If you've ever listened to the DVD commentary for the Simpsons Season 8 episode "My Sister, My Sitter" (4F13) you'll know that it's a highly unusual one for a simple reason - showrunner Josh Weinstein brought his kids, Molly and Simon, into the recording booth. Which, needless to say, significantly alters the nature of the commentary (in the best of ways, as I intend to demonstrate). I can only assume that Weinstein had promised them the opportunity to appear in a DVD commentary as a special treat (that, or he couldn't find a babysitter himself on that particular day) and chose this episode because it's one of the more kid-orientated of the season. It deals extensively with the relationship dynamics between Lisa and Bart, and doesn't concern itself with any problems that are obviously adult in nature (unless you count Homer's momentary crisis of being trapped in a water fountain). The only other episode within the same season that fits the same bill would be the season finale, "The Secret War of Lisa Simpson", which is honestly a more cordial episode in terms of what its reveals about Bart and Lisa as siblings, but far more conventional as a story. In a way, it's strange that he opted for this one, because despite being so heavily focused on the younger family members, it doesn't exactly make for feel-good viewing. It takes those kids to some ghastly places, and when it escalates, it escalates quickly. (Please also note that Molly and Simon were clearly both very young at the time of recording, and from just their voices I have trouble deciphering which is the boy and which is the girl, so excuse my inability to attribute which snippets of dialogue to which child. I'm going to do the non-committal thing and refer to them individually as "one kid".)
"My Sister, My Sitter" is an oddity of an episode. In that regard, it fits in perfectly with the rest of Season 8, which is a wonderfully-written season on the whole, but a bizarre one to revisit, given how obsessed the show had then become with what it evidently saw as its own impending demise. It was also by far the darkest season to date - there is this strangely unsettling tone that pervades much of Season 8, a festering malaise that manifests in surprisingly bitter guises, of which purpose-made one-off characters largely seem to bear the brunt, and which comes to a particularly infamous head around the end of the season, when Frank Grimes puts in an appearance (Grimes is the most notorious example of a character who was introduced in a Season 8 episode only to be killed off in an arbitrary and entirely emotionless fashion by the end, but he was by no means the first, as Shary Bobbins, Frank Ormand and Poochie can all attest*). "My Sister, My Sitter" is odd and unsettling, but in ways that set it apart from the rest of Season 8 - what makes it such a strange episode, in part, is that it's a deceptive one. Ostensibly, it's one of the smaller, more down-to-earth stories of the season, built around a fairly standard sitcom scenario - Lisa struggling to manage her siblings while Homer and Marge are out spending an evening at an adult function. It starts off in a gentle, sanguine place, with Lisa developing a sincere interest in becoming a babysitter after reading a series of books about the Babysitter Twins (a pastiche of The Baby-Sitters Club, a popular series of children's novels by Ann M Martin), but first having to prove herself to the townspeople and break past their (understandable) misgivings about hiring an eight-year-old to watch their children. Episodes focusing on how Springfield functions as a community tend, inevitably, to end up showcasing just how deeply unpleasant they are en bloc, and "My Sister, My Sitter" is ultimately no exception, but for now it's nice to have a scenario in which you can't really begrudge the community for their indifference, even as you feel Lisa's frustrations - the townspeople aren't being mean, they're just not hot on the idea of tasking someone so young with such a big responsibility (although the irony of the following Marge line does not escape me: "Parents need to be sure their sitter can handle anything that might happen; that's why they hire teenagers").
Lisa finally gets a foot in the door when Ned lands in a tight enough jam that he allows her to watch Rod and Todd (the episode is still comfortably in sanguine, down-to-earth mode at this point, although there is apparently a traumatic story going on in the backdrop involving Maude and her mother being taken hostage in Lebanon, which Ned somehow manages to present here as a mild inconvenience - "the embassy says it's just a routine hostage-taking, but I have to drive to Capital City, fill out some form to get them out..."). Lisa does such a sterling job that Ned recommends her to the entire town, and it isn't long before she's inundated with requests from trusting parents. Then comes the fateful evening when Marge (who previously had reservations about Lisa's suitability for the job) tasks Lisa with watching Bart and Maggie while she and Homer attend a trendy new shopping renovation at the Springfield waterfront, a prospect to which Bart doesn't take kindly. He sets out to make the evening as difficult as possible for Lisa, initially in entirely mundane, everyday kinds of ways, although things get crazier when Bart places a barrage of increasingly improbable prank calls, bringing all manner of unwanted attention to the family's doorstep. Finally, when Bart takes a tumble down the stairs and endures a couple of gruesome-looking injuries, the episode finds itself veering off into dark territory indeed. Lisa struggles to get medical attention for an unconscious Bart, and ends up wandering down quite the rabbit's hole of chaos and desperation. By the end of the episode, we're into full-blown nightmare mode (a point that Lisa herself even makes explicit). There is an epilogue in which Bart and Lisa patch things up and the negativity of the night before seems to have completely dissipated, but I'm not convinced that it quite takes the sting off, in light of the desolate journey we've just undertaken. This may be an episode about the kids - kid concerns and kid relationships - but in its way, it's every bit as twisted and fucked up as any other episode of Season 8.
"My Sister, My Sitter" is also nothing if not a divisive episode - some viewers really dislike how Bart behaves therein, since he grows intent on sabotaging Lisa's reputation as a babysitter for entirely petty reasons, while others defend Bart's behaviour on the grounds that he's ten years old, and most ten-year-olds would probably react in a similarly belligerent manner if they had to take orders from someone two years younger than them. In the latter camp is Mike Amato of Me Blog Write Good, who has this to say on the matter: "I read some people thought his behavior to be cruel and malicious, but I think they’re off base. They also probably don’t have siblings." I have a counterargument to make to that - perhaps they do have siblings and recognise all too well just how searingly realistic this episode is in its portrayal of sibling relations, and aren't wild about the episode for precisely those reasons. It's here that my own personal biases inevitably come into play, since I'm a younger sibling myself and am no stranger to the casual cruelty of older brothers, so it's a given that my sympathies are wholly with Lisa. The most reckless and unpleasant thing Bart does in this episode - bang his wounded head against the door in an effort to make the evidence of the injury that happened on Lisa's watch all the more damning - definitely has the ring of authenticity, from my perspective. To those who view this kind of sibling interplay as little more that innocent roughhousing that inevitably passes with age, I would add that in the season running order, "My Sister, My Sitter" follows on directly after "Brother From Another Series", another episode about sibling relations gone sour, in which we have the cautionary example of Bob and Cecil Terwilliger to remind us that sibling rivalries aren't all innocent japery, and sometimes this contention does go on to form of the basis of troubled relationships well into adulthood.
You the man, Herb.
Bart's behaviour may be realistic in terms of how siblings revel in one-upping one another, but that doesn't necessarily make it entirely in-character for him either. Certainly, Bart has an established history of making things difficult for any babysitter unfortunate enough to be saddled with him (Laura Powers excepted), but he's not ordinarily this malevolent toward his own sister. They have their moments, but when the chips are down Bart does tend to be very helpful and supportive of Lisa, and vice versa. Episodes where they find themselves at extreme loggerheads (such as "Lisa on Ice") don't treat the rift half as casually as it's depicted here. And Bart must appreciate that there is far more at stake for Lisa in this particular scenario than her simply disappointing Marge and Homer.
All in all, "My Sister, My Sitter" doesn't exactly register as my favourite episode. And yet it is a fascinating one to watch for how bizarrely, gut-wrenchingly nasty it becomes in the third act. Once Bart has obligingly knocked himself out and obliterated all conscious agency on his part for the near-remainder of the episode, it ceases to be a bitter story of sibling enmity, and instead becomes a harrowing tale about Lisa being all on her own, tasked with more responsibility than she can reasonably handle, and facing an uphill and entirely futile climb in her efforts to put things right. It's a punishing episode for Lisa, and definitely tips over into the mean-spirited vein that was becoming increasingly commonplace throughout Season 8, but it's effective in that you really get a sense of just how little and vulnerable Lisa is throughout. She might be extremely mature for her age, but when all is said and done she is still only a child, and this episode examines what happens when she ends up in a real pressure cooker of a situation, one which she doesn't have the experience or worldly-wisdom to deal with. (Note: "Lost Our Lisa" of Season 9 is basically a diurnal version of this very scenario, only minus the added detail about Lisa having to wheel around her brother's unconscious body and her caged baby sister wherever she goes.) When emergency services refuse her plea for help, assuming that this is yet another in a long line of medical hoaxes originating at Evergreen Terrace that evening, Lisa balks and makes a questionable decision - instead of consulting with trusted family physician Dr Hibbert (whom she fears will put the blame on her capabilities as a babysitter, leading to the annihilation of her business), she decides to pack Bart off to a dubious office run by Dr Nick Riviera, having been reassured by his ad's promises of complete confidentiality, and of offering the same level of service as one would expect from Dr Hibbert. I suspect that Lisa wouldn't be quite so naive if she weren't so desperate, but it's a telling moment, revealing not just how flagrantly out of her depth she is, but also what a tectonic-shifting crisis this constitutes for her personally. She finds herself caught between two impulses which wouldn't ordinarily be so at odds - her desire to do things honestly and by the book, and her aversion to being censured by adult authority for doing things wrong. I said that there was more at stake for Lisa here than merely letting down Marge and Homer, but that probably would be the worst of it for her. The most damning thing to come out of Lisa's fantasy sequence is not Wiggum's hypothetical conclusion that she beat her brother silly with a pack of frozen lima beans, but Marge's echoing proclamation of being "so disappointed."
Meanwhile, as Lisa descends ever-deeper into the maelstrom, Marge and Homer are having a comparatively uneventful time of it down at the waterfront. Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood of I Can't Believe It's An Unofficial Simpsons Guide criticise this aspect of "My Sister, My Sitter", calling it "a clever episode, if a little disjointed - the two stories don't gel as well as normal." I can't say that I agree - I think it's more that the subplot involving the adult Simpsons doesn't have that much narrative momentum behind it in itself, and seems to be largely there to give us the occasional breather from Lisa's crisis. Homer and Marge don't have any real arcs or conflicts of their own going on, and for the most part are simply wandering past stores with humorous-sounding names. Perhaps the script could have expanded on their excursion and made, say, the moment where Homer gets trapped in the fountain into more of an actual story thread, but that would likely have detracted from the dementedness of Lisa's arc. The laid-back aura of the waterfront scenes works because it provides such a jarring contrast with what Lisa's up against; not just in the sense in that she's going to pieces and her parents are not, but also because Lisa's journey is leading her directly in the kind of seedy local underbelly that fashionable developments like the waterfront seem purpose-designed to conceal. Springfield may think it's moved to fancy new digs, but the squalid dive is lurking right around the corner, and not far from here we have an eight-year-old wandering the streets and rubbing shoulders with local ne'er-do-wells in a fruitless effort to get her brother restored to consciousness. The narrative threads end up intersecting in the penultimate scene, when Lisa and her wheelbarrow of delights blunder into full view of the crowd at the waterfront, and her worst nightmares about being rebuked by adult authority materialise in a histrionic eruption of volcanic proportions. Its a thoroughly unsparing climax, which insists on grabbing Lisa by the scruff and dragging her down to the darkest depths she can possibly envision, enduring the faux hysteria of the townspeople as they willfully misconstrue her situation, re-imagining it as the outcome of an improbable murder plot that winds up being leagues more ridiculous than the worst-case-scenario she'd dreamed up earlier. But then Springfield as we know is a pretty ridiculous place.
Which is where the DVD commentary comes in, and those Weinstein kids. The commentary for "My Sister, My Sister" isn't as chocked with information about the episode's development as some of its brethren, largely because Molly and Simon have a tendency to interrupt such discussions to ask questions about the plot. They're clearly very young children, so it figures that they'd be less interested in the production details than in trying to make sense of what's going on in the episode in front of them. But if you're listening because you hoped to learn as much as possible about the making of the episode, then you might be disappointed. Molly and Simon ask a number of questions that, while they probably seem like entirely pertinent questions to kids of their age, are going to be entirely self-explanatory to older viewers (for example, they want to know why Rod and Todd are afraid of ladybugs, and why Homer is so overdressed for his waterfront visit). I'll confess that I found this a little trying at first, but as the episode goes on and evolves into a creature far redder in tooth and claw, I found myself developing an appreciation for Molly and Simon's perspective on events, and was ultimately glad to have them along for the ride. During the sequence where Lisa is having to contend with a flurry of people showing up at the house, summoned by Bart under phony circumstances, one of the kids asks why this is happening. Ostensibly, this sounds like another kids' question with an obvious answer, but I realised that Molly and Simon were actually tapping into the deeper sense of despair and injustice underpinning this episode - they just wanted to know why Lisa, a good-hearted babysitter who's doing her best to keep atop of an unruly situation, is having to put up with so much misfortune that she blatantly doesn't deserve. The accelerating cruelty of the story was clearly starting to get these kids, and as the commentary continues they acquire a new and very useful niche for themselves, not so much asking obvious questions as calling out the senseless malevolence that characterises the latter half, with the kind of guileless sincerity that only kids their age can exude. This reaches its peak at the point where Bart starts banging his wounded head against the door, and one of the kids, evidently disturbed by Bart's act of self-mortification, asks what he hopes to achieve by doing this. Josh Weinstein explains that he wants to make the wound bigger so that Lisa will get into even more trouble, to which the horrified child responds, "But why? He can die!!" Exactly, Molly (or Simon). Isn't it all so terribly screwed up? A slightly embarrassed Weinstein responds, "Hopefully he won't go far as to die..." (Yeardley Smith, the voice of Lisa, also highlights, albeit less despairingly, the perverseness of that scene, observing that Bart seems awfully chipper when he must be in excruciating pain). Almost as cathartic is a moment at the climax of the episode, when Dr Hibbert points at Lisa and proclaims, "My diagnosis - bad babysitting!", and one of the kids actually cries out in protest, "BUT SHE'S A VERY GOOD BABYSITTER!" Molly and Simon Weinstein are alright by me.
Elsewhere in the commentary, we also hear that they were going for a noir type feel for this episode, which definitely comes across during the sequence where the kids finally reach Dr Nick's office, only to discover that, due to the high number of outlandish maladies that have befallen Springfield's seedier night owls, they have zero chance of being seen before the dawn (if indeed the dawn ever comes). This moment plays like the seamy nocturnal cousin to that sequence from "Homer's Triple Bypass" in which Homer is rushed to hospital and we get a glimpse into the vast array of stupid and embarrassing injuries which have half of Springfield congregating in the emergency room on a typical day (so, Akira has his hand lodged in a karate board, Jacques has his fingers stuck in a bowling ball, Chief Wiggum was taking a bite from a sandwich and his jaw locked...). When the lights go out, Springfield's more unsavoury element comes out to play, but they too seem fated to blunder into predicaments that are every bit as pitiful, whether they be criminal in nature (Snake), kinky (Smithers...if you're wondering just what he's so eager to have taken care of, it was the 90s, and people were still pretty hot on that story about Richard Gere) or crushingly banal (Comic Book Guy, who's learned the hard way that loneliness and cheeseburgers don't mix). It's troubling but also very revealing that no one bats an eyelid when Lisa walks in from her own private hell - you would think that most people, even the kind of sleazy clientele that Dr Nick is wont to attract, would be more concerned if a sleep-deprived eight-year-old wandered in in the dead of night with only her unconscious sibling and a baby in a cat carrier for company, but it seems that everyone is too absorbed in their own individual problems to care. I am reminded of the closing line to Jules Dassin's 1948 film noir, The Naked City: "There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them." At this place and time, Lisa, Bart and Maggie aren't three unaccompanied children in dire need of assistance; rather, they're but another sorry story in a city that already has hundreds, and as such they're instructed to take their place within the wheelbarrow line.
For Lisa, the darkest hour comes when she is forced to confront her very worst fears - being publicly shamed for her failings - and it turns out to be so much worse that she'd ever imagined. Except that the world doesn't end then and there, and we get an epilogue in which the dawn does come, and Lisa discovers that not only is tomorrow another day, but that the experience of being fiercely condemned by adult authority is actually far less of a major deal than she'd always assumed. Because the following morning it's business as usual, with Lisa continuing to get calls from parents who desperately need her to sit their kids. Before that, though, we get a moment of reconciliation between Lisa and Bart, in which the latter apologies for his behaviour the night before. In the commentary, Smith asserts that "My Sister, My Sitter" is ultimately a positive episode in which Bart and Lisa come through for one another, but again, if you want that kind of thing I think you'd be much better off with "The Secret War of Lisa Simpson". Bart does sound sincere at the end, but in light of the sheer magnitude of what Lisa went through his apology still seems kind of perfunctory - in fact, even though it's the inferior episode overall, I think I prefer the equivalent scene in "Lost Our Lisa" where we see Bart traverse the full spectrum of emotions in attempting to apologise to Lisa through her bedroom door, never once twigging that he's talking to an empty room. Lisa assumes that her babysitting business is now dead in the water, and is surprised to discover that her services are still very much in demand. It seems that the town has already forgotten about the events of last night - or, more accurately, the thought does cross their mind and give them momentary pause about the arrangement, but not enough to override their needs in the present - life must go on, and they've got judo classes to attend and kids who need watching. I'm not sure what this ultimately says more about - Springfield's overall indifference as a community, their self-awareness as to the sheer ridiculousness of their own mass hysteria, or the fundamental need of the Simpsons universe just to move on, casting off whatever troubles might still be lingering after twenty-one minutes, so that order can be reestablished and the groundwork laid for another wacky adventure next week. I'm not sure, but I'm happy for Lisa either way. She really is a very good babysitter - most people would have cracked and beaten Bart with a packet of frozen beans long before we got to the stair-toppling incident.
Here are some additional things we glean from elsewhere in the commentary track (when Molly and Simon aren't delivering their increasingly fraught observations):
- During the church scene toward the start of the episode, we see Homer decked out in a blue sweatshirt that I don't think we've seen him wearing at any other point within the series. Episode director Jim Readon momentarily stalls the discussion in an effort to figure out why they bothered with that unusual detail, but to no avail. It's a good question, although a better one would concern just what's up with Skinner's face in the above shot.
- By far the most fascinating production anecdote to come out of this commentary concerns not "My Sister, My Sitter" itself, but a "lost" Simpsons episode that was never produced. Among the trendy developments at the Springfield waterfront is the restaurant Planet Hype, where you can enjoy a menu of foods personally approved by Rainier Wolfcastle's secretary. This is an obvious a swipe at Planet Hollywood, a restaurant chain that opened to a swathe of publicity in the early 90s (but struggled to maintain momentum as the decade wore on), whose big marketing hook was that it was backed by a number of A-list movie stars. Apparently the show's staff were informed that Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger all wanted to guest star in the series, on the condition that it threw in some free publicity for Planet Hollywood. The staff produced an episode script, which had the stars in a Three Stooges dynamic, only to discover that it was all the idea of a Planet Hollywood publicist, who had conveniently neglected to run it past Stallone, Willis and Schwarzenegger in advance, and none of them were interested. I have a sneaking suspicion that that whole anecdote is probably a lot funnier than the episode itself it would have been.
* Hmm, I just realised that two of them even have the same first name. Did someone named Frank do something to piss off one of the show staff? Also, I've seen Rex Banner show up in that list sometimes too, but NO WAY. That would make Wiggum a murderer, wouldn't it? At least the others were predominantly the result of freak accidents.
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