“Punish, punish, punish and, when it is too late, love.”
There are stories that move you on your own and stories that tell you how you should look, with tips and tradition to get the job done. “Manger stuff,” The Simpsons‘impossible 700th episode, does everything to mark its place in history, but gives us a reason to celebrate it. As a piece of TV history, it is a novelty. Like an episode of The Simpsons, it is almost not there.
Look, I have no pleasure in that. After all, I am the AV Club reviewer who spent his years covering the latest series Simpsons making the case for the intermittent Good tour as proof that there is still some kick in the old woman. And I was genuinely sad when the inevitable ax fell last year, signaling that the AV Club’s decision to go back to normal Simpsons coverage starting in 2011 Season 23 allowed us Simpsons robust pot for gold TV for a long time enough. As much heat as I occasionally got Simpsons online professionals for being contemptuous (I will never get over angry Yeardley Smith—I just won’t), I can point to a dozen or more episodes from the past six seasons that I would slide comfortably in any Simpsons‘spree of good old times.
But we are not here to remember on the occasion of a good episode of round numbers, we are here to say “Manger Stuff”. And “Manger Things” barely registers.
G / O Media can receive a commission
Rob LaZebnik is the credited writer, and his name is one I usually look for with hope at the beginning of an episode. The Simpsons it is a perfectly controlled ship at this point, with everything looking sharp, and our voice cast overcoming the remotely recorded COVID process without any hiccups. I laughed once for real, at the disposable joke where Mr. Burns’ cozy assurance that his employee’s Christmas party is filled with goodwill is contradicted by a random bullet resounding in the plant’s grille in front of him. It’s an old joke, but it worked well and I laughed.
Flanders – whose role in this terminally blurred episode is otherwise unlikely to be disposable – brings up the whole idea of Jesus “Love your neighbor” to convince flashback pregnant Maude to allow the outcast Homer to share his vacation while meditating as the guy “It seems that he never lives near anyone”. And Homer, spending the night in the “Son of Man cave” in Flanders, is momentarily tempted by a painted demon from Bosch, responding to the little monster’s conversation about the lake of fire immediately shooting: “A house by the lake? I could write a little! ”I am always on board a joke about the unexplored and unexpected corners of Homer J. Simpson’s mind.
That’s not much entertainment to hang any episodes on, though. And “Manger Things” throws a lot of logs into the fire to try to generate some heat from the “700th spectacular episode”. It’s a Christmas episode. It’s a flashback episode. Marge throws Homer out. It’s an episode from Flanders. Homer plays emergency doula for Rod’s birth, for God’s sake, a monumental retcon that brings Homer and Maude into an intimacy so unexpectedly deep that it makes Homer’s infamous and insensitive reaction to his inadvertent murder of Maude much more horrible in retrospect .
It’s kind of shocking, even for a tired professional Simpsons viewer, how little nurturing is done for any of these plots. The Christmas angle exists to increase Homer’s sadness over Marge’s decision to give him the boot (and to ensure that Neddy is delivering Christmas turkeys to those in need during Maude’s time of need), but it could have been defined any time. (If there is a symmetry for episodes 1 and 700, both installed during the holidays, that’s all.) Homer, after being informed by Moe in a secret room about the Simpson garage (for some reason), ends up camping there and spying on his family through conveniently conducting ventilation. of sound. But while Dan Castellaneta obediently provides the depressed Homer with many sad moans and sighs over his situation, the central conflict between the couple is not dramatized, but fabricated. Homer doing a Clark Griswold Style The lonely Christmas nest in the cramped and forgotten space of the attic pretends to pathos without ever compromising, and everything is so terribly flat and uninvolved. Also, as season 32 fanatics know, Marge kicked Homer out a few episodes ago, so not only is her decision here portrayed as wrong (Lenny and Carl secretly drunk the reluctantly abstainer Homer at the party), this narrative shouldn’t be fired for nothing .
Likewise, there is no real comic hay made from the flashback premise of the previous six years. Homer has a little more hair. The same is true of Abe, who, in this version of the story, had the illusion that he would be able to live with his son’s family indefinitely. We have that much debated backstory about why Marge had to replace the kitchen curtains, for those who use that kind of thing. Bart (4 years old) and Lisa (2 years old) are small figures, Nancy Cartwright and Yeardley Smith slightly raising their characters’ voices, but the brothers act similarly in response to Homer’s sudden absence. There is a sigh of effort to suggest that Bart’s bastard tendencies derive (this time) from his brief absence from a father, but, as the rest of the character beats “Stuff from the Manger,” it almost doesn’t exist. And when the climax breaks out with the birth attended by Homer de Maude, Ned and Marge’s arrivals are as simple and superficial as these things can be. (There is literally no reason given for Marge to be suddenly in the house in Flanders to witness Homer’s convenient help.)
In the promotional materials leading up to the big 700, “Manger Things” was sold with the idea that Homer would find an unknown room at the Simpsons’ house. This is at the heart of an evocative idea, metaphorically promising that there is still something hidden and wonderful, even in something that you imagine has been left with no way to surprise you. “Manger Things” barely explores the completely banal attic of the family garage, wasting hopes that I allowed myself to get up while I was allowed to dive back The Simpsons (speaking professionally). 700 episodes and 32 years is an eternity on television. Hell, it’s a too much time for anything or anyone. Congratulations are due, even if another big number of the round is as artificial a milestone as ever, so congratulations to one of my favorite shows of all time. And, as always, next week will be better.
Missed observations
- In addition to Marge being chosen as the (unintended) villain of the play here, Maude is also terribly harsh and non-Christian / non-Flanders. She’s not wrong – Homer eats the Christmas ham still wrapped and raw from the Flanders as a midnight snack – but his characterization here is just a big sour bore.
- It is also atypical for Marge to tell the children that what she needs for Homer to get her way back in good grace is: “a great thing – a great thing to prove that all the nonsense I tolerate is right.” As a rule, yes, these grandiose end-of-episode schemes are what bring the Simpsons’ wedding back from that week’s edge, but Marge isn’t the type to articulate that so explicitly. In the couple’s dynamics, Homer is the one who thinks that great gestures can fix a lifetime of abandonment and disappointment, while Marge succumbs because she recognizes that such antics are all that her loving but imperfect husband can bring together. Marge doesn’t want gestures, and the writing here betrays the character in a truly disheartening way.
- Bill Plympton returns with the opening of the show, “Homer’s Family”, his seventh joke by the guest animator. I agree with Sam Barsanti’s opinion that the cartoon fantasy hand-drawn flight is kind of cute, in its own way. The play puts Homer back at the heart of the show, his smiling face never changes, even when pieces of him explode (there’s always a element of bodily horror with Plympton) and then float around in his noggin, Marge and the children eternally linked to their Homer-centered orbits through the power of love and the sitcom tradition. The fact that Homer is irrevocably transformed through this subtraction of Cronenberg and yet chooses without complaining to be submerged in this new reality of wife, children and 32 years of stasis, is more a reflection on The Simpsons than anything really “Manger Stuff”, an affectionately poetic and inventive riff on a subject whose weekly reality has often become mechanical and mundane.
- Thanks for reviewing too much The Simpsons again, you freaks. It’s good to be back, even if it’s just for a visit.