[7.4/10 on a post-classic Simpsons scale] Oh man, you guys. I have no idea what to do with this episode. If you sort of pretend it isn’t a Simpsons episode, and instead some Twilight Zone-esque alternate show about a random nuclear family, it kind of works. You can’t ask for trifling things like the characters to act like real human beings, or to have any real sense of a logical story progression, or heaven forbid some kind of earned ending.
But what it has are jokes! Idiotic but somehow funny jokes! Bart tipping his frosted throw pillow over and declaring, “My bar mitzvah cake! Now I’ll never be a man” tickled my funny bone. The Blue-Haired Lawyer’s routine about Homer’s memory being “hazy like the moors of Scotland” is somehow hilarious. Drunk Marge is a surprisingly durable source of comedy. And god help me, Homer chloroforming himself at ten in the morning is a gag so imbecilic that it wrapped back around to hilarious for me.
I don’t know what to tell you. This isn’t what I want my Simpsons to be. It plays like an episode of Family Guy that somehow snuck into Springfield. These do not feel like the characters I grew up with. Homer and Bart feel both stupider and crueler than the personalities we know and love. Not only doing a cop out ridiculous ending, but lampshading it so you don’t have to explain how any of this could possibly make sense is the worst type of Scully era excess.
But god help me, I laughed. I got a kick out of the ridiculous series of events that kept progressing. This one is so stupid, but in an endearing, entertaining way that I cannot help but enjoy. Scully episodes are a “sometimes food” for sure, but this one hit the spot in its own idiotic way.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2023-09-12T01:27:05Z
[7.4/10 on a post-classic Simpsons scale] Oh man, you guys. I have no idea what to do with this episode. If you sort of pretend it isn’t a Simpsons episode, and instead some Twilight Zone-esque alternate show about a random nuclear family, it kind of works. You can’t ask for trifling things like the characters to act like real human beings, or to have any real sense of a logical story progression, or heaven forbid some kind of earned ending.
But what it has are jokes! Idiotic but somehow funny jokes! Bart tipping his frosted throw pillow over and declaring, “My bar mitzvah cake! Now I’ll never be a man” tickled my funny bone. The Blue-Haired Lawyer’s routine about Homer’s memory being “hazy like the moors of Scotland” is somehow hilarious. Drunk Marge is a surprisingly durable source of comedy. And god help me, Homer chloroforming himself at ten in the morning is a gag so imbecilic that it wrapped back around to hilarious for me.
I don’t know what to tell you. This isn’t what I want my Simpsons to be. It plays like an episode of Family Guy that somehow snuck into Springfield. These do not feel like the characters I grew up with. Homer and Bart feel both stupider and crueler than the personalities we know and love. Not only doing a cop out ridiculous ending, but lampshading it so you don’t have to explain how any of this could possibly make sense is the worst type of Scully era excess.
But god help me, I laughed. I got a kick out of the ridiculous series of events that kept progressing. This one is so stupid, but in an endearing, entertaining way that I cannot help but enjoy. Scully episodes are a “sometimes food” for sure, but this one hit the spot in its own idiotic way.