One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish (aka And My Last Day on Earth...)

"The War of The Simpsons" wasn't the only occasion where Homer was willing to risk everything in a battle of nerves involving an unusual fish. Slightly earlier that same season, in episode 7F11, "One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish", Homer found himself potentially at death's door after dining on ill-prepared fugu at a sushi restaurant. (In fact, there are no less than three episodes in Season 2 where a strange fish plays a significant role, when we also factor in "Two Cars In Every Garage, Three Eyes On Every Fish" - something in the water in 1990/91?) Advised by Dr Hibbert that he has less than twenty-four hours to live, Homer vows to make the most of his last day of life and compiles a bucket list of things he wants to accomplish before the sun is down and his internal organs throw in the towel. (Side-note: Fugu is an actual delicacy in Japanese cuisine, although it can only be legally prepared in Japan (and many other countries) by a specially licensed chef; as a result, most cases of poisoning have tended to be from amateurs who caught and prepared their own puffer. So the good news is that your chances of ingesting the poison are extremely slim if consumed on licensed premises. The bad news is that, if you should find yourself lethally poisoned, then you would probably be dead in considerably less than twenty-four hours, and odds are that you'd also be in too much pain to get terribly far into a bucket list. Hibbert's prognosis about the heart exploding is obviously hooey - actual blowfish-induced poisoning would result in paralysis and eventual death from respiratory failure.)

"One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish" is another of those episodes that never clung especially tightly to my radar as a child, but I've come to appreciate a whole lot more with every passing year I've added to my life. It is, without a doubt, one of the most quietly touching, meditative and profound the series has ever yielded. I've heard the argument from other fans that the episode conceptually fails because we know that Homer's going to survive this, so there's no dramatic tension. Personally, I would question if that was really the purpose of this episode. Did the production team genuinely believe that they could trick any of the viewers who tuned in for the episode's original broadcast back on January 24th 1991 into thinking that they just might kill off one of their principal characters eleven episodes into the season? I think it's a given that we always know that, come what may, our central family are going to pull through. One of the tenets of sitcomdom is that order must ultimately be restored within thirty minutes. Hence, Sideshow Bob cannot kill Bart (except in a Halloween episode, where the rules are slightly different), Homer and Marge cannot run off with whichever Home-Wrecker comes their way, and Maggie can never become particularly well-developed on the vernacular front. "Blowfish" is ostensibly about Homer having to face up to the inevitable a lot earlier than he'd anticipated after eating a life-threatening menu item, but at its core there's a deeper and far more universal concern, which has to do with Homer becoming seriously aware, for the first time in his life, of his own mortality. This is an episode that pits Homer against the clock; time is the antagonist throughout, and it's not an enemy that can actually be defeated. Rather, all Homer can do is to learn how best to live with it. And that's what makes the scenario so relatable. Most of us haven't ingested toxic pufferfish, but all of us must, at some point, contend with our own mortality, the realisation that our time on Earth is limited, and that all of those plans and dreams we intended to fulfill are getting hopelessly lost in the shuffle. The headlining blowfish is itself a minor detail, something to get the main story into motion and to enable a George Takei guest appearance and a few gags at the expense of the sushi restaurants that were a lot more of a novelty at the dawn of the 1990s - this is about Homer realising that, one way or another, time is running out. "Blowfish" succeeds, not because Homer is doing to die, but because we all are. (And yes, I realise that it's a mighty unfortunate time to be making that particular statement, but I digress.)

The opening scene establishes the theme of the episode through very subtle means. From the beginning, there is emphasis on time, only at this stage Homer finds himself at odds with it because it does not move along quickly enough - he's frustrated that Marge's microwaved meatloaf isn't cooking any faster. At the same scene, Lisa evokes the inevitability of death when she laments, "From cradle to grave, etched in stone, in God's library somewhere..." And there is a lot of emphasis on clocks throughout the episode - the bedside alarm clock, the clock at the police station, the "Time For Another Duff" clock at Moe's. Homer's crisis forces him to contemplate time from all angles - the loose threads from his past that are still dangling, the present that he has never truly made the most of, and the world that will continue after he's gone. At the end of the episode, Homer dedicates the supposed last hours of his life to stepping back and contemplating his existence within a much greater, more cosmic scale - that is, the fullness of time itself - when he listens to The Bible on cassette tape, as read by Larry King.

Despite the magnitude of the problem facing Homer, "Blowfish" is one of the more subdued and reflective episodes of the series; the middle act in particular pivots around exploring his relationship with each individual family member in micro-vignettes, as he tries to give each of them the most meaningful-possible send-off (while not letting on to the reality of the situation). And this is certainly the kind of episode that could have only made during the show's earliest seasons - it's hard to imagine today's Homer, or even Homer circa Seasons 5-8, compiling such a modest bucket list that largely has to do spending time with his family, ensuring that he ends things on a positive note and leaves behind a sturdy legacy (nowadays he would probably prefer to harass various celebrities or something). Homer has very few axes to grind at the end of it all. The only item on his list that betrays any kind of anger or resentment at the hand life has dealt him is his note to find time during the day to really stick it to Mr Burns; the only item that shows any sign of deep personal sorrow and regret is his note to make peace with Abe. He goes about using much of the day constructively, priming Bart to be his successor ("After me, you're the man around the house"), taking time to appreciate Lisa's sax-playing talents, which up until now he had always dismissed as an "infernal racket" and making a videotape in an effort to communicate with Maggie's future grown-up self from beyond the grave.

Still, the day does not exactly work out as planned. Inevitably, time slips away at a much faster rate than Homer can keep atop of, and several items on the list have to be jettisoned as Homer is forced to narrow down his real priorities. He gets a massive setback at the beginning of the day, when Marge (who at this point is the only character to share the burden of Homer's knowledge) offers her own item for Homer's list and suggests that they get up early and watch the sunrise together. Come 6:00am, however, when the alarm clock sounds its blaring intrusion and attempts to snap Homer back into the reality of his impending demise, he unconsciously reaches over and smashes the snooze button, just as he'd do on any other Saturday, and ends up sleeping in to 11:29 and losing the entire morning. In thinking he can silence the clock by putting off contemplating the matter of his looming mortality, and attempting, literally, to sleep on it, he awakens to find it looming all the more oppressively. There's the implication that Homer and Marge could have taken the opportunity to watch the sunrise together on any morning of their married lives up until now, but that the opportunity was always passed up because come each morning they were simply too apathetic.

For various reasons, Homer continues to lose out on time as the day progresses. After that fairly sedate middle act, we once again feel the force of the clock ticking when his efforts to bury the hatchet with Abe results in Abe suddenly wanting to make up for lost time that Homer no longer has. They end up having to cram the relationship they never took the time to develop into a single afternoon, at the expense of the time Homer had allocated for other personal ambitions such as going hang gliding and planting a tree. It looks, on the surface, if Homer is paying the price for his magnanimity, but there's also the insinuation, as he finally breaks away from Abe, that Homer is only now having to face the consequences for numerous years worth of misspent time. He observes that Abe is "a little love-stared", seemingly not grasping the insight that he would not be facing this problem if he had not waited until the last minute to reach out to his father. A further act of ill-judgement also costs him dearly, when he finds himself being booked for speeding and has to call on his friend Barney to bail him out. Nathan Rabin, in his review on The AV Club, is critical of the episode's third act for taking what he calls "a pointless detour...the only real benefit to this subplot was that it afforded us a sadly funny glimpse into the sordid sad sack existence of Barney." I, however, disagree. Not only does it up the tension in the final act, but it's also an example of an unforeseen occurrence throwing Homer's plans into disarray (as with life in general, there's an awful lot that happens that you don't see coming, and it can really throw a wrench into whatever ambitions you planned on fulfilling - take 2020 so far, for example; as this month began, I wasn't exactly anticipating that we'd all be cooped up indoors by the middle of it). Its primary function is to get that inaudible clock ticking even louder. As the night sets in, Homer admits to Barney that there was an awful lot that he intended to do that day that he simply didn't have time for, a simple, matter-of-fact statement that rings sadly profound, in how it alludes to the various unfilled dreams and ambitions we will inevitably have to rule out over the course of a whole lifetime. "Blowfish" is in effect about Homer attempting to live his whole life in a single day, and experiencing the highs and the lows, and all of the stuff that simply gets lost in between.

Although Homer has already abandoned plans to have one last drink with his boozing companions at Moe's Tavern, Barney manages to twist his elbow into going after all, although it comes at the expense of the closing window of opportunity for spending his final evening on Earth with his family (again there is the insinuation that, even on his prospective last day, Homer is unable to break the cycle of misspent time by which he's lived up until now). As with "Homer's Night Out", there's a deliberate contrast between the cleanliness of the family home and the squalidness of life beyond the bounds of the family unit (we get another fleeting window into perpetual bachelor Barney Gumble's unsanitary domestic terrain), and the two are depicted as being perpetually at odds with one another (Moe and Barney mock Homer for feeling the pressure to contact Marge). And yet Homer ends up extending those very feelings of familial warmth to the greasy clientele at Moe's Tavern, whom he addresses with a farewell speech that seems reminiscent of how a parent would talk lovingly to their child: "Sometimes, when I'm at work, I think of you and smile". It's a double-edged moment, at once sweet and sincere and also slightly perverse, once we realise that he is effectively addressing them in lieu of his actual family, who are waiting at home for the final dinner that will not be happening (in one sense, he does get to accomplish his goal of having one last dinner with his family, only it's a liquid dinner and the family in question are the barflies he's long been inclined to hang out with in order to avoid the responsibilities of home). He does, however, remain committed to fulfilling the last item on his list - to be "intimat" with Marge - to the extent that he's forced to leg it back home in the style of Dustin Hoffman's character from The Graduate.

Homer makes it back, and as he and Marge share their last tender moments in the bedroom we switch to more serene indicator of time, in the brilliant moon in the night sky. Homer then slips away from Marge, bids his farewells to each of his children as they sleep, and then retires to an armchair in the living room with a cassette walkman loaded with Larry King reading aloud the Good Book. Homer's impending demise might have put him in an unusually spiritual mood, although the silent stoicism with which he attends (and occasionally fast forwards) King's readings suggests that his main intention is to obtain solace by contextualising his own existence within the broader being of the universe. Homer decides to close things out with the reminder that his life was only a minuscule part of something much larger, a tiny speak in a vast cosmos that stretches beyond all comprehension. In a sly subversion, however, this ends up accentuating the immensity of the events we have just witnessed, so that the entire cycle of creation and destruction (or at least God threatening to smite the Earth with a curse) ends up becoming a tiny footnote to Homer's most important and most apocalyptic of days. Of course, it's also an excuse to throw in a few digs at the expense of books on tape (which, as per the DVD commentary, were also something of a novelty at the time), and King gives a hilariously irreverent sign-off ("I love the San Antonio Spurs, by the way, if you're betting in the NBA this year...") that nevertheless feels genuinely chilling, for how his abrupt, mid-sentence departure coincides with Homer's sudden collapse. The universe ends, both on King's tape and in Homer's living room, with neither a bang nor a whimper but with the mellow sound of horn music murmuring out innocuously as the sun rises over a white-bread suburbia.

But of course, Homer is alive. This much does not come as a surprise to us. Marge treads downstairs the following morning and finds Homer in an inert but drooling state, a sure indicator that his body has not yet given up on life. As she rouses Homer from his sleep with the triumphant declaration that he is alive, Homer does not at first process what she is saying - again, he responds much as he would on any other morning, with half-awake bewilderment, but when it finally does seek in, he bellows out the news of his vitality with the full-hearted enthusiasm of someone who is only now, for the very first time, coming to understand what it truly means to be alive. On the DVD commentary, the production team joke that the ending is, when you strip it right back, a pretty flagrant case of cheating, as it offers no explanation for its final outcome. We spend the episode continuously hearing that Homer is going to die, and then by the miracle of plot convenience he's still standing by the fade-out. I have to admit, though, that I don't get terribly hung up on this point. I suppose it's enough to assume that there was always a slim chance he could survive the fish's toxins and he simply beat the odds - although, irrespective, it's also something of a cheat that Homer never at any point shows any symptoms of ill or threatened health. But none of that is too important, for the episode speaks to us on a far deeper level. Homer has come to the realisation that each new day is a gift in itself, and it is his awareness of his own morality that has afforded him this wisdom. It's a conclusion that recalls the Buddhist proverb, "Every morning we are born again. What we do today is what matters most." Obviously, Homer is still going to die eventually, as are all of us. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow, maybe not for many years from now. For now, though, we are still here, and have another opportunity to get started on whatever it was that that we were unable to get around to yesterday - and that in itself, the episode posits, is something worth celebrating.

It is a powerful ending, allowing Homer the exultant dignity of his survival and his renewed perspective on life, before subtly undercutting it all with one final joke suggesting that Homer was, ultimately, unable to put his new insight into practice and that, as time became less of a commodity to him, he sunk right back into his groove of living out each day in the same listless fashion as he did before. An end-credits sequence shows Homer seated on his coach, munching on pork rinds while watching a televised bowling tournament, having numbed himself to the sounds of that clock, which continues to tick away at the same rate it did before. "Blowfish" is, in the end, a punchline episode, and it ends up appearing that the entire experience has existed purely in service of this one closing gag. What's interesting, though, is that the punchline it ends with is completely different to the punchline that was initially planned - and, what's more, you can still see the seeds for the original punchline being sown conspicuously all throughout the episode. For an episode that's all about the tying up of loose ends, there are a number of threads that are just left hanging. Homer's bucket list includes no acknowledgement, positive or negative, of neighbour Ned Flanders, although their paths end up crossing anyway on Homer's prospective last day on Earth. When Ned invites Homer to a BBQ he's hosting the following day, Homer's pettiness gets the best of him, and he's compelled to exploit his tragic circumstances as a means of inconveniencing the neighbour who never wished anything but the best for him. We likewise don't see how things work out with regard to Abe, or to Burns, who doesn't escape an unmannerly heckling on Homer's last day, but only because Homer had the good (or possibly ill?) fortune of spotting him in public on his drive to Moe's Tavern. On the DVD commentary writer Nell Scovell explains that the script originally had an epilogue with Homer having to deal with the consequences of those aforementioned actions. We find him slaving away over a BBQ, grudgingly having to make good on his promise to Ned, as he faces a hounding from Abe, who now wants to spend his every waking moment with him, AND an angry telephone call from Burns, who wants to see him in his office on Monday. Marge approaches Homer and asks him if he is not happy just to be alive, to which an exasperated Homer offers no response. It's a logical punchline, albeit much more openly sour in tone, but the punchline they went with was undoubtedly the more affecting of the two. And it seems that we have time itself to thank for that - according to Scovell, the epilogue was cut simply because the episode was at risk of overrunning. And in the end, those loose ends are all the better for being left dangling. In the scheme of things, none of them are very important, for we know exactly how each of them will play out anyhow - being the good neighbour that he is, Ned will forgive Homer, Abe and Homer will continue to have their ups and downs and Burns will, in all odds, have forgotten who Homer is by Monday morning. We are content for Homer's lingering troubles to quietly fade into obscurity, as Homer becomes one with infinity, gazing passively at that bowling tournament as if he has all the time in the world.

Oh wow, remember the days when we could actually go outside for things like brunch and bowling? The irony is that, at this current time of writing, Homer's tactic of staying at home, isolating himself on the couch and living off foods with a high shelf-life is a solid strategy for survival. Except that all bowling tournaments would certainly be cancelled. If there's a lesson we can glean from both Homer's experience and from our own recent turn of events, it's that nothing in life should be taken for granted. Because really, you have no idea when and just how rapidly things are going to change.