Let's talk about the time The Simpsons paid homage to Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder" as part of their annual Treehouse of Horror rituals. The segment, "Time and Punishment", was included in "Treehouse of Horror V" of Season 6 (episode 2F03), which first aired October 30th 1994.
"Time and Punishment" follows the basic plot of "A Sound of Thunder" for its first two or three minutes, deftly adapted to suit the beats of the Simpsons universe - here, we have Homer in the role of Eckels, Abe in the role of Travis (kind of) and Ned Flanders in the role of Deutscher. Homer acquires a time-travelling toaster and goes back to prehistoric times (unlike Eckels, he did not mean to do this), crushes an insect (unlike Eckels, he meant to do this), and returns to 1994 to discover that it's now a horrifying dystopia ruled by a tyrannical (if characteristically affable) Ned. With that, we've reached the equivalent point at which Bradbury's original story stopped. "Time and Punishment", though, goes a step further, in exploring the truly deranged possibilities in having its time-travelling bug killer go back in an effort to fix their mistake, only to keep on distorting the space time continuum in ever more ludicrous ways. Conveniently for Homer, it seems that the space time continuum merely resets to its "default" state whenever he uses the toaster to travel back in time, so he never runs into the obvious problem as to what would happen if he were to encounter a past or future version of himself (just as well, as the way things were going, he'd probably have ended up killing them too, and then we really would have a paradox on our hands).
"Time and Punishment" is notable for being the least gory segment in a Halloween episode that went out of its way to be as violent, visceral and gratuitously tasteless as its slot and budget would allow - which is not to say that it's not an extremely macabre experience. In fact, it has the highest body count of the three, once we factor in non-human causalities - given that Homer is at one point implied to have caused a mass extinction by unleashing late-20th century microbes upon the prehistoric world. And, despite being relatively light on mutilation humour, it boasts one of the episode's most thoroughly disturbing moments, when the freshly-lobotomised Marge, Bart and Lisa appear clutching jars filled with brine and their own severed frontal lobes, imploring Homer join them in their newfound bliss. Morbid humor worms its way in in small and sometimes surprising ways. Take Homer's murder of the mosquito, for example - when he swats the little bloodsucker, it doesn't go down without also emitting a piteous whine, followed by a close-up of its lifeless, mangled body. At another point he also flattens a particularly adorable pink fish (a walking one, which obviously bodes badly in terms of the evolutionary course of terrestrial life on Earth).
"Time and Punishment" is not just any Treehouse of Horror installment. It happens to be a strong contender for my personal pick for THE absolute definitive Treehouse of Horror segment. Although "Treehouse of Horror II" would have little trouble securing my vote in terms of which Halloween episode functions most successfully as a cohesive whole, judged as as individual, self-contained piece, "Time and Punishment" feels like the Halloween shorts at the peak of their game. It packs so much outrageous mayhem into roughly seven minutes, yet there's something pleasingly effortless about how it all comes together, so that it never feels overly forced in its dark absurdities. It plays, beguilingly, like an actual, bona fide Simpsons story that just so happens to follow a more fantastical trajectory than usual. To clarify what I mean by that, I need only point to the preceding segment, "The Shinning", which is an affectionate and very cleverly-executed parody of Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film The Shining. It does not, however, play like an actual Simpsons story - rather, it is a self-consciously very different kind of story, into which the family has been merely transplanted. "The Shinning", more so than any other Treehouse of Horror segment before it, was a straightforward re-enactment of a pre-determined narrative, with all of the characters playing their designated parts. Homer behaves in a flagrantly out-of-character fashion all throughout "The Shinning" because he's cast in the role of Jack Torrance (I've no doubt that no TV and no beer would have some kind of adverse on Homer's emotional health, but he's no axe murderer). In "Time and Punishment", he serves as Eckels' analogue but is still recognisably Homer - he reacts to the various far-out situations he finds himself in as Homer plausibly would. "The Shinning" is so intrinsically linked to the movie it's parodying that if you're unfamiliar with Kubrick's picture (and it should be noted that the segment is specifically parodying Kubrick's movie, not King's novel), then I don't know how you make sense of it; "Time and Punishment", on the other hand, uses Bradbury's scenario as its starting point but makes the story its own, to the point that familiarity with "A Sound of Thunder" is not really necessary to getting the benefit of it (although you should read "Thunder" anyway, because it's great). I think that "The Shinning" is exceptionally well-done, as such re-enactments go, but that Treehouse of Horror segments are generally at their strongest when they have the semblance of regular, slice of life Simpsons stories that got eerily corrupted. "Time and Punishment" is a particularly delightful example, for it allows its premise to develop at a relatively gentle pace and avoids advertising its nastiness upfront. It opens benignly, in a typical Simpsons fashion, with the family gathered at their breakfast table, and the opening gag, where Homer's hand becomes lodged, not once, but twice inside the toaster, could have served as the opener to any regular Simpsons episode (certainly by the Mirkin era). Only once Homer has reassembled the toaster and we get a glimpse of its space-age new abilities does the freakiness get underway, and even then, it takes its sweet time in getting to the full-on horror.
"Time and Punishment" also has the distinction of being the only segment of "Treehouse of Horror V" to end happily. "The Shinning" ends with the entire family freezing to death to the sounds of "One" from the musical A Chorus Line. "Nightmare Cafeteria" offers not one, but two possible endings, neither of which are favourable to Bart - either he gets liquefied in a blender or eviscerated by a greyhound while the rest of the family dances to an adjusted version of "One" from the musical A Chorus Line. "Time and Punishment" ends by returning us to where it all started, with the family seated nonchalantly at their breakfast table - this time round, there is a slightly disturbing twist to the arrangement, but not so disturbing that Homer is unwilling to overlook it. I noted previously when I covered "Bad Dream House" that, despite the non-canonical nature of the Halloween shorts, the writers initially seemed reluctant to end with anything other than a return to the status quo (the shock twist ending to "Treehouse of Horror II" notwithstanding). By "Treehouse of Horror IV" they seemed to grow a lot more accustomed to the idea of ending segments in truly bleak or harrowing places, and "V" had largely followed suit. With "Time and Punishment" we get the best of both worlds - an ostensible reaffirmation of normality that's actually anything but.
On the episode's DVD commentary, the production team acknowledge the debt to "A Sound of Thunder", although none of them are invested or reverent enough to remember the title of the story, just that it was derived from a work by Ray Bradbury. They also bring up that, unlike Stanley Kubrick, Bradbury was NOT a fan of The Simpsons, and might not have appreciated the show leeching off of his intellectual property. Unfortunate but true - it's my understanding that Bradbury was vocally critical of the series near the beginning of its run, which is why they in turn took such an open swipe at him in the Season 2 episode "Lisa's Substitute". Finally, they acknowledge that Bradbury, unlike Kubrick, was still alive at the time of the commentary's recording, but were confident that, "He's too weak to sue."
The audio commentary for "Time and Punishment" is a revealing one for multiple reasons. Among other gems, Groening tasks the rest of the crew with explaining Homer's line, "I'm the first non-Brazilian person ever to travel through time," which left many viewers nonplussed - in I Can't Believe It's An Unofficial Simpsons Guide, Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood muse that, "The reference to Brazilian time-travellers is bizarre - we draw a blank," and I suspect they speak for a lot of fans. If you were hoping that the commentary would finally shed light on this mystery, you would be sorely disappointed, because they never do explain it, which suggests two possible conclusions - either it was such an obscure, far-reaching reference that the crew themselves couldn't even commit it to memory, or it was a lot of random nonsense they made up on the spot (the latter would not surprise me, although Mirkin still thinks that it was a legitimate reference). What we do learn is that the line in question was originally scripted as, "I'm the first non-fictional character ever to travel through time" (take that, Eckels), which Groening insists was funnier. I'm going to disagree with Groening - "I'm the first non-fictional character" is the kind of profoundly obvious wisecrack that any common or garden sitcom could have made, and I'm not surprised that the writers felt obligated to come up with something a little more challenging. Given a choice between a head-scratcher and an overly obvious gag, I'll take the head-scratcher, although it is always preferable when there's a solution to the riddle.
Where the commentary gets really juicy, however, is when segment writer Greg Daniels starts talking about this character called Roy, a teenage boy he was convinced was living with the Simpsons in one of Homer's alternate realities. He's confident this sequence was fully animated, and must have been included in a broadcast version at some point because enough fans seem familiar with the character. Of course, any Simpsons obsessive worth their salt knows where he's getting his wires crossed. Roy, an archetypal Gen X-er who once inexplicably joined the Simpsons household, did indeed exist, but he appeared in the Season 8 episode, "The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show", not here. Daniels, though, isn't completely barking up the wrong tree - as it turns out, Roy's origins can be traced to this very episode. Allegedly the series was, at the time, under pressure from executive forces to introduce a character along the lines of Roy (possibly to compensate for the series' overall lack of prominent teenage or young adult characters). It seems that the character of Roy was initially devised for this episode, in direct response to this outsider's unwanted suggestion, but not actually used, leaving him free for Oakley and Weinstein to later dust off come "The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show". (Questionable Wikipedia Information of The Day: the Wikipedia page for Treehouse of Horror V currently states that: "Roy was a lodger in [The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show], rather than a son", although Roy's connection to the family is never actually explained in that episode. It's not clear if he's a lodger, a distant relative, or even a fourth Simpsons child who's been glaringly retconned into the show's established continuity - the characters all just accept that he's there without question, and that's the joke in itself.) The absolute culmination of juice occurs when Mirkin asks, "Was it somebody from outside the show? I heard it was somebody from inside the show." Oh, now that would be a tasty twist. It's hard to tell just how serious they're being, but my money's on James L. Brooks. Call it a hunch.
Roy's exclusion from "Time and Punishment" and later resurrection in "Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie" is not a development I especially regret. A character as intrinsically meta as Roy, and so wrapped up in the anxieties surrounding the series' longevity, definitely feels more at home in the sly, knowing world of Season 8 than in the comparatively complacent Season 6. The joke has more pertinence in an episode built on the implicit admission that the series was running out of options of where to go from here. Nevertheless, his genesis in earlier drafts of "Time and Punishment" is suggestive of a fascinating, unexplored angle from which the segment could have delved into various alternate versions of The Simpsons; how certain details could be mixed and matched and the knock-on effects on the show's overall dynamic. As it is, the segment reinforces the same lessons as "The Last Temptation of Homer" of Season 5, which also involved alternate realities, and in which Homer likewise learned to embrace the present, imperfect universe. His opening reflections - "Marge, I've had my share of troubles, but sitting here with you and the kids in our cozy home, in this beautiful, free country...it just makes me realise that I'm really a lucky guy" - may seem, in the short-term, like nothing more than the set-up to that particularly inspired bit of slapstick involving the toaster, but it also sets out the basic underlying conflict of the segment and precisely what's at stake. It's an intrinsically unstable universe, founded on the kind of inane chaos where your hand will intermittently become lodged in the toaster, but as the balance is presently stacked, Homer understands that he has a pretty good deal of it, and spends the entire segment desperately trying to defend that. As with "Last Temptation", the various alternate realities the universe throws at him play like a series of great cosmic jokes at his expense; he samples one where he is forced to cow to his much-resented neighbour Ned Flanders, and another where humans are gargantuan in size, and he finds himself on the receiving end of the kind of retribution he unleashed on that mosquito. In another, Homer is tempted with what, ostensibly, looks to be his best possible reality - one where the family is rich, the kids are well-behaved and Patty and Selma are out of the picture - and momentarily decides to settle there, only to discover that there may in fact be a hidden cost. No one in this universe seems to know what a donut is. The great cosmic punchline to this particular gag comes when Homer abandons the reality only for it to start raining donuts outside - a concept so impossibly ridiculous it as though the universe is wilfully wearing its cruelty on its sleeve. One gets the impression that the universe deliberately dragged Homer back in time just to have a little sport with him...which would imply that the Simpsons universe is also behaving in a perfectly in-character manner throughout this segment.
"Time and Punishment" doesn't have quite the same satiric undercurrent as "The Shinning", which, in addition to lovingly homaging Kubrick's film, acts as a subtle rebuttal to contemporary hand-wringing about the supposed effects of media saturation. Although not quite as upfront on the matter as "Itchy & Scratchy Land", it makes the case that deprivation of media violence is more likely to result in murderous outbursts than exposure to it (of course, if it was making the same point about the other item denied to Homer, beer, then I'm not sure it works quite as well). The one point at which "Time and Punishment" seems to feed into the episode's wider social theme is in the narrative thread involving the alternate 1994 controlled by Ned Flanders. David Sims on The AV Club has some qualms about this aspect of the episode, reasoning that it's "almost too stereotypically dystopian and evil, with the only special Ned touch involving the forced smiling—surely the whole thing would be a theocracy?" Eh, I'm not so sure. Devout religiosity has been Ned's thing since as far back as Season 2, but at this point in the series I think the idea behind his character, and the Flanders unit as a whole, was more that they represented the kind of "perfect", socially desirable family that inevitably put the Simpsons in the shade. They were well-behaved, well-presented and always seemed to be in perfect harmony with one another, and Ned's dystopia in "Time and Punishment" represents the dark extension to all this sanitization - a neutered society in which dissension and individuality has been carefully vetted out and conformity is encouraged toward a single ideal. I suspect that Ned was chosen to be Deutscher's counterpart for three reasons. Firstly, he's a character to whom Homer would truly hate having to submit. Secondly, there is a whole ton of humor (and horror) to be gleaned from the discrepancies in Ned's friendly demeanour and the downright brutal spirit-breaking techniques he employs. Thirdly, Ned, being that spotless model of social desirability, readily embodies the kind of prudish, moralistic sensibilities that stand as a direct counterpoint to a culture enraptured with life's chaotic imperfections; sensibilities that have here been magnified to a truly nightmarish degree. There is an understated visual kink to Ned's dystopia, in that the Negative Nellies who are forced to undergo Re-Neducation are made to dress like either himself or Maude, according to their gender, making it clear that Ned aspires to mold the entire world in his family's anodyne image. The sequence is a stark (and darkly hilarious) warning against any culture where individual thought or expression is obliterated in favour of a forced harmony that is horrifying in its falseness, perfectly exemplified in the gruesome discomforts of those metal hook-induced smiles.
The ending of the segment is double-edged, for while it appears to reaffirm the status quo, it does so only superficially. There is the disturbing matter that Homer does not actually make it back to his own timeline. He arrives at a reality that seems like a pretty good match, but for one unsettling detail - human evolution has, somewhere along the line, incorporated long reptilian tongues, which are used to scoop up food (begging the question as to why humans also developed cutlery in this timeline, because they don't seem to have any use for it). Homer is momentarily shocked, but decides that he can live with it, and with that the segment fades out. It is an optimistic ending (in a sense, it reminds me of the ending to the 1985 Twilight Zone episode "Wordplay", in that Homer ends up exhibiting the same resilience and willingness to adapt as Robert Klein's character), for Homer upholds the same perspective he expressed at the beginning of the segment - where things are not ideal, but more-or-less okay, one should find the value in that. Homer realises that things are as good as they're ever likely to get, and that to throw it away over something as insignificant, in the grand scheme of things, as reptile tongues would simply be picky. Throughout the segment, we have the irony that the "perfection" Homer is trying to regain is really imperfection that has the virtue of being familiar to him, and it is perhaps an awareness of this that ultimately causes him to be less particular. He accepts the compromise, and learns once again to be at peace with the universe.
Besides, reptile tongues aren't such a bad thing. Presumably, that whole debate as to whether or not it's physically possible for humans to lick their own elbows is totally moot in this reality.
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