Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes? (aka Look Who's Talking)

It's interesting how little time The Simpsons wasted in bringing Herb Powell back for his shot at recovery. He was only the second "guest" character to return in a starring role, the first being Sideshow Bob in "Black Widower", and even then Bob had wait two whole seasons before being considered as viable sequel material. Herb was brought back after only one season - in his case, it's evident that the production team knew straight away, after finishing "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?", that they wouldn't be leaving his story there. They knew they had yanked just a little too hard on the feel-bad chain, something confirmed on the episode's DVD commentary, where it's noted that James L. Brooks had felt uneasy about the ending and suggested that a line of dialogue be added to indicate that Herb would land on his feet; the writers had toyed with this idea, but ultimately decided to save it and use it as the basis of its own episode. Hence, we had "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?" (8F23), which first aired on August 27th 1992, one of the rare Simpsons episodes to debut in a summer slot (your typical Simpsons season begins in September and wraps up somewhere in May). This led to some confusion as to whether "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?" was to be seen as the delayed finale for Season 3 or the early debut of Season 4; Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood of I Can't Believe It's An Unofficial Simpsons Guide had it grouped in with the latter, but subsequent official sources have clarified it to be part of Season 3. The August air date was down to a scheduling experiment that Fox subsequently discarded; they'd attempted a similar trick the previous year, by having Season 2's "Blood Feud" premier in July.

It's also interesting to compare Herb's return to Bob's, which landed only a few episodes ahead of it in Season 3's running order, in terms of where each episode ultimately leads us. "Black Widower" saw Bob slide ever more despairingly down the path of corruption, affirming his enmity with Bart and locking him into a vicious cycle that would continue ad infinitum. For Herb, the gamble of choosing to reassociate himself with the Simpsons actually paid off. He was restored to his former glory, and able to exit with his dignity and his prosperity intact. Bob's sorry story was just getting started, but for Herb this has remained his character's coda; even with the series still in production and various other vintage characters being dusted off for the sake of perpetuation, Herb has yet to be mined for his threequal potential. Technically DeVito did return to voice Herb for a third time in a Season 24 episode, "The Changing of The Guardian", but only as a voice heard on an answering machine recording, and it's such a brief and inconsequential moment that (much like the second occasion on which A. Brooks technically voiced Jacques, in Season 15), a lot of viewers tend to overlook that it's there. In terms of in-the-flesh appearances that enable us to hang out with the character in any meaningful way...well, I wouldn't completely rule it out (DeVito's still working, and if they'll bring Jacques back after sitting on him for 33 years then there's got to be hope for Herb), but I think it's very unlikely his book will be re-opened at this stage. Which takes us into one of the biggest mysteries regarding Herb - why did he completely disappear from this point onward? "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?" might not suggest any immediately obvious routes for sequelisation in the way that "Black Widower" did, but it does leave the door open for Herb to continue to be a part of the family's lives. You'd think that, in 30 years, he might have popped in to say hello at least once. Despite departing on good terms with his biological clan, there's been little to no evidence that he's even maintained a relationship with them thereafter. Are we to assume that all of this stuff is just happening off of screen?

In the end, Herb might have been stunted by much the same problem that Ruth and Laura Powers had in establishing themselves as long-term presences - when you enlist guest voices in the roles, it's inevitably going to limit how often we'll be seeing them. And in Herb's case, there's been some backstage gossip indicating that the reason he did not return is because DeVito didn't want this to be an ongoing gig and was unenthusiastic about being asked back a second time. I can confirm that nothing is said of this in the episode's DVD commentary. There, Nancy Cartwright asks point blank if Herb's going AWOL was down to DeVito not wanting to voice him again; she gets a predictably waffly response from Al Jean, which acknowledges that, "He might not have", but appears to indicate that they never brought Herb back because they couldn't think of a good enough reason to do so (Jean claims the show would never bring back a character gratuitously, but your mileage may vary on that). Rather, the origin of said gossip turns out once again to have been Hank Azaria, who was quoted in a Times Union article in 1994 as saying that he thought DeVito regretted coming back and wanted to get it over with (note: I have not read said article, so I'm going to do the unthinkable and assume that the Wikipedia citation is accurate). As with Azaria's public smearing of Christopher Collins, a pinch of salt is required (Would we know for a fact that DeVito's lack of enthusiasm was down to his not wanting to do the show? Might he just have had something else on his mind at the time?), but he offers a more compelling explanation than Jean's for why we never saw Herb again. Still, if it is true then it certainly isn't reflected in DeVito's performance - he's on every bit as fine a form here as he was in "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?"

The title "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?" would appear to cement a pattern for a hypothetical series of Herb episodes (one I would fully expect to be discarded if Herb were to return today, mind), whereby each episode titles take the form of a question openly directed toward a brother, and each is evocative of the despairs of the Great Depression. "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" was derived from the 1941 film Sullivan's Travels, specifically the title of fictitious book about the Depression that John McCrea's character spent the picture looking to adapt (said fictitious book would later inspire the title of the 2000 Coen brothers film starring George Clooney). "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?" is lifted from the song "Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?", which was composed by Yip Harburg and Jay Gorney for the 1932 musical Americana and reflects the perspective of an honest hard-working man brought to his knees by the economic crash (the title was also used for a 1975 documentary by Philippe Mora). In both cases, the question could just as easily be asked by either brother of the other. In the original, the question is initially implied to be Homer's - in fact, Homer explicitly asks it during his first act quest to locate his half-brother, but once we've met Herb it seems just as pertinent to his own lifelong desire to figure out where he belongs, a question he ultimately regrets asking. With the second installment, the title alludes most obviously to Herb's goal of convincing Homer to lend him a monetary sum to fund his latest endeavor (and to his impoverished state in general), but also to Homer's desire for Herb to spare him a little clemency. That both titles reference the Depression indicates that the social and economic divide between the two brothers is to be seen as a particularly tender spot in their dynamic. In the original, Herb provided a window into the rich and successful man Homer could have been under different circumstances. "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?" offers an intriguing reversal on that scenario, so that Herb becomes a haunting impression of how much lower Homer could potentially have sunk; his homely lifestyle now seems positively luxurious compared to Herb's lot. We catch up with the former motor CEO to find him living in abject poverty - he's now a hobo, and he spends his days swapping tales of former glory with his fellow transient (Mickey Mouse whorehouse gag, blah blah blah, now belongs to Disney, blah blah), eating out of dumpsters and being shunned by anyone higher up the ladder. Homer, meanwhile, has just been surprised by a cash bonus of $2000 from the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant - it's actually a paltry settlement, to brush off any legal liability on Burns' part for what prolonged exposure to nuclear radiation has done to Homer's fertility, but Homer hasn't read the fine print and has been hoodwinked into thinking he's receiving an award for outstanding achievement in the field of excellence. At least he's sharp enough to demand an award ceremony from the deal (which itself must have cost Burns more than $2000; Joe Frazier's fee alone would have been a tidy sum). Tensions are ignited when his downtrodden doppelganger appears at the door, demanding retribution for the American dream he personally took from him. Also, Hands Across America features somewhere in the backdrop.

 Hmm...

I say it's intriguing, but I also think the decision to make Herb a hobo somewhat wrong-foots "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?" as a sequel. There's a tremendous irony in that the episode was purposely conceived to take the sting off of "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?", and yet it retroactively makes that ending (and by extension the events of "Old Money") seem even more mean-spirited - there, Herb lost his business and his mansion home, but there was nothing to imply that he was going to end up this badly off. As per the DVD commentary, writer John Swartzwelder just has a thing about hobos and will take whatever excuse he can find to work them into a narrative, so here we are. Likewise, the decision to make Herb a hobo who looks to have stepped right out of a second-hand vision of the Depression era (complete with Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp as one of his associates), while further underscoring the thematic intentions of the title, results in a distinctly caricatured, borderline "cute" depiction of poverty that has few pretences of engaging with the realities of what homelessness looked like in the 1990s. It's not that I require Herb to have a drug habit and be dying of tuberculosis, I'd just prefer that his impoverishment arc was handled with a marginally less cartoonish touch.

I should emphasise that I do really like "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?" I greatly appreciate its existence, and its essentially warm intentions. After brutally destroying Herb in his debut episode, they brought him back just to give him a second chance and allow him to regain everything that he'd lost. How lovely is that? It is, though, one of those episodes in which I've found more and more to criticise every time I watch it. Compared to "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?", which holds up really well, there are a couple of distinct shortcomings here that mark "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?" out as a lesser sequel. The first is that the storytelling is considerably less economical than in "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" By now we were deep into the Jean-Reiss era, which means there's a lot of farting around in lieu of narrative progression. It genuinely surprised me to hear Cartwright remark on the DVD commentary that this was one of those episodes where a stash of great material had to be left out due to time constraints (she tells us that the original script was 53 pages long), because the final product reads as the exact opposite, ie: an episode with a lot of dead space it's struggling to fill due to the narrative not being especially well-developed (you know, like "Cape Feare"). Why else would you have an award title as long-winded and convoluted as The First Annual Montgomery Burns Award For Outstanding Achievement In The Field Of Excellence and have the characters repeat it over and over? I get that the awards ceremony, as gratuitous as the entire sequence is, is intended to be its own bit of ridiculous bombast, but there's a truly baffling moment where Bart later says the award title in full, and if they were really that strapped for time then they could have fit at least two whole other jokes in there. Same goes for that sequence where Homer tells Lenny and Carl that his life couldn't possibly get worse, then waits in knowing anticipation for the next story beat - it's amusing, but a deliberately inefficient use of time from an episode that purportedly had little. There's also a rather glaring narrative cheat in terms of how Herb finds his way back into the Simpsons' lives - he learns that Homer has come into money on picking up a discarded copy of a Springfield newspaper, which one of his fellow bums just happened to be using for cover. While it's never specified exactly where Herb is at this point (is he still living in Detroit? Is that the city we see in the backdrop during the scene with the mother and the baby?), he's clearly not anywhere near Springfield, so what are the odds that a local paper detailing Homer's story would happen to find its way out to him? The episode makes the shrewd call to brush past this quickly, so quickly that you might not notice it at all - but now that I have, I fear it will bug me for all eternity. Let's just call it fate and move along.

The second problem is that Swartzwelder, as talented as he is, doesn't write Herb nearly as well as Jeff Martin did before him. He captures Herb's angrier, chipped-shouldered side just fine - without his workforce, he doesn't get the same opportunities for contemptuous outbursts as he did in the original, but he gets to chew out his brother enough times (there are even a couple of instances of physical violence, which is further than Herb went in the predecessor). What he doesn't nail, which Martin's script conveyed so beautifully, are Herb's more kiddish qualities. Balancing out his temperamental nature in "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" was that Herb was so distinctively a child at heart. Despite his success, he carried himself with the vulnerability of a lost and wounded child who'd never figured out his place in the world, and though he'd dedicated his life to business and board meetings, what he really wanted to do was to hang out at the zoo and watch cartoons all day. Herb connected so well with the Simpsons children because his own inner child was so alive and kicking. "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?" doesn't ignore the particular affinity that Herb had with the younger members of the Simpsons clan - in fact, his efforts to regain his fortune are based around his bonding with and understanding of Maggie - but, gorilla mask aside, there's less of a sense of him behaving like a kid himself. It could be that his time on the streets has knocked those qualities out of him, which is fair enough, except that Swartzwelder replaces them with a hackneyed jingoism that doesn't seem entirely consistent with his characterisation in "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" Sure, Herb had lived his American dream, but he also had an outward, Frank Grimes-esque bitterness about how weighted against him the system had been. There's an extent to which Swartzwelder's script seems content to uphold Herb's redemption as a fairly uncritical celebration of the glibly patriotic sentiments he espouses - ironic, then, that it's named after a song expressing a stirring disillusionment for how the people who'd helped build America were abandoned by it in a time of economic hardship. Herb runs into one major roadblock, when he concedes that a mere idea isn't much use without the funding to get it off the ground, but otherwise getting rich again comes very easily to him (considering how hard clearly had to fight for it the first time around). The world below the poverty line becomes a dumping ground for corporate failures (where Herb is rubbing shoulders with a pimp busted for copyright infringement and the inventor of New Coke), and you only stay there if you've opted out of corporate consumerism's rules. Herb's wild idea is to create a device that translates a baby's cries and gargles into perfectly comprehensible speech, so that any parent can respond directly to their needs. He seeks out the Simpsons not only because he knows they've got the cash to spare, but they also have the baby to hand. Which is a point in this episode's favour - any story that finds a significant part for Maggie to play is a rare and precious thing.

The baby translator itself is one of those plot details that just seems tailor-made for viewer nitpicking. The production team even admit on the commentary that, if anyone were to successfully make such a thing then it would be a game-changing invention, so it's weird how it, like Herb himself, is completely forgotten after this one episode. Besides, how would Herb, whose background is in automobile design, not linguistics or child psychology, be able to single-handedly decode an entire baby "language"? At the very least, he would surely have to study a wider range of subjects than Maggie, and the process would take years, not the 30 days the script implies. But whatever, we get some nice moments between Herb and Maggie (I particularly love Herb singing her one of his former company's advertising jingles as a lullaby) and the real attraction is obviously in getting to hear that baby talk translated into the most absurdly articulate and deadpan of announcements (and not to mention, into DeVito's gruff voice).

Somewhere at the sidelines of Herb's baby translator journey is a deeply despondent Homer. Homer really wants Herb to forgive him. But he also really, really wants a chair. Truth is, Homer was miserable before Herb showed up. At the start of the episode, Bart and Lisa accidentally destroy the beloved couch on which he'd forged so many cherished TV-related memories, and even getting his award ceremony and dubious cash prize does little to cheer his spirits. He's still mourning that prosaic item of furniture, speaking of it to Joe Frazier as though he was going through a relationship break-up. Then a vibrating chair with the tantalising product name "The Spinemelter 2000" catches his eye, and Homer decides that he's ready to love again. He tries out the chair, leading into an inspired interlude that recreates the Star Gate sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), emphasising not only the chair's space age qualities, but that it represents the next major step in reclining evolution. As kismet would have it, the chair's price tag is $2000, but Marge is reluctant to blow all of the money at once on a luxury item, pointing out that they could make better use of it by replacing the faulty washer and dryer downstairs. This is probably the cleverest aspect of Swartzwelder's script, conveying a more quietly critical view of consumer society. Homer's world of material comfort stands in direct contrast to Herb's world of desperate poverty; so long as his ass is well-cushioned and the TV is on, he doesn't have to deal with the harsh realities going on beyond his doorstep. Hence the delightfully cynical evoking of Hands Across America, a charity initiative held on 25th May 1986 to raise money for the homeless and hungry, in which an attempt was made to create an unbroken human chain spanning the United States. The event has been roundly mocked as a failure - as is reported here, there were large gaps in certain states (shockingly, nobody wanted to be standing out in the desert in late May), the amount raised was $15 million, considerably less than the $50 to $100 million target, and obviously it did little to solve the issues of impoverishment overall. As with a lot of these charity initiatives that were fashionable in the 1980s, there's a sense it was more about the people involved than the people it was purportedly helping, a superficial stunt that was not actually looking to get to grips with any of the root causes of poverty, and instead sold a feel-good image of everyone uniting to take on the ugliness of the world - an observation that recently inspired Jordan Peele to turn HAA into a symbol of horror in his 2019 film Us. In this flashback, Homer is not involved in the chain, presumably because he cannot bear for his butt cheeks to part ways with his couch, something that ostensibly marks him out as more a passive observer than a participant, but it's not like anyone else in that room is effectively doing anything different. The destruction of Homer's couch foreshadows Herb's arrival - his sheltered lifestyle is about to be disrupted by a harrowing reality in which he is directly implicated. Both his past dealings with and likeness to Herb mark the problem out as his responsibility, one that he cannot ignore when it's right under his roof and threatening intermittently to punch him in the nose.

Despite Marge's misgivings, Homer still has is heart set on acquiring the Spinemelter, and his big dilemma arises when he has to choose between propping up his world of vapid material luxury and giving a needy individual a second shot at life. Ultimately, he does right by his brother, and while Herb purposely withholds his forgiveness until his fortune has been successfully regained, by the end of the episode their goodwill has paid off. Herb is transformed into a wonderful Wizard of Oz, thanking the family for their support and hospitality by fulfilling each of their individual desires - a new washer and dryer for Marge, a book club subscription for Lisa, a lifetime NRA membership (somewhat questionably) for Bart, and the promise of "something nice" for Maggie. Homer directly evokes Dorothy's dialogue when he he observes that there probably isn't a vibrating chair in Herb's bag for him - tellingly, acquiring that chair is being equated with going back to Kansas, so that he can return to a state of normality and not have to deal with the dangers outside of his comfort zone. Homer is clearly disappointed when it looks as though Herb only intends to extend him his forgiveness and to re-accept him as his brother, but is elated when Herb reveals that he bought him the Spinemelter anyway. Ideally, Herb would like for the restoration of their brotherhood to be regarded as the bigger prize, but he recognises that Homer's mind isn't quite working that way, and by relenting and fulfilling his silly yearning for that expensive chair, he's really procuring his own release, confirming both that he accepts his brother for the carnally-driven loafer that he is, and that he's well and truly over his grudges. After all they've been through, it would be downright petty to deny him.

As for what's next for Herb, I'd like to think he'd have used his regained fortune to help the impoverished, after his own experiences below the poverty line - starting, I would hope, by going back to assist that group of hobos he was previously settled with. But I guess we'll never know. Neither Herb nor his amazing baby translator have graced our screens again. Come to think of it, I'm not sure that the Spinemelter 2000 has either. Surprisingly, the one aspect of this episode that has enjoyed a miniature legacy is the kitschy bird knick-knack that Homer acquires from Herb as part of their agreement. It was later seen in the Season 7 episode "King Size Homer", where it had a significant impact on the plot direction, and later still in the Season 9 episode "Das Bus", where one of Bill Gates' goons unfortunately destroyed it. A sad and unceremonious end for such an underrated series icon.

The greater question concerns whether or not there was really anything more left to do with Herb after his second episode, and to be totally honest...yeah, there was. There actually is a loose end regarding his character that "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?" never acknowledges, which is that Herb never got to meet his biological father. It's strange, really, because if Herb was living with the Simpsons for several weeks, then you'd think the opportunity might have come up. Did Abe never call in at the Simpsons' house within that time? Did the family never offer to take Herb to see Abe at the Retirement Castle? Are we to assume that all of this stuff was happening off of screen? The obvious answer is that the writers couldn't think of a way to integrate Abe into this plot, so they got around the question by ignoring him altogether. Perhaps if they'd chopped out a couple of utterances of that overwrought award name, they could have squeezed him in. But alas, the prospective meeting between Abe and Herb may just have to sit it out for this lifetime.

On a more meta level, I facetiously like to think that the reason Herb has never returned or potentially even maintained his relationship with the family is because Herb himself was smart enough not to get involved with the Simpsons after this. Having recovered his fortune and gone out on a happy note, he decided to leave it there - why do anything to risk undermining that? Frankly, just flirting with a return was dangerous enough - as demonstrated by what was on that answering machine recording I mentioned in "The Changing of The Guardian". It was just a throwaway gag that you could easily ignore if you please, but Herb said that he was broke again. Ah well, we've established that the guy is a survivor, and for all we know his life since has been a perpetual cycle of downfall and recovery, as gruelling and repetitious as anything Sideshow Bob's had to face. Perhaps there's no benefit in having to see any of that onscreen - as delectable a character as Herb is, and as interesting as it might have been to see how his place within the Simpsons clan would have functioned from here, there is something very sweet and gratifying about the final image we have of him being his redemptive embrace with Homer. Truly happy endings with the Simpsons universe, where everyone gets what they want and there's no lingering bitterness on any side are an even rarer and more precious thing than episodes where Maggie gets to star (think of just how acidly things were resolved in "Black Widower", to which this ending is an appealing antidote); maybe it's only right that Herb's story has gotten to remain in the purity of that moment.

Living In The Bottle: The Trial (One Foot In The Grave)

Of the pentad of bottle episodes that emerged during the run of BBC sitcom One Foot In The Grave, "The Trial" stands out as the obvious outlier. The other four more-or-less adhered to a certain set of narrative rules, laid out by the first of these efforts, "Timeless Time". Victor and Margaret would be mired in some uncomfortable situation where time had been brought to a complete standstill, Victor would openly muse on whichever of life's assorted annoyances was bugging him most in that particular moment, intermittently pushing Margaret to breaking point along the way, until finally their testiness dissolved into mutual melancholia, as they reflected on past heartbreaks and scuppered ambitions ("The Beast In The Cage" being the only one to do so without delving into any specific, hitherto-unspoken-of instances from the characters' backstories). The seemingly mundane framing scenarios - a sleepless night, a bank holiday spent seated in a traffic jam, a stretch in a waiting room where every other client seems to be called before you, an evening in a prolonged blackout - become clever metaphors for life's broader trials and aggravations, and close deliberately without resolution, other than Victor and Margaret quietly acknowledging that their only recourse is to grin and bear whatever lies ahead. Each episode did its own thing to differentiate proceedings ("The Beast In The Cage" added supporting player Mrs Warboys to the dynamic, while "Threatening Weather" has apocalyptic undertones that seemed to knowingly anticipate the impending end of the series), but the basic structure was not immensely different. "The Trial", which aired on 28th February 1993 as part of the fourth series, makes the most radical deviation from the formula, by removing one key element - on this occasion, Margaret does not have to share in Victor's entrapment. This one deals with Victor being stuck indoors whilst on call for jury service, having been sent home to await further instructions on when he'll be needed. Margaret, meanwhile, is out of the picture, presumably working in her day job as a florist, although it's never explicitly stated where she is. Most bottle episodes were basically two-handers, focussing on the dynamic between Victor and Margaret and emphasising that they were fundamentally in all of these hardships together (however reluctantly on Margaret's part) by virtue of their union. But this time the hardship was Victor's to bear, and Victor's alone.

The result is the only episode of One Foot In The Grave in which Margaret never appears. Even the Comic Relief sketch from the same year, "The Bath", which consisted of Victor musing on more of life's inconveniences from within the tub, managed to incorporate Margaret somewhere, by way of an answering machine recording. But what's more surprising is how little indirect presence Margaret has; Victor mentions her in precisely one scene, when he realises that he can't find his flannel because Margaret has tidied it away, purportedly so they'll always know where it is, which in practice only makes it harder for him to find. It's a rare moment in which we get to see Victor grumble about Margaret's annoying tendencies behind her back (the reverse happens a lot more frequently throughout the series). Otherwise, "The Trial" plays almost as a glimpse into a parallel reality in which Victor lives alone, and doesn't have Margaret to act as the neutralising straight woman to his continual carping. And make no mistake, that is the real entrapment. Victor is stranded not merely inside his own house, but inside his own head, having nobody to play off of except himself. Tempting though it will be to file this one in the Index of Conflict as a Man vs. God narrative, it's really a case of Man vs. Self. Well perhaps. Man vs. God is certainly the narrative Victor perceives throughout - he sees himself as perpetually at the mercy of some divine judgement, cruel and arbitrary in its retribution, and with a particular interest in sabotaging his day. It's an opinion he expresses early on, in his churlish observation that the storm clouds currently cluttering up the sky only appeared as he was starting to unwind the flex on his lawnmower. And in its opening shots, the episode certainly invites the viewer to share in his paranoia that there may be darker forces conspiring around him; in lieu of the opening sequence with the tortoise stock footage (which would disappear from the bottle episodes from this point onward) we're faced immediately with those ominous, rumbling clouds, followed by the curious foregrounding of a crow perched in a tree branching overlooking the Meldrews' house, that cliched symbol of foreboding.

That crow is, incidentally, the only living being glimpsed onscreen for the full 28 and a half minutes other than Victor himself. "The Trial" is really a full-on monologue, in which Richard Wilson is presented with the challenge of having to carry the action entirely by himself, something he accomplishes with utter aplomb. That's not to say that Victor doesn't get ample opportunities to butt heads with anyone else for the duration, but always from a distance - he gets into multiple heated exchanges via telephone, in which we're only privy to what's being said at Victor's end. And a familiar character still manages to worm their way into the happenings. Margaret may be uncharacteristically absent, but Mrs Warboys puts in a surprise (though not to Victor) contribution, ambushing him with a telephone call to fill him in on the boring particulars of her recent visit to Cork (in her case, her muffled but unmistakable voice can be momentarily heard coming down the line). Intrusions from the outside world are sparing, and there's a sense to which they might even offer Victor some relief from the monotony, a chance to direct his loathing outward rather than inward. One such interlude yields the episode's most enduring visual gag, when Victor opens the door to his downstairs toilet to reveal that a yucca plant he'd had delivered earlier has been inserted directly into the pan, in an all-too literal reading of Victor's instructions on where to leave it. Victor likens the unseen young delivery man to Frank Spencer, the notoriously accident-prone hero played by Michael Crawford in 1970s BBC sitcom Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em, an observation that's not without irony given that Frank and Victor don't strike me as altogether dissimilar creations. Both are sitcom leads renowned for their characteristic attire, their perfectly quotable catchphrases, their inability to keep any new source of employment for long and, most crucially, their tendency to be on the receiving end of a deluge of outrageously improbable mishaps. Both are accustomed to grappling with chaos wherever they go, and they invariably do so badly. Victor's obviously a whole lot smarter and Frank's a whole lot sweeter, but both men are united in each being their own worst enemy. ^[1]

Unlike Frank Spencer, whose flaws were ultimately mitigated by his unrelenting innocence, Victor has a reputation for being rather a nasty character, and that's always seemed unfair to me. Victor could unquestionably make things a lot easier for himself if he learned to rein in his temper a little, but then who wouldn't be tempted to completely blow their top if they went to use their toilet only to find a yucca plant protruding out from it? There's an extent to which Victor is merely the product of a universe that is every bit as chaotic and inconsiderate as he perceives it to be, the classic figure of the sane man who to an insane universe must appear insane (as he himself points out, just look at the outcome of the 1992 general election). "The Trial", being the OFITG installment that forces Victor to look the most relentlessly inward, is our most extensive study into where one interpretation begins and the other ends. He holds himself to account for a couple of instances where he recognises that his rage was disproportionate, and ponders if he might just be the villain of his own story. The episode builds up Victor as a ridiculously paranoid individual, only to tease us with the parting implication that, actually, they might just be out to get him after all. The viewer finally becomes the juror, and is left to make their own verdict.

The title of the episode has multiple meanings. Most obviously it alludes to an event that should be happening within the narrative, but isn't. Victor murmurs that this is his fifth day of being on call for jury service, and he hasn't even set foot inside a courtroom (side-note: I was summoned for jury service myself once, and my experience was the same as Victor's - I would show up only to be sent home every day, and never even saw that jury box). The implicit suggestion is that the process of waiting and having nothing to occupy one's mind other than the most menial of distractions should itself be a trial. For a while, that looks to be the central joke, but the title suddenly acquires renewed significance come the third act, when Victor perceives himself as being put on trial by a higher power for his most recent misdeed. It's also a reference to Franz Kafka's 1925 novel The Trial, the dystopian tale of a bank clerk apprehended on a charge that is never specified and forced to navigate a labyrinth of head-spinning bureaucracy (in Victor's case, that labyrinth is largely his own self-inflicted concoction). David Renwick's script immediately makes us mindful of this allusion, by having Victor evoke another of Kafka's works, The Metamorphosis, in the very first sequence. It's likely not a coincidence that, whilst on the phone to a switchboard operator, he sardonically introduces himself as "Victor Meldrew the talking cockroach", a nod to the nightmarish premise of Kafka's novel, in which the protagonist awakens to find he has been inexplicably transformed into a giant insect and is placed under house arrest by his mortified family. (The more pedantic viewer might point out that, in Kafka's novel, the form Gregor acquired was never explicitly identified as a cockroach; it is, nevertheless, the interpretation most favoured by popular culture.)

Victor's in-universe reason for likening himself to a cockroach is that he feels that the switchboard operators have been treating him like an insect; aside from adding shades of the Kafkaesque to his ostensibly mundane predicament, it functions as a cunning bit of foreshadowing, the third-act crisis being directly informed by Victor's erratic reactions to the creepy crawlies infiltrating his abode. Early on, he spies a daddy long legs on the lampshade (note: the term "daddy long legs" can refer to multiple species, depending on which part of the world you're in, but in the UK it's a crane fly) and while he's keen to evict the intruder, he does so with an evident level of care and compassion, making an effort (albeit an unsuccessful one) not to break any of the insect's legs while handling it and, having cast it outside, following it long enough to observe it finding alternative shelter by limping into a discarded Lucozade can. Later, he notices a woodlouse crawling across his kitchen floor and gloatingly squishes it. There's no discernible reason why one house pest should have warranted such a humane response and the other found itself on the receiving end of Victor's meanest impulses, other than that they happened to encounter Victor at slightly different points in his immurement. This is something that Victor himself openly reflects on, and he's disturbed by the arbitrariness of his own judgement. This paves way for the climactic conflict, when Victor projects that arbitrariness onto the wider universe. If he would choose to punish a woodlouse with death for the crime of crawling across his kitchen floor, then why wouldn't some higher power, to whom he must appear as small and insignificant as a woodlouse, choose to punish him with death for the crime of disproportionately punishing a woodlouse? Victor openly notes that he is not a religious man, but he is too fundamentally suspicious an individual to not suppose that there must be some kind of malicious conspiracy going on around him, its basis in the cosmic. The murder of the woodlouse is the misdeed for which he specifically believes he's being tried, although one senses that this is the culmination of a whole lifetime's worth of rash responses to minor annoyances that he realises, with hindsight, could have been handled better. (Such uneasy introspection is anticipated by a sight gag where Victor manages to spread ink from a leaky biro all over his face before noticing, two minutes later, how ridiculous he looks in the mirror.) Also prodding him into his repentant despair is a passive-aggressive missive pushed through his door by a couple of Jehovah's Witnesses to whom he was recently rude. "May the Lord have mercy on your soul", they tauntingly close, which conjures up notions of a death sentence.

The twist, then, is that Victor ends up becoming the defendant in a trial of his own making. But it doesn't stop there. He also becomes the jury, judge and executioner (he is, after all, the only person around to play any of the parts), and it's that final role he seizes with by far the most relish. Why does Victor become so convinced that he's been sentenced to death? He notices a mole on his stomach that he swears wasn't there the last time he looked and panics about what that might mean. The viewer, of course, is unlikely to share in Victor's paranoia, which is blatantly over the top. Earlier sequences have already established Victor as a hypochondriac, prone to browsing through his medical dictionary and construing the most minor of ailments as an indication of something much nastier ("Colon tumor! Often no symptoms in the early stages...exactly what I've got!"). Victor appears to settle upon a rational line of action, and rejects it - he notes he's seeing a skin specialist next week and can discuss it then, only to conclude that he'll probably be dead by next week. He's now so committed to the narrative that he's getting what he deserves for his incorrigibility that his first inclination is to lie down and take it. "I've had a good life," he muses, before taking a moment to register what he's just said, and throwing the universe's verdict bitterly back at it. "I'VE HAD A BLOODY AWFUL LIFE!"

It strikes me as significant that the incident with the woodlouse, followed by the missive from the Jehovah's Witnesses, comes after Victor's aborted attempt at writing a letter to his brother Alfred. Alfred was previously introduced in the Series 3 episode "The Broken Reflection", where he was played by Richard Pearson. While it's not a requirement to have seen Alfred's prior appearance in order to understand "The Trial" (which does a perfectly succinct job, on its own terms, of illustrating that communication between the brothers is strained), it probably does help to know the full background. As per "The Broken Reflection", Alfred lives in New Zealand and he and Victor seldom have any face-to-face contact. In that episode, Alfred came to visit Victor, and while Victor was initially hostile to the intrusion, he came to realise that a lot of his disdain for Alfred was rooted in the reality that they were actually very alike. This prompted Victor to treat Alfred with a newfound tolerance, which unfortunately came too late; Alfred happened upon a dictaphone recording in which Victor had unwittingly expressed his prior dislike and, figuring he wasn't wanted, returned to New Zealand. "The Trial" perhaps lessens the sting of that ending, in confirming that Victor and Alfred have since reconciled and maintained a relationship by postal communication, even if Victor still struggles in relating to Alfred. While Alfred has no physical presence in "The Trial", the structure of the episode seems to place their relationship curiously at the centre, suggesting that Victor's failings toward his brother are indicative of his broader failures as a human. It's in his indifference toward Alfred that Victor goes down his dark path, turning away from the task at hand and noticing the woodlouse. It's also Victor's second attempt at writing to Alfred, on the premise that he doesn't have much time left, that yields his salvation - in his last letter, Alfred had sent an old photograph of the six-month-old Victor and, on studying it more closely, Victor realises that the mole in question was actually on his body the entire time. Perhaps it has less to do with Alfred in particular than the notion that, in reaching out to another, Victor is momentarily escaping entrapment in himself and whatever distorted perspective of reality it's concocting, prompting him to take a more objective view. As with Edgar Allan Poe's The Purloined Letter, the solution turns out to have been under Victor's nose (or, more accurately, under his navel) all along. Come to think of it, that corvid seen at the start of the episode might even have been an allusion to Poe, in sly anticipation for how this pickle would ultimately resolve.

Victor rejoices his deliverance, albeit with the backhanded observation that he was "sentenced to death and I managed to get off with life". It gives him, momentarily, a renewed perspective on life. "I'll never be rude to another Jehovah's Witness for as long as I live", he declares, before pausing and upping the ante: "I'll never be rude to anyone again." We know that this much is beyond Victor's reach. Like his earlier resolution to add healthier variety into his junk food diet of chocolate, crisps and chips cooked in fat with OK fruity sauce, it's well-intentioned but doomed from the outset to failure. The two failed resolutions are cleverly linked, in the episode's final, revolting discovery. Prior to discovering the mole, Victor had been musing about a baker in the local supermarket who had recently lost his toupee. Having at last settled on a nourishing lunch option he would actually enjoy (beans on toast), Victoria slices into a loaf of bread, only to find that terrible missing toupee concealed inside! Whereupon he gets on the phone to the supermarket manager and starts blowing his top once again; just to make it plain that he's relapsed into the same old cycle, the language used mirrors that of his earlier call to the garden centre. The question is, can you blame Victor for his reaction? After all, finding a misplaced wig in your intended lunch would be an even more disconcerting experience than finding a yucca plant lodged in your toilet. No matter how sincerely you had vowed to mend your ways, you would totally go to pieces. Is it therefore fair to suppose that Victor is actually the villain of his own story? The episode closes with deliberately mixed signals on that front. Victor, for whatever reason, cannot resist trying on the wig himself, if only to confirm, on glancing in the mirror, how ridiculous it looks. He reaffirms himself as a fool and seemingly embraces that identity for the sake of getting his momentary catharsis against the supermarket. And yet the final shots of the episode have us panning back out of the Meldrews' house and back into the torrential downpour outside, suggesting that Victor might well have been the victim of a cosmic prank and that an Old Testament deity is raining its unabating, gleefully disproportionate wrath down upon him. Or is the wrath all Victor's, an utterly proportionate response to a chaotic universe that gets the Victor Meldrew it certainly deserves? (Which probably shouldn't apply to that harmless woodlouse, mind). As with all of the series' bottle episodes, it ends without clear resolution. Victor is still under house arrest, and the jury still hasn't returned.

PS: I don't get Victor's jab at Robert Mitchum, since he was in some riveting thrillers (really, Victor, you were bored by The Night of The Hunter?). There is something intuitively sound, however, in his bracketing of the Dudley Moore Trio with the six-legged menaces with which he won't share a bathroom.

[1] Fun fact: Richard Wilson was in an episode of Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em ("Wendy House").