“Oh, Kenny, look at the interplay of light and shadow. It’s so luminous and vibrant!” – Lisa Simpson
“Thanks, Lisa, I painted that one. The real one’s in my garage.” – Kenny the Museum Guard
If there is one topic on which Zombie Simpsons has a thorough and well practiced knowledge, it is imitating great art. That didn’t help them keep “The War of Art” from being a meandering, exposition filled wasteland, of course, but it does add a nice level of unintentional meta-irony that will help you through what passes for the third act. By the time Max von Sydow shows up to talk about the beauty of his forged work, there’s about four different subplots bumping along, two of which kind of even get resolved. In the meantime, it’s mostly yelling, some gasp inducing plot twists, and the now standard pages of exposition.
First Lisa gets a guinea pig, an opening act that is mostly filler occasionally punctuated by meaningless suspense. Then the Simpsons have to get a new painting for behind the couch. They buy one from the van Houtens, which turns out to be valuable, which in turn means that they could or could not split the money, which leads to disputes over ownership, which leads Homer and Lisa to an island resort with a brain rotting alcohol that I would dearly love to have been drinking while I watched this.
- No couch gag this week? They must have so much good stuff that they didn’t have time for it. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
- Homer is reading text we can clearly see on the screen. Zombie Simpsons, now with built in closed captioning.
- This guinea pig selection scene is going on so long that even the show got bored with it.
- This guinea pig escape/chase scene is also very long, but opts for sheer nonsense and fake suspense over repetition.
- We went through all that to get the painting ruined? Jebus.
- The fake Wikipedia table of contents is actually pretty good. It’s got sex, death, betrayal, poison and a more coherent story than the rest of the episode.
- Homer has been repeating the word “Whoa” for fifteen seconds now.
- It ended up going for twenty-six.
- As the same conversation bleeds into about an eighth scene, Marge straight up asks Homer how he feels about the plot.
- “And all I have to do is not say something about some painting to my Mom and Dad?” – Milhouse recapping what you’ve just seen for the umpteenth time.
- And, as if to underline what a waste of time all that was, the van Houtens show up right away and have a boring fight with Homer and Marge.
- This episode is so herky-jerky that they just moved the plot along by someone yelling, unironically, “Stop the auction!”.
- The auctioneer bears a disturbing resemblance to the guy who nicked some of Homer’s sugar pile.
- After a brief expository scene between Homer and a once-again-kicked-out-of-the-house Kirk, Marge explains to us what’s been happening . . . twice: “That painting has torn the town apart, destroyed Kirk and Luann’s marriage, and everyone’s very worried about Milhouse” and then, “That picture has brought out the worst in everyone!”.
- Oh, good, we’re on a tropical island and Lisa brought her guinea pig in a travel cage. Thought they forgot about that little guy, didn’t you?
- Man, this island has a massive oversupply of conveniently expository characters.
- One of whom quickly took Homer and Lisa back to his house! Seamless!
- Homer, trying to speed things up, “Then why did the auction house say it was real?” Nothing says good writing like directly asking a character we just met to explain everything as blandly as possible.
- Guh, this guy just keeps going on and on. Now he’s debating Lisa about beauty and art. Isn’t this show supposed to be a comedy?
- Max von Sydow narrating the history of “Strupo” over the credits has some actual jokes in it. I don’t often offer suggestions to Zombie Simpsons because there’s nothing worse than a back seat driver, but they maybe should’ve put some of those in his actual part.
Anyway, the ratings are in and they continue to be the kind of rock bottom we’ve come to expect from springtime Zombie Simpsons. Last night, just 3.93 million viewers wondered why kind of sloppy forgery of The Simpsons they were watching. That’s the fourth lowest total ever and means that six of the ten least watch, including #1-4, are all from this season.
