This single shot from “Sideshow Bob Roberts” contains a more coherent story than the entirety of “Peeping Mom”.

After four weeks off, Zombie Simpsons is back.  Not much changed.  This week, Chief Wiggum accuses Bart of going on a bulldozer rampage, he then hands Bart to Marge so that the two of them can have the same idiotic conversation several times in a row.  Because that one note attempt at emotion couldn’t possibly fill twenty whole minutes of screen time, the Flanderses get a new dog who likes Homer better than Ned.

– Decent couch gag.

– We’re not off to a good start here as Marge walks into the Apple store (or whatever they’re calling it) and has a random stranger exposit things at her before taking off his shirt and waving it around.

– Marge is in the car, brakes suddenly, then asks what happened so Lou can appear out of nowhere to tell her.

– Chief Wiggum, handcuffed to Bart (who is weirdly silent) continues this week’s parade of telling us what’s happening.

– Now Lisa is using a magnifying glass to look at, in order, “monarch butterfly, earwig, rollypolly, doodle bug, beer cap, ant, beer bottle, Barney”.  She then tells us that the Flanders got a new dog.

– Oof:

Ned: Now it’s time for her Christian doggy training.
Lisa: This will be interesting.

Guess what comes next?

– This conversation between Marge and Bart is really bad.

– Sigh:

Homer: Marge, Bart, I’ve noticed neither of you has said a word all meal.  Are there feelings going unexpressed here?

He then holds up his fist and threatens . . . both of them?  It’s not clear.  It is awful writing, though.

– Marge and Bart are now in the kitchen going through the exact same conversation we just saw them have . . . again.  In a sick way, it’s almost impressive how many words they can use to describe basically nothing.

– Ooh, a popped eyeball!  When it doubt, go with what you know.

– They’re still having the same back-and-forth conversation.  Bart says something, Marge doesn’t believe him, repeat until time on the episode expires.  For extra stupidity this week, neither of them is acting like even a vaguely sentient person.  Marge hasn’t asked Bart for an explanation and Bart hasn’t offered one.  In what parent-child conversation has that ever been true?  And we’re on the third go round of this.

– Marge is now following Bart onto the school bus.

– Homer just said, “Oh, you must be Flanders’ new dog.”  We’re looking right at him!

– Marge is in class with Bart now.  Even if this did make sense it wouldn’t help when Nelson just ran screaming out of the room because he thinks she’s a zombie.

– The bullies just zinged Bart while Marge stood there.  Nice to see they still don’t care who’s present for a conversation.

– Now we’re on the playground.  Milhouse just told us what we were about to see, then we saw it.

– Now we’re at dinner and Marge told Lisa to lean back so she could keep looking at Bart.  Here’s one of the problems with this: we’ve already seen Marge not look at Bart several times.  Her focus on looking at him at all times is so stupid they can’t even keep it up, but they keep bringing it back up.

– Lisa and Homer are now having a fully expositive conversation, with both of them say how they feel at all times.

– Now Bart and Milhouse are in the woods.  This will make it even stupider the next time Marge insists on focusing her gaze at all times on Bart.

– Bart and Marge just rehashed their conversation again.  Neither one of them offering or asking for an explanation.  Ten minutes to go, I’m setting the O/U on times this happens again at 2.5.

– Oh, goody, half the family is dressed like ninjas now.

– The b-plot about Flanders dog just checked in.

– Now we’re rehashing the opening credit sequence as Marge chases Bart.  Filleriffic!

– Even by the rock bottom standards of their chase/action sequences, this is bad.

– Yet another bulldozer conversation rehash.  Two and a half minutes since the last one.

– The b-plot is winding down, so Homer’s Brain is now expositing what he’s feeling for us.

– After telling us what he was feeling several times, Bart changes his big, end-of-episode prank.  That took a lot of time.

– Bart just ran up and told us what we just saw him do.

– And, naturally, we get one final bulldozer conversation.  The under has it at 2.0 since I set it.

– Since they remain completely unwilling or unable to structure an episode to actually fill their allotted time, we’re now getting one of their bizarro post-plot series of sketches.  This one involved dog’s butt sniffing and the theme from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

Anyway, the numbers are in and they continue to be real bad.  Last night, just 3.23 million people couldn’t understand why Bart and Marge had the same idiotic conversation over and over again.  That’s #4 on the all time least watched list and keeps Season 26 on track to be the least watched season ever.

“It all began about two years ago before Maggie was even born.  Bart, you were Lisa’s age, and Lisa, you were the age Bart was several years ago.” – Homer Simpson

As it has doddered along these last few years, Zombie Simpsons has started to turn to flash forward episodes a bit more often where Bart and Lisa are adults with kids of their own.  For “The Kids Are All Fight”, they went the other way, going backwards to some indeterminate time a few years ago when Bart was four and Lisa was two.  The story, which was even more incoherent than usual, involved little Bart and Lisa escaping the house and going on a wacky adventure that consisted of a series of disconnected scenes.

– And we are off to a poor start with Moe telling us out loud that he doesn’t know how to work his cash register.

– Homer found an old roll of film in his jacket, and then Carl appeared out of nowhere to tell Homer that he can’t get film developed anymore.

– It’s okay, now they’re developing it in the bar, which leads to the whole family being at Moe’s, where the expository dialogue flows like water.

– After a brief montage showing old pictures of Bart and Lisa fighting, we get one of those adorable in-episode retcons so Marge can scold Homer for not stepping in while he took the photos.

– As an example of why this show can’t write a decent joke anymore, I present their attempt to make fun of the Planet of The Apes movies, in its bloated entirety:

Marge:  Well, it’s quite a story, a story of a special bond between a brother and a sister.
Bart:  I’d say our story’s a tragedy, like the Planet of the Apes.  The tragedy being they can never stop making them!
Marge:  Hey, come on, the first and eighth movies were pretty darn good.

It has nothing to do with what’s going on, involves Bart speaking two sentences, one of which is an explanation of the other, and then Marge finally getting to a punchline that is itself buried in the middle of another overly long sentence.  Whether or not you think that’s funny is up to you, but that mass of words never would’ve made it past the first draft of an actual Simpsons script.

– Flashback Bart and Lisa are now clubbing each other with books while Marge looks on helplessly.

– Oops, we’re back at Moe’s in the present now, where the family describes a time they went to Kwik-E-Mart.  Mmm, tell don’t show.

– Yet another example of how messy these scripts are: after once again telling us (for about the sixth time in three minutes) that Bart and Lisa were always fighting, Marge says, “That’s why we never developed that roll.”  Not only is this line completely unnecessary (the scene ends right after it) but it contradicts the fact that we just saw Homer pull this forgotten roll from his suit.  I don’t care about inter-episode continuity, and I recognize that intra-episode continuity is too much for Zombie Simpsons, but these two things didn’t even have a commercial break in between them.

– And we’re back in the past, where Bart is in the clown bed.

– They just went to slow motion and played Also Sprach Zarathustra while Homer went in to strangle Bart.  Was that supposed to be the first time that happened?  Who knows?  They had Bart smash a lamp over Homer’s head right after.  Hey, ate some time at least, right?

– Guh, this is bad:

Marge: Homer, I just the worst dream.  I lost one of the kids at the World’s Fair.
Homer:  It’s okay, which one?
Marge: Brisbane, ’88.
Homer:  Oh, that’s so horrible, baby!
Marge:  I know.  I know.

Again, you have one punchline (and not a particularly strong one, if you ask me) buried amid line after line of setup and whatever it is you call it when your joke goes on for two more lines after your weak punchline.

– Now they’re at the expository counselor’s office.

– Hey, Grandma Flanders is back, only now she’s less senile and her voice is less scratchy.  Is stuff like this and the clown bed supposed to be fan service or is it just filler?

– Now she’s babysitting and screaming.  So . . . filler.

– And speaking of filler, Marge and Homer are apparently getting dressed for brunch (and having an expository conversation about what they’re doing, Marge even informed us when she zipped up her dress).  Keep in mind they’re showing us this after the scene where Grandma Flanders looked to have been babysitting for quite some time already.  Did they put these in the episode in the wrong order, or did nobody care?

– And now Grandma Flanders is dead.  So . . . definitely filler.

– Homer and Marge stayed home to screw, so, naturally, Homer had to recap what we just saw, “My favorite kind of weekend morning, a sexy snuggle while our rotten kids are someone else’s problem.”  Homer then cackles maniacally for 10-15 seconds.

– Now Bart is riding through traffic on a big wheeler.  Jebus, I’m bored.

– Aaaaand we’re back to hopping around in the story.  Apparently, Homer and Marge did go to brunch, and now they’ve discovered that Bart and Lisa are gone.  This is chronologically confusing and sloppy even by student film standards.

– Apparently, Gil is being hired by Wiggum now.  There is yelling.

– Bart was arguing with the bullies, but then Lisa showed up even after we saw Bart drive away in front of another car.  Oof, this is a mess, none of these scenes go together at all.

– I’m zoning out now.  Bart and Lisa are at the retirement home.

– Homer just shot a pizza.  Then there was exposition.

– More random scenes are happening.  I’m done.

– And we end on a weirdly out of place Seinfeld musical beat while Hibbert talks to the Flandereses, which is itself ended by Lisa, back in the present, saying, “You’ve had three natural endings already.”  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: they know these episodes are slapdash and pathetic, they just don’t care.

Anyway, the numbers are in and they remain at historic lows.   On Sunday, just 3.30 million viewers wished they were watching “Lisa’s First Word”.  That is up ever so slightly from last week’s 3.23, but still good for #6 on the all time least watched list.  There are three episodes to go, and barring a major surge in viewership, Season 26 is going to easily eclipse Season 25’s record as the least watched ever.

“Hey, look, someone’s attractive cousin!” – Bart Simpson

This week on Zombie Simpsons, a bunch of old Air Force pilots show up to threaten Homer into spending time with his dad, or something.  Meanwhile, Milhouse’s hot cousin (voiced by Carice van Houten, a/k/a She Who Queefs Shadows on Game of Thrones) likes to use e-cigarettes.  Nothing much happens in either.

– Short couch gag and shortened opening, don’t see that too often.

– We open at Milhouse’s super elaborate birthday party.  Homer picks up the take home bag and helpfully tells us what each of the contents are as he picks them up.

– Homer is now plotting out loud against elaborate birthday parties.

– And montage.

– Ugh, and as soon as the montage is over, Marge pops up to ask, “Homer Simpson, do you know anything about these epic birthday fails?”.

– More witty, sparkling dialogue:

Homer: I’m not afraid of Big Birthday!  Ahh!  Big Birthday!

– Now there’s a guy in a suit telling us what we’ve just been watching.

– The guy in the suit is still here, and now for some reason he’s threatening Homer with never having balloon animals at his kids birthday parties.  This got super weird faster than usual.

– Now Homer has thrown a party and at air museum for Rod Flanders.  If this was coherent enough to be confusing, I’d be confused.

– Grampa’s old Air Force buddies (don’t ask) just flew in out of the sky.

– Uh, Homer just fed Grampa a carrot and then led him away by his bolo tie.

– Milhouse’s attractive cousin just showed up with an e-cigarette.  This should provide a healthy mix of hapless topicality and expository nonsense.

– The old guys just showed up at the house so Homer can fight them in his underwear.

– Remember what I said about nonsense exposition?  Here’s Milhouse:

Milhouse: Everybody’s got one gift.  Mine is portable, indoor Dutch shuffleboard.

He then puts the game on a shelf labeled “Portable Foreign Games”.  Ugh.

– Apu is now ranting about e-cigarettes.

– But there was a good sign joke in the background.  A video game called “Marbury vs. Madison”.

– The old Air Force guy is now babbling about something.

– And they’re at the movies.  We got another decent sign gag, “The Exhaustibles 3: Arthritis Will Unite Us”.

– But then there was a preview for a movie about a “dystopian future”.  Homer then started listing off dystopian future movies.  It goes on for a while.

– They did mention the Mr. Burns play in the list though.  That was nice of them.

– Oh, the Air Force guy was apparently with them the whole time.  Huh, he didn’t do anything during that whole listing thing.

– Expositing crappy jokes is just what they do:

Air Force Guy: If you love your father, you’ll make sure he doesn’t get disoriented trying to work the knobless faucet.
Grampa Simpson: I’m too cold to trigger the infra-red.
Homer: Ugh

We then see Homer waiting outside the bathroom.

– Now the old Air Force guys are holding Homer at gunpoint to make him hug Grampa.  Yeesh.

– Back in the B-plot, Bart and Milhouse’s cousin are reciting lists of things to each other.

– Marge and Luann just showed up out of nowhere. to catch Bart with the e-cigarette.

– Bart just ran into the kitchen to say that they’re sending Milhouse’s cousin back to Holland.  This show seems to enjoy out of the blue plot swerves.

– And now we’re in a flashback.

– And Lisa interrupted the flashback.  Though she wasn’t there before Grampa started it.

– We’re back in the flashback and Abe is flying a test jet despite the fact that he wasn’t a pilot.

– This flashback keeps going.  We just got a Jack Kerouac reference explained to us.

– And it ends with the revelation that some waitress was really Homer’s mom.  That doesn’t really have any bearing on the rest of this story, but they seemed to think it was a conclusion of some kind.

– Now Bart is chasing Milhouse’s cousin down at the airport.

– Bart is now expositing about, ah screw it.  There’s only a minute to go and this isn’t worth recapping.

– Milhouse has a lizard tongue.

– And then the A-plot showed up to . . . not resolve itself.  Weird.

Anyway, the numbers are in and you’ll be unsurprised to learn that they continue to be historically bad.  Last night, just 3.11 million people wished they were watching Carice van Houten on Game of Thrones instead of this.  That makes it #4 on the all time least watched list and leaves Season 26 with an overall average of 5.00 million.  Season 25’s average was 4.99 million and there are two weeks to go, so Season 26 is almost certainly going to take the title of least watched overall.

“I guess I’ve always used violence as a way of getting attention.” – Jimbo Jones
“Yes, yes!  Me too!” – Nelson Muntz

Bart gets bullied, so Marge gets the town council to pass an anti-bullying law, which allows Wiggum to lock up a bunch of random people, which puts Homer into group therapy for bullying Flanders, which causes Homer to become a hero, which causes Flanders to resent him and make him beg for forgiveness.  That terrible sentence took you much less time to read than this episode would to watch.

– Weird couch gag with all the soccer balls, but at least it was brief.

– And we are off to a bad start.  Willie explains to Skinner that he’s going back to Scotland and that he got Johnny Mathis as his replacement, which leads to a shot of Mathis cutting hedges while singing.  Expository celebrity crap started early this week.

– Hey, something not entirely terrible!  While reading the morning announcements, Skinner announces a school dance as a, “treat for the popular children and a chance for the rest of you to look within yourselves and ask what’s wrong.”  Of course, it’s barely part of a larger sentence and is immediately followed by Agnes materializing out of nowhere to yell at Skinner, but that was at least an attempt at cynical satire.

– Because nothing gets explained on this show only once, now we’re at the Simpson house with Marge pulling a flyer out of Bart’s backpack and reminding everyone that there’s a dance coming up.

– Homer is spinning his fence with the Flanders like a propeller to decide which one of them gets the part Ned just painted.

– Montage with a Soul Train opening called “School Train”.

– Okay, the fake Thomas the Tank Engine saying, “I’m going to die, children, and so will you someday” was good.  It, of course, was immediately taken too far by hauling him off to be crushed in a press, but I’ll take what I can get.

– Ugh.  The “Puberty Demon” just showed up and told us who he was after Bart asked him directly.

– Bart is now dancing with some new girl.  Didn’t get get a new girlfriend last week?

– Hey, if you’re gonna pay for a Daft Punk song, you gotta let your second montage of the episode really go on to get your money’s worth.

– Bart won a dancing trophy and is now outside getting beaten up by the bullies.

– After an anti-bullying speech at the dinner table, Marge is now at a town council meeting to, presumably, repeat what she just said.

– Yup.

– They passed a bullying law, so now Wiggum just arrested the bullies while restating what we saw in the previous scene.

– Wiggum is now explaining to Brockman what he’s going to do next, start arresting adults.

– I guess we’re on an arrest sequence, so far it’s Krusty, Apu, and Bumblebee Man before Lisa starts restating what we were just told would happen and then saw happen.

– There goes Chalmers.

– It took a while to get there, but Rod and Todd had a fantasy about Jesus being bullied before God complained that he raised a wuss.  Not bad.

– And now the jail is almost full and it’s Homer’s turn.

– This episode really needs a B-plot.

– Oof, they just cuffed Homer, but then he walked out of the house with his hands uncuffed and slipped on a slip-n-slide.  This show has an attention span of approximately four seconds.

– And Homer has been sentenced to a bully rehabilitation program being run by Albert Brooks.  Hi, Albert!

– Ugh, Brooks is mostly monologing here.  It’s not great.

– Now Agnes is crying.

– Now Chalmers is yelling.

– Now Homer’s yelling about Flanders.  This scene is interminable.

– Brooks told Homer to go “deeper” and Homer lowered his voice.  Rimshot.

– Brooks is still yelling at Homer.

– After a short PSA style ex-bully commercial, we are back in the therapy room.  Ugh.

– And now Homer is some kind of celebrity, throwing out the first pitch at a baseball game.

– Homer is still a hero, now riding in a parade float.  Meanwhile, the Flanders boys are on their second go-round of pointing out how unfair that is.  Expositastic!

– Flanders is now directly telling Homer how he feels before ending with, “Now do you feel remorse?”.  I do so enjoy it when characters tell us exactly how they’re feeling then ask other characters to do the same.

– Homer’s now on his knees begging Flanders for forgiveness.  This could take a while.

– Montage!

– And the story ends with Flanders forgiving Homer.

– But since that didn’t fill up the allotted time, we’re back to the School Train, with Otto on LSD and Ms. Frizzle from The Magic School Bus yelling at him.  They’ve really taken a shine to these post-story sketches.  By Season 35, this will just be a sketch comedy show.

Anyway, the numbers are in and they are right where you’d expect.  Last night, just 2.78 million people decided that bullying might not be so bad after all.  That’s good for #3 on the all time least watched list and has pushed Season 26’s average viewership down to 4.90 million, breaking Season 25’s record of 4.99.  There’s one more to go, and the lower it gets, the tinier the audience for Season 27 will need to be to break this record again next year.

“At last, I’m going to do what Bob never could: kill Bart Simpson!” – Cecil Terwilliger
“By throwing me off a dam?  Isn’t that a little crude for a genius like you?” – Bart Simpson
“Ooh, I suppose it is.  Enh.  If anyone asks, I’ll lie.” – Cecil Terwilliger 

The annual Halloween episode has come and gone, and this year’s was just as bland and forgettable as last year’s, and the year before that, etcetera.  Perhaps next year’s will break the cycle of boredom, but I guess we’ll have to wait to find out.

– Before we get started, let’s just pause for a moment to note that this is the twenty-sixth(!) edition of this. Jebus.

– Another weird opening, this time a bad “Grinch Stole Christmas” take off. Took the better part of two minutes, though, so at least there’s that.

– Segment one opens with Bart spinning Wendell on a merry-go-round so the kids can gamble on when he’ll puke. Wendell both barfs and doesn’t, so Bart somehow keeps the money and no one cares. This is off to an incoherent start.

– Sideshow Bob shows up to tell us what we just saw and explain a joke about the wallpaper on Milhouse’s phone.

– Bob’s dancing around with Bart’s intestines on his shoulders. Kinda weird.

– Bob is now drinking Bart’s blood with some wine. You know how you can tell these segments are slapdash? We’re two minutes in and barely anything has happened except Bart and/or Bob explaining what we’re seeing at that moment. For a brief comparison, by the two minute mark of “The Shining”, the family has arrived at the house, Bart’s met Willie and had his power explained, and Burns and Smithers are cutting off the cable TV and beer supply.

– After nothing happened for another minute, Bob is now using Bart’s corpse for putting practice.

– Bob stepped on a rake. Good work, guys.

– Bob is expositing again. Seems he misses Bart.

– Now we’ve got a montage of Bob killing Bart and reanimating him. This is gonna go on for a while.

– Homer just exposited what the “Reanimate” lever does after we saw a montage of it working.

– Anyway, that ended.  On to segment two, “Homerzilla”!  (There’s a fresh idea.)

– You know that joke where dubbed Japanese dialogue is deliberately offset from the character’s mouths (they did it at the juicer factory in Season 4)? They just did that joke, but had Comic Book Guy pre-explain it by saying, “Yes, let us show disrespect with poorly dubbed laughter.” Woof.

– Two minute mark. Still expositing the setup.

– Homerzilla is attacking now. It’s just a series of disconnected and not terribly clever sight gags. Ooh, Homerzilla has the fighter planes on yo-yo strings!

– And now we’ve swerved into a movie parody where Hollywood executives remake Homerzilla as a big, American extravaganza. Still mostly just Homer doing weak sight gags like plugging Buzz cola.

– And it ends on them narrating text we can read.

– Segment three just started with Lisa, off screen, expositing at Bart and Milhouse. Milhouse then fell down a hole, but told us about it so we wouldn’t get confused. Then Lisa and Bart talked about getting in the hole, then they got in the hole.

– Apparently we’re doing a Chronicle thing here, so the annoyances of found footage movies can come to the small, animated screen. Lisa and Milhouse have powers, Bart doesn’t and . . .

– Montage!

– Now Lisa lets us know that, “Milhouse has gone mad with power”.  K.

– Now Maggie has superpowers and the episode finally gets around to ending with another montage.

– And we end on another admission that the show sucks, with Kang and Kodos yelling that it isn’t Season 4 anymore.

Anyway, since I’ve been blissfully slacking on this, let’s take a look at the numbers for the last three episodes.  Two weeks ago, “Puffless” pulled just 3.29 million viewers, which places it at #10 on the all time least viewed list.  A week ago, “Halloween of Horror” was watched by 3.63 million viewers.  That makes it #16.

Of course, neither of those episodes had a football lead-in the way last night’s did.  “Treehouse of Horror XXVI” was seen by an appropriately spooky 6.66 million viewers, which counts as a good number for Zombie Simpsons these days.  That’s about a million people less than last year’s Halloween show, a dropoff that’s been pretty consistent this year.

“Dad, why are you singing?” – Lisa Simpson
“Tell a lie!  Tell a lie!” – Homer’s Brain
“Because I have a small roll in a Broadway musical.  It’s not much, but it’s a start.” – Homer Simpson
“Bravo.” – Homer’s Brain 

I gave up on this episode halfway through (read more and you’ll see why).  The basic idea is that Lisa wants to go to band camp, but Homer loses money in a poker game to Moe’s elderly, ex-Broadway star girlfriend.  (I am not making that up.)  Said ex-Broadway star comes over to the house and then takes Lisa on tour, wacky hijinks ensue, etcetera etcetera, and then at some point the credits roll.

The couch gag is a kind of Star Trek doodle that probably never should’ve left the upper right corner of some bored person’s script.

We open with a West Side Story “Tonight, Tonight” song opening for poker night.  Most of the lyrics are the word “tonight”.

Lisa: “to save time, I’ll start describing the favor.” There’s an extra layer of laziness and audience contempt when they pre-exposit the exposition.

Lenny just fell out a window.

Poker montage!

Now they’re doing an Inside Out thing in Homer’s head.  Helpfully, it restates what’s going on (again).

And Homer loses at poker.  Barney is now driving a dart board like a steering wheel.  Feh.

Late at night, Bart pokes his head into Lisa’s room to re-exposit the plot.  Thanks, Bart!  I was confused as to whether or not Homer losing at poker would impact Lisa going to band camp.

The old Broadway lady is at dinner with the family now.  They’re recounting stories.  Tell, don’t show!

Here’s a typically boring and haplessly constructed series of events:

1. Homer tries to flatter the old lady by saying “tell me you’re writing a book”.  Then . . .
2. Bart starts choking himself with his necktie, which causes the camera to pan away from her and over to him.  Then . . .
3. Homer grabs Bart and says, “sit down, boy, we’re trying to show this dame that we’re deserving of her pity”.  That neatly restates the thing we’d just had explained to us twice.  He continues:
4. Homer: “Where’s that crutch I gave you?”
   Bart: “There’s nothing wrong with my leg.”
   Homer: “There will be!”
5. Bart then bashes Homer’s leg with a crutch, so . . .
6. Homer screams in pain, then . . .
7. He pretends to hobble around on the crutch when the old lady, who’s been sitting there the whole time, is put back into frame.  Homer then restates the plot once again.  Pre-explained jokes, repeated exposition, no sense of object (or character) permanence; Lordy, this show is bad.

Lisa is now playing saxophone for the old lady, then pulls out “Laney’s” albums and reads the covers to us while she shows them.  This form of storytelling, reading out loud while showing us the accompanying picture, is usually reserved for librarians reading to kindergartners.  It is also sadly typical of Zombie Simpsons.

Marge is arguing with the old lady, then Grampa chimed in before saying, “I’ve been here, I’ve just been quiet”.  Things like this are why I’m convinced the writing staff knows how shitty these scripts are and is long (LONG) past the point of caring.

You know what?  Fuck it.  Let’s skip forward three minutes and see what’s happening . . . the screen is panning over a bunch of empty theater seats and balconies before Milhouse appears from nowhere to tell us he got a ticket and then Lisa describes what we just saw.

Let’s skip ahead another three minutes . . . the old lady is singing (Lisa’s part of the band).  Moe, in the audience, then tells us what we just saw, “Cheering for someone getting a word right.  That is a low bar.”  Indeed.  Three more minutes, please . . .

Moe and the old lady finish the episode in a “visiting New York City” montage.  But there’s one of those post-credit sketches where Homer is arguing with an Amish guy who’s related to Flanders.  I watched 51% of this carcass, that should be enough.

So, the ratings for the last two episodes are in and very little has changed.  The one from two weeks ago, “Friend With Benefit”, did not have the benefit of an NFL lead-in and was endured by only 3.5 million viewers.  (Fun fact: the headline of that article includes the words “family”, “guy”, “series”, and “low”.)  This one did have an NFL lead-in and managed 5.64 million viewers, almost exactly a million less than the previous episode that had football protecting it from apathy.  Overall, ratings: still atrocious.

“Well, Bart, uh, did you make sure to return all the guns?” – Homer Simpson
“Sir, yes, sir!  Luckily I am now trained in six additional forms of unarmed combat, sir!” – Bart Simpson
“Well, he’s got more confidence.” – Marge Simpson
“Uh, yeah, I’ve always said the boy could use more confidence.” – Homer Simpson

Paths of Glory is a terribly underrated Kubrick movie staring Kirk Douglas as a French colonel in World War I.  This episode, which shares its title for some unaccountable reason, should in no way be held against that fine film.  In one of the plots, Lisa goes looking for a long lost invention by a forgotten female inventor.  In another one, Marge and Homer start thinking Bart is a sociopath so he gets recruited to join the Air Force, or something.  I tuned out by then for reasons that will become clear should you be bored enough to read the rest of this.

– The “couch” gag didn’t involve a couch, but at least it was short.

– We’re off to a bad start here as each kid at a kind of science go-kart race spends time explaining what kind of car we’re seeing as we see it.

– And Lisa loses the race because Duffman swooped in driving the Duff blimp, then Martin, Uter, and Database (who just appeared from nowhere and wasn’t even racing) start teasing her for being a girl for some reason. Okay.

– Huh, there’s Kearney and Dolph ragging on liberal arts colleges because, you know, that’s the kind of thing they would do, know or care about.

– Now the Old Jewish Guy appeared for no reason to exposit this:

OJG: “Don’t you worry kid, they also laughed at Amelia Vanderbuckle.”
Lisa: “Amelia Vanderbuckle, who’s she?”

Guess what happens next? Go on, guess.

– Some guy just got his head cut off. Carry on.

– Lisa is reading a fake Wikipedia article out loud. I have nothing to add to that, but it’s been going on for a full minute.

– Lisa is now explaining that “if we can find those inventions, we can prove that Amelia was scientifically significant”. So, so much exposition.

– Bart and Lisa are now wandering around an abandoned asylum, where Jimbo and Shauna are making out and expositing how they feel.

– Lisa is reading names that are also printed on the screen. Fillertastic!

You heard her say them!  Now watch them on screen!

– Lisa found a wax cylinder, then she found a player for it, now the exposition is playing from it. Hooray.  Oh, then it caught fire and now she’s using it as a torch.  Weird.

– Holy shit, they’re doing it again. Lisa is reading labels that are also on screen.

– Bart found a maniac’s diary, then declared, “Look at me, I’m enjoying reading”. They do know characters are allowed to display their feelings instead of say them out loud, right? I would think they would know that, but I’ve been wrong before.

– Look at this collection of kids:

File this as yet another example of how characterless they’ve made all their characters. Ralph and Nelson are just there because, well, shutup that’s why.

– Chief Wiggum just pulled up in a bowtie to tell us, “Ralphie, come on, we got daddy-son tap class. Tap class!” Did repeating “tap class” get a laugh at the read through? If so, has anyone checked to see if there’s a gas leak?

– You’ll never believe it, but Wiggum goes on to exposit about tap class before shouting “tap class” two more times.

– Now Wiggum is talking to Marge because he has pages from the diary. Wiggum thinks Bart wrote them because keep shutting up, that’s why.

– Marge is now declaring how she feels out loud.

– Homer got home, so Marge is explaining what we just saw.

– Now Lisa is talking to Milhouse. Is their conversation reductive and repetitive? You know it!

Milhouse: “Wow, this is a surprise, I’m usually sweating when we talk, but not this time.”
Lisa: “It’s amazing how you can charm and disgust me at the same time.”

– Now Milhouse is helping Lisa track down the missing invention and . . . nope, can’t care anymore.

– Marge just told us she printed out a “Sociopath Test” for Bart as we saw her do it, Homer then declared that they can’t just give that to him. Marge then says they need him to think the test is for something else. This episode is just people talking to each other about what they’re going to do.

– Bart is now reading out loud. And now he’s realized they’re giving him the “sociopath test”. Then he tells us what he’s going to do, “Fine, I’ll pretend to be the biggest sociopath in the world.”

– Homer and Marge are expositing at the kitchen table, and I’m done. Let’s fast forward!

– One minute later (and I think missed a montage) there’s this:

Avert your eyes, children, he may have taken on another form!

– One minute more and Homer and Marge are in the treehouse still talking about what they’re going to do. More fast forwarding!

– Bart is in a bouncy castle driving down the highway. One more minute, please.

– Bart is in a mental institute where he’s apparently getting inducted into the Air Force or something.

– One minute after that, Homer and Marge are back at the kitchen table talking about Bart again. This is about the fifth scene like this, and that’s just in the parts I’ve bothered to watch.

– One minute later and Lisa must’ve found whatever it was she was looking for in the other plot. She is, naturally, explaining what we’re looking at.

– One minute more and Bart’s still in the military. He’s wearing his regular clothes, but whatevs.

– One minute after that and the general is speaking, “Son, the simulators we told you weren’t simulators, were simulators.” This is apparently a shocking revelation. Moving on.

– And things end with Marge saying, “What a day! What a day!” while they all hug.  Huh.

– Nevermind, Lisa is at a museum with the thing she discovered.

– During the credits, Homer is looking at loom porn. Don’t worry, that didn’t make any more sense in the episode than it does in text here.

So, that was a mess.  The ratings are also a bit of a mess this week because of both a football overrun and the President (who is a Demeecrat, according to Grampa) going on TV last night. Right now, “Presidential address/The Simpsons” is listed as having 8.20 million viewers, which is huge for Zombie Simpsons, but will probably change significantly once they get things sorted out.

“Now, come on, you’re going to learn how to shave.” – Homer Simpson

I completely didn’t realize there was a new episode last week.  Ignorance is truly bliss.  This week, Homer goes to the store to buy milk, and ends up getting a new kind that pushes both of his kids into early onset puberty, which basically means zits for Lisa and a mustache for Bart.  Meanwhile, there’s a new, hot teacher at the school and Bart and Skinner compete with each other for her attention.  If it was coherent in the least it’d be weird, instead it’s just the usual Zombie Simpsons mess.

– La-Z Rider couch gag was kinda fun, and sucked a minute and a half out of the episode. Good for it.

– We open on thirty seconds of chaos in the classroom while Willie reads poetry. For the record, that’s 10% of the show gone and not a single word written by the staff. This might be the best episode of the season.

– Nevermind. Willie just pre-explained a vaping joke.

– The new teacher is a cool army vet. Bart’s inner monologue is explaining to us how he’s feeling about this.

– Homer is driving now and singing that he has a legal BAC. Then he passes Wiggum, who says, “I like it when the drivers sing their blood alcohol level”. It’s not enough for them to (repeatedly) tell us what we’re seeing, now they’re telling us they like doing it.

– Case in point: Homer just said, “Woo-hoo, I’m running a basic errand.”

– Apu and Homer are discussing fancy milk. Apu then tells us we’re about to watch a video. Guess what happens next? Go on. Guess.

– The video took forty seconds.

– Homer, Bart and Marge are in the kitchen acting surprised that Bart’s hair is combed. Homer then narrates and explains a sign gag before asking Bart to restate the plot about his cool new teacher.

– Still in the kitchen. Still restating the teacher plot.

– Bart’s hanging out with the new teacher by telling us about things we didn’t see. Novel.

– Montage!

– Skinner just appeared out of nowhere, and we got everything explained out loud again by Skinner’s brain, Bart’s brain, and then the new teacher’s brain.

– Lisa and Bart are both starting puberty apparently, so their natural, child like reaction is to run into their parents room and exposit about it.

– Marge says, “I just read about it in Thing magazine.” Then she holds up the magazine.

– Homer is teaching Bart to shave. Huh. Never seen that before.

– It’s apparently recess, and Skinner is expositing as a way of hitting on the new teacher.

– Lisa is wearing makeup now to cover up her new acne. This leads to more inner monologue exposition, which is apparently this week’s theme: “Oh, my God. I’m popular. Hope this doesn’t go to my head. It went right to my head!”

– Bart’s getting tutored by the new teacher, so Skinner walks in from nowhere to continue their pointless romantic rivalry.

– The milk puberty plot is rolling along in the kitchen again. Much explaining.

– Oof. So Homer calls the milk hotline, which Snake picks up in jail. Snake then carves the address into some guy’s head. It sucks when they repeat themselves. It sucks more when they repeat Family Guy.

– Having caught Skinner making out with the new teacher in the hallways (you know, cause it’s a school), Bart just walks into Skinner’s office. Skinner then explains how he’s dating the teacher. Also, Bart’s mustache looks weird.

It looks like a barnacle.  

– Aaaand now we’re back in the hall where Skinner is talking to the new teacher, and Bart signs for a delivery of “Pets” after expositing that he needs a way to derail Skinner’s happiness.

– I may be having an embolism, but I actually think this episode is getting worse. Skinner and the new teacher are making out in the teacher’s lounge. Then Skinner opens a box of chocolates that contains a bunch of animals who promptly disappear. Skinner then explains that they’ve been pranked, which causes Willy to materialize out of no where to plot revenge.

– Lisa is now at a party for popular kids and think expositing again. Then she gets on a table and starts explaining things, causing a voice from off screen to yell, “Is there a point to this?”. Good on you, voice from off screen.

– Lisa’s skin, it turns out, is fine because, as she helpfully explained to us, “the bad milk wore off”.

– Ralph pops out of nowhere and Lisa acts like she’s never met him.

– Bart is in his room still plotting revenge. Lisa then appears to restate the plot again, just in case we in the audience didn’t remember the last five times they explained it.

– Skinner and the teacher are at a skating rink. Bart is also there because reasons.

– Skinner’s mother then appears to break up his relationship, then Bart and Milhouse and Skinner go hang out and roast marshmallows.  Didn’t see that coming.

– And we end on Bart and Lisa fighting in the kitchen before Maggie picks them both up and Homer explains that she can do that because she’s still drinking the milk. That’s right, they actually ended the episode with Homer expositing a joke. Points for consistency, I guess.

The NFL ran long yesterday, so primetime didn’t even start until 8:20 on FOX and the numbers are currently a mess, but the first pass has them at 6.44 million.  The final ones will be higher than normal because they always are after playoff football, but that’s pretty week considering.  Last week, even with an NFL lead-in, Zombie Simpsons was watched by just 4.42 million people.

“I want to go on the yard work simulator!” – Bart Simpson

The official synopsis for this week’s episode of Zombie Simpsons:

Mr. Burns’ search for a clan to play his virtual-reality family leads him to hire the Simpsons, except for Homer, since Burns intends to play the father. With nothing to do, Homer befriends the new next-door neighbor, a woman who eats, drinks, thinks and acts like him.

A more honest synopsis:

Burns goes to a therapist, who then dies for no apparent reason. At the funeral, which the Simpsons attend because reasons, Burns realizes no one loves him. Then he runs over Frink, who was using a virtual reality headset. Burns then has Smithers use Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie as a virtual reality family so that he can pretend someone loves him, which for some reason means all four of them have to live at Burns Manor seemingly forever. Meanwhile, Homer meets a new female neighbor of his and becomes weird friends with her. When Marge gets back from Burns Manor, she freaks out about this in one of the dumbest and angriest Zombie Simpsons scenes in a while. Then it ends.

The most unintentionally entertaining part of the episode was the couch gag. They’ve gotten so used to explaining jokes and filling their scripts with unnecessary exposition that they did it before the episode even began. First, we see the family on the couch with a smart phone in front of them. Each member gets clicked and turned into an icon:

As couch gags go, at least it’s slightly novel. But when it gets to Homer, instead of having the screen flash “memory full” or some other wordless joke like the couch gags have long been, they had Homer explain out loud what was happening:

Homer: I’m too fat!

The phone then gets swapped for a larger tablet and he declares himself, “Still too fat!”. It’s completely unnecessary, we can plainly see that he’s too big to fit, but they felt the need to explain it anyway. I’m not laughing with you, Zombie Simpsons, but for once, I am laughing.

Anyway, the ratings are in, for both this week and last week’s premier. For the season premier – with no football lead-in – Zombie Simpsons managed to attract just 3.36 million viewers. That’s a horrifically bad number, but thanks to the nearly as bad Season 27 premier, isn’t actually a record. Last year’s premier only got 3.26 million viewers. By way of comparison, the previous low was Season 25’s 6.29 million.

On Sunday, Zombie Simpsons managed to display some self awareness with their chalkboard gag:

Unfortunately, they did, in fact, lose half of their NFL lead-in. FOX’s postgame show was watched by 12.49 million Americans, with Zombie Simpsons retaining only 6.00 million. Heh.

“Hey, ma, I’m on TV!” – Drunk #1
“Hey, where’s that weather chick?” – Drunk #2
“Ooh, this is some wicked party!” – Drunk #3
“Hey, have you seen Sully?” – Drunk #4

Zombie Simpsons has settled into its rut well enough that they have a “travel” episode pretty much every season. This year, they went to Boston, though in a break from tradition they also had the family move there for six minutes of screen time. Other than that weirdness, it was a very typical travel episode: a few real things and people got renamed, everything was pretty nice, and Homer screamed around the locals a lot.

In what I choose to take as a tacit admission of their massive overuse of exposition, right at the beginning they have Homer say, “Do you have to describe everything?” as Marge is placing pot pies on the dinner table one by one. Unfortunately, that didn’t stop them from spending the rest of the episode telling us what we’re seeing. This includes when Homer is chasing the Flanders kids around like a bull, several reminders that they’re in Boston on a “hate-cation”, and a truly hacktacular scene where Lisa declares, “They’ve got every recognized species of nerd!” and then process to list them as she walks in front of each one. There was also a montage near the end where they drew lots of real Boston places and had Bart tell us what they were.

Eventually, Homer tears a baseball cap in half and the family moves back to Springfield. Really, that’s what happens. If you haven’t seen it, I don’t recommend it.

Anyway, the ratings are in and they are the typical catastrophe we’ve come to expect from non-NFL lead-in episodes. Last night’s ode to Boston was witnessed by a mere 3.39 million viewers. It took them a long time to finally fall through the 4 million viewer mark, now they do so routinely.

“No! No, let me explain! Every Friday evening after work Mr. Burns undergoes a series of medical treatments designed to cheat death for another week.” – Mr. Smithers 

I’ve been staying with friends in Arlington, VA this week and doing the D.C. tourist thing in Our Nation’s Capital while a constant loop of “Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington” plays inside my head (with a side order of “Amendment to Be“). That left watching another lifeless Zombie Simpsons Halloween special pretty low on my priority list. But watch it I did, and it was, well, lifeless.

At the risk of repeating myself, the attention span of Zombie Simpsons has grown so short that they can’t even write coherent 6-7 minute segments. Like several previous Halloween episodes, this one was atomized even further, starting with an opening sketch with fan service ghosts, then going into a long couch gag that was a parody of Planet of the Apes called “Planet of the Couches” (<- creative!). After that they did their three main segments before ending with a 600th episode montage that made me pine for the days when they refused to celebrate meaningless milestones.

The first segment was a Hunger Games/Mad Max 4 mashup where Burns somehow had taken all the water. Here’s a typically brainless scene:

Lisa: Oh, God, me and my big mouth.
Marge: Ooh, I just donated the winter clothes.
Ralph: I’m a god in this reality.
Lisa: Sure, why not?

After that was an exposition heavy segment where Lisa’s imaginary best friend kills a bunch of people. Remember that line from “Hell Toupee” where Lisa exclaims, “Of course, the transplant! Somehow Snake’s hair must be controlling…” and then Marge cuts her off because everyone’s already figured that out? This segment was an extended exercise in ignoring that. Observe:

Imaginary Best Friend: Hey, Lisa, let’s gossip about boys. Isn’t Milhouse so cute? Oh, of course, he suffocated.
Lisa: My Mom was so right when she said I didn’t need you anymore.
Imaginary Best Friend: Oh, I see, so nosy old Marge was the reason you moved on from me.
Lisa: Oh, no, she’ll kill Mom! What do I do?

Finally there was a Kingsman thing where Moe is secretly running a spy agency out of the bar. Homer is some kind of villain, a lot of it is a weird action sequence that kills a lot of time by killing a lot of people, and then it ends for no apparent reason. As usual, about half the dialogue is them explaining what we’re seeing, but I think I’ve quoted this thing enough.

Anyway, the ratings are long since in and they remain bad even when they’re good. On Sunday, Zombie Simpsons managed to pull 7.44 million viewers, by far their highest since last January when they had playoff football as a lead-in. Unfortunately, since the post-game show had 15.38 million viewers, they once again managed to lose more than 50% of their NFL lead-in.

“Oh, you’re gonna love it in Cuba, Marge. There’s shredded pork everywhere.” – Homer Simpson

In a world where up has become down and black has become white, I suppose there’s some comfort to be taken in the fact that Zombie Simpsons remains as incoherent and forgettable as ever. In this season’s second travel episode, the family goes to Cuba to get Grampa medical care, or something. That story line gets dropped very quickly in favor of a series of disconnected Cuban references and something about the CIA. This episode also features an unusual amount of “look a character just appeared out of nowhere” scenes.

Some lowlights:

• We open with a Shark Tank parody that has voiceover that explains what it is. Later, they will explain this again.
• After an expository scene with a retirement home nurse, a van drops Grampa off in skid row. Wiggum just happens to be there to tell no one in particular that this is also where he drops off mentally ill people. There are a lot of darkly funny jokes to be made about how many homeless people in America are also mentally ill. Zombie Simpsons decides to explain it with no actual joke. This show can be painful to watch.
• Now we’re in a VA hospital waiting room where there’s a long wait time and that wait time is explained over and over again. Then a random guy walks up from nowhere to explain that Grampa should go to Cuba for cheap medical care.
• Smash cut to a cruise ship where Fred and Ricky from I Love Lucy walk up from nowhere to banter for a bit. Yeesh, this episode is lazy.
• Grampa sees a Cuban doctor. You’ll be unsurprised to hear that nothing else happens.
• Montage of Grampa driving in an old car with helpful exposition from a Cuban guy who walked up from nowhere for no reason. I should be counting these, but I’m not going back and you can’t make me.
• The family is having dinner, while Homer exposits where they are. Then they’re in a hotel. Then Grampa’s in a bar. These are just scenes next to each other.
• “Wheels McGrath, I knew you in the Air Force!”, says Grampa as another random person walks in from offscreen.
• Grampa’s old friend wants to start a nightclub in an old airliner. Which he got to after “hacking” through the jungle because he likes hacking. Repeating words is funny. Repeating words is funny. Repeating words is funny.
• Second montage.
• There’s a Ticketmaster joke that gets explained twice.
• Now the airliner is flying away because it was all a CIA plot, or something. The episode still has two minutes to go, so there’s a random golf scene tacked on and a rehash of the Shark Tank thing from the beginning.

There are a couple of okay sign gags in all that (Marge is reading a book called “Cuban Escapes by Elian Gonzalez”, for example), but it’s hard to notice amidst the swerving plot, layers of exposition, and half-dozen or so characters who randomly appear from the ether. In other words, it’s typical Zombie Simpsons.

Anyway, the numbers are in and Zombie Simpsons once again got a nice bump from football, and once again failed to hold even half that audience. The post-game show drew 21.28 million viewers. Zombie Simpsons managed just 7.13 million.

Obviously numbers like this are enough for FOX to pick up two more years worth of episodes, but while this qualifies as a good (even great) number these days, it’d be a terribly low one even just five or six years ago. That’s the sorry state of network TV: crowing about audience numbers that would’ve been a disaster at the beginning of the decade.

“Let’s just agree that the commercialization of Christmas is at best a mixed blessing.” – Lisa Simpson
“Amen.” – Gary Coleman

Annual or near annual Christmas episodes were never a hallmark of The Simpsons. The premier episode was a Christmas special, but that was the last time the show did a Christmas episode until Season 7’s “Marge Be Not Proud”. That five season gap has never been repeated. The show went back to the tinsel well in Seasons 9, 11, 12, 13, 15, 17, 18, 22, 23, 25, 26, and now again in Season 28. (And I might have missed one because a lot of those seasons blur together.)

This year’s entry in that sad parade was several pieces of fractured nonsense mashed together into an episode. There’s a bit about Krusty connecting with his estranged daughter, who’s apparently a devout Christian. There’s also a bit about Reverend Lovejoy needing more converts, which leads him to lean on Krusty, which leads to Krusty making his show dull and then almost drowning in a frozen river. There’s also a C plot about Maggie being afraid of an Elf on the Shelf type thing called the Gnome in Your Home. It involves lots of exposition and an extended dream sequence in which nothing happens except a completely pointless cameo by Wayne Gretzky.

As per usual, Zombie Simpsons seems blissfully unaware of its own story even as it unfolds. Early in the episode we see Lovejoy get pressured from his superiors to get more converts. It’s dumb (and more and higher ranking reverends keep walking into the scene for no reason), but whatever, it’s a decent enough start for a plot. Lovejoy eventually bumbles into Krusty while both are at Moe’s, which is odd but I guess still sorta makes sense. We next see Krusty at church singing an off lyric hymn on stage while his daughter is for some reason sitting with the Simpsons, which doesn’t make sense on multiple levels, but is at least still moving the story forward.

From there things get utterly incoherent as one of Lovejoy’s bosses shows up again to say that Krusty needs to be baptized right away for no particular reason. Lovejoy states Krusty’s reasons for wanting to wait, which are then immediately dropped so Krusty can get baptized in a frozen river. Krusty then falls into the river, has a near death experience, and comes out apparently still a Christian, until – with not even a single line of dialogue to explain it – he sits next to a Jewish ambulance and is immediately Jewish again.

All this makes so little sense that in an unrelated sequence after the story ends, they show regular God next to a Jewish version of regular God (no, it doesn’t make any sense) arguing over which one of them gets credit for Krusty. I understand that the show has a kind of “rubberband” reality where things can get stretched, but it shouldn’t be too much to ask that the rubberband not get stretched, released, and then broken several times during the same story, sometimes even during the same scene. Case in point: Krusty’s near death experience under the ice is treated as serious even though Jasper catches him on an ice fishing line and Reverend Lovejoy pulls him out of the water, after which Krusty is fine.

Anyway, the numbers are in and they continue to be low and meaningless. On Sunday, just 5.60 million viewers wondered how many Christmas episodes Zombie Simpsons has done by now. That’s about where the ratings were last December, which is both bad in terms of overall viewers and irrelevent since the show will be with us for at least two more seasons anyway. That should result in at least one more bland and immemorable Christmas episode.

“They can’t take our house! My pot-bellied pig is in there! Oh, Mr. Porky, no!” – Homer Simpson

It has long been true that just about the only thing anyone remembers from the bloated mess that was the movie (itself now almost ten years old) is Spider-Pig. In this episode, Spider-Pig comes back as a kind of Mojo-the-Helper-Monkey replacement. Wacky hijinks ensue. In the B-plot, Marge becomes obsessed with de-cluttering her house, which leads Lisa to get rid of her saxophone until it turns out Marge had it all along. No, it didn’t make any sense in the episode either.

Here are some typically brainless scenes:

• The couch gag has dialogue again. This seems to be happening a lot more lately. I guess they’re finally giving up on maintaing them as a short, silent pre-show joke. Can’t say I blame them. Every part of this show is beyond the point of exhaustion.
• There’s a book called “The Japanese Warrior Monks’ Guide to Tidying Up”, which would be okay as a throwaway gag, but turns into an entire storyline, complete with Marge reading the whole title aloud after we’ve already seen it three or four times. Delayed exposition, huh.
• The writing on this show has gotten so sitcom-y over the years that I don’t even notice it most of the time, but this was particularly bad: “Think of the kids! The kids working in overseas factories to make this crap!” Setup, beat, punchline.
• Characters who weren’t in the room suddenly appearing in the room: Milhouse & Grampa so far, I’m sure there will be more.
• Homer makes a “reuse this calendar” joke. Sure it’s not 1985 right now, but who knows what Season 30 will bring?
• So, uh, Spider-Pig is back for some reason.
• 
  Homer just attempted to give Spider-Pig away in a darkened parking lot at night, which lead to a lot of shallow “creepy van” jokes that ended with a guy in a gimp costume in the back of one. Do things like this really get laughs at table reads? And, if so, has anyone checked for a gas leak in that room?
• There’s a Dr. Nick scene. About half of it is him counting to five in Spanish.
• In one of their more bizarre scene set ups, Marge and Homer have a confrontation about Homer keeping Spider-Pig while they’re standing in the front door. How did they get there? Why are they there? No idea. The scenes on either side have nothing to do with it. I know they don’t care about things like this, but nobody actually seems to live in this universe anymore, they’re just cutouts standing in front of backdrops waiting for the next skit to start.
• Homer and Lisa are now duel expositing about their feelings at the dinner table. Really badly:
  Homer: Oh, that is really, really sad.
  Lisa: Wow you understand how I feel?
  Homer: Yes, because I feel about my pig the way you used to feel about your honk-a-ma-flute.
• “Homer, those kids hands are covered in barbecue sauce”, um, okay.
• “Dad, no, that’s a snake from the petting zoo!” – The context for this line is that Homer is going to spray the hounds with a hose. There is no petting zoo. This show makes more sense when you pretend there’s an invisible box marked “Props” that follows everyone around.
• 
  So . . . Mr. Burns’ hounds attacked Spider Pig, with lots of growling and tearing. Then they get pulled off and Spider-Pig is . . . fine. Looks a little sad, but fine. Homer then freaks out because he needs to or something. The whole scene is awkward, because they want it to simultaneously be a vicious dog attack, but they also don’t want to show any blood or gore because this is still supposed to be a comedy.
• Now there’s a pig doctor treating Spider-Pig, and now Mr. Burns is going to put him into pig rehab because he just exposited about his insurance for some reason.
• Homer is having a dream about the Mayo Clinic being doctors who are mayonnaise jars. Worse, the mayo jars spend the whole dream expositing what they’re doing.
• Pig vacation montage. There’s three words I wasn’t expecting to type when I started this episode.
• Let’s end on some more clunky exposition: “Now what’s wrong?”, “My joy’s returned  but my passion’s gone.”
• They must’ve really liked that mayo doctor things, because they’re killing the last twenty seconds of contract mandated runtime with an ER parody. Timely.

Anyway, the ratings are in and the annual Zombie Simpsons NFL Playoff lead-in has once again produced their best number of the year. On Sunday, 8.19 million people left their televisions on after the Giants-Packers game. To my surprise, FOX is also getting a late playoff game this Sunday, so that’ll help Zombie Simpsons next week as well.

“What can I say except thanks for the predictable champagne, pizza that’s hardly ‘numero uno’, and ice cream cake which reminds us why make thirty-one flavors when you can’t get vanilla right?” – Retiring Food Critic 

Every once and a while, Zombie Simpsons puts its nose to the grindstone and actually tries to make an interesting episode. The Lego episode wasn’t very good, but it was at least visually interesting and ambitious. That “Kang and Kodos are real” episode was maybe gonna be the second movie and actually had some ambition to it. “The Great Phatsby” was certainly promoted like it was going to be something out of the ordinary, a one-hour episode! They put on the full publicity press, getting written up for their [Drudge Siren]FIRST HOUR LONG EPISODE[/Drudge Siren] in publications as diverse as USA Today and Billboard.

Problem is: they didn’t deliver. This is a very normal episode of Zombie Simpsons that got ballooned to twice its runtime. Consider this, from that Billboard link:

Beanz, whose past collaborators include Britney Spears and Timbaland, created about 18 songs for this episode. Executive producer Matt Selman has said that’s more than any other guest composer he’s ever worked with. Part of that prodigious output included fun collaborations with Snoop, Common and RZA.

I watched all forty-two bloated minutes of this thing, and even if you stretch the definition of the word “song” until it tears apart you aren’t going to get anywhere near eighteen of them. By my count, there were three: one during the Burns spending montage, one to exposit how the evil rap mogul had tricked Burns, and part of one near the end that was gonna be the Burns revenge diss track. I guess if you want to count the instrumental remake of the theme song over the end credits that’d get you to four, but that’s still a lot less than eighteen. For comparison sake, in the regular twenty-two minute Shary Bobbins episode, there were five full songs, six if you count the end credits theme song.

So if there were only a few songs, what the hell was in all that screen time? The same garbage that’s in most Zombie Simpsons episodes: montages, nonsensical plots and subplots, and exposition galore. They had two separate B-plots, one for the first half of the episode (Lisa gets a rich boyfriend, then betrays him to comb a pony) and one for the second half (Marge opens a knicknack shop, which is hilarious to everyone who’s ever spent a lot of time in the Hamptons – relatable comedy!). If you’re wondering how well that worked, go back and watch those straight-to-DVD Futurama “movies” that did the same thing. It’s just as bad.

Perhaps my favorite moment, and further evidence that they put as little effort into actually writing/editing this as they do for their regular dreck, came when Homer meets a goose. First, we see the goose swallow a shrimp whole:

That is immediately followed by Homer saying, “He eats the way I do! Without swallowing.” Chewing. The word they were looking for is “chewing”. So not only is this a repeat of a joke from “Homer’s Enemy”, they got first-grade vocabulary wrong.

The rest of the episode is just as dumb. Near the middle, after Burns has lost all his money, Homer begins expositing that Burns is sad. Then Burns starts to cry and Homer, in voiceover, exposits that as well. Then Burns tears his shirt open. Helpfully, Homer exposits that too. It goes on for forty(40!) seconds. The good news is that I don’t need to screencap it because Homer explained everything:

Homer (VO): The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they’re watching their whole world fall apart and all they can do is stare blankly. Oh, no, wait, he’s crying now. That’s worse. Now he’s really sobbing heavy. Oh, now he’s gone to his knees and he ripped his shirt open. All of his buttons fell off of his shirt. Now he’s kicking his porch. Oh, he hurt his foot and he’s hopping around! He tripped over a dog. That’s way worse. Montgomery Burns had hit rock bottom.

That’s how you eat up two episodes worth of screen time. It also places a somewhat different character on this quote from Matt Selman:

For all the hype about “The Great Phatsby” being The Simpsons’ first-ever hour-long episode, and the understandable skepticism about its description as “a rap-flavored parody of The Great Gatsby,” the episode’s origins are decidedly more modest. “This was just going to be a regular episode, but the table read went so well, in a fit of passion and excitement and ambition and excess, we decided to supersize it,” is how Simpsons executive producer Matt Selman puts it, and that makes sense when looking at the final product.

Did that table read include such gems as these:

Carl: If there’s no more money, we’ll take our personalized bowling balls, fold up bicycles, and go. [Guess what happens then! Go on, guess!]

Bart: What kind of crazy flavors are these? Quince jelly and pepper? Market greens? Bone broth brittle? I don’t know what this place hates more, kids or ice cream. [All of those flavors, by the way, were on a sign behind him.]

Old Guy: Well, before long another aimless soul will open another adorable store here. And when they do, old Sam the Sign Hanger will be ready with his level and his ladder. Oh, why here comes one now. [At that, two people show up. But you knew that already.]

On the plus side, there were a few good sign gags that didn’t get read out as dialogue. At one point while Burns is in his family crypt (don’t ask), there’s one that reads “Ebenezer Burns: The Ghosts Taught Me Nothing”. Heh. The opening line also wasn’t bad:

Homer (VO): In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice. He said the laziest way to tell a story is through voiceover narration.

That was supposed to be self-irony. Turned out to be the regular kind.

Anyway, the ratings are in and getting a huge lead-in from football helps as always. That sorry excuse for a hip-hop Gatsby parody was seen by 14.08 million viewers. That number will probably get revised downward somewhat (there was another football game on opposite the show), but it’ll still be there biggest number in a while.

“And I’ll be able to tackle all the hard hitting children’s news the grown-up controlled media won’t touch. Plus I get to be on TV!” – Lisa Simpson

Zombie Simpsons long ago stopped astonishing me with how bad it can be, but every once and a while I can’t help but marvel at just how far the writing has devolved. These episodes mostly adhere to the loosest of structures: an A-plot, a supplemental B-plot, both wrapping up near the end. But the incredibly low bar they have for what counts as a story (or as a resolution) is remarkable when you take a second to think about it.

Consider this episode’s B-plot: Lisa is apparently the chief reporter for a school radio station. How do we know that? Well, we see her – all by herself but with a hat and a microphone – standing outside of a fake awards show. From there we see a staff meeting, one report from detention, and then Skinner abruptly ends the radio news show, causing Lisa to be apparently heartbroken. That’s it.

It’s four scenes, and I doubt it’s even three full minutes of screen time, even if you count generously. It gets – ahem – resolved at the end when Homer is leading the police on a chase and Lisa gets a megaphone from Chief Wiggum so she can explain what her dad is doing.

This, in turn, is seen by some fat guys in a restaurant and causes them to come to Homer’s aid. Even if we ignore all the ways that doesn’t make sense, it still doesn’t do anything to resolve Lisa’s being sad about her radio station getting cancelled. What’s the thinking? (Was there any thinking?)

I’m pretty good at scrounging these episodes for even the most tendentious and transparent of links between scenes, but I got nothing here. The only line Lisa has after this is to tell Homer, “I’m sorry, Dad. It’s over” before he rides the caboose down a hill and off a bridge.

The A-plot is just as incoherent. Patty and Selma have to move in with the Simpsons, though since they never come back after the scene where we see them move in it hardly seems to matter. Homer eats at a chili dog place from his childhood, but the owner doesn’t remember him until he does. Credits. Yeesh.

– I don’t think I’ve mentioned this in a long time, but there really is no better shorthand for the difference between The Simpsons and Zombie Simpsons than the change in what happens to Homer between the original opening and the HD one they implemented back in Season 20. Homer used to see Marge’s car coming, yell, and get out of the way. Now he just gets plowed into, leaving a Homer shaped hole in the garage wall.

– Huh, a 2001 opening. Never seen that before. But this one’s in the service of a giant domino setup that goes on for a full minute. That screen time ain’t gonna fill itself.

– In some of the promotional hooha over the Gatsby double episode, I saw one of the staff congratulating themselves on not having Homer rap, saying it wouldn’t be funny. Well, in this episode Homer raps.

– Homer just said, “Stop forcing banter” after this joke exchange at Patty & Selma’s fake awards show:

Patty: You know, Selma, James Bond has a license to kill.
Homer (offscreen): Stop forcing banter!
Selma: But a lot of people would kill for these licenses.

That is followed in the next scene by Homer yelling banter at Lisa:

Lisa: Ooh, here comes an audience member now.
Homer: One guy in the In Memorium reel was alive when it started!
Lisa: Don’t forget your giftbag!
Homer: It’s just a coupon for a dollar off a car wash…

It goes on from there, but you get the idea. They know this show is bad. They don’t care.

– After that, Homer drives for a long time so he can get some real fast food since Krusty Burger is now Japanese health food, or something.

– Montage

– Arriving at a hot dog place, we get this timely gem: “Chewy, we’re home. Chewy is what I call my mouth.” I love it when the jokes slip seamlessly into the dialogue.

– Grampa just appeared in a scene for no reason. Can’t remember the last time an episode didn’t have someone materialize out of thin air.

– Exposition is bad enough when it’s for actual plot points. This is for a plot point that won’t be mentioned again for the rest of the episode:

Marge: Patty & Selma lost their jobs at the DMV because they spent too much on the awards show.
Selma: We went over the forty-three dollar budget.
Patty: By a hundred thousand dollars.
Marge: To save money, I said they could live here for a while.

We don’t see Patty or Selma again after this scene. I’m so glad it was here.

– Hey, the B-plot just showed up real briefly. Hi, B-plot!

– We’re on like the fourth montage now after Homer fires himself so he can go back to the hot dog stand.

– Krusty is there for some reason, sad that his restaurant is now terrible health food. He says, and I am not making this up, “I’m a self hating chew”. Oy, that’s bad. (Also: Krusty will later be part of a cabal of fast food mascots chasing Homer and this hot dog stand down a freeway. It wouldn’t have made sense even if they had an explanation, which they didn’t.)

– Now Homer is playing the tambourine, and there’s a song whose lyrics are mostly the words “hot dog” over and over again, and then what passes for the plot gets dropped in as the old hot dog guy says, apropos of nothing, “I still don’t remember you, man.”

– B-plot scene alert. Principal Skinner is there for no reason, he takes her hat, some kid runs in to say something, even by Zombie Simpsons standards this is shabby and strung together with chicken wire.

– I don’t know if there’s such a thing as Exposition Tourette’s, but if there is this show has it in spades. This is what Homer says as they pull up to the hot dog stand with a big “Closed” sign on it:

Homer: Oh, no, the hot dog stand is closed. The place I forgot for thirty years is gone.

– Then Homer wraps a chain around his neck and gets choked.

– And now he’s driving off with the hot dog caboose in tow.

– More forced banter:

Lisa: Chief Wiggum, maybe I can defuse the situation.
Wiggum: De-fuse? Well, there’s a first time for everything.
Lisa: Can you hand me your mic?
Wiggum: Every police regulation says no, but you know what says yes?
Lisa: What?
Wiggum: Your eyes.
Lisa: Awww.

– Now a bunch of fat guys, who were happily eating the health food ten seconds ago, are dragging this caboose up a hill because, uh, reasons. It goes on for twenty seconds.

– Old hot dog guy is back and now he remembers Homer for no reason.

– Ralph, who shows up out of nowhere asks why the cartoonish moon (which is playing a saxophone) needs sunglasses.

– And finally, we end on mascot cannibalism because, sure, why not?

Anyway, the numbers are in and for once the Grammys are good for something. Last night’s screenwriting atrocity was witnesses by a mere 2.45 million viewers. I haven’t been keeping my ratings spreadsheet up to date because I’m lazy, so I don’t know where that ranks, but it’s really bad.

“Hey, that little boy is playing three games at once.” – Chess Bystander
“Checkmate.” – Opponent #1
“Checkmate.” – Opponent #2
“Checkmate.” – Opponent #3
“Dang.” – Bart Simpson

I try to forget these episodes as quickly as possible. (Given how bland and repetitive they are, this isn’t usually very difficult.) But just one week after I accused Zombie Simpsons of having Exposition Tourette’s, they put on an expository masterpiece, even by their wretched standards. It starts with Bart getting a temporary tattoo that says “Bad to the Bone”. He informs us of it, then repeats the phrase several times as he applies it, shows it off, sees it wash away, and then misses it.

But the real pinnacles of exposition here come in pairs, first in the middle, and then again at the end. The first is during one of several flashbacks (the second week in a row they’ve done multiple flashbacks to some oddball trauma Homer suffered as a child) where Homer learns chess from an old guy, which is quickly followed by a real chess master (voicing himself) on Skype telling Homer exactly what he’s doing as he does it.

The second pair is back-to-back at the end to – ahem – resolve both of this episode’s main stories. If you like characters not only telling you directly what they’re feeling, but also explaining why it matters, you’re in luck. I have transcribed them below so that you can enjoy all of their feculent glory.

In terms of what actually happens, in one story, Bart throws away a hat Lisa really liked, and is then accompanied by a guilt monster voiced by Patton Oswalt. In the other, Homer is apparently a well practiced chess player who has to work out some grief against Grampa. If both of those seem devoid of thought, humor, or sense of any kind, congratulations, your brain works at least as well as a third-grader with recent cranial trauma.

– These are my notes, verbatim, from the opening: “Couch gag with dialogue again. Oh, this must be the Robot Chicken thing. Oof, that took a while.” I even think the exposition bug is catching, Homer exposited his way through the whole thing, describing what he was doing and seeing.

– We open on Bart and Lisa on the couch, expositing directly into the camera about the story we’re about to see. This is gonna go well.

– Grampa watches Bart play a World War II game, then surrenders to it.

– Now they’re at the beach and Bart has built a giant sand head over Homer. He then drops some seaweed down the head, which falls out of the nose onto Homer’s head. In the next scene, Homer reminds us of what we just saw.

– Lisa is hat shopping by having a dream montage.

– Homer’s now having a chess flashback. We’re five minutes in and we’ve got exposition, montages, and flashbacks. I have never taken a screenwriting class. I have no desire to take a screenwriting class. But I can say without hyperbole that this script would earn a failing grade in every screenwriting class ever taught.

– Bart’s plot appears to consist mostly of him saying he’s “Bad to the Bone” after he got and then lost a temporary tattoo of that. If any part of this changes, I will let you know, but I don’t expect it to. Also, he just threw away the hat that Lisa bought.

– Frantic Lisa searching-for-hat montage. Depending on how you want to count, that’s two or three of them. This is naked clock eating and we aren’t even eight minutes in.

– Patton Oswalt just showed up to be Bart’s guilt as a weirdly Hugo looking monster. Mostly he exposits:

“Your lack of remorse just makes me grow.”

He then grows.

I miss pigeon-rat.

– Homer has apparently rediscovered his love of chess. Fine. So have Barney, Lenny, and Carl, who are all playing him 3-on-1 at Moe’s. Uh, okay.

– Lenny just zipped himself into a suitcase, which was odd. Then Moe dragged him off to a closet where other people are apparently zipped into suitcases. I don’t want to overuse, “Uh, okay”, but, uh, okay.

Nothing says “Moe’s” like chess tournaments and random luggage stunts.

– Ooh, another chess flashback, this is #1 on our Masterpieces of Exposition tour:

Homer (Voiceover): So I found a professor who lived nearby. A master of the game. Kind. Patient. Devoted to me. I went everyday.
Professor: You are ready now.
Young Homer: Thanks for the lessons, professor.
Professor: You remind me of my son.
Young Homer, Oh, where is he now?
Professor: He’s right over there. He just doesn’t like chess.

It goes on from there, and I picked it up in the middle. That’s how interminable it was.

– Lisa tells Bart’s guilt to grow. In the background, that’s exactly what it does. Live exposition!

This enormous exposition monster will devour us all!

– How about another montage? Homer is mad an Grampa for quitting their chess games, so we get thirty seconds of Grampa getting beat up as bowling pins and an imaginary head.

– Now we’ve got a celebrity self voice via Skype for no reason whatsoever. Here is #2:

Chess guy: You cut out for a second. Did you gasp. Then you will nod. Then you will eat a piece of cheese while your wife doesn’t look. Then you will undo the top button of your pants. I’m always three moves ahead.

For once, I actually see what joke they’re going for here. The problem is that he says these things as Homer is doing them. He’s not ahead of anything. It’s like that time Skinner ruined the “Who’s on First?” bit with Chalmers, but unintentional.

– Bart is now tracking down Lisa’s hat, which he threw into a junk yard. He wants God’s help, so all of a sudden Rod and Todd are there. There was no joke about God sending them. They were just there.

– To wrap things up, Homer and Grampa are playing chess, with lots of action asides to make it take longer.

– And here’s your resolution to that, which is also Exposition Masterpiece #3:

Homer: Dad! Dad, it seems I love you. Can’t you say it seems you love me to?
Grampa: Aw, my son loves me. Now I can die in peace.

– We go right from that into the other resolution, #4:

Bart: Now what’s your problem?
Lisa: Oh, shut up! I forgive you!
Bart: You forgive me?
Lisa: Yes.

– And now there’s a giant mutant at the nuclear plant because weird asides are just how they fill those last few seconds now.

– One weird aside wasn’t enough, so here’s Homer’s version of Bart’s guilt monster, complete with other demons. Who then exposit themselves.

Your guess is as good as mine. 

Anyway, the numbers are in and they’re just as bad this week as they were last week. A scant 2.46 million viewers had this episode read to them. Poor bastards.

“Krusty, this camp was a nightmare. They fed us gruel. They forced us to make wallets for export. And one of the campers was eaten by a bear!” – Bart Simpson
“Oh my God!” – Krusty the Klown
“Well, actually, the bear just ate his hat.” – Bart Simpson
“Was it a nice hat?” – Krusty the Klown
“Oh yeah.” – Bart Simpson
“Oh my God!” – Krusty the Klown

It will come as no surprise to readers of this site that Zombie Simpsons is dumb and derivative. It’s been coasting off the legacy of The Simpsons for well over a decade now, and it’s got to scratch and claw at the worn out bottom of a wormy barrel for story ideas that have maybe only been done once or twice before. That brings us to “Kamp Krustier”, this week’s attempt to squeeze people’s fond memories for just a little more attention.

The episode opens with a title card reading, “A short while ago, in Season 4…”. This is, presumably, to let us know that they know how absurd it is to have a direct sequel episode a quarter of a century after the original. (It doesn’t help.)

From there, we see Santa’s Little Helper wandering around the house, past discarded items of Homer and Marge’s clothing. We then see him walk past the kitchen, which is trashed and in which Maggie is resting in a chicken bucket. Eventually he gets outside to find Homer and Marge humping in the treehouse, after which Homer literally bangs a gong he produces from nowhere.

Now, I don’t want to blow this out of proportion, and I recognize that they’re under no obligation to faithfully recreate things from Season 4, but even this first scene is telling about how much the comedy of this show has gotten dumber since then. If there’s one thing Simpsons Marge would never, ever do, it’s let the house become a trashdump like this and leave Maggie completely unattended.

We know this because we were shown the exact same scene (literally) in Season 4. Homer and Marge get extra frisky while Bart and Lisa are gone in “Kamp Krusty”, and the house looks fine and Maggie is being watched.

Look at the above: Homer and Marge are still getting it on, but Marge hasn’t suddenly forgotten who she is just so the show can have Homer crow about sex like a twelve-year-old who just learned what the word means. On The Simpsons, it’s clear that Homer and Marge’s lives got easier and more fun without Bart and Lisa around, on Zombie Simpsons they just default down to a trashed house because that’s the simplest and most outrageous thing they could come up with. That it’s something Marge’s character would never do doesn’t enter into their thinking.

Don’t get me wrong, the opening didn’t ruin the episode or anything (the rest of the script is more than capable of that), it’s just a perfect, 1:1 comparison of how vacuous the show is now and I couldn’t pass it up.

As for what actually happens in “Kamp Krustier”, well, the kids come back and get sent to a therapist where Bart fakes being traumatized so as not to go to school while Lisa pretends not to be traumatized so she can go to school. Meanwhile, in the other plot, Homer becomes ultra-smart and productive at work after he and Marge can’t screw 24-7 anymore. No, it doesn’t make sense. And no, neither really get resolved.

– Continuing with the whole “let’s show a dumbed down version of twenty-four seasons ago”, here’s a couple of screen grabs from what “Kamp Krusty” would look like if they did it today:

Yes, that is Bart riding a vulture. Please laugh.

 – While riding the vulture, Bart burns four children alive, screaming “Death to tennis camp”. It’s weird.

– Krusty is dropping the kids off and Milhouse is sucking his thumb and so is Kirk.

– Now we’re at a group therapy session where Bart realizes he can get out of school. Outside, Skinner walks up out of nowhere to complain that the therapist parked him in:

Skinner: Uh, somebody parked me in. Toyota Corolla. It’s got to be one of you.
Therapist: Try the karate studio.
Skinner: I tried the damn karate studio.
Therapist: Ugh, alright, it’s me. I blocked you in, okay?

Then it ends.

– Homer’s trying to get it on with Marge, but she shoots him down and then Bart shows up to sleep in their bed for some reason.

– At breakfast, Marge is reading a pamphlet on Bart’s trauma:

Marge: This pamphlet on trauma they gave Bart is very alarming. Loss of appetite. Thousand yard stare.
Bart: Not hungry.
Marge: Where are you looking?
Bart: A thousand yards away.

Expository repetition comedy, brilliant.

– In a nod to their favorite kind of dialogue, there’s an Itchy & Scratchy cartoon with an expository intro.

– Homer getting to work early because Bart is still sleeping in his parents’ bed. Suddenly, Homer’s smart and tells us that it’s because he’s sexually frustrated.

– In a twist we probably could’ve done without, Bart’s having a nightmare about camp, wakes up to tell the audience, “My God, I really am traumatized”. He then goes to Lisa’s room in the middle of the night:

Bart: Lis! Lis!
Lisa: Can it wait till morning?
Bart: Sure. [morning comes] Lis! Lis!
Lisa: Thanks for waiting till morning!

Bart then tells Lisa about a dream he had so she can explain what’s going on:

Lisa: It’s coming back to me too! Whatever happened must’ve been so horrible we repressed the memory. But don’t tell, because they’ll make me miss school.

Thanks for the recap, Lis.

– Homer being smart montage.

– The kids are now at an amusement park where Lisa exposits her trauma and tells us she’s riding a ride while she’s riding it.

– Marge tries to seduce Homer, but he shoots her down and pulls a theremin out from nowhere.

And now, the punchline: “I said therapy, not Theramin!” [rimshot]

 – We’re now at the “Masters and Johnson Institute”, which has a sign outside reading “If We Weren’t Doctors, We’d Be Arrested”, which is so far the only funny thing in this episode. Well done, sign gag.

– Homer and Marge are now in a sex therapy session with Michael Sheen and Lizzy Caplan from Masters of Sex, a show I have no particular opinion on since I only made it through about four episodes. They also tell us exactly what we’re seeing.

– Moe then shows up to masturbate with a robot in the hallway outside the therapy room. He orgasms behind a pebble glass window, and the show reaches what may be a new low.

“Alright, I just finished. Deviant out.” That’s what he actually says. 

 – For reasons that I’m sure were explained, the Simpsons go to Kamp Krusty at night to discover that it’s now an adult retreat.

– Bart exposits us into a flashback:

Bart: I’m remembering now, we were trying to escape by canoe.

– Also, Mel is in the flashback and Bart narrates exactly what we see.

– Homer and Marge eventually have sex at the camp while Bart and Lisa discover that their trauma was actually a dwarf posing as a child who escaped and didn’t die. I made none of that up.

Anyway, the ratings are in an they continue to be bad. Last night, just 2.62 million people heard Moe finish. To its (VERY) slight credit, Zombie Simpsons acknowledged this near the end. Bart says, “Now I’m glad everything’s alright”, which leads to the following two screens:

(That’s the fake dead dwarf/escaped child on the left. In case you were wondering.) 

“I have a watch with a minute hand.” – Bart Simpson
“Alright, you can come. What time is it?” – Mr. Smithers
“12:80. No, wait. Wait. What comes after twelve?” – Bart Simpson
“One.” – Mr. Smithers
“No, after twelve.” – Bart Simpson

First off, sorry for there not being a Behind Us Forever for “22 for 30” last week. I was traveling Monday and Tuesday and by the time Wednesday rolled around I really didn’t feel like getting back into it. For those who haven’t seen it, Zombie Simpsons replaced character exposition with voiceover narrator exposition, Bart shaved points in a basketball game, and that was about it.

This week it’s back to character exposition. Springfield goes through a couple of parenting fads, first wanting to give all their kids trophies, and then not wanting to do that. Meanwhile, Grampa gives Bart an old pocketwatch that makes Bart feel confident (which he apparently hadn’t been doing before). Bart loses it, then Homer gets it, then Homer gives it to Bart. Then, in another one of those bizarre post-credit sequences they rely on so heavily to fill their time, Ralph Wiggum gets drafted into the NBA with the NBA commissioner voicing himself.

The watch Grampa gives Bart has great significance, which the show repeatedly reminds us of through statements like this one, “That watch was the only thing that made me not terrible, I can’t lose it”. Homer even had what had to be a 30 second rant in the middle in which he explained three or four times why he cared about the watch, but I’m staying with a friend of mine and the DVR only recorded a couple minutes of the show, so I can’t transcribe it. (The torrent isn’t up yet, and I need to go to bed soon because I’ve got to get up at 6am to catch two trains and then get in a truck to drive to Arizona. Being semi-homeless isn’t as bad as I thought it was gonna be, but it does not respect one’s preferred schedule very often.) Homer also yelled about Freud a lot.

This episode opens in Frog Heaven where we see two angel frogs talking about what’s happening to one of their bodies back down on Earth. Turns out Bart is desecrating it more than dissecting it. There’s maybe the kernel of a good joke in here, but Zombie Simpsons runs it into the ground by cutting back and fourth about five times and repeating it so often that they end with the frogs getting tired of their own gag.

From there we get a couple of parenting experts who give different advice, two montages, lots more exposition, and a scene where Bart repeatedly drops rocks on Milhouse’s head. Since I have no screen grabs, I can’t properly illustrate any of these scenes, but take my word for it when I say that they make no sense. For example, Bart losing the watch – one of the few discernible plot points in the episode – occurs for no reason at the end of a montage. Since one episode of Zombie Simpsons is pretty much like all the others these days, I think you get the idea.

I was able to get this quote down live, “My trophy business has failed”. Try to guess what had just happened. You will not be wrong.

“Mr. Goodbar to the front desk. The front desk is looking for Mr. Goodbar.” – Candy Convention PA

Season 28 has only a few episodes left, and the most distinct thing I can say about “Looking for Mr. Goodbart” is that it is one of them. They once again switched to a voiceover narration for (some of) the exposition, there was a subplot about Homer and Lisa playing a barely renamed Pokemon Go thing, and Bart spent much of the episode being nice to old ladies before he learned a lesson about it, or something. As usual, none of it makes sense, characters appear out of nowhere frequently, and what passes for the plot is too incoherent to really wrap up.

(No, I have no idea what’s with the title. It worked as a throwaway joke in Season 6, here it’s just part of their sick need to make every episode title a pun.)

– Since Zombie Simpsons never misses an opportunity to celebrate a meaningless milestone, this one opens with the first Ullman short (that was also in the “138th Episode Spectacular”) because it just passed its thirtieth anniversary (two weeks ago, but who’s counting?). There’s also a song.

– The first scene is Bart getting gussied up in the bathroom before he goes out into a fancy restaurant and gives a table of old ladies a cup of tea. It then lurches right into voiceover narration:

“I know what you’re thinking, this must be some kind of prank. Is there laxative in the punch bowl? Well, there is, but they’re doctors prescribed that. I’ve changed. I’ve become pinchable. You look confused. Why don’t I start from the beginning?”

After that we go to the school with a “Two Months Earlier” subtitle. This is gonna be really dumb, isn’t it?

– At grandparents day, Skinner and Chalmers are mad at Bart for adding some lyrics to some song. I’m glad they retired Krabappel after Marcia Wallace died (like they should’ve done for Lunchlady Doris), but it speaks to the creative bankruptcy of the show now that they don’t bother coming up with a replacement. This looks to be a very ordinary day in the fourth grade classroom, yet it’s being headed by Skinner and Chalmers. The nominal superintendent then yells at the nominal principal via text messages because Zombie Simpsons will cling to the rotting skeleton of The Simpsons and repeat jokes no matter what. Later, in Skinner’s office, Agnes shows up for no reason and Skinner makes Bart walk her to the bus stop because that’s totally in character for everyone.

– Meanwhile, and in a highly timely parody, Lenny is playing “Peekymon Go”. (Ripped from the headlines!) He walks into the reactor core. Then Homer starts playing and does the same thing.

– On their way out of the school, Bart and Agnes bond by messing with Martin’s grandma for some reason. In a completely believable and not at all inhuman turn of events, Martin’s grandma then gets mad at her grandson because she was lightly taunted by them.

– Later, in a graveyard, the show has a parade of characters walk over Frank Grimes’s tombstone playing their very insightful Pokemon misnaming. I think this counts as fan service because at the end Gil shows up to tell us that he didn’t catch the monster.

– After some more Pokemon scenes, Homer gets sprayed by a skunk. We then see him sitting in a tomato juice bath in the garage with Marge.

I’m going to transcribe it because it neatly illustrates several of this show’s repetitive problems:

Marge: Sprayed by a sunk. Homey, that game is too dangerous.
Homer: The game was fine. Reality was dangerous. Now could you move a little to your left, there’s a stumblebee right behind you.
Marge: Is there any fad you don’t take too far?
Homer: The aerobics ones.
Lisa (Out of nowhere): Mom, what dad could use is a co-layer who’ll make sure he doesn’t get hurt, because the game is good for him. You can see that he’s lost weight from the walking.
Homer: I’m using the factory holes on my belt.
Marge: Wow! Wow! Lisa, why are you interested?
Lisa: Because it’s the greatest game ever! In this world, I can throw a ball!

Let us count the terribleness here: first, Marge exposits what we just saw. Then Homer acts like an invincible jerk. Then Lisa, who could’ve plausibly been there anyway, walks in from nowhere like she’s been a part of the conversation the whole time. (At this point, they’re so used to having people walk up to conversations that they do it even when they don’t have to.) Then Homer repeats a joke from “Brush with Greatness” (nearly word for word). Then Marge invites Lisa to exposit, and Lisa promptly does so. The scene is hacktacular in so many ways that it’s almost impressive.

– Speaking of hacktacular, we get Bart narrating more now and he explains that kissing up to Agnes got him free sneakers, so now he’s going to kiss up to other old ladies too. This is promptly followed by a montage of grandma nicknames.

– There’s an Itchy & Scratchy that ends with a human character killing himself with a revolver. It has nothing to do with the rest of the episode (we see Bart laugh at it while watching with an old lady, but that’s it) and seems, well, a little out of place.

This is TOH level gore and is very far from the violent but cartoon-y antics of Tom & Jerry. 

It’s not the violence or the gore that bothers me. It’s the fact that it’s random, pointless, and unconnected to everything else in the episode. A chef killing himself can be funny, but it’s not funny when that’s all there is to it.

– As usual, the only good part is the occasional sign gag.

Gotta admit: Curl Up And Dye is a pretty good name for a hair salon full of old ladies.

– But whatever good I was feeling is immediately blown away by more pointless exposition and random character appearances. In this one we meet Phoebe, an old lady who yells at Bart and then exposits his scam. She will be the focus of Bart’s story for the rest of the episode. As much as I don’t like to play Monday Morning Screenwriter here, I dunno, maybe it would be good to introduce the main character of the A-plot before the halfway mark.

– I don’t feel like explaining it, but the weird Cybill Shepherd thing is just bizarre.

– Sometimes my bare notes don’t need to be elaborated upon: “Comic Book Guy wanders by”

– I guess Phoebe is British because her presence let Bart frequently repeat the phrase “taking the piss”.

– Skinner’s in bed expositing about his life.

– Phoebe paid Bart to check her out of her nursing home. Now Bart’s worried she’s going to kill herself and goes back. The receptionist there neatly explains a bunch of things we didn’t see.

– And now there’s a flashback to what we saw two minutes ago. These episodes have the structural consistency of playdoh that’s been left out in the sun.

– Homer and Lisa playing Pokemon is still going on. They decided to buy cheat codes or something, which Homer is now burning, and then Homer starts talking about knives and cakes for some reason. No, it didn’t make any sense on screen either.

– Bart is looking for the supposedly suicidal old lady, and out of nowhere a bunch of Pokemon players show up to help, which leads to the . . .

– Searching montage! (In which a Pokemon rendered version of Maggie is told to “stab and kill and maim”. Lotta weird bloodshed in this one.)

– Phoebe is found, and exposits that it was all pointless anyway, “I’ll admit I had some dark thoughts, and I used you to escape form the home. But once I got out here by myself, completely free, I realized there’s so much to live for.” Thanks for wrapping up the plot, exposition lady!

– Homer now meta-expositing to run out the clock.

– And since event that couldn’t kill the last of the time, we have a Skinner sketch to end things, including Milhouse expositing.

Last night, a scant 2.26 million viewers sat through that doughy mess of an episode. Near as I can tell, the networks are taking another (well deserved) overall beating this year, so I have no idea how the drop in the absolute ratings for Zombie Simpsons compares the rest of the schedule. Still: incredibly low ratings are incredibly low ratings.