“I never thought I’d win this easy.” – Bart Simpson
“This has nothing to do with you, Simpson. I have many, many issues with my beloved smother-, mother.” – Principal Skinner
The B-plot in this episode was a forced rehash of “Homie the Clown”. The A-plot was, almost impressively, even dumber, with Skinner pulling a giant combat knife out of his mother’s back and not noticing that she wasn’t actually dead before trusting himself to Homer and Bart(!). Before we got to that, however, we had plenty of Bart acting wildly out of character, more exposition than you can throw a screenwriting book at, and, oh what the hell, a nuclear submarine.
- Even the couch gag has to electrocute Homer. It’s like a nervous twitch.
- Skinner exposited his whole announcement to the school. This isn’t starting well.
- “No, Skinner said I had a clean slate, so right now I’m as good as any kid!” – Seriously, that was the previous scene
- Lisa actually asks Bart “What are you doing?” – Fry’s holophoner opera for Leela was less hacktacular.
- Homer farting with each step into the yard isn’t as bad as that time they did a whole Halloween segment about him farting, but it’s pretty bad.
- Lisa just biked up to Krusty, who helpfully told her everything that was going on in his life. I liked this scene better when it was in “Bart the Fink”.
- “You’re like egg salad at a picnic, Simpson” – They do know they don’t have a laughtrack to hoot and ooh and the appropriate times, don’t they? Sometimes I’m not sure.
- Bart’s little action sequence about trying not to be late was almost completely pointless. The only good thing about it is that now I can stash that dumb truck into my inventory on Tapped Out.
- “Time to celebrate with a fruit on the bottom yogurt” – Skinner telling us exactly what he’s about to do, I think that makes on for every major character in this episode.
- This b-plot about world Krustys (Krustii?) is atrocious, even before you get to the whole “Homie the Clown” thing.
- Okay, Irish Krusty is funny.
- So, the fake death thing is dumb, but it just keeps getting dumber with Skinner going along with it/falling for it. Scooby Doo had more well conceived plots.
- There’s the repeat of Irish Krusty, which isn’t as funny as the first one. When they do come up with something funny, they really can’t resist overusing it.
- And now Milhouse and Maggie are involved because . . . huh?
- Almost as an afterthought, they decided to wrap up the B-plot with a chase scene. I guess that was nice of them.
Anyway, the ratings are in and they are good by current Zombie Simpsons standards and wretched by the standards of Zombie Simpsons of a few years ago. Last night’s hapless remake made just 6.82 million people with they were watching Season 6. That’s a high for this year, yet well below the average for even Season 22.
