Original airdate: November 3, 2019
The premise: Homer is conned into buying a boat, and tries to sucker others into buying shares in it to offset his debt. Meanwhile, Lisa convinces Bart to help her free an orca whale from a water park, which inspires Bart to perform his own selfless act in freeing a gorilla from a zoo, with much more disastrous results.
The reaction: Boy, it’s been a while since I’ve seen an episode where so little happens. Homer is swindled by a smooth talking salesman on a dock into buying a boat, which takes incredibly little effort, and not in a purposefully funny way. They try to anchor (ha ha) his impulsive purchase on his memories as a kid asking Abe if they can get a boat, and he later shows off his fancy new purchase to his dad, but that doesn’t really amount to anything. Nor does his apprehension of telling Marge about his extravagant new purchase, when he finally does fess up, she’s fine with it, so that leads to no plot progression either. Finally, something happens: the boat’s motor starts to give out, and Homer is shocked to hear the repair costs, now feeling he has to share the boat with friends and have them make payments to pay it off. We never actually hear any of these amounts, what Homer paid for the boat or the cost of repairs. If the salesman had tricked Homer into paying an extremely paltry fee for the boat itself, knowing that it was a shit boat that would quickly break down and carry a hefty fee to get it back to working order, that would make sense as a story. And I think that’s what they were trying to go for, except they didn’t actually write it that way. Homer buys a boat for X price, and now is saddled with a bill for Y price, and now there’s concern for some reason. He starts off sharing the boat with Lenny and Carl, which is fine, and then he ends up giving a share to all the usual Springfield suspects: Comic Book Guy, Sideshow Mel, Bumblebee Man, the Lovejoys, the Hibberts, Crazy Cat Lady, and so forth, who all get on the boat at once and sink it. Why were they all together at once? Shouldn’t they have divvied up shifts for when they can use the boat? I have no idea. In the final scene at Moe’s, everyone is at the bar super pissed at Homer, but he placates them by saying how great it was they owned a boat for five minutes, and that turns the crowd around and they cheer for him. It really makes absolutely no sense. I feel like my synopsis here is making the story sound more logical and coherent than it is. As it plays out in real-time, and divided between a B-plot, it really felt like nothing was happening. There was virtually no forward momentum, no stakes, no emotional investment, just… nothing.
The B-plot (or maybe the A-plot, this one seems like it has more screen time) starts with Lisa planning to free a captive whale after being aghast by their awful treatment and living conditions during a visit to a local water park. It’s all incredibly on the nose (the opening shot has the family entering ALCATRAZ WATER PARK “Subject of 5 Award-Winning Documentaries.” All of this is mostly in reference to the 2013 documentary Blackfish, and the ensuing efforts to address concerns of animal mistreatment at places like SeaWorld and to free the orca whales in captivity. It’s an issue that’s still ongoing, but it once again feels like the show missing the boat of a cultural moment by many years. SeaWorld still does have a handful of orca whales, but only because they claim they wouldn’t survive out in the wild. If the episode was actually about that, with the whale having no idea what to do once its cage was opened, or getting killed or seriously hurt immediately after being freed, that might have been interesting. But whatever. Bart is roped into helping out, and feels the strange, foreign twinge of satisfaction of a job well done, dubbed by Lisa as “altruism.” He follows up chasing after their feeling by freeing a gorilla from the zoo, who immediately goes on a rampage through town that we don’t see, and then Lisa calms him down somehow and that plot is over. Bart getting invested in a cause because it involves illegality like breaking and entering would have been an interesting enough plot for a whole episode; in fact, that element of it sounds like “Bart vs. Itchy & Scratchy,” which did a mostly adequate job in selling that premise. Here, the idea has so little room to actually grow into anything, so it’s all pretty meaningless. Much like the entire episode itself.
Three items of note:
– Bart and Lisa also enlist Willie to sneak into the water park, as he mentions that he works there during the summer. It feels pretty random, and they don’t give him anything really to do other than make some kilt jokes and at the act break, he plays “air bagpipes,” which is just Dan Castellaneta making ear-grating noises for ten seconds. Ugh.
– Homer hounds Lenny and Carl to try to get them on board (ha ha) his boat scheme. Cutting back and forth to them, we see them asleep in bunk beds with a portrait of Bert and Ernie on the wall. Later, we see them cruising on the boat with their girlfriends, both of whom look like the other in dresses. I’m sure I’ve mentioned this several times, but this joke of Lenny and Carl being inseparable/gay for each other has been pushed to its limits at this point. Who were once just two working schmoes who acted as a sounding board for Homer to bounce ideas off of have now become this weird codependent couple who are obsessed with one another. You can evolve characters’ roles and personalities as the years go on, hell, I encourage it, but these two have been stuck in this role for decades now and it’s not getting any funnier. Because it wasn’t funny in the first place.
– The gorilla is finally set free at Dr. Jane Goodall’s Pennsylvania reserve, where Lisa lays the praise on thick to Goodall, who is voicing herself. The character model is the exact same one used for Dr. Joan Bushwell from “Simpson Safari,” as her character was effectively just a rip-off of Goodall herself. I really don’t care about, mostly because that episode was a piece of shit, but probably much more entertaining than this. Goodall isn’t a very good actor, but it’s not like I expected much from her, and I don’t think there were any jokes in her scene (stringing an eager Lisa along for a maybe sort of chance for a scholarship? I guess that’s a joke? Oh, who cares.)
One good line/moment: Ehhh, whatever. This season really blows so far.
Me Blog Write Good 
Sooo…was Willy helping them free the orca just a giant set-up for a Free Willy joke that never happened?
Reading your season 31 reviews makes me so sad. The fact that only one of these episodes doesn’t have a “One good line/moment” section that isn’t BLANK makes me worried about this show’s future, considering last season there seemed to be a surprisingly decent amount of funny and potential. But I guess now in what I’m sure we’ll be calling the “Disney-era” in the future, the show seems to have gone down to the level of Season 28, maybe even below that. Why can’t this season have episodes like “Werking Mom” or “Mad About the Toy?” Sure those episodes aren’t very good, but at least they made you laugh.
Okay, maybe I’m being too much of a worrywart here. This is only episode 5. There’s gotta be at least one episode later in the season that isn’t a vacation to Snooze City.
The air bagpipes bit was wince worthy. But yeah, this episode was a big ol’ mess.
Mike I have a question for you. Has reviewing Zombie Simpsons for eight years tainted your enjoyment of Classic Simpsons? Like if you were to watch an episode like Rosebud or Deep Space Homer after reviewing this episode, are you able to have the same level of enjoyment as you did when you were reviewing Seasons 1-8?
Absolutely not. The show as it is now feels so alienated from what it used to be, I’ve basically shed any sort of concern about tarnished legacies or tainting the greatness of what the show once was. The series is already ruined, seemingly beyond repair, but nothing can take away from the greatness of the old shows. If anything, the classic era stands even brighter in direct comparison, especially whenever the current series attempts a similar plotline or character study, or worse yet, a direct sequel to an older show like “Kamp Krustier” or “Singin’ in the Lane.”
There’s a Dead Homer post that compared the show’s classic era to the works of Shakespeare and Twain and that high schoolers in the next century may have to view some of those old Simpsons episodes and perhaps even write papers about them similar to how high schoolers today have to read classic stories like To Kill a Mockingbird or Catcher in the Rye.
90s Simpsons is immortal. No one’s going to remember the stuff from afterwards. Not even the movie.
Well, it’s good to know that you can watch Rosebud and Deep Space Homer with the same level of enjoyment as you used to, but I don’t…really…see…your…problem with new character studies unless they make the characters out-of-character for whatever reason. I know that I can’t change how differently you feel from me about Springfield Splendor or Dark Knight Court or A Totally Fun Thing Bart Will Never Do Again when you have already gone 4 Season 31 episodes in a row (including the one after this) with no good jokes, lines or moments worth mentioning…you got to admit, it really teaches you to treasure the other 2000s and 2010s episodes that you enjoyed as a whole, enjoyed half of, or had other good jokes and character moments worth mentioning.
No.
“No.” True, but you’ll probably know what I am talking about the next time you see a Season 31 episode that you don’t give a blank for one good line or moment. You should not take for granted any good lines or moments you find in post-1990s The Simpsons because a good moment is a good moment no matter what episode or year it is in, am I right?
Hmmm…well, since you said in The Girl on the Train that Halloween of Horror and Friend With Benefit would be the best Season 21-30 episodes, whenever episodes like those come up, as well as the other episodes you marked as The Best in other episodes after Season 8, are “The Best” episodes post-Season 8 still alienated from what The Simpsons used to be?
Even if you answer yes to the best post-Season 8 episodes being alienated from what The Simpsons uses to be, it means that a small part of you CAN find some episodes of The Simpsons to be good in a new way some of the time, and just remember that we can disagree on liking or hating the same episodes. For example, I remember when you enjoyed Bart-Mangled Banner because it was consistently wacky all the way through and didn’t do what Co-Dependents Day and My Big Fat Geek Wedding did.
Good moments are good moments, yes, but I can only appreciate them so much if it’s two or three solid lines out of an otherwise laugh-less twenty minutes of a meaningless story with characters I don’t care about. The Simpsons is a comedy show, it ostensibly should be making me laugh consistently throughout. The fact that it doesn’t, and hasn’t for over fifteen years, is a pretty glaring issue.
As for the episodes post season 11 or so that I consider good shows, yes, I do consider them separate from the classic era. The show just changed so dramatically from season 8 to 13, and slowly degraded ever since, that they feel like two completely different shows. But that’s not a bad thing; for a show to run this long, it really should be a completely different show, but it’s needlessly chained to its past and unmoving in trying anything different with its characters or core elements of the show. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I really don’t think the writers don’t give a shit. Despite my thoughts to the contrary, and moments in these awful shows where it really seems like they don’t, I have to believe they care. They wouldn’t have been hired if they weren’t funny and didn’t know their way around a good script. I honestly don’t know what the problem is or how it can be fixed, but it certainly isn’t an impossibility that the show could still crank out some good episodes before it finally croaks. Hell, it would make writing this stupid blog easier on me, that’s for sure.
I’ve suspected for a while that the reason the series’s writing has languished in such ineptitude for over fifteen years is a result of the show’s ‘immortality’. During the classic era, the writing team, regardless of personnel, was generally fueled by both the show’s vulnerability to cancellation (meaning that a string of lacklustre/unpopular episodes, particularly during the show’s earliest years as an unorthodox and occasionally controversial force of counterculture, would inevitably bear consequences, unlike in more recent years where the show being renewed for another season is virtually an inevitability regardless of the number of feebly plotted and crushingly unfunny episodes they crank out within that season) and a genuine desire to move the series forward and output a quality creative work, which ultimately correlated with hours of jokes rewrites, sleep deprivation and showering in the bathroom sink at 3:30am – by comparison, by the depths of the Scully era, it became apparent that the series had evolved into a corporate mascot and televised ‘tradition’ regardless of its quality (possibly due to the safety net of its awe-inspiring legacy during the 1990s), which incentivized the writing team to cease actually investing effort into the show and coasting merely to collect their substantially growing paychecks as opposed to virtually kill themselves a ninth or tenth time to produce a season of the show only to be met with an identical challenge indefinitely for a show that, by 1998, had clearly run most of its creative course; it’s simply not human nature to continue the level of effort the show’s first eight seasons required to create for the length of time demanded by Fox without some form of economizing, which the writers, I guess, were content to agree with. Resultantly, the Scully era is the first era of the show to feel genuinely lazy, yet it’s a frustrated, aggressive laziness typical of burnt-out comedy writers self-consciously writing for a series they are full aware is past its peak.
Of course, while the decline in quality obviously set in under Scully’s reign of terror, Jean’s ascension arguably worsened this decline by allowing him to (at least allegedly) purchase a stake in the franchise (granting him job security both as a stakeholder in a multi-million dollar media franchise and due to his public reputation as a founding father of the ‘beloved’ classic seasons (or, at least, half of them)) and thus rapidly transform the writers’ room into, judging by the social media walls of Selman and co., a Harvard grad club (note that an episode is almost never promoted or discussed by the current crew through its actual plot or characterization but through some form of increasingly transparent gimmick, typically a specific pop culture reference or the ‘fun’ they had playing around with the latest celebrity guest of the week, with no indication or second judgement of the quality of the references or guests in question seemingly registering) and relive his youth writing for seasons 1-4 (hence the show’s insistence on clinging to its past by rehashing the same fix or sive plots repeatedly) basically reducing the series’s crew to a collection of middle-aged men locked within a cushy gig where they can meet high-profile people, play around with their relatively high budget (hence all the elaborate-yet-meaningless pop-culture references during the Jean seasons) and be paid substantial checks in a way requiring minimal effort due to the show’s inevitable continuation – and, in the circumstance that the crew do manage to achieve genuine quality mildly reminiscent of the classic era, they seem to shrink away from repeating their success as if they’re concerned that viewers will either notice the subpar basement-level quality their episodes typically rest at (shattering the illusion of the show ‘still being the same Simpsons’ from the classic era due to its characters, running gags, repeated plots and Al Jean’s stamp of approval) or that they’ll be forced by public demand to produce more episodes of such a level of quality, which I can only assume the writers don’t see as sustainable when you’re left in an otherwise attractive job tied to a show destined to continue for eternity. I’m not saying that no one left within the crew/writing team still cares, it’s simply that their hunger to prove both the show and themselves has evaporated, and that psychology is basically mirrored through the Jean era’s insistence on conservatively clinging to the same tired status quo and lame jokes for season after season (in other words, the Jean era almost seems to be produced akin to an assembly line or corporate product, which would, again, explain its crushing safeness and artificially repetitious storytelling).
Oh, I see what you mean! Maybe if I pushed Al Jean out of the way, I could be the new show runner of the Simpsons for 3 to 6 years and help whatever writers want to get The Simpsons out of a rut by doing something new with characters or core elements of the show (besides aging them up) by not needless “chaining it to its past” which really depends on your definition of the past it is chained to, if you could please clarify that for me.
I could even write some great episodes myself if I watched all 672 episodes from all 3 decades to know what works and what doesn’t work. That is why I compile a list of what episodes I determine to be the 10 best and 10 worst from all 3 decades. If all the other writers only have like, a few good ideas within them, then all we need to make a really great season are to put together the best ideas from 10+ different writers on staff! Everyone wins because I would not force them to produce episodes as great as they used to because I can spread them around. I would also eliminate “tell, don’t show”, bring back Stark Raving Dad, and only allow for modern pop-culture references if they actually have a purpose or make for a good joke in a story not revolving around them.
And you know what, creator central? I don’t care if better new episodes actually do cause viewers to notice “subpar basement-level quality” episodes, because what matters is that we make better episodes going forward! But yeah, in your incredibly long speech there, you do have a point about the possible issue with…Al Jean reliving his youth of Seasons 1 through 4 by accepting the same plot 6 times-oh. Now I might know what Mike meant by The Simpsons being chained to its past!!!
creator central, do you believe that The Simpsons’s subpar basement-level quality episodes are as bad as The Emoji Movie? Worst than The Emoji Movie? Or is The Emoji Movie still something worse than bad The Simpsons episodes? I don’t know how to stop The Simpsons because They’ll Never Stop The Simpsons, and not even the best possible or worst possible final episode could stop it, so it seems.
I just want to be a better The Simpsons show runner for 3 years, write some of my own episodes to lead by example, and maybe teach Al Jean a lesson about not sticking to the past and recycling weaker versions of old plot lines or trying something new. Because there has to be a better solution than stopping The Simpsons, or at least a solution as good as that to make The Simpsons better in the near future.
I am not exactly sure what episode ruined the series, or what partiuclar episodes in a collection of bad episodes ruined The Simpsons for you, but for me, only REALLY bad episodes like…That 90s Show, Mona Leaves-a, Wedding for Disaster, Pay Pal, Three Scenes Plus a Tag From a Marriage, or Flanders’ Ladder, how those episodes operate and what they do with the characters, only things in that particular set of bad episodes can really tarnish the legacy of The Simpsons for me and maybe you. You were the one who said Wedding for Disaster took a dump on A Milhouse Divided!
This is the third episode in a row that has no “One Good Line/Moment” moment. This’ll be Season 28 level of crap, ain’t it?
Gosh, I hope not! There had better be a good moment in the next three episodes or we are done for! I hate being done for.
Isn’t Carl married, anyway? I feel like that was previously established, but i don’t remember when and really don’t care enough to bother looking it up
I don’t get this one at all. The title makes no sense. Or is it supposed to be a reference to Homer on a boat by him being a gorilla? I don’t know. This episode just happened and I have nothing I can say I liked about it.
I groaned at the fact that they brought Wily with them to free a whale just to have it be a Free Wily joke. As for Bart’s whole thing with the gorilla, didn’t we have already have an episode where Bart helped a gorilla? Or am I thinking of something else?
Homer having a boat should have been funny, but instead, it seemed pointless. How stupid are Lenny and Carl anyway? I don’t get that sequence, though, I did slightly chuckle when Homer scooted by them at work and they ignored him in order to work.
Overall, just another lackluster, forgettable episode from this forgettable season.
BTW, did anyone else notice that Lisa left the roof hatch open when she went back downstairs while Bart and Wily were on the roof, but then the camera angle changes and it’s closed? Boy, I hope someone got fired for that blunder. 😀