Marge meanwhile struggled with the notion that the healing power of KISS, which helped her get through (mostly Homer-related) headaches during her pregnancy, might have screwed up Bart. Not easing Marge’s conscience is a flurry of pranks, including a Pixar-inspired gag that draws the attention of the town. Bart going too far is another oldie, but goldie, and at least it’s excellent fodder for local news coverage.
That brings us to Channel 6 anchorman Kent Brockman, whose regret is that he didn’t follow his colleague Rachel Maddow (performing her own voice) to the more fertile fields of cable news. Now if you ask me, Kent hasn’t missed much, the circus that is cable news is in a lot of ways more useless than local human interest stories, and Kent’s done alright feeding on the dual teats of infotainment and celebraphony. Of course, Kent’s brief flirtation with cable news gave the writers opportunity to take a few shots at the industry: Fox (“Dinosaurs died from over taxation”), MSNBC, (“Fox started it!”) and CNN (“Will trade news for food”). Ultimately, Kent decides that the manipulations of “Faux News” are too much, and opts to return to the local beat where he can decide what’s news, like a god. We also learned the previously unknown origin of the great Springfield Tire Fire, because 25 years later it was just that important to find out who lit the match.
The final regret belonged to C. Montgomery Burns, which is unusual because who would have thought that the man who makes Lex Luthor look like a well-mannered pauper in comparison would have any regrets. For Monty it was the woman who broke his first heart, a French girl named Lillah who wanted to marry Mr. Burns on condition that he spend five minutes a day doing something for others, but instead left the future despot and became a Buddhist monk. Even though Lillah dies, Monty once again learned his lesson about doing onto others, but I wouldn’t expect that to last long though.
So once again, nothing changed and everything stayed the same. A few good jabs at the mainstream media and KISS are fun, but everything else during the last half-hour seemed to come from a Simpsons Mad Libs. It might be forgivable, and after 25 years it’s not like there are a lot of stories left to be told, but really, if the material was funnier, and the one-liners were zippier, then I might have been satisfied more by the result.
On another issue, this week’s couch gag featured an elaborate tribute to The Lord of the Rings, which, in hindsight, turned out to be the cleverest thing about the outing. It had some funny bits like Funkytown and the James L. Brook on the map of Middle Earth, and it was clearly a labour of love for the writers and animators.
The only problem is, the whole bit was released online on Thursday. This is the second time this season that the show has had a big nerdy couch gag. The last one was Guillermo del Toro’s take on the opening credits from “Treehouse of Horror,” and that one was also released online before the show too. I might suggest if The Simpsons is going to do these fan service bits, they might save them for the show to get more people to tune in, but that’s just my opinion.
What did you think of last night’s episode? Leave your thoughts in the comments section below!
