35x02 A Mid-Childhood Night's Dream

[9.5/10 on a Selman Era scale] Remember when the Simpsons felt like human beings? It seems like such a long time ago now. The show’s still had its emotional high points over the years (largely while Matt Selman was serving as substitute showrunner for Al Jean), but in large part, Homer, Marge, Bart, and Lisa stopped feeling like real people and started feeling like joke machines who existed to be bumped from zany scene to zany scene.

Despite its fantastical dreamworld setting, “A Mid-Childhood’s Night Dream” is achingly real. It is founded on real emotions: of parent worried about losing the sweet children she knows to the inexorable march of years and growing up, of kids maturing and wanting to be seen for what they are and not what they were, of the way that relationships evolve over time but in a way that doesn’t have to diminish them, of the fact that fifth grade boys definitely need to learn about deodorant.

It is beautiful. I’m a firm believer in the idea that oftentimes the abstract and the impressionsitic can do a better job of getting at truth than the literal. So I love using the dream imagery of bubbles, representing both a touching memory of domestic bliss and the sense of something precious about to pop. I love the visceral panic of Marge losing Bart’s hand in a department store, frantically trying to find him, and encountering a dismissive teenager instead. I love the use of size here, with Ms. Peyton growing immensely when warning about the end of Bart’s childhood and Marge feeling tiny as she imagines walking through her home as an empty nester.

All of these big choices communicate the feeling of what Marge is confronting in the way that's accentuated by the exaggerated and surreal imagery. It’s disorienting and in some cases distressing to see, which puts is in Marge’s shoes.

Frankly, it felt like one of the dream episodes of The Sopranos, which is high compliment! (Maybe it’s just the mutual premise of food poisoning prompting emotional epiphany and psychological hardship with your kids growing up.)

Not for nothing, it’s still funny! There is a lot of heavy stuff here, with Marge reckoning with the fact that Bart may not be her “special little guy” anymore. But there’s also a lot of cute, clever, and downright hilarious choices here. For whatever reason, my favorite jokes in the whole thing were the freeze frame gags in Marge’s file folder of yesterday’s thoughts. Absurd bits like “I have manly thumbs” and “Do I have to watch The Wire?” really tickled my funny bone for whatever reason.

But honestly, every comic element of this one clicked. Ms. Peyton’s grave seriousness about preteen B.O. hit home in an amusing way; the inner Lisa half-translating our favorite eight-year-old’s insights in Marge’s “Lucy dream” was a clever device; Homer’s various transformations were creative and fun; and all they kept finding new layers to the gags about food making Marge nauseous in a way that surprised me. The advent of a “summer sushi” stand, and the radio ad involving “warm mayonnaise” got especially absurd laughs out of me.

With all the humor, the episode never loses the heart or the truth behind what it’s doing. I love the little insights here that feel very human. The fact that Marge remembers a time when Bart was the sweet one and Lisa was a handful is a particularly nice touch, dovetailing with the theme of how kids are constantly evolving, and that's okay.

There’s some clever writing in how “bounce-a-thon” becomes the inflection point for Marge’s anxiety about those changes. Her realization that Lisa is still a mommy’s girl and so she’s desperate to be there to capture a photo of Lisa for her scrapbook smartly dramatizes the immense pressure Marge is feeling to hold onto her kids’ childhoods by any means necessary. The fact that Bart won’t do the thumbs up photo to add to her scrapbook is an equally canny choice to turn their conflict into something tangible.

It too feels real. Again, the lived in touches help drive this one home. Bart being able to express himself so maturely about why he doesn’t want to do the pose leaves Marge taken aback. Her removing a splinter from his palm makes her realize how much his hand has grown. These small signs that your son is not a little kid anymore pile up, in a way that would make any parent wistful.

And yet, what I admire most about the episode is it doesn’t resolve all of this anxiety in a place of hopelessness, or cheap gags, or even a saccharine “their childhoods will always be there” message. Instead, Marge embraces Bart doing comic picture poses over sweet ones. She laughs at the cleverness of his faux-mooning tableau. She may still mourn the little boy he isn’t, but she comes to love the young man he’s become, and there is great beauty in that, to love the evolution and change you see as someone grows into the person they’re going to be. Bart may not be her sweet and “special little guy” in the same way, but now he’s her “funny little guy”. Being validated like that means as much to Bart as it does to Marge.

In a strange way, it gives Marge what she wanted. The episode returns to hand-holding again and again as a motif. Marge remembers her little boy grasping her fingers as a sign of maternal bond. She remembers the bittersweetness of convincing him to let go to go to kindergarten. She senses his disinterest when she removes a splinter from his hand now.

It’s a potent image.You don’t have to dig too deep to understand the meaning and impact of letting go, of feeling a loss of connection, that's represented by your child not reaching for you anymore.

That's why there’s such catharsis in the final moments, when Marge earnestly likes Bart’s little gag, and he’s plainly touched by being affirmed in that way. So he does what he always did. He takes his mother’s hand and invites her into his world, into the life he has now and the person he’s becoming. I get misty-eyed just thinking about it.

That's not typical for The Simpsons in its post-classic years. And yet, under the new regime, the door has opened wider and wider to this kind of earned emotion and earnest character exploration once again. (See also: last season’s superlative “Pixelated and Afraid”.) The show had leveled out after the insanity of the Scully years, but largely stagnated, in ways that sanded down the characters. Now, they’re allowed to consistently be people again. And like Marge with her son, it is once again exciting, and heartening, to see what the show might grow into next.