The Homer They Fall (aka Fustigation Aside)

Season 8 of The Simpsons was the series' Death Period, a time when the atmosphere in Springfield seemed unhealthily fixated with the notion that all things must pass. The show's anxieties regarding its own presumed-imminent demise wouldn't become totally transparent until the latter stages, with the aggressively meta trilogy of The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show", "Homer's Enemy" and "The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase", but even long before then you got the whiff of a certain tension in the air. One of the season's earliest offerings, "The Homer They Fall" (4F03), which debuted on November 10th 1996, opens with a vicious nugget of satire regarding the decline of once formidable television institutions and the pitfalls of hanging onto the glories of yesteryear. A public reunion between the surviving cast of 1960s juggernaut Bonanza promises nostalgic diversion but instead becomes a depressing memento mori, as two ageing Native American actors perform to a modest turnout amid the grubby consumerism of the Springfield Mall. "On the series we were always trying to kill the Cartwrights," one of the performers quips. "But it looks like Father Time took care of that for us, right?" A nonplussed Marge notes that the dingy display represents a downgrade from last year's rendition, where three Native Americans at least managed to show up. Already we can picture how much more diminished the set-piece has yet to become on subsequent years, with the lone man standing feebly gesturing to an audience of even lesser size and enthusiasm. Elsewhere, the episode's title might have conveyed its own degree of ominousness. It is a nod to the title of the 1956 Humphrey Bogart boxing picture The Harder They Fall, itself taken from the saying, "The bigger they come, the harder they fall" - this is often attributed to welterweight champion Jersey Joe Walcott, and describes how those of greater stature are doomed to suffer the most mortifying of downfalls.

To some fans, Season 8 represented the first step on on the series' own inevitable descent from greatness, even if it was a far smaller step than what was to come in the Scully era. Or perhaps that's the price it paid for taking as many risks as it did. Season 8 is something of a contradiction - a wildly cynical chapter in the show's history that, by its end, had outright admitted that it had nowhere to go whilst encompassing some of the boldest and most experimental Simpsons stories since the series' beginnings, back when the mere idea was hot and radical. Naturally, not every risk taken was to everybody's tastes (the aforementioned meta trilogy, in particular "Homer's Enemy", seemed purposely designed to sit uneasily with a chunk of the viewership), and might have amounted to the feeling of there being a disturbance in the Simpsons equilibrium, the tipping point before things fatally gave way. Season 8 may not be the cosiest of seasons, but it is the one that I find the most infinitely fascinating, an era combining razor-sharp writing with an intrepid determination to push as many envelopes as it could. "The Homer They Fall" is a relatively unassuming example of what No. 8 had to offer, and while nowhere close to being its most contentious entry, strikes me as another terribly undervalued one. Notably, Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood went down surprisingly hard on it in I Can't Believe It's An Unofficial Simpsons Guide, offering this assessment: "A pastiche on Mike Tyson's return to the boxing circuit after his time in jail, and his conversion to Christianity. Sadly, this makes for the dullest, one-joke episode of the entire series." Which was about as negative as they had been about any episode up until this point. I'd be curious to know what they consider the story's one joke to be exactly (they're also wrong - Tyson was raised a Christian and converted to Islam). I will say that the episode potentially did itself no favours in coming so soon after Season 7's "Homerpalooza", another episode centred on Homer's freakish ability to withstand the kind of extreme bodily trauma that would kill or severely cripple the average person. Both stories climax with Homer discovering that there are limits to his superhuman abilities, and defiantly putting himself in a situation that will not end well while his family observe powerlessly from the sidelines. If you were worried that the series would be running short of ideas after 150+ episodes, "The Homer They Fall" might not have been the installment to put your fears to rest.

"The Homer They Fall" is also another in the long line of "Homer Gets A Job" episodes that originated with "Dancin' Homer" of Season 2 and, as Marge deftly puts it, lands somewhere in the middle in terms of plausibility. On the DVD commentary, the production crew share that they had fully anticipated the Frank Grimeses in the audience scoffing at the notion of Homer becoming a boxer and finding himself in the same ring as his universe's equivalent to Mike Tyson, and so went to great lengths to justify it within context. It was not, though, considered outlandish enough to occupy the gallery of unlikely Homer adventures that had the actual Frank Grimes so incensed in "Homer's Enemy" - because let's face it, you're not going to get much sillier than Homer being sent into outer space. A question that often hangs over the "Homer Gets A Job" stories is how Homer is able to pursue his latest occupation and retain his regular job at the plant (excepting "Dancin' Homer", which explicitly addresses this), but here I don't find it much of a stretch to suppose that boxing is just an avocation he's doing outside of working hours. The set-up has Homer discovering that he possesses a unique condition in which his brain is cushioned by an extra-thick layer of fluid, meaning that his skull can endure an insane amount of punishment. On witnessing this, Moe suggests that he try his hand at boxing, revealing his own history as a budding young boxer who ultimately didn't have what it takes to enter the big leagues, and offering to be his manager. He quickly establishes that Homer has no aptitude for delivering punches, but that needn't matter - Moe trains him to follow a fool-proof strategy that involves allowing his opponents to expend all their energy and then making them keel over. It's a strategy enables Homer to rise to the top of the local leagues, fighting hungry young hobos in Moe's bar, but things take a more precarious turn when Moe is approached by his former manager Lucius Sweet (guest voice Paul Winfield), who's willing to offer a substantial sum to have Homer go up against heavyweight champion Drederick Tatum. Moe knows this is a fight Homer couldn't hope to win, but is tempted by that opportunity to get close to the prestige that was denied him in his own boxing career.

Despite the familiarity of the premise, I would argue that "The Homer They Fall" is as bold and experimental as many of the more prominent Season 8 installments, but it's bold and experimental in low-key, deceptive ways that perhaps don't register right away. For one, it is only nominally a story about Homer. He's front and centre throughout, but it doesn't take a great deal of interest in what being a boxer actually means to him. "Homerpalooza" makes for a handy comparison, since it handles what is essentially the same set-up entirely differently. There, becoming a roadshow freak who routinely took a steel ball to the gut offered something of real personal value to Homer. It was a chance to reconnect with his youth and to be a part of the hip and happening culture of the 90s. To be idolised by his children, who had earlier rejected the notion of par-taying with him if he were the last dad on Earth. To be someone of influence, and not just another ageing fogey left in the dust by the fickle nature of fashion. In "The Homer They Fall", becoming a semi-professional boxer is essentially a means for Homer to lead a marginally swankier lifestyle, getting to eat his salad dressing of choice, upgrading from Premium mode to Mega Tycoon mode at the car wash and, possibly, enjoy those blue cupcakes they sell sometimes. It's a hobby with some neat perks, but not something Homer seems to be staking his sense of self-worth upon. The episode keeps him in a very passive mode, blankly going along with whatever Moe imposes on him, and showing virtually no initiative of his own. There is a point, early on, where Jonathon Collier's script betrays its lack of interest in Homer, and in the Simpsons as a whole, and this is where it possibly comes off as a little cold to some - in the first act we've the basis of a very convincing personal struggle for Homer, when Bart acquires a space-age utility belt from Comic Book Guy, only for it to be stolen by Jimbo, Dolph and Kearney. Homer attempts to get the belt returned by taking the matter to the parents of the bullies, but unfortunately they're also bullies who would just as happily whale on him. Homer withstands their attacks but fails to get the belt back, and subsequently laments to Moe that all he seems to be good for is taking beatings. We see the sliver of an emotional stake in his recognition that he was unable to rectify things for his son, but this is swiftly forgotten - and, even more egregiously, so is the entire narrative thread involving Bart's belt. Apparently Jimbo, Dolph and Kearney are allowed to keep it. First act conflicts that are essentially nothing more than extended build-ups to the main event weren't necessarily anything new (remember Homer's trampoline in "Bart's Inner Child"?), but what makes it feel a little unsporting here is that we're given just enough insight into how taken Bart is with the belt to care that he gets it back. Often life doesn't have happy outcomes and the bullies do win, but the fact that it isn't even mentioned again threatens to get the episode off on a slightly bum note. As it turns out, the bullying material does have thematic significance later on, but nothing that pays off any emotional investment in Bart's plight specifically. 

The Simpsons themselves are effectively ciphers in "The Homer They Fall", with the arguable exception of Marge, who gets to be the voice of reason and decency as we descend into the cut-throat insanity of the third act. But even so, her anguish at the prospect of watching her husband be pummelled into a bloody pulp is only secondary to the real emotional thrust of the story, which is on Moe and his desire to be more than a sleazy bartender serving crummy liqueur to Springfield's most downtrodden clientele. Moe is given a more overtly sympathetic treatment here than he was the last time this conflict was the focus, in "Flaming Moe's" of Season 3, even though his treatment of his best bud is on a whole other level; his theft of Homer's cough syrup cocktail might have been scummy as hell, but at least he wasn't endangering Homer's life in the process. Yet Collier's script offers even greater insight into Moe's deflated soul, his determination to cling to whatever meagre scrap of eminence might come his way, and his final realisation that some things in life take priority over personal glory. And that's the hidden genius of "The Homer They Fall" - it purports to be a story about Homer's rise and fall within the boxing arena, but it's really a story about Moe's fall from a much broader kind of grace and his triumphant rise again (to an absurd degree that basically ends up in quotation marks, but we'll get to that in due course). 

Honestly, it's one of the things that I most admire about Season 8. Far from merely being a season of flashy gimmicks and biting anger at its own viewership, there was a genuine effort to flesh out a selection of the supporting cast and give compelling new context to their place within the show's dynamics. The premise of Moe as a man of broken dreams, who'd once had the opportunity to really make something of himself but had tragically blown it, was previously trialled in "Radioactive Man" of Season 7, albeit for a single scene that had no bearing on the overall story. There, it was revealed he was part of the Our Gang ensemble (somewhat questionably, given that that would have made Moe, what, 70 in 1995?), but had obliterated his acting career after inadvertently killing one of his co-stars (the original Alfalfa, aka Carl Switzer, who in reality died at age 31 under circumstances no less dark). Ultimately, it played less like a sincere expansion on the character's backstory than a protracted, nostalgia-wrecking joke about the industry's exploitation of child actors ("Luckily Alfalfa was an orphan owned by the studio"), but there was a real pathos to the idea nevertheless. The reasons for Moe's failure as a boxer are more mundane, but also more relatable - in the end, he simply wasn't good enough, getting knocked out 40 times in a row (that plus politics). Who hasn't known the sting of desperately wanting something, only to have life feed you a bitter reality sandwich? Moe put his all into boxing, going through a range of monikers (Kid Gorgeous to Kid Presentable to Kid Gruesome and finally to Kid Moe), and having nothing to show for it but a collection of faded memories. These memories remain a great source of fondness and pride for Moe, and he keeps the various artefacts from his boxing career on display to remind him of a more prosperous time, but they are all crucially squirrelled away inside a toilet (could there be a clearer metaphor?). Then Sweet strolls back into his life and offers him a Faustian bargain - the chance to bring those dreams out into the open, where the entire world will be watching, and to demonstrate that he isn't a failure by producing a fighter who can put up a decent stand against a champ. Moe states the obvious - "Homer's no boxer, he's just a freak" - but Sweet already knows that Tatum's victory is a foregone conclusion. He just needs Homer to "sustain verticality" for three rounds, in order to create a crowd-pleasing display for Tatum's comeback fight. If Moe can achieve that, then Sweet can secure him a future in the boxing scene. The sequence ends with a fabulous piece of direction from Mark Kirkland, as Sweet puts on a crown and walks away, leaving the toilet door to slam and conceal Moe once again inside his den of squalid ruination. He does a lousy thing in accepting the terms and sending Homer to the ring with Tatum like a lamb to the slaughter, but our sympathies are with Moe nevertheless. We understand his yearning to escape that despair, and to follow Sweet to the glory of which he'd once dared to dream.

Truthfully, "The Homer They Fall" has a heart of gold, not unlike Moe himself in the end, although it hides this behind its somewhat rough exterior. As with "Flaming Moe's", the friendship between Homer and Moe is shown to be parasitic in nature, with Moe cunningly manipulating Homer into giving him the lion's share of his earnings, even if the money isn't what he's truly seeking from the arrangement. He also insists that Homer put complete trust in him as his manager, only to exploit that trust by setting him up to fight Tatum (whom Homer initially assumes to be just another hobo). But it proves overall to be far less cynical about the relationship than "Flaming Moe's", demonstrating that there are grounds for a fundamentally supportive affinity between these two non-achievers. Moe's entire arc is cleverly bookended with him needing to make sound moral choices, both of which involve stepping up to defend Homer from the barbarism of adult thugs - first, the parents of Jimbo, Dolph and Kearney, and finally a thuggishness of a whole other magnitude.

A more subtle, possibly coincidental way in which "The Homer They Fall" harks back to "Flaming Moe's" is in the reintroduction of Drederick Tatum, who in the Season 3 episode was seen giving a television interview in which he had this to say about Springfield: "That town was a dump. If you ever see me back there, you know I really [bleep]ed up bad!" And [bleep]ed up he clearly did, for he's back in Springfield in this very episode, looking to restart his boxing career after a slight blip in his personal life. Tatum was established as a character all the way back in Season 2, in "Homer vs. Lisa and The 8th Commandment", but had never received a starring role up until now, having been largely restricted to throwaway cameos, and having appeared to go a bit quiet around the middle of the decade (I guess now we know the reason). As noted, Tatum is a thinly-veiled parody of real world boxing champion Mike Tyson, right down to speaking with Tyson's trademark frontal lisp. Like Tyson, he'd also been through a spot of legal bother, having served a term in Springfield Prison on a charge of assault against his mother. Tyson was actually in prison on a rape charge, but that's somewhere The Simpsons were obviously never going to go - Tatum pushing his mother down the stairs is ostensibly meant to be a more comical-sounding equivalent, although when you think about it, it's perhaps not significantly nicer, given the presumed age and size difference between the two parties. Still, the episode manages to sell us on the humor of the circumstance, mainly in Tatum's half-assessed expression of remorse: "If I could turn back the clock on my mother's stair-pushing, I would certainly reconsider it." Despite the stain on his record, Tatum certainly hasn't fallen from grace in the eyes of the public, who are all too happy to buy into his anticipated pulverising of Homer as a narrative of righteous revenge. Sweet, meanwhile, is based on Tyson's then-manager Don King, and in his case the script even draws a big bold line under the allusion, in Homer's oddly gratuitous remark that Sweet is exactly as rich and as famous as King, and looks just like him too. The casting of Winfield as Sweet was a cunning allusion in itself, since Winfield had played King only a year prior in the HBO biopic Tyson (although for yours truly he is first and foremost the wisecracking Mirror from The Charmings, one of those "forgotten" 80s sitcoms that I remember all-too vividly). Winfield is wonderful in the role, perfectly nailing Sweet's flamboyance and quirkily ostentatious vocabulary, and keeping him charismatic enough for us to feel the lure of the transparently slimy bargain he's selling.

For as passive as Homer is in all of this, he gets one really good and revealing scene, when his family learn of the impending match-up and challenge him on its wisdom over the breakfast table. Lisa cautions him that the odds against him winning are a thousand to one, according to the casinos in Vegas, to which Homer responds with his most quotable line of the episode: "Alright, I think we've all heard just about enough from Mr. Newspaper today." Implicit in his delivery, and in the churlish manner with which he crumples the offending item and disposes of it out the window, is a definite sense that Homer isn't as clueless as he might seem about his situation. He knows deep down that he hasn't a snowball's chance in Hell of coming through this intact, but is desperately trying to convince himself otherwise. This is reinforced in a later sequence, where Moe instructs Homer to visualise how he can possibly triumph and the best Homer can come up with would be for Tatum to be felled by a congenital heart defect moments before the fight begins. Why is Homer so obstinately insistent about putting his life on the line? Is he really that won over by the pipe dream of owning a plug-in room deodoriser? Has his success against all of those brawlers from the boxcars given him an inflated sense of confidence? Or is he like Moe, and susceptible to the prospect of participating in the glitz and glamour a heavyweight match, even as a pawn sent out to be brutally fustigated? We don't get a ton of insight into Homer's perspective, but we get just enough hint that there is something of a little more substance going on.

The final act where Homer goes up against Tatum is a surprisingly gut-wrenching affair. It's peppered with lots of smaller gags, the funniest being when Homer enters the ring to "Why Can't We Be Friends?" by War, but it's startling how much the tension is allowed to dominate. The sequence before the fight where Marge confronts a visibly anxious Moe is played almost exclusively for drama - as we touched on when covering "Flaming Moe's", Marge and Moe are typically positioned as opposing forces in Homer's life (even with Moe's pitiful crushing on Marge), with both in constant, if indirect competition for his devotions, but this is as life and death as their rivalry has gotten to date. The closest thing to a joke in the exchange is the way Moe brusquely attempts to blow off Marge's concerns with his insistence that, "I'm not the villain here, okay? If Homer gets killed in the ring tonight, it'll be because of your negative attitude!" Marge manages to force a promise from Moe that he will throw a towel into the ring the instant that Homer is in any kind of danger, and leaves - the way the camera then lingers on Moe's conflicted expression, to the sound of Marge's receding footsteps, is almost eerie in its disquietude, a small moment in which we find ourselves trapped in Moe's lonely dilemma, culminating in him emphatically discarding the towel altogether (thus regulating his moral compass to the trash). The episode's second guest voice, Michael Buffer, shows up to play himself doing his familiar announcing duties (and as a child of 90s Britain, I cannot overstress how flat-out impossible it is for me to hear him holler "Let's get ready to rumble!" and not immediately have PJ and Duncan ringing in my ears^[1]), before Tatum proceeds to beat the living shit out of Homer. There are clear limits on how far the episode is willing to go with this brutal display - we don't see any blood or real injury detail - but every last thud from Tatum's hulking fists against Homer's malleable skull lands with an ice-cold shock to our own systems. As well it should. Moe had earlier raised an interesting point, when he'd disputed who ought to be seen as the villain of this flagrantly messed-up scenario. Is it Tatum, who's doing the actual pummelling of a man he blatantly outclasses in strength and stamina? Is it Sweet, who procured the whole dubious arrangement? Is it indeed Moe himself, for putting his personal ambition above the interests of his best friend?  Or maybe it's the entirety of Springfield, for so vehemently cheering the atrocious spectacle on? 

What's clever about the climax is that although it's Homer receiving the pummelling, the character whose endurance is really being tested here is Moe. How long can he stand by and do nothing before it dawns on him that it again falls on him to save his pal from being massacred by mindless bullies? In this case, the bullies are filling up the entire stadium, shaking their fists and urging Tatum to make the finishing blow. We suspect that their motivation isn't altogether different from that cited by the parents of Bart's tormentors, in that they need the bread and circuses as distractions from the crummy lives they've had to live. They collectively get in on the carnage, baying to see Homer offed for their own gratification, and Moe finally summons the gumption to stand up to them all, thanks his moral centre getting its second wind - that, and a device pilfered from an audience member known as the "Fan Man". Introduced by Buffer as a "ruiner of events worldwide", the Fan Man was a real individual (actual name James Miller) who'd gained notoriety when he'd interrupted a heavyweight title fight in 1993 by riding a powered paraglider into the ring, and went on to pull off a series of similar stunts in both the US and the UK. (Reading about him, I was put heavily in mind of Larry Walters, the man who attached a bunch of helium balloons to his lawn chair and went for a flight over part of Los Angeles, in that their lives sound like funny anecdotes to share at dinner parties, until you click on the relevant Wikipedia pages and discover how tragically they ended.) Moe lifting Homer to safety with the powered paraglider is a nod to that disrupted heavyweight fight, but it's also a cheeky bit of symbolism in its own right, signifying Moe's ascent from the depths of depravity. It's an allusion so transparent that the script once again can't resist having Homer underline it, asking in his semi-conscious state if Moe is an angel. "Yes Homer, I'm an angel," Moe dryly responds. "All us angels wear Farrah slacks." Tatum is awed at how much Homer's manager evidently cares about him, and shows some vulnerability of his own when he asks Sweet if he would have done the same for him. Sweet insists with his usual leer that he would, then packs Tatum coldly off to the van, giving us the sense that he too has been exploited for the sake of public spectacle. Sweet pays Moe a check for $100,000 but condemns him as an incurable loser and will have nothing more to do with him. Moe seems to have no hard feelings about this outcome; when Marge thanks him for giving up his prestigious new path for Homer, Moe replies, "What do dreams matter, Marge? I was able to stick up for a pal." Moe enters the story thinking he needs one kind of redemption, but exits having attained quite another.

The ending is, admittedly, a little suspiciously naked on the sentiment, especially given that we're dealing with a scuzzbag like Moe here, and The Simpsons being The Simpsons insists on tempering it with a dose of sly humor, sending us off what has to be one of the most bewildering outros in all the series. Having gained his angel wings, Moe is unable to stay grounded and leaves Springfield behind, insisting that he needs some time to think. His seraphic exit is tempered by the sudden reappearance of the Fan Man, who yells at him to return the stolen paraglider (there is something nicely cyclical in how this story begins and ends with pilfered contraptions), undercutting the melancholy with a reminder of the sheer absurdity of what we're looking at. It only cranks that weirdness up to 11 for the closing credits, taking Moe's redemption motif to more dizzying heights still by showing him using the paraglider to help people in various crises around the globe - we witness him saving a mother and baby from a flooded village, lifting an explorer from a quagmire, extinguishing a forest fire and distributing boxes of aid to the needy. And all to the sounds of "People", a song originally performed by Barbara Streisand for the 1964 musical Funny Girl, here delivered with haunting precision by regular Simpsons vocalist Sally Stevens. It is specifically a song about the value of managing to get beyond "grown-up pride" and to bare vulnerability, something that we know Moe would ordinarily be averse to. Honestly, this whole sequence gets to me in ways that it probably shouldn't. The joke is that it pushes the notion of Moe the saintly humanitarian to such a degree that it doesn't seem quite sincere, ultimately putting his redemption in quotation marks. And yet I could shed honest-to-God tears at it. Stevens' performance is just that achingly beautiful, and I profoundly regret that it wasn't included on Songs In The Key of Springfield, or either of the sequel albums. If you'd told me at the time that The Simpsons would be ending with Season 8 and this was to be Moe's personal adieu, I would in all odds have believed you, and declared it one of the most poetic character send-offs of all-time. In that parallel timeline I'm sure the thought of paragliding Moe still being out there, encircling the globe and helping every desperate soul he happens across, would be weighing on my mind even now.

Sky 1 edit alert!: This might actually be the single most baffling edit that Sky 1 ever implemented. For some reason they always used to remove the couch gag and jump directly to the credits on the TV set. Sky 1 were occasionally known to cut couch gags from Halloween episodes, if they depicted anything too grisly for their standards (the family being hung in "Treehouse of Horror VI" for example), but this particular couch gag was assuredly as inoffensive as they come, depicting the family in cowboy gear, and the couch bucking like a horse and carrying them off into the sunset. What's even more peculiar is that they later had no problem with showing that exact same couch gag before "Homer vs. The Eighteenth Amendment", so I've no idea what was going on here. Sometimes Sky 1 were just screwy. Also gone (less bafflingly, if austerely) was Moe's "Future down the crapper" remark.

[1] Fun fact: there is a trademark on Buffer's signature "Let's get ready to rumble!" announcement, hence why Ant and Dec had to title their single with the looser "Rhumble" variation. 

Two Dozen and One Greyhounds (aka Are Those Naughty Dogs Back Again?)

The third canine-centred episode of The Simpsons' classic era stands out as the anomaly for a number of reasons. "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds" (2F18), which aired April 9th 1995 toward the tail end of the sixth season, is the only entry of the four that isn't focused on the relationship between Bart and Santa's Little Helper. You get the impression that the Simpsons kids are much more protective of the dog (and his progeny) than their parents, which tracks with what we saw in those previous episodes, but there's no sense here that Bart relates particularly strongly to Santa's Little Helper because he sees in him so much of his own incorrigible self. Truth be told, "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds" isn't really a Santa's Little Helper episode at all, with the dog's most significant participation confined largely to the first act. He serves as a catalyst to the main conflict and then takes a backseat, making this not much of a step-up from his turn in the previous season's "Sweet Seymour Skinner's Baadasssss Song". And yet his presence is felt all throughout this story. The plot involves him courting a female racing dog and siring an improbably large litter of twenty-five puppies, all of which have his face, and his appetite for destruction. We might not spend a lot of time with the leading pooch himself, but we have twenty-five bags of his troubled genes crawling around in his stead - which turns out to be way more Santa's Little Helper than anyone (not least the Simpsons themselves) can handle.

An advantage that "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds" should have over the other "classic" Santa's Little Helper episodes is that, out of the four, it is the least prone to sentimentality. A shortcoming shared by "Bart's Dog Gets an F", "Dog of Death" and "The Canine Mutiny" is that their resolutions all hinge upon "boy and his dog" cliches played mawkishly straight, but this is something that "Two Dozen" sidesteps altogether. It isn't interested in tugging on the heartstrings, but in revelling in the inevitable chaos that comes with attempting to live under the same roof as twenty-five puppies, sire dog, dam dog and an ostracised cat. For the first two acts, this is as free-wheeling a farce as The Simpsons had ever tried its hand at by Season 6. Eventually, it settles into becoming one of those "Bart and Lisa Investigate" stories that have been a staple of the series since "Krusty Gets Busted" of Season 1, but even with some belated menace thrown into the plot (in the form of Mr Burns, and his nefarious plans for the puppies), it never takes itself overly seriously. There are action sequences that anticipate the high-adrenalin climax of "Brother From Another Series" (with Bart and Lisa being held at gunpoint and escaping by sliding down a chute), but here it's mostly in quotation marks.

Unfortunately, none of those anomalies work in the episode's favour, and I'm inclined to rate "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds" as both the worst of Season 6 and the weakest of the show's runty litter of Santa's Little Helper outings. It is, if nothing else, more watchable than the mean-spirited "Dog of Death", but it is a far junkier experience. I feel a slight trepidation in saying that, as I get the impression that this is the best-regarded Santa's Little Helper episode among Simpsons fans, and I'm sure that is 100% down to the musical number that Burns performs toward the end about his sociopathic love of animal hides. No dispute that it's an extremely energetic and unforgettable set-piece, and I suspect that having it land so very late on in the game convinces viewers that the episode as a whole was a lot stronger then it was, since that is the last major spectacle it leaves us with. This is a case of The Simpsons cheekily exercising the writer's escape clause outlined by Robert McKee (Brian Cox) in the 2002 film Adaptation. :"The last act makes a [story]...You can have flaws, problems, but wow them in the end and you've got a hit." My question is, if the "See My Vest" sequence didn't show up to give us a much-need serotonin-boost at the eleventh hour, is there anything at all about this episode that would stick out to you as memorable or inspired? Aside from maybe the Rory Calhoun reference that works precisely because it's so unintelligible?

The thing is, "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds" is a cute episode, but it's also kind of dumb. What's startling is that it's dumb in a way that I don't think there had been any real precedent for until now, at least in terms of A-stories. It makes a bit more sense when we take into account who wrote it. This was a Mike Scully script, and while Scully was still entirely capable of writing episodes with strong narrative backbones and sincere character observations (see "Lisa's Rival" from earlier that season), his worst indulgences were already starting to creep through, notably in his approach to writing Homer (again, see "Lisa's Rival" from earlier that season, or for a particularly foreboding example, "Lisa on Ice"), and "Two Dozen" feels like the first occasion on which he really let those eccentricities run rampant. I don't much care for the direction the show went when Scully eventually took over as showrunner, and I can somewhat see the blueprints for that direction in this episode. The story is half-baked and excessively cartoony, the humor is crude and physical, the Simpsons themselves are written fairly unsympathetically (although that's par for the course with these dog episodes) and the mindfulness for tying up loose ends is lacking (see next paragraph). The small mercy is that Homer is nowhere near as horribly written as he was in "Lisa on Ice" (in part because this plot doesn't give him as many opportunities to be an all-out dick), although Snowball II gets the worst of what we have - in "GET THAT CAT OUT OF THE WAY!" you can pick out the aggressively entitled tone he'd be assuming a lot under Scully.

For once, however, I am not inclined to name the eternally maligned Snowball II as the critter done dirtiest by this particular doggone script. That honor goes to Santa's girlfriend, She's The Fastest. "Two Dozen" kicks of with Santa's Little Helper in an unusually hyperactive mode and the family failing to realise that his behaviour problems stem from sexual frustration, until he breaks free and chases down and mounts a female dog on the tracks. Rather than doing the sensible thing and getting their dog fucking neutered, the Simpsons decide to take the female dog into their abode (her owner, the Rich Texan, seems only too happy to relinquish her, laughing uproariously when Marge asks if he'll miss her loyalty and companionship). It's a move that makes the Simpsons look stupid as hell, if they don't foresee where this scenario is headed, although maybe that's part of the joke. Needless to say, She's The Fastest didn't become a long-term fixture of the Simpson household - after the events of this episode, she's never seen again, and "Two Dozen" never attempts to give her character closure or account for her subsequent absence. I can't say I'd gotten terribly attached to this dog or had been anticipating many great adventures with She's The Fastest to come, but I do find it cheap and lazy that the script would go to such lengths to incorporate this additional pet into the Simpson fold, only to forget about her the instant she's served her narrative purpose. Could they not have worked in at least a throwaway line indicating that she'd fallen out with Santa's Little Helper and gone off with some other family? I'd like to give Scully the benefit of the doubt and assume there was something along those lines in an earlier draft that was cut for time, but the fact of the matter is that She's The Fastest is only a plot device, brought in solely to proliferate Santa's seed, and the episode has no qualms with treating her as such. In fairness, she's not the only animal to be acquired by the family and then completely memory holed - after Season 4's "Duffless", we'd heard nary a peep from that hamster who was adopted by Lisa and abused in the name of science/vengeance. The difference being, I suppose, that Lisa was chiefly interested in that hamster as a test subject, and there was no indication that she'd intended to keep it once her experiment was concluded (as terribly out of character as it seems for Lisa to treat an animal as a resource and then discard it). In "Two Dozen" we have Bart and Lisa begging for ownership of this dog and her original owner walking out on her, so it doesn't sit half as well with me for her to fade from the picture without thought or comment. There was an alternative - rather than saddling the Simpsons with a second dog and getting all that extra story baggage, they might have had the dam's owner dump the unwanted puppies with them (as happened with Eddie's litter in the Frasier episode "The Unkindest Cut of All"). As a side-note, the character design for Santa's girlfriend also bugs the living snot out of me - they gave her human eyelashes, for Pete's sake!^[1]

Returning to the dog track allows the series to get reacquainted with its beginnings in "Simpsons Roasting on An Open Fire", and while the explicit references to the events of that episode are a little jarring, given how drastically far removed "Two Dozen" feels from it tonally, I do like the subtler callbacks that don't advertise themselves so openly. She's The Fastest's racing number is 8, just like Santa's Little Helper before her, and Homer is once again swayed into placing a bet based on the perceived significance of the dog's name - which on this occasion actually works out for him, or at least it would have done if Santa's Little Helper hadn't disrupted the race. She's The Fastest's career is tanked, and for better or for worse, she takes up residence with the Simpsons. We get to see how the family's attitude toward responsible pet ownership has further degraded since the days of "Bart's Dog Gets an F", where it was recognised as a major transgression for Santa's Little Helper to be left to roam the neighbourhood unattended. In this episode, Marge, of all characters, willingly opens the door for the dogs so that they can wander all over town as they please, in a fanciful sequence that ends with the dogs seated at their own personal table outside Luigi's restaurant and coming to blows over what must be the toughest spaghetti strand in the world.

This might be a good point to acknowledge that "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds" is, specifically, The Simpsons' tribute to the Disney animated canon (long before they themselves fell under the ownership of the Mouse), and there's an extent to which we need to view it through that lens. The title alone is a dead giveaway that the plot aspires to pilfer a few details from the 1961 classic One Hundred and One Dalmatians (it also evokes Fox's 1950 film Cheaper By The Dozen, then yet to be remade with Steve Martin and Bonnie Hunt), but the Disney references are scattered and varied enough to suggest a broader running theme. The romantic interlude with Santa's Little Helper and She's The Fastest is plucked straight out of  Lady and The Tramp (1955), while the climactic "See My Vest" number is a flagrant rip-off of the "Be Our Guest" song from Beauty & The Beast (1991). (It's probably not an intentional reference, but that especially corny gag where Snowball II bats away the catnip also puts me strongly in mind of that random Parisian in The Aristocats (1970) who decides to lay off the Merlot.) The entire story is a love letter to Disney, and as such it might be given leeway for being a little more cutesy and anthropomorphic than your average Simpsons outing. On the episode commentary, Groening talks with pride about how they always strove to have the animals in the series behave like real animals, with the rare anthropomorphisms being reserved for situations where they'd ring a deliberately disturbing note (the example he cites is in "Bart Gets An Elephant" of Season 5, where Santa's Little Helper and Snowball II attempt to walk upright and say "We love you" in a manner that suggests the effort is causing them excruciating pain). Ironic, then, that "Two Dozen" itself proves to be something of a deviant in that regard, with quite a few jokes that have the animals behaving in distinctly un-animal ways that, while self-consciously silly, feel as though they're intended to be charming rather than weird, eg: Santa's and She's snickering at the Shar Pei in the park (the Shar Pei's reaction is great, though) and Snowball II rubbing her eyes in disbelief. Still, such touches are handled with a sharp enough Simpsons edge. The sequence that's the most conspicuously Disney-ish is Santa's and She's aforementioned date around the town, and while this section is a little too long and frothy for my tastes, it's kept afloat by a playfully subversive undercurrent. There's a moment where the dogs have their picture taken after poking their heads through a photo stand-in, which is a self-evidently ridiculous scenario (who's taking the picture? Who is the photo even for?), except it's revealed that the image on the other side is a recreation of one of Cassius Marcellus Coolidge's paintings of dogs playing poker. To the untrained eye, this might read as a harmless, perfectly kitschy cultural reference, but a more seasoned Simpsons viewer might interpret its appearance as ominous, having been trained by "Treehouse of Horror IV" to see those pictures as inherently cursed. The spaghetti kiss moment from Lady & The Tramp likewise goes humorously wrong, with the apparent lovebirds turning into snarling beasts the instant their resource guarding urges are activated. And when we finally get to "See My Vest", a great part of that joke is that what Burns is singing about is so horrifically far-removed from the intentions expressed by Lumiere and chums to that same cheerful tune (although it might have appealed to Gaston, who used antlers in all of his decorating).

There was, of course, always more to Disney than cute creatures batting their unnaturally elongated eyelashes. There was an element of danger, typically involving the separation of the young and innocent from protective paternal figures and/or a deliciously flamboyant villain, and while "Two Dozen" eventually yields both of those things by bringing Burns into the mix, we first have to sit through a very laggy and staccato middle section that's little more than a string of skits about puppy-inflicted mayhem. The birth of the twenty-five pups brings what I personally consider to be the most unforgivable aspect of this episode, this being that it contains what has to be by and far the worst, most cringe-inducing line of dialogue ever spoken by a Simpsons character, at least in the 90s. I refer to Bart's "Hey look, a really small dog just fell out of Santa's girlfriend!" Forget that "Springfield swings like a pendulum do!" line my brother used to rag on hard in "All Singing, All Dancing", this is just heinous. Among other sins, it makes it sound as if Bart doesn't understand where babies come from, which of course he does. He had that video he showed his class about how kittens are born (the ugly truth) in "Lisa's Substitute", and he'd surely have put it together that puppy births are going to be much the same process. Then again, the whelping of She's The Fastest is a surprisingly clean business, devoid of afterbirth, umbilical cords and meconium, and the puppies are born with their eyes already open. Disney's depiction of the process in One Hundred and One Dalmatians honestly felt a touch more realistic.

I'm not going to go after "Two Dozen" for its far-fetched set up because at this point in the series it just seems futile. The premise of the Simpsons seriously thinking that they can live with twenty-seven dogs (plus a cat, a fish tank and - possibly - a hamster somewhere in the backdrop) is perhaps no more fanciful than the premise of them attempting to co-exist with a full-grown African Elephant chained up in their yard. It does mean, however, that when the threat of removing the puppies is finally introduced, it seems like common sense prevailing and not something you can really feel too mad at the adult Simpsons for imposing. Lisa's response - "Is that what we do in this family? When someone becomes an inconvenience we just get rid of them?" - would be a patently spurious rebuttal even without the cutaway gag showing Abe in miserable solitude at the Retirement Home. Sorry Lisa, but you clearly don't have room for all these dogs, and it's evident enough by now that your family are shitty pet owners anyway. This is, I think, what makes "Two Dozen" a weaker installment than either "Bart's Dog Gets an F" and "Dog of Death" - for all of those episode's deficiencies, they dealt with the trials of pet-keeping in a grounded fashion in which there were genuine stakes. When Bart (twice) found himself in the position of having to speak up for the beloved dog his callous parents were prepared to sacrifice to make their own lives a little easier, his distress and indignation felt real and searing. Here, we have a ludicrous scenario that plainly isn't sustainable, and which the family look obtuse for ever allowing to get this far. You just can't feel the same sympathy for the children's position this time round because, yeah, the line does have to be drawn somewhere. Their unreasonable pleading nevertheless manages to buy the puppies a short reprieve, with their parents agreeing to keep them so long as they don't cause any more trouble (um, right, because that's really going to happen). At this point we suddenly leave the milieu of a whimsical Disney film and find ourselves plonked right in the middle of the hellish sitcom banalities The Simpsons is so fond of sending up. Marge and Homer are hosting a dinner party for Reverend Lovejoy, Homer's old army drill sergeant (the remnant of some prior unseen adventure where Homer joined the army and was mistakenly discharged a month early) and the regional director of the IRS. Exactly the kind of trio whom you wouldn't want present to witness the stomach-churning spectacle of your roasted turkey ripping open to reveal two flea-ridden gremlins inside. The puppies are evicted!

Rehoming the puppies presents its own challenge, thanks to the pups' harrowing tendency to vocally object whenever any prospective new owner tries to separate them. "We've got to be realistic..." Marge insists (a little late to say that now), before Burns shows up and offers to give all twenty-five of them a loving home. We know right off the bat that Burns' intentions for those dogs can be none too savoury. The family themselves are savvy enough to recognise this, and to deny Burns ownership of the puppies, but not so savvy that they don't also turn their backs on the puppies for long enough for Burns to stuff them into a sack and take them anyway. "Two Dozen" took its sweet time, but now we finally have something resembling a decent conflict. Actually, when Burns shows up the tone of the episode changes drastically, going from Happy, Dopey and a bit Sleepy to something much more energetically demented. It stands to reason - it is so often the Disney villains who are the MVPs of their stories, with their extravagance and their dark eccentricities, so it should not surprise us that this rule would apply to Disney pastiches too. The third act kicks off with a sly moment of self-awareness, by pretending to go through the motions of having the Simpsons treat the puppies' disappearance as a genuine mystery, before cutting abruptly to the chase, with Bart and Lisa infiltrating Burns' mansion to investigate. They observe Burns taking curiously doting care of the puppies, prompting the Simpsons kids to ponder if they've perhaps misjudged the decrepit billionaire. But no. Burns lays out his sinister agenda with nauseating starkness, adhering to the traditional Disney model of belting out your heart's deepest desire with a lavish song and dance number, in this case an upbeat showstopper detailing the gruesome array of animal skins that went into the attire in his personal wardrobe. His latest fashion hankering is for a tuxedo made from greyhound fur - a narrative development that's honestly no stranger or more fucked-up than the Disney film it's spoofing, where ninety-nine Dalmatian pups were similarly threatened with the prospect of becoming a garish fur coat, although Burns' evil motives are expressed with a shameless theatricality that would put even Cruella herself in the shade. "See My Vest" stands out among Simpsons musical sequences because it is such a delirious exercise in bad taste - a head-spinning voyage through one man's hedonistic vision of every living creature under the sun as the raw materials to be cut up and modified into whatever hideous garment takes his fancy. Every taboo regarding animal mistreatment is violated; Burns has both slippers made from an endangered rhino and a beret made out of a decapitated poodle (less an outrageous fashion statement than a serial killer deviancy). The show was at least able to forgo its usual hard-on for hamster abuse on this occasion, though I suppose those loafers, former gophers aren't so far-removed from a hamster.

To be honest, this is all a bit much even for Burns, which goes back to what I said about his actions in this episode being in quotation marks. He's playing the cartoonishly flamboyant villain in a Disney parody; his shameless theatricality might be jaw-dropping, but it also ensures that it stays just unreal enough for comfort. He also gets to show the inkling of a sensitive side, having earmarked twenty-four of the puppies for death, but intending to spare the one that's endeared itself to him with its ability to stand up on its hind legs (just like Rory Calhoun - you know, the man who's always standing and walking), and whom he's christened Little Monty (even at his most doting, there is something faintly perturbing in his desire to transform this loveable pup into a reflection of his own ego). Bart and Lisa are able to exploit Burns' affection for Little Monty to their advantage, but not without first making a daring escape with the other puppies down a laundry chute. I'll concede that there are some underrated gags in the attempted rescue sequence - I like Bart's "Hush, puppies", and in particular that strange, ominous shot of the door handle slowly turning, as Burns and Smithers take an inexplicably long time getting back into the room that holds the puppies (Smithers, incidentally, doesn't get to be much more here than a quietly disapproving bystander to Burns' scheme). All that I can say is that it is mighty fortunate that the puppies were all able to vacate the laundry basket before Bart and Lisa landed, or else they would have risked squashing a few of them in the effort.

The group does not get far before being cornered by Burns and Smithers, at which point Bart gets a hold of Little Monty and mixes him up with the others, hoping that if Burns can't pick out his favourite dog then he'll have to treat them all with the same mercy. Unfortunately, Burns has no trouble distinguishing Little Monty, because he's the only puppy of the twenty-five who'll stand on his hind legs at his command. Thinking quickly, Bart is able to coax the remaining twenty-four to stand upright by dangling a line of socks above them (the culmination of a running gag in which the dogs were shown to have a perpetual hunger for socks), so that Burns can no longer tell which one is Little Monty. The whole scenario is a little hokey, but it plays neatly on the reason for Burns' contradictory outlook on the dogs, in that he sees Little Monty as different to the others and worthy of attachment because he's able to assert himself as an individual. It nearly backfires, for in practice all that Bart has done is nullify Little Monty's individuality, so that none of the dogs now stand out to Burns, and he initially resolves to kill them all. But even a heart as frosty as Burns' cannot help but melt on being confronted with a barrage of plaintive puppy-dogs eyes, and he decides that the creatures are simply too cute to kill. It's an undeniably sentimental turn from a character who, just a few minutes ago, seemed totally unabashed about wearing a decapitated poodle noggin, but Scully's script is clever enough to temper it by having Burns' evil not immediately subside, but suddenly swing in a startling new direction. The only crime more shocking than killing puppies would be killing children (unless it's Sideshow Bob attempting to kill Bart, in which case it's only business as usual in the woods), and Burns declares himself prepared to do just that, turning his gun on Bart and Lisa, with no apparent motive other than than that he can. But of course, he can't, for even those pesky meddling Simpsons kids are too disarming when you have them at their most vulnerable. Has he learned his lesson that fur is murder? Kind of. Burns insists that he'll never wear another item of clothing made from an animal...provided that animal can do an amusing trick.

As it turns out, Burns has a more ambitious trick in mind than simply standing on two legs. The epilogue reveals that he went on to successfully train the rowdy rabble into champion race dogs (Santa's Little Helper, as we'll recall, was a lousy racer, so the puppies obviously took after their mother in that regard), adding a further ten million dollars to his already bountiful funds. Meanwhile, Homer isn't exactly taking the realisation that he let these world champion dogs slip through his fingers. To its credit, the episode bows out in a uniquely ballsy fashion, with one of the strangest, most hair-raising endings of all of Season 6 (worthy of Season 5, in fact), which sees a horrified Marge wandering down to the basement to find Homer's silhouette swinging in an ominous manner designed to suggest that he's hung himself. What's going on is naturally a whole lot sillier - Homer is gripping onto a ceiling beam whilst batting an old lightbulb, which is apparently the most constructive outlet he has for his chagrin at losing the dogs. The episode then fades out right as the burning bulb smacks directly into his forehead, with obvious results. Homer suffering some form of physical mishap and screaming in agony is yet another Scully indulgence that would overstay its welcome once he took over, but here the execution is sharp and well-judged. If it's any consolation to Homer, I doubt that the puppies would have become world champions if they'd stayed with the Simpsons. It's not as though they had the resources or the know-how to train those dogs, who'd have instead spent their days lounging around, devouring socks and watching Baywatch. Besides, from an animal welfare perspective the greyhound racing industry isn't a whole lot less contentious than the fur industry, so you could argue that the puppies didn't actually win either.

 

Sky 1 edit alert!: Back in the day Sky 1 would always trim the dog track sequence to remove the frames where you see Santa's Little Helper mounting She's The Fastest, although we still got Bart and Lisa's confused commentary right after, making it plain enough what those naughty dogs were up to.

Also, gone was this entire exchange:

 

Bart: Oh, me and Santa's Little Helper used to be a team. But he never wants to play any more since his bitch moved in.

Marge: Bart, don't ever say that word again!

Bart: Well that's what she is! I looked it up!

Marge: I'm going to write to the dictionary people and have that checked. It feels like a mistake to me.

 

I am in two minds about this. Bart is referring to a literal dog as a "bitch", not a woman, but the way that statement is framed, it is still clearly intended to have misogynistic connotations, so I get why Sky might have felt uneasy about it. What puzzles me is that they always retained that moment in "Marge In Chains" where Apu calls Marge a bitch - I don't remember seeing that episode and ever not hearing it - and the context there is so much meaner-spirited. Regardless, it's not a huge loss, this being a limper variation on a joke that was much better done in "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?". Bart doesn't get nearly the same relish out of calling She's The Fastest a bitch as he did Herb a bastard.

Finally, I noted in my review of "Dog of Death" that there was unequivocally some anti-cat sentiment among The Simpsons' writing staff. To set the record straight, this observation does not apply to showrunner David Mirkin, who is evidently a cat person and devotes a chunk of the "Two Dozen" commentary to speaking with affection for all of the cats he's owned. Scully, by comparison, seems to have had mostly bad luck with the animals - growing up, his childhood pets were a cat he was severely allergic to (but which was beloved by his mother), and a canine vagabond that ditched him after only two days.

 

[1] I get that it's a reference to the antiquated practice of creating female counterparts by taking the male's character design and giving it long eyelashes and maybe a ribbon (see Minnie Mouse, Daisy Duck, etc). I don't have to like it, however.

Team Homer (aka Birds of A Feather)

It's finally time for us to talk about "Team Homer" of Season 7 (episode 3F10), and we might as well start by leaping straight to the main attraction - yes, this is the episode with that amazingly inspired sight gag where Jacques, Lurleen, Mindy and Kashmir are seen competing in the Springfield bowling leagues under the team name "The Home-Wreckers". That alone makes this one of the most important installments in the history of The Simpsons. No hyperbole, if you feel any kind of affinity or attachment for the characters in question then it can't be underestimated just how mind-blowing powerful this deceptively small moment is. Not only do we have "Team Homer" to thank for applying the term "Home-Wreckers" to handily denote these characters as a collective, it's really down to this episode that we're able to think of them as a collective at all. It's not as though they ever encountered each other in their respective adventures in coming between Marge and Homer. Perhaps it was always inevitable that Lurleen and Mindy would get together for the sake of a sly background gag, but "Team Homer" really went the extra mile in assembling all four of these characters and depicting them as a literal team battling what are always insurmountable odds. Everything about how the gag plays out is absolutely perfect. Their presence isn't lingered on and their significance as a unit isn't made any more explicit than in their team name - the episode trusts that you'll recognise each of these characters and connect all of the necessary dots yourself. Not so surprisingly, none of the Home-Wreckers get any dialogue, but their expressions as they exit the Bowlarama, having been knocked out of the league by the Pin Pals (coupled with Kashmir's impulse to take the loss out physically on Jacques) mark them out as rather sore losers. Maybe no more so than the Channel 6 Wastelanders, but it adds just an extra dash of personal acidity to their participation. If you look at the scenario from the Home-Wreckers' perspective, then the stakes for three of their four members would have been gut-churningly high. Lurleen and Mindy were both rejected by Homer, who just so happens to be the Pin Pals' honcho, while Jacques was rejected for Homer (and if we must retroactively factor in the happenings of "Pin Gal", then he presumably knows who Homer is). Once again, these characters have been pushed out to the sidelines to fester in their bruising defeat. Ironic then that Kashmir, who shouldn't logically have the same degree of personal investment in the match-up, seems to take the loss the hardest. Kashmir has always been the somewhat square-shaped peg among the Home-Wreckers, in that she wasn't interested in a relationship with her associated Simpson, and I have a sneaking suspicion that if this gag were done much later in the series' run, then she might have been looked in favour of one of Marge's jilted admirers, Artie Ziff (the reason why Artie didn't qualify at the time is, I suspect, because he had yet to create any serious trouble for Homer and Marge after they were married). But it's a gag works so much more aptly with Kashmir on board - her voluptuous form meshes better with the seductive aura of the team. As a bonus, it gives the Home-Wreckers the additional distinction of being the only team we see competing with a majority of female members (even if the lone male is quite blatantly the team captain...after all, he is the pro).

The real genius of the Home-Wreckers gag is in how it simultaneously speaks to both the richness of Springfield's wider community - to the idea that all of these little character connections are being constantly interwoven off of screen and that the show's world is so much bigger than the Simpsons' eye-view of it - and to just how fundamentally small and narrow in scope the Simpsons universe really is. I love the idea of Homer-Wreckers all being friends and would gleefully take an entire spin-off about their singledom exploits. But coupled with the revelation that the Home-Wreckers all know each other is the eyebrow-raising implication that they also all know what they have in common. That they call themselves "The Home-Wreckers" would suggest that they are entirely aware that they've each created apocalyptic mayhem for a family unit at some point over the past seven years (in Kashmir's case, not even purposely). Whether they're aware that it's the same family unit in all cases is more ambiguous (if so, can you imagine the sheer awkwardness of the conversations that must have gone on between them?), but it is nevertheless telling that the basis for their solidarity and self-definition should be the relatively minor point in their respective lives in which they tangled with a Simpson. It's not like we, the viewer, ever got a chance to know them for doing much else. It's a sly acknowledgement that the world does indeed revolve around that one cursed clan, and that all of its denizens exist in some form of service to them - even if, in the Home-Wreckers' case, that service was antagonism, to test the marital bonds between Homer and Marge. The Home-Wreckers understand exactly where they stand in the scheme of things, and they recognise how much it bites.

The Simpsons had already come a long way by the time "Team Homer" dropped, but the Home-Wreckers' cameo is a heartening reminder that the show hadn't forgotten its roots (Mindy being the only member who'd had her star turn in the latter half of the series' contemporary run). This was the second episode in which the topic of bowling took centre stage (technically, it was the third episode in which the Bowlarama was a major setting, but in "And Maggie Makes Three" the bowling itself largely took a backseat to Homer's short-lived stint as a non-divine pinspotter), and while Jacques' appearance is as close as it comes to explicitly referencing its predecessor, there are other subtle ways in which the episode is indebted to "Life on The Fast Lane". There's a nice continuity nod when Homer is telling Marge about the Pin Pal's initial victory over the Channel 6 Wastelanders, and Marge demonstrates herself to be very knowledgeable about bowling. Elsewhere, exterior shots of the Bowlarama are still being recycled from "Life on The Fast Lane".

The Home-Wreckers' appearance constitutes only a fleeting portion of the overall story, and yet it is very much the heart of the episode. Oh true, I do have a ton of bias on that point, but I don't think it would be overly controversial to suggest that the narrative tensions surrounding the Pin Pals' league prospects aren't half as delectable as observing how the various different team alignments fall among the Springfieldians - how they "quad off", in the words of showrunner David Mirkin, and what it says about each character's broader sense of personal identity. Some of these team formations seem perfectly natural and logical within universe - Patty and Selma, for example, are part of the DMV Regulation Kings, alongside a couple of unnamed male colleagues who seem every bit as grouchy and terminally bored with life as them. Others offer a more ostentatiously novel mix of characters, like the Channel 6 Wastelanders, a team comprised of Springfield's most prominent television personalities: Krusty the Clown, Kent Brockman, Arnie Pie (in The Sky) and Bumblebee Man (is Scott Christian sore that he didn't make the cut?), who happen to be the most obnoxious and self-aggrandising of the competitors, outside of the Pin Pals themselves. Other teams are linked by humorous gimmicks that suggest a surprisingly candid self-awareness on the part of their members (those aforementioned Home-Wreckers, but also the Stereotypes). In most cases, it is really fun to speculate how these teams might have come together and what kind of internal dynamics they would have (we get to see so few of them in action). The quad-off requiring the greatest suspension of disbelief are reigning league champs and ostensible episode antagonists, The Holy Rollers, a team made up of Reverend Lovejoy, Helen Lovejoy, Ned Flanders and Maude Flanders (none of them characters whom I would have pegged as having even a casual interest in bowling, much less being this proficient at it). What they obviously have in common is that they're representatives of Springfield's religious faction...which doesn't automatically make them birds of a feather. All signs point toward Maude and Helen getting along just fine, but it was well enough established by now that Timothy isn't so keen on Ned; the notion that he'd choose to hang out with Ned socially and work this well with him as a team is a glaring contrivance we'll just have to overlook. For the purposes of the story, the Holy Rollers make for effective final opponents because they radiate a moral purity that puts Homer and his scruffy lot in well the shade - the self-satisfaction of never having been caught driving without pants, as Moe so eloquently phrases it. Plus, it's implied that they might literally have God on their side - Ned explicitly calls on God for special favours during one bowl - making the Pin Pals the definitive underdogs.

"Team Homer" boasts an exceedingly simple premise, but it is nothing if not a busy episode, and we certainly do have a lot to unpack with it. There are multiple ways in which this unassuming adventure represents a significant turning point for the series, both in-universe and out. When it debuted, on January 7th 1996, it came attached with a note of immense sadness. The Simpsons was in its seventh season and had spectacularly exceeded early projections for its life expectancy; "Team Homer" arguably marked the point at which the march of time was felt so much more painfully than ever before, for reasons outside of the show's control. It was the first episode to air after the death of script supervisor/voice actress Doris Grau, on December 30th 1995, and was dedicated to her memory. The first Simpsons cast member to pass on was technically Christopher Collins, the original voice of Mr Burns and Moe, who parted ways with the show after only a few episodes - reportedly because he didn't get along with the rest of the crew - and died in 1994 due to encephalitis (side-note: Collins' place within Simpsons lore and his premature death are something that I think about a lot, and might be worth a whole blog post in itself some day). Grau, though, marked the first loss among the long-term players (although Phil Hartman's untimely death wasn't far on the horizon), and while her signature character, Lunchlady Doris, never had as much chance to shine as her character in The Critic (also named Doris), it was sad knowing that a particular avenue in the show's ever-burgeoning community was already closed off. It makes it all the more poignant, then, that "Team Homer" should be a rare episode to give Doris a spot of actual development, hinting at her own sense of broader identity outside of her designated position at the school cafeteria (not only is she competing in the league, but she's apparently the mother of Squeaky-Voiced Teen). Alas, this was as far as it could ever go, at least with this particular incarnation of the character. The luncheon lady was eventually reinstated to the show, with Tress MacNeille as her vocals, but under the revised moniker of Lunchlady Dora, a tacit admission that the character could obviously not be the same now that Grau was gone.

Within the episode itself, we can also see the subtle but impactful ways in which the sands of time were shifting and rearranging the balances between the show's supporting players. "Team Homer" marks the first significant step in what I like to term the "Life After Barney" phase - the fact that Moe, and not Barney, gets to be the character who accompanies Homer to the alley is a far bigger deal than it might seem at first glance. If you've listened to enough Simpsons DVD commentaries, you'll have picked up that Barney was a contentious character behind the scenes, and it's around this point that a conscious decision looks to have been made to pack him off into a soft retirement. The show never went as far as jettisoning Barney altogether (despite the efforts of incoming showrunners Josh Weinstein and Bill Oakley to get him stitched up for the attempted murder of Burns), but he was effectively relieved of his duties as Homer's best friend, with Moe being eyed up as a viable replacement. I tend to think of this as something that only got properly underway once Weinstein and Oakley had taken hold of the reins, but I have to remind myself that "Team Homer" was actually a holdover from Season 6, back when Mirkin called the shots, so perhaps there was more overlap in their intentions than I've given credit for. For Homer to have any kind of one-to-one socialisation with Moe outside of the bar was unusual at the time and, coupled with his recent B-story in "Bart Sells His Soul", indicated that Moe was going to become a much more prominent player from now on. As for Barney, he isn't completely forgotten - his absence is explicitly accounted for, when Homer notes that he stopped coming to the bar after acquiring a girlfriend. What's interesting is that Lenny and Carl's participation is ruled out within the same statement, and for the same reason. Although they would eventually become two of Homer's closest and oft-seen companions (replacing Apu and Otto as the other half of the Pin Pals), at this point the writers still seemed to want to maintain a clearer division between Homer's work life and his social life.

On that note, "Team Homer" functions as a neat little study into Homer's friendship values and where he's inclined to look for solidarity. He's first inspired to form the Pin Pals, along with Moe and Apu, on the recognition that they've been excluded from the league because they don't have teams of their own. The premise that initially binds them is that they are all outcasts. Their ragtag origins and downtrodden status are inadvertently advertised in the cheap uniforms for which they have to settle, inviting the derisive attentions of the Channel 6 Wastelanders. (At first glance, I thought it odd that Sideshow Mel wasn't among them, but then they are the bullying team and I couldn't see Mel getting in on that or being this outrageously nasty about the Pin Pals' uniforms. It's not within his nature. I'm disappointed that it is apparently in Arnie's). On their own, they would be losers, but through coming together and openly celebrating that connection they're able to turn the tables on teams who might easily have bested them. It's worth noting at this point that "Team Homer" was another Mike Scully script, if you squint you can discern his version of Homer coming into play, just put to a more constructive and benevolent purpose than usual. The watershed moment for the Pin Pals comes when Homer suggests that they carve out a niche as the team that supports each other. There's actually nothing to suggest that the other teams don't, they just don't make a loud and obnoxious a display of it with an arsenal of team chants, as Homer is able to rally his fellow Pin Pals into doing, and apparently that's where most of them are going wrong. For a while, this morale-boosting technique is enough to overcome what might be the Pin Pals' obvious deficiency - not the teams' shoddy, homemade uniforms, but rather its distinctly arbitrary formation. Otto Mann (I was never sure if his name was intended as a pun on "automan", or a reference to the Ottoman Empire) remains the odd man out of the group. He gets roped in because he happened to be in the right place at the right time, and had seemed to be more interested in the contents of the Bowlarama's claw machine than in the game itself. He isn't someone whom Homer, Moe or Apu would ordinarily interact with, and it's really not surprising that he's the one who later gets booted from the team to make way for Mr Burns, a development that engenders a lesser sense of betrayal than perhaps it should. One suspects that just about any character other than the loathed and decrepit Burns could have filled his vacant position to begin with.

What is obviously important is that all of the team members are in perfect sync with one another, and this is presumably why Homer's chants prove so formidable. They give the Pin Pals a persistent point of synchronisation, the sensation that they are working actively together at all times on exactly the same page. Any cracks in that unity are going to risk exposing serious weaknesses. The team that suffers the most embarrassing loss - the Springfield Police Framers - makes the grievous mistake of attempting to force one thing that is not like the others into the mix and doesn't even have the honor of getting to bowl a full game (a shackled Snake, for some reason, is having to fill in for one of the police officers, and takes the opportunity to escape custody, forcing Wiggum to forfeit). But just as a breakdown in unity may be fatal to the team, it might also prove damning to the individual. To lose your team is to lose a chunk of your identity which, as is exemplified by all of the teams competing, is fortified by the company you keep. For the outlier Otto, being exiled from the Pin Pals means being banished back to his place beside the claw machine to hunt for lobster-shaped harmonicas, but for the other members the stakes are higher. For Moe, a place on a successful bowling team is his means of demonstrating that he's better than dirt (maybe not that fancy nutrient-loaded dirt you can apparently buy in the stores). The most revealing moment for Apu, meanwhile, has less to do with Burns' intrusion than it does an off-screen drama to which we are mostly not privy. As it turns out, he was invited to join another team, the Stereotypes (a name even more flamboyantly on the nose than the Home-Wreckers, denoting the heavily caricatured likes of Captain McCallister, Groundskeeper Willie, Luigi the Italian chef and Cletus the slack-jawed yokel), but turned them down, apparently feeling that he could do better than to identify with such a shameless parade of human cliches. He later rethinks that position, once Burns enters the scene and the Pin Pals start to lag behind the Stereotypes.

The plight Apu faced with the Stereotypes - the prospective flattening of his identity through the degrading integration into a unit that champions conformity over individuality - is echoed by the episode's B-story, in which Bart's "Down With Homework" t-shirt, courtesy of a MAD Magazine iron-on, causes such a violent uprising at Springfield Elementary that Skinner insists on having his students wear uniforms. This in turn causes the children to lose all sense of singularity, to the point where, as observed by the outgoing Lunchlady Doris, they even start blinking in unison. I don't have quite so much to say about this subplot on its own, aside from that I find its overblown take on the subject inherently nonplussing, because a) I'm from the UK, where schools requiring students to wear uniform are the overwhelming norm and not the exception, and b) trust me when I say that the uniform worn by the kids at Springfield Elementary is considerably LESS dorky than the uniform I had to wear. The school I attended had this thing about ugly and uncomfortable blazers. I would have killed for Mr Boy of Main Street! The most interesting thing about this story, to me, is in how it parallels the themes present in the A-story. Both are concerned with how the individual's identity and self-perception is molded by the wider group and, as Erik Adams points out in his review on The AV Club, uniforms prove equally integral to how that group is defined. They reach for opposite conclusions, however. For the students of Springfield Elementary, putting on a uniform means becoming part of a faceless mass and being denied any form of personal expression. For the league contenders, a uniform signifies acceptance and the possibility of finding one's place in the world (or even acceptance of one's place in the world, as with the Stereotypes). The result is an episode where the values of the young are implicitly contrasted against those of the fully grown. There's an unspoken tension between the children's youthful urge to rebel against every which way authority should attempt to pigeonhole them, and the sad neediness of the adults in finding their purpose and affinity in whatever group might be prepared to have them.

Nowhere is that sad neediness more evident than in the figure who threatens to bring the Pin Pals' empire crashing down, all because he aspires to be a part of it. You don't tend to see a lot of sincere analysis for how Burns is characterised in "Team Homer", possibly because Scully's script insists on putting quotation marks around it. When Burns approaches the team and requests that they accept him as one of them, he is entirely upfront about the fact that his desire springs from an "unpredictable change of heart". This is Scully both admitting to the narrative contrivance and foreshadowing how the scenario is likely to end - it's all very slick, but I can't help but feel that it sells Burns a little short. Is it so inconceivable that Burns might notice the camaraderie among the Pin Pals and become curious about what he's missing out on? "Team Homer" did not, after all, air terribly far ahead of "Homer The Smithers", an episode that on the one hand illustrates just how painfully out of touch Burns is with the common man (as seen in his encounter with Lenny) but also implies that he isn't entirely satisfied with life in his ivory tower, and there's a side of him that yearns to step just a little out of his shell. For the most part, Burns lacks the capacity to forge real connections with others, something that could, under certain circumstances, have him come off as vulnerable. Here, he's is so inept at traversing the ins and outs of human interaction that he doesn't seem to pick up on the fact that the rest of the Pin Pals don't want him around. He goes through the motions of what he assumes to be jovial interplay and accepts the feigned camaraderie he gets in return. Maybe I'm in the minority, but every time I watch this episode I always feel just a smidgeon of sympathy for Burns. There's a sliver of pathos in his trajectory that isn't played up too heavily due to the emphasis being on how he inconveniences the team, but it does have a moment of genuine emotional pay-off...even if the way things will ultimately end is always a foregone conclusion.

Burns gets involved in the first place because Homer goes to him on the off-chance that his boss might be persuaded to sponsor the Pin Pals' costly registration. To his surprise, Burns seems entirely willing, but only because he's on an ether-induced high that causes him to perceive anyone he interacts with as delightful advertising mascots - in Homer's case, the Pillsbury Doughboy (addressed here by his less common moniker Poppin' Fresh), whom Burns is compelled to poke in the belly and make giggle (as is the characters' trademark) and in Hans Moleman's case, Lucky the Leprechaun, whom Burns is, far more bafflingly, compelled to trepan with a drill (did those horrible cereal-stealing children ever do anything comparable to Lucky?). Burns later notices the unexplained expenditure and traces it to Homer. He goes to the Bowlarama to confront the Pin Pals, only to shock everyone by revealing that he wants to join the team - a proposition that Homer, being in Burns' employ, isn't in much of a position to decline. Of course, swapping out Otto for Burns disrupts the team equilibrium in a way that no amount of chanting is going to compensate for (not that we see the Pin Pals getting up to much chanting after the exchange; their enthusiasm as a unit is clearly gone), turning the teams' prospects of besting the Holy Rollers into a pathetic pip dream - much to the chagrin of Homer, who laments that he'll never have anything on his trophy case to stand alongside that Academy Award in his dubious ownership. That ill-gotten award, incidentally, provided the basis for the episode's most unfortunate gag - in fact, it's a very strong contender for the Simpsons gag to have aged the most poorly within the briefest space of time (more so even that John Travolta's appearance in "Itchy & Scratchy Land"). For all the modern day hubbub about the Simpsons' alleged ability to predict the future, it's quite astonishing how unlucky they were with this one. When the episode originally aired, the name on the award was Haing S. Ngor, who won Best Supporting Actor for his role in the 1984 film The Killing Fields. Then on February 25th 1996, less than two months after the episode aired, Ngor was murdered at his home in what was thought to be a robbery gone wrong. When the episode next aired, the name on the award had been changed to Don Ameche, who won for the 1985 film Cocoon, lest anybody think that the intended joke was that Homer was Ngor's killer, and had stolen the award while raiding the actor's house. That would be a tremendously dark conclusion to draw about our main character, but I can understand why caution was exercised.

That Burns should suck at bowling isn't much of a revelation. He's a feeble old man who can accomplish very few physical tasks without the aid of his personal assistant, and here he is trying his hand at a game that requires the skilful manipulation of a 15lb ball. The thing that really makes him intolerable as a teammate, though, is that he doesn't appear to see a problem with his not being able to bowl. Until the end of the episode, Burns doesn't actually give two shits about winning. Despite his initial assertion that he was moved to join the Pin Pals because watching them revel in the Home-Wreckers' vanquishing struck a chord with his tyrannical nature, Burns doesn't seem too perturbed by the team's inability to experience that same kind of victory once he's joined. When the Pin Pals take a thorough thrashing from the Stereotypes, he laughs it off and attempts to reassure Homer that the championship is unimportant since "the only ship worth a damn is friendship." I have to wonder what's actually going on with Burns at this point. Is he really as naive as all that? Is his buoyancy a protective measure, to compensate for his uneasy awareness that he can't bowl for toffee? Or is this a testament to just how eager he is to experience the thrill of belonging to a team - that he doesn't see winning as the end goal so much as having a fun time with his companions (even if it's very clear that no one else is having much fun)? That's not to say that he lacks any sense of spirited competition - prior to the deciding match with the Holy Rollers, he tries to rally his team with the glorious battle cry of "Who's ready to kick some Christian keister?" Of course, by this stage the rest of the team's enthusiasm is dead on the floor, and Homer seems prepared to bite the bullet and be rid of the old man once and for all. That is until Burns reaches into a box and reveals that he's bought them all a special gift for the game - uniforms that are not merely presentable enough to be seen in, but as Apu puts it, fine enough to be married in.

The moment where Burns pulls out those custom-designed shirts is a surprisingly affecting one. For one, it indicates that Burns is bearing his soul more nakedly than ever, and just how desperately he yearns for acceptance in these ranks. Somehow, it doesn't register as a pathetic gesture, but an empowering one that elevates all of the Pin Pals above one of their lingering insecurities - the fact that they've come this far and are still saddled with the crummiest uniforms in all the league. Burns' gift serves to unify them as a team, if only fleetingly, by providing the grounds for a common celebration. And when Burns says his bit about how, "I've always been wealthy, but this is the first time I've felt...rich", well, I could almost buy that he genuinely means it, within that specific moment. It just doesn't stick. Against all odds, the Pin Pals go on to beat the Holy Rollers, but it has less to do with Burns than the unwitting assistance they receive from their discarded teammate Otto, whose ongoing efforts to get hold of that infernal lobster harmonica end up sending some good vibrations their way. (Did the Holy Rollers seriously not notice what had gone on with the claw machine? Because surely they would have had grounds to contest the Pin Pals' win? Then again, I don't think Ned's prior tactic of calling on divine intervention to get him a strike was all that sporting either, so call it karma.) The Pin Pals are about to receive their trophy when Burns suddenly claims it for himself, announcing that he's had yet another of his unpredictable changes of heart. Not quite so unpredictable, really. Obviously, Burns has to go back to where the status quo wills him, but he's able to rationalise this transition as an entirely logical one on the pathway to personal growth - teamwork was always essentially a means to end, and vital to the greater game is recognising when to stab your teammates in the back for the promotion of individual glory. The urge to forsake his fellow Pin Pal so that he might he might position himself as the overall victor is, in his words, akin to a boxer shedding "roll after roll of disgusting, useless, sweaty flab before he can win the title".

Wounded, the Pin Pals take solace in the obvious conclusion - that the trophy itself was but a silly trinket, and The Real Treasure Was The Friends We Made Along The Way. The team is reconciled with Otto in the glibbest of fashions; the implication, one supposes, is that Otto's unorthodox support in beating the Holy Rollers shows that the universe was always gravitating toward a natural order, and the final unity of the team in its "true" form represents a moral triumph over Burns' corruption. But all of that is undone (deliberately so) in the story's epilogue, in which the Pin Pals decide that it would be awfully nice to have that silly trinket after all and have Homer break into Burns' mansion to steal it while the others cheer him on. That might be subversion enough, but the script goes the extra mean-spirited mile in having the theft go horribly awry - Homer is unable to clear the mansion grounds before Burns' security dogs catch up with him, at which point the rest of the team up and abandons him, leaving Homer to be savagely mauled. The Pin Pals are exposed as a sham and the episode ends up vindicating Burns, by suggesting that what he did in the Bowlarama is really a variation of what most people would do under the right circumstances - to work as a team for as long as it is convenient, only to put themselves first when it comes to the crunch. As Burns observed, teamwork will only take you so far.

Sky 1 edit alert!: Sky 1 broadcasts in the 90s always used to take out that early exchange where Homer attempts to prostitute himself to Marge in the hopes of raising the $500 registration money. Instead, we cut straight to the part where Marge gives Homer practical advice about asking Burns for a sponsorship. If I'm honest, I find this gag kind of weird and kind of skin-crawling (it's got Scully's trademark crass all over it), and I don't think the episode loses much without it. It was, however, considered an important enough moment to be transcribed in The Simpsons: A Complete Guide To Our Favorite Family, which is how I first learned of its existence. While we're at it, the same entry also contained the publication's most bizarre mistranscription, of the scene where Smithers is discussing Burns' monthly "boweling". I always heard that line as "Remember that month you didn't do it?", and I think that is the correct dialogue, but whoever transcribed that entry heard something else entirely, and it raises a few icky questions.