Original airdate: November 24, 2019
The premise: Three spine-tinging stories… wait, didn’t we do this already this year? “A-Gobble-ypto” retells the first Thanksgiving as a violent turkey massacre through the lens of an avian Simpson family. In “The Fourth Thursday After Tomorrow,” Homer buys an AI system imbued with Marge’s DNA to help with the holiday cooking, but Marge quickly finds herself jealous of her more efficient artificial counterpart. In “The Last Thanksgiving,” far from Earth on a space vessel, the kids of Springfield Elementary find themselves terrorized by a sentient blob of cranberry sauce.
The reaction: Similar to “Halloween of Horror” from five or so years ago, we get another double dipping into the TOH format for one year, this time featuring macabre Thanksgiving-themed tales. It’s not shocking that this episode was much, much better than this year’s incredibly tepid Halloween offering. It is shocking that this was one of the most competently made episodes in a good, long while. I don’t know if I’d bring it to the level of “great,” but I was surprised throughout how all three stories went decently crafted and paced. The first features a bunch of our Springfield residents as turkeys, and others as Pilgrims seeking to make them their dinner. Things get graphic real quick when turkey Maude gets her head blown off, turning her into a bloody mess. This whole episode is pretty brutal; I really don’t know why the Halloween shows have been rendered bloodless, but here it’s fine. Is it because they’re just turkeys? Anyway, it’s a decent little story of the turkey Simpsons saving each other and reuniting, which was fine enough. Hearing the voice cast gobble as their characters was disarmingly adorable, I’m not gonna lie. Story #2 felt like a reworking on “House of Whacks,” the TOH with the smart house voiced by Pierce Brosnan, but here, it’s Marge that finds herself threatened by an AI of herself. In fact, I think “Whacks” kind of hurt this story a bit, in that maybe they felt they couldn’t have had the conclusion be that the AI Marge tries to murder OG Marge and take her place, because it would just like that story they did eighteen years ago (holy SHIT do I feel old). AI Marge’s great escape over the Internet was a good conclusion though. The last segment I think I enjoyed the most just because it was mostly dumb fun, a giant blob of cranberry sauce sucking out the bones of young children. Hilarious! It’s also an Alien parody of sorts, but unlike the last decade of so of Halloween segments, this story actually work unto itself because it’s using familiar pop culture trappings to tell a different kind of story (it also helps Alien is firmly in the cultural zeitgeist as a classic movie, unlike, say, Mr. & Mrs. Smith or Dead Calm). I guess because it involves aliens and outer space, but by the end, I was reminded of “The Man Who Came To Be Dinner,” the totally-not-canon-maybe Kang and Kodos episode, which surprised the fuck out of me by actually being the best episode in years. Is that was it takes for this show to start getting better, to do these crazy-go-nuts, off-the-way, not-strictly-canonical stories? I mean, after over thirty years on the air, why not? The only thing really holding this episode back is I didn’t get a whole lot of laughs out of it, which is a big mark against it, but it’s still easily the best of the season thus far, maybe the best in the last few years.
Three items of note:
– The special begins with Marge coming out from behind a curtain on stage to address the audience, a whopping twenty-nine years after she introduced the very first Treehouse of Horror in the same fashion. I know I’ve mentioned it several times before, but sometimes I get kinda sad hearing Julie Kavner’s poor strained voice. I assume she’s not in any sort of pain doing it, but the woman’s pushing 70, and it can’t be easy to maintain that gravely tone. It was especially worrisome in the second segment when the two Marges were talking back and forth with each other. I just felt like asking Kavner to stop and offering her a lozenge.
– It got to a point in the first segment where things almost seemed like they were getting too violent. We get multiple bloody turkey beheadings in a row, Willie gets his eyes impaled by corn cobs in a town wide panic, and Lou and Eddie get horrifically picked apart and killed by a murder of crows. I’m still curious about why this show is so graphic when most of the recent TOHs aren’t. In the last Halloween show we saw Burns and Smithers get their heads bitten off completely bloodless, and yet here, it’s like an orgy of violence by comparison.
– This is Russi Taylor’s final vocal performance on the show, and it sure is a doozy. Toward the end of the last segment, Martin traps Bart, Lisa and Milhouse in a locked room with the cranberry monster, having aligned with it (“I admire its purity! Its lack of messy humanity! This ‘creature,’ as you call it, is unencumbered by the petty morality of a dying species!”) He then strips, wishing to become one with the gelatin, killing himself in a magnificently gross fashion. Aping on horror/sci-fi movie tropes and staying true to character, Taylor’s final hour as Martin proved to be a moving and effective one. What better way to go out than Martin’s formless skin slapping pathetically against a metal door? Taylor was truly one of the greats in the world of voice acting, and she will truly be missed.
One good line/moment: Aside from Martin’s final moments, we get a really solid joke toward the very end when the ship crash lands on an alien world. Bart and Lisa rush to hug their parents who just woke up from their sleep pods. Santa’s Little Helper exits his own pod to join them. One final pod opens to reveal the skeleton of Snowball II and nobody reacts, and then the scene ends. Beautiful.
Me Blog Write Good 
Wow! I didn’t think this would happen, but now that it did, I’m glad you found another special episode that you liked as much as Halloween of Horror at the end of the 2010s, especially with Russi Taylor’s final episode as Martin Prince in the YABF production cycle. Although, in actual production order, Russi’s final episode as Martin that isn’t Treehouse of Horror XXX is the Dateline: Springfield episode, Woo-Hoo Dunnit.
I was going to complain about why they decided to revive the anthology episodes from the dead but hey, good on you for liking this! Then again, you also liked “Tales from the Public Domain” (I do to, admittedly. I actually watched the Hamlet section after reading Hamlet in college) Weird how the new episodes you like the most are the ones we least expect, such as their 30 for 30 parody and last year’s Itchy & Scratchy episode that satirizes feminism. Maybe there is hope for this abysmal season after all.
I thought it was an interesting idea to have an anthology story for Thanksgiving. It’s also the second episode I watched this season and was a massive improvement over the joke that was the Treehouse of Horror one. Of course, they still screwed it up a bit.
The opening bit with Marge coming out was a cool callback to the early THoHs. I found it rather amusing. I also loved how horrific the first segment was. It was like they were going all out to make up for the Halloween episodes no longer being horrifying. The biggest shocker for me was Maude Turkey getting her head blown off. That caught me off guard, something this show hasn’t done in years.
But then the second segment happened, which was utterly boring. All I did was think of “House of Whacks” from THoHXII and that was not a good thing since that was an awful story back then. It did have a few laughs early on though, so that’s something. It also seemed to drag on for quite a while.
As for the last segment, it was a mixed bag. I liked parts of it, I laughed at parts of it, but then it fell to pieces in the long run with a really dumb ending. Still, it is hands down the best Simpsons episode I have watched since Halloween of Horror.
DON’T FORGET:
YOU’RE HERE FOREVER.
I think I enjoyed the first segment most because it was done almost entirely in pantomime for the first half. There was some dialogue for the villagers, but the turkeys never spoke until the end where we see subtitles. WIth pantomime, no jokes or really off lines can be said.
And yes, even Homer’s “Why you little” gobble got a bit of a chuckle out of me. This may very well be the first time since Season 12’s “A Tale of Two Springfields” that a strangling or “Why you little” gag actually made me laugh.
I have to admit, this episode was between ok to pretty good.
But I DID tear up a bit of how Martin chooses to be one with the gelatin monster, because of how it’s the last time we’ll hear Taylor’s voice. May she rest in peace.
Good episode preferred Bob’s Burgers and Bless the Harts’ specials but this one was better than THOH at least funny
Reminded me a lot of Futurama, especially the last segment. There were two Futurama episodes that came to mind, the one about people’s life forces being sucked out of their bodies, and the one where a monster sucks out people’s skeletons.
Very good episode. All three segments worked well, in particular the last one which was solid entertainment. Episodes like this remind you that there is still an occasional pulse in this series.