Another Yuletide is upon us, and I can think of no better way of heralding the season than by circling back to a concern I touched on earlier this year in my coverage of "Pin Gal", but there didn't have scope to delve into - how IS Bob getting by in this cruel, crazy, beautiful world? I've brought you up to speed on the state of things for my other golden boy Jacques, and laid out in staggering detail how I feel about that, but what about Bob? He is, after all, the primary tie that still binds me to the series after all these years. My enthusiasm for modern Simpsons may not be up to much, but I remain so enraptured by Sideshow Bob as a character that whenever he's a new episode on the horizon, they have my undivided attention. It's not because I think there's a particularly riveting arc going on with his narrative or characterisation (to the contrary, both have been spinning their wheels for quite some time), but because he holds such immense significance to me personally. I feel like I've invested so much of myself in Bob, this peculiar-looking cartoon clown who's been around since my childhood, and for whom I've always felt this strange but unabating affinity. The fact that he's still here, and that I've been able to intermittently check in on him as I've grown up and aged over the years honestly seems pretty wild to me. Bob and I, we're on this journey to nowhere together, and I've no intention of deserting him now.
Bob made his most recent appearance only weeks ago, but in a Treehouse of Horror segment, meaning that it automatically had no bearing on his character's development or his current standing within the series' continuity (for whatever that continuity may be worth nowadays). In terms of canon appearances, Bob hasn't been seen since before the pandemic, and it just so happens that his last two episodes were both festive affairs. That in itself is a funny thing - The Simpsons went for about three decades without a seasonal Sideshow Bob installment, and then two came along, not quite at once, but in relatively close proximity. The first of these was "Gone Boy" (XABF02) of Season 29, which debuted on 10th December 2017 (just a few days ahead of Disney's announcement that they were officially buying Fox) and, of the two, boasts the more dubious Yuletide credentials. Personally, I wouldn't have classed "Gone Boy" as a Christmas episode - it's set during winter amid lots of snow-covered scenery, but other than an incidental remark from Abe about picking out a Christmas tree, there's nothing to specifically indicate that the season of good tidings is anywhere close at hand. And yet, they stuck an ostentatiously Christmas-themed variation on the opening sequence on the front, so here we are.
Thus far, I haven't spoken much about modern Bob episodes, or anything past the 1990s. Like many old-school viewers, I'm of the opinion that Season 8's "Brother From Another Series" was the last stop before a seriously rough ride - there was a significant gulf, both narratively and tonally, between his spat with Cecil and his next appearance, in Season 12's "Day of The Jackanapes", that set a negative precedent for how he'd be utilised going forward, and from which Bob as a character never truly recovered. Nevertheless, I think it's important to acknowledge that the Bob episodes that came after are not to be viewed as a monolith - within that time, there have been different eras applying their own approaches to the character, and the odd thing being done that's even quite interesting and experimental, at least in theory. Handily, these eras can be sectioned off more or less according to their decade, with the 2000s representing a particularly inauspicious time for our hero. It no doubt says something that my favourite Bob appearance from that era was in Season 20's "Wedding For Disaster", where Bob shows up for a single scene, the joke being that he is just randomly there and has nothing to do with the pivotal conflict. Of the "true" Bob episodes, "The Italian Bob" was the only halfway decent entry of the lot, with the aforementioned "Day of The Jackanapes" and "Funeral For A Fiend" each representing the absolute nadir of his career. I am willing to credit his 00s run with this much, however - with the exception of "Day of The Jackanapes", something that was maintained for most of the decade was the sense of an ongoing arc, with each new Bob appearance having some kind of meaningful impact on where he'd be situated for his next one. "The Great Louse Detective" did the unthinkable and allowed Bob to escape at the end; "The Italian Bob" went directly from there and revealed that Bob had fled to Italy, with the intention of starting a new life in a secluded village where nobody knew who he was. Then "Funeral For A Fiend" saw him return to Springfield with his newly-acquired Italian clan to cause fresh hell for the Simpsons, with the outcome that he was eventually recaptured and sent back to square one. The approach since then has been to treat that whole period as something of a lost weekend for Bob - none of its developments, including the fairly significant one of giving him a wife and child, have stuck. Continuity between Bob episodes has generally loosened, with writers typically sticking him wherever he's needed for the sake of convenience. "Wedding For Disaster" had him inexplicably out of jail and hanging out with Krusty, before he was back behind bars again for "The Bob Next Door". The 2010s also saw Bob sink to a new low in his homicidal obsessions, in that he started to do some really fucked up shit with his own body. Not so much in "The Man Who Grew Too Much", where it's more cartoonishly silly than it is gross or disturbing, but what he gets up to in "The Bob Next Door" would frankly make John Kramer vomit. I don't recommend that episode to viewers with a weak stomach. Unfortunately for them, it yielded one of the few developments that's actually impacted on subsequent Bob episodes - every now and then, we have this running gag where his facial skin will randomly peel off. Um, yay?
It might be a testament to how badly my
expectations were whittled down across the preceding decade, but I was
comparatively satisfied with Bob's run throughout the 2010s. Obviously
we weren't scaling the same glorious heights of "Sideshow Bob's Last
Gleaming" and "Brother From Another Series", but I've learned to take what I can get from these things. "The
Bob Next Door" was the only one I honestly didn't dig on any level -
once you get past the body horror angle (which is impressively gnarly for a non-Halloween episode), it's a very standard
Bob-wants-to-kill-Bart story in the most worn and misshapen of "Cape
Feare" molds (see below). The others, though, have at least something going for them. "The
Man Who Grew Too Much", for as ridiculous as its narrative trajectory gets,
has a genuinely lovely idea at its core - Bob and Lisa, two lonely
intellectuals, finally realising that they have a lot of common ground.
"Wanted: Dead Then Alive" from "Treehouse of Horror XXVI" is a pretty
good Halloween segment that yielded one of my all-time favourite Bob
quotes ("What is this Game of Thrones they're referencing?"). And then there's "Gone Boy", which finds Bob in a more introspective mood than usual. It doesn't do a whole lot more than state what's been bleedingly obvious about his character for some time, but the fact that it states it at all sets the tone for a somewhat different type of Bob encounter. This one is sympathetic toward Bob, and that much is definitely appreciated.
The title of the episode is an obvious nod to Gillian Flynn's 2012 novel Gone Girl (which became the basis of a David Fincher film in 2014), and like that story it deals with characters reacting to the disappearance and presumed death of a character who is actually very much alive, although that's as far as the plot similarities go. Homer manages to lose Bart out in the wilderness; unbeknownst to him, Bart has fallen down a manhole and become trapped inside a secret underground military bunker (which also happens to house a Titan II missile). The entirety of Springfield comes together in a frantic search for the missing boy but quickly writes him off for dead, much to the distress of his family...and to Sideshow Bob, who can't wrap his twisted head around the suggestion that something might have gotten to Bart before he did, and with his arch nemesis no longer out there he may just need to find a new hobby. That's the first thing we must address about modern Bob - his obsession with slaughtering Bart has basically eaten his brain, dominating his thought processes in a way that's often regressive to the rest of his characterisation. There comes a point where it ceases to be sinister and just becomes sad. So very, very sad. I said in my review of "Pin Gal" that Jacques' existence is looking kind of pitiful now, but he is still safely above Bob by numerous tiers in the debasement iceberg. Jacques at least has a passion and an occupation that gives him drive outside of stalking a Simpson.
My problem with most Bob episodes past the 1990s can be summed up in a nutshell - they are, broadly, way too indebted to "Cape Feare". "Cape Feare" is the episode they predominantly want to be, or at least to evoke. In some respects, that's understandable. For better or for worse, "Cape Feare" is the most beloved of Bob's appearances, and its cultural impact is undeniable. Its cheeky reappropriating of Bernard Herrmann's score for the 1962 thriller Cape Fear (also featured in the 1991 remake) managed to rewire popular perception of the theme, so that a significant chunk of people now recognise it foremost as Bob's leitmotif. But it's also the episode that bolstered perception that scheming to kill Bart is what Bob as a character is fundamentally all about - that he's a total monomaniac with no higher life's aspirations than to violently disembowel a 10-year-old child. For someone as talented and resourceful as Bob, that's a pretty dire fall from grace, yet it is the assumption that's clearly underpinning almost all of his later appearances. If you're not convinced that that wasn't all Bob cared about back in the day, then let's play a game. Of the six original Bob episodes, how many of them actually involved Bob attempting to murder Bart? By my count, only two: "Cape Feare" and "Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming". Let's narrow this down even further - how many were there in which murdering Bart was actually the be all-end all of Bob's scheme? That distinction belongs to "Cape Feare" alone. In "Last Gleaming", Bart was never Bob's primary target; rather, they happened to cross paths, and Bob took advantage of that and dragged him into his kamikaze mission. "Brother From Another Series" opens with Bob remarking that whenever he could find a spare moment, he's tried to murder Bart, which is obvious hyperbole, but within the context of the enmity running alongside wider ambitions. This is, I feel, why many of Bob's schemes post-Y2K have rung so hollow - they've lost sight of the fact that there was more to his character than him being a pathologically vindictive freak of nature with impeccably charming manners. Certainly, he's always had that vindictive streak, and would never pass up an opportunity to thoroughly spite anyone who so much as put a chink in his pride. The difference being that in his earlier years, Bob's Machiavellian endeavours tended to be also geared towards obtaining something that had value and meaning beyond his personal grudges. What he mainly desired, more than revenge, was leverage. He sought to control and influence other people, whether it came from his position as a local children's TV personality, as mayor of Springfield, or by threatening to blow up the town with a nuclear device, so that he could refashion the world to be a little more as he believed it should be. Driving him was a certain principled, if supercilious vision, in that he was deeply concerned with society as a whole and its low cultural standards (that his concerns were often valid made it all the more juicy). Bob was effectively waging his own one-man culture war, and while he no doubt saw Krusty's most devoted fan as the epitome of what he was up against, he recognised that the problem neither began with Bart nor ended with him.
An irony I often contemplate when mulling over the Cape Fear films, and their extensive influence on Bob's character trajectory, is that the 1991 version ends with this line, spoken by Juliette Lewis's character: "...if you hang onto the past, you die a little every day. And for myself, I know I'd rather live." That's a very good takeaway, and one that Bob himself has spectacularly failed to grasp over the years. My lifelong journey with my favourite character has, in the bleakest possible terms, amounted to watching him die the most harrowing and protracted of emotional deaths. Everything Bob once had going for him has been gradually snuffed out as he clings to the one toxic desire he inexplicably believes will solve everything. If only he could make like Elsa and let it go. It's not completely his fault, of course. It's not like Bob didn't already take an entirely sincere stab at going straight, all the way back in "Brother From Another Series", only to be denied transcendence of the role the status quo had decreed him. In "The Italian Bob" he attempted to get away from Springfield altogether, and for a while found happiness in a separate domain, only for those rotten Simpsons, purveyors of the status quo, to flush him out and drag him back into his old habits. There might actually be a sliver of justification in Bob's blank-eyed insistence, in this episode, that "Evil isn't a choice." The irony in question has less to do with Bob's in-universe perspective than it does the show's fixation with its own past, and how it has continually used him in a way that seems centred on chasing bygone glories. Its veneration of "Cape Feare", and its need to keep trading on memories of that episode, have effectively kept Bob's characterisation in stasis, trapping him in a past ideal of himself which was frankly always a distortion of what he stood for, heavily informed by a Hollywood picture that was itself drawing from one of the industry's past successes. Robert Mitchum, filtered through Robert De Niro, filtered through Robert Terwilliger. Instead of trying to remake Cape Fear over and over, why not let the poor guy do something truly original? Something that doesn't involve him attempting to kill Bart or getting a rake in the face? If there's some concern that it wouldn't be a Bob episode without a random rake blocking our hero's path, I would counter that "Sideshow Bob Roberts", "Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming" and "Brother From Another Series" all managed perfectly fine without it.
"Gone Boy" certainly contains no shortage of callbacks to "Cape Feare". Bob's infamous "The Bart, The" tattoo makes a reappearance, he has his inevitable rake troubles (as well as banana skin troubles, for a whisker of variation), Bob gives another passionate one-man rendition of Gilbert and Sullivan (to Milhouse, on this occasion), and the script even works in a gratuitous Hitchcock reference (Bob dreams in the title sequence for Dial M For Murder, and in Saul Bass graphics). What it's very deliberately not evoking, however, is the one key aspect that I suspect caused "Cape Feare" to resonate with viewers as strongly it did, in spite of its flagrantly shallow plotting - there, Bob was legitimately threatening. "Cape Feare" managed to make him the butt of an absolute onslaught of physical comedy, and yet still present him as someone Bart should be intensely afraid of. Here, Bob is simply a nut who doesn't know what he's doing, much less why he's doing it. When Bob and Bart finally meet, in the third act, Bart doesn't take him at all seriously, as he shouldn't. That genie isn't going back into that bottle. This is a problem that John Frink's script clearly understands all too well, hence why it has Bob come across as more ridiculous than threatening. That Bob has become a parody of himself is precisely the point; "Gone Boy" openly probes why he remains so compelled to keep targetting Bart after all this time, with the conclusion that Bob himself doesn't even comprehend it any more. By this stage, their enmity is comparable to that of Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner. In the Coyote's case, it blatantly isn't about his basic need to eat and stay alive - devising such elaborate schemes and assembling all those complex contraptions, he must burn considerably more calories than he's going to obtain from ingesting a single roadrunner. And if he's got money to buy devices from Acme, then presumably he's got money to order take-out. He continues with his pursuit, not because there is anything worthwhile to be obtained from it, but because he's too entrenched in it to back out now. His allotted role of chasing that Roadrunner has come to define who he is. Bob, similarly, has become so entrenched in his pursuit of Bart that he can't see it for the patently absurd waste of time and calories that is. What, exactly, is hoping to achieve, outside of the fact that wanting to kill Bart is apparently his thing, and he needs that relationship with Bart to validate his being?
This in itself is not radically new territory for a Bob episode to be exploring. The notion that he's developed too much of a personal attachment to the kid, however warped, to go through with the anticipated killing was integral to the resolution to "The Great Louse Detective". And the implication that life after Bart would lose all luster for Bob was the premise of "Wanted: Dead Then Alive" - of course, being a Halloween installment, Bob was there given the leeway to violently off Bart and then figure out how to reanimate him so that he could do it over and over. This was played entirely for grisly kicks, as you'd expect it to be. "Gone Boy" considers the matter from a markedly different perspective, which is to say what a fucking tragedy this all is for Bob. It occurred to me that the episode's title alludes not merely to Bart's disappearance, but to Bob's lost contact
with anything resembling reason, reality or self-respect.
What makes "Gone Boy" more interesting than your average "Cape Feare" knock-off is that it introduces a character with whom Bob is able to explicitly discuss these very concerns. The episode begins with Bob out in the open, as part of a team of prison inmates assigned to cleaning up trash off a roadside (so, naturally, Cool Hand Luke allusions abound). The inmates are instructed to join in the search for Bart, and while this sounds as though it's going to provide Bob with the ideal opportunity to escape and get dangerously close to Bart, that expectation is swiftly subverted. This particular thread doesn't go anywhere, outside of the inmates subsequently learning that the search is to be called off because Bart has been officially declared dead. Bob is so distraught that he starts to self-harm by repeatedly thwacking himself with a rake, behaviour that gets him referred to the prison psychiatrist. The psychiatrist's name is, surprisingly, never given - Bob addresses him simply as "doctor" - which is kind of a shame; he's a prominent enough figure here that I think he deserved at least to have his moniker spoken. His dialogue with Bob is amusing, thanks in part to his improbably calm demeanor, and it's nice to see Bob interacting with someone who is ostensibly more sympathetic toward him than most. Make no mistake, the guy is still recognisably a dick. He drops a weighted disc onto Bob's abdomen, and the final gag involving his character, while not exactly at Bob's expense, still leaves rather a bad taste in my mouth (call me a prig, but I just can't laugh at the implied execution of multiple mentally ill inmates). The points he makes to Bob are nevertheless valid - that his murderous obsessions have impeded his ability to derive anything meaningful out of life, and he'd do well to look on Bart's death as a release - and they clearly resonate with Bob, even if he initially rejects them. Beckoning Bob in the other direction is Bart, or at least a hallucinated version of him, who takes control of Bob like a puppet, a pointed visual metaphor illustrating how Bob has basically surrendered all of his agency to Bart. For as much as Bob strives to have Bart living in persistent terror, he has in practice allowed this 10-year-old kid to dominate him and dictate his every move.
What the psychiatrist says is sensible. What he does, less so, which is to hand his obviously unstable patient a pair of scissors and tell him to cut out Bart's image from a photograph, thus assuring himself of his ability to remove Bart from his life. A frantic Bob refuses to accept that Bart is dead, whereupon he sticks a scissor blade into the psychiatrist's leg and makes a bolt for it. And just like that, Bob is loose and free to stalk Milhouse all the way to Evergreen Terrace. Apparently, all he needed to do to escape was skewer the thigh of a man who didn't look as though he would have been able to physically stop him from running out anyway. Which is all very questionable, when you consider that he was in a psychiatric facility inside a freaking prison. Shouldn't there have been a whole squad of security on the other side of the door ready to pin him to the floor and tranquilise him? I get that plot contrivances are sometimes a necessary evil to keep a story flowing, but this is quite a big leap, Frink.
Milhouse, meanwhile, has discovered that Bart is alive and gone to the Simpsons' house with the intention of revealing his whereabouts to the family, but decides to keep his mouth shut so that he can take advantage of Lisa's fraught emotional state and her desperation for a shoulder to cry on. Which is really very rotten of Milhouse - Bob's intrusion, and his cornering of Milhouse, frankly feels like instant karma knocking the young Van Houten right in the head. On being forced to lead Bob to Bart's location, Milhouse points out the obvious - if Bob goes down the manhole and into the bunker, he'll also become trapped there. Bob, who already immured himself in his own metaphorical bunker with Bart ages ago, is naturally undaunted. The ensuing confrontation has soon escalated to the point where Bart and Milhouse are strapped to the Titan II missile, with Bob working all of the necessary controls to activate the device. With only five minutes to launch, Bart asks Bob the million dollar question - why is he doing this? The way he puts this to Bob is startling; he doesn't sound like he's attempting to manipulate him, as he did in "Cape Feare". Rather, this is Bart making a sincere attempt to understand his nemesis after all these years, and why he feels so compelled to gruesomely destroy him. By now, even Bart has lost sight of what this was once all about. Bob can't produce even a vaguely rational answer (Bob: "It's an ICBM...I Commit Bart's Murder!", Bart: "That's your justification for killing two kids?!"), which gives him pause. He telephones his psychiatrist (currently hospitalised from Bob's earlier assault with the scissors) for guidance. The psychiatrist, comically unfazed by the revelation that Bob has a couple of defenceless children at his mercy, assures him that he already knows what he wants to do. Moments later, we see the missile fire off into the air...but Bart and Milhouse are safely down in the bunker below. Bob has cut them loose, and might have metaphorically freed himself in the process.
The Bob episodes "Gone Boy" inevitably evokes, if less consciously than "Cape Feare", are "Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming" (once again, Bob's ambitions have gone nuclear) and "Brother From Another Series", in that it involves Bob making a sincere effort to go straight and managing to make peace with Bart along the way. Here their conciliation feels more cute than convincing - I mean, they actually hug at the end, a move that both parties would undoubtedly have regarded as a step too far in "Brother From Another Series". I suppose it's best read on a symbolic level, with the firing of that missile representing the total dispelling of a greater burden for Bob, leaving him and Bart free to be as chummy as they please, give or take a little lingering mistrust on both sides (Bart asks Milhouse to confirm if Bob isn't about to stick a knife in his back; Bob asks Milhouse to confirm that Bart hasn't stuck a "Kick Me" sign on his back). Of course, that missile is still going to end up somewhere - we see it crash into the Springfield Sculpture Gardens, where the pretentious aesthetes in attendance mistake it for a conceptual piece and mock the efforts of this NORAD ("More like Snore-ad!"). What happens next is a little odd; the missile apparently explodes and reduces them all to ashes, only it's presented in those same Saul Bass graphics that plagued Bob's dream earlier, leaving me unclear as to the reality of this sequence. I'm happy to write it off as another hypothetical scenario, as I'd sooner cling to my interpretation of Bob as fundamentally incapable of hurting anyone, except obviously himself. I suggest we just sweep it under the rug, as the Bass-ified Willie does.
Six months later (so the titles say, but there's still snow outside - shouldn't it be summer by now?), we find Bob back with the prison psychiatrist, exhibiting a much more optimistic outlook on life. Bob admits that, for the first time in forever, he feels real happiness, and that he now has a whole new ambition of opening up a flower shop. Hey, if they seriously want to explore Bob's aspirations of becoming a florist in future episodes, then I'm all for it. Could it be that Bob is about to get a happy ending for a change? Kind of; it's a more genteel conclusion than Bob is used to, but there is an obvious limitation on his ability to change his situation. He remains weighed down by the consequences of the life choices he's made, as signified by his now having eight (I counted) weighted discs spread out across his chest and abdomen - he acknowledges that he'll first have to go through three consecutive life sentences before he can realise his new dream. Still, the episode treats us to an additional surprise in the form of an epilogue, flashing forward by many years to reveal an older Bob (I would guess somewhere in his 60s), now released and living in a lighthouse. It's not revealed if he ever got that flower shop he wanted, but it seems that he's chosen to isolate himself from the rest of civilisation, either out of shame or because it's the only way he can keep himself out of trouble. He gets an intermittent moment of human contact with the Squeaky Voiced Teen (or a descendent of the Squeaky Voiced Teen), who shows up at his door to deliver a copy of The New Yorker. Bob divulges to the Teen that his routine now consists of maintaining the lighthouse and wandering the beach, where he writes "DIE BART DIE" in the sand each day before the tide inevitably wipes it clean. What's that all about? Is he contemplating the futility of the twisted ambition he spent countless years pursuing, and how little of a mark he was able to leave on the world, or is this some kind of cleansing ritual that never quite gets the desired result? Either way, it's harrowing just how deeply the phrase has stayed ingrained in his thought processes, even if he's found a non-destructive means of channelling the associated impulses. Having transcended the thing that ostensibly gave his life meaning, Bob is left only to ponder the realisation that there never was any meaning; he remains haunted, less by Bart himself than by the extent of his obsession with Bart and how it consumed him. I will admit, when I saw they were flashing forward with Bob, I was trepidatious about what kind of prospective destiny they were going to pigeonhole him into, but this doesn't strike me as an altogether unfitting way for Bob to eventually end up, leading an existence that's basically peaceful, but suffused with regret. I appreciate that they went with a scenario that's thoughtful and quietly sad, as opposed to anything too knowingly silly, and one I can actually get something out of on an emotional level. Even the abruptness of the final punchline, so typical of anything with Al Jean's stamp on it, doesn't detract from the poignancy of the sequence. What Bob previously wanted more than anything was leverage, and now he absolutely has a message that others should hear - that life is too short and too precious to be spent on useless things like revenge - but Teen dismisses him as a nut and leaves him in isolation once more, telling him that if he installed a mailbox then he wouldn't have to knock.
Perhaps the most troubling revelation is that Teen has fifteen other lighthouses to visit today, all of them populated by people whom he considers weirdos. Presumably, those fifteen people all have stories of their own about what drove them to such a secluded existence and the psychological baggage they now carry with them. Bob is hardly an outlier in this world; the route he's travelled may have been wildly off track but it's well-trodden nonetheless.
Finally, I want to draw attention to a scene where Bart, inside the bunker, goes through a collection of records and pulls out an album by a group of cartoon rodents known as Calvin and The Hipmunks. I hit the pause button so that I could examine the tracklist on the back of that thing, and they've a song called "Having A Ball At The Berlin Wall". Oh, you joke, Simpsons, but it happened.
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