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The Simpsons Review: “Diggs” & “The Man Who Grew Too Much” (Season 25, Episodes 12 & 13)

After a long winter break to accommodate the Olympics, the Oscars and anything else that sucked eyes away from the show to other places in this valuable prime time real estate, The Simpsons returned with double the normal number of episodes. Both episodes visited some old themes and ideas, but only one seemed to make anything worthwhile out of the recycled material.

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So yeah, the plot literally cut Bob’s motivation from actual cartoon super-villainy. The shame of it is that there was an opportunity here to do something interesting and inspired. Could Bob, a man capable of evil deeds, rehabilitate himself by doing good at a company like Monsanto, a corporation which in the real world is often described as being evil? I guess we’ll never know because the whole things ends at the Springfield dam as Bob tries to kill Bart and Lisa when they discover his Dr. Moreau complex.

The further shame is that the topic of GMOs could have lent itself to something more than a side note to a Sideshow Bob story. The “educational film” about GMOs that Lisa shows at the PTA, “Apocalypse Chow,” was hilarious for being the kind of hyperbolic to the extreme, like the documentaries Loose Change and Zeitgeist, and the addition of “My name is Jenny McCarthy and I endorse this tirade” at the end helped seal the bit. Otherwise, it was a missed opportunity, and one that might have yielded a result in the vein of the classic “Lisa the Vegetarian,” a dietary quandary where there’s two sides to the issue, and a lot of room to mock both sides of the debate.

The B-story was also disappointing and fraught with missed potential. Marge tried to get Springfield’s teens to sign an abstinence pledge through classes at the church, but the ridiculousness of the concept isn’t given a proper airing and instead we get half-hearted attempts by Marge to sell the idea with finger puppets.

If you said that abstinence classes sounds more like a Flanders thing, you’d be right, but timing of the abstinence classes conflicted with tango lessons with Edna. At the end of the show, we see Ned and Edna tango, but in a final, touching send off to the voice of Mrs. Krabappel, Marcia Wallace, we see that Ned was dreaming of the tango. Wearing a black arm band, he looks at Edna’s picture and says, “I sure do miss that laugh.” Nelson pops up in the window and gives his signature “Ha! Ha!” but quickly adds “I miss her too.” If the episode itself left you bitter, the simple tribute left you feeling bittersweet. We all miss that laugh, right?

The all around better pick for best new Simpsons episode of the week was “Diggs,” which featured a tremendous couch gag courtesy of Sylvain Chomet (The Illusionist and The Triplets of Belleville). The high energy bit with its very French spin on the family had a lot of attention to detail, but the episode that followed had a wonderful simplicity, a straightforward story about a boy, and older boy and a bird. And the older boy may or may not have some problems.

Money issues force Bart to turn himself into a geek and eat anything for a couple of bucks, but when the gag goes too far, Bart finds himself shunned. Enter Diggs, voiced by guest star Daniel Radcliffe, the new kid at school whose single handily revived the Springfield Elementary Falconry Club by serving as its president, secretary/treasurer and faculty adviser. Bart learns the joys of falconry and how to conjugate the verb “to do,” and makes a good friend in the well-spoken and erudite Diggs. But when Diggs decides to jump out of a tree to try flying for himself, Bart realizes that Diggs might not be all there.

When it was revealed that Diggs has mental issues that require his hospitalization, the writers played the family’s reaction for laughs (Marge’s Arkham Asylum reference was especially good), but allowed Bart to have more heartfelt concerns about Diggs. When Lisa tries to comfort Bart with a hug, he suggests that rather than hugging each other that she should hug the bedpost and then he will. The moment was funny and sweet and was just the kind of young brother-sister logic that makes sense. I had forgotten that The Simpsons could do these moments, and from what I’ve seen this season so far, I thought they weren’t capable of doing them anymore.

The gags were also sharper in this episode, from Homer’s mob mentality about getting back his $20 back, to the people that Diggs pretended had signed his cast (which included Cthulhu, the TARDIS, Allan Quatermain, and Kilgore Trout). Diggs as a character worked well because he wasn’t overshadowed by the stunt casting of having Radcliffe voice him. With a slightly off American accent, Radcliffe played Diggs quite straight, which makes the little moments of actual crazy stick out all the more. It’s nice when a celebrity guest can just disappear into the character and frankly, if you didn’t know that Diggs was Harry Potter, you probably wouldn’t have thought twice about it.

So, Sunday night’s Simpsons hit .500 in terms scoring. The take away seems to be that simple is best, and that when the show tries to do too many things at once it ends up not doing much at all. At the very least, Bart can now cross off falcon on his animal collecting bingo card, which by now has to be almost completed. Probably all that’s left now is for Bart to take possession of is a shark, which he can then promptly jump over. Although, a lot of you probably think that he has already.

What did you think of the new Simpsons episodes? Sound off below!