Spookyfish (aka Aunt Flo's Last Visit)

"Spookyfish", only our second Halloween spent in the perennially cursed regions of South Park, has the distinction of being the episode to introduce the world to the terrors of "Spooky Vision", a gimmick in which the corners of your screen are continuously occupied by cut-out images of Barbra Streisand, as the words "Spooky" and "Vision" are spelled out down the sides in conspicuous lettering. I don't recall if Trey Parker and Matt Stone made this point saliently enough on any prior occasions, but they don't much warm to Streisand, and I guess they were still clearing that bile out of their system. Being a fan of Babs myself, my response ought to be, "Ha, joke's on them, I like looking at pictures of Barbra Streisand!" - except that there is something about this presentation that has me feeling weirdly uncomfortable. It is a joke at the viewer's expense as much as Streisand herself, being a glaringly lame novelty that's intrusive, distracting and designed to try your patience. But as the episode goes on, I find that it gets to you in more unsettling ways. The static images become authentically eerie (particularly the one featured in the middle act, where Babs' eyes appear completely blackened), a testament to how you can make anything unnerving by having it be this prominently and perpetually out of place. It becomes marginally less intrusive in the remastered episode, where the wider aspect ratio has the Spooky Vision elements more spaced out, which is honestly why I prefer watching it on the ye olde DVD. There, it's more boxed in, claustrophobic and all-round harder to ignore. In other words, the perfectly discombobulating Halloween experience. Bless you, Babs!

From my perspective, "Spookyfish" boasts a far more dubious distinction still, in that this is the first episode in which my favourite character never appears. Ah well, we mustn't be greedy about such things - on review, I'm really very pleasantly surprised at just how far Mr Garrison got into the series without sitting out a single episode (keeping in mind that he was technically in "Not Without My Anus" by way of the opening recap, which you might consider cheating, but I'm still counting it). You can correct me if I'm wrong on this, but the only other supporting character who I think appeared in all thirteen episodes of Season 1 (besides Mr Hat) was Chef, and he lost his streak very early in Season 2 with "Chickenlover", so Garrison did well to keep his going for as long as he did. But once he had lost it, he lost it quite markedly. Garrison was largely absent from the tail-end of Season 2, with "Gnomes" being the only episode from here until the finale in which he would feature. I feel a slight disloyalty in admitting it, but on my recent rewatch of Season 2 I found those three Garrison-less episodes to all be pretty strong in spite of it - yes, even the Charles Manson Christmas episode, which is the one that made me go "Huh?" back in 1999, turned out to be a whole lot better than I'd remembered. "Spookyfish" stands out as a particularly great entry; the biggest criticism to be made is that the narrative feels overstuffed with ideas (it's little wonder why Garrison isn't included - there wasn't room for him if he wasn't going to directly service the story), but they are uniformly fun ideas, and the results are lively and hair-raising in the way that the most memorable Simpsons "Treehouse of Horror" installments always were. It leans into the nightmare angle more heavily than the previous year's "Pinkeye" and brings out some genuine willies. A big part of that is down to the audio - whoever was responsible for the sound production on this episode really earned their money. The music, specifically the recurring leitmotif comprised of a banshee-like wailing, sells you on the notion that you've wandered into some Twilight Zone iteration of South Park, one that makes the regular town feel safe and friendly by comparison.

"Spookyfish" opens with a cheeky bit of misdirection, through a drawn-out sequence that has us anticipating that the plot will revolve around an Xenomorph-type alien turning up in South Park and creating havoc over Halloween. We follow the alien as it approaches Earth (in a shot that parodies the opening of Independence Day), hones in on Colorado and touches down near the bus stop. It emerges from its interplanetary craft, hissing malevolently, whereupon it steps into the road and is immediately crushed by the wheels of the school bus (it turns out that the alien was not much bigger than a house cat, recalling the twist ending of a certain Tony Ross book), abruptly shutting down that prospective narrative thread. Instead, we catch up with Stan, Kyle and Kenny, who are planning to acquire a pumpkin so that they can enter a local carving contest. Cartman shows up with a ridiculous fake beard and, even more alarmingly, an impeccably polite demeanour; he explains, without a hint of irony, that he wasn't in school today because his mother was unwell and he wanted to stay home and do chores for her, but he's eager to know if they were assigned any homework for the evening. This perturbs the boys, who can tell straight off the bat that something within their universe is drastically out of whack. Stan returns home, but he isn't finding any refuge there either. His mother Sharon's Aunt Flo has come to visit, as she does every month, and she's brought him a present in the form of a pet goldfish (the fish is never formally named, but we'll call him Spooky). Stan is unnerved by this new addition, which has a tendency to stare at him with a chilling intentness, like it knows something he doesn't, but his family don't believe him when he insists that the fish is working to some sinister agenda. At most, he gets Sharon to notice when the bodies of random townspeople start appearing at the foot of his bed, only for her to assume that her beloved boy has taken to murdering and to hastily conceal the evidence on his behalf. Meanwhile, confusion abounds over Cartman's alternating disposition - the familiar mean-spirited Cartman (who's become extra insufferable ever since he added the word "hella' to his vocabulary) has clearly not gone away, but every now and then he'll apparently don the beard and transform into a kindly soul with a propensity for breaking out into Barney The Dinosaur-esque sing-songs about how much he cherishes his friends. The boys eventually put it together that there are two Cartmans in town, one of whom (the one with the beard) is an interloper from a parallel dimension. From that, they're able to determine the spine-chilling connection between Cartman's doppelganger and Stan's homicidal goldfish, but not before it brings tragic consequences for Kenny and Aunt Flo.

As a kid, I'll admit that I only half-got the joke with Aunt Flo. I realised that her presence in the Marsh residence was being used to make a bunch of allusions to Sharon's menstrual cycle - the humor in her being repeatedly referred to as Sharon's "monthly visitor" did not go over my head - but since I was totally unfamiliar with the euphemistic origins of the name "Aunt Flo", I didn't quite appreciate that she WAS the menstrual cycle, personified. Nor did I grasp the real underlying significance of Sharon's muted despair at the prospect of Aunt Flo no longer coming to visit her. Back then, I was more inclined to take the scenario at face value, as a strange tale of an intrusive relative who'd attached themselves to one member of the family, but whose visits were always an intensely awkward experience for everyone else. Whereas nowadays, to these adult eyes and ears, the metaphor really has all the subtly of a rabid hedgehog traversing a balloon factory. Aunt Flo has red hair and wears a pink and brown cardigan, she comes to visit Sharon once a month and sticks around for five days or so, during which she creates endless discomfort for the boys of the household, who aren't thrilled about having to put up with her, or her influence on Sharon's emotional state (Shelley comes off as a mite more accommodating). And then when she's removed from the picture permanently, that's our indication that Sharon has hit the menopause.

Now, for as much as Stan and Randy dread Aunt Flo's visits, she honestly doesn't come off as that unpleasant a character in person. In fact, most of the ways in which she's an imposition we only hear about second-hand from Randy - she'd reportedly object to Stan being permitted to sleep with the light on, on the grounds of it being a waste of electricity, and Randy gets banished to the couch while she's around. But whenever we see her in the flesh (and blood), Flo generally seems very nice and well-intentioned. For one thing, she buys the kids such cool and generous gifts. A goldfish would make for a thrilling present, if it didn't also happen to be a serial killer from a parallel dimension. When Flo learns how strongly Stan dislikes the fish, she takes it pretty hard but she doesn't take it out on Stan. As for her turning Sharon into a total bitch, if you ask me Sharon was a lot more openly callous toward Stan in "Clubhouses", when Aunt Flo wasn't in town (if nothing else, "Spookyfish" does make it clear how very important Stan is to Sharon, something she herself had openly undermined in "Clubhouses").

And yet I have to admit that I don't completely trust Aunt Flo. It isn't explicitly borne out by any of the story's developments, but I've somehow always gotten the impression that she knows more about the situation than she lets on. There is a small, ostensibly incidental moment that seems to frame her in a knowingly sinister light, when a blood-stained Sharon steps back into the kitchen, having buried the first of the fish's victims in the yard and Aunt Flo (appearing in silhouette) catches her off guard. Sharon expresses surprise that Flo would be up at this time, but what Flo is doing up is never explained. Instead, she regards Sharon fondly and remarks, "Look at you, with your little shovel. Just like when you were 12!" In the original script, their interaction goes on a little longer, with Flo attempting to remove a loose eyelash from Sharon's eye and repeatedly poking her due to her trembly hand movements (later revealed to be caused by Parkinson's Disease), but in the episode itself it ends more abruptly, putting the emphasis squarely on Flo's contextless observation. It is a strange scene, touching on some common knowledge between Sharon and Flo that is not brought up again, or explained to the viewer. It colours their interaction with an unsettling ambiguity. Do we interpret Flo's observation as cheerfully oblivious, or is she indicating to Sharon that she understands what's going on? Does she genuinely not notice the blood on Sharon's clothing and on the tip of her shovel, or is she merely unfazed by it? Would we even expect Aunt Flo to be fazed by the sight of blood, given that it's what she herself deals in? And what meaning are we intended to read into her words? Is the implication that Sharon participated in a similar kind of backyard burial when she was a preteen? Are we to suppose that she potentially murdered someone at the aforementioned age, and this is why she's so quick to jump to conclusions about Stan being the killer, since she's assuming that the apple hasn't fallen far from the tree? Or might that be a hyperliteral interpretation of what Flo is insinuating? I think the really critical clue is in the specification that Sharon was 12 at the time that she previously played around with a shovel...12 being the average age when menstruation begins. 

You know what? I think we can figure this one out. Flo is reminding the blood-stained Sharon of how things went down on her first visit, and of the origins of their monthly relationship. It creates an implicit connection between the fish's activities in the present and Sharon's preadolescent fear and revulsion at her changing body. Am I proposing that the 12-year-old Sharon grabbed a shovel and buried the evidence of her menstruating in the back yard? Again, that might be a hyperliteral way of interpreting things. I think it's more that Sharon was faced with the problem of concealing what her body was doing and of keeping the flow of blood contained. Covering up her son's perceived new penchant for making blood spill is but a variation on what she's adapted to doing every month of her life for the past three decades or so. 

I'll confess that there was one aspect of "Spookyfish" that had, up until now, never quite satisfied me - the revelation that Stan's goldfish came from the same "evil, opposite" universe as the bearded Cartman. The two don't exactly feel as though they're cut from the same malevolent cloth, with the specific brand of evil manifested by Spooky the fish being on a whole other level to that of the mirror universe's human denizens, and even that of the other pets that appear in the final act. Basically, we get three distinct types of menace that are all tied up with the same convenient narrative bow, which seemed like kind of a slapdash solution (not that I suspected Parker and Stone of harbouring any pretences to the contrary). In the case of the mirror humans, the term "evil" is, for the most part, humorously misapplied. It's not that the mirror world is inherently evil, just wrong in terms of how it compares to the workings of the regular South Park universe. The character dynamics have been rearranged, and in some cases swapped out altogether. Evil Stan and Evil Kyle are disagreeable thugs, Evil Cartman wouldn't hurt a cockroach, we never meet Evil Kenny (my guess is that he's also dead in the parallel universe by the time Evil Stan and Evil Kyle cross over), but from the sounds of it he's got deep pockets, and Chef's evil counterpart is a skinny white insurance salesman (it leaves you wondering what the rest of the evil universe must be like - I'll venture that Evil Garrison really is the shameless womaniser that our Garrison so desperately wants people to believe he is, and Evil Mackey is a drug dealer). With the animals, you could argue that they ARE opposites, in the sense that pets are supposed to be domesticated and non-threatening, only their natures don't seem so much inverted as corrupted, in a way that recalls the situation in Pet Sematary - it seems enough to assume that the pets have turned homicidal because the ground on which they dwell has gone sour. Spooky, though? Pardon the pun, but he's a whole other kettle of fish. The other evil pets are savage little monsters with demonic red eyes and an insatiable taste for human misery, but appear no more intelligent than their regular, non-evil counterparts. Whereas Spooky is clearly sapient and conniving (he's also educated enough to write messages on the side of his bowl), and seems to get no shortage of kicks out of actively taunting Stan. There does appear to be a certain kind of calculated method to the fish's madness, even if it's not altogether clear what that might be. As a villain, I always thought he warranted a slightly more in-depth backstory than simply being from the same generic plane of evil as every other threatening thing in this adventure.

I do of course get what the parallel universe is really about. Primarily, it's to pay homage to the "Mirror, Mirror" episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, in which we got acquainted with the Enterprise's evil counterparts from a darker dimension. Hence why the interlopers here all have those ridiculous-looking goatees - it's a nod to the mode of facial hair favoured by the mirror Spock. To fortify the Star Trek allusion, an image of William Shatner even works its way into the story, albeit as a live action photograph (remember, he's Canadian, so the South Park style would in theory have called for him to have the flapping head and beady eyes). As the story develops and we end up at the Indian Burial Ground Pet Store where Flo purchased the fish, the hellish portal from Poltergeist (1982) also becomes a part of the explanation; as with Tobe Hooper's film, its presence is a retribution, brought about by the desecration of Native American land and culture in a way that goes far beyond what the store's moniker implies (the pet shop boy in charge admits that he exhumed the corpses, pissed on them and then buried them again upside down. Why did he do this? "I don't know, I was drunk?"). What my mind inevitably wanders back to, however, is the classic Twilight Zone episode, "Mirror Image", in which Vera Miles is at risk of being replaced by her evil double from another dimension. The evil Vera Miles, much like the Evil Cartman, either can't return to her own world or has no intention of returning, and to survive her only recourse is to supplant the Vera of this one. Despite his genial nature, the Evil Cartman poses an innate threat to the regular Cartman, in that the two of them cannot coexist in the same reality. This is reinforced in a subtle running gag, whereby whenever the two Cartmans are seen together there is a visible split down the middle of the screen (although curiously not while Kitty is in frame), evoking the sensation that we are in fact watching the same "actor" in a dual role that's been spliced into a single shot in the crummiest of fashions. This is especially prominent in a shot where Kenny is standing behind the two Cartmans and is effectively cut in half by the splice line (actually, it's too bad that the fish doesn't similarly bisect him, or that would have been the perfect precursor to the Final Destination method of foreshadowing). For all intents and purposes, there can be only one Cartman. Evil Cartman seems to have no difficulty assuming the life of the regular Cartman; he admits to being confused by the arrangement, but is still quite happy to treat the regular Liane as if she were his own mother and the regular Stan, Kyle and Kenny as if they were the same people he's being hanging out with all his life. The danger of displacement facing the regular Cartman is explicitly realised in the third act, when the Evil Stan and Evil Kyle emerge from the portal with the intention of reclaiming the Cartman of their universe. Regular Stan and Kyle, having decided that they prefer Evil Cartman to their own (not so much because he's kind and helpful, but because he lacks Cartman's annoying habit of saying "hella" all the time), are prepared to betray regular Cartman so that they can hold onto his counterpart. Does that make the regular Stan and Kyle the truly evil ones? Or do we not blame them one iota?

The animals from the parallel universe differ from the humans in that they don't have mirror counterparts. Actually, that's not strictly true - the evil menagerie DO have counterparts, in that their designs have been largely recycled from animals seen elsewhere across the series. I'm pretty sure there's an evil Sparky, an evil Rex (the whippet-type dog belonging to Clyde), an evil version of the scruffy gay mutt from Al's sanctuary, an evil gaggle of gay gooses, and an evil ferret that's really Mephesto's four-assed mongoose with its extraneous asses removed. But with the animals, the feeling of tension between two opposing worlds becomes more figurative. As noted, the Indian Burial Ground Pet Store evokes Pet Sematary, where the reconfiguration of a docile family pet into a monstrous beast (through an association with soured Native American land) was linked to the displacement of childhood security. Located behind a door at the back of the store is the portal from Poltergeist, an opening that allows children to be abducted from their carefree suburban existences and whisked away to a more ghoulish plane of being. 

At long last, I think I've happened on a connection between the bearded denizens of the mirror universe, Spooky the murdering fish and Aunt Flo that satisfies me. Nowadays, I'm inclined to read the whole of "Spookyfish" as an analogy for the horrors of puberty.

To explain this, it's necessary to think about what it is that Aunt Flo actually gives to Stan through Spooky the fish and why she gives it. Within the script, Flo's Parkinson's Disease plays as a largely incidental detail, amounting to nothing more than a spectacularly bad taste joke when the regular Cartman hops onto her trembling lap and observes that "You don't even have to put a quarter in her!" But the fact that Flo is not in the best of health might be taken as an indication that Sharon is already in the perimenopausal stage. Flo is aware that her visits to Sharon are nearing their end, and in light her presents to the children can be seen as parting gifts - gifts that, in actually, serve as warnings that the cycle is merely gearing up to begin anew and that they will be next to begin their slow and painful initiation into the messiness of adulthood (or at least to Stan; Shelley seems to be off the hook, but only for now). Stan is of course incapable of menstruating - he'll learn that the hard way in the following season's "Are You There God? It's Me, Jesus" -  but what he gets with the fish is a horrifying window into the menstrual process. Keep in mind that, for Spooky's initial victims, we don't actually see how he pulls off the murders. Later scenes confirm that the fish is capable of leaping out of his bowl and mauling anybody who stands nearby, but it remains unclear how he managed to get out of the Marshes' house, kill two random outsiders and bring their bodies back into Stan's bedroom. For all intents and purposes, the fish simply makes the messy corpses materialise, leaving Stan to experience the terror of awakening and being confronted with the sudden appearance of blood. That is the real curse of the Spookyfish. A figurative period.

I am suggesting that the fish and Aunt Flo are effectively one and the same, which might seem at odds with the implication that Spooky later kills Flo, preventing her from sharing the location of the Indian Burial Ground Pet Store. But again, we don't actually see how Flo's demise plays out. The kids simply return to find her unresponsive, lying in a pool of the crimson fluid she was in the business of bringing forth into the world. This is the point at which one door closes while another creakily opens. One way or another, Flo's time has come, while the fish stays behind to continue her messy work with the incoming generation of prepubescents.

What's interesting is that this fear of puberty is most vocally articulated not by those on the cusp of experiencing it, but by an adult character, Sharon, who has already been there, done that and learned to accommodate Aunt Flo's monthly appearances for all these years. She sees the disturbance in Stan's bedroom and immediately thinks she understands what's going on and how to deal with the problem (namely, to conceal and contain). Her complicity in her son's apparent killing spree enables her to relive the horror of her own pubescence, but what really terrifies her is the prospect of losing her good and handsome boy, as he threatens to morph into something monstrous and beyond her control. She attempts to keep him grounded in the realm of childhood, by singing him a modified version of the traditional lullaby "Hush Little Baby" (in which she promises to bury any non-compliant mockingbirds in the back yard). Her protective urges reach their peak when Officer Barbrady calls around to ask if he can make a routine inspection of the Marshes' yard. He's investigating some missing persons (all of whom are victims of the fish, except for Shatner), and has a hunch that they might show up hiding out in somebody's bushes. He steps into the yard and sees evidence of the hastily buried corpses (we get a rare cameo from Sparky the gay dog - his only appearance of this entire season, in fact - claiming one victim's limb for a chew toy), prompting Sharon to knock him unconscious and imprison him in her basement. She needn't have bothered - we noted in our coverage of "Weight Gain 4000" that Barbrady has this astounding ability to miss what's directly in front of him, and that isn't any different here. Even when Sharon has him chained up and naked from the waist down (for reasons that are never explained), the reality doesn't seem to fully register for Barbrady. He at least cottons on to the likelihood that Sharon is hiding something, stating that he'll have to ask her a few questions, but is otherwise fairly impervious to his situation, singing "Jimmy Crack Corn" and casually greeting a flabbergasted Randy, when he goes down into the basement, as though he were passing him on the street.

The law may be beyond useless, but the threat of losing your child to the march of puberty is very much real. It is depicted here as something that will either destroy the child or steal their soul, with the former scenario being borne out when Kenny (naturally) falls victim to the fish, prompting Sharon to bury him in the yard (all while fighting off the hungry rat pack, who would have happily disposed of the body for her). Carol McCormick appears at the house to ask Stan if he has any idea what happened to her son, in a scene that always gives me the goosebumps. It's a rare thing for Kenny's death to be treated as a serious matter, even in-universe - usually, Stan and Kyle will react to it in the moment (although curiously not in this instance) and then move right along, as though they didn't just witness something that should by all counts have scarred them for life. We the audience are well aware that Kenny will be back next week as if nothing happened, and for the most part the show isn't looking to kid us otherwise. So it is genuinely startling on the sporadic occasions where it does have something resembling genuine consequences within the space of the individual story. Here, Carol is shown to be distraught at Kenny's disappearance and is drinking to numb the pain (and I feel so bad for her that I'm willing to overlook that she hit Kenny in an extremely rough-looking manner in an earlier scene). Meanwhile, Cartman is at risk of being abducted and permanently banished into the mirror world, on a case of mistaken (and then not-so-mistaken) identity. The portal behind the pet store, from which Spooky the fish originates, becomes the dividing line between childhood security and adolescent chaos - on the other side, the boys discover, is a world populated by distorted versions of themselves who all have facial hair (the beards might be a Mr Spock reference, but they are also signifiers that the transmutation into adulthood is well underway). Once Cartman has traversed that line, his childhood will become forever inaccessible to him, and the petulant brat his world has known will in effect have been erased and replaced with a humbler, maturer version of himself. Which is an outcome that few would find at all disagreeable, although the Evil Stan and Evil Kyle also show up to put a more unsightly face on this coming of age process and its potential to warp a person beyond recognition, in being contentious little hooligans. The Evil Stan and Evil Kyle certainly see themselves as more advanced than their regular counterparts, whom they each individually talk down to by calling "kid".

But there is clearly something more that's bothering Sharon about the prospect of her son hitting his metaphorical puberty, the question of what he is becoming and the possibility of distance (whether emotional or physical) being imposed between them. Watching her son come of age is a reminder that she too isn't getting any younger, and that there are further incoming changes she'll have to contend with regarding her own body. Aunt Flo might have been an alarming intrusion in the beginning, but her appearances have since become what's normal and familiar for Sharon, and the loss of Flo leaves her feeling broken and deflated. Once the line between the two worlds has been crossed there is no going back - the ceasing of monthly visits will not signal a return to the carefree days of prepubescence, but a disconnect from youth and fertility. It's here that the script is able to figure in a dash of quiet pathos, in a scene where Sharon attempts to open up to Randy about her grief at Flo's departure, only for him to struggle to relate to the issue on any level, dismissively suggesting that she should not see it as an ending, but as a new beginning (of course, he is also understandably distracted by her preceding admission to having falsely imprisoned Barbrady and buried a load of bodies in the back yard).

It may be too late for Sharon, but the boys still have the option of remaining children, with the episode climaxing in a thrilling showdown between growth and immaturity. The Evil Cartman proves an asset to the gang when he's able to diplomatically resolve the problem with Spooky the fish by talking the pet store owner into accepting a return. Stan and co will resist getting drawn into puberty's little tortures for now, thank you very much. Unfortunately, the mirror universe has other ideas - soon after, the Evil Stan and Evil Kyle arrive on the scene and attempt to coerce the owner into revealing information on the Evil Cartman's whereabouts by trashing the store with baseball bats, freeing the homicidal animals from their cages in the process. Their search takes them to the regular Cartman, whom they initially try to zap back to their reality, by way of a space age device called a "gingification gun", only his unpleasant temper quickly clues them in that he's not the Cartman they want, and he agrees to lead them to his doppelganger. Elsewhere, Stan, Kyle and Evil Cartman, having discovered what a brilliant team they make, decide to enter the pumpkin carving contest using the butternut squash Kenny had supplied earlier (since he couldn't afford an actual pumpkin) and manage to make the best of it and produce the winning entry. Mayor McDaniels is about to award them their prize of a Halloween chocolate (salty?) ball when they spot the Evil Stan, Evil Kyle and regular Cartman advancing in their direction. Worse still, the evil pets also arrive at the town square and begin massacring the townspeople (seriously, where are Jimbo and Ned when you need them?), although this much works in the boys' favour, as amid the confusion regular Stan is able to get hold of the gingification gun and use it to send the Evil Stan and Evil Kyle back to their universe. He then points the gun at the regular Cartman and gives him the bad news - he and Kyle prefer the Evil Cartman who doesn't say "hella" all the time and give zero fucks about cutting him loose. Thinking on his feet, Cartman gets into a tussle with the Evil Cartman and rips off his beard, meaning that Stan and Kyle can no longer tell which of them is which. One Cartman - the one on the right - pleads that the only course of action is to use the gun on both of them, to be sure of eliminating the Cartman they can't stand. Stan promptly fires on the Cartman on the left, sending him screaming into the mirror world, and assures the Cartman who remains that the choice was obvious as there was no way that their Cartman would have proposed anything so self-sacrificial. Then comes the taunting response: "Hahaha! You guys are hella stupid! I knew you would fall for that!" On this occasion Cartman has outwitted them (whatever else you can say about Eric, he is nowhere near as dumb as he looks), and the spirit of unabating immaturity has prevailed. Of course, Stan does still have that teleportation gun at the end, so in theory there would be nothing to stop him from zapping Cartman into the other reality out of spite, but from the looks of it he isn't actually that petty.

Meanwhile, the narrative thread with the evil animals goes unresolved. In the final sequence we see that Barbrady has been freed by Randy, who apologises for Sharon's behaviour and explains that she's been having a hard time with her Aunt Flo having permanently left her. Barbrady is happy to let the matter slide, since he recalls that his wife went through something similar when her monthly visitor stopped coming (the younger me saw this as a humorous misunderstanding on Barbrady's part, thinking that he meant periods while Randy was talking about an actual person, although given that Aunt Flo is the personification of menstruation, who's to say that she wasn't calling on Mrs Barbrady in a similar form too?). Barbrady walks over to the townspeople being savaged by the pets and attempts to restore order, still naked from the waist down, and we leave with the massacre still in progress. We're given no reassurance that equilibrium will be returning to South Park any time soon, although the closing chaos does at least bring a moment of personal clarity for Sharon, who witnesses Spooky jumping out of his bowl and lunging at a man's jugulars, and considers that she was perhaps a little too quick in leaping to conclusions about Stan.

I wonder whatever happened to Spooky the fish? As horrifying as he was, I have to admit that the little murdering shit grew on me. He was a fun and memorable Halloween villain, and I like to think that he went back to his own universe, along with the other evil pets, to patiently await the next occasion when Aunt Flo will require his services. Because make no mistake, Flo isn't really gone. Her relationship with Sharon might have concluded, but her work at the Marsh household is far from over, and I've a feeling that she'll be back at their door before very long. Keep in mind that Shelley is 12 years old. Flo might not have targeted her on this occasion, but maybe that's because she knows that she'll have plenty of time to play around with her later. Good curses never die, they merely get passed along.

Treehouse of Horror '98: The Terror of Tiny Toon (aka They're Laughing At Your Pain!)

The one thing that no one ever really expects when it comes to these Simpsons Halloween specials is complete originality. Traditionally, the Treehouse of Horror series has always been where the show gets to nip out of its comfort zone and indulge in the kinds of horror-fantasy pastiches that the regular Springfieldian reality is unlikely to accommodate, and going in there does seem to be this unspoken assumption that every segment will offer a Simpson-ised twist on something familiar. So much so that it tends to throw people whenever we get a Treehouse of Horror segment with no really obvious source. Take "Nightmare Cafeteria" of "Treehouse of Horror V", for example. Some will insist that it's a parody of Soylent Green (1973), even though it's nothing like Soylent Green (there might be a vague allusion in the premise of cannibalism being used as a solution to overpopulation, but that's as far as it goes). Not all THoH entries approach their influences in equal measure, of course. Some offer abridged and dedicated recreations of very specific stories, others spoof genre conventions more broadly (compare how "Attack of The 50-Foot Eyesores" handles the set-up of giant monsters to how "King Homer" does it), and there are those where you may be able to discern the odd nugget of inspiration here and there, but it isn't sustained or central enough for the segment as a whole to qualify as a parody of said source. Inevitably, some of these perceived connections will end up feeling more tenuous than others. On the question of whether "Hell Toupee", the opening segment of "Treehouse of Horror IX", is actually a reworking of the Amazing Stories episode of the same name, I'd argue that there might have been an element of idea-borrowing (although this is explicitly refuted by the production crew on the episode's DVD commentary, and not in the "wink wink, nudge nudge" way that they suggested that the "Time and Punishment" segment of "Treehouse of Horror V" had nothing to do with the Ray Bradbury story "A Sound of Thunder"), but the segment certainly isn't a full-on parody in the way that "Nightmare on Evergreen Terrace" very conspicuously is of Nightmare on Elm Street.

But what of the episode's second segment, "The Terror of Tiny Toon"? The title is clearly a play on that of the 1938 Western The Terror of Tiny Town, but was the narrative, which sees Bart and Lisa getting transported into an Itchy & Scratchy cartoon, and terrorised by their favourite cat and mouse duo, modelled on any one thing in particular? At the time of writing, the Wikipedia article for "Treehouse of Horror IX" states as a fact that it's a parody of the 1992 movie Stay Tuned (citing a Den of Geek article that merely describes it as "Stay Tuned-styled"), but that one I kinda wanna straight-up call bullshit on. Mainly because the basic premise of a character getting sucked into a television set and interacting with the assorted programs and personalities therein was already a worn one by the time Stay Tuned got a hold of it. I had seen it done in at least two cartoon shows, Garfield and Friends and Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, before I'd even reached my first half-decade, and there are other features where it shows up too, like Amazon Women on The Moon (1987) and Shocker (1989). It was a standard of the cable and satellite era, when people watched a shit-load of television and had more choice than anybody in search of diversion could possibly require. The major distinguishing detail in Stay Tuned (a pretty lame movie if you ask me - The Simpsons could certainly do a lot better for parody material -  although I think there is a faction of the Blockbuster generation that considers it a cult classic, so I probably should keep my mouth shut) was that the broadcasting system in question was operated by Satan (offering six hundred and sixty-six channels), which doesn't seem to be what's happening here. I'm not sensing a lot about the segment that would mark it out as specifically a parody of Stay Tuned, as opposed to yet another variation on a standard premise in an age of media saturation. (In the interests of fairness, Stay Tuned does get a mention on the DVD commentary, but in rather an odd context that suggests that it's been confused with the 2006 Adam Sandler vehicle Click.)

If "Tiny Toon" was conceived as an allusion to any one movie in particular, then I reckon it's more likely to have been one much closer to The Simpsons' home - namely, the "It's A Good Life" portion of Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), where Nancy Cartwright plays a schoolgirl named Ethel, whose monstrously omnipotent "brother" Anthony banishes her into a televised cartoon and watches with glee as she gets set upon by the sadistic creations therein (cue endless jokes about how Cartwright has been stuck in the cartoon world ever since). As an aside, I've always felt that the means through which Bart and Lisa get transported into their television bear a truly uncanny resemblance to how Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon get spirited away to the titular town in Gary Ross's Pleasantville (tussling over a remote control with reality-warping powers), only the timing doesn't line up - Pleasantville was released to US theatres on October 23rd 1998, exactly two days before this episode's debut. Sometimes these so-called allusions might be nothing more than total coincidences.

Truthfully, and in spite of the over-familiarity of the premise, "Tiny Toon" has a set-up that feels wholly organic to the Simpsons universe, to the extent that it doesn't need to be a parody in order to justify its existence. It seems straightforward enough that the writers wanted to do a segment where Bart and Lisa had the opportunity to interact with Itchy and Scratchy, something that couldn't happen within the series proper but was perfect for a Halloween show. It allows for further commentary on the subject that Itchy and Scratchy were primarily designed to critique, that being the question of media violence and how harmful it is to children. More than anything, "Tiny Toon" feels like an extension on an idea articulated in the Season 6 episode "Itchy & Scratchy Land", which was the closest the family had previously come to being on the receiving end of the cartoon duo's brutality (by way of malfunctioning animatronics in their likeness), and ended with the conclusion that violence was funny so long as it wasn't happening to you. Specifically, Bart notes that the horror the family endured at the titular amusement park would have been funny to someone who was watching them, an observation blatantly designed to call out the viewer's role in all of this. As a concept, Itchy and Scratchy have this inherently double-edged quality, prompting us to question what the real evil of the equation might be. Even if we are amused by the sadistic inventiveness of the shorts, odds are that we'll be instantly perturbed by the uproarious reactions of the characters in-universe, which turns into a grotesque mockery of our own. (It's one of the reasons why an Itchy and Scratchy spin-off would, in all likelihood, not work, as you would only get half the joke...and if anyone's going to bring up Happy Tree Friends as a counterargument, I feel that series was honestly more indebted to the running gag from South Park about Kenny's numerous demises than it was to Itchy and Scratchy; it's a cartoon version of Final Destination, more or less.) Clearly, Itchy's repeated dismembering of Scratchy is meeting a need within the Springfieldians, and the magnitude and abundance of that need might be more disturbing than anything that happens in the shorts themselves.

What's immediately appealing about "Tiny Toon" is that, following more than a decade of abuse for the Simpson children's jollies (the cartoon cat and mouse having been a part of their lives since the Tracy Ullman days), Scratchy finally gets to call out Bart and Lisa in person and put to them the all-important question: "Why are you laughing?" The icing on the cake is that Itchy would be just as horrified by the notion of anybody laughing at the pain that he's deliberately inflicting. Whatever force compels him to get horrifically homicidal with his feline co-star, it is a private arrangement that can only truly be understood within the bounds of their show's internal culture; he doesn't view his sociopathy as a spectacle that exists for the amusement of others, and the very suggestion enrages him. Bart and Lisa might have had the luxury of laughing at this cartoon carnage where there existed a clear dividing line between the two worlds, but now they've found themselves on the wrong side of the fourth wall, and have to answer for their desensitisation to televised violence. Worse still, their plight becomes entertainment for anyone outside of the television screen; Homer wanders in and, seeing that Bart and Lisa have been magicked into the cartoon realm, cheerily wonders how they'll get out of this one, echoing the sentiments of the viewer (although this is a Halloween episode, so we can't automatically take it as a given that they will get out of it).

The prospect of Scratchy getting his overdue revenge on Bart and Lisa is such an inspired one that it almost has you regretting that the show didn't think of it a little earlier in its run, back when it had a point to prove about the joys of media violence amid Congressional efforts to curb it. The THoH installments IV to VI are where the series peaked in being gratuitously bloody and disturbing, something it largely shifted away from toward the end of the decade (wherever the segments persisted in being tremendously unsettling tended to be on an emotional level more than a gory one - see the endings to both "The Thing and I" and "The Genesis Tub"). "Tiny Toon" could have benefited from more of the demented energy seen in "Time and Punishment" and "Nightmare Cafeteria", for if there ever was a segment you'd have expected to be truly balls to the wall surreal, it's the one set inside a cursed cartoon (a place where, as Anthony tauntingly reminded Ethel in Twilight Zone: The Movie, anything can happen). The utilisation of cartoon cliches throughout "Tiny Toon" is fun and reasonably inventive (in one scene, Bart and Lisa's eyes pop out, and in another Bart is able to get them out of certain doom by creating his own eject button), but could have been more madcap still. By Season 10 the show's writing in general had also lost a noticeable chunk of its freshness, and scripts were becoming increasingly hampered by what could be described specifically as Simpsons cliches - "Tiny Toon" has a particularly glaring instance where Bart asks Lisa, "Don't you ever get tired of being wrong?", a gag transplanted wholesale from "Attack of The 50-Foot Eyesores" but with a more mundane payoff. The segment does, however, boast one really great, authentically disturbing moment, when Bart has an axe lobbed at his head and initially laughs it off, only for a trickle of blood to appear on his forehead and for him to register that the cartoon weaponry is capable of dealing him actual damage. And there is ultimately a bulletproof reason why it was for the best that they waited as long as they did to tell this particular story - too much earlier and it could not have included Poochie, who makes a glorious cameo appearance here. Rumors of the alien pup's demise were greatly exaggerated, it seems. He's still skating around Itchy and Scratchy's neighbourbood, still trying desperately to hold onto relevancy, and still getting little in the way of respect. (I'd have loved to have seen something of Disgruntled Goat too, but you can't have everything.) 

On the one level, "Tiny Toon" is a pure parental nightmare, in which Marge's long-standing concerns about exposing children to media violence are proven valid. The segment opens with her denying Bart and Lisa permission to watch a Halloween-themed Itchy & Scratchy short ("If I let you watch one of these gruesome Halloween cartoons, I'd be a pretty lousy mother!") and having the foresight to confiscate the batteries in the remote control before going out trick or treating with Maggie. She didn't figure on Bart rooting through Homer's toolbox and pulling out a plutonium rod (not unlike the one he unleashes into the streets of Springfield every week) to use as a substitute battery, however, so the kids still get their gruesome Halloween blood-fest, and a whole lot more than they bargained for. Superficially, "Tiny Toon" seems happy to echo the conclusions reached in earlier iterations of this premise, namely that an abundance of television is probably not a good thing. By making television the work of the literal Devil, Stay Tuned had a particularly unsubtle subtext on that front, although it wasn't radically different to the one we'd already garnered through the similar misadventures of Garfield and Mighty Mouse (or indeed the situation in Poltergeist) - if you stare into the chattering cyclops for long enough, it will steal your soul. In "Tiny Toon", the television becomes a box that literally devours children, and exposure to the violence within becomes something that will very actively and grievously harm them. As usual with Itchy and Scratchy, though, there exists that element of double-edgedness - from the cat and mouse's perspective, Bart and Lisa are the villains who mocked their experiences by regarding them as entertainment, an assessment that arguably aligns the Simpson children more closely with the barbarous Anthony than with the doomed Ethel. In Twilight Zone: The Movie, the cartoon world was a reflection of Anthony's uninhibited id - he felt an affinity for entities of the animated ilk because he too could make anything happen according to his childish and sadistic whims - and we sense that Itchy & Scratchy offers something similar (albeit much less extreme) for Bart and Lisa, in being an outlet where it is socially acceptable to let their inner sadists hang out, and where laughter at the cat's pain is hotly encouraged.

There have been occasions throughout the series where exposure to the gruesome antics of Itchy and Scratchy does indeed appear to be having a detrimental effect on the children - most obviously in "Itchy & Scratchy & Marge", where Maggie took to emulating whatever behaviour she saw on the box. At the end of "Itchy & Scratchy Land", Lisa is inspired to prove a point to Marge by throwing a shoe at Bart, behaviour that would be egregiously out of character for her in any other context. But in general, The Simpsons has seldom given much credence to the idea that media violence makes sociopaths of us, with the characters' uproarious reactions to the violence being as far as it goes. Their laughter is ugly and disturbing, sure, but is it actually harmful or unhealthy in of itself? Is the television a corruptive force, conditioning viewers to find images of suffering funny, or is it merely a reflection of what's already dark and horrible about their human psyches? Is the media landscape shaped by our need for diversion, and for acceptable targets on which to vent our immense feelings of helplessness and frustration in our day to day lives? It might not speak well of the series' denizens that, rather than sympathising with the downtrodden Scratchy, they'd align with the bullying Itchy in making him their all-purpose punching bag (not that they feel any real loyalty toward Itchy, as we saw in "Homer Goes To College"), but The Simpsons has never shied away from exploring some of the meaner tendencies of the human condition.

The implication that Bart and Lisa are being confronted by manifestations of their own repellent ids (and are thus less comparable to Ethel than to Anthony getting a taste of his own medicine) is reinforced when Homer gets bored of their fight to remain in one piece and switches over to Live with Regis and Kathie Lee (ehh, that was a morning show, right? So what time of day is this all supposed to be happening at? I would have assumed early evening if Marge and Maggie were going trick or treating. But whatever, this is a magic TV remote, and I'm sure that it's capable of bending reality in all sorts of ways). The sequence with Philbin and Gifford is by far the strangest thing the segment has going, not least because Philbin and Gifford appear as their regular live action selves, enduring some crude interactions with the animated figures that are momentarily transplanted into their show. We'd seen live action footage integrated with animation in a prior Halloween segment, "Homer³", but I believe that Philbin and Gifford had the honor of being the first celebrities to guest star in The Simpsons in live action form, a novel choice that diminishes the distinction between the conflicting cartoon worlds. Suddenly, Bart and Lisa cease to signify a "real" world imperilled by a lawless fictional one, for in this sequence there is no real difference between them. Both animated duos become chaotic forces that feel mutually out of place as they invade the space of the morning show, scalding Philbin with cilantro-free soup and causing Gifford to indignantly abandon the set. Despite their limited screentime, Philbin and Gifford end up stealing the segment, as between them they snag the two best lines - Philbin's "My eyes! My beautiful eyes!" and Gifford's "I'm going home! Dom DeLuise can interview himself!" Superb delivery in both cases. 

 

The question at the heart of "Tiny Toon" concerns the dividing line between entertainment and reality, and at what point it crosses over from being harmless diversion into cruel exploitation. It's a question that proves something of a through line for the entire episode - "Hell Toupee" sees Snake receiving the electric chair as part of a dystopian (although sadly not implausible) reality show, while "Starship Poopers" climaxes with the family seeking the televised services of Jerry Springer to settle an interspecies custody dispute. We've leeway to revel in whatever is offered up for our viewing pleasure, so long as it remains distant and safely contained on the other side of the screen; when Bart and Lisa attempt to experience the same action directly from the frontline, they find they are no longer protected by that barrier and that things go down very differently. "Tiny Toon" hints that the healthiness of our media consumption hinges on our ability to differentiate between what is real and and what is merely fictitious, what has consequences and what's all just frivolous fun, with the cartoon domain becoming a hellish intersection where the two are blurred and where the evil in our ids is no longer in check. The segment adopts a more reassuring stance in its final moments, reversing the situation so that the cartoon world spills over into the Simpsons' but proves entirely harmless outside of its own ink and paint turf. Bart is returned to his reality in a partially-skeletal form, having been hosed with a school of piranha (a sequence that, while creative, comes with a curious lack of a nauseating aftertaste), but with no ill effects other than to freak out Marge, and it's easily remedied with Lisa's resourceful use of the rewind button. Itchy and Scratchy attempt to follow them through the screen, but find that when they cross over into the "real" world, they become semi-bound by its rules, rendering them no more menacing than an actual cat and mouse and resigning them to new existences as family pets. The balance is thus restored, and media violence can be safely accommodated within the realm of domesticity once again. Itchy, who has seemingly lost his ability to speak and can only squeak like a regular rodent, is captured by Homer and dropped into a gerbil tank. Meanwhile, Scratchy's thirst for vengeance is pacified when he falls in love with Snowball II, a cute moment that's somewhat soured by Marge's assertion that he has to be neutered, lest he go on to sire a litter of freakish real cat-cartoon cat hybrids (cue a classy iris out on Scratchy's crotch). The takeaway is that media violence, insofar as it is all just escapist fantasy, is way too ridiculous a beast to translate into much of a threat in the real world. It can't get too far in before its balls come off.

TACtics: Gravel Truck (I Can Feel My Lunch Bouncing About)

"Gravel Truck" is something of an oddity - it boasts one of the most gruesome-looking accidents in all the TAC canon, and yet the ad as a whole is not, by their standards, fantastically memorable. In fact, in my head it's always lived in the shadow of "Mates", a similar (although somewhat less graphic) ad from New South Wales' Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA). The execution of "Mates" is frankly a lot naffer, but that works in its favour. As a cautionary piece, it's got no shortage of character. "Gravel Truck" has the smash factor, but doesn't have the...let's call it the smarts factor. The lingering discomfort that a particularly striking safety ad leaves on your psyche when it's done. Can we dig in and figure out why? 

Before we get started, there is some discrepancy concerning the title and debut year of this entry. Multiple YouTube uploads and at least two different PSA wikis have it down as simply "Gravel", with both wikis stating that it's from 1993. The Monash University Accident Research Centre's 1999 study, however, lists the title as "Gravel Truck" and the year as 1996, and that's the source I'm going with. 1996 seems about right to me, since it strikes me as characteristic of TAC's output from specifically the mid-1990s, when they were at their absolute peak with their televisual trauma farming. Nothing was withheld in making those shocks as bold and salacious as possible. We had the combusting vehicle in "Fireball", the all-out crunching of the combi in "Nightshift", the kid going under the wheels onscreen in "Mum In A Hurry" (most other ads would have been tasteful enough to cut away and leave that to your imagination, but taking prisoners was hardly TAC's thing), and the almost Final Destination-esque twist of that giant tanker lunging out of nowhere in "Bush Telegraph". All of which, needless to say, made for hard-hitting imagery. Still, I wonder if in "Gravel Truck" we are starting to see the limitations of this technique. The problem with relying too much on shock value is that viewers will potentially grow numb to it after a while, enticing you to chase after bigger and ever-more outrageous spectacles, to the point that they risk becoming so over the top that they lose their ring of credibility (there is a certain infamous Northern Irish speeding PIF that I think absolutely falls into this trap - you surely know which one I'm talking about). I'm not saying that "Gravel Truck" is anywhere near that level of extremeness, but it is in rather an odd in-between space, like TAC were experimenting with shocking viewers with a more nauseating Red Asphalt-style approach that was centred on gaping at bodily injury, but then good taste (mostly) prevailed and they decided to be as moderate as possible about it. It goes simultaneously too far and not far enough, and as a result it cancels out what identity it might have had.

It is another scenario in which multiple factors have a hand in the accident, with the particularly deadly ingredient this time around being the speeding. There are shades of "Tracy", in the visible P symbol on the vehicle (indicating that the driver is new and inexperienced, despite his protests to the contrary), and "Fireball", with its emphasis on the hazardous nature of the country roads, even to people who think they can handle them. At least the young occupants of this specific doomed vehicle are a less rowdy bunch than the kids in "Darren" and have their seatbelts buckled, although it doesn't do much to spare them from the carnage in question. We learn that they're on their way to pick up Sophie, who will apparently be "dark as" if they keep her waiting. Jess, the front seat passenger, is the sensible party in this equation, repeatedly berating the driver Gary for going too fast, while back seat passenger Nick encourages him to hammer it. Gary suggests that it's the bumpiness of the terrain that's getting to Jess, and insists that they're in safe hands because he's driven this route numerous times. Having haphazardly overtaken one truck without incident, they encounter another truck coming in the opposite direction, prompting both vehicles to swerve to the side to pass each other on the narrow road. Unfortunately, since Gary is driving too quickly and impulsively, he doesn't see the obscured danger until it's too late - there is a school minibus travelling close behind the truck and, thrown slightly off course by the gravelly surface at the side of the road, he nearly blunders right into it. He manages to swerve, just clipping the minibus, but loses control of the car and sends it hurtling into the bush, where it makes a truly brutal side-on collision with a tree. The dust settles, and we catch sight of not only the lifeless bodies slumped inside the wreckage, but Gary's mutilated remains lying beside it (we recognise that distinctive chequered flannel he was wearing). The impact really seems to have ripped him up; the camera doesn't exactly hone in on it, but it lingers long enough for you to notice that he might be missing his head (I'm not totally clear, but he's certainly missing something). We've seen glimpses of bloodied corpses before in TAC ads, like the girlfriend in "Fireball", but this is on a whole new level of gory detail. Or at least it would be if it weren't so curiously soft-pedalled (if you're going to be that graphic, then you might as well go whole hog with it). The image of decapitated Gary falls a little flat as the ad's final zinger, but at least the impact of the car against the tree is astoundingly savage - to the extent that we're not doubting the seriousness of the accident and the gorier touches don't really add much. It comes off as a half-hearted attempt to tack on a gratuitous shock for viewers growing wise to the formula.

Something that is notably absent from "Gravel Truck" is any kind of emotional follow-up with the grieving parties, which isn't necessarily what denies it the smarts factor. I have gone on record as saying that this particular aspect of the TAC formula is the one that can be hit or miss for me, since my preference tends to be for more understated displays of emotion. Sure, there are times when a more overblown reaction is entirely appropriate - I think "Beach Road" and "Mum In A Hurry" are examples of ads that manage to justify it, in lending an inescapable realism to their appallingly tragic scenarios. On the other hand, some of the most unsettling TAC endings have been the ones that handle the reactions of surviving characters in a low-key fashion, such as the trucker's drooping shoulders at the end of "Nightshift" and the final words of "Bush Telegraph". They close their ads on a more muted note, but it stays with you. "Gravel Truck" looks to be going for a similarly understated approach in having the camera pan briefly to the minibus, where the audience of murmuring children within function as a Greek chorus on the unspeakable horror, only it's still such a melodramatic detail that I think comes off as a touch comedic (albeit not to the charmingly awkward extent as the comparable ending in "Mates", where a busload of schoolkids gawks at the wreck with a seemingly gleeful fascination like the proper little monsters they are).

The smarts factor requires more than lurid spectacle (whether it be physical, emotional or both). We need a reason to feel a connection with the characters, and like there are real lives being devastated here. I do wonder if the real reason why "Gravel Truck" makes less of a lasting impression is because it's overall less narrative-driven than some of TAC's other ads - the characters touch briefly on their plans for that evening and on the need to pick up Sophie (whoever she is), but we're not given a huge sense of the wider world and of their place within it. Compare it to, say, "Fireball", where the opening dialogue established the characters' connections to the local community (setting up for the epilogue's twist), but also the broader life plans that were about to be tragically terminated. All of this was in service of the message about these kids being at at home in the country, yet still succumbing to its perilous roads, but it gave you a strong enough taster of the kind of lives they had been leading. One of TAC's greatest strengths was in how they were able to blend the build-up to an accident with the details of the everyday, whereas in "Gravel Truck" much of the dialogue feels a little too openly expository and repetitive. There's a lot of repeated emphasis on Jess's objections to Gary's speeding, and on Gary's insistence that he knows the road. Perhaps ironically for a speeding ad, the build-up feels slow, and not in a deceptively calm way, but in a way that's taken up by a large amount of empty space. Like a lot of TAC ads, "Gravel Truck" exists in two different presentations, the full 90 second version and the shorter 60s second edit, and for the most part, I don't think the former benefits from being so long. Lost from the shorter cut are the comment about Sophie being "dark as" and a moment where Gary casually lists off the layout of the route ahead: "You go up over this rise, there's a sharp turn to the right, another dip then it's a quick left." He is, perhaps inadvertently, listing off the various points where mishaps could easily occur if adequate care is not taken, and shrugging them off as they're no big deal. It's a classic case of familiarity breeding contempt, establishing Gary's overconfidence and indicating that he isn't making any allowances for the possibility of something unexpected entering the mix. It is a useful narrative detail, but it causes the subsequent sequence where Gary hastily overtakes the first truck to feel redundant, since it doesn't tell us anything about Gary (or Jess) that we don't already know. I'm not really seeing why we needed to have both of them. I have considered the possibility that the latter might potentially have been intended as a fake out moment, where we expect the accident to happen and the characters get away unscathed (only to crash further up when they push their luck one time too many), but I'm not sure that it plays that way - it feels as though it's there purely to reinforce the point about Gary being a habitually reckless driver. 

Where "Gravel Truck" does excel is in one of its most subtle yet ominous touches - the cloud of dust rising off the road as they make that turn in the opening, establishing the rougher nature of the road and foreshadowing the part the treacherous terrain will play in the accident. I'd argue that this is the only serious means by which the shorter edit loses out; the dust cloud kicked up in the 90s second version lasts longer and is considerably more impressive. The dust is, without question, the star of the piece. Not only does it pepper the journey with a hint of impending instability, the way it rises and settles at the end makes for a poetic final visual, even more quietly affecting than the mangled corpses it's swirling above. Dust they are, and to dust they have returned.

TACtics: Bones (Bend Your Knee, Katie)

 

The good news is that, despite its ominously macabre title, "Bones" ends up being one of the happier TAC installments. That says little, and indeed it shouldn't, but still, the victim actually survives in this scenario. That has to count for something, right? 

Debuting in 1992, "Bones" adheres closely to the formula set out previously in "Darren", with us once again finding ourselves inside a car with a bunch of kids with a frightfully low sense of self-preservation. Our protagonist, backseat passenger Katie, unbuckles her seatbelt and leans forward to whisper something in the ear of the driver Chris, causing him to giggle. The front seat passenger, who goes unnamed, attempts to get in on the private joke, but is rebuffed. Chris, like Darren before him, makes a perfunctory effort to be the mature one in the equation, by telling Katie to sit back and put her seatbelt on again, but in the process takes his eyes off the road - which is hugely unfortunate, as it's right at that moment that a pedestrian steps out into their path. Chris's reflexes are thankfully still on point enough that he's able to swerve and avoid the pedestrian, but this causes him to rear-end a van parked at the side of the street. They would have been looking at a mercifully minor collision, but for the fact that Katie hadn't had time to re-buckle - and since there's nothing to restrain her, she goes head first through the windshield and smacks into the van on the other side. This being TAC at their most brutally immersive, we get to experience that short but horrifying trip right along with her, via a POV shot that has us sailing over the dashboard and winding up with a load of broken glass in our face. 

It seems fair to say that the pedestrian likely didn't possess a significant sense of self-preservation either, as from the looks of it he'd already stepped out in front of a hulking great lorry, although it's hard to tell exactly what was happening at his end, and that's by design. Our perception of what lies up ahead is as limited as it is for the occupants of Chris's car. What "Bones" gets across particularly deftly is the importance of expecting the unexpected, and being prepared for the fact that what's on the immediate horizon could change in the blink of an eye. The ad opens with a subconscious hint of what could potentially go wrong - the first thing we see, even before our main characters have pulled into view, is that formidable lorry trundling along beside them. Even if no threat is visible, its looming presence has us instantly alert to how vulnerable and out of their depth this snickering lot are (in contrast to "Darren', where the road appeared open and free, and the perfect playground for these puckish young day trippers, until it wasn't). Our instinct proves entirely astute, for the lorry does indeed play a critical role in their downfall, by obscuring what's incoming. It represents that overhanging element of uncertainty, the doings on the road that are intrinsically beyond their control and perception, making it especially lethal when the pedestrian - the element of unforeseeable chaos - leaps into the mix and throws everything into disarray. There were a few different factors at play here. The pedestrian doesn't appear to have made the most sensible choices, and that much was obviously out of Katie's hands. Distracted driving also played a part in the accident (if Chris had seen the pedestrian sooner, he might have been able to brake then and there, as the lorry did), and to a degree that was Katie's fault, since she was the one interfering with Chris's concentration, though the onus was ultimately on Chris to not take his eyes off the road. The fundamental point, however, is that if Katie had been wearing her seatbelt, she would have been safely protected in the event of the unexpected. By figuring she could let her guard down for just a brief moment, she left herself exposed to the fickleness of chance. 

On the upside, Katie has survived her little misadventure, although the price she now has to pay is a heavy one for such an easily preventable mistake. The epilogue of "Bones" closely recalls the "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives" entry "Recovery", in which we witnessed a man undergoing physiotherapy after losing his ability to walk in an accident. The emphasis in "Bones" is likewise on the harrowing fragility of the human form (hence the title) and what a long and arduous road it can be to get back to normally when physical trauma has stripped you of your everyday functioning. The processes both of standing up and sitting back down in her wheelchair have her in a wad of acutely discernible discomfort, and there is an additional shock, when we get sight of Katie's face (obscured at the start of the epilogue, as she's being wheeled into the rehabilitation centre), and see how heavily scarred it is. The physiotherapist offers her words of support, assuring her that tomorrow will be better and that moving about will get easier every day, but her optimism is undercut by Katie's tearful response: "I'm just so sick of this." She echoes the protagonist of "Recovery", who similarly asserted that he couldn't keep going, no matter how much encouragement was thrown his way, although the implications of "Bones' are potentially even grimmer, suggesting that Katie has been in rehabilitation for long enough already, that she's heard it all before, and all that tomorrow really has to offer is the prospect of having to come back and repeat the agonising ritual all over again. The short ends hauntingly, with a sobbing Katie holding her arm across her wounded face in a diagonal position that evokes the protective embrace of a seatbelt.

"Bones" received a new lease of life in 2019, when it returned to the airwaves, this time in an edited version that was cut down from a minute to 30 seconds, and accompanied by a revised tagline: "This ad made people buckle up 30 years ago. Shame we have to play it again." The maths was a little off, but the point was sill effectively made.

TACtics: Haunted (You Were Aware Of That, Were You Chris?)

 

When the Transport Accident Commission got started with its television advertising in 1989, its approach was one of unrelenting realism. The pseudo-documentary format of earlier entries like "Girlfriend" and "Beach Road" swiftly evolved into the more salacious shocks of "Darren" and "Fireball", which sought to recreate the sensation of being inside a doomed vehicle moments before a crash, causing the viewer to feel less flies on the wall than active participants in scenarios destined to end in tragedy. The emphasis was squarely on the raw immediacy of those life-changing accidents, and on pinpointing the moment at which we'd slipped past the point of no return and were left to soak in the harrowing realisation that, for the persons involved, things were never going to be the same again. But even the most audacious of formulas can only retain their teeth for so long. Numerous variations and countless psychologically scarred Victorians later, and TAC felt that a fresh angle was in order to complement the emerging millennium. "Haunted" from 2005 shows a dramatic shift from the shock-driven tactics of those earlier campaigns, with an approach that leaned more toward the spirit of the UK's "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Live" series, where emphasis tended to rest less on the accident itself than on the longer term fall-out - in this case, the very longer term. "Haunted" is impressively ambitious in its narrative scope, telling a story that spans multiple decades and demonstrates the bitter extent to which a single failure in adhering to your responsibilities as a driver can leave you mangled as a person, if not always as conspicuously as you might imagine. It seeks to address the very question that was explicitly raised by Ken Stott's character at the end of "Fireman's Story", but was there treated as defying any kind of comprehensible answer - how does a drink driver get on with life whilst having to accommodate the knowledge that their foolish actions brought fatal consequences? Even if you are able to maintain the guise of normalcy going forward, is it not the kind of thing that would be perpetually tearing you up inside?

"Haunted" makes for a fascinating comparison with "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives", since it does the one thing that campaign seemed determined to avoid, and does it very effectively - it has you sympathising fundamentally with the perpetrator. This was a perspective largely downplayed in D&DWL, where PIFs centring on the consequences for the drink driver were either about the immediate horrors of being booked for an offence and becoming the most hated person in the vicinity ("Arrest") or filtered through snapshots of the broken innocence for which they were directly accountable ("Kathy" and "Eyes"). The drink driver was usually the incorporeal boogeyman, and rarely humanised ("Mates", one of the few specimens in which we actually got to meet them in the flesh, had them depicted as a snivelling wimp, not unlike the bloody idiot seen staggering about the hospital corridors in "Girlfriend"). They are, naturally, the antagonists of the equations, with the traditional route being to regard them as objects of scorn and contempt (something still manifest in the uncompromising campaign tagline), but the stance taken by "Haunted' is a valid one nevertheless - we do need to be able to put ourselves in their shoes, and appreciate how their lives could so easily become our own if we were to make the same mistakes. In "Haunted" we find ourselves immersed in the world of the perpetrator to the point of entrapment. The claustrophobic cruelties of being wedged inside a steel box hurtling along on a terminal collision course are supplanted with the equally horrifying experience of being stranded inside the head of a man whose outlook has been irrecoverably altered by an ill-advised decision he made at an earlier junction in life, when he hadn't grasped how easy it was to go over the alcohol limit. We get something resembling DETR's "What's It Like?" campaign, with its nightmarish impressions of the offender's inner turmoil, but explored from a more narrative-driven angle.

"Haunted" follows a man named Chris from his early 30s into the later stages of middle age, all throughout which he is persistently troubled by visions of a mysterious boy in an ominous black shirt. Chris gets older, while the boy stays the same age. A subtext of child neglect seems to intermittently suggest itself (Chris's initial reluctance to acknowledge the boy, the lack of a shoe on the boy's left foot), raising the possibility that the boy might be the childhood Chris, or an abandoned son from a prior relationship. It is evident that the boy's appearances represent intrusions on Chris's life within the present, reminders of a past that he would sooner leave behind, but remains beleaguered by. A flashback eventually reveals the identity of the boy - he was the victim of a road accident that Chris caused in his early 20s, when he got behind the wheel after drinking a couple of beers, something that he hadn't considered a huge deal until was faced with the worst possible outcome and blood on his hands. The boy's metaphorical ghost has attached himself to Chris ever since, ready to make himself known whenever Chris gets a little too comfortable in the here and now.

The effectiveness of the short rests a lot upon the lack of any really overt drama outside of the flashback sequence, and even that is handled with a healthy degree of moderation - the featured scenario is similar to that of "Beach Road", with the paramedics trying unsuccessfully to revive the boy while Chris is questioned, only minus the presence of any distraught relatives, a move that allows the emphasis to fall purely on Chris's horror. On the surface, the Chris of the present appears to be leading a very normal and positive life. Whatever the consequences of his drinking driving were for him from a strictly legal standpoint, they are seemingly behind him. He has a job and a couple of kids with whom he shares a patently loving bond. He hasn't completely gone to pieces in the aftermath, but holding it together underneath remains an unending struggle for him. In one sequence we see Chris riding the bus, looking as if he's about to crack a casual smile about something, only to see the kid gazing back at him from an adjacent street and for his momentary mirth to be shut right down. I did wonder if there was any significance to his using public transport in the present day instead of driving, although I suspect that the main purpose of this scene is to show Chris as an active member of a community while illustrating the extent of his isolation (there is an obvious metaphor in none of the other passengers being seated particularly close to him). Awareness of the boy's omnipresence is a burden that he alone has to carry. We see intermittent hints of how this burden might be placing a strain on his relationships, most notably in a shot that shows the boy lying on a bed between Chris and his wife, who are facing in opposite directions - although a wedding ring is still visible on Chris's finger in the final sequence, so I don't think the implication is that it is literally driving them apart. Rather, their physical separation becomes a shorthand for how intrinsically alone Chris is in his suffering, so that even when he's in the company of others, he cannot keep that kid at bay. Those close to him might well be aware of that spectre from his past, but that grief and culpability is not something in which they can personally share.

For Chris, life must go on, but a part of himself has certainly died at the scene of the accident, while the anonymous kid has acquired a kind of ghoulish immortality, as the unabating shadow to Chris's emotional state. Chris is locked into the horror of that terrible moment when the boy was declared dead; in a powerful stylistic touch, the present day is depicted in predominantly gloomy, storm cloud-ridden tones, in contrast to the overwhelming brightness of the flashback, which is firmly established as the incident that overshadows and defines all else. In a way, the boy does represent the younger Chris, in becoming a symbol for their mutually extinguished vitality. The kid is unable to progress any further, while the ageing Chris is unable to fully embrace the life right in front of him, so that even an occasion as ostensibly joyous as his daughter's wedding is undercut by his relentless pangs of conscience. In the full version (see below) we hear a reference to the speech that Chris is due to deliver as the father of the bride, and sense that he perhaps views himself as a fraud, in being called upon to toast the future that he feels he has already cancelled. The film has a cyclic narrative, closing as it began with Chris, now in his early 60s, standing alone out of doors with only his memories, the pain of which has clearly not dulled over time. The final shots within the present are set against a murky evening sky, indicating little prospect of alleviation from his demons - the horizon offers only further darkness.

I'd rate "Haunted" as one of TAC's most affecting pieces. The balance of realism with more abstract storytelling is infinitely more successful than in "Glasses", and it builds up a convincingly intimate portrait of Chris as a genial guy paying for a single (yet severe) mistake from which there is unfortunately no going back. Of note is that there are two different cuts of the film, the full version clocking in at a couple of minutes in length, and a truncated version that's only half as long. The version uploaded to TAC's official YouTube channel is the shorter of the two, which omits a sequence where Chris is seen in his kitchen preparing lunch for his children, as well as various other smaller touches such as the paramedics laying the deceased boy's shirt back over his chest.

Interestingly, toward the tail-end of the decade the UK had "Live With It", an anti-speeding PIF from THINK! with a near-identical premise, although the execution was markedly dissimilar. I wouldn't say that it in any way eclipsed the sombre potency of "Haunted", but for what it's worth it stands out as one of the better THINK! entries, proof that a compelling premise can come in multiple flavours (although in this case always in some variation of grim).

Duffless (aka Kiss My Red Asphalt)

 

It's fair to say that Season 4 was a relatively bright and breezy time in The Simpsons' life. Compared to Season 3, which had an entire trilogy based around scenarios where certain Springfieldians were either at risk or at perceived risk of being done away with by their compatriots, whatever anxieties had been plaguing showrunners Al Jeans and Mike Reiss seemed to be mostly out of their system by their tenure's second half. Season 4 is where they allowed their cartoonier tendencies to rule the roost, and (for better or for worse), the show's world got a whole lot more dynamic and larger than life. Serious and grounded stories were a little less high on the agenda, but that's not to say that the odd dose of genuine discomfort couldn't still work its way into the mix. So which episodes stand out as the darker entries of Season 4 (besides the Halloween show, which is always a given)? Obviously there's "Kamp Krusty" - any installment in which the children of Springfield find themselves far from home and at a summer camp that's actually a sweatshop dedicated to the manufacturing of cheap wallets for sale in Hong Kong was bound to be a harrowing experience. That was a Season 3 holdover, however, so it only half-counts. The implications of "Marge vs The Monorail" are frankly horrendous (how many people in North Haverbrook died?), but played at such an overblown level that they don't necessarily register. The situation in "Marge In Chains" has some distressing overtones, but the script isn't focussed enough to fully realise them. Where Season 4 gets most convincingly uncomfortable, I'd say, is with a pair of episodes where the consequences of Homer's lifestyle choices are at the forefront, namely "Homer's Triple Bypass" and "Duffless". "Bypass", in which Homer comes down with heart disease and requires a major operation, has him once again reckoning with the possibility that his time on Earth might be coming to an imminent halt (as he did in "One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish" of Season 2), while serving as a commentary on the American healthcare system, with his quest for surgery that won't break bank. "Duffless' (9F13) is less overtly dramatic - here, Homer is never in a situation where his life is immediately endangered (well, except where an eight-legged freak is involved) - but is in some respects the more emotionally haunting of the two. It works as a quieter, more nuanced character study, in a fairly similar vein to "Selma's Choice" (by astonishing coincidence, both episodes feature trips to dubious Duff-themed attractions), where the lead character is put under pressure and must come to a decision about what it is that will ultimately bring them fulfilment in life.

Debuting on February 18th 1993, this one sees Homer being arrested and convicted of a drink driving offence, resulting in the loss of his licence and prompting Marge to challenge him to give up beer cold turkey for a month. The resulting conflict is a fairly barebones one - once Homer has agreed to Marge's request, there's not a lot for him to do other than to stick it out as his entire world closes in on him and the allurement of the bottle mounts - but there is an honesty in its observations that keeps it at all times compelling. We see Homer being pushed to a really low point, with a good deal of emphasis on the intense loneliness that accompanies his addiction (even while attending an Alch-Anon meeting, he finds no solidarity) and the claustrophobia (a nightmarish sequence where the Duff brand is omnipresent). It's not the easiest going of episodes, but it finds the light at the end of the tunnel, offering up one of the most sweetly redemptive closing sequences of all the series. So sweetly redemptive, in fact, that there's the temptation to accuse it of being disingenuous, since we know that the status quo won't actually be yielding no matter how feel-good the sentiments, but that's a discussion we'll get to in due course.

One of the smartest things about David M. Stern's script is in how it implicitly challenges the underlying assumptions reinforced by what was then one of the series' longest-standings dynamics - namely, how hard it was to feel overly stressed about Homer's drinking habits when Barney Gumble is right there and so perpetually intoxicated that he's barely able to keep himself upright. If you want disingenuous, then maybe take a look at what that's all about. Since as far back as Season 1 (most notably, in "Homer's Night Out"), Barney has been on hand to make Homer look better by providing a sobering example of how Homer's life might have been if he'd really ballsed things up. Compared to Barney, Homer leads a relatively normal existence, with a steady job and a loving family, and for as frequently as he's seen occupying his bar stool at Moe's, he isn't shown to habitually drink to the same excess as Barney. But there is a certain fallacy in all of this, given that that Barney is merely a caricature of an alcoholic, played to such a grotesque extreme that he ceases to be an accurate representation of what addiction necessarily looks like. The implication (particularly prominent in "Homer's Night Out") is that drinking has been allowed to dominate his life because he doesn't have the responsibilities that Homer does to give him the incentive to do better, but then we know that it would be awfully naive to suppose that people with responsibilities like jobs and parenthood can't also be addicts, or that they wouldn't do a better job of disguising it than Barney. Alcohol dependency often exists within the cracks of normalcy, not outside of it. In that regard the opening act of "Duffless" does something fairly deceptive. Homer sneaks out of work early to accompany Barney on a tour of the Duff brewery, where they enjoy a selection of free samples (Barney with far more reckless abandon than Homer). As they're leaving the tour, Homer ostensibly does the responsible thing by confiscating Barney's keys and preventing him from driving them home, only to get pulled over by the cops when he then gets behind the wheel. Homer appears perfectly lucid, but when he's made to take a breathalyser test it's revealed that he is in fact over the limit, resulting in his arrest. Some viewers consider this turn of events to be most unfair, given that Homer had made the effort to be sensible with Barney and was blatantly nowhere near as intoxicated as his companion, but I would argue that that is precisely the point. Homer might have been right to have interfered with Barney, but he ultimately wasn't in a fit state to drive either. (Only a little bit over? You bloody idiot.) It is a common misconception that you need to be drunk to qualify as a drink driver, and while I'm not expecting or desiring for The Simpsons to function as a PSA on that point, it's also a valid observation in terms of what it says about Homer's characterisation. He might be doing okay compared to Barney, but does that actually mean that he's doing okay? I agree that there is an egregious injustice in Barney spitefully giving Homer away and then being encouraged to drive home by Wiggum, but that's Springfield's police department for you. Besides, by the nature of the episode's ending, it wouldn't be accurate to say that Barney gets off scot-free. For what he has to go through, Homer is given fleeting insight into how self-improvement is at least possible, whereas Barney stays deep in the pit of stagnation. 

With Homer having returned home from his legal ordeal, stripped of his licence and faced with the gruelling prospect of attending traffic school and two months' worth of Alch-Anon meetings, Marge quizzes him on his drinking practices using a checklist from a pamphlet, and it becomes sadly evident just how heavily Homer uses alcohol as a crutch for getting through the day. There's a delectable humor in Homer's responses ("Do you ever drink alone?" "Does the Lord count as a person?" "No." "Then yes."), but a genuine undercurrent of pathos too - not least in a moment where Marge asks him if he drinks to escape reality, and we see him take a swig of beer before checking himself out in the bathroom mirror and indulging in the fantasy that he has an ultra-buff body. It's hilarious, but it also illustrates what kind of existential despair is plaguing Homer underneath. For him, drinking offers relief from the weariness of existence, and from the eternal dissatisfaction of being who he is. Agreeing to give it up for a month means having to live with himself, and with the rest of Springfield, in a way that he's really not keen on doing.

With the major theme being how Homer navigates the grim vapidity of his day to day life without falling back on alcohol to ease the monotony, it shouldn't surprise us that "Duffless" emerges as one of the more grounded episodes in a season with a tendency to go off the rails. Conversely, it also offers up a formidable contender for its single biggest "WHAT THE FUCK?!" moment, when Homer attempts to exit the plant through a disused corridor and comes face to face with a spider the size of a Clydesdale horse. People don't talk enough about how reality-breaking that spider is - it is one heck of a fanciful thing to be implementing outside of a Halloween show, even with the unspoken assumption that the spider got really big through exposure to nuclear radiation (a fish with three eyes is one thing, but a spider that's like something out of a 1950s B-movie might be pushing it somewhat). The spider can supposedly be subdued with the recitation of Biblical verses, but if you're like Homer and don't know any of those, chucking a rock at its head will work just as effectively. That spider's not so tough. (It's also purple, which makes it marginally less horrifying than it would be if it were a more conventional spider colour.)

As much as it is, I'll admit that I'm cool with the spider. I rather enjoy the random nonsense of it all. Intellectually, its presence should be treated as a far bigger deal, but it's also the kind of detail you can only get away with if you push past it as quickly and as cheekily as the narrative does. The spider is, in the scheme of things, quite harmless. For me, the thing that prevents "Duffless" from attaining true greatness is the B-story, which sees Bart destroying Lisa's project for an upcoming science fair and Lisa seeking vengeance through a back-up experiment involving a hamster, a supply of cupcakes and an electrical current. It's nothing really terrible, but it's far from my favourite Simpsons subplot, and I promise you it's not because of the scene where the hamster receives a mild electrical shock. I know I've a tendency to grumble whenever the show does jokes about abused hamsters, but on this occasion that's honestly the least of my problems. I'm of the opinion that the two older Simpsons siblings work best when they're a team, and any episode that pits them against each other is automatically on shaky ground. It's not that it can't be pulled off, but I don't think that Stern ever lands the right balance. Here, their rivalry is nowhere near as mean-spirited and one-sided as in "My Sister, My Sitter" of Season 8, but it still leaves rather a sour note, which is ironic for a subplot that was presumably implemented to give balancing levity to an A-story that touches on heavy topics. Bart destroys a futuristic tomato that Lisa had been growing using steroids - not out of malice toward Lisa, but because Skinner presented him with an opportunity for mayhem that he couldn't pass up - leaving her naturally distraught (she'd also had aspirations of the tomato being used to combat world hunger, so...nice going there, Bart). With the science fair looming, she devises an alternative project that involves running a series of tests to determine if her brother is a slower learner than a hamster, with the intention of humiliating him in front of the school.

Quick question to Mr Stern - are we supposed to sympathise with Bart in this situation, or Lisa? Because neither party is coming off particularly well. There is, in theory, nothing wrong with attempting to explore Lisa's pettier, more childish side - in fact, it's what fuels some of the subplot's best laughs ("That'll learn 'im to bust my tomater!" is an absolute banger of a one-liner, and I love how Lisa's degraded grammar all but affirms her personal debasement). There's amusement to be had from her ruthless antics, but it's hard to get past the fact that she is being extremely vindictive. At the same time, I've no real sympathy for Bart. It's not as though he even attempts to atone or take responsibility for wrecking her tomato, nor are we given any evidence of Homer, Marge or even Skinner reading him the riot act for it. So I don't like the fact that he wins at the end (with victory handed to him by Skinner, no less, although it does allow him to give a shout-out to the very scientist who inspired his name). There is something about this whole outcome that feels terribly unsatisfying. Honestly, I'd have much preferred it if Bart and Lisa had both lost and the ribbon had gone to that overzealous father who'd commandeered his son's volcano project and worked too long and hard on it to let the poor confused kid share any of the glory. Also, this might be a tad nitpicky, but another reason I don't much care for the subplot lies in how it fudges the timeline of the A-story. Lisa explicitly states that the science fair is happening in three days, meaning that the actual length of time spanned by the bulk of the onscreen action is very short, and Homer's prolonged period of abstinence is left to be largely rushed through within the last few minutes. This might have felt a tad less hurried if there'd been a little more ambiguity as to how much time had already elapsed when we get to the science fair, and an aching Homer is seen drooling over Ralph's alcohol-fuelled car.

Where the subplot best succeeds is in its darker, more unsettling moments, like Lisa imagining a hamster with Bart's head getting stuck in a maze and crying out "Help me! Help me!" in the manner of the human-fly hybrid from the 1958 version of The Fly (consistently one of the most disturbing pop culture items you can possibly reference - just look at The Emperor's New Groove). Then there's the allusion to A Clockwork Orange (1971), where a highly-conditioned Bart attempts to grab hold of a pair of cupcakes (just like Alex reaching for the topless woman's breasts) before collapsing in a quivering heap. I'm likewise always unnerved by the high-pitched whining Bart makes during his first encounter with the electrified cupcake (which the subtitles on Disney+ helpfully indicate that is a Three Stooges reference - ah well, I've already admitted I'm not massively well-versed in their lore). Incidentally, on the DVD commentary Reiss talks about how difficult it was implementing the moment where the hamster gets shocked (this, coupled with Lisa's white saviour fantasy, admittedly feels like an out of character thing for her to do now, even if the hamster isn't seriously harmed). They were aware that the audience's sympathy would lie with the hamster and looked to make it as quick and easy as possible...which begs the question as to why they were so callously indifferent to that poor expired hammy we saw in "Dog of Death"? Given the frequency with which hamsters seem to end up dead or imperilled on The Simpsons, I had gotten the impression that the show's crew regard them as acceptable punching bags, although Reiss insists that this isn't the case. (Jean does, however, go on to immediately confirm my suspicions about them being a bunch of cat haters, when shares his theory that onscreen kitty carnage is all well and passable in television, but once you've killed a dog, you've automatically lost your audience. I don't know if I buy that as a universal principle. Wouldn't it depend on whether your audience was comprised predominantly of dog lovers or cat lovers?)

 

As brutal as those kids are, the most disturbing portion of the episode, bar none, would be the video Homer is forced to watch in traffic school detailing the potentially grave consequences of drink driving, which is presented by an incongruously buoyant Troy McClure, star of such esteemed driver's ed titles as Alice's Adventures Through The Windshield Glass and The Decapitation of Larry Leadfoot. I've never gotten official confirmation on this, but I strongly suspect that this film was modelled on the Red Asphalt series, an infamous collection of films produced by the California Highway Patrol between 1960 and 2006 that urged responsible driving using tactics straight out of the Mondo playbook (shocking images of crumpled vehicles and mangled bodies abound). Specifically, I believe that Troy's film was based on the 1989 entry, Red Asphalt III, which opens with a similar mise-en-scene and has the presenter saying "What a _____ waste!" multiple times. If you're tempted to look up Red Asphalt III, know that it isn't for the faint of heart (among other stomach-churning vignettes, we're shown footage of a driver whose head has taken a massive battering, and I think you see parts of his brain spilling out into the wreckage). Appalling stuff, and yet I'll admit to having a certain sympathy for Homer's reaction as he sits there giggling at the lurid onslaught. He's portrayed as an anomaly among an audience of fellow offenders who are all at serious risk of losing their lunches, but he nails a fundamental aspect of the experience of having to soak in a production of this nature (either because you were forced to do so in traffic school or because you're a masochistic sicko like myself and your morbid curiosity got the best of you). So often, it is insanely difficult not to laugh, particularly with a specimen like Red Asphalt III that insists on being as overbearing as possible with its grisliness. I would argue that it's not even schadenfreude. Sometimes the brain just goes, "You know what would be the most inappropriate reaction right now? Laughter!", and before you know it you've lost control. Truth is, laughter can be a natural response to stimuli so terrible and overwhelming that it defies being processed in any other way. Homer's exact assertion is, "It's funny because I don't know 'em!", suggesting that it's is a privilege of the distance between ourselves and the subject, and that's valid enough - often, the stimuli is so extreme that it doesn't fully register as someone else's lived horror. The issue doesn't just lie with Homer either; the irreverently upbeat music and cheesy puns that accompany the presentation are concessions that, no matter how high-minded the professed intentions, there is something dreadfully exploitative about exhibiting real-life death and suffering in this manner. All I know is that allowing myself the occasional ignoble snicker is what made it possible for me to get through Red Asphalt III. It is a confounding film. Unlike Troy, the presenter in the initial sequence does a decent and respectful job of reminding us of what's really at stake in these situations: "Remember that each [body bag] carried away contains a destroyed human life. Not a dummy or a cleverly made-up actor, but a real body. A lifeless person. Next time it may be a friend, a brother, your child, or you." But then we go into the studio with our main presenter, and he isn't quite so delicate in his approach. He gestures, with a more theatrical anger, to a pile of videotapes that he tells us were created by highway patrol officers depicting real accidents - "This one is simply labelled: 17-year-old DUI, six dead!" It's all a little much to take in. There are times when awkward tittering is the only coping mechanism we're left with.

It's also the only mirth that Homer derives from what's otherwise a soul-crushing experience. As he gets deeper into his dry month, he finds himself a pariah in every social situation, at once the sole sane individual who can see the rampant futility of the world with his metaphorical beer googles off and a man going slowly to pieces as he's pushed to the very limits of his endurance. Being a rare sole sober spectator at a baseball game opens his eyes to what a tedious, chaotic mess the entire affair is, while having to sit through the supperware demonstration that Patty and Selma are hosting in the Simpsons' home (I'm guessing that he's usually down at Moe's when this sort of thing is going on?) has his thoughts turning quietly murderous. Empathy and community are bitterly denied him, even by those who claim to be peddlers in it. He gets exiled from the local Alch-Anon group when he confesses that his cravings for anything remotely close to a beer had him crawling beneath the bleachers of a football stadium ingesting dirt, and the judgemental pricks therein won't even pretend to understand that desolation (not even Hans Moleman, who here reveals himself to be a 31-year-old who ruined his life through excessive drinking). The greatest menace, though, comes from the Duff advertising that's slapped in every direction he looks, and serves as a constant reminder that it's never less than him against the world. Earlier in the season, "Lisa The Beauty Queen" had tackled the topic of cigarette promotions and their odious efforts to create a generation of young smokers, and it was explicitly noted in that episode's commentary that such an outspoken attack was only possible because cigarette companies couldn't advertise on television and the networks didn't have to worry about stepping on their toes. With alcohol it's a much thornier issue, although "Duffless" still gets surprisingly audacious in critiquing how a product so potentially harmful can be pushed on consumers who can't handle it. The promos Homer has to contend with in the present might not be as bare-faced as the 1950s television ad glimpsed at the Duff brewery, where viewers were urged by a cartoon medic to fill up their undernourished Q-zones with "pure beer goodness", but their sheer omnipresence proves just as diabolical. It illustrates how difficult it is for someone fighting addiction when the pressure to drink is so deeply ingrained within every aspect of the cultural scenery. It gets to the point where even a passing train bearing the Duff logo on every carriage appears to taunt him by repeatedly commanding him to "Chug".

Even with the odds so heavily stacked against him, Homer makes it through the month with his promise to Marge intact, at which point he's eager to head straight to Moe's and get his Q-zone overflowing once more. Marge is disappointed that this would be his first inclination, since the entire purpose of this exercise was to prove to him that he had the willpower to survive without alcohol, not give him an excuse to go on the mother of all binges. Still, when Homer arrives at his sorely-missed watering hole, he finds that he can't go back to the way things were. He looks around himself, takes note of the palpable dolour that hangs over the bar's patrons, and becomes conscious of how much his own perspective has shifted within those 30 days of non-boozing. He tells Moe to put his beer back in the fridge and leaves, having decided that he'd sooner spend the evening sober, and in the company of Marge. It's here that the episode runs into its greatest challenge - we all like happy endings, and after the anguish Homer has endured in this particular go-around, it feels as though he's earned one, but how does it balance itself against our awareness that this newfound harmony is probably not going to last? Homer's weakness for Duff is too prominent a character trait to be going anywhere, and will prove his expressed Achilles' heel just two episodes along, in "So It's Come To This: A Simpsons Clip Show", so does the ending become any less sincere with that in mind? There is a flip side to this problem, which is that alcohol addiction isn't an issue likely to be resolved by just one month's worth of abstinence. Realistically it would be something that Homer should expect to struggle with for a while. So perhaps the ending risked looking disingenuous either way. Instead, it exits on a glorious middle ground, with Homer gaining a moment of clarity on what it is that really makes his life worth living, and the sincerity of that realisation certainly not being in doubt (he was willing to give up the beer in the first place for her). Meanwhile, Moe speaks on behalf of the slighted status quo, asserting that Homer will be back in his usual spot before long, and working in an odd bit of pseudo-fourth wall breaking when he gestures toward the viewer and indicates that they, too, will return. It's then revealed that he is in fact pointing his finger at Barney, who's very much wedded to his personal Hell (to the extent that if Moe's bar didn't close, he wouldn't set foot outside its walls), but for a brief second, the viewer is implicated in this culture of sorry dependency. We know that nothing's going to change substantially for Homer, and we wouldn't miss it for the world. It's as if our need to return to our television sets night after night and while away the hours chuckling at the kinds of sad saps who populate sitcoms is indicative of some existential hole within our own lives. We're all creatures of our own dubious habits, after all.

In the meantime, Homer and Marge are allowed ride off into the sunset singing "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head", in a homage to Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid (1969). There's a cute visual gag in that Homer still doesn't have his licence back and is having to ride about on Lisa's little pink bicycle to get anywhere. With Marge perched on the handle bars it should be additionally awkward, but they're managing. It also doubles as a touching metaphor, with the bike, once a symbol of Homer's failure and humiliation, becoming his final means of mobility, a chance to glide free from the burdens of his past, now that his recent upheaval has directed him to an alternate path. It's a path that seems to only ever open on a temporary basis in the world of The Simpsons, but it's a reassurance to know that it's there. 

 

BBC2 edit alert!:  The death of Diana, Princess of Wales on 31st August 1997 had an inescapable impact on the zeitgeist in the UK. I remember tuning into Sky 1 to watch The Simpsons that very day and having to sit through numerous links showing footage of Diana and her family set to mournful music, creating such a deluge of misery that they had me feeling dirty for merely desiring a bit of fun and levity with a cartoon family in between. You'd have thought that "Duffless", which contains an explicit shout-out to Diana Spencer, would have been an obvious target for Sky 1's censoring scissors when it next appeared. Yet I remember being surprised when they aired "Duffless" in what was still the close aftermath and the entire Princess Di sequence was left completely intact. It's not that there's anything overtly problematic or offensive about the sequence in itself (the joke is just Barney being a drunken wally, in mistaking something as ridiculous as a pile of rags for the Princess of Wales, and Homer being comically hurt in the process), but given the atmosphere at the time I wouldn't necessarily have faulted Sky if they'd opted to play it safe and not have Diana joked about in any capacity (particularly given the episode's broader subject matter, and its subsequent talk of fatal road accidents). But no, they either overlooked it or decided it was okay. And then when BBC2 got round to airing the episode (some time later, once things had settled down a notch), they did implement all the anticipated edits, so that Barney simply drives forward without explanation, causing Homer to miss the mattress on the roof of the car and hit the ground, and the sequence immediately ends. While I've no doubt that the Beeb made these cuts in the interests of not ruffling anybody's feathers, it's quite possible that they thought it would be confusing to have Diana referenced as though she were still among the living - as I recall, they also cut the moment in "Treehouse of Horror IV" where Richard Nixon, having been summoned to the Jury of the Damned, protests that he's not dead yet, on the grounds that Nixon was dead by the time the BBC aired it and the joke would have made no sense. To which I say, they should have given a bit of credit to the viewer's ability to decipher the original context - not least because the actual punchline of that exchange was Devil Flanders' "Listen, I did a favour for you!", which will never not be hilarious. Also, the man never drank a Duff in his life.

This was not, however, the most bewildering edit to be made to The Simpsons on account of Princess Diana. Believe me, I've a much juicier anecdote to share when I get round to covering "Rosebud". Spoiler: that one was Sky 1's doing.