“And this is Lord Thistlewick Flanders.” – Ned Flanders
“Charmed . . . Uh, googily doogily.” – Lord Thistlewick Flanders
Every once and a while we get episodes like “Pay Pal” that seem to be made up of B-plots that got discarded from other episodes and were found lying on the writers’ room floor. The first thing that happens is that there’s an Evergreen Terrace block party, then John Oliver shows up as a new British neighbor. Then he gets into a fight with Homer and vanishes completely from the episode. With the “British neighbor” story concluded, there’s a new (more or less unrelated) story about Marge paying a kid to be friends with Lisa. Neither story underpins or overlaps with the other and you could easily see either one being the subplot to some larger and wackier A-plot.
Despite the fact that the zaniness is about a low as Zombie Simpsons is capable of setting it (no magic powers, no fantasy worlds, not even any nuclear explosions), things still manage to make absolutely no sense. Marge and Homer throw a giant party for Lisa but cover it up before she can arrive because none of the other kids showed up. Grampa tells a story about paying Lenny and Carl to be friends with Homer that falls apart as it’s happening. There’s an elementary school gym square dancing scene that has so little to do with anything else that it might have been accidentally copied and pasted in from another script. But, hey, next weak is the season finale and then we can all forget about Zombie Simpsons for four months, so as silver linings go that’s a pretty good one.
- Couch gag is the usual excessive filler, clocking in at forty seconds.
- This Itchy and Scratchy episode takes way too long, but the real problem is the competely pointless amounts of gore: cats drowning in their own barf, skinned corpses, lots of popped eyeballs. They do know that a big part of what makes cartoon violence fun is that the coyote’s blood and guts don’t splash out when the boulder lands on him, right?
- What’s with Bart watching TV on a massive and ancient looking portable television, anyway?
- Shauna and Gil are not what you’d call a strong comedic pairing.
- And now Gil is singing.
- “Now let me taste some of Ned Flanders no alarm chili”. Ah, for the days when it was two or two and a half alarm chili.
- Homer and Marge are talking in bed and Lisa appears in the door to make an observation about not having any friends. That’s exposition fairy!
- “That’s the saddest thing I can imagine my daughter saying to me”, characters should always tell you exactly what they’re feeling said no screenwriter ever.
- Now it’s Bart’s turn to appear mysteriously outside of his parents bedroom. They really make it hard to tell if they just don’t care about constructing scenes or if they drop characters in and out just because they can.
- Did Homer just look directly at the camera? Yes, yes he did. That was odd.
- Well, at least this couples party didn’t take long to get to its perfectly silly fighting between Homer and this dull British guy.
- On the walk home, Homer climbs across people’s roofs. Weird.
- Hey, a partying montage!
- So Homer and Marge threw a party for Lisa but then tore it down before she could get there, so the whole thing was completely pointless. Also, they seem to think “Gus Hubner” is a really funny name and worth repeating as a punchline several times.
- Lotta scenes that really drag their feet this week. First the gym teacher had to explain why there was a wall in the gym, then we had to wait for it to open. Only then did we get to the exciting square dancing scene.
- Okay, this was kinda funny: “Nobody likes jazz that much, even the guy playing it had to take drugs.”
- This girl Lisa is friends with is the very definition of characterless. She’s so bland I’m surprised she got a name.
- Bart had a nice “pace and exposit” scene until Milhouse showed up from nowhere.
- And then Lisa explains what’s happening, because we didn’t just see it ourselves or anything.
- Hey, another montage. That ate up some time.
- Lisa’s confrontation with Marge is hacktacular from start to finish. The two of them just explain stuff past each other, and it’s made all the worse because they’re both being weird and serious. They really have no idea how to let characters act like people anymore. Everyone sounds like their reading cue cards: “I would’ve found a friend eventually. You couldn’t wait a damn decade until I got into college.” Who talks like that?
- At least they acknowledge at the end of Grampa’s weird flashback that it doesn’t make any sense.
- And now Marge and Lisa are confronting each other again. This time Lisa is mentally expositing just to us instead of out loud, though.
- And now also out loud: “It’s funny, but hurting your feelings made me feel better.”
Thank goodness that’s over. I kept expecting John Oliver’s character to briefly show up sometime in the second half of the episode, but he just vanished completely after his fight with Homer. He wasn’t really all that wacky and kinda seemed like he might have a bigger story purpose that “eat time in Act 1″, but I guess not. On any other show that’d be weird, but on Zombie Simpsons its just a regular week.
Anyway, the numbers are in and they remain in the same sorry state that they’ve been since January. Last night just 3.61 million people wondered what happened to John Oliver’s character. That’s good for #4 on the all time least watched list and has dragged Season 25′s average viewership down to 5.07 million per episode. Next week is the season finale, and if it comes in at 3.40 million or less, Season 25′s average will slip below five million. That number doesn’t hold any real significance, it’s just easy to remember. Either way, Season 25 is already the least watched season ever.
