I've been talking a lot recently about other possible Simpsons universes, and the probability that the Simpsons universe with which we're familiar being the result of something being fundamentally out of whack within the cosmos, an issue that gained particular salience with the introduction of Mindy in "The Last Temptation of Homer". I probably should acknowledge the fact that there was an issue of Simpsons Comics set in an alternate Simpsons universe where Homer never met Marge and did indeed marry Mindy. The comic in question was called "The Great Springfield Frink-Out" (or, in longer form, "Milhouse The Man, Krusty in The Can & The Great Springfield Frink-Out"), and it appeared in issue #33, which was published in October 1997. So, in this timeline Homer married Mindy and, rather than pursuing a clean and wholesome career in nuclear engineering, has fallen in with the Springfield Mafia. Marge, meanwhile, stuck with her old high school beau Artie Ziff, and did not become President, as was divined in Angel-Klink's vision, but instead peaked a little lower down the government food chain as Mayor of Springfield (while Artie became state attorney general). By the time our story begins, both marriages have broken down, and neither Mindy or Artie appear in the comic in person.
The context to this particular slice of Springfieldian life gone awry is that Professor Frink, in an effort to bring stability to what he sees as an inherently chaotic cosmos, concocts the Electramatic Frinkodyne 3000, a device intended to perpetually synchronise the internal clocks of all of the VCRs in the Springfield municipal area (too bad for Frink that fickle consumers would be abandoning their VCRs in six months time for those horrible shiny disc thingys). Frink, however, is clearly so preoccupied with whether or not he could that he hasn't stopped to think if he should, and a quick mishap involving microwaved enchiladas wrapped in tinfoil is all it takes to completely eviscerate the space-time continuum. Patrolling the streets of Springfield, Frink is horrified to discover that everything therein has been warped beyond recognition. Or is it as fundamentally altered as he assumes?
Before I go any further, I probably should shed some light on where I stand with the comics in general. I can't speak for other Simpsons fans, but for me the Simpsons Comics have always been this peripheral part of the franchise that's just kind of there. There was a time in the late 1990s when I made an honest effort to get into them, and to collect them every month, but I'm not convinced I wasn't doing this purely out of brand loyalty than whatever standalone merits the comics might have. Often, the personal anecdotes told by Matt Groening in the "Bongo Beat" feature were more interesting than the comics themselves, and I was seldom wild about how they characterised Sideshow Bob, who plays simultaneously like a more evil and strangely neutered version of his animated self (but then he inevitably loses a great chunk of his Bob-ness without Kelsey's vocals to really bring him to life), although occasionally they could churn out genuinely interesting and creative ideas such as this one. I'll say this much, however - under no circumstances are they to be regarded as canon. Case in point, one of the comics (#23) gave Bob a nephew named Neil, whose existence is not supported by anything in the series proper. The comic in question was published in August 1996, a number of months ahead of the initial airing of "Brother From Another Series". Before then, we knew basically nothing about Bob's life before he became Krusty's sidekick (other than that he attended Yale University) and certainly nothing about his family, so at the time this would have been considered a perfectly open pool to swim around in, albeit not for long. The introduction of Cecil Terwilliger put paid to any possible intersection of Neil with the series' canon, for Cecil appears to be Bob's only sibling (a hypothesis reinforced by the fact that their relationship is based on that of Frasier and Niles Crane) and Cecil sure as heck isn't Neil's father. It's also not as if the comic did anything remotely interesting with Neil as a character; he was a plot device and nothing more, so I can't say that I weep terribly at his discounting.
Now, let's look at some of the miscellaneous workings of the alternate Simpsons universe depicted in the "The Great Spring-field Freak-Out":
- Before we get on to the Frink-Out itself, I should say that by far the strangest thing about this story has nothing to do with the complete and total rearrangement of the Simpsons universe, but rather a story detail that's established before we event get to the central calamity. Here, Frink has been given a sidekick who accompanies him on his adventure. His name is Balthazar and he is...a hyper-intelligent lab monkey who is fully articulate and has freakish mutant wings protruding from his back. I'm going to assume that this character was concocted exclusively by the comic writers, because something like that is way too outlandish for the series proper. I guess the comics really did play fast and loose with the rules of the Simpsons universe. Forget Neil Terwilliger, he was merely the tip of the iceberg.
- It's never explained how Marge's marriage to Artie broke down. Mindy...left Homer for Jacques. Hahaha! (Or, whoever has Jacques' niche in this particular universe.) As much as that tickles me, I think that if Homer had married Mindy, they would be pretty much a dead cert for pairing for life. I mean, the two of them were blatantly made for one another. Marge and Artie...yeah, them I could see divorcing several years down the line (but then I'd say the same about Marge and Homer).
- Homer's marriage to Mindy produced two children, Bart and Maggie, while Marge and Artie had one child, Lisa. This is probably the biggest stretch of logic within the story, because if Homer had married Mindy and Marge married Artie, then Bart, Lisa and Maggie would flat-out not have existed. A different combination of genetics would give you two completely different sets of children. This, honestly, undermines any sense that we're looking at an alternate universe that could have existed, had the characters made different choices at critical moments in life, or their circumstances been slightly altered, and instead makes it into a straightforward shake-up, with characters recast in other characters' roles on a far more arbitrary basis. So, Bart and Maggie are now Mindy's kids and Lisa is Artie's daughter, biologically impossible though that may be.
- Having said that, I like the fact that Lisa, in this universe, is only of average intelligence. It was suggested in the Season 7 episode "Mother Simpson" that she inherited her booksmarts from her paternal grandmother Mona, so with that connection gone, it figures that there would be some kind of knock-on effect for Lisa. Somewhat poignantly, Mr Bergstrom is now her regular class teacher, only he and Lisa don't have such a tight bond here.
- Now for the really juicy bit - Sideshow Bob never went into showbiz and instead pursued a career in education. Accordingly, he's not "Sideshow Bob" in this universe but just plain old Robert Terwilliger (or Terwilly the Lilly, as Bart calls him, albeit not to his face), and he now has Seymour Skinner's niche as principal of Springfield Elementary. I enjoy this aspect of the story a lot, because not only is it an alternate career path in which I could conceivably see Bob taking an interest, there's a pretty slick underlying gag in that he's basically swapped out one position of enmity with his 10-year-old nemesis for another - the twist being that his 10-year-old nemesis has also changed and is now none other than Milhouse Van Houten.
- Milhouse really hit the jackpot in this timeline, acquiring the choicest characteristics of both Bart and Lisa - he's a Grade A student with an insatiable appetite for challenging authority in all its forms. He's also quite clearly the "star" of this particular universe, since he's the one to whom all the really exciting stuff has happened in the past, be it foiling the Springfield Mafia in its various nefarious schemes or discovering his own comet. Bart, meanwhile, regards Milhouse with admiring eyes and dreams of the day when he too can be such a hotshot. Also, Lisa appears to be the same age as Bart and Milhouse; they're all in the same grade at any rate.
- Krusty has Sideshow Bob's niche, in that he's now the alienated TV sidekick turned master criminal, although he never elaborates on the specifics of his crimes. There's also no hint of any enmity between Krusty and Milhouse; if Krusty does harbour any kind of murderous ill-will toward this universe's Shamus in short pants, then he'd have to get in line, because the Springfield Mafia are feeling pretty sore about those aforementioned defeats, and also have a hankering for Milhouse's blood.
- If Bob's a principal and Krusty's a master criminal, then that raises an obvious question as to who's top clown in this universe. The answer is a character who, in the regular Simpsons universe, had his career ambitions of being a clown thwarted and instead settled for a job in hydraulic engineering. I speak of course of Bob's brother Cecil; here, it seems that the stars were aligned more heavily in his favour, for not only did he live the dream, he clawed his way to the peak of the clowning food chain and made Krusty his sidekick. I'd be happy for Cecil, except that he's even more of an odious corporate shill than Krusty, and much of his celebrity seems to pivot around the promotion of one of the most evil products of them all, ie: tobacco. To be fair to Cecil, he doesn't appear to be targeting his product at children (a print ad for one of his upcoming public appearances says "Hey Adults!", making me wonder who Cecil's key target audience is in this universe), but cancer sticks are cancer sticks all the same. His sidekick is presumably Chief Wiggum, who is never seen, but at one point Cecil refers to an off-panel "Sideshow Clancy".
- Bob and Cecil are estranged in this universe, as they were at one point in the regular Simpsons timeline. It's never made clear why they fell out here, but I would hazard a guess that it something to do with Bob being embarrassed by his brother's celebrity.
- Lurleen Lumpkin doesn't appear in person, but she has her own restaurant in this universe.
- The majority of adult characters have kept their basic personalities more-or-less intact - Krusty's still surly and blasé, Bob's still a supercilious drama queen, Marge is still firm but nurturing, etc. The point, evidently, is to illustrate that they would be essentially all the same no matter where they wound up in life, and no character bears this out more than Burnsie. Here, he is but a humble convenience store clerk with an ostensible penchant for charitable deeds, but deep down inside there beats unmistakably the heart of a tyrannical mogul, and he has his sights on economically conquering Springfield in his old age. He still has Smithers by his side, only here Smithers is Burns' literal lapdog...which I realise puts paid to my efforts to interpret this as a possible alternative timeline that the characters could feasibly have accessed, had things gone differently. Swapping out a child's biological parents is already enough of a stretch, but I think we have to throw our hands up at the point that a character has had their species changed.
- One of the few adult characters who hasn't quite kept their defining traits intact is Ned. He's now a shock jock.
- Moe is...actually, I won't spoil this one. It's a punchline to which I couldn't possibly do justice with my puny words. I'm sure you can get hold of a copy of "The Great Springfield Frink-Out" easily enough if you care.
- Here, Bob describes his hair as "involuntarily kinky". I'm making note of that because, yes, that's something he said.
This is indeed a disturbing universe.
We have various story threads intersecting throughout. Frink is attempting to get the universe restored to normal by reconnecting the Electramatic Frinkodyne 3000 to an area with a continuous electromagnetic field, and enlists the help of Krusty, who having been dealt a sore hand in this particular timeline, has little to lose in going along with what everyone else is quick to discard as the ravings of a madman. Meanwhile, Milhouse, Bart and Lisa skip a school assignment at the Retirement Castle to attend a public appearance by Cecil, and are pursued by Bob, Marge and Homer, who each have their own respective dogs in this fight. All of them are entirely oblivious to Burns' gestating scheme to seize control of their dismal town.
Things may be slightly off-kilter, but the final takeaway of this adventure is that there is a basic underlying logic to the Simpsons universe that cannot be offset. There is a sense throughout that Frink's efforts are possibly redundant, for the universe appears to be "correcting" itself, at least to a point. Frink comes to this very conclusion on the final page of the comic, when he concludes that:
"Science is a powerful force in this universe. But will the world allow science to completely screw it up with the messing and the reorganising and letting things happen that simply cannot occur? In a word, no. Science may do a little pushing, but my oh my, how the world pushes back."
Frink asserts that there is an "intrinsic pattern" to which the universe inevitably gravitates - he refers, of course, to that bugbear known as the status quo, and not for nothing is this particular panel accompanied by an image of Homer and Marge wrapped together inside a hammock. The nexus of the Simpsons universe, as we all know, is the Simpsons' unity as a family, so all that it needs to do to create some semblance of restoration is to bring Homer and Marge together. Marge feels this imperativeness during the scene where she and Homer cross paths for the first-time, and she makes this internal observation of Homer: "You know, he's grossly overweight, a bit unkempt, and he smells strange, but there's something about this man...I can't take my eyes off him!" It's around this point that other aspects of the familiar universe begin to re-emerge - as Homer is wandering into the same vicinity as Marge, Burns suddenly has a brainwave and realises that the key to conquering a city is by controlling its power supply. Meanwhile, Bart discovers what a capacity he has he has for pranking and, having received Milhouse's validation, vows to finally come out of his shell and be the rabble-rousing punk he's always dreamed of being. The Bart we all know is reasserting his existence, but it's not so clear if anything similar has happened with Lisa. Her resourceful thinking gets the kids out of a tight spot with Bob, but Milhouse specifically praises her for her ability to "stick it to the man", not any potentially untapped intelligence she might have. Obviously, there are limitations as to how far the corrupted universe can actually go in realigning itself with the familiar - Bart and Lisa will still not be biologically related, and Smithers will still be a dog - and yet the implication appears to be that, so long as a few fundamental elements are in place, the rest of it is more-or-less interchangeable. Once the titular family unit is just that then we have something vaguely recognisable, and that may well be enough to get by. This is before Krusty gives the universe a final boost, by wrapping his enchiladas in tinfoil and sticking them in a microwave, with the Electramatic Frinkodyne 3000 not far from hand, causing the universe to revert to its previous state.
Naturally, "The Great Springfield Frink-Out" operates on the assumption that the default setting for the Simpsons universe is the intrinsically "correct" one, which makes sense from the perspective that the preservation of the status quo is necessary for the series' continuation. But how does it stand with regard to my hypothesis on "The Last Temptation of Homer", about the default Simpsons universe being born out of error, because the universe failed to follow its intended course, hence why it pushes so relentlessly for Homer to end up with Mindy (who inadvertently exposes the sham)? Here, a prospective union between Homer and Mindy is presented as a painful little deviation from which the universe is actively pulling Homer away, as opposed to a legitimate outcome that could have been under alternate circumstances. In "The Last Temptation of Homer", the magnetism between Homer and Mindy presented a paradox, because the kismet willing them together was undeniable, but it would also have guaranteed the destruction of everything propping up their universe. I am inclined to see the set-up of "The Great Springfield Frink-Out" as representative of a Simpsons universe in which such destruction has already occurred, and which the universe is attempting to rewind from the point of obliteration, so that we work backwards from the end to where we begun. Homer's arc opens with him mourning an apocalypse that has already happened - tellingly, his boss (Comic Book Guy, here in the place of Fat Tony) accuses him of behaving as if it's the end of the world - but by the end of the comic he finds renewal in moving away from the black hole of the unknown and reaffirming what is instinctively familiar to him. There is the sense of a cosmos attempting to rebuild itself from the fragments of what it vaguely remembers, which is why everything is more-or-less correct despite being so flagrantly wrong, and why the characters, one some level, are able to unconsciously recall memories of their former lives (Marge, for example, makes the mistake of calling Homer "Homey", before immediately correcting herself).
The final panel shows a disturbing contradiction to Frink's assumptions that everything is perfectly restored to how it was, and that the universe may only follow a set pattern. Balthazar is horrified to discover that Frink actually has an additional face peering out from the back of his head - a reminder that, whatever path we find ourselves traversing in life, there's always a road not taken beckoning us in the opposite direction, stoking our curiosity and regret. We are slow walkers, and we certainly look back.
Finally, I will credit the Simpsons Comics with this much - unlike the TV series, which largely forgot about Cecil after "Brother From Another Series" (he appeared in two more episodes, one of them a non-speaking cameo, which I suppose is better than nothing), they actually gave him a fairly decent afterlife. The introduction of Cecil in Season 8 did more than just facilitate a few clever in-jokes capitalising on Grammer's other signature role - it fundamentally changed Bob, and he never felt like quite the same master criminal again, now that we finally had insight into who he was before those unfortunate events went down. Cecil added a whole new dimension to Bob's character, so it seemed wrong to me that most subsequent Bob episodes tend to ignore Cecil's existence altogether. I appreciate that in the comics, he made several more appearances, and essentially became, if not Bob's sidekick, then his consort (although obviously, they had it easier, as they didn't have to go through the complications of re-enlisting David Hyde Pierce every time). There was even one comic, "Simpson/Sideshow Sibling Smackdown", which cast Cecil as a kind of anti-hero and explored a hypothetical rivalry between himself and Lisa. I like the idea...however, I find myself stopping short of wholeheartedly liking the comic because, once again, I have issues with how Bob was characterised. But that for a whole other occasion.
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