Weight Gain 4000 (aka Man Say Thing Not)

Who is Kathie Lee Gifford anyway?

That was the question lurking persistently at the back of my mind on a Friday night in the summer of 1998, when I had my first ever South Park experience (the proper old school way, by sneaking into the spare room and keeping the volume down, so that my parents wouldn't figure out what I was watching). The episode I saw was "Weight Gain 4000", then making its UK terrestrial debut on Channel 4, which follows the Colorado mountain community's ill-fated love affair with Kathie Lee Gifford, a celebrity I'm pretty sure no one in the UK had ever heard of before this series came along. At the time she was well-known to Americans as the host of a popular syndicated morning talk show, Live with Regis and Kathie Lee, but as a name she gained absolutely zero traction across the pond. They couldn't have picked an individual to whom the Wickershams and Decklers were more indifferent - so unlike Barbra Streisand, with whom I've since had ample opportunities to get acquainted through countless other media, the send-up she received in early South Park is still what I primarily associate with her. There is exactly one other thing that I know her for, that being her strange guest appearance (alongside her co-host Regis Philbin) in the "Terror of Tiny Toon" segment in The Simpsons episode "Treehouse of Horror IX", in a rare instance of the characters interacting with live action footage - a sequence as aesthetically and narratively jarring as you would anticipate, but Gifford herself got a memorable line out of the deal ("I'm going home! Dom DeLuise can interview himself!"). I don't know Kathie Lee and am only vaguely aware of her reputation, but I've never felt that was a particularly insurmountable barrier to appreciating "Weight Gain 4000", since I get the impression that the episode is treating her as something of an arbitrary celebrity anyway. So far as I can tell, the only dialogue taking any kind of really personal jab at Gifford is the observation by one of Mayor McDaniels' aides that she loves children...if they're working in a sweatshop, an allusion to a line of Gifford-branded clothing that became a source of controversy in 1996 when it came to light that sweatshop labour was used in their manufacturing. Otherwise, she could have been swapped out with any number of contemporary celebrities and most of the jokes and plotting would still have made every bit as much sense. The point isn't really Kathie Lee Gifford per se, but she represents in context, ie: celebrity at its most empty, vapid and disposable. How am I supposed to feel about Gifford? However I want, I suppose. For the purposes of this story, she becomes a total non-entity, a blank slate propped upon a rickety pedestal, onto which the characters can project their adoration and yearning for proximity to that more elevated state of being - or alternatively their self-loathing and feelings of scuppered ambition.

A question that did not play on my mind at all throughout that initial viewing was how I was supposed to feel about Mr Hat, a quirky-looking glove puppet and the South Park resident who is most firmly in the anti-Gifford camp. He and the puppet master, third grade teacher Mr Garrison, have a long-standing grudge against Gifford that dates back to their childhood, when Gifford (then identifying by her birth name, Epstein), snatched a talent show victory from them at the eleventh hour. Her upcoming visit to South Park represents an opportunity to settle the overdue score, and Mr Hat is determined to see that Garrison takes it, and takes it the old-fashioned way, by acquiring a gun and blowing Gifford's brains out. His character I had no difficulty figuring out where I stood on - Gifford might be a non-entity, but I'm positive that Mr Hat isn't. 

Watching "Weight Gain 4000", it never once crossed my mind that Mr Hat was anything other than a living being with a mind of his own. It was extremely easy to buy into his reality, and the show's characteristically flat art style had a significant hand in that, since Mr Hat has the exact same eyes as every other "real" character within the cast. He doesn't emote, and his pupils remain in a mostly fixed position, but he looks no less conscious than anybody else. When I look into the puppet's eyes, I don't see the vacant gaze of an inanimate object, but rather the uncanny intentness of a sapient, if preternatural being that is quietly observing and taking in everything around it. That Mr Hat spends most of his screen time looking directly into the camera doesn't exactly quell my unease. Let's face it, this wouldn't be any stranger or any more absurd than any of the other weekly happenings within this pissant white bread town. If you were on board with the monsters and aliens, the regenerating Kenny, the talking crap as a part of this reality, then why would this living puppet be any more of a stretch? And yet, I remember it coming up in a discussion on South Park back in the day and being mildly perturbed that I was the only one who saw it that way. Everyone else in that group was convinced that Mr Hat was just the alter ego of Garrison and that this was the real joke I wasn't getting. I countered that if you paid close attention to the puppet, his eyes frequently moved. I knew this because whenever Mr Hat was on screen, he was usually what I was focused on. At first I was mainly just guarded against that uncanny stare of his, but I quickly picked up on the fact that the position of his pupils intermittently shifted between shots, in a way that indicated a responsiveness entirely independent of Garrison. It didn't happen in every episode, but it happened enough times to make it worth looking out for. The group's response when I cited all of this? "I think you're the loony one in this room." Or something to that effect. I felt like I was being aligned with Garrison, in having some deep-rooted emotional need to see life in the inert puppet. Eh, maybe. It could be that I just have an innate affinity with the delusional. It had never occurred to me that the feral hippo raiding the trash cans in Lily Takes A Walk might be all in Nicky's mind either.

I still believe. I am, however, prompted to reconsider "Weight Gain 4000" from the perspective that it was almost certainly written with the intention that there be some level ambiguity on this point, and that the average viewer is liable to approach it with the assumption that Mr Hat is just a common or garden puppet and Garrison just very severely disturbed (not an invalid assessment regardless) - at least until the end, when the situation is somewhat muddied. After all, this is a familiar trope: the ventriloquist who brings life to an inanimate prop that he subsequently can't control. The implicit question prompted is a fantastically eerie one - who is the real puppet and who is the real puppeteer? It also plays into a very prevalent fear, automatonophobia, the aversion to anything designed to suggest a pseudo-humanity and sapience where none should reasonably exist (puppets, dolls and dummies are among the most common automatonophobic subjects, but it also applies to statues, mannequins, masks, animatronics and waxworks). It was used with particular notoriety in the 1945 Ealing anthology Dead of Night, and there are also at least two classic Twilight Zone episodes dealing with this premise (three if we count Talky Tina). The malevolent puppet tale that Garrison's story in "Weight Gain 4000" most recalls, however, would be Richard Attenborough's underrated 1978 horror Magic, where Anthony Hopkins played a socially awkward ventriloquist named Corky whose dependence on his dummy Fats takes a deadly turn when the dummy incites him to kill (you'll notice that even their names point to the ominously subverted nature of their dynamic - which is flesh and which is wooden?). Mr Hat isn't really like the dummy Fats, though. Fats is a distraction; we spent the whole movie staring at that unnatural little bugger, waiting for the much-anticipated moment where he'd come to life on his own terms (a la the circus doll from Poltergeist), and yet he confounded us by keeping perfectly stationary. This was all our own folly; we were warned from the start, on no uncertain terms, how this was going to work and of the real meaning behind the title: "Magic is misdirection, and misdirection is getting the people to look in the wrong place at the wrong times." Not so with Mr Hat. His is a presence that both demands and rewards close scrutiny. 

As a concept, Mr Hat didn't come from nowhere. He is thought to have been based on Mr High Hat, a real educational tool designed to help kindergarteners develop language skills (South Park co-creator Trey Parker confirmed that Mr Hat was modelled on a puppet used by one of his own teachers to deliver lessons - the kicker being that, unlike Garrison, she didn't bother to throw her voice and just synced up its movements with a vinyl record - although Garrison himself took inspiration from a fruity literature teacher who'd had some novel opinions on Beowulf). I suspect that the whole Garrison-Hat dynamic originated with the observation that it would be hilarious to see a teacher who used a Mr High Hat puppet getting into a Magic-type scenario with it, and "Weight Gain 4000" is the South Park episode that attempts to mine the most out and out spookiness from that prospect. On the automatonophobia scale, Mr Hat occupies a curious middle ground. He's uncanny, but he doesn't take you all the way into the valley. He was based on an actual educational puppet, and as such he was designed to look basically cute and ostensibly innocent, although the beady intentness of his gaze runs somewhat contrary to that.  It is interesting to note that his original design, as seen in the first episode, "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe", didn't have eyes at all. I couldn't tell you if this was revised specifically for the purposes of "Weight Gain 4000" (which was the second episode produced, although "Volcano" aired ahead of it in the US, leaving me a bit unclear on the official ordering), but the addition of eyes completely rewires your perception of the character. As well being more consistent with the design of the original Mr High Hat puppet, it makes him a whole lot more convincing as an antagonist. The eyes become a window into the puppet's crazed little soul - without them, it becomes harder to suppose that he has one. In "Weight Gain 4000" they are put to particularly sinister use in a sequence where he coerces Garrison by making his pupils glow read and doing an Exorcist-style head spin (for the record, I don't count this among those instances of eye movement suggesting independent responsiveness, since it is framed in such a way that it could be in Garrison's mind; the others are not). Another unsettling touch is that most of Mr Hat's dialogue in this episode is delivered in a voice that is significantly deeper and more threatening than the one Garrison usually gives him - which becomes especially creepy in shots where the focus is on the puppet and you can't actually see Garrison's lips moving (notably, when he retrieves Mr Hat from the dresser drawer), making it easier to buy into the premise of the voice being the puppet's own. (Also, while I doubt this allusion was intentional, something that doesn't escape my notice about Garrison is his ambidexterity, with his left hand being his "own" hand and his right hand the one claimed by Mr Hat. Same predicament as Norman Bates, then.)

The premise of "Weight Gain 4000" has it that Cartman has been named the winner of a national environmental essay contest, and is due to have his award presented to him by Kathie Lee Gifford in a televised ceremony. Cartman refuses to elaborate on the details of his winning paper, which was reportedly chosen from out of over a million entries, causing his peers to suspect that his victory was certainly not legit - in particular Wendy Testaburger (RIP Mary Kay Bergman), who'd put a lot of work into her own submission, an essay about the plight of bottlenose dolphins, and feels cheated by the outcome. The adult characters, meanwhile, are all too wrapped up in the prospect of Gifford's visit to care. For Mayor McDaniels, this is an opportunity to boost her own profile by showcasing what an efficient and cultured little town she's running, with the hopes that she might be able to ditch all of these stupid hicks and move onto something more glamorous. For Chef (RIP Isaac Hayes), who's been asked by McDaniels to perform a song at the ceremony, it's an opportunity to get his rocks off with a sultry queen of sexual fantasy (his words). And for the town, it's a chance to experience an ephemeral sip of elevation, by basking in the aura of the celebrity passing through and maybe working their way into a fleeting crowd shot on national television. What nobody is talking about (apart from Wendy and Stan) is the dolphins. There are no actual dolphins in the episode, but they represent the real aggrieved party in this scenario - the worthy causes for which the essay contest was presumably designed to promote awareness, but that end up being lost amid what it ultimately becomes, a spectacle of publicity whoring and vacuous celebrity worship. When Cartman dismisses dolphins as "intelligent and friendly on rye bread with some mayonnaise", he does so in explicitly meaner and more forward terms than everyone else, but he sums up the basic indifference of the whole town.

I don't think it's controversial to say that the individual we most care about in all of this is Garrison. Later installments would go to lengths to cement him as a man (or woman, depending on when you were watching) whose unpleasantness and depravity knew no bounds, but for now, we are just two (three?) episodes in and he is by and far the most sympathetic character here. It is difficult not to feel for anyone whose life is as screwed up and vulnerable as his evidently is, but he's also appealing because he is, among the adults, the only dissenter who doesn't buy into the town's mindless worship of Gifford. Which is not to say that he isn't just as warped by the allure of celebrity as the others. His resentment of Gifford stems from her having beaten him in a national talent show as a child, and (as he sees it) costing him his own shot at stardom. The underlying conclusion is that celebrity is interchangeable, and that the media stars we put on pedestals are no better or more deserving than the rest of us, but just had all the lucky breaks. When it comes to Gifford he is both right and wrong. On the one hand, it would be churlish to deny that Kathie won because she was the better ventriloquist, and she clearly stoked young Herbert's feelings of inadequacy in that regard - the thing that upset him the most about young Kathie's performance is that she was able to throw her voice with two puppets at once, something he struggles to do with just one. But then it can't also be denied she also had an unfair advantage with all of that luxuriously over the top stage production. As Garrison puts it, "She had choreography. How could we compete with that?!"

Garrison's increasing urge to assassinate Gifford is driven by his distorted sense of justice, and by Mr Hat's (blatantly erroneous) assurances that it will make everything better. Initially, though, he sets his sights on merely upstaging her, when McDaniels enlists him to direct the children in a play about the history of South Park, to be performed at the ceremony. He attempts to assert control over Mr Hat by confining him to a dresser drawer, but finds that his disdain for Gifford won't be so easily suppressed; McDaniels sits in on a rehearsal of the play and is naturally horrified to discover that it consists of the children beating one another senseless in a recreation of a historic confrontation between pioneers and the Utes. Garrison's defence is that his play is historically accurate, although we suspect that this violent spectacle stems less from any noble obligation to avoid whitewashing the atrocities committed against the Utes than it does his passive-aggressive yearning to express his loathing of Gifford (whether or not he's conscious of it). To give McDaniels her due, she is the closest thing this story has to a semi-sensible adult. She's in it for herself and is explicitly indifferent to the matter of whether Cartman won the contest fairly, but she at least has a decent handle on what is and isn't appropriate to include in the ceremony (it's just unfortunate that she didn't think to vet the song Chef had prepared as she did Garrison's play). When she challenges Garrison on whether their esteemed guest would actually enjoy seeing children crack each other's heads open, he lets his disdain for Gifford slip, loudly and in front of the entire town, and gets completely ostracised for it. It's for this reason that we don't lose sympathy for Garrison, in spite of his startling aloofness over the injured children, and McDaniels clearly being in the right about the inappropriateness of his play - we can feel the crushing loneliness of where he stands. The residents of South Park, much like the residents of Springfield, are governed by the law of mob mentality, which Garrison has found himself in the dire position of being vocally out of step with. Hence why he goes back to Mr Hat. The puppet is the only ally he has.

In the meantime, Cartman faces a quandary of his own, since McDaniels has suggested that he get in shape for his television appearance, but he isn't inclined to break his ingrained habit of sitting on the couch and stuffing his face with Cheesy Poofs. In "Weight Gain 4000", Parker and Stone are clearly making some kind of statement about television culture and the media we're primed to emulate, with the episode title deriving from the dubious nutritional product into which Eric invests all of his hopes and dreams of looking his best for the day of the ceremony. After seeing an ad on TV (and being naturally undeterred by its disclaimer that it might lead to irreversible damage to the liver and kidneys), he's convinced that he can achieve a perfectly toned body through a program of non-stop consumption and parroting of the promotion's inane "Beefcake!" sloganeering. In reality, it proves a fast track to morbid obesity. Although Wendy would appear to be Garrison's obvious parallel, being similarly aggrieved about losing a contest under circumstances she considers unfair, when you look at it his story actually has more in common with Cartman's. Both are subjugated by a voice that compels them to unquestionably obey, coming from an object that serves as a substitute for human companionship, playing off their inadequacies and selling them a facile solution to a problem it will in actuality only exacerbate. The television promises Cartman speedy buffness, but causes him to become more overweight than ever. Mr Hat promises Garrison instant healing for his long-term emotional distress, but goads him down a route that can only finish off his already wrecked mental health. There's not such a difference between Cartman's misplaced faith in what his television is telling him to do and Garrison's willingness to go along with what his puppet buddy is asking (outside of Garrison at least having reservations in the beginning). Both amount to insanity. In the meantime, the whole town buys into a mass delusion regarding the ceremony, a parade of lightweight gestures designed to fuel the sensation of getting their fifteen minutes of fame while nothing of real substance is accomplished, not least as far as those suffering dolphins are concerned (Man say thing not!). Lacking from the occasion is any spotlight on Cartman's paper or on the thoughtful issues he supposedly raised, because that is decidedly not its purpose.

Determined to not lose sight of that point is Wendy, who is the most competent participant in all of this, something that might put her in the loneliest position of all, for competence is not in abundant supply in South Park. Garrison, for his part, is really not adept at this assassination business. Not only does he show up to the ceremony openly brandishing a gun (which he acquired from Jimbo with very minimal questioning), he approaches the last person it is within his interests to be seen by, Officer Barbrady, to ask for pointers on where to get a clear shot view of Gifford. But then neither is Barbrady adept at this policing business, cheerfully directing Garrison to the book depository, so it balances out. Since no one with any authority has had the initiative or curiosity to take a look at Cartman's paper, Wendy chooses to take justice into her own hands, by breaking into the classroom filing cabinet, where she discovers that Cartman's winning paper was nothing other than a copy of Henry David Thoreau's 1854 publication Walden; or, Life In The Woods, a plagiarism so slackly bare-faced that all he did was cross out Thoreau's name on the cover and pencil in his own. Even so, her subsequent efforts to expose Cartman's cheating are utterly thwarted by the town's illiterate disinterest, as Wendy realises, despairingly, that they are uniformly lacking in awareness for one of the seminal works of American literature. There's a pronounced link being drawn between all this mass worship of celebrity and the televisual image and the dumbing down of cultural standards, when Wendy admonishes the town with the rejoinder, "I bet if Walden was a sitcom you'd all know what it is!" And it would be unfair to suggest that this problem is limited to South Park. Whatever screwy virus has infected this town has already spread out far beyond its confines - the fact that Cartman's paper got past every check in a national competition without anybody noticing is pretty fucking telling. To say nothing of the episode's most bizarre gag, when Wendy pulls her own submission from the cabinet to find that the anonymous judges who marked it had the same inexplicable misconception about (and lack of compassion for) dolphins as Cartman, questioning why, if they're so smart, they would live in igloos.^[1] The masses are a mindless bunch. But then the wayward individualism Garrison embodies also gets flipped on its head, once the ceremony is underway and he discovers that, for as isolated as his Kathie Lee hatred has made him in his own community, on a national level he would have to get in line. Gifford is driven into town in a bullet-proof dome (a parody of the popemobile) and it dawns on Garrison that he isn't the first person who's attempted to take a shot at her. Clearly that woman has pissed off a lot of people. But then what celebrity hasn't?

It falls on Wendy to be the moral centre of the episode, when she overhears Garrison discussing the assassination plot with Mr Hat and resolves to put aside her grievances with Cartman until she's ensured Gifford's safety. Which is ironic, in a way, because if we're viewing Season 1 in a vacuum, then I think Wendy ends up being the most profoundly evil South Park resident of them all. At this stage, I'm not even sure that Cartman's got that much on her. His rap sheet within those first 13 episodes is already pretty ugly - he's awful to Pip (but then so is everyone else), he dehumanises Marvin and he takes an unsettling amount of joy in dressing up as Hitler for a Halloween party - but rarely takes him above the level of a particularly mean and ignorant school yard bully. In terms of all-out unbridled malevolence, there's surely nothing that tops Wendy's actions at the end of "Tom's Rhinoplasty". Justice for Ms Ellen, who was perfectly lovely and never did anything to hurt anyone (no, Kenny doesn't count - that was just fate working its usual way with him).

Still, you can't deny the girl's got guts. When Barbrady proves useless in locating and apprehending the armed Garrison (in spite of his having earlier told Garrison where to go), she's prepared to confront him directly, along with Stan, the only one of the central four who could be convinced that saving Gifford was a nobler endeavour than being on television. By now, they're getting to the point in the ceremony where Gifford is about to hand Cartman his award, for which she's presumably going to have to briefly open up her glass bubble, and that's all that Garrison needs. Wendy tries to talk him out of it by speaking to him from a position of empathy, insisting that she understands how he feels because she's been through a similar experience with Cartman. This affinity is something that Garrison wasn't expecting and responds to, leaving the matter teetering on a knife edge as to where it might go. During their confrontation, you'll notice that Mr Hat is only visible in shots where Garrison is leaning toward shooting Gifford. Whenever it looks like Wendy might be reaching him, the puppet can't be seen. It's a neat way of illustrating the tug of war between Wendy and Mr Hat for Garrison's senses, showing us which of them has the advantage in that given moment. Wendy gets Garrison to lower his gun, making it look as though she might have clinched it, but all hopes of a peaceful resolution are brutally dashed when Stan turns out to be a terrible judge of when to keep his mouth shut. He makes the fatal move of expressing awe for Gifford's ventriloquist mettle, triggering Garrison's feelings of inadequacy and ensuring that Mr Hat gets the final word. The shot is fired, just as the stage cracks under Cartman's immense weight, causing Gifford to be flung from it and Kenny to take the bullet instead, to nobody's real horror. Kyle does his thing and acknowledges Kenny's death in the moment, but otherwise the town moves on almost instantly from what by all rights should have been an appallingly traumatic spectacle, too hung up on the premature departure of Gifford and the TV crew to care. It's almost as if they all know this isn't a consequence that will actually stick.

Indeed, the most troubling aspect of the ending is not Kenny's improbable impaling on the flagpole, but the way Wendy ultimately betrays her own principles. I'm not talking about her attempts to publicly expose Cartman as a cheater, coming after that seemingly heartfelt speech to Garrison about her own experience in learning how to lose graciously. The script definitely frames her as something of a hypocrite in this regard (Stan: "What about not holding anything against the person who wins?" Wendy: "Well, not if it's Cartman!") but the thing is, she's not wrong. Cartman committed a really audacious act of plagiarism; I don't think it was petty to try to expose him at all. No, I'm talking about the fact that, when she fails to inspire the faintest level of outrage over Cartman's cheating, she gives up and accepts a consolation prize in the form of Stan's offer of a tuna fish sandwich. Tuna fish, you say? From the girl who'd written so passionately about the suffering of bottlenose dolphins? See the incongruity there? I mean, for all we know the tuna Kyle's mom buys is all dolphin-friendly (Shelia Brofloski is nothing if not conscientious, right?), and the script doesn't explicitly call Wendy out on this, but I find it hard to believe that it wasn't a deliberate choice to specify that the sandwiches would be tuna of all things. It's a contradiction made all the more unsettling for the fact that it passes without comment, with Wendy giving only a resigned "What the hell" and following after Stan. Does it imply that she was never that sincere in her cause, or that she's giving up then and there, having realised the futility of what she's up against? Either way, this shit's bleak.

Fortunately, the ending is a little less unhappy in other regards. The only character who's left with no form of consolation (besides Kenny) is McDaniels, last seen lamenting her thwarted ambitions of escaping the town and inadvertently insulting its populace before a microphone. Garrison gets hauled off to the nearest psychiatric hospital, which in theory should mean that he'll get the help he needs - although when Stan and Kyle later pay him a visit he indicates that Mr Hat is the actual target of the psychiatric intervention. Misdirection, or does the puppet's psychosis indeed put Garrison's in the shade? In either case, the extensive therapy he went through clearly got results; as far as I'm aware, he never expressed any further desire to kill Kathie Lee Gifford. Actively pushing Garrison into doing bad or questionable things also wasn't his raison d'etre going forward, at least not in this way. Elsewhere, Cartman's blind adherence to Weight Gain 4000 has paid off, in the sense that he gets to be on television after all, in an interview with Geraldo Rivera (ah, now this is a US talk show host I am familiar with - the Al Capone's vault guy, yes?), having become so morbidly obese that he can't leave his house. Despite the distinctly unflattering nature of the feature, Cartman proclaims himself to be living proof that a person can attain their dreams. Judging by his continued spewing of that "Beefcake!" nonsense, he's still entrenched in the delusion that he's achieved optimum buffness, although maybe that's of no odds. After all, it got him on the receiving end of national media attention, however dubious and however transitory, and that's all the affirmation he needs. At the very end we see that Chef also achieved his short-term goal of getting Gifford to sleep with him, in spite of how mighty perturbed she'd at the time looked by his public serenade about hummingbird sex (a simile Chef went even harder with in the version that appears on the Chef Aid album, where he sings about the male hummingbird letting his humming gravy fly all over the nest, or somesuch). Unfortunately, she might even be too much of a rabid sex maniac for him to handle.

There is a certain bitter irony in the episode's final arrangement with Garrison and Mr Hat (both are confined, but the latter is much more heavily restrained), given how their characters would subsequently develop. "Big Gay Al's Big Gay Boat Ride" would drop the first all-important hint that Garrison's mental health issues were compounded by his being a self-hating gay who was too terrified to leave the closet. It likewise came to light that Mr Hat enjoyed a freedom that Garrison adamantly denied himself, in that he was more at ease with his sexuality and habitually fantasised about being in a sauna with pro-footballer Brett Favre and a bottle of thousand island dressing, a pleasure that Garrison could only experience vicariously, via his connection with Mr Hat. Mr Hat was so much more liberated, in fact, that in "Summer Sucks" he was willing to temporarily abandon Garrison in order to pursue his kinky fantasies for real, driving Garrison to attempt to replicate their relationship with a vaguely human-shaped twig that, most tellingly, wore a pink triangle on its shirt. I will say that if Mr Hat is nothing more than Garrison's alter ego, then I'd be considerably less disturbed and confounded by the events of "Weight Gain 4000" than by whatever is meant to be going on with that bizarre love triangle with Mr Garrison, Mr Hat and Mr Twig. The Gifford murder plot would at least be comprehensible.

Actually, the Garrison-Hat interaction that gives me the most pause is a fairly low-key one, from the Season 1 finale "Cartman's Mom Is A Dirty Slut". We find the two at a bar, with Garrison wanting to go home for the night and Mr Hat insisting on "just one more cosmopolitan". Garrison tells the puppet it has a drinking problem it needs to admit to, but wilfully orders the requested beverage. The implications of this exchange are quite a bit more unsettling than first meets the eye. From Mr Hat's words, it isn't clear if the craving for cosmopolitans is his own, or if he's enticing Garrison to keep drinking (thus becoming the devil on his shoulder yet again, albeit less dramatically than in "Weight Gain 4000") - Garrison's response indicates the former, although in practice it might make little difference. It's safe to say that, either way, Garrison will be the one physically drinking that cosmopolitan, even if it is to accommodate an alcohol dependency originating with his other half. If it's not his problem, then he's obliged to make it his own. Their partnership hinges on a shared energy, an uncanny interrelation of form and personality. Garrison relies on Mr Hat to articulate the forbidden regions of his psyche that he's too terrified to face alone, while Mr Hat relies on Garrison to articulate him. That is the nature of their symbiosis - they are both each other's voice.

So is Mr Hat real? That is a silly question. Of course he is. You only have to pay attention to him across enough episodes and I promise you'll see the evidence.

Look, to play devil's advocate for just a moment, the most compelling case against Mr Hat's reality is that characters who attempt to come at Garrison's relationship with the puppet from a rational standpoint often end up sounding pretty danged convincing. In particular, the psychiatrist Garrison sought out in "Summer Sucks" (actually the titular character of another contemporary Comedy Central series, Dr Katz, Professional Therapist) whilst pining for the absent Mr Hat really did seem like he had Garrison's number: "I think Mr Hat was actually your gay side trying to come out. It's you who is gay, but you're in denial, so you act out your gay persona with a homosexual puppet." It makes enough sense as he says it. But then Katz never met Mr Hat in person. And in the same episode we also get what also seems like irrefutable proof of Mr Hat's reality, when we go inside Brett Favre's sauna to find him in the company of the stray puppet. Favre greets him cordially and there's a close-up of Mr Hat blinking and returning his gaze. The puppet blinked on screen, and the puppet master wasn't anywhere in sight. What more proof do you need, people? A similar situation occurs in "World Wide Recorder Concert", when school counsellor Mr Mackey attempts to talk to Garrison about his daddy issues (they are a doozy, I can tell ya) but is blocked by an aggressively protective Mr Hat. Mackey offers the rational explanation, that Garrison has switched personalities to Mr Hat as a coping mechanism for his traumas. Mr Hat does not himself disagree with this assessment ("Good one, Sherlock. You figure that out all by yourself?") but goes on to wipe the floor with Mackey in a round of fisticuffs, during which he is removed from Garrison's hand, and the children who witness the incident independently acknowledge that it is indeed Hat and Mackey doing the fighting. Clearly the show liked to mess with us by suggesting both possibilities within the same breath. And here's the beauty of it - they don't actually contradict one another. There's no reason why Mr Hat can't be alive and a figure onto which Garrison projects all of his insecurities, hostilities and latent desires. Both things can be true. The real ambiguity might lie with where one stops and the other starts.

Sometimes the puppet's actions defy any and all rationalisation, as seen in "Chef Aid" of Season 2. Mr Twig, then making his sixth appearance with Garrison, becomes the target of a series of strange attacks by an unseen assailant who obviously has access to Garrison's residence. Garrison sets up a camera and summons Barbrady the instant the photos arrive from the developing lab, hoping he'll arrest the culprit, but instead gets branded a "weirdo" by Barbrady and discovers the pathologically jealous Mr Hat lurking inside his closet (ho, could there be a clearer metaphor?). Crucially, the viewer never sees what the pictures actually show, taunting us with the possibility that Garrison might have captured his own unconscious rejection of the twig (and whatever he sees, he has to concede that he's wasted Barbrady's time). This is what Chef presumes to be going on; when he and Garrison later cross paths in police custody (Chef having been arrested for non-payment of a fine and Garrison for his increasingly erratic public behaviour), he offers the diagnosis (less sensitive than Mackey's) that Garrison has "split personality schizophrenic jeebies." And then Mr Hat, determined to get back into Garrison's good graces, shows up and manages to bust them out by using a vehicle to break down the cell wall. Chef is witness to this occurrence, confirming that it isn't just in Garrison's head. By the end of the episode, Chef is a believer. When asked how he escaped, he has to credit the jailbreak to Mr Hat, even though he has lingering questions about how the puppet managed to reach the gas pedal.

Is Mr Twig real? Sure, why not? Given enough time I've a feeling he could have gone full Otesánek.

Finally, while Mr Hat is typically thought of as a reflection of all of the most awkward, problematic and messed up traits in Garrison (we haven't even touched on his role in "Chef Goes Nanners"), it is only fair to acknowledge that there are times when he is conversely the voice of reason in their dynamic. In the Season 3 episode "Succubus", he (rightly) advised Garrison that his "poontang" facade wasn't fooling anyone. A more subtle instance of Mr. Hat being able to claim the moral high ground over Garrison occurs in another Season 3 episode, "Jakovasaurs", when McDaniels reminds Garrison of a sorry incident where he was entrusted with caring for a wounded pigeon with which he supposedly attempted to copulate. Garrison tries to blame the pigeon, insisting that it was promiscuous and asking the townspeople to raise their hands if they can honestly say that they've never slept with it. A split second later and everyone except Garrison has their hands confidently in the air - and if you look at Mr Hat, you can see that his hand is also directed visibly upward. Apparently even he considered that pigeon a low point for Garrison.

 

[1] A lot of people assume it was Garrison himself who wrote that, since it came from his filing cabinet, but he didn't judge this contest and the official script (which differs slightly from the finished product, mind) does indeed specify that it was written by the judges. I'll admit that it's not particularly clear, however. The implications of the people who ran this national context being just as churlish and ill-informed on these issues as Cartman are definitely a whole lot wilder.

Blood Feud (aka Will There Ever Be A Rainbow?)

"Blood Feud" (7F22) is a Simpsons story that is purportedly without a moral. This much is proudly flaunted in the arch final sequence, in which the family discuss the implications of the preceding 20 minutes and arrive at the conclusion that it was "just a bunch of stuff that happened", albeit a bunch of memorable stuff. It is not, however, a story without morals. The distinction might be key.

From the start, The Simpsons has always been a little too cool for conventional moralising. The very idea that the show might exist to provide serious instruction rather than silly diversion was curtly dismissed in this episode's direct predecessor, "Three Men and A Comic Book". There, the joke was that the takeaway was entirely obvious, and even articulated by Bart, but the characters themselves remained churlishly unreceptive. In "Blood Feud" the family doesn't so much as fail the lesson as it fails them. They actively go looking for meaning in their most recent experience but can't find it - or, more accurately, are unable to condense it into any kind of glib, easily-packaged adage in the way that Marge attempts. This was the final installment of Season 2 (airing unusually late, on July 11th 1991, as part of some experimental scheduling Fox was dabbling in at the time), and as such its contemplative closing sequence gets to serve as a spiritual summary for the show's entire second year, rounding it out with the confounding image of the family eating from their TV trays while regarding the colossal Olmec head that now takes up most of their living room, diverting attention from the typically all-commanding television set. The head becomes a hilarious metaphor for the gaping lack of clarity left staring them in the face, which they have no choice but to figure out how to accommodate (echoing the viewer's own bewilderment in having to digest this as our conclusion). That, "Blood Feud" supposes, is merely life. Few of us have had to reckon with the specific problem of having an unwanted giant Olmec head hoisted upon us, but we've all been in situations where we've had to accept non-closure as a form of closure. This final observation, which feels so crucial to the spirit of the episode and the series as a whole, apparently stemmed from the writers' frustrations in figuring out how to close the danged thing - earlier versions of George Meyer's script apparently had a different conclusion in mind, but the crew felt that it was the kind of story that defied being wrapped up in a neat little bow and ultimately decided to make that the ending. Thus bearing out the episode's point that sometimes it's better just to shrug your shoulders and move on than to give a situation more pontification than it merits.

There is, supposedly, no coherent lesson to be drawn from "Blood Feud", but that's not to say that the moral choices made throughout have had no value. "Blood Feud" is certainly a lot more concerned with the nuances of those choices than was "Three Men" before it, laying out a scenario in which there is little black and white, but various shades of grey. This scenario involves Burns coming down with a potentially fatal condition called hypohemia (made up, but it sounds convincing enough coming from Dr Hibbert's lips) and requiring a blood transfusion to save his life. The first complication being that Burns' blood type is O negative, meaning that he can only receive blood from O negative donors, who aren't exactly in abundant supply. A heartbroken Smithers (who is B positive, and thus unable to help) makes an appeal to the power plant workforce to come forward if they have O negative blood or know anyone who does. It's here that we run into our second complication, in that most of the workforce view Burns as unworthy of compassion and are unwilling to so much as look into it. "I'd give him my blood," laughs Carl, "Except for one thing. I don't want to." Homer is disgusted by this reaction, but not because he cares about Burns - rather, he spies an opportunity to get into Burns' good gracious and to reap a handsome cash reward by doing him the ultimate solid. (Note: It is revealed in this sequence that Carl is Homer's supervisor, something that I'm not sure ever came up again, but it allows for a great interaction where Carl shows an unusually reprimanding side.)  He is delighted to discover that Bart has the desired blood type, although Bart himself has misgivings (something that seemingly has less to do with Burns than with him being put off by the physical process of giving blood). To be fair to Bart, this isn't his first rodeo. It isn't brought up in the script, but he had previously donated blood in "Bart vs Thanksgiving", and the experience didn't exactly have a great outcome from his end, with him losing too much blood and being left to pass out outside the clinic. Homer convinces Bart to go through with it by assuring him that the obscenely wealthy Burns will repay them with riches beyond their wildest dreams. The transfusion is a success and Burns makes a full recovery, but Homer is dumbfounded when all he sees fit to send their way is a perfunctory thank you card addressed to Bart. In the heat of the moment he decides to pen Burns a message of his own, filled with unbridled insults, but is convinced by Marge not to send it. Unfortunately Bart, believing his father's anger to be righteous, gets a hold of it and slips it into the mail anyway. How will the family fare now that there's no going back?

The situation is compounded by the matter that neither Homer or Burns can be said to be wholly in the wrong or in the right. They both behave extremely poorly at different points in the episode, but their respective feelings of aggrievement aren't exactly unjustified either. Homer is unapologetically upfront about his avaricious motivations for getting Bart to donate his blood, but the fact remains that Burns would be dead if not for his intervention. Does the barefaced shamelessness of Homer's intentions make Burns any less indebted to him? As for Burns, he initially does only the bare minimum in expressing gratitude to Bart for providing the life-saving fluids, but based on what we see from Burns' end, we're given no reason to believe that those sentiments weren't entirely sincere. It seemingly never crossed his mind that the family should desire money for saving him, and he sees the card as an appropriate and civilised response to a basic act of human decency - which potentially says more about how out of touch he is with his fellow man than any laudable values on his part. It's also clear that none of that really matters once the insulting missive has found its way into his hands, and that whatever he's going to do to Homer next will absolutely not be civilised. But then again, can we really blame Burns for being incensed that one of his employees had the nerve to write a letter telling him that he stinks like an elephant's butt? Hard to deny that Homer dug his own grave on that one.

For its first two thirds, "Blood Feud" is predominantly interested in the extent to which Homer is a corruptive influence on the impressionable Bart, an idea previously explored in "Homer's Night Out" (speaking of which, we get a return appearance from the Fe-Mailman, who'd sadly slip into oblivion thereafter). There is a war being waged for the soul of the Simpsons household, as embodied by Bart, the bountiful child who holds the power of life or death within his plasma, and the value he's inclined to attached to his unique position. On the one side is Homer, who sets an actively bad example by teaching of the wrong lessons, then gets to deal with all of the consequences when Bart is inspired to take matters into his own hands. At the opposite end is Marge, who becomes the family's moral centre, insisting that there was no greater incentive to donate Bart's blood than the simple fact that someone was in need and they were in a position to help them. That the beneficiary is Burns, the man who just four episodes back, in "Brush With Greatness", she declared to be totally lacking in virtue is of no odds to her. It was the right thing to do, and no less than what any decent person would have done. Her outlook is mocked by Homer as overly idealistic, with the accusation that she's living in a make-believe world populated by "magic frogs with funny little hats". Lisa, meanwhile, has little to add to the main conflict, being too preoccupied with a subplot where she is attempting to give Maggie a head start on her education by subjecting her to flash cards with very advanced themes - which pays off beautifully come the Olmec head's arrival.

Bart might have the ability to restore a moribund Burns back to life, but we'll also see that he has the power to bring terrible destruction if his gift is misused - which is blatantly a given in Homer's hands. His  skewed priorities are perfectly laid out in a hilarious scene where regales Bart with a debased retelling of Androcles and the lion, in which he's misremembered Hercules as the hero (he's presumably getting his wires crossed with the story of Hercules and the Nemean lion), incorporates elements of Arthurian lore (countless people try to pull the thorn from the lion's paw but are unsuccessful) and also thinks that it might have been a Bible story. The biggest corruption, though, comes in what Homer recalls as being the story's moral; it ceases to be a tale about how altruism begets goodwill, which we too might be in need of someday, but rather about how it's always worth helping those in positions of wealth and power because they can give you the most in return. In his version, the lion happened to have deep pockets and rewarded "Hercules" with a share of his riches (Bart has questions about how a lion would have money in the first place, and is assured that it was the olden days). In the original story, Androcles was a fugitive of Ancient Rome who encountered a wounded lion while on the run and helped it out by removing a thorn from its paw. Some time later Androcles was captured and sent to the Circus Maximus with the intention that he be devoured by wild beasts for the entertainment of an emperor. The lion he found himself up against was none other than the one he'd aided earlier, who remembered him and greeted him in friendship. The emperor was so moved by what he saw that he allowed both Androcles and the lion to go free. Not only was Androcles' compassion for the lion reciprocated when he was in a position of powerlessness, it even managed to indirectly win over a third party who had shown up to watch his blood being shed. This is all worth noting, because a variation on the Androcles story actually does play out throughout the events of the episode and its original message is borne out, just not in the way that Homer anticipates (clue: Burns is not the lion in this scenario, but the emperor).

Homer does not have particularly noble intentions for the bulk of "Blood Feud", although what keeps him from becoming too despicable is a similar kind of principle to "When Flanders Failed", in that his outlook might be exaggerated, but there is nevertheless something recognisably human in it. Humans are messy, and not every good deed we might be inclined is going to come from a position of total selflessness. If we were to help someone with a lot of cash to spare, then perhaps on some level we would be thinking about a possible material repayment, even if we wouldn't be so outspoken on that point as Homer. If we'd made such a magnificent gesture as to donate our blood to someone who'd be dead without it, then we too might feel a little underwhelmed if all we ended up with was a minimally-worded thank you card. Where we know Homer is definitely going too far is in the way he involves Bart in his retaliation. He is unable to accept any responsibility for having misled his son into thinking that a big reward was guaranteed, rationalising the sending of his letter as nothing less than an act of parental duty ("I promised my boy one simple thing. Lots of riches. And that man broke my promise"). In itself, the writing of the letter isn't necessarily a bad thing - if Homer feels that strongly about it, then it might well be healthy for him to get his words down and out of his system - but he imbues Bart with his toxicity, getting him to write his churlish abuses as he dictates them. Bart doesn't seem to take the lack of reward as hard as his father, although he is only too happy to be enlisted as his partner in crime (the elephant's butt line being his personal contribution). After all, it appeals to his love of mayhem and of challenging authority. Unfortunately, Burns is not the kind of authority it is within the family's interests to challenge, and certainly not in such a bluntly crude way. This is something that Homer comes to recognise, when Marge dissuades him from sending the letter in the heat of the moment and asks him to sleep on it. His anger dissipates overnight, as is deftly illustrated in what might be my favourite sequence of the entire episode, when we get a little peak into Homer's dreams and initially find him throttling Burns, who morphs into a bottle of syrup Homer is joyously applying to a plate of pancakes (I miss the days when the dream sequences in The Simpsons were distinguished by their slightly off colour palettes). Unfortunately, the negative impression he's made on Bart won't be pushed aside so easily. The kid hasn't mastered the adult technique of getting worked up and then seeing sense the following day, and he has no such filter where Burns is concerned. He is however familiar enough with the adult routine to know that they tend to bottle out if they don't immediately act on their rage, and takes the liberty of posting the letter on his father's behalf. (Side-note: when Homer learns what happened to the letter and cries out, "D'oh!", you can see a slightly off-model Ned Flanders trimming his hedge at the front.)

In its second act, "Blood Feud" turns into more of a caper with Homer and Bart, as they attempt to retrieve the wayward letter from the mailbox and later from the post office. It's here that the story is at its most purely silly and joyful, as they try everything from physically attacking the mailbox (winning the solidarity of a passing Barney, who cheers them on in fighting the power), to conspiring to destroy its contents by watering its insides with a hosepipe (Bart is trepidatious at the prospect of damaging everybody else's mail in the process, but Homer sees this as trivial: "You know the kinds of letters people write? Dear somebody you never heard of, how is so and so, blah, blah blah, yours truly, some bozo. Big loss"), to walking up to the post office counter and pretending to be Mr Burns, only to immediately realise the flaw in their plan, in that Homer doesn't actually know his boss's first name. Finally Homer attempts to sneak into Burns' office first thing in the morning and retrieve the letter before Burns even notices it's there, but by now it's too late. Burns gets to the letter first and reads it out in Homer's presence. Naturally, he's appalled at the words contained and Homer's future is looking distinctly unrosy.

It's in the third act that "Blood Feud" steps away from the Homer-Bart conflict and reveals where its interests really lie. It is a story with a surprise hero, which is the thing that I most appreciate about it and would argue makes it the perfect ending to the second season. Finally, Homer's benevolent gesture is repaid in no insignificant way, with the real show of gratitude he receives coming not from Burns, but from Smithers, who is the lion to Homer's Androcles. Burns initially wants to fire Homer, but decides that that would be going too easy on him and orders Smithers to arrange for him to be brutally beaten by Joey the goon (another promising side character who would remain sadly under-utilised). Unlike Burns himself, however, Smithers cannot overlook that Homer saved Burns' life, and for that much he feels personally indebted to him. He later shows up at Burns' office to report that the beating did not go ahead, because he intervened and called it off, thus risking becoming the next target of his boss's wrath. In the process, he becomes the episode's real moral centre - Homer and Burns are by turns unsympathetic, and we might even deem Marge's principled assertion that helping Burns should be reward enough in itself to ring a little hollow in practice, but there can be no question that Smithers has done something incredibly selfless, genuine and courageous. Keep in mind that the season's second episode, "Simpson and Delilah", saw Smithers attempting to spitefully sabotage Homer's career to protect his own status, so I see his actions here as a case of his characterisation coming full circle. He gets a chance to atone for the sins of his recent past and to demonstrate the circumstances under which he'd be willing to stand up to Burns. In this instance, the gambit pays off. Burns, much like the emperor from the story of Androcles, is moved enough by Smithers' show of humaneness that it jars him out of his rage and has him reconsidering his response to the Simpsons' life-saving gift. The most bittersweet aspect of the ending is that Homer doesn't find out about any of this. Although he fears some kind of retribution from Burns, he never learns how close he came to being pummelled into a bloody pulp and that it was Smithers (whom he'd dismissed as a jerk in "Principal Charming") who saved him. So when the family are discussing the story's moral implications and conclude that there are none, their perception is somewhat blinkered by their having missed out on its most vital development. If the point of this story goes above their heads, then it might be because it was only ever ostensibly about them.

 (Here's something I never noticed until my most recent viewing: Burns has a mounted triceratops head on his wall. The ultimate symbol of impossible decadence. Not only that, but a triceratops skull later appears in the window display of Plunderer Pete's. Someone involved in production clearly had a fetish for those decapitated dinos.)

What "Blood Feud" ultimately offers is further illumination on the nature of the Burns-Smithers alliance, a relationship Marge had previously queried in "Brush With Greatness", when she wondered how Smithers could bear to be around someone who was so abusive to him, and to everybody else. Smithers' response was very telling: "I value every second we're together, from the moment I squeeze his orange juice in the morning till I tuck him in at night." I'd wager that a significant part of Smithers' pull to Burns stems from his being persistently exposed to the elderly tyrant at his most vulnerable. He understands Burns on a far more intimate and personal level than any other Springfieldian, and while this doesn't mean that he necessarily gets to see a much nicer side to him than anyone else, he does see a far needier side. Burns might be a bogeyman, but he's a bogeyman who requires constant nurturing in order to function, something that arouses Smithers' protective urges and speaks to his need to be needed (the series would later propose a similar, less convincing underpinning to Homer and Marge's relationship, in "Secrets of A Successful Marriage"). We see the extent to which he's willing to go for Burns at the start of the episode, when he immediately offers up his blood, and it's revealed that he'd previously helped Burns out of another medical tight spot by giving him one of his kidneys (slight nitpick, but if Smithers is unable to donate blood to Burns, he can't donate a kidney either). He's also the only person on Earth who treats Burns' illness as a cause for mourning, rather than for scoffing or for filling one's own pockets. It is, paradoxically, this steadfast devotion to Burns that puts him at odds with Burns regarding the fate of Homer. Ordinarily, Smithers will go along with Burns because he loves him so wholeheartedly; he also couldn't turn against the person who ensured the survival of the man he loves.

On that score "Blood Feud" ends up being a surprisingly humanising episode for Burns - somewhat ironically, given the positively vampiric lens through which he regards the transfusion ("I tried every tincture and poultice and tonic and patent medicine there is, and all I really needed was the blood of a young boy"). It builds on the conclusion Marge reached in "Brush With Greatness" that whatever inner beauty there was to be found in Burns came from his being a man of intense physical vulnerability - here, we find him in even more intense physical need than usual, and Burns is eventually prompted to reckon with the implications of this. Despite Marge's assessment, in "Brush With Greatness", that there was nothing good in Burns' character, "Blood Feud" suggests that there is a level on which he is redeemable. He has to hand it to Smithers and acknowledge that he hasn't given the Simpsons their fair due. Its stance on the Burns-Smithers dynamic is ultimately more positive than that of "Homer The Smithers" of Season 7 - an episode that, while it illustrated how valuable the relationship was to both parties, suggested that it was also grounded by an unhealthy, mutually restrictive interdependence (you may recall that when I covered that episode, I likened their dynamic to another classic fable, this one about the perils of expecting honor from those who are not inclined to give it). Here, Burns and Smithers are depicted as life partners whose employer-employee relationship functions on the same level as that of a married couple, with Smithers filling a similar role for Burns as Marge does for Homer. When Burns tells Smithers, in the episode's single greatest line of dialogue, "As usual, you've been the sober yin to my raging yang", we can certainly hear echoes of Homer's earlier remark to Marge, when she'd dissuaded him from posting the letter, about finally understanding the meaning of the term "better half". Homer and Burns each do regrettable things in their fits of rage, and require their respective partners to bring much-needed balance to the dynamic, in keeping them from going off the deep end - something that, in both cases, is presented as being no less than the natural give and take of any supportive relationship. If "Blood Feud" has a moral, I would argue that it has something to do with the extent to which we are all essentially dependent on one another, be it in the physical sense that Burns was dependent on Bart's fluids and Homer on Smithers' mercy, or in the sense of needing that other person to bring perspective to our own skewed and potentially destructive disposition.

The Simpsons, though, can't really appreciate that, because all they're left with in the final scene is that rather hostile-looking Olmec head glaring back at them. Burns resolves to gift them with the most marvellous and luxurious present that money can buy, but instead ends up bringing them the ultimate white elephant, a 3000 year old carving that, while a beautiful bit of craftsmanship on the part of the Mesoamericans, isn't going to do anything other than occupy a lot of space and weird them out. Even when Burns is trying to be nice, he can't help but betray his fundamentally antagonistic nature. The carving he picks out as his peace offering is specifically of Xtapalapaquetl the god of war, which stands in direct contrast to the other item with which he gifts the Simpsons, an advance copy of his upcoming autobiography about his battle with hypohemia, which bears the hilariously hokey title, Will There Ever Be A Rainbow? Now really, what the heck does that even mean? Within this context, we suspect that "rainbow" to be a superficial metaphor packaged in a superficial question that Burns is only superficially interested in answering, much as he is only superficially interested in meeting the needs of the Simpsons, for all of the expense he throws their way. There is no reason why he should have chosen Xtapalapaquetl, other than the likelihood that it appealed to his own belligerent character, and he thus assumed that the Simpsons would love it too...that, or he was subconsciously looking to make a statement to his underlings about how he's not to be trifled with. Burns and Smithers receive a happy ending, with Burns getting to walk away feeling satisfied that he's made amends, and Smithers getting to prop Burns back up on his pedestal, assuring him that he's his god of generosity. Meanwhile, the family are left scratching their heads over what to make of this uneasy mix of gratitude and contempt on their would-be benefactor's part.

Still, it's hard to feel that the Simpsons have been particularly cheated by the outcome. Perhaps they have gotten exactly what they deserve. Bart, who made the actual physical sacrifice that saved Burns, is unironically delighted with the head, which might be what most counts. Elsewhere, the benevolence of Homer's gesture has been repaid in full (although he doesn't know it) and his less noble intentions have been answered in a way that feels appropriately humorous. Now, all that's left to do is to survey the (white) elephant in the room, the gaping hole where some form of closure, fulfilment or enlightenment should be where instead there sits a big angry head. Even if Burns wasn't mocking them, it certainly feels as though the universe is. Marge insists that there must be something the family was meant to learn from all this and reaches for some kind of simplified instruction, but she can't find one that accommodates the story from all angles. Her first attempt is "A good deed is its own reward", but Bart objects that he considers the Olmec head to be a fabulous reward, so she adjusts it to "No good deed goes unrewarded". Homer counters that it was actually a bad deed, his strongly-worded letter to Burns, that got them the alleged prize, prompting Marge to shift to the more morally ambiguous "The squeaky wheel gets the grease." Rather than let the discussion degrade further, Lisa offers the resigned suggestion that there maybe was no moral to this particular tale (she's only partially right - there is a moral, but it's too nuanced to be reduced to the kind of concise and cliched observation that Marge requires). The family all agree, but conclude that it was at least a memorable chapter in their lives - a winking concession to the viewer that they hope they at least enjoyed coming along for the journey (and the 21 journeys before it), even if the destination was a baffling non-sequitur. As a capper to the whole season it really is delightful. The family wind up no richer and ultimately no wiser than when they came in, but find a joyous satisfaction in the times they've spent together.

Finally, I don't know what that skinny figure on Bart's desk with the long hair is supposed to be (a stressed Troll doll?), but I kinda want one.

Halfway Across The Galaxy And Turn Left (aka Third From The Sun)

A children's series from the 1990s that I wish people talked about more is Halfway Across The Galaxy and Turn Left. A gem of a series based on a 1985 novel by Australian author Robin Klein, regarding a family of fugitive extra terrestrials who flee their home planet of Zyrgon and travel to Earth by following the directions laid out in the title, where they attempt to start anew in a suburb down under. I remember this one being a pretty big deal back in 1994. People on my playground spoke about it, and were genuinely interested in where the story was headed. I'm not sure how we let this one fall into the cracks of obscurity, but I suggest that we all rectify that post haste. 

The big intriguing hook of Klein's original premise was that, in Zyrgon society, the family dynamics are reversed, so that children have authority over their parents, or at least have an official route to gaining that authority. The book centres on the middle child, X, who is the equivalent of 12 years old on Earth, and has studied tirelessly for the position of Family Organiser, earning a scholarship at the Zyrgon Community Centre and becoming formally recognised as the head of her household. In spite of her status, X feels a degree of inferiority compared to her two siblings, for her teenage sister Dovis is a skilled pilot on track to becoming a Cosmic Flier, while youngest child Qwrk is a mathematical genius awaiting a professorship with the Knowledge Bank. By contrast, X's role is considered dull and not very glamorous, a path she pursued because she couldn't excel at anything more exciting. Nevertheless, her hard-nosed leadership proves indispensable when the children's Father, a compulsive gambler, is exposed as a serial lottery cheater and wanted by the Zyrgon Law Enforcement, forcing the family to vacate the planet. They anticipate that this will be only a temporary measure, with the current regime expected to topple at any moment, and regularly check in with Lox, a dashing young Space Shuttle captain with whom X is infatuated, for updates on the situation. In the meantime, they attempt to hide on Earth by posing as a human family who've recently relocated from abroad, adopting Earth names (X becomes Charlotte, Dovis becomes Astrella, Qwrk becomes George, Father becomes Mortimer, Mother becomes Renee and the family, whose surname was never given, become the Jacksons) and attempting to assimilate themselves into the local culture. Not wanting to attract attention, X orders them to be as nondescript as possible, but this poses a problem when the children attend school and Qwrk is required to present as a child of average intelligence, something he can't even fake. X has him take up the violin, hoping that his lack of musical aptitude will convince the school that there is nothing remarkable about him. But, as Boards of Canada told us, music is math, and Qwrk has little trouble applying his mathematical prowess to mastering the instrument, causing him to be hailed a prodigy and for the school to restructure his lessons around his musical education. Meanwhile, the charismatic Dovis takes to life on Earth like a duck to water, becoming one of the most popular girls in her peer group, and Mother and Father find jobs pertaining to their respective talents for fashion and cooking. X is the only one who still struggles to adjust, bogged down by the weight of her responsibilities.

Eventually, X decides that it would be easier for the family to return to Zyrgon, if they used the money saved from her scholarship to bribe the officials to drop the charges against Father, by which point everyone else has grown accustomed to their Earth routines and meets her proposal with resistance. X then discovers, through communication with Lox, that they actually can't go back, since it's come to light that the test papers that earned her that scholarship were falsified, and she's now the one the Zyrgon authorities are interested in apprehending. Father admits to tinkering with the results on X's behalf, knowing how much she'd wanted to succeed as an Organiser. Realising that she's been living a sham and was never suited to the position, X feels relief rather than disappointment. The book ends with her dispelling the raft the family travelled in, so that the Zyrgon law enforcers will be unable to trace it to their current location. With no choice but to remain on Earth, she opens up to embracing her new life as a child, announcing that the family will have to learn to start organising themselves. In the meantime, she's going ice-skating with her schoolfriend Jenny Roland.

At just 144 pages, the book is a slim read. The television adaptation, conversely, consisted of 28 half-hour episodes, so you know that they added in a ton of extra material. The show's Wikipedia entry states that the series was split into two arcs, with the first staying close to the events of the book. Eh, sort of. For the first 10 episodes or so, it's a reasonably faithful adaptation. We again follow the adventures of X (Lauren Hewitt), Qwrk (Jeffrey Walker), Dovis (played by German actress Silvia Seidel with dialogue dubbed by Amanda Douge), Father (Bruce Myles) and Mother (Jan Friedl), who in this version come to the fictional Melburnian suburb of Bellwood (filmed in the actual Melburnian suburbs of Williamstown and Surrey Hills), claiming to be returning to Australia after a period of living in Peru. They face many of the same challenges as in the book (Qwrk's violin story, for example, is transplanted pretty much wholesale), although the tone of the narrative is noticeably altered, not least because we get considerably more direct insight into the happenings on Zyrgon, something that in the novel was related largely second-hand from X's perspective. Zyrgon culture has also gotten even more draconian - in the novel, the penalty awaiting X and Father, should they be apprehended, was a term in the Detention Centre, which was not suggested to be any worse than an Earth prison, whereas in the series they are threatened with execution by being cast into a pit of lava. After 10 episodes, the series starts following its own storyline, based on the new world-building introduced. It should be acknowledged that Klein penned her own sequel to her novel, Turn Right For Zyrgon, which I understand was written after the TV series and incorporated a few of the plot points from its latter half. I will confess that I've never read the sequel, copies of which seem to be quite hard to come by (I'm not even sure if it was ever published in the UK, in spite of the popularity the series enjoyed here at the time, and the original novel being readily available during its run), so I am unable to comment on how it compares to the events of the series. 

Produced by Crawfords Australia, the series aired in 1994 on the Seven Network in Australia, and in the UK as part of the now-defunct CITV programming block. At the time, I got really invested in the story and characters, although for such a long-running series it was basically inevitable that I was going to miss an episode here and there, and for some reason my viewing during the second half got particularly spotty. I am happy to say that I caught the finale, "We Live On The Best One", so I at least got to see how everything concluded. I had missed the penultimate episode, "Trial By Lava", and remember how shocked I was when I learned from the recap what the final cliffhanger had been. But I was thrilled to bits with how the story ultimately resolved, and the closing line, spoken by X, is one that's really stuck with me through the years. I recently revisited the series in full, which it had long been on my mind to do, and was chuffed at how much I got from it the second time around. This is a show that has it all - a memorable cast of characters, a gripping sense of adventure, a stirring theme tune (courtesy of Peter Sullivan), visual designs that are really quite lovely (inevitably, some of the effects look kind of dated now, but for a television production of its day it seriously doesn't look too shabby, with those shots of the Zyrgon civilisation in particular still feeling so chilly, haunting and alien), and while it makes for darker, more dramatic viewing than some of the other Australian children's shows I remember from that era (most notably Round The Twist and Genie From Down Under), there's still a healthy undercurrent of that same antipodean quirkiness. My only quibble is that the sprawling structure^[1] isn't immune to intermittent flabbiness. There comes a point (around episode 13) where it shifts from being a serialised science-fiction adventure into more of an episodic fish out of water dramedy, and from there you get your share of episodes that could be described as "filler", in that they don't do a massive amount to further the overarching plot. Such fillers aren't necessarily a bad thing, with some simply slowing down to focus more on the characters (episode 14, "Qwrk Lands On His Feet", an unusually X-lite installment that has Qwrk befriending an aspiring skateboarder, offers an agreeable little study of the youngest Jackson). But there is a particularly laggy stretch later on (namely, episodes 20 to 22) that leaves you wondering when the adventure is going to pick up again - which it thankfully does in style for the remaining six entries. It's an excellent series, though one that might have benefited from being a smidge shorter.

(Top: The villainous Chief, as portrayed by Bruce Spence. Bottom: Chief in his more harmless rubot form.)

One of the most significant changes in the television adaptation was the addition of The Chief, a sinister and relentless law enforcer who'd tracked the family all the way from Zyrgon and was intent on bringing X and Father to his twisted vision of justice. In his anisocoric eyes (yes, Chief has the same eye condition as David Bowie), X had abused her position as Family Organiser by refusing to turn in her father, which already made her a high-level traitor to Zyrgon society, never mind any matter of falsified test papers. In the finale, it's revealed that he'd also harboured some personal jealousy of X, recognising how favoured she was by Zyrgon ruler Prinicipa (Diane Cliento) and her potential to rise up the ranks faster than him. (Chief had no real interest in Mother, Dovis or Qwrk, and in episode 11, "Home Is Where The Heart Is", when he temporarily apprehended X and Father, was happy to leave them behind on Earth.) In the book, the Zyrgon law enforcement were never more than a distant, vaguely-defined threat, with much of the conflict arising from the family's efforts to adjust to life on Earth, while in the television series the jeopardy naturally became a lot more immediate and intense, with an enforcer so actively and aggressively on their trail. Chief also got confused by the ways of Earth, and had contempt for what he saw as the planet's chaos and disorder (there's a hilarious moment in the penultimate episode where he tries to explain to Principa the concept of shopping malls). As a child, he was by and far my favourite character, and I recall that very specific disappointment, on reading the book, when it became apparent that he wasn't going to be in this version of the story; without him, it became a very different, somewhat slighter experience (although there was a reference to a "Law-Enforcer-In-Chief" who according to Lox loves the sound of his own voice, which I suspect was the basis for his character).

One of the joys of rediscovering the television series as an adult has been in seeing how fantastically well Chief holds up as an antagonist. A big part of that has to do with his being played by the legendary Bruce Spence - not only does Spence's lofty, gangling frame give him an imposing and convincingly alien presence, he could imbue Chief with a sublime creepiness and sublime campiness all in one package, simply through what he does with his mouth (a talent put to subsequent use in his cameo as the Mouth of Sauron in The Lord of The Rings: Return of The King, which was egregiously excised from the theatrical cut). The guy is skin-crawling, but so, so fun. He also has an unexpected and frankly weird character arc, which involves him spending the middle portion of the series in the form of a harmless "rubot" (robotic beings used on Zyrgon in the roles of dogs and cocktail waiters), having accidentally transformed himself in a botched attempt to capture X, and being adopted by Father as a sort of pet he keeps around without X's knowledge. For a few episodes, he and Father appear to forge quite a loving bond, with Father regularly going out of his way to protect Chief, after taking pity on him in his disarmed state. From Chief's perspective the truce was almost certainly one of convenience - having finally returned to his true form (in episode 19, "Welcome To The Human Race"), he goes right back to hunting Father and X. Mercy and emotion are just not things that he comprehends, and while X is able to teach him something of their value in the series finale, his time under Father's care is oddly never cited as a factor in his eventual redemption.

The other major change made by the television series was to expand extensively on the role of Jenny Roland (Kellie Smythe), the lonely Earth girl befriended by X who ultimately gives her a reason to feel that she belongs on the Blue Planet. In fact, the very first scene of the opening episode centres on Jenny's perspective, indicating that the series will be her story as much as X's. It is established that Jenny is struggling with the absence of her father, who distanced himself from the family following the breakdown of her parents' marriage. Jenny spots a falling star in the night sky and wishes for her father's return. She then makes an additional wish that is not said out loud, but later shared with X - she wants things to be different for her at school this year, and to find a friend. (Were you watching, Chris Sanders?) The narrative thread regarding Jenny's father is not explicitly resolved, but he implication is that X has arrived to fill a dual role, both as Jenny's friend and as a surrogate parent, in helping her to come to terms with her father's abandonment. When X attempts to have the family return to Zyrgon (claiming that they are going back to their old home in Peru), Jenny is forced to relive that abandonment and expresses her anger for her father by taking it out on the fishing boat he left behind, a symbol of their vacated connection. Unlike in the book, where Jenny remains oblivious to X's origins, in the television series X chooses to confide the truth in Jenny and her brother Colin (Che Broadbent), who become actively involved in the family's efforts to remain undetected on Earth and to evade the clutches of The Chief. In turn, their alliance provides Jenny with a means of healing from her own upheaval. The fishing boat, which has stood unused since her father's desertion, is granted a newfound mobility thanks to the Jacksons' telekinetic abilities (abilities that might potentially be unlockable in Earthlings too, if they concentrate). It plays an essential part in rescuing X and Father when they are apprehended by Chief in episode 11, and at the end of of episode 12 ("X: The Unknown Factor") when the girls have come through the first phase of their ordeal, they go out for a celebratory joyride in their flying boat, mutual survivors of adult insensitivity. Just as X learns to enjoy life by becoming more of a child, Jenny learns to take control of hers by becoming more confident and independent. In the final arc, when Chief succeeds in capturing X and bringing her to trial on Zyrgon, Jenny and Colin make the gutsy decision to accompany Dovis halfway across the galaxy (and right) to save her.

Not all Earthlings are so hospitable, of course, and X must also contend with alpha schoolgirl Michelle Froggat (Tenley Gillmore) and her lackey Dallas (Katrina Lambert), who've long looked down on Jenny and take a similar disliking to X for not fitting in (in the absence of Chief, they were essentially the closest thing the book had to corporeal villains). By the end of the book it's hinted that Michelle might be forming a grudging respect for X, after she wins a school race; in the series, their enmity merely intensifies in the second half, when Michelle's family move into the house next to the Jacksons and her father (Denis Moore) becomes equally fixated on their weirdness (her mother (Ellen Cressey) is more inclined to let them be, in a dynamic that vaguely reminds me of Patrick and Pippa from One Foot In the Grave). In all fairness to Michelle, she undergoes a pretty traumatic experience in episode 12, when Chief falsely imprisons her and assumes her form in order to lure X into a trap; I'm not sure I'd be so inclined to roll with all of these strange going-ons around me either. (It does mean that, for one episode, Gillmore gets to have an absolute ball playing Chief in Michelle's form, replicating Spence's uncanny lip energy.) 

The character who feels the most altered from his literary counterpart is Lox (Paul Kelman), the family's contact on Zyrgon. In the book he was a vain, unsympathetic character who cared only about his own reputation and status, and when the scandal about X's forged test papers came to light refused to help the family any further. He was also X's primary tie to her home planet, an attachment that revealed a more fanciful side to her hyper-serious character. She had aspirations of one day marrying him, in the same way that a schoolgirl might fantasise about marrying a favourite pop star, and was disappointed to learn that he'd become engaged to a kiosk attendant named Jady following her family's departure. Finally seeing through Lox, and her own foolishness in being so enamored of him, antecedes her willingness to let Zyrgon and the position of Family Organiser go. Her devotion to Lox represents her sense of affinity with the adult world (in her view, that she was "born in the wrong chronology"), which she comes to realise was deeply misplaced; in her final line in the book, it is implied that she might have transferred those affections to the more age-appropriate Colin. In the series, while still the object of X's naive pre-adolescent attachments, Lox isn't quite so self-serving and becomes much more of a comic relief figure. In this version, Jady (Kerry Armstrong) is no mere kiosk attendant, but the fiercely loyal assistant of Chief (she's also the source of the series' funniest running gag, in the conspicuous amatory tension between herself and Chief that their own tyrannical protocol keeps them from acknowledging), looking to honey trap Lox into revealing information about X's whereabouts. Eventually Lox is forced into hiding himself and joins the family on Earth, where he becomes fascinated with cowboys and westerns and attempts to emulate their culture, not appreciating how hopelessly out of place it is in 1990s Melbourne. He nevertheless proves himself useful in episode 19 by saving the family from Chief, then fresh out of his rubot era, and is inspired to return to Zyrgon as a dissident (albeit a mostly incompetent one).

Zeppy and Jenny 

Also dropping by to offer support are Aunt Hecla (Sandy Gore) and her pet Zeppy, a zepelope, or "hybrid antelope" as per the book (specifically, he looks like a hybrid of a pronghorn and Dougal from The Magic Roundabout), though if anyone asks he's a rare breed of Earth goat. Despite her eccentric appearance, Hecla is the voice of reason, a former Family Organiser who alone recognises how absurd it is to place that kind of responsibility on a child. She takes it on herself to shoulder X's burden, assuming X's form and giving herself up to Chief, although the ruse is uncovered once she is back on Zyrgon (Zeppy, meanwhile, remains on Earth with the Jacksons, but he becomes less prominent as the series goes on and by the end has completely faded into the backdrop). Hecla vocalises one of the story's key concerns, which has to do with the perils of parentification and of forcing children to grow up too soon. During her stay on Earth, she tries to dissuade X from feeling so accountable for her family with the reminder that she is only a child. This is echoed more harrowingly in the penultimate episode, when Chief is preparing to execute X by throwing her into the much-feared lava pit, and Hecla tries to reason with him to let her go on those exact same grounds. There's the implicit suggestion that there is not such a gulf between what parentification has done to X and Chief's attempts to literally destroy her. In Klein's book we might have detected a certain subtext, in which the whole of Zyrgon (there a less concrete threat) reads as a shorthand for the omnipresent anxieties that loom over X and keep her bound to her premature obligations. This analogy is even more pronounced in the series, where Zyrgon becomes a caricature of adulthood at its most joyless, a cold blue realm of endless discipline and uniformity, where fun is literally forbidden and sweet treats are unheard of (crucially, it is the residents' demands for ice cream - a classically childish request - that causes Chief to lose his control over them). Earth, by contrast, represents the freshness and boundless opportunities of childhood, a green and vibrant world in which the family are reborn and given the chance to reinvent themselves from scratch, and to discover the potential that they never knew they had.

Another major theme of the television series is immigration and diversity, with X and her family being foreigners attempting to start over in a world that is new to them, and which does not always understand them in turn. I feel this was the significance of making the Froggats direct neighbours to the Jacksons in the latter half, since it makes the issue of coexistence more explicit - we share a common world and need to live alongside one another, even if our customs and outlooks don't always accord. Mr Froggat despises the Jacksons for being different, and there's an obvious message about how such bigotry may be passed down through the generations, with Mr Froggat's bitter intolerance visibly rubbing off on his daughter. Which is not to say that there's no hope for Michelle. In episode 26 ("Dark Night, Star Bright") she finds herself caught between her parents' opposing views on the matter. Mrs Froggat encourages Michelle to accept the Jacksons and advocates multiculturalism, while Mr Froggat lays out his vision of a "perfect" society in which everyone is the same and non-conformity brutally punished, a vision that is chillingly reminiscent of the dystopian system on Zyrgon. Even Michelle, who looks up to her father and usually goes along with him, is disturbed by the notion. Elsewhere, in episode 15 ("Hearing A Different Drummer"), Dovis enters into a relationship with a young poet named David (David Walters), and admits to him that her family are originally from Zyrgon. While David likely doesn't appreciate that "Zyrgon" is a whole other planet, as opposed to another country, he is unfazed, sharing that his family is of Ukrainian descent and assuring Dovis that Australia is, historically speaking, a new country for a lot of its populace.

By the end of the series, while the narrative on Zyrgon is neatly tied up, the situation with the Froggats is a left little more open-ended. The Froggats must resign themselves to the fact that the Jacksons are here to stay (following a brief interval in which they'd announced their intention to leave, much to the delight of Mr Froggat and Michelle), but will relations between the two families be in any way improved going forward? Will Michelle continue to make X's life difficult in school, or will she finally come around to her, as she did the book? Sure, if X can depart Zyrgon on peaceful terms with Chief, then Michelle should be a doddle, right? The answer might lie in that powerful closing line, when the Froggats go outside to see the Jacksons returning to their property with a splashy new car, and receive the unwelcome news that they are not only staying put, but are now lottery winners. It seems that Father has been up to his old tricks again, although one would hope that this is just a one-off to give his family enough money to live comfortably in their new lives. "What luck", says Mr Froggat, barely concealing his deflation. X responds: "That's not luck, Mr Froggat. THIS is luck. There's a million billion of these planets, and we live on the best one." The final sequence shows the Jacksons, along with Jenny and Colin, running playfully around their garden, a collection of children and children at heart, while the Froggats observe them from the other side of the fence. The shot then pulls back to reveal Australia as viewed from outer space, part of a bigger world and indeed a bigger universe. Although the Froggats appear to be excluded from that final celebration, we might detect an implicit invitation in X's words, one that is being extended to the viewer as much as to her reluctant neighbours. After all, her closing statement is "We live on the best one", denoting the Earth's entire populace. The invitation is to see ourselves as part of a global community that is enriched by our individual differences, and in which we become stronger when we embrace and lean on one another (a message likewise conveyed in the conclusion to Chief's arc, when he and X both become stranded in the lava pit, and are required to cooperate in order to get out alive). To simply be on this wonderful planet, and to have so much splendour and diversity around us is, in X's terms, is to have done better than to have won the lottery. The opportunity to make the most of that is there, and the Froggats' final position in that equation is undefined in the same way that our own position is undefined - whether we choose cross the fence and partake in the Jacksons' celebration, or else stay leerily upon the sidelines, is ultimately in our hands.

The "Jacksons" - don't forget to turn left!  

[1] It is, I think, a bit of a stretch on Wikipedia's part to claim that the series can be divided into two distinct arcs. Broadly, it can be broken down into four different phases: the initial 12-episode adventure, the more laid-back interval from 13 to 18 that focusses on the Jacksons vs the Froggats, David romancing Dovis and the subplot about Father caring for Chief as a rubot, culminating in Chief's regaining his true form in episode 19, that rather idle gap between 20 and 22 where Mother goes to Paris and Lox goes home but not a lot else happens, and then the final arc where Chief reunites with Jady and they close in on X for the climactic showdown. Not the most even structure, but a lot of good times.