself started out. Both Homer and Graining were tired of the clichés on television and set out to make something more true to life, and both shows immediately forwent that idea to go for the same over-the-top clichés. In the end, though, the in-universe incarnation didn't last. The pilot it parodies the way in which it reflected America and allowed them to laugh at themselves. Bart being strangled by Homer was something thought of as funny; that what would be considered abuse in the real world was acceptable in a show based off the real world. Also, acknowledgement of the myriad product tie-ins that the show has and has had, with Marge putting her face on birth control pills and Bart's image being used in Fox's array of made-up slen. This, as well as the decline in the quality of the show, even using "Principal and the Popper" as an example of an episode that was very poorly received. It shows a level of self-awareness about the show's creation and history that makes many of the later season decisions come across as much more intentional. The writers know about the complaints and have chosen to address them in the way that they have—more fuel for the theory that The Simpsons was changed because the writers recognized it was better not to let it run into the same rut forever.

Season 12: As far as between-season developments go, season 12 sees very little change structurally from before. There were a handful of first tries as far as writing goes, and we see the second digitally animated episode so far. But small things like that are no different than the change we normally see from year to year. By this point, The Simpsons has finally found a new groove, one that will let them write out the next several years' worth of seasons without exhausting the audience with repetition nor making episode ideas become difficult to produce, despite what the showrunners themselves might say in a tongue-and-cheek manner. The new direction of season 11 is to be kept as usual, though there's a stronger sense of confidence in how these stories are developed. We see some return to form with the more relatable stories of money troubles or babysitting the neighbor's kids, but these rarely stay as grounded as they began. It's as though the writers were afraid to try to compete with the sappiness of the early seasons before, but now they're confident enough in their own writing that making a real moment occur won't be seen as copying off of their own paper but as a brand new approach to a familiar family. Most people you asked today will say that season 12 is the last possible Golden Age season of The Simpsons; many more will say that it ended earlier, and very few will say that any season beyond 13 is considered classic Simpsons. So the last few seasons have more or less been the awkward pre-teen years of the show's lifespan—those transitory years where your childhood nostalgia is no longer forming, but you haven't quite figured out who you are as a person yet. But now The Simpsons is entering the new millennium and has a new identity to go along with it. So despite this video being a breakdown of the Golden Age, there's still a bit of value in...

Comparing what the show Once Was to what it's becoming, and of course answering why that change happened and if the downfall was really as big a decline as some claim it was.

Treeh House of Horror XI: G-Ghost. The dad, Homer, reads a horoscope saying he will die. And after a few near misses, finally chokes on a piece of broccoli. He gets to the Pearly Gates, where St. Peter warns him that he cannot get into heaven unless he does one good deed. So he returns to Earth as a ghost to try to do this, but his attempts all end in failure, as he harms the people he's trying to help. Before, at the last minute, he's trying to come up with one good deed when an out-of-control stroller rolls down the stairs towards him, and he rescues the baby. But because St. Peter wasn't looking, he gets sent to hell anyway.

Scary Tales Can Come True. The Simpson family are living as fairy tale peasants. But when Homer loses his job as the village o—, he decides to throw his kids out in order to save money on feeding them. Bart and Lisa wander the woods, where she's able to warn Bart about upcoming dangers using her book of fairy tales. But when the two come across a house made of candy and go inside, they're captured by a witch who intends to make Lisa do chores while she fattens up Bart to eat. They're saved by Homer, who simply ate his way through the house, and he fights the witch, getting transformed a bit before pushing her into the oven. In the end, he's able to save the family's finances with his new chicken legs.

KN—of the Dolphin. Lisa sees a dolphin, Snorky, being mistreated at the aquarium and decides to free him. But Snorky is the dolphin king, and he leads the rest of his race in a fight back against the humans. During a town meeting to determine what to do about all the dolphin-related murders, the dolphins storm the hall, and Snorky reveals that dolphins used to live on land before humans drove them into the sea. Then he decrees that humans must be banished into the ocean. But Homer leads the town of Springfield in a fight back, saying that humans have wiped out species before. Though when this fails, they simply adapt to their new life in the [Music] water.

A Tale of Two Springfields. When Santa's Little Helper has his doghouse taken over by a badger, Homer tries to call Animal Control, only to learn that it's in Springfield's new area code, as the telephone company ran out of numbers and split the town. Homer is upset about this and leads the town in a violent mob, splitting Springfield into Old and New Springfield along the area code lines. But the two sides of the town start to feud with one another through judgmental actions and out-of-whack taxes. So Homer ramps up the opposition by building a garbage wall between the two cities, only for all of New Springfield to rush to Old Springfield, as they have food and water. Homer then comes up with a plan to convince the Who to perform on his side of the wall in order to bring back the residents. But the band opts to simply have the wall torn down instead of allowing the fight to go on. Pack mentality can affect anybody with even the slightest provocation. Despite the large number of similarities between Old and New Springfield, they still feud over an arbitrary decision made by a telephone company. The town split, motivated more so by an aspect of "us versus them" than the class lines that Homer insists on, and so the two halves of the town become mortal enemies, just the way that Shelbyville had been the rival of Springfield for the seasons up to this point. Homer's constant attempts at sabotage only make things worse for his side, between retaliatory strikes and accidentally enriching his foes. And of course, had the towns worked together or not split in the beginning, the whole situation never would have happened in the first place. This episode also makes a bit of commentary about the structure of episodes themselves. The first few scenes are Homer trying to remove a badger, but as soon as he learns about the area code split, he tells the badger off, as they now have more important things to worry about. This mirrors the way that A plots and episodes often lead into unrelated B plots. And The Invasion by the Badgers at the very end drives home the fact that this doesn't always make sense, not that that was the goal for the writers at [Music] all.

Insane Clown Poppy. During a book signing, Krusty is visited by a fan, Sophie, who reveals that she is his daughter, conceived during an affair that the clown had during the Gulf War. She begs him to spend some time together, which he reluctantly agrees to, only to learn that he's not a great dad. But when he sees Homer at the beach with his kids, he asks for some fatherly advice, which pays off, and the two end the day with her serenading him on the violin. Later, while playing poker with the mob, Krusty bets the instrument on a hand, only to lose, and he recruits the help of Homer to get it back. They break into a mob compound during a party and make their way into a room full of violin cases, only to burst out when a gunfight happens. Afterwards, Krusty is able to return the violin to his daughter, as well as a large sum of cash that was in the case as well, and the two make up. There's a bit of irony in the fact that Krusty is a terrible father at first, something acknowledged during the episode. He entertains children on television but can't do the same thing in person, not even during public appearances, as he allows the hype to carry his lack of enthusiasm. But what's also brought up in this episode is how good of a father Homer is, despite the fact that the episode began when Homer blew up Lisa's room and needed some way to apologize. The advice Homer gives his new casual acquaintance, Krusty, is not to overthink. Homer rarely thinks at all, and he's still able to be beloved by his children, at least some of the time. So this episode raises the question of why Krusty and Homer are tolerated as father figures. Krusty gets a happy ending after getting his daughter's violin back, even though, in theory, that should have made him even for gambling it in the first place. It's not as though breaking into a mob compound is a sure sign that he'll never take a risk with something that has sentimental value again. And Homer, too, is the one to suggest risking their lives to get an instrument back instead of an apology that would indicate changed behavior. Of course, this is pretty typical behavior from Homer, but in this plot, the type of behavior that would have normally gotten him into trouble in the first place is now the solution to a wrong inflicted on Lisa.

The Tree Hugger. Hoping to buy a new console, Bart gets a job hanging menus on door handles, which disgusts Lisa, as it's a waste of paper. Later on, when taking the family out to Krusty Burger, they see a group of environmental activists at a standoff with the police, where Lisa falls in love with a teenage activist named Jesse Grass. Hoping to get to know him better, she visits the guy in prison, and he convinces her to join his activist group, Dirt First. At a meeting, they learn of Mayor Quimby selling the logging rights to Springfield's oldest redwood tree and plot to have somebody live up there to prevent it from being cut down. Lisa volunteers, but after a few weeks starts to miss her family and sneaks out to spend the night with them. But the next morning, she finds that the tree was felled by a lightning strike, and she is presumed dead. In her memory, the fallen tree is repurposed into a log with her face at the top, the centerpiece of a new nature preserve. But the rich Texan who promised the preserve changes his mind and constructs an amusement park instead, prompting Lisa to reveal herself and putting an end to the construction again. Inspired by Jesse, she knocks over the Lisa log, and it barrels out to sea. Lisa's activism is something that has become a larger and larger aspect of her character over time. What began as the occasional interest has become the defining trait of who she is, but not the sole factor in determining her wants. Lisa is willing to live in a tree for weeks, but only because of a childlike crush. She's active, but not too active. The Dirt First members are shown to be much more involved than she is, to a point of absurdity, not even eating food that casts a shadow. By having the pro-environmentalist types come across as insane and the anti-environmentalist types come across as cruel, Lisa gets to stand in the middle with the moral superiority, as she's mostly involved with nature for personal reasons. And it's these personal reasons that allow us to better sympathize with the characters in the plot by seeing things from Lisa's perspective. Her actions are a lot more understandable. Dirt First unfurling a banner on Krusty Burger is seen as disruptive, as is the disproportionate response by the police. But when Lisa disrupts a logging company, it's a victory from the outset that they stood down, and her faking her own death is viewed as something worth doing. Marge's only complaints are that the family is too used to good deeds, activism backfiring.

Homer Versus Dignity. After a celebration for Bart turns into an evening of performing to make up for a bounced check, the Simpson family wonders when they became the lowest rung of society. Homer prepares to ask Mr. Burns for a raise, but as Smithers is out of town, Burns decides to give Homer the extra money on the condition that he become his personal prank monkey. The next few days involve Homer going around and doing whatever Mr. Burns says, mostly harassing Springfield or humiliating himself, which culminates in Homer pretending to be a panda at the zoo and being mated with. When Lisa discovers what her father has been doing for money, she encourages him to stand up for himself, and he agrees, buying back his dignity by donating the money from the panda stunt to give toys to children. And this gives the president of Colington the idea to have Homer play Santa in a parade. But Mr. Burns tempts Homer one last time to throw fish guts on the children who came to see him. And in the end, Santa ruins the parade, but it's not Homer throwing the fish guts, but Mr. Burns himself, as Homer realized that his dignity should not be thrown away so cheaply. From the start of the show, the Simpson family has struggled financially. It's a recurring plot point that they can't afford many of the things they want, those things all being what the rest of society dictates that they ought to have. The show began as a deconstruction of the sitcoms of the 60s—that that age of wealth has long since gone, and a family being supported on a single income while owning a two-story house, two cars, and so much else was a distant dream. And after a decade, that dream has only become further and further away. Much of the audience of The Simpsons was born well after that reality by this point, and so the lengths to which Homer will go to try to maintain some level of financial comfort have to be extended as well. In the early seasons, Homer might depend on a Christmas bonus to afford to buy presents for his kids, or he might work as Santa for a week. But here, he makes money by selling out his sense of shame, and that's enough to get the kids inoculated—no longer a little something extra, but something that they needed from the beginning. And he's giving away something much more than spare time to get it. While the actual content of the episode is today considered shocking, that was always the point. We need to see just how low he's willing to go in 2001 compared to 1989 in order to get even less—a harsh lesson in the rate of inflation since the show has begun.

The Computer Wore Menace Shoes. Because he doesn't have access to email, Homer misses a work memo and decides to get a computer so as to catch up to the current century. After buying one, he gets Lisa to teach him how it works and eventually creates a terrible webpage in order to get people to visit. He starts to post a rumor that Bart heard from Nelson about the mayor misappropriating city funds, which turns out to be true. Riding the high of being right, Homer, disguising his name as Mr. X, begins to listen in on gossip around town and expose it on his website, eventually winning him the Pulitzer Prize, which he shows up to claim in person. But now that he's revealed his face, nobody in town wants to associate with him due to fears that he'll publish their secrets. With no new source of news, Homer begins to make things up. Then he ends up kidnapped, waking up on an island full of people who know too much because one of his random news stories about flu shots happened to be correct. He escapes the island after this reveal and returns to civilization, only for his whole family to be kidnapped later, waking up on the same island, where they decide that the whole experience isn't so bad. A story about Homer buying a computer ends with him kidnapped and placed on an island where disruptive inventors are sent by the rich and powerful—a plot that starts out so simple, going completely off the rails for its ending. All of this topped off by having a non-conclusive conclusion. There's no resolution at the end of the episode, although we're far beyond the point where that sort of thing matters. The Simpsons was once known for being a show that took a more realistic and nuanced approach to the issues that actually mattered to people. It was a show that eschewed escapism to depict the real world. This episode's plot begins in a similar way. In the early 2000s, many people were getting computers for the first time, so what could be more relatable than Homer Simpson doing the same thing? And the answer is quite a lot, actually. The Simpsons was not a show that was realistic and relatable because of the things that characters did, but the motivations they had for doing these things. It wasn't that the family was relatable because of their house or their car or their actions, but because of what they meant to one another. So, on the surface level, this is an episode about Homer getting a computer, but it's really an episode about a man misspreading information on the internet for attention and money, and that's a plot that we can see much more of in the real world. The great money [Music] caper.

After a magic show, Bart gets encouraged to start his own magic act. And when the family car is damaged by a falling sturgeon, Homer hopes the act will raise enough money to pay for the repairs. But nobody is offering money, and the two fight, leaving Bart alone at the pier. When passersby offer to pay his cab fare home, realizing they can make money by gaining sympathy, Homer and Bart begin to grift the people of Springfield with a series of phony scams, eventually raising enough money to get the car repaired and then some. But when Abe Simpson offers to give them one big scam against the retirement castle, things go wrong, as one of their marks turns out to be an undercover agent. But when they try to scam the agent into thinking they're in jail, he reveals himself as a con man and steals their car. Bart and Homer come up with the lie as to how they lost it, claiming it was a carjacking done by a bushy-haired foreigner. And the next day, Groundskeeper Willie is arrested. He goes mad at the trial and opens fire, and after Skinner is shot, Homer reveals the truth, but the whole carjacking ordeal was faked by Marge and Lisa, who simply wanted to teach Bart and Homer a lesson. Before he can question how so many people were able to be in on the prank, Otto takes everyone surfing. Homer has had a lot of money-making schemes over the seasons, but rarely do they ever go quite as well as they do here. Being able to come up with the series of schemes to trick the people of Springfield requires a lot of knowledge and charisma, two things Homer has always lacked. And while this can be in part attributed to the assistance of Bart and Abe's book, it's still a part of the episode that stands out from his earlier characterization. Not that this is the only issue. Abe Simpson apparently wrote the book on grifting—the thing that makes Bart and Homer trust him when it comes to following his next scam. But when he's in on the big grift at the end of the episode, meaning that the whole plan was either in place from the start or it was a lucky contrivance. Having so many people in on the joke and having nobody rat it out or make a mistake is also unlikely, though not outside the realm of what's possible in The Simpsons. And this episode takes full advantage of the fact that the plot falls apart if you think about it too hard. Homer is upset when Bart doesn't raise money at first, claiming he would have made more if he had gone into work that day—an acknowledgement of the fact that for all the financial troubles the Simpson family encounters, labor is never really a solution. And of course, the episode's ending is intentionally stupid to drive home the point that no, you really shouldn't be thinking about it that hard.

Skinner's Sense of Snow. While the family is at the circus, a winter storm blows in, covering the town in snow. Everything is shut down except the elementary school, which Bart and Lisa have to attend anyway. But while there, the snow continues to come down, trapping the children and Principal Skinner inside. He resorts to using his military training in order to keep them in check, but this only makes them angrier. Reaching a breaking point when Bart's attempts to tunnel out are thwarted by him, and he's trapped, the children restrain Skinner and proceed to rule over the school without him. So he sneaks a plea for help into the school hamster's ball and releases it. This hamster then crashes through the window of Flanders's car. Homer and Ned produce a makeshift snowplow and get trapped while attempting to break the kids out, the car filling with engine fumes. Now conscious again, they begin to rush to the school's aid but crash into the cracker factory and knock the salt silo over, which melts the snow surrounding the door and freezes the students and Skinner, the whole group agreeing never to mention the incident again. There was an opportunity to put a simple moral into this episode about Bart's leadership of the school children versus Skinner's that was missed. While Skinner ran a strict ship with rationing food and limiting what the kids could and couldn't do, Bart was free to let the children ravel however they wished to do so. Simply showing that they were running out of food or that the smoke fumes from burning the permanent records was causing hallucinations could have also served as the distraction that Skinner needed to send the help note, and it would have made his treatment of the kids seem more justified. But as it was, his attempts to keep them inside the school that got his power usurped in the first place. The second act of the episode comes across as more Skinner being needlessly cruel, but aside from that, this episode is still rather solid and keeps in the traditions established by the later seasons while also being slightly above them. The first act is, as usual, disconnected from the rest of the story, but the A and B plots are more connected than what's typical. The fake-out with Skinner's hamster ball collapsing into the snow only to wind up rescuing Homer and Ned makes the plot justify one another, and the conclusion feels more earned than an episode that ends pointlessly, as so many do. [Music]

Homer, Enthralled by a Motion Capture Suit. Homer invests the family's life savings into the company that produced it, only for them to go bankrupt shortly afterwards. In order to fix the family's finances, he signs up to be a test dummy at a medical research center. While there, the scientists working with him are stunned by how stupid he is and give him an X-ray, where it's learned that Homer has a crayon lodged in his brain. The crayon is taken out, and Homer's IQ increases significantly, immediately giving him the intelligence needed to get along with Lisa. After enjoying his newfound brainpower, Homer begins to actually do his job at the nuclear plant and submits a safety report there that gets the whole place shut down, all of the employees being fired. Between this and being run out of a stupid movie for not laughing, Homer realizes that it's difficult to make friends while you're smart, and so he goes to Moe to have the crayon put back in. Lisa is distraught about this, but after finding a note from Homer's smart brain, she's a bit comforted about the few days they were able to spend as intellectual equals.

The Simpsons' take on Flowers for Algernon. Though the tragedy of that tale is here replaced with Homer voluntarily letting himself return to his intelligence from before. The idea that smart people cannot be happy is one that's commonly explored in media, but also one that's not necessarily a law of the universe. Intelligence is often associated with a better awareness of what's going on around you, but the same awareness can be used to one's advantage. For example, understanding the scale of the universe may make your actions seem insignificant, but for some, that insignificance can be liberating. Make whatever you want out of life, because there's no wrong way to live. This is how Lisa has been able to cope with her intelligence, channeling her woes into creative outlets. But Homer, not having the experience that she does, quickly wants to return to his own life, and that old life is what is compared to throughout the episode.

The town of Springfield has always been characterized by a sweeping lack of intelligence, with Homer leading the mob in many of the more ill-conceived ideas. And as Springfield is a stand-in for the West, there's this idea that the writers don't think very highly of the typical viewer at home or the culture surrounding them. It's not just that stupid people make the world around them worse, but that they actively resent those who don't go along with their bad ideas. Poking Mom. Homer has his back injured at a convict rodeo, and while visiting him in the infirmary, Marge notices a painting done by a convict. From there, she gets the idea to teach an art class at the prison, where she gets to know Jack Crowley, the inmate whose painting she loved in the first place. After encouraging his talent, Marge vouches for him during a parole hearing, and Jack is sent to live with the Simpson family, where Marge gives him the idea to apply for a job painting a mural for the elementary school, even lying about his history to get them the job. But Skinner doesn't like Jack's take on the mural and demands him to remove the edge, which Jack resents, but ultimately complies with. Once the mural is revealed, the students and onlookers don't like it, and Skinner blames Jack, despite the ex-con following Skinner's instructions. The mural and Skinner's car both catch fire, with Jack being the culprit despite denying his involvement, and Marge has him sent back to jail, upset at herself for trusting the man. Meanwhile, Homer accidentally treats his back injury from the rodeo by falling on top of a trash can and starts to sell the patent-pending miracle cure, only for Springfield's chiropractors to sabotage his device when they grow upset with him encroaching on their territory.

Marge trusts Jack because he has artistic talent, something she associates with a sort of gentleness to the guy's soul. But this trust is betrayed repeatedly throughout the episode, something she refuses to see as she doesn't want to be wrong about her intuition. There's a desire from some people to paint the world as black and white: there are good people and bad people, and each of these types has certain traits exclusive to their personalities. Nobody with the spirit of an artist could also be a bad person; a bad guy must be bad and evil all the time in everything they do. Though to be fair, this is generally how people in The Simpsons are portrayed in these later seasons. While Homer may have been a caring, if not a bit abrasive, guy in the earlier seasons, that nuance has long since been eliminated from his personality, and he's now consistently a greedy jerk, eager to put his children's lives in danger for quick curiosity or to risk injuring others for money. So for Marge to believe that a guy like Jack couldn't possibly be more nuanced than he is is also something that the audience could go along with, if only because that's the expectation placed on the writing by now.

Worst episode ever. Bart wins $50 from Homer in a bet and splurges alongside Milhouse, winding up at the Android's Dungeon, where they get banned for life after stopping a woman from selling a box of Star Wars memorabilia to Comic Book Guy for $5. But later, when trying to stealthily watch a Tom Sven appearance, Comic Book Guy has a heart attack from being made fun of and is told to leave his store for a few days to de-stress. As it was Bart and Milhouse who called the ambulance that saved his life, he agrees to let them run the store. This works for a while, but Milhouse does most of the work while Bart bosses him around. So wanting to make a decision on his own, Milhouse purchases 2,000 copies of a glasses-clad superhero comic that nobody wants. While fighting over this decision, Bart and Milhouse stumble into the Comic Book Guy's secret video collection and get the idea to raise money by screening the illegal videos down there. Elsewhere, Comic Book Guy meets Agnes Skinner while trying to make new friends, and the two enjoy each other's ability to make the people around them miserable. But when Bart and Milhouse's video exhibition is shut down, Comic Book Guy gets arrested, and everything goes back to normal.

The town of Springfield is large and very populated, with each random background character capable of evolving into a more fleshed-out character in an episode's notice. Here, it's Agnes Skinner and Comic Book Guy—technically Jeff Albertson, but that's not a name given to him until the 16th season—who are given a deeper dive into their characterizations. Agnes has always existed in the shadow of Skinner's character, despite in-universe ruling over everything he does. And Comic Book Guy is the type to argue with children as though they were his peers, being based off of every comic book store owner in America. Comic Book Guy was originally meant to have a real name, but the creators of the show kept procrastinating on what to call him until his lack of a name became a joke in and of itself. It's interesting how, with so many scenes occurring there, the kids have never even bothered to find out the guy's name. But that's part for the course for a person who intentionally allows their interests to define more of their personality than, well, their personality. If you keep acting rude to other people, you'll be left with nothing but the other jerks of the world.

Tennis the Menace. Abe Simpson wins an autopsy at a retirement home talent show, and Homer takes him to the funeral parlor to start pre-planning his death. But while there, he gets the idea to install a tennis court at the house and does that instead. He and Marge begin to host various couples from around Springfield in doubles games, though Homer's antics cause them to lose every time. Soon, Marge overhears others badmouthing the Simpson family, and this encourages her to try to take the practice more seriously. But Homer doesn't share in the sentiment and has Bart practice for him. Upon realizing that Bart is a much better player, Marge takes him to an upcoming tournament instead of Homer, and he starts to grow jealous, encouraging Lisa to be his doubles partner out of spite. The two teams play against one another in the Crusty Charity Classic, though Homer isn't sure about his chances of winning, so he has Venus Williams substitute for Lisa, making Marge decide to sub out Bart for Steffi Graf. Then more substitutions are made: Marge with Pete Sampras, and Homer with Andrea Jaeger, before the Simpson family is no longer playing in their own game anymore, and they decide to stop feuding. This is the second episode to be digitally inked, though the method wouldn't be picked up in earnest until season 14, as the showrunners wanted to refine the technique a bit more before fully committing to it. It's also another episode that exemplifies the trope of the writers having a disconnected A-plot. This time, however, the usage of the trope is directly acknowledged by the characters, Grandpa Simpson acting incredulous over the fact that the episode was about tennis instead of how it was set up, as though the writers themselves were getting a kick out of letting the audience guess what was coming up next. The plot beyond the first act, however, is much more straightforward than many other Simpsons plots; it's about tennis the whole way through—no building upon the set piece, no mystery islands for the characters to wake up on. Everything happened in a much more logical, early-season style of progression, and as such, there's significantly less focus on the actual plot of the episode as a character of that plot is given more weight. This episode is not so much about tennis as it is about the feuding the Simpson family has over the sport.

Day of the Jackanapes. Crusty is losing his ratings to a game show, which, combined with the constant network executive notes on how to improve his show, pushes him over the edge, and he announces his retirement. During a later interview, he describes how he taped over all his old shows, including all of the seasons, which Sideshow Bob watches in prison and vows revenge for having his life's work erased up to that point. His revenge scheme involves getting a job at Springfield Elementary to get close to Bart, hypnotizing him, and then having an explosive-clad Bart blow up Krusty during his retirement show. After the first several steps of his scheme go through, the show begins, and Bart is primed to listen for the keyword to attack, only for Krusty to go into a monologue about how ashamed he was of the way he treated Sideshow Bob over the years, then blaming himself for Bob's life of crime. In the end, Mr. Teeny is the one to detect the explosives, which he takes from Bart and throws into a room full of the network executives. Afterwards, the whole group goes out for dinner together, where Krusty laments that Sideshow Bob has been given the death penalty. Sideshow Bob has tried and failed to get Bart Simpson so many times that it's becoming overplayed—something mentioned during this episode. It's strange how this dynamic has also seemed to regress in his last appearance; Sideshow Bob has made his peace with Bart and was forced to stop his own brother's plans, the episode ending with him being arrested in order to maintain the status quo. But here, that status quo was not only retained but has regressed; he now wants to destroy Bart Simpson for seemingly no reason other than because that's what he does. Despite the episode acknowledging how overdone these plots are, it still goes along with the script because what else are they to do? But this episode, being Krusty-centric, also served as the ever-useful chance for the showrunners to poke fun at executives and others who would put notes on their work for improvement. Krusty mentions having been on the air for over 60 years, showing many old clips of his; he's a comedy legend in-universe, and the idea that he would need to be told how to be funny comes across as hubris at best. The same could be said of The Simpsons; it was, and at this point still is, an extremely successful show, to the point that other networks were hardly trying to replicate its success, and yet there were still those who seemed to think that they knew better than the guys who had made it into this juggernaut. [Music]

New Kids on the Block. Bart fakes his way into winning a marathon but gets found out and attacked by a mob, only to be saved at the last moment by a man who introduces himself as LT Smash. Smash says that Bart has the potential to be in the boy band that he's recruiting for and invites him to the studio for training, where he's teamed up with Milhouse, Nelson, and Ralph to become Party Posse. They perform a few concerts and get big—big enough to have their music video air on national airwaves, including the chorus of "I von at niage," which Lisa learns spells "Join the Navy" in reverse. The music video, being filled with subtle and not-so-subtle imagery that's meant to convince kids to join the armed forces, she investigates further to learn that LT Smash is actually Lieutenant Smash and that the whole boy band has been a project by the U.S. military to recruit new members. But when Smash learns from higher-ups that Mad Magazine intends to run a satirical article on the boy band that will ruin the reputation, he goes mad and attacks, to fire cannons at Mad's headquarters. Lenny arrives with a plan to stop him, but they're too late, and the HQ is destroyed—to no real damage. Satirizing boy bands is a difficult thing to do, in large part because the genre is so over-the-top that there's no real criticism to be made that's not abundantly clear already. You could call the music manufactured and pandering, but the target audience is aware of this already. The manufactured nature is why it's a sure thing to be popular, and the pandering is something that most people don't mind if they're in the target demographic. To insult the music from a theory perspective likewise misses the point of the group's popularity as well. In the end, it's just a popular thing that's popular for being popular. Through this episode, instead, takes the less obvious approach of making a satirization of the military's capacity for stealth marketing. This is something that still persists today, whether it's military flyovers at sporting events or dumping money into popular first-person shooters. But the episode focuses still on the more absurd aspects of this relationship at the time. The idea of an attack on New York City was something out of sci-fi or a disaster movie; it was early 2001, and it keeps with this through-line for the entire episode. The massive threat to the Party Posse is a satirical jab done by a comedy magazine.

Hungry, Hungry Homer. The Simpson family goes to Legoland—or Blooland—but Lisa's souvenir Eiffel Tower is missing a piece, and the gift shop won't honor a replacement until Homer steps in and makes vague threats. Realizing how nice it felt when Lisa got her set completed, he vows to begin standing up for the little guy in life, including getting Marge's coupons honored and ultimately trying to get Lenny's season tickets refunded after the Isotopes start to lose. But while he's speaking to the team's owner, who works for the Duff Corporation, Homer learns that the team is being sold to Albuquerque. He tries to spread the story, but Duff continuously covers it up until he's forced into dramatic actions. Homer begins a hunger strike outside the stadium. This works for a time, attracting attention away from the team, until Duff decides to rewrite the narrative, repositioning Homer and pretending that his hunger strike is an attraction for the team. Eventually, he's removed from his position and brought onto the field to shill a new hot dog. But realizing that all of the ingredients are popular Southwestern items, he's finally able to convince the crowd to boo the move, and it's cancelled, with Homer able to eat his fill once again. For an episode with a plot primarily about Homer going on a hunger strike, this episode doesn't get to the actual strike until the third act of the story, with very few jokes about Homer being hungry able to be made—likely a good decision because it would get old to see him be hungry for any longer. The first two acts of the episode consist of Homer learning how nice it is to do good things, to help the downtrodden and give a voice to the voiceless. But Homer going on a hunger strike is the last thing one would expect him to do. This was necessary to explain why he suddenly had the change of character needed to go through with something like this, and in typical later-season fashion, there is lampshading as the kind of person he is this week, with the newfound love of food. This episode sees a positive ending, unlike what The Simpsons was previously known for. There's generally some kind of sardonic or bittersweet return to the status quo, but here it's Homer who gets to be the hero as a direct result of decisions he made. He wanted to go on a hunger strike until the team was kept in Springfield, and then it was. This is one of the rare moments where Homer gets exactly what he set out to achieve and exactly the way he wanted it. The change in his temperament is obviously the driving force behind why the shift in tone works so well. For the first time in a few seasons, it genuinely feels good to root for Homer.

Bye-Bye Nerdy. When a new student, Francine, moves to Springfield Elementary, Lisa attempts to befriend her, only to wind up being aggressively bullied by this new girl. She tries to find some common ground for the two to bond over, but nothing seems to catch the bully's attention until she reviews some security tapes and comes to the conclusion that bullies don't attack nerds if they can't smell them. Lisa creates a new spray to prevent the scent of the pheromone and save nerd-kind from centuries of bullying. Meanwhile, Homer and Marge are scared by a professional baby-proofer, so Homer attempts to make his house safer, then spreads the safening to the rest of Springfield. However, once he learns that he's putting baby-injury-related industries out of business, he changes his mind and pleads with the children of the world to injure themselves once again. Lisa in this episode tries to deal with Francine, a bully who's viewed as beneath reason, someone whose life goal is to attack the weak with no purpose. This is the general characterization of bullies in media that's persisted for decades and would continue to exist for years afterwards. Often, there's a moral stance in episodes featuring schoolyard bullies that the other party secretly likes the victim, or they just want attention, or that they have some sympathetic angle. But here, all of the lessons from media fall by the wayside as Lisa fails to apply them to her situation. So how does she approach a person who is unapproachable? And Lisa finds some sort of solution from science. By using data, she can find that nerds secrete a pheromone that causes bullies to attack them, and from there neutralizes it to permanently put a stop to the decades-old trope of the bully—not that this does any good in a universe with a resetting continuity. Homer's problem of trying to baby-proof the world has an equal and opposite characterization that babies are the reverse bullies, trying to injure themselves instantly for no reason other than curiosity. His issue winds up being tied to an industry that exploits these wounds, though I can't help but think that in an earlier season of The Simpsons, he would have uncovered that these industries were the same ones putting sharp corners on furniture all along, or something equally absurd and yet self-fulfilling.

Simpson Safari. After years of mistreatment, the bag boys of America go on strike, barricading grocery stores and preventing Springfield from getting any food. Hungry, the Simpson family follows Santa's Little Helper to the attic when he sniffs out something to eat, and they find an old pail of animal crackers from Homer's old school lunchbox. Inside is a solid gold giraffe, which guarantees the prize of a trip to Africa. Upon arriving there, they get a tour from Kiten, who takes them around the entire continent in a few hours, viewing the sites and scaring off poachers. But later, when Homer enrages a hippo during a dance, the family is chased into the river, where they're pushed into uncharted waters. They eventually come across Joan Buswell's chimp refuge, where a scientist studying chimp behavior takes them in and asks for their help to fend off invading poachers from grabbing her chimps. But Lisa learns that these poachers are really Greenpeace, trying to rescue the monkeys from a diamond-mining operation that Joan has been running. Once the truth comes out, she bribes the family with diamonds to ignore the exploitation, and they return home, learning that Kiten has become president. The Simpsons go to blank is a common trope by this point in the show's lifespan, but this episode falters due to the decision to have the family travel to Africa. It's normal for the showrunners to do a bit of research on the place they're writing about, only to throw out whatever facts aren't funny to do comedy instead. But here, the lack of research combined with the massive scale of the place being visited just makes the episode's conceit pointless. Unlike Japan last season, Africa is an entire continent, so to see the breadth of the area traveled to ensure that the Simpson family gets to see everything notable about the place ends up hurting the potential for any satire on the cultures they're visiting. The script even calls attention to this: Lisa complains about seeing various unrealistic depictions of animals, and there's almost a humorous tone to the depictions of various features and monuments that the family is able to appear in. New places simply because they're the places that audiences would know—scale be damned. But the social aspects of Africa's depiction also seem to stop at anything not shown in The Lion King, and so a show that was once lauded for its nuance in its satire can come across as merely paying lip service to its old ideals in an episode like this one.

Trilogy of Error. Lisa shows off her new science project, Linguo, to Homer, who damages it with beer before smelling brownies and investigating. But while trying to steal a brownie from Marge, she accidentally cuts off Homer's thumb, leading her to call the police, who misinterpret the—

Call it attempted murder, and they send cop cars out to 123 Fake Street, the fake address Marge gives. Meanwhile, Lisa is repairing Linguo, but takes too long and ends up missing the bus, catching a ride from Crusty, only to wind up at the wrong Springfield Elementary. There, she meets Thonus, an equally nerdy student, and the two fall in love. Before Lisa has to head out again for the science fair, she runs to Mo's, expecting to see Homer there, but he hasn't arrived yet.

As he and Marge took off to go to the emergency room, only to crash into Reindeer Wolfcastle's Ferrari, which they steal when he exits to smash their car. Meanwhile, Bart and Milhouse sneak out to Milhouse's crying cave, where they find a collection of fireworks that they set off throughout the city, accidentally blowing up Nick Riviera's Clinic before hiding out at the fake address Marge gave. When the police raid the house, they're forced to work as informants to find out who has been smuggling the fireworks, though their efforts are hampered by Chief Wiggum's incompetence and sent on a chase across the city. Lisa doesn't find Homer at Mo's, but does find Marge, and when she hears which part of the drunken rant Homer is on, takes Lisa to school, only to run out of gas and secretly hitch a ride with Cletus, who Homer is also riding with. The four go to Nick's, only to learn that it's on fire, so Homer has to walk to Shelbyville Hospital. As Marge and Lisa stole Cletus's car, they stop when Bart emerges from a manhole in the street, having been chased there by Fat Tony and when the Mafia goons fall and corner Bart and Milhouse, Marge throws Linguo at them, and it overloads from the constant correction of the mobsters' grammar, igniting the fireworks and blowing everything up. The explosion causes Homer's head to land near Homer, and he runs back to the mobsters as they're being arrested, only to learn about the predicaments, and they offer a solution. In the end, the mobsters reattach Homer's thumb, which also doubles as Lisa's science project, and the episode ends with Mr. Teeny pointing out how contrived the plot was.

This was a packed episode, told through the perspective of three tales at once, separated by the commercial breaks, starting with Homer's tale. There are a series of unexplained events and melodies to his adventures that are slowly revealed as we see Bart and Lisa's side of the story, so there's an additional sense of mystery created because of the differing perspectives. And what would otherwise be a confusing plot is given a few extra layers of eccentricity, creating an appeal of the episode instead of any individual events. Not that the episode itself needed the help. The writers mentioned in interviews afterwards that writing jokes for the episode was difficult, as everything would affect not one, but three plot lines, and yet the disconnected jokes end up being some of the most memorable of the season, if not the show itself.

I'm going to praise-land. Ned meets with Rachel Jordan, the woman who helped him get over Maude, at a church event and tries to invite her over for the night, only for his obsession with his dead wife to get in the way of forming a relationship. Realizing he's not yet over Maude, Ned asks the Simpson family to throw out all the old things of hers that he's still attached to. In the process, they find an old sketchbook that includes plans for a Christian amusement park named Praiseland. Ned takes it upon himself to build Praiseland, despite the steep cost to himself, and soon the park is open, but it's a flop, as the park is too bland for people's taste, until patrons start to have convulsions near the Maude statue, declaring it a miracle. Homer gets the idea to start charging people for their religious visions, and they're able to raise money to donate to a local orphanage, but Ned soon learns the real reason behind the visions: there's a leaky gas line beneath the statue causing them. And when he sees two children trying to light an offering candle, Ned and Homer tackle them, and the sight of two grown men attacking orphans causes the park to lose its patrons and shut down. But after the whole ordeal, Ned meets Rachel again and asks for a second chance, which she accepts. Without Maude, Ned has steadily become a different person; his descent into Flanderization, starting out in this episode, is as he begins to define himself less as a foil to Homer (who has no trouble highlighting his own shortcomings) and more of a religious zealot. But at this point in the series, the zealotry is still well-intentioned; he only opens a Christian amusement park out of a desire to carry out his wife's wishes and only continues its operation as he feels that he can do some good in the world. He's even willing to shut it down when he concludes that leaving the park open might end up causing brain damage to the people experiencing the visions. So, despite the general trend of Ned's post-Maude characterization, here he is actually seen as a more complex individual. Without her, he goes through a crisis of faith—not in God, but in himself—first as he struggles to find some meaning in his life without Maude, and then as he struggles to turn that meaning into something beneficial. He stepped out of the shadow of being Homer's normal neighbor and has started to become somebody more unique. It's only a matter of how long this new Ned remains active.

Children of a Lesser Claw. The Simpson family goes to a free day at the YMCA, where Homer breaks his knee while attempting a basketball stunt. He has surgery to restore it, but confined to a wheelchair, starts to grow bored as he can't go outside to live his life any longer. But when Ned Flanders comes over in need of a babysitter, Homer volunteers to watch Rod and Todd, enjoying the experience so much he gets the idea to open a daycare to watch even more children. Homer is a great caretaker and gets along well with the kids, much to the jealousy of Bart and Lisa, who begin to conspire to expose their father. Later, at the Good Guy Awards, Homer is recognized for being a pillar of the community, only for Bart and Lisa to splice in home movies to the reel, showing off his life, and this causes the people of Springfield to decide against wanting to continue to send their children to Homer's daycare. Not wanting to lose the kids, he kidnaps them and drives away in a stolen police truck, crashing it and eventually being caught. When everything returns, turns back to normal. There's a lot of uncharacteristic behavior from Homer in this episode, a few things even pointed out by the narrative itself, such as how Homer is somehow bored with sitting around all day, despite his most iconic pose being in front of the television spacing out, and the fact that he is suddenly a great caretaker of children, despite the knowledge otherwise by Bart and Lisa. What's more is that the two kids start to become jealous of the time that other kids are spending with their father, in spite of earlier episodes showing that they tolerate him at times and denounce him at others. But maybe it is just jealousy that forms from not being able to have something. Bart and Lisa say that Homer doesn't appreciate them as much because he takes them for granted, but this is also something that they themselves have done, not really caring about the time they spend with Homer until they start to realize that that time is over. And of course, Homer doing anything but sitting in front of the television is something that he only misses being able to do now that he's confined to a wheelchair and can't go out for some crazy adventure.

Simpsons Tall Tales. The Simpsons win a trip to Delaware in an off-screen competition, but not wanting to pay an airfare tax, they jump aboard a train where they meet a hobo who offers to tell them stories as they ride. The first is the story of Paul Bunyan, played by Homer Simpson—an unnaturally tall child who grows into an unnaturally tall adult, but unable to continue feeding and clothing the giant man, the townsfolk drag him out to the wilderness, where he begins to wander. He carves a giant ox for companionship and later comes across Marge, who he woos. After the two fall in love, but when a giant meteor threatens the land, Paul is the only one big enough to stop it, which he does by catching it in his pants before throwing it to Chicago, which starts the great fire there. The next story is meant to pander to Lisa, about Connie Apple Seed. Tired of the constant buffalo hunting and eating of her family's wagon train, Lisa—Connie attempts to get them to switch to apples instead as a renewable source of food, but they reject the offer and continue to hunt the buffalo while Connie goes off on her own, planting seeds along the way and changing her name. Eventually, the buffalo run out, and the settlers begin to starve as they resort to cannibalism. But Connie returns with a bushel of apples to save the day. The final story is about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, played as Bart and Nelson. Nelson gets caught holding a girl's hand and is forced into a shotgun marriage, but he flees the wedding and heads downriver alongside his friend. They try to buy supplies but are identified by the shopkeeper there, continuing to be pursued across state lines from Missouri to Missouri. They jump aboard the steamboat, only to get propelled into the dining hall, where a fight is started after they say the word "cheat." Kicked off the boat, the two are caught underwater and later [Music] executed. In the end, The Simpsons arrive in Delaware to see where J.C. Penney's sends its damaged merchandise, leaving Homer behind to pay for the stories with sponge bats.

Season [Music] 13. A handful of episodes produced for Season 12 were held over for the following season. As Season 12 is included in the retrospective, and you know this video isn't already long enough, I'm including them here in order to be more inclusive for everything possibly relevant to the Golden Age discussion. The Parent [Music] Rap. Bart and Milhouse see an unattended police car and play around inside of it, only to accidentally turn off the parking brake and crash it. Judge Snider rules over their grand theft auto charge, giving Milhouse a lenient sentence as "boys will be boys," but goes on vacation just before Bart gets sentenced, replaced by Judge Constantia Harm. As she views the incident to be the fault of bad parenting, she has Homer and Bart tethered together as punishment. This punishment seems to be effective for a while, with the father-son duo getting along better than usual and learning more and more about each other, but the differences are still there, and it soon becomes too grating a punishment to bear, so Marge chops the wire apart and frees them. But when Harm learns of this, she decides to punish Marge and Homer instead, having them put in stocks until Marge admits she's a bad parent—something that she refuses to do. So Marge and Homer break out of the stocks and plan on vandalizing Harm's houseboat, though they accidentally sink it in the process. During this sentencing, Bart feels guilty that others are being punished for his mistakes and pleads to be punished in his parents' stead, but before Harm can send him to juvie hall, Snider returns and declares that "boys will be boys," letting him off the hook. There's a sense of irony to the finale of this episode—that Bart gets completely off the hook with a light sentence by Judge Snider, no different than the finale of basically any other episode when the continuity resets from plot to plot. No real punishment can ever really stick; Bart will always be as well-behaved or poorly-behaved as the plot demands. So Judge Snider's leniency is an in-universe way of explaining how Bart's behavior can continue to go uncorrected, but we also see the opposite extreme presented as well. Judge Harm's punishment for Bart and Homer works out for part of the episode, but after a while, it starts to harm their relationship even more, to the point that the usually passive Marge has to intervene. This shows that the punishment, while cruel and unusual, was working and would have continued to work if it had only been cut short (pun not intended) from the actual sentence. Marge repeatedly says that it's obvious Harm has no children, and maybe it's Marge's judgment that could have made the ideal solution for this episode—knowing just when the boys have had enough, that their tethering lesson has stuck. But Marge's will is largely ignored in this episode, as is the glaringly obvious contradiction to the idea that she's a bad parent.

In Lisa, Simpson, Homer, the Moe. Homer tells a story about Bart digging a hole for no reason—so boring that Moe cuts him off, lamenting how mundane his life has become. He returns to his old college to meet with a former instructor for advice on how to reinvigorate his love of bartending and is told to rebuild the bar without so much dank. While he's out, Homer is put in charge of Moe's bar to moderate success, but Homer returns as the bar is being demolished and rebuilt, lamenting that his brief foray into bartending is over. Later on, the new bar, now only called "M," is far too modern for the regulars, and they become excluded from Moe's new lifestyle of hanging out with hip young models. Moe kicks out his old friends but feels guilty for doing so, and when the ghost of his old instructor returns to haunt him for losing his way and learning that young people don't tip, Moe decides to undo all of the changes. He walks in on Homer in the middle of having transformed his garage into a hunting club, legally allowed to serve drinks, but a jealous Moe feuds with Homer, challenging him to actually go hunting while thwarting Homer's attempts. He gets shot by the guy, but in the end, they're able to put the ordeal behind them and sit down to a D'oh!-Thanksgiving dinner alongside the regulars. Moe gets burnt out on his passion of bartending after years of doing the same thing again and again, seeking a change by replacing the scenery and attracting new clientele. But sometimes the reason we do the same thing over and over in life isn't so much out of helplessness but because we've made a niche that we prefer. Moe regrets the change, as despite being bored of the old bar, the other patrons didn't feel the same way. He got into bartending out of a desire to be happy serving others and realizes that having four regular patrons is a sign of loyalty that you've done well for yourself. Homer also gets a brief taste of this lifestyle, to the point that after only a short time working as a bartender, he also desires to keep doing it, the men whose loyal patronage he's earned being those he poached off of Moe. It's not only that Homer enjoys being a bartender, but that he enjoys the company of his friends; in fact, he barely even serves drinks, having his family do most of the labor. So when Moe kicks the gang out, it's a betrayal of that idea. The other guys get the impression that it was their friend group Moe had grown sick of rather than the bar itself. But after tracking down Homer's hunting excursion to sabotage it, the whole group realizes that they do still care where everyone gets their beer from, and the episode is able to conclude with a heartwarming return to form.

A Hunka Hunka Burns in Love. Disappointed by the fortune cookies at a Chinese restaurant, Homer gets a job writing fortunes of his own, and his fortune—"You will find true love on Flag Day"—is sent to Mr. Burns, who goes out to make it come true. He struggles for a while before noticing a female officer, Gloria, ticketing his car, and it's love at first sight. But Burns struggles to connect with Gloria as she believes that he's too old, so he recruits the help of Homer to appear more youthful and energetic. Homer goes along on all of their dates, giving Burns advice and helping him with the more physically demanding tasks. But when Burns asks Gloria to marry him, Homer and Gloria are later kidnapped by Snake, Gloria's ex-boyfriend, causing Burns to deduce that Gloria ran off with his more youthful friend. But once the police track the couple down to Snake's hideout, there's a standoff, broken by Homer accidentally lighting the place on fire. Burns rushes inside to save Gloria, only for Gloria to end up carrying him out to safety. In the end, though, she realizes that the whole affair has made her fall back in love with Snake, and the episode ends with Burns single once more. As this plot focuses on Mr. Burns, the writers had the task of trying to keep the audience engaged with his love life while still making him a character who could be rooted for. Burns has always been someone designed to look unlikable, to be unlikable and evil all the time, so to make him more sympathetic took details like making him smile more often—something that the artists struggled with as he didn't have a proper design for this sort of expression. As an example of the changes that needed to be made, Burns's eyebrows are not visible for most of the episode. His iconic sour attitude is also something that had to be toned down following the start of the second act, as it's difficult to undo so many years of audiences rooting against the guy in order to make the plot work. Overall, the episode gives a positive outlook on the Scully era of The Simpsons—that the show has finally found a groove that, while distinct from what came before, is still able to catch and hold the attention of audiences while still being entertaining. Homer's work at the nuclear plant isn't even mentioned; he immediately gets a job writing fortune cookies, which is then ignored following the first act, and the means through which he and Mr. Burns meet up in the episode is nowhere near the plant, where it would have made sense for them to start their plot.

The Blunder Years. Homer and Bart prank Marge into believing that the spokesman for a paper towel company is going out to have dinner at their house, and to make it up to her, they take her out to a fancy dinner. While there, a hypnotist has Homer go back to his 12-year-old self, and he begins to scream non-stop. As his screaming is being disruptive at the plant, they have Carl, Lenny, and later Moe come over to try to explain what could have happened in Homer's youth to repress the memory. The episode then becomes a flashback to a summer of the past with Homer, Moe, Lenny, and Carl exploring at the old quarry, where Homer finds a corpse. Back at the present, the Simpson family heads out to find the body, only to follow the sewer pipes up to Mr. Burns's office. There, Burns shows them security footage of what really happened: Mr. Smithers Sr., Burns's assistant at the time, had gone into a melting-down reactor core to prevent the town from being blown up and died of radiation poisoning, with his son, Waylon Smithers Jr., being left in the care of Mr. Burns while the incident was covered up. This episode largely serves as a parody of *Stand By Me*, using this framing to immediately make the audience familiar with the general plot threads through cultural osmosis. Even if you've never seen the movie, you'll likely know that Homer is going to find a body, and then from there, the episode becomes a pseudo-murder mystery about the history behind the corpse—a story that doesn't involve the Simpson family, and so it merely has them take a literal seat once their role in the plot is over with. Between the involvement of Lenny and Carl in the flashback, then the story shifting to one about Smithers and his father, the Simpson family is only really in this episode as a through line to connect stories about other characters, such as in the previous episode when Mr. Burns was the focal character, or the one before that being all about Moe. This is so it also serves as another indicator of the show's floating timeline. Homer and the rest are now pre-teens during the early 80s instead of young adults or high schoolers, though unlike so many other flashbacks up to this point, there's very little done to date the flashbacks using set pieces or pop culture references. The focus is purely on the characters, which is why something like this is better received than later flashback episodes. This and the new background given to characters like Smithers sets the new era of the show firmly in its way; there's no need to be held to whatever continuity has been established before—it's not as though the show has ever stuck to it before.

Outro. At the start of this video, about 11 hours and 9 months ago, I made the comparison between *The Simpsons* and Shakespeare, and perhaps that is the most apt comparison between this show and any other cultural staple that I could make. Shakespeare has contributed myriad different words to the modern English language, as well as entrenching certain plot archetypes and tropes into the modern consciousness. His works have done more to shape the world than perhaps any other playwright in history, and so too has *The Simpsons*. The landscape of modern television has been totally altered by the presence of this single…

Show one monolith that made everything that came afterwards look different from what came before, and the comparisons don't end there either. Shakespeare's influence was so great because his reach was equally vast. Audiences of the time loved his work nearly as much as audiences today do, and this audience isn't just made up of intellectuals and the aristocratic Elite who could spend their free time trying to get works of media with which they had engaged. There was plenty of low-brow humor in each play that allowed the peanut gallery to appreciate what they were seeing in front of them.

The Simpsons can at once tell a story that touches on deep political issues while also throwing in some slapstick or a body-poop culture reference. It can make the stupid people watching it feel smart and the smart people watching it laugh themselves stupid at the same time. This is the key feature as to why The Simpsons is still discussed today and why it will still be discussed in decades when or if it eventually gets taken off the air. It's not just a show that became hugely popular, but a show that deserved every ounce of that success, where the expectations set by its writers were so high that even the people making it occasionally failed to live up to their own standards. Though the Goodwill from such cultural residents was more than enough to let them write it out on their own coattails.

More than a simple show about a simple family, The Simpsons is the show. If only one show on television ever mattered or meant anything, it was The [Music] Simpsons. Now let's all go out for some frosty chocolate milkshakes.