Bart Gets an F (aka Well, Back To The Forecastle of The Pequod)

In the midsection of 1990, back when The Simpsons was culture's hottest new plaything, revered by zeitgeist and loudly denounced as a threat by various conservative commentators, its early propensity for boat-rocking could be recapitulated in a single item of merchandise - the infamous t-shirt in which Bart claimed to be an underachiever "And proud of it, man". The statement was deemed so inflammatory, and so contrary to the ethos of the American education system, that it was cited as the primary stimulus for a spate of bannings of Bart Simpson t-shirts in numerous schools across America. The nature of that shirt was really two-fold, communicating the anarchic spirit of the callow cartoon sitcom and its willingness to ruffle the feathers of the established order, while being symptomatic of the money-spinning sloganeering that threatened to brand the series as an obnoxious fad (of the kind The Simpsons would later brutally skewer in the 1994 episode "Bart Gets Famous"). Judging by the various little nods and in-jokes that were already working their way into the scripts by the show's second season, the writers viewed the explosion of Simpsons merchandise as a mixed blessing, treating it with bemusement but also anxiety. The series may have been becoming more confident and refined off the back of Season 1, but there was also a certain wariness that accompanied its rapid rise to fame, a cautiousness about the possibility that it could all come crashing down at any second. At first glance, "Bart Gets an F" (7F03), which had the honor of opening the greatly-anticipated Season 2, on October 11th 1990, appears to have been purposely conceived in an effort to put that contentious t-shirt slogan into a broader context; this much is explicitly denied on the episode's DVD commentary, but it's hard to believe that it wasn't an influence in some way -  there's a scene where Dr Pryor, Springfield Elementary's little-seen educational psychologist, appropriates the wording of the infamous t-shirt, transforming it into the judgement of a befuddled authority figure attempting to force Bart into a tidy little pigeonhole. It's a joke at the expense of the shirt, but also the people who didn't get the message of the shirt and insisted on turning its very existence into an exercise in hand-wringing.

Those looking to defend the controversial shirt would point out that, if you looked closely, the word "underachiever" was featured in quotation marks, in a box above Bart's head, and was not actually included in his speech bubble. As such, it would be wrong to interpret the designation as coming from Bart's own lips. "Underachiever" was the unhelpful and derogatory label, handed down by authorities who were less interested in understanding Bart than in compartmentalising him, "And proud of it, man!" was the defiant response. All that Bart was really conveying is that he was a survivor, ready to take whatever snap judgements were assigned him and to wield them against his detractors (not that the t-shirts could necessarily be read as meaningful indicators of the show's intentions - elsewhere on the commentary for "Bart Gets an F", the staff are surprised to note that Bart actually does say "Cowabunga!" in this episode, and that it wasn't just an attempt by the merchandising department to ride on the coattails of the Ninja Turtles). Bart did not actually aspire to be an underachiever, as anyone who'd seen the Season 1 episode "Bart The Genius" could have told you. There, we saw Bart take a sincere crack at completing a math test, before succumbing to the temptation to cheat, and pride was certainly not what he felt on being trolled by his precocious classmates during a lunch break. "Bart Gets an F" makes the theme pivotal to "Genius" even more pronounced - namely, the problem of how Bart is to survive, knowing that he won't survive by merely adhering to the rules the established system requires of him. An irony that's present throughout the episode is that Bart clearly is a child with a great deal of ingenuity and creativity, as he demonstrates with the assortment of wily tricks he pulls in the hopes of circumventing his situation and preventing his academic deficiencies from being exposed. But this is not the kind of ingenuity the system favours, and in "F" Bart is made to face the worst of his fears - that after one failure too many, he'll be caught out, branded as stupid and denied the possibility to ever be recognised as anything else. "F" deals with how much it hurts to be labelled; whatever profession Bart could possibly have to be proud of being called an underachiever is blatantly in self-defence.

Like "Bart The General", "Bart Gets an F" takes a universally relatable subject and humanises Bart by having him grapple with it. Who hasn't had their stomach absolutely wrenched by the prospect of sitting an exam for which we felt ill-prepared? Even the swottiest of us have little immunity to the examination blues, and the psychological scars they leave behind run deep. The last exam I personally took was in 2007, yet I still intermittently have nightmares about them to this day, and I know I'm not alone - it's the most cliched type of bad dream you can possibly have, next to being caught naked in public. Here, the test Bart is required to take is not in itself an especially major one, but there is an awful lot riding on it. Following a string of recent failures, Bart has been given an ultimatum; either he passes his upcoming history test or he'll made to repeat the fourth grade, something that Pryor admits upfront is going to be shameful and emotionally crippling to him. On this occasion, Bart has no choice but to do things by the book, the one thing he suspects may be beyond his skill set.

Bart's battle for survival was, appropriately enough, echoed in the concurrent fortunes of the series, for at the time that "Bart Gets an F" debuted, The Simpsons was facing an insurmountable challenge of its own. Keeping momentum going after the monster success of Season 1 was always going to be an uphill task, but compounding the matter was Fox's decision to move the show from its established Sunday timeslot to Thursday night, to compete directly against one of the heavy-hitters of the era, NBC's The Cosby Show. The media had an absolute field day in drumming up the rivalry between the brash young Bart and the reliable (now disgraced) Bill Cosby, with most camps expecting Cosby's sitcom to come out on top. They were right, too - although initial estimates had "Bart Gets an F" pegged as the ratings victor, the final results gave the edge to Cosby, and he continued to best them for most of the duration of their rivalry. On the commentary, the production team make it clear that they were opposed to the move, and a good chunk of their discussion therein is taken up lamenting the impact on the show's ratings. The ratings it did achieve were deemed strong enough by Fox standards for the series to endure, but The Simpsons didn't thrive in the Thursday night line-up as it had on Sunday. Mike Reiss goes so far as to question how much bigger the show might have been if the move had never been imposed. I'll admit that I was a bit taken back by that suggestion - after all, it's The Simpsons. How much bigger did it need to be? But I suppose it's important to keep in mind that, in terms of purely ratings, "Bart Gets an F" represented the absolute peak of the series' popularity. That, by no small means, can be attributed to the stronghold that Bart as a character currently had on zeitgeist. While "Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish" was at one time slated to be the season premiere, "Bart Gets an F" was ultimately moved to the front due to it being the age of Bartmania, and kicking things off with a Bart-centred story was deemed the best strategy. This was a good move - its failure to beat The Cosby Show notwithstanding, "Bart Gets an F" still drew higher ratings than any other episode in the series' history. More than three decades on and its status as the highest rated episode of The Simpsons has yet to be surpassed. In other words, it reached its zenith as it was barely getting started.

The series' remarkable longevity also means that there is an additional irony that pervades "Bart Gets an F", and which would have been totally non-existent back in 1990. The threat Bart faces is one of stagnation, which he visualises by means of a nightmare in which he is literally trapped in the fourth grade a good three decades or so onward, and still hasn't memorised the name of that dratted pirate from Treasure Island (his son, Bart Junior, has already surpassed him on that front). It is a patently ridiculous scenario, but it touches on a deeper fear still, that once he has been pigeonholed as academically challenged he will never transcend this, be it through his own inability or the weight of the stigma. There is a sense that this stagnation is already happening - while Lisa, who is a whole two years younger than Bart, has numerous A-graded papers adorned across the Simpsons' refrigerator, the height of Bart's academic career was apparently a picture of a cat that he drew in the first grade. His theoretical reward for defying expectation will be permission to progress, and to grow beyond his current status as the troublesome underachiever of grade no. 4 - a departure that will not be happening, due to the series' dependency on maintaining the status quo and keeping all of the characters in their allotted places. Sorry Bart, but you may in fact be doomed to repeat the fourth grade for all eternity. The only thing that has changed is that, sadly, Marcia Wallace is no longer with us, necessitating Edna Krabappel's removal from the picture. But Bart himself certainly hasn't gone anywhere, making his struggle in this episode effectively all for naught. This is the ultimate cruel joke that the Simpsons universe has insisted on playing on Bart, long after forcing him to miss out on the revelries of Snow Day. It's a cruelty that took some years to become truly apparent, and it grows more salient with each passing year.

The metaphysical futilities of the matter notwithstanding, Bart is a bright kid, but for some reason he can't knuckle down and memorise the information he needs to tick all the right boxes, even when his academic credibility depends on it. Colonial history just isn't as interesting to him as playing Escape From Grandma's House down at the Noiseland Arcade, and before he knows it the whole evening is gone. Part of the problem is that he clearly sucks at time management, which isn't so uncommon for a child of his age. We could certainly say a few things about how the school, while keen to chastise and stigmatise Bart for his repeated failures, doesn't seem to making much of an effort to otherwise engage him. But it seems to me that a great chunk of the blame rests with Homer and Marge, who could be doing a better job of overseeing all of this and ensuring that Bart is setting aside adequate time in which to study - or, heaven forbid, sitting down and attempting to go through a few of the details with him. Instead, Homer physically drags him away from an intended cram session to watch Big Gorilla Week on the Million Dollar Movie channel, while Marge's knee-jerk response is to optimistically insist that Bart is just a late bloomer (she does not actually believe this, judging by her openness to the possibility of holding Bart back a grade). It's not something that the episode makes an explicit deal out of, or even implicitly alludes to much, outside of a scene where Homer and Marge find Bart asleep atop his textbook and wonder why he keeps on failing, in spite of his good intentions. But why indeed.

The next morning, Bart wakes up ill-prepared for his test, but manages to feign a convincing enough case of amoria phlebitis for the school nurse to send him home. After a day of ill-gotten ice cream and television, his next step is to telephone Milhouse and quiz him for the answers - a fatal miscalculation, as we discover the following day that Milhouse himself did very poorly, although still well enough to put Bart in the shade. (Note: some viewers find it confusing that Bart manages to score worse than Milhouse by supposedly replicating Milhouse's answers - the current summary on Wikipedia puts it down to Ms Krabappel giving him a different set of questions, but this much is never stated in the episode itself. Personally, I would take Bart's poorer result as indication that he even managed to do a half-assed job of committing that ill-advised cheat sheet to memory.) This latest failure ends up being the straw that breaks the loaded camel's back, with Pryor being brought in to give his grim recommendation (surprisingly, for an episode so heavily centred around the school, we see little of Skinner throughout). Bart manages to convince the higher powers to give him one last chance to prove that he is capable of doing better, but has ample doubts himself and looks to guidance from an outside source. He starts by reaching out to Otto, the school employee who acts the least like an authority figure, and thus the one to whom Bart finds it easiest to relate. All the same, Bart is sharp enough to recognise that Otto's response, which is to assure him that being held back a grade is no big deal, is not one he should be swallowing - his proclamation that, "I got held back in the fourth grade myself, twice. And look at me! Now I DRIVE the school bus!", merely feeds into Bart's concerns about never escaping the cycle. Instead, he turns to self-professed "natural enemy" Martin Prince, in the hopes that he can teach him a thing or two about academic prowess in return for a few pointers in improving his schoolyard reputation.

When Martin was introduced in "Bart The Genius", he was effectively the anti-Bart - whereas Bart was the perpetual rebel who lived to upset the apple cart, Martin was the kind of impeccably well-behaved child that authority figures can only dream of. Appealing to the higher-ups came as naturally to him as undermining them did to Bart. In "Genius" Martin's own outlook on the rivalry seemed to vacillate from sincere obliviousness (imploring Bart not to bear some simple-minded grudge against him for wanting to protect the school from vandalism) to knowingly relishing any opportunity to get one up on Bart (reminding Ms Krabappel that Bart is supposed to face the window during exams so that he cannot copy his neighbour's paper). The two of them were set up as so diametrically opposed that Bart forming an alliance with Martin and bringing out his latent rebel feels like it could have been used as the basis of a entire episode in itself. Here, it makes up only a small portion of the story, yet the episode still cranks a delectable amount of mileage from it, delving into Martin's character and illuminating a few hidden depths and vulnerabilities in just a handful of minutes. Bart wins the attentions of Prince by latching onto his Achilles heel, which is to say his flagrant lack of popularity among his peers. Martin has no social rapport with the other children, but has always assumed that they admire him from afar, and seems genuinely dismayed to discover that his prize-winning dioramas and years of service as a hall monitor in fact mean nothing to them. But even before then, there's a moment where he finds himself standing on the sidelines of a schoolyard ball game and seems to register how out of his depth he is amid the rituals of his fellow students, returning to Herman Melville's Moby Dick with the sad resignation, "Well, back to the forecastle of the Pequod." It's a great line, evocative of a sinking ship, suggesting that Bart and Martin, in spite of their polarities, are each mutually doomed for their respective deficiencies. It also calls attention to how many references there are throughout the episode to monstrous animals and their attempted conquest - the episode opens with Martin giving an impassioned analysis of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and The Sea, a text The Simpsons would homage more extensively at the tail-end of the season with "The War of The Simpsons". Ahab's hunt for the white whale and Santiago's battle with the giant marlin might be seen as indicative of Bart's own quest to reassert his pride and proficiency atop an ocean of despondency that's all set to drag him down into its depths. He is at war with the wayward part of himself that he just can't seem to tame into submission. Conversely, Homer's sympathy for the plight of King Kong knock-off Gorilla The Conqueror - "It's so unfair! Just because he's different!" (and speaking as one who always roots for the monsters in these things, his sentiment is greatly appreciated) - would appear to align Bart's struggle with that of the beastly entities themselves. He is the aberrant outcast the school authorities are intent on vanquishing for not conforming to their pre-determined standards, and he's headed for a metaphorical harpooning if he cannot change his course. His bargain with Martin is rooted in the assumption that the influence of the teacher's pet might lessen his own feral tendencies; instead, he ends up creating a monster out of Martin. After being coaxed into pushing a boy into the girls' lavatory, Martin develops a taste for schadenfreude and decides that what his life needs is more adrenalin and less academia. He runs off to the arcade with Milhouse, Richard and Lewis (those last two were still desperately clinging on to relevancy, but it wouldn't be long now), leaving Bart in the lurch on the night before the test. Bart's influence rubbing off a little too successfully on Martin is another plot development that feels as though it could have occupied an entire third-act conflict, but the episode cheekily allows it to settle itself - Martin is still a rebel by the end, apparently going so far as to emulate the behaviour he abhorred Bart for in "Genius", only for everything to have been conveniently restored to factory settings by his next appearance. We are living in a time loop here, after all.

The one tactic that it seemingly never occurs to Bart to do, but feels like it should have been obvious, would be to have asked Lisa to help with his studies. I mean, she's right there in the next room and I suspect she'd be far less likely to rescind on any agreement than Martin. From a narrative perspective she serves a different purpose, which is to provide an outlet for Bart's conscience - more specifically his underlying recognition that his efforts to bluff his way through life, while protractedly avoiding facing up to the real nitty gritty, are ultimately going to get him nowhere. Lisa is the only character who calls Bart out on his feigned case of amoria phlebitis; her exact words, "Everyone knows you're faking it, Bart", would appear flagrantly untrue, given that he has clearly fooled Marge, Homer and the school nurse, but they get at a deeper reality - one that, judging by his response ("Well, everyone had better keep their mouth shut"), Bart is all-too wary of. Lisa's astuteness comes up again toward the end of the episode, when, having been abandoned by Martin, Bart falls back on his very last resort, which is to put his hands together and beg for divine intervention - he asks the highest authority of them all to find a way of cancelling school so that he may have one more day in which to make the facts sink in. When he wakes up the following morning to find Springfield covered in a thick layer of snow and the school non-operational, Bart's first instinct is to rush outside and play with the other children, but he's stopped by his sister. She admits to having eavesdropped on his prayer session, and reminds him of why he asked for the day off in the first place. It's another classic Lisa moment in an episode where she otherwise barely features; she seems both perturbed that God has apparently deigned to answer Bart's lowly request, and indignant that he was all poised to squander the miracle on a day of sledding. Bart can see Lisa's point, so he retreats to his desk and attempts to get down to some studying. It doesn't go smoothly, because as would become rapidly obvious as the series went on, whatever higher power sits atop of The Simpsons universe is an absolute bastard. It hears Bart's pleas and appears to sympathise, but is, at best, insisting on testing him further, or at worst, looking to have a bit of spiteful sport at his expense. Bart gets his wish for an extra day's revision, all while the rest of Springfield gets to enjoy what is formally declared (by Mayor Quimby, making his debut appearance) as Snow Day, the funnest day in the town's history. All of our friends are there - Jacques, Kashmir, Bleeding Gums Murphy. Even Sideshow Bob is able to make the occasion. (The one character who is mysteriously absent is Herman; they actually flag this up on the DVD commentary, noting the skipped opportunity for a sight gag with Herman's missing arm disrupting the circle of townspeople linking hands.) The sequence where all these assorted Springfieldians unleash their inner children in the frozen wonderland is a beautiful one indeed, illustrating how rich and developed the supporting cast was already coming this early on in the series' lifespan. But it comes as an absolute punch in the gut to Bart, who does his best to shut it all out but is barely able to focus. There's no such thing as a free lunch, but did the Powers That Be not appreciate that Bart already has a serious problem with keeping his attention span in check? It leads to a genuinely harrowing moment, where Bart takes to repeatedly slapping his face, admonishing himself with the threat, "You wanna be held back a grade?"

The resolution to the episode has that characteristic Simpsons back-handedness. A more conventional sitcom might have ended with Bart not only passing his test, but passing with flying colours, thus upholding that trite assumption that you can do anything if you put your mind to it. "Bart Gets an F" insists on a harsher but far more honest answer, that it is entirely possible to try your hardest and still not succeed. The following day when Bart turns in his paper, he asks Ms Krabappel to mark it on the spot and spare him the uncertainty. She complies, and hands Bart back a score of 59, just one point short of a D-. Bart is so crestfallen that he immediately bursts into tears; we the people had seen precedent for Bart crying in "Bart The General", but it comes as a shock to Edna, who clearly isn't used to such unbridled displays of emotion from her least favourite student. Even when she tries to be sympathetic she can't help but come off as damning - "I'd have thought you'd be used to failing by now", she suggests, apparently amazed that Bart had ever expected he could do better. It's here that Bart's actual salvation arises, not from a triumphant display of academic mettle, but from his casual regurgitation of a random historical factoid - Bart professes to feeling empathy for George Washington for surrendering Fort Necessity to the French Empire in 1754, knowledge unwittingly absorbed during his ostensibly futile study efforts. Edna is impressed by his demonstration of independent learning and agrees to give him that urgently-needed extra point. She does of course have her own motives for wanting to bump Bart's grade up to a D-, since she wasn't exactly relishing the prospect of another year as his teacher. But we sense that she is genuinely happy to cut him some slack and will take whatever excuse she can get to do so, putting Bart in the clear and and incurring his spur-of-the-moment gratitude.

The punchline of the episode takes a similarly backhanded tone, with the family gathered around Bart as his by-a-whisker D- (and barely obliterated F) earns pride of place on the refrigerator door. Not only is his achievement framed, half-tenderly and half-facetiously, as no less monumental than any of the Lisa-procured A's with which it presently rubs shoulders, his admission that "Part of this D- belongs to God" would appear to posit this meagre accomplishment as being of enormous cosmic significance. Which it is. Earlier on, Lisa had offered this observation about Bart's supposed friends in high places: "I'm no theologian. I don't know who or what God is exactly. All I know is that he's a force more powerful than Mum and Dad put together, and you owe him big." For the purposes of this particular episode, I think we can answer Lisa's musing, which is to say that "God" is a higher being named David M. Stern, and he is indeed more powerful than Homer and Marge combined. It's important to keep in mind that whenever characters in fictional shows pray to God to intervene in their mortal affairs and change the impending outcome, they are in effect asking the writers to grant them a deus ex machina. Bart's closing words are an acknowledgement that, in spite of how heavily the odds seemed to be stacked against him, the universe was always fundamentally on his side - he and his family are its very nexus, and the Powers That Be are inevitably going to offer him a way out of whatever predicaments they thrust him into, even if they'll insist on wringing twenty-odd minutes' worth of laughs from his suffering in between. Having glimpsed the inherent cruelties of his universe, Bart feels at peace with it and assured of his place within. Just as well, because it's a relationship that could continue for some decades yet to come.