Who Shot Mr Burns? Part One (aka Eternal Darkness...Well That's Just Great)

Is there any phrase in the English language more ominous than, "To be continued..."?

As a kid, I certainly didn't think so. There was a short period, some time in the early 1990s, when the bane of my TV-watching existence was a most peculiar and disturbing TV ad in which stock footage (I presume) of an enormous truck hurtling down a desert highway was interspliced with the cries of a terrified critter, apparently in the path of the truck and in danger of being crushed by it. The creature itself was of no discernable species - the most we ever saw of it was its huge plastic eyes rolling open and shut as it stood there, seemingly powerless to alter its fate. Then, the action came to an abrupt halt, the words "To be continued..." were flashed across the screen in big bold letters, aaaaand I never did figure out what that was all about. As far as I'm aware, the scenario never was continued, and maybe that was the joke in itself, but it was never apparent to me what the advertisement was actually selling, and it's haunted me ever since. If you're wondering why you've never seen this featured as a Horrifying Advertising Animal, it's because I've never been able to find it. Not having a clue what the campaign in question was for has seriously impeded the whole search process. I would love to put the matter to rest once and for all, because as things are, that whole scenario still lies suspended in my head, with no clarity as to the fate of that plastic-eyed critter or what the heck I was even watching. The phrase "To be continued..." is ominous because it signals the dawning of a time of uncertainty, of finding yourself caught between not knowing and knowing with no guarantee that you'll ever emerge from the darkness and toward the enlightenment at the other end of the tunnel. "To be continued..." is a phrase that taunts you with your own powerlessness in the scheme of things.

On May 21st 1995, Simpsons episode 2F16, better known as "Who Shot Mr Burns? Part One", first aired and deviated from sixth seasons worth of convention by closing out with an on-screen title "To be continued". In the entire history of The Simpsons, there was only ever one real precedent for the series doing a two-parter - in 1989, a couple of the Ullman shorts had combined to create a single story, with "Maggie In Peril: Chapter One" leading into "Maggie In Peril: The Thrilling Conclusion". This marked the first occasion that a season of the series proper had ended on a cliff-hanger, the final images of Season 6 showing an unresponsive Burns sprawled out across the town sundial, having taken a bullet to the chest, and Chief Wiggum promising to lead the forensic investigation into flushing out the culprit. Not an easy task, given that Burns had spent the preceding twenty minutes alienating numerous different factions of Springfield, finally launching a full-blown assault upon the entire town with a megalomaniacal scheme to block out the sun (thus forcing them to require his plant's electricity 24/7). Everyone in Springfield had the motive to want to hit back at Burns, but the clues, if carefully studied, would point to only one individual. And this is where it got exciting - you, the viewer, were invited to play along and demonstrate that you were smarter than Chief Wiggum by cracking the case before he did. Fox ran an official contest, "The Simpsons Mystery Sweepstakes", in association with 1-800-COLLECT, alongside additional promotional tie-ins with United Artists Theaters, 7-Elevens and Pepsi. The most wonderful, amazing prize was on offer to the effective detective who ultimately triumphed - the chance to have their animated likeness immortalised in an upcoming episode of The Simpsons. You had all summer long to make your guess, before the solution was revealed with the airing of Part Two in September. Watch carefully, and remember, nobody in town was above suspicion.

Except for Smithers, of course. I always had utmost confidence in the innocence of my man Waylon.

There was precedent for the series tackling the whodunnit format before, although on nothing like the scale attempted here. The first two Sideshow Bob episodes had certainly encouraged the viewer to play amateur sleuth along with Bart, but were, let's face it, rather limited on the mystery front. I doubt that anybody watching "Krusty Gets Busted" was terribly surprised when Bob turned out to be the culprit, given that he was the only truly viable suspect introduced throughout the course of the episode (the only alternative was that Krusty actually did it). "Black Widower", meanwhile, was less a whodunnit than a how, why and huh?-dunnit (one that continues to baffle me, in terms of Bob's motives). The most direct precursor to "Who Shot Mr Burns?" would be the promotional tie-in contest with long-term corporate allies Butterfinger in 1993, which revolved around the conceit of Bart attempting to establish which of six possible candidates had stolen his coveted bar of chocky; consumers were required to collect suspect testimonies inside Butterfinger wrappers, and to establish which of the six had no alibi (in a shocking twist, it wasn't Homer). This time, though, the stakes were a lot higher than Bart getting his sugar rush - depending on how the scenario played out, the shooting of Burns really had the potential to change the show's dynamic. The entire set-up was first and foremost a parody, one that deliberately evoked the water cooler phenomenon of the "Who Shot J.R.?" arc of Dallas fifteen years prior. And yet, there is a startling amount of actual drama to the closing sequence of "Who Shot Mr Burns? Part One". The scene where Burns is apparently accosted and threatened by his off-screen assailant is played entirely straight, making it look as if a genuinely ugly confrontation has occurred (this in itself is all a set-up, so that the viewer can have the rug royally pulled out from under them in Part Two, when we learn what actually went down, but just for a moment there, things did seem to be getting really intense). To say nothing of the unambiguously grievous injury sustained by Burns. I don't know how many viewers at the time would have seriously entertained the notion that the series might kill Burns off, but the cliffhanger certainly taunts us into thinking that it's a possibility. Marge's observation that, "I don't think we'll ever know who did this", indicates that she isn't banking on the likelihood of Burns coming around and being able to tell them what happened. It's also a bit ominous the way everybody just stands around and gawks at the fallen Burns, instead of, you know, attempting to take a pulse and, God forbid, actually help the wounded old man. The professional medic on the scene, Dr Hibbert, is more interested in challenging Wiggum (and by extension, the viewer) to crack the mystery than in tending to the unconscious Burns. I don't know about you, but the vibe I get is that these characters have already written Burns off for dead. Finally, there's the theme variation we hear during the closing credits, a homage to John Williams' "Drummers' Salute" from his score for the 1991 film JFK, which is about as grim and sombre a composition as I think can possibly be transmuted from the ordinarily sunny Simpsons theme. All in all, it was one heck of an unsettling way to be rounding out a season.

The "Who Shot Mr Burns?" mystery succeeded in its goal of getting everybody talking about The Simpsons (Fox spun a full-blown event out of this silly cartoon whodunnit), and it remains today a fondly-remembered chapter in the series' history. All the same, I do have to wonder if the need to engineer such a massive publicity stunt was, at the time, perceived by some fans as a sign of desperation; that the series of nearing the brink of creative bankruptcy, and had cooked up this self-proclaimed event in an attempt to stay relevant. It's a malaise of which I'm sure the Simpsons production crew were well aware - they open the concluding installment with a nod to another classic Dallas moment - Bobby Ewing's infamous shower resurrection - widely considered to be the most galling and quintessential of all jump the shark moments (save for the one where a guy literally jumps over a shark). And, for the life of me, I couldn't think of a better way to kick-start the seventh season than with an affectionate reminder of the sheer precariousness of it all. At some point, much like Pam Ewing, you're going have to wake up, smell your showering zombie husband, and notice the brittle strings keeping your favourite show aloft. In many regards, "Who Shot Mr Burns?" was the PERFECT segue between David Mirkin's era and that of the incoming showrunners Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein (who also penned the two-parter), in that it signalled a shift from a more complacent era of the series' history into one that practically thrived on an awareness of the inevitable. I am somewhat leery of using the term "complacent" to describe Mirkin's tenure, since it sounds as though I'm doing the man a terrible disservice - Mirkin had, after all, inherited the series in the post-Bartmania era, when the initial novelties of a cartoon as irreverent and ground-breaking as The Simpsons were now firmly behind it, and did a terrific job of ensuring its survival and furthering its reputation as one of the sharpest shows on television. Mirkin's era is, nevertheless, what I'm inclined to term "comfort zone Simpsons" - which is to say, the time when the show seemed most self-confident and settled in what it was. It had passed the most recent test, in disproving those naysayers who had once dismissed the series as a flash in the pan televisual bauble. The problem Oakley and Weinstein were faced with, when they took the reins, is just how long they could reasonably expect to keep that streak going. In other words, we were entering the post-post-Bartmania era. Burns might ultimately have recovered and sunlight was restored to the denizens of Springfield, but once that gun had been fired things were never going to be the same again. That abrupt and startling conclusion to Season 6 seems almost poetic.

So that we're clear, I'm not suggesting that The Simpsons jumped that proverbial shark under Oakley and Weinstein - to the contrary, I would champion their era as the most intelligent and fascinating in the series' history. But it definitely felt like a more hazardous chapter than what had come before it. Following on from the example of "Who Shot Mr Burns?", it was an era where multiple risks were taken and new things tried (something as radical as "The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase" seems unfathomable in Mirkin's era, where the most experimental episode was probably "Lisa's Wedding"). It was also an era where the show became more introspective and openly uncertain about its own future, with the repeated insinuation that Oakley and Weinstein were anticipating that the next phase might not be post-post-post-Bartmania, but post-Simpsons. This became a greater preoccupation within the latter end of their run, although Smithers' lamentation about the fine line between everyday villainy and cartoonish super-villainy would indicate that they were always very conscious of where the point of no return might lie.

You do have to credit the "Who Shot Mr Burns?" saga - it was a very clever and intricately-constructed mystery. Maybe it was a little too clever and intricately-constructed for its own good. The hype surrounding the mystery was so robust, and the two-parter itself held in such high regard by the series' fans that it's easy to overlook the fact that the official contest was, technically speaking, a resounding fiasco. Not one of the entrants submitted the correct answer (or, more accurately, not one of the sample of 1,000 randomly selected by Fox), and nobody received the promised reward of having their animated likeness featured in an episode of The Simpsons. Contractual obligation stipulated that they had to pick a winner, regardless; one was chosen at random from the pool of unanimously incorrect entrants and that person paid off with a more conventional cash prize. The producers were aware of at least one individual who had posted the correct answer, with the correct reasoning, to an online discussion group, but he had not done so through the official contest and was thus ineligible for the grand prize. Nevertheless, efforts were made to get in touch with this individual once things had settled down, as the Simpsons crew wanted to send him an under the table gift in recognition of his sharp detective skills, but alas, the email he had posted under was by then defunct. Meanwhile, that wonderful, amazing prize that had been brandished so tantalisingly ended up sinking into oblivion, much like the briefcase of cash in the movie Fargo. What a senseless waste.

I spoke a bit about my personal relationship with the "Who Shot Mr Burns?" mystery previously in my coverage of the promotional special, Springfield's Most Wanted. In a nutshell, I missed out on the phenomenon in 1995 (the contest did not run in the UK, so a smaller deal was inevitably made of it), but I consider myself very lucky that I got to experience the mystery fresh anyway, albeit two years too late. Sky 1 aired Part One, Springfield's Most Wanted and Part Two consecutively over three nights, giving me two days in which to crack the mystery. I had a lot of fun trying but got hopelessly lost in a sea of conjecture, and ended up wishing that I'd had the foresight to tape Part One, because without the ability to rewind and pause I didn't stand a snowball's (case in point: a misremembered detail from the final sequence had me completely thrown off the trail). I was, however, adamant about one thing: I could not bring myself to even consider the possibility that Smithers had pulled the trigger. I had confidence in Waylon's innocence. That much at least paid off.

Not having paid attention in 1995, I couldn't say for certain just how satisfied contemporary viewers were with the revelation that Maggie Simpson had fired the gun at Burns (I suppose I could read the reviews they left on The Simpsons Archive, but I'm not that much of a glutton for punishment). No doubt it disappointed those who were hoping for a more elaborate conspiracy involving multiple characters. With hindsight, Maggie really should have stood out as one of the safest possible options, given that she was one of few characters who could take a shot at Burns and not be deemed criminally accountable - thus facilitating Marge's glib suggestion, at the end of Part Two, that they "all get back normal" - even if, somewhat ironically, a status quo shake-up was precisely what Oakley and Weinstein had desired when they started working on the episode. They had originally proposed that the shooter be Barney, and that he face the full brunt of the law for his attempted murder of Burns, owing to their strong dislike of the slurring alcoholic and eagerness to have him written out of the show (they didn't get their way, but when they were brought on as showrunners, Barney was pretty much low-key retired anyway - from "Team Homer" onward, the series was clearly making a conscious effort to have Moe replace him as Homer's best friend). Still, if they were dead-set on a solution that didn't necessitate changing anything about day-to-day life in Springfield, then wouldn't the other obvious option to have been to have made guest star Tito Puente the shooter? I bring this up, not because I think it would made a better twist (actually, I think there is another very compelling reason why Maggie was by and far the best candidate), but because I find it curious that, in Springfield's Most Wanted, the Mirage casino actually listed him as the least probable suspect, with odds of 600/1. Perhaps there were doubts as to whether a real-world celebrity would sign up to be depicted as an attempted killer, but then The Simpsons had a proud history of treating its guest names with a healthy irreverence (to the point where Ernest Borgnine was repeatedly degraded and potentially even killed in his appearance). And what guest wouldn't have been positively thrilled by the prospect of being immortalised as the culprit in a heavily-promoted Simpsons whodunnit? (Not that Puente needed this accolade to attain immortality.)

But before we dissect how "Who Shot Mr Burns? Part One" functions as the basis for a mystery, how well does it hold up as an episode on its own terms? Is it still going to satisfy those seeking their usual Simpsons quota for colourful mayhem and biting witticisms without looking to get heavily involved in the mystery angle? As a story, it opens in my least favourite way for any story to open, with a dead rodent (thinking about it, the tragic demise of Super Dude the gerbil not only sets in motion the events that lead to the discovery of oil beneath the school, but also deftly foreshadows the outcome of the mystery - Super Dude is crushed by his own drinking bottle, much as Burns is felled by his own gun) but only gets better from there. It is, nevertheless, a highly unusual slice of Simpsons life, in that pretty much everything that happens therein is very transparently a means to an end. The narrative is structured around the generation of contrivance after contrivance, giving an escalating number of Springfieldians personal reason to despise Burns, until finally we're at a point where everyone in town is baying for the old man's guts. This doesn't preclude incorporation of some really good character exchanges, notably between Skinner and Chalmers, who not only get to act out a proto-Steamed Hams routine ("It's an unrelated article? Within the banner headline? "Yes!"), but also enjoy a rare moment of genuine affinity, through mutual derision of the facetious suggestion that they use the school's new fortune to provide each student with funding for a college education. But the episode gets particularly crowded in the third act, when the Burns hatred starts haemorrhaging left and right, and finds itself with precious little room to breathe for all the antipathy. It is amazing just how artfully the writers are able to juggle the various motives for murder (although having the characters bleat out their grievances in succession at the town meeting certainly helps), but all the same, Part One never feels like anything less than twenty-minutes of extended set-up, brimming with clues and an even greater number of red herrings, and purposely designed to be rewound, paused and dissected in excruciating detail. It somehow never collapses under the weight of all its machinations, but it necessitates Part Two as a palate cleanser, not simply in providing closure to the titular mystery, but because the story unfolds at a much more leisurely pace that better enables the viewer to kick back and enjoy its various twists and turns. Among other things, "Who Shot Mr Burns" may actually be a bit harsh on the titular character, who is featured here at his most excessively evil. Not only do his sun-blocking shenanigans propel him, as Smithers so deftly puts it, to the class of cartoonish supervillainy, Burns seems to be actively going out of his way to make as many enemies as possible, as if he knows this is required of him to get us to the inevitable outcome. It's one thing to accidentally knock a child and a dog out of their treehouse, crippling the latter in the process, but how much of a thoroughgoing rotter do you have to be to knowingly gloat about said crippling? And to the face of said child, who's probably experiencing all manner of trauma from the ordeal? On the DVD commentary, the crew even note how out of character Burns is being...to a point. Sure, the man has always been a sociopathic miser, but would he previously have had the guts to show up to a town hall full of potential aggressors just to rub his villainy in their faces?

Of all the town's vendettas against Burns, the ones that feel the most satisfying are either those that get the strongest narrative build-up (ie: the Elementary school staff) or those that can pass for long-running character threads that are finally coming to fruition. Smithers has always been the closest thing that Burns has to a significant other, a fact that the dedicated sycophant ordinarily delights in, but here we get to see what happens when Burns' lust for conquest swells to a point where even Smithers isn't prepared to follow him, with the result that Waylon ends up being the jilted lover of the situation. (As to the one-sided sexual tension in their dynamic, there's a moment in Part One where we find the boot curiously on the other foot - Burns makes a comment to Smithers that could be perceived as flirting with him and Smithers doesn't take the bait.) From a character standpoint, Smithers' arc might be the single most compelling thing about the episode, introducing a sliver of genuine emotional anguish into what is otherwise a knowing exercise in gimmickry. He is the only participant having to watch this whole sorry mess play out from the perspective of seeing someone he loves descend down the path of self-destructive iniquity; the other suspects are more privileged in having disliked Burns to begin with. Smithers feels a warmth and attachment to the maniacal old git that clearly doesn't dissipate when Burns casts him aside, and in that regard the whodunnit serves as quite a neat little character study for him. Elsewhere, the mystery makes clever use of one of the show's most absurd running gags, in Homer's increasing exasperation at Burns' inability to commit his name to long-term memory (it gets even cleverer in Part Two, too). I would argue that Burns' automatic memory loss on all matters Homer is one of the means through which the status quo is protecting itself - Homer's inexplicable failure to make any kind of lasting impression on Burns is probably the main thing keeping him in his employ, and if Homer were an inch more self-aware he might even embrace this as a good thing, although it's easy to comprehend why he gets so upset about it here. All he wants is a little respect and acknowledgement from the man for whom he's worked for so many years - Burns' refusal to accommodate his identity equates to the rude insistence that he's a man of no importance. The cruelty of Burns' selective memory is underscored during a sequence where he receives a box of candy with the Simpsons' picture strategically concealed underneath, and it becomes apparent that all his memories of prior encounters with the rest of the family are perfectly intact. I do kind of want to know what he had to say about Snowball II, however.

The real centrepiece of the whodunnit ends up being the town sundial, which Burns had sought to render useless in blocking out the sun, but goes on to function as his primary means of communication (it would seem) with both the townspeople and by extension the viewer once that bullet wound has compromised his ability to keep upright. The sundial, much like everything else in this episode, was 100% plot contrivance - in six whole seasons, I don't think it was ever established that the town even had a sundial - but it provided the writers with their pivotal "Eureka!" moment in piecing the mystery together, when they realised that the "W" would convey a completely different meaning if approached from an alternate angle. When Burns collapses on the sundial, his fingers appear to be directed toward the letters W and S, the obvious gambit being that the writers hoped they could trick you into thinking that Burns was implicating the prime suspect, when in actuality these letters referred to someone completely different. The conclusions you drew about Burns' shooter were designed to hinge on whatever significance you attached to the letters in question, and whether you read them as WS or MS. On that basis, you could automatically rule out Homer and Lisa as suspects, as there was no way of connecting them to either combination. An ingenious plot device, although one that leans wholesale into one of the amusing foibles of the whodunnit formula. There's a scene in an episode of One Foot In The Grave where Patrick and Pippa discuss the classic whodunnit trope wherein the murder victim, shortly before shuffling off this mortal coil, manages to assemble some sort of cryptic clue pointing toward whoever killed them - specifically, a Poirot adaptation in which the victim's grasping of a herb leaf is thought to implicate his nephew Basil. "A bit tentative, isn't it?" asks Patrick. "I mean what if he missed and picked a bit of parsley instead? They could have hanged an innocent man." He suggests the victim would have done better to have found a piece of paper and written the name down. "Yes", says Pippa, "But you don't think of doing things like that when you've just been shot in the stomach," raising the question as to whether you would think of doing things like picking a leaf of basil either. I suppose have much the same thoughts as Patrick when it comes to the whole notion of Burns attempting to communicate the name of his shooter by pointing to corresponding letters on the sundial - it's all a bit tentative, isn't it? How were the townspeople to know to which MS/WS he was even referring? And what if, in his waning consciousness, he misdirected and ended up pointing to N or E? Are you really going to stake your conclusions on the perceived actions of a person who was, in all likelihood, too shocked and wounded to even think clearly? Granted, they do make a joke about this in Part Two, when Burns suggests that this so-called pivotal clue might all have been a big fluke anyway, but as a plot point that doesn't make it any less silly.

Focussing our attention on the WS's and MS's in the line-up narrows down the list of viable suspects considerably, but there are more of them than you might think at first glance. Burns' closing "message" could have referred to any of these:

• Waylon Smithers: The prime suspect in-universe, but as I say, I wasn't having it. As it turned out, Smithers had an alibi, but you needed to connect a few dots and have a good eye for background detail to determine what it was.
  
• Marge Simpson - Well, they note this on the DVD commentary, although Marge was never on the table as a suspect, since we saw where she was when the shooting occurred. I'm aware that there are a few YouTube conspiracy theorists who've attempted to retroactively pin the misdeed on her, but I don't even want to know how that works.
• Simpson Mutt - Burns had earlier used this term to describe Santa's Little Helper, although if this is what he was trying to convey then it seems the most ridiculously tentative scenario of them all. For one thing, Santa's Little Helper isn't even a mutt, he's a greyhound. Who was going to look at the letters "S" and "M" and immediately conclude that he was referring to the dog? Irrespective of the semantics, Santa's Little Helper is a dog, and as Burns would say, has neither the cranial capacity nor the opposable digits necessary to operate a firearm (now, if they'd worked Mr Teeny into this mystery, it might have been a different story). It was always difficult to take him seriously as a suspect - but then was Maggie really that much easier?
  
• Sideshow Mel - Bob might have been sitting this particular mystery out, but his successor was there to continue the Sideshow knack for drawing suspicion in his stead. And did you think it odd how Ned Flanders, of all characters, randomly calls for Mel's opinion during the meeting? All a contrivance to make you conscious of the fact that, oh yeah, he's another SM. Mel doesn't hold water as a suspect, however; he is a Sideshow, and as such guns aren't really his style. Sharp pointy stabby things are his style. He brought a knife to the town meeting. Mel had an important part to play in how the mystery panned out, but not as the shooter.
  
• Smith & Wesson - The make of gun that Marge had previously confiscated from Abe and buried in the Simpsons' yard, later revealed to have been dug up and retrieved by an unidentified character. "Smith & Wesson" could have potentially implicated either Abe OR Bart, since they were both aware of the gun and where it was buried. In Part Two, the Smith & Wesson transpired to be a total red herring; it was Abe who dug it up, but only because he couldn't bear to be parted with it.
• W. Seymour Skinner - Contrivance alert! A diploma in Skinner's office bears the moniker W. Seymour Skinner. So Skinner has a W at the front of his name? Since when? At every other point in the series, he's only ever been known as good old Seymour Skinner (well, except on that other occasion you all know and by all odds loathe, but we're not talking about that today). Regardless, Skinner could be eliminated as a suspect due to the silencer on his gun - the gunshot that felled Burns was clearly audible.
  
• Moe Szyslak - Likewise, this was our first time hearing Moe's full name, with "Szyslak" being chosen at random from a phone book in order to conform to the pattern of MS's. As with Mel and Skinner, his choice of weapon marked him out as another false lead - Moe had a shotgun, which would have made a total human pizza out of Burns. 
• Scottish Willie: I've seen this one suggested, but it really does seem like grasping at straws to me, to the point that I seriously doubt it was one of the options the writers had in mind when devising the mystery. While we're at it, why not have "Wretched Souse" to apply to Barney?
  
• Maggie Simpson: Strange that.
  

I maintain that the biggest giveaway, with hindsight, should have been the granddaddy of all plot contrivances - that Marge, for some reason, doesn't take Maggie with her when she goes to investigate where Homer, Bart and Lisa are at. Instead, she just leaves her infant daughter unattended in the parking lot with the car window wound down. Under ordinary circumstances, I could see Homer doing something like that, but it does seem glaringly out of character for Marge. That alone should have told you that something was up, that Maggie's presence was needed elsewhere. As I admitted in my write-up on "Springfield's Most Wanted", this was the big mistake that kept me from getting close to solving the mystery - on my very first viewing of Part One, I could have sworn that Marge had Maggie right there in her arms when the gun was fired. I actually don't feel too silly for this, rewatching the episode, because Marge IS holding Maggie at the very end, when everybody gathers around Burns, despite it really not looking as though she would have had the time to return to the parking lot, collect Maggie and get back to sundial again (not unless she could outrun The Flash). So I can see how the episode confused me. That was dirty, Oakley and Weinstein, although I can quite understand why you did it. The irony of having Marge declare, "I don't know if we'll ever know who did this..." when the shooter is LITERALLY RIGHT THERE UNDER HER NOSE was just too tempting to pass up.

And now, an addendum of sorts to a comment I made in my coverage of Springfield's Most Wanted, when I expressed confusion as to why Krusty was ranked as the third most likely suspect by the Mirage, despite the total lack of any evidence that would even vaguely implicate him. A couple of years ago, back when we were all bored and cranky with being shut indoors all day, you might recall that there was a brief regeneration of interest in the episode, when a Reddit user pointed out that the "Krusty" we see at the end of the episode giving Flanders the stink eye actually better resembles the model used for the Krustified Homer in "Homie The Clown" (painted nose, missing eye sags), and the internet went absolutely wild over it. The implication that this was Homer disguised as Krusty opened up the door for a barrage of sinister new conspiracy theories that were YouTuber's wet dream...until Oakley interjected to confirm that this was all news to him and that he and Weinstein had specified in their script that Homer not be in the final scene, which seemed to put the matter to rest. Meaning that we were either to chalk this up to an animation error, or possibly some rogue animator's idea of a joke (albeit an unsporting one). Well, thank gravy for that. What stood out to me as interesting about the whole observation, however, is that John Walsh had actually forwarded a theory, in Springfield's Most Wanted, that Krusty and Homer had exploited their uncanny resemblance and worked as a team to take down Burns (implying, presumably, that Krusty pulled the trigger and an incognito Homer showed up at the sundial to give Krusty an alibi). Pretty much everything that Walsh presented as "Springfield's Most Wanted's own investigation" actually did have merit to those looking to solve the mystery, even the ones that sounded insane outside of context - there was, for example, hidden meaning to the "multiple images of the number 3" - and his comment about the shooter having "their sights set on Burns" makes it clear that, if Walsh himself didn't know who the culprit was, whoever wrote that line certainly did. His theory about Homer and Krusty always stood out as a glaring anomaly in an otherwise pretty sensible set of findings; intentionally so, I'd long assumed, just to mix things up a little, but now I'm wondering if the writer was once again in on a little joke that we maybe weren't. By that, I think we can trust Oakley's assertion that it wasn't something he and Weinstein intended, I just question if it really took until 2020 for anyone to notice and speculate on this. There must have been some reason why Krusty attracted so much suspicion in 1995, and I dare say not because nobody would wilfully spend that much time in Reno.

Even if you did happen to notice this episode quirk in at the time, there was reason to doubt that The Simpsons would use the whole "Krusty looks like Homer" trick as the basis of their solution. Why? Because they'd already played that card (more-or-less) in their answer to that aforementioned Butterfinger contest in 1993. There, Krusty was the culprit, and he'd tried to set Homer up (oh, the effect that sugar addiction can have on a person). All non-canonical to the TV series, but still fresh enough in the public's mind, one presumes, to necessitate taking things in another direction.

 To be continued...

McDonald's '97: Singing In The Rain (Let The Stormy Clouds Chase Everyone From The Place)

Prior to the cultural shifts of the 21st century, McDonald's had lived quite comfortably as a predominantly kid-orientated brand, and for a while there was most in its element pitching itself as a place to bag free plastic, undergo family bonding rituals and celebrate younger rites of passage. When it came to placating the adult set, who might not have kids in tow and were less likely to be won over by the grotesque revels of a certain Ronald McDonald, the company occasionally had some strange ideas (the Arch Deluxe fiasco springs to mind), but few more disarming, I'll wager, than this ad devised by Chicago-based ad agency Leo Burnett for UK television in 1997. It also doubled, apparently, as an attempt to launch a new pop act, and while that aspect of the campaign effectively sunk without a trace, the ad itself is to be regarded as a classic. It follows a young motorist who pulls over to adjust the roof of his convertible during heavy rainfall, only for the roof to jam. Whereupon our protagonist whole-heartedly accepts his waterlogged fate and resumes his journey. Along route, he goes on a mind-bending power trip involving a Godzilla-sized lemur, the Bognor Regis International Birdman rally and comedian Tommy Cooper, before finally pulling up outside a McDonald's eatery; there, he finds refuge from the rain, but not from the sardonic observations of the attendant on duty, who exercises the last word in having the "Caution: Wet Floor" sign accompany him around the building. 

The appeal of the ad lies in how it transforms what is a mundane drive for fast food wrapped in greaseproof paper into a celebration of LIFE - or at least life in which all roads inevitability lead to McDonald's. The protagonist's life is represented as a veritable scrapbook of second-hand memories, culled from a variety of stock and archival footage, few if any of which have very much to do with McDonald's. It is, in many respects, an arbitrary mishmash, but with the golden arches crowbarred into enough places (the lemur footage has been manipulated so as to appear as though the creature is carrying a paper bag bearing their trademark logo, whilst fries and shakes appear elsewhere) to posit McDonald's as the underpinning of this deluge of positive energy. The rain represents what is unpredictable and permanently outside of the protagonist's control, with McDonald's being the stabilising constant that makes it ultimately all weatherable. Come rain or shine, there'll always be a Mickey Dee's around the corner, ready to greet you, shelter you from the elements and accept all major credit cards. What's a little wet hair when you can anticipate a full belly at the end of it all?

The visual collage is accompanied by  a pop-reggae version of everybody's favourite meteorologically-inclined standard, "Singing In The Rain", performed by Gazebo. No, not the Italian guy who likes Chopin. This Gazebo was a duo comprised of Dee Jacobee and Sean Andrews, and the track was released as a single by EMI in September 1997, with proceeds going to the companies' respective charities, EMI's Music Sound Foundation and Ronald McDonald Houses. According to Discogs, this was their only release under the Gazebo banner, but then their Discogs page seems a mite confused and falsely lists the act as being part of The Shirehorses parody project (I remember The Shirehorses, and I'm reasonably positive that this had nothing to with them). Despite the popularity of the ad, the single itself was not a massive success, peaking at no. 78 on the UK Singles Chart. I suspect this could either be attributed to lacklustre promotion (I certainly don't recall those aforementioned Shirehorses plugging it on their Radio 1 breakfast show), or to the likelihood that most consumers didn't consider the track to be anything special beyond the context of this ad. Myself, I have a lot of affection for Gazebo's take on "Singing In The Rain", but then I have to admit that a chunk of that affection might be tethered to my fondness for the ad itself. Whenever I hear Jacobee's "I'm happy again!", I've a leaping lemur running through my brain, and I can't be certain that the quirkiness of that image isn't responsible for a good part of that serotonin rush. Nevertheless, it's a track that works a certain magic on me, in transporting me back to a very different place - by which I refer not just to the simpler times (for me, anyway) of 1997, but to the more abstract sense of giddy delirium I always identified as lurking within the ad's eccentricities. The combination of non-stopped drizzle, upbeat reggae and plundered imagery really cut through my defences as a pre-teen, making something as routine as a rain-drenched road trip in the rain feel as though it could be a portal to a whole new world. It didn't translate into enthusiasm for the product on my part, but there was something about the ad in itself that I always found strangely reassuring.

A paradox presented throughout the montage has to do with the fine line depicted between euphoria and absurdity - the intoxication of soaring to the most dizzying of emotional heights is tempered by the acknowledgement that, sooner or later, everything must succumb to gravity and come crashing back down to Earth. The ad is structured around an intermittent interplay between the more down-to-earth reality and the protagonist's enraptured state, so that a brief encounter with an umbrella-bearing pedestrian flashing him a bemused smile is processed as a recreation of the "V-J Day in Times Square" photograph (which is less disturbing than the real thing, given that he doesn't have her in a headlock). The peak of his exhilaration is incorporated largely through footage of sporting victories, in which both players and spectators are seen celebrating; his euphoria also gets him as high as moon, where, somewhat conversely, we see an astronaut stumble. Pratfalls are as integral to this montage as are jubilation - a jockey is also propelled off his horse by the same beam of energy we saw trip up the astronaut, and the protagonist drives all the way to Bognor Regis to knock a Birdman contender off his perch (the Birdman rally being a competition based around who can defy gravity for furthest before taking an inevitable tumble). The importance of the pratfall, one suspects, is in affectionately underscoring a certain playful foolishness to human endeavour, which asserts that we should only take ourselves so seriously. The higher we fly, the more ridiculous we look when we fall, something the ad proposes should be embraced as part of the process of weathering that metaphorical rainfall - a willingness to look foolish is essential in order to experience the view from aloft, however ephemeral. This is borne out in the punchline of the ad, when the protagonist strolls into McDonald's, that most ubiquitous and prosaic of fast food restaurants, apparently still on top of the world in his head, only for his visibly sodden state to get him branded a hazard by the staff therein. It is a humbling reminder of the tensions between the protagonist's internal world and the more mundane realities, and yet the joke is not entirely at his expense. Consider that the protagonist is never jarred out of his reverie; instead, the world bends to accommodate him, the attendant's adjustment of the Wet Floor sign being service as much as anything he is going to receive at the counter. In addition, the attendant's sardonic wit, in relocating the sign, is depicted as a continuation of that same spirit of fun, albeit in a more low-key fashion. The message is very much that McDonald's is a haven for the fun-loving, in a world that does not see the fun embedded in enough places, even if that zest for living is inevitably expressed through the textures of everyday banality.

While the ad's heavy reliance on archival footage, intended to carry a ready-made cultural currency for the viewer, enables it to be creative and charming (some of the interweaving is implemented so shoddily, but perhaps that only caters to those charms), it might also speak to the homogeneity of the experience, the sense that participating in a consumerist culture means ingesting a universal purview that leaves no effectual room in which to express originality on our part. The limitations of the protagonist's reverie are that he is having to filter it through the lens of images that are not his own, incorporating himself into pre-existing archetypes rather than establishing himself as his own person. Despite his plucky individuality in embracing the rain, the driver is a consumer much like any other - as evidenced by the fact that he's living off a diet of Big Macs and recycled memories.

PS: I'm going to throw up my hands and admit that, despite my best efforts, I was never able to locate the original source of the footage at 0:37 (also featured on the cover of the Gazebo single). I am not as well-versed in silent cinema as I should be. Would you believe it, though, that same man also shows up in an episode of Henry's Cat? "1919: the year Magnus Fortitude invented amphibious boots..."

Lisa's Rival (aka And Believe Me, This Is Not A Dream!)

"Lisa's Rival" (1F17) is a strange episode. I don't think it receives due credit for just how strange it really is - presumably because it boasts what is, ostensibly at least, one of the more down-to-earth A-stories of Season 6. A new pupil joins Lisa's class and transpires to have an uncanny amount in common with the precocious Simpsons middle child - she also plays the saxophone and possesses an intellect well beyond her years. On the surface, it seems as though Lisa might finally have found a kindred spirit, but things are ever more complicated than that. The new girl, Allison Taylor (guest voice of Winona Ryder, of Mermaids fame), is talented and advanced in ways that seem to persistently undermine Lisa's own distinctions, not least in that she's better at netting adult recognition for her abilities - one of the greatest daggers to Lisa's heart comes in learning that Allison is actually a year younger than her, and was moved up from the 1st Grade because she found it unchallenging. The worst thing about it all, though? Allison is a lovely person, and 100% sincere about wanting to be friends with Lisa. Which makes it so much harder for Lisa to come to terms with the fact that she basically hates Allison's guts. The episode is very much a character study, in exploring how Lisa copes with emotions that, intellectually, she figures she should be above, and the story is accordingly modest in scope, climaxing with a sequence set around an entirely arbitrary school diorama contest, in which the real stakes have more to do with whether or not Lisa's conscience will prevail over her petty desire to see Allison fail just this once. There's no shortage of cartoonish wackiness, but it exists largely on the sidelines, with a subplot about Homer attempting to cut it as a door-to-door sugar salesman and a running gag where Milhouse is hunted by the FBI. In a season that also sees Homer becoming the prophesied leader of a masonic society, Springfield nearly being crushed by a comet, and a trip to an amusement park where the animatronics attempt to eviscerate the guests, the world in "Lisa's Rival" feels remarkably sedate.

Make no mistake, though, "Lisa's Rival" goes to stranger territory than all those episodes, but it's strange in subtler, more understated ways that hinge upon there being a disturbance in the very fabric of the show's reality. On surface, life carries on seemingly much as normal, yet clearly the world as we know is being shaken to its very foundations. I'd put it within the same category of Simpsons adventure as the previous season's "The Last Temptation of Homer", in that its plot revolves around the Simpsons universe appearing to have rewritten the very rules by which it operates. Allison feels as though she were cut from the same cloth as Mindy Simmons, with both gals proving impossibly deadly adversaries for their episode's respective protagonists - Mindy in repeatedly undermining the fundamentality of Homer's union with Marge, and Allison in demonstrating to Lisa that her allotted role as overachieving outlier isn't as set in stone as she's had the privilege of thinking for the past five seasons. In both cases, Homer and Lisa are forced into a position in which everything they've taken for granted about themselves and the world suddenly seems to hang queasily in the balance. And when things are decidedly off in Camp Simpson, the universe as a whole seems significantly less balanced. 

The cataclysmic nature of the crisis is slyly hinted in the episode's beginning, which kicks off with a sequence based around Lisa disturbing each of her family (Maggie included) in succession with her saxophone-blowing, until finally she decides to take her practising outside to the backyard; this culminates with a throwaway gag where her playing is overheard by Ned Flanders and his sons, who mistake it for Gabriel's trumpet and joyously exclaim that Judgement Day is upon them. The Flanders clan might well be onto something there, because the following day does indeed transform into one of reckoning for Lisa - in her case, she appears to have woken up with the wrath of the universe raining down on her head for no other reason than the cosmos is bored and desires a new plaything. This much is reflected in Miss Hoover's weary reaction to the prospect of yet another day with Lisa being the only student in her classroom to display any degree of appetite for learning; far from something to be cherished or encouraged, Lisa's singularity in that regard is simply a reinforcement of that never-ending cycle of monotony. Allison's interjection is welcomed by Hoover because it signals a break from this inertia. At this point, we have no reason to believe that Allison is in any way superior to Lisa - as far as we know, she would have correctly answered Hoover's question on Columbus, had the universe followed its conventional course. The real disturbance comes in Hoover's open display of favouritism toward Allison, with Lisa being bothered by the fact that she has never made Hoover "Yowee". The universe as a whole seems to vastly prefer Allison, in spite of the fact that she isn't doing things massively different to Lisa, and with Hoover's reaction it's tempting to see the entire arrangement as a gigantic conspiracy against Lisa, something that's frankly no harder to swallow than the likelihood of a girl with such an uncanny amount of common ground entering her life in the first place. However you slice it, Lisa has become the victim of a particularly cruel cosmic joke.

All of which doesn't preclude it from also being a really good school-yard drama, where Lisa gets to deal with some of the messiest of human impulses and, finally, to assess what's actually important to her. Viewing the situation through entirely rational lens, her reaction to Allison might seem somewhat petty - after all, Allison being a little better than her as an academic and a saxophonist doesn't suddenly negate the fact that she's still incredibly advanced for her age (and for a Springfieldian, period). And yet, who among us is going to claim that if we were in Lisa's shoes, we wouldn't have grappled with the exact same dilemma? Lisa's life might be one of undervalued solitude, but at least she has her stellar grades and musical flair to reassure her that, no matter how miserable things might get, she is, in fact, doing well. Yeardley Smith, the voice of Lisa, admits in the episode's DVD commentary that she was quite upset upon reading the synopsis, because she knew this was a situation that Lisa would really struggle with: "It was bad enough that her father doesn't understand her and that she doesn't have any friends, but now suddenly she has this kid who's younger than her and better at everything. And I thought, this is going to crush her soul...I was a bit worried about her."

First, though, let's tackle that whole subplot about Homer and the sugar pile...I will admit upfront that I have somewhat mixed feelings about it. It absolutely didn't surprise me to learn that this episode was written by Mike Scully because, despite the deceptively placid nature of the Lisa A-story, the Homer subplot is a pretty telling indicator of the direction the show would eventually be taking during his tenure as showrunner. It's ridiculous and random as hell, features Homer at his most abrasive and in-your-face (at this point, anyway) and is, let's face it, kind of shallow and really kind of dumb. Having said that, there is something undeniably endearing about the simplicity of it all - Homer pilfers a whole load of spilled sugar from a roadside accident, and really is so stoked to have a mountain of ill-gotten Texas tea-sweetener stashed away in his backyard that he loses his marbles with delirium. There's a brief allusion that, just for a moment, threatens to transform the sugar into some kind of cocaine metaphor (Homer quotes Tony Montana from Scarface), but the episode doesn't hammer too far on this point, content simply to explore whatever rich possibilities arise from Homer getting excited over a big pile of sugar. This produces a handful of classic moments - like everyone else, I can't help but laugh at Homer's misconception that the plant's, "Don't come in on Monday", means he's getting a four day weekend. But at the same time, Homer is so giddy and obsessive in his sugar craze that it borders on being intermittently frightening. His inexplicable "What's to be done with this Homer Simpson?" spiel is another fan favourite moment, although for me it feels uncomfortably reminiscent of that sequence from "Secrets of a Successful Marriage" (boo, hiss) of Season 5, when Marge requests that Homer stop sharing personal secrets about her, and he responds by bleating out an incoherent deluge of non-sequiturs that are all taken from lines from random movies. It bothers me less here, as Homer isn't being quite so jaw-droppingly insensitive to Marge specifically; nevertheless, it's between these two sequences that I think you can pinpoint Homer's descent from relatable underdog to out-and-out Looney Tune. This Homer, larger than life and prone to spewing random movie quotes, could be hilarious and he could be infuriating, depending on what situation he was in, but in neither case does he reason or respond to anything like an actual human being. (Speaking of non-sequiturs, this may be the episode where dispensing them became Ralph Wiggum's defining characteristic. The kid always occupied Cloud Cuckoo Land, but it's here that he seems to derail from reality altogether. Was Mittens the catfood-scented cat ever referenced again? Or did the writers forget they gave the Wiggums a cat, much as they forgot they once gave Smithers a Yorkshire terrier?)

The other notable thing about the sugar subplot is that it really has sod-all to do with the A-story. It's not a strict requisite for a subplot have any kind of meaningful bearing upon the main narrative in order to be successful, but here there's zero intersection whatsoever; the two stories feel lightyears apart from one another. At most, they have a couple of features in common - Marge hovers helplessly on the sidelines of both narratives, unable to find the words that will convince Lisa to see her problem differently, or to talk Homer down from his sugar high, and Skinner also worms his way into both. The most interesting thing the alignment ends up doing is to highlight a somewhat contradictory aspect to Bart, who gets to be both Homer's (overridden) moral compass during his theft of the sugar pile, commending him for his downright decent offer of help to Hans Moleman and questioning the legality of taking of the sugar, and later the force beckoning Lisa into what is, in Bart's own words, "the nether regions of the soul".  Bart revels in mayhem, and he whole-heartedly seizes the opportunity to bring out Lisa's own capacity for devilry, but he is just as capable of drawing the line wherever he senses the responsibility ought to fall to him. The all-important factor, one supposes, is in how much gratification there is to be had in subverting the established order - with Homer, Bart is pretty much forced into being the adult of the situation, whereas with Lisa he gets the satisfaction of seeing someone who figures they're too mature to be playing with fire discover just how intoxicating it can be. That, and Bart does seem to genuinely sympathise with Lisa's plight. Despite that he is clearly posited as a corruptive force for Lisa, in encouraging her to play dirty in her one-sided war against Allison, "Lisa's Rival" still contains a really good example of that ever-enduring Simpsons solidarity, with Bart explicitly wanting to help Lisa because he can't stand to see her so miserable (except in matters of a rubber spider being placed down her dress).

Bart might have Lisa's back, but he clearly represents a kind of danger to Lisa throughout the episode - which is to say, Lisa's shadow self, the slippery slope down which she risks descending if she allows her rivalry with Allison to get the better of her. Lisa is effectively caught between two poles, with Allison embodying the kind of moral and intellectual purity that she acknowledges should be commended, and Bart the darker impulses that complicate her ability to do so. At one point Lisa admits that, "I should be Allison's friend, not her competitor. I mean, she is a wonderful person", with which Bart agrees, but in a backhanded manner that cuts directly to Lisa's deepest anxieties: "Why compete with someone who's just going to kick your butt anyway?" Lisa does not disagree with this assessment, but she objects to Bart's phrasing. The fact that Allison is such a wonderful person is, of course, the most offensive thing about the girl; it a sentiment that Lisa later repeats to Allison's face when she is invited over to her house, but with an obvious resignation that barely disguises her deep frustrations. On the one hand, Allison's arrival is a golden opportunity for Lisa to experience the kind of friendship and understanding that she's often struggled to attain among her peers, a fact to which Lisa herself is by no means blind. Allison is, in many respects, her own mirror image (as per the DVD commentary, Allison was named after Scully's own daughters, Allison and Taylor, although we might also note the number of common letters in "Lisa" and "Allison"). But the mirror is distorted; it is as if two parallel universes are undertaking a freak convergence, offering Lisa a tantalising glimpse of the better version of herself she might have been if the stars were just a little more aligned in her favour. Part of what fuels Lisa's jealousy toward Allison is the realisation that she's having a much easier ride of it than her, at least where adults are concerned - she was moved up a grade, she makes Hoover "Yowee", and she has a father who is a professor and likes to play intellectual wordplay games with her. On that basis, she is living Lisa's dream life. Occasionally, though, we do see flashes of vulnerability on Allison's part - not least that, to her peers, she's just a nail sticking out inviting a good hammering down, as Lisa was before her. In being outshone by Allison, Lisa finds that she's also less visible to bullies, who take to harassing Allison in her place. Lisa's observation that, "It used to be my face in that mud", on seeing Allison get pushed to the ground by a couple of girls, is ambiguous - it's not altogether clear if she's bemoaning the fact that her erstwhile tormentors have moved on to another target, or if she's empathising with Allison's plight, in acknowledging that, yes sir, it does really suck being at the top. With that in mind, you can understand why Allison is so eager to make things work between herself and Lisa. It's not as though she has a whole lot of options for making friends elsewhere. This, actually, may be one of the most satisfying things about "Lisa's Rival" - that it takes the time to make Allison a fully human character too. Inevitably, we are limited in the amount of insight we get into Allison's mindset, since we're seeing the situation exclusively from Lisa's point of view, but we get inkling enough of what her own anxieties and weaknesses are, particularly at the end of the episode, when Allison makes a casual revelation that, with hindsight, casts her seemingly effortless overachieving in a slightly different light. And Ryder brings such warmth to the character vocally that, although we side with Lisa in understanding exactly what kind of threat she poses, it's extremely difficult to feel much in the way of hostility toward Allison personally.

With the exception of Marge (and Homer, although he does not involve himself in Lisa's story), most of the grown-up folk are in full-on jerk mode throughout "Lisa's Rival", grotesque caricatures of adult insensitivity and indifference toward childhood insecurity. They are required to be, so as to act as mouthpieces for this great cosmic giggle at Lisa's expense. This includes Allison father, Professor Taylor, who yields the most staggeringly condescending response when Lisa struggles to play his ridiculous celebrity anagram game (seriously, I've noodled around with the name Jeremy Irons and, as far as I can see, the only halfway viable answer is the one Lisa gave. How many celebrities, besides Alec Guinness, does it even work with anyway?*). But she has a far more gruelling time of it on school premises, where she not only has to contend with Hoover's partialities, but her band audition escalates into an all-out nightmare, culminating in a fake-out so arbitrarily, disarmingly and inexplicably quirky that it's hard to imagine the episode as a whole being quite the same without it. I speak, of course, of Lisa's false awakening after passing out during her saxophone duel with Allison (on top of everything else, Allison has the better lung capacity); Largo congratulates Lisa on having "made it", before clarifying that he was referring to her regaining consciousness, and that Allison won first chair. Lisa screams in horror, whereupon we fade out, to find her back down on the auditorium floor. "Oh, just a dream", she murmurs in relief...only for the exact same sequence to repeat itself, but with the added detail of Largo getting right up in her face and declaring, with disturbing intensity, "AND BELIEVE ME, THIS IS NOT A DREAM!" There's something about Largo's bulging eyes (complete with the disproportionately large pupils that were endemic to this era of the series), his Muppet-shaped nose and that very Aardman-esque mouth that makes the moment legitimately terrifying.

What's odd - and I am going strictly from memory here - is that I swear Sky 1 used to cut the false awakening part of the sequence, jumping directly to Lisa's "Just a dream" and running from there. I recall it came as something of a revelation to later see the sequence intact and to understand her remark in its proper context. Before then, it wasn't exactly clear to me what Lisa was dismissing as "just a dream" - the disastrous endings to her saxophone audition? Her rivalry with Allison, period? Strangely, though, I never felt that the joke lost anything for it. The punchline - the grotesque fervor with which Largo impresses the reality of the nightmare upon her - stands just as well on its own as a declaration of how violently and malevolently the cosmos is determined to rub its displacement of Lisa in her face. Largo's line may indeed be the episode's all-defining one. (Not that fantasy offers any real refuge for Lisa either, as she later discovers when she tries to imagine how life would be if she embraced her Born To Runner-up status and formed a musical act with Art Garfunkel, Jim Messina and John Oates. Why would they come to our concert just to boo us, indeed.)

Skinner is also on good - if absurdly malleable - form in "Lisa's Rival". His presence permeates every corner of the episode - as noted, he has a cameo in Homer's story, and in the opening sequence his voice is heard on the receiving end of Bart's attempted prank call ("As a matter of fact, my refrigerator wasn't running. You've spared me quite a bit of spoilage. Thank you, anonymous young man!"). At one point, Marge hilariously misunderstands Lisa's suggestion that she might be moved up a grade if her mother were "nicer" to Skinner ("Lisa! I am nice!" Yeah, I have a feeling that Skinner wouldn't go for it, anyway). He even appears at Largo's side during the band audition, and while he doesn't contribute anything to this sequence in narrative terms, I dig the subtle character details of him starting blankly and yawning, indicating just how bored out of his skull he is by the entire process. Where he really peaks, though, is in the climax, when he's tasked with judging the entries for the diorama contest, and gets to rabidly turn on Allison the instant she does something to indicate she might be anything less than perfect (although she is very blatantly being set up). Naturally, he is but a puppet getting his strings pulled by some higher power intent on making the situation as unendurable as possible for Lisa, but he gets a nice revealing moment where he lets slip his bitterness at how his own talents and ambitions have been left in the shade ("Elementary school is where I wound up and it's too late to do anything about that!").

With help from her brother, Lisa is given the opportunity to dispose of Allison and reassert her position as resident overachiever - Bart takes Allison's diorama on the Edgar Allan Poe story, "The Tell-Tale Heart", and replaces it with a box containing an actual cow heart, making Allison look like a bit of a sick prankster in the eyes of Skinner. As their stunt plays out, Lisa faces a paradox - she finds that she cannot destroy Allison without also destroying herself in the process. In that regard, the climax of the episode feels less evocative of "The Tell-Tale Heart" than of another Edgar Allan Poe story, "William Wilson". Here, a man is persistently plagued by his doppelganger, before eventually murdering him and receiving the grim warning that: "from now on you are also dead - dead to the World, dead to Heaven, dead to Hope! In me you lived - and, in my death - see by this face, which is your own, how wholly, how completely, you have killed - yourself!"  In engineering Allison's fall from grace, Lisa is called upon to debase her own character and to fundamentally alter who she is - her self-definition is founded on not only her pre-eminence within the classroom, but on her integrity and willingness to always do the right thing. Thus, to defeat Allison in this manner would result not in a restoration of the established order, but the birth of a new and corrupted one, in which Lisa has no chance of recovering all that she was. Malice is never pretty, but it's particularly unpalatable when levelled at someone as sweetly unsuspecting as Allison, who is the very bastion of those values that Lisa herself holds so dear.

Lisa is able to spare herself the fate of William Wilson - her own heart wins out against her eagerness to win, and she returns Allison's diorama. Unfortunately, it's now Allison's turn to discover just how fickle the Simpsons universe can be - no sooner has she been restored to Skinner's good graces, when he suddenly decides that she's lost her lustre. Skinner glances at her meticulously-crafted diorama and declares it, "a little sterile...no real insight." "Meh", agrees Hoover, all out of Yowees. With Allison's welcome having all but expired, the stage appears to be set for Lisa to reclaim her top spot, although Lisa herself is quite miserable at the prospect: "After the way I've behaved, I don't deserve to win." The universe agrees. Instead, it reveals the endgame to this particular round of Status Quo-prodding. Turns out, Allison was merely a pawn in an even more diabolical cosmic joke still - Skinner awards first prize to Ralph, who doesn't know what a diorama is and just showed up with a box of Star Wars action figures (still in their original packages, mind). And really, could there being a more telling sign that life in Springfield is up and running as usual? Perhaps the cruellest aspect of Allison's reign of terror is not in how she honed in so ruthlessly on Lisa's well-marked territory, but in how she taunted Lisa by demonstrating that intelligence and diligence could indeed lead to recognition and reward (if inevitably only to somebody else). Since when has it ever been within Springfield's ethos to value such things? Forced to take her proper place as Lisa's equal in unsung achievement, Allison admits that she's actually relieved to have been upstaged, for once in her life, since it's helped her to see that losing isn't the end of the world. This is an interesting revelation, since up until now, we've never really had any hint that that's what's been driving Allison. Marge's assurance that, "She's more scared of you than you are of her" had previously netted the sardonic response that, "You're thinking of bears, Mom." But maybe Marge was onto something after all. Maybe Allison has lived with the interminable pressure of knowing that one day, if not Lisa, then certainly somebody will come along and prove every bit her own match. That is the real curse of being at the top; to quote the classic Twilight Zone episode, "A Game of Pool", being the best of anything carries with it a special obligation to keep on proving it.

In the end, Lisa apologises to Allison for attempting to sabotage her entry, and Allison, with no hard feelings, asks if the two of them can still be friends. "Only if we're the best," says Lisa. It's a sweet conclusion, but sadly any seasoned viewer knows full well that it's not going to stick. Allison is voiced by an A-list celebrity, and the rules therefore dictate that she will not be staying on as a cast fixture. As with Mindy Simmons, you might occasionally catch her hovering around the background of select episodes, one of her most prominent appearances being in the Season 10 opener "Lard of The Dance", in which she, like everyone else, was wowed over by a new girl named Alex (guest voice of Lisa Kudrow - "Your name's Lisa? Shut up, I love that name!") who puts Lisa in the shade, all while Homer is running around chasing some phantom enterprise in dubiously harvested foodstuff and, jeez, I hope that the writers were at least aware of the irony.

And now for my hottest, spiciest take on anything in "Lisa's Rival". For my money, do you know what's better than the entire sugar pile subplot (Beemobile and all)? Better even than Milhouse's brush with the FBI? Marge reading Love In The Time of Scurvy (a play on Gabriel García Márquez's Love In The Time of Cholera) and her thwarted attempt at saucy fantasy with her imaginary pirate bo. It's a small but charming insight into Marge's quest for alleviation from her own life of thankless solitude (regulated discreetly into the backdrop of the episode, as is often the case with such insights), and I love how it receives a callback a little later on, when we catch Marge reclining with the same tome, only to be jarred back into her pirate-less living room by an anguished Lisa. The theme of corrupted dreaming, of reality ruthlessly hunting you down, no matter how far you attempt to retreat into fantasy, actually seems to be a running one for this episode. To wrap things up with a cheap allusion that takes advantage of our guest celebrity of the week, we might even say that Reality...Bites.

*Although I tried Art Garfunkel and got Feral Gunk Rat. I'm quite pleased with that.

High Time You Grew Up (aka Beware The Friendly Stranger)

There's a connection between an obscure, long out-of-print children's poetry anthology and early 90s pop music that you likely don't appreciate. I myself was entirely oblivious to it until just a week or so ago, when I happened to dig my old copy out of storage. The book in question is High Time You Grew Up, which was printed by Mary Glasgow Publications in 1989, and compiled by poet Fred Sedgwick as part of the This Way That Way series, a collection comprised of ten anthologies, five of which were aimed at the infant demographic (ages 4-7), and five at juniors (8-11). The series seemed to be quite popular when I was child - at the very least, copies were prolific enough throughout my own school - so shame that they've effectively fallen off the face of the planet (before being reunited with my own copy, I'd attempted to source another from Abebooks, and my search came up woefully short). The connection occurs on page 3, with Sedgwick's presentation of "Fragment" by Gerda Mayer. If the accompanying illustration, courtesy of Felicity Roma Bowers, strikes you as oddly familiar, it's because it's the same image (more or less) that appears on the cover for the Genesis album We Can't Dance - and, yes, it was created for this book first, before finding its way into the hands of Collins and crew. On the Genesis album, the background colours have been modified for a more dominant yellow effect, and the child's silhouette has been tweaked - a girl in the original, on We Can't Dance they have been given a more masculine appearance, and a hat similar to that of the adult figure, emphasising that the two are to be seen as generational counterparts, a move that seems particularly evocative of the opening track, "No Son of Mine" (indeed, the "No Son of Mine" single offers another variation on the image, this time showing the child alone and abandoned). That is this anthology's claim to pop cultural fame, and for that reason alone it should not be permitted to sink into obscurity.

 

Original image

We Can't Dance cover

 

I know none of the details regarding how Bowers' art was brought to the band's attention, but it strikes me as wholly appropriate that an illustration from this particular anthology should have touched a nerve with somebody within the Genesis ranks, in seeking a graphic correlative to a song about the regretful frictions that dominate a parent-child relationship. More compelling still is how the cover illustration to "No Son of Mine" seems to function as an extension of the anthology as a whole, its relation thematically as much as aesthetically - the image of a child, left to contemplate the world by their lonesome, perhaps prematurely, but on some level almost certainly permanently, feels like the perfect all-purpose visual tag-line to any number of poems from this collection.

The title of Sedgwick's anthology was taken from the final poem, "High Time You Grew Up" by David Kitchen, and clues us in that the overarching theme of the collection has to do with the anxieties and inevitabilities of coming of age - in particular the clashes of will between parent and child as the latter is tasked with having to navigate from childhood and to adulthood, and confronting the realisation that they cannot stay in their place of perceived safety forever. Not every poem follows this theme overtly - "Home Sweet Home" by John Gohorry, for example, is a charming piece of nonsense verse that appears to emphasise the necessity of remaining young at heart. Ditto "The Walk" by Anonymous, which mimics the structure of a children's party game in which a story is recited continuously in succession, with a new detail added with each participant. Some of the poems examine this sense of bygone innocence from a perspective in which time and space are the antagonists - for example, in "Back Home" by Amryl Johnson, the poet reflects on her nostalgia for her childhood in Trinidad, and the feeling of cultural displacement that continues to reverberate through her present life in London, with the conclusion that, "Back home is just a sad-sweet memory". Some have the echoes of the historical traumas that stand between the past and the present; in "Fragment", we see Mayer, whose Jewish family were forced to flee her native Karlsbad in 1938 to escape the incoming Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, pay tribute to the "frail ghosts...faint tune" that is the memory of herself and her father playfully holding up a mouthorgan to the Bohemian winds. Elsewhere, multiple poems deal specifically with the failure of parents and children to see eye-to-eye, with consequences ranging from the farcical to the downright gruesome. Some of these conflicts are fully benign - "Eating Habits", the only poem in the anthology to be contributed by Sedgwick himself, offers a humorous bit of role reversal in which a child relates their exasperation at being unable to convince their mother to swap her granary loaves for unhealthy white bread ("I've really tried to show that what's, well, good, isn't always good for you"). In "Old Grandpa - A Poem To Finish" by John Cotton, we hear the opening details of an anecdote about a familial senior, a grandparent this time, whose faded eyesight and adrenaline-chasing propensities will spell trouble for anyone foolhardy enough to hop aboard the pillion of his trusty Norton. Four of the poems find children having to cope with situations where they are left without parental oversight, only one of which, "Half Asleep" by Wes Magee, is especially non-threatening in nature. In the others, the children end up contending with demons both internal ("The Purse" by David Kitchen) and external ("Eddy Scott Goes Out To Play" by David Orme), and maybe something in between (the title poem). It's this particular threesome of poems that most got under my skin whilst reading the anthology as a child. Although the We Can't Dance connection immediately made the publication that much more fascinating to me, you might have picked up on the fact that I was looking to reacquaint myself with it before I knew that it was there, and you really have these three poems to thank for that. They made their mark on me because they each, in their own individual ways, managed to chip away at a little piece of my own perceived childhood safety. On a thematic level, they also segue beautifully into one another, and would have made a brilliant closing trilogy to the collection if not for the rather awkward placement of "Eating Habits" in between "The Purse" and "Eddy Scott".

The first of the three, "The Purse", is told from the perspective of a young kleptomaniac who compulsively steals from his mother's purse whenever he's left alone inside the house. His mother is seemingly unaware of her son's thieving compulsions and regularly buys him things; pleads the protagonist: "Each kindness makes it worse/Because I know, when she's next door/My hands will find her purse." The poem plays like a darker, more introspective version of Allan Ahlberg's "I Did A Bad Thing Once" (from the collection Please Mrs Butler), in which the confessor is unable to fathom his compulsive actions, just that he will, invariably, surrender to them. His observation that "my hands will find her purse" indicates that he sees his body as operating independently of his will. In Sedgwick's anthology, the impact of the poem is enhanced by illustrations by Kim Palmer; they are presented in black and white, the only illustrations in the anthology to adopt this approach, the effect of which is to give the images a cold, washed-out feeling that is reflective both of the protagonist's blanched, fearful state and the self-loathing vantage point from which they can only contemplate the whole sorry business. Despite his admission that he has never been caught and made to face any consequences for his actions, he laments that, "I'm sure someone's watching me", alluding to his own guilt and better judgement; this much is captured in one illustration in which we get a voyeuristic glimpse of the protagonist edging toward the purse from a reserved enough distance on our part. Above the protagonist is a framed picture, too far away to make out; on the next page, we see that it is a picture of a woman and child, which we assume to be the mother and protagonist at a younger age. In the present, his back is turned to the image as he steals from her purse. There is a sense of time coming between them and threatening to blemish their relationship - from the sounds of it, his mother is unwilling to let go of that ideal vision of her son, while the boy himself knows it to be no longer there. The world he now inhabits is a more precarious and confusing one, in which is mother remains, in a distinctly unhappy way, a source of comfort and stability; latching onto her purpose is how he maintains his sense of normalcy and stability.

His situation is positively rosy compared to that of "Eddy Scott Goes Out To Play", which may be the darkest, single most fucked up poem I think I've ever encountered in an anthology marketed explicitly toward children. I at least suspect that it was intended for a slightly older age range than the one advertised on the cover. Orme's poem tells the woeful tale of a child whose daily routine involves being turned outside to feed and entertain himself, equipped with a pound ostensibly for his dinner. On this fateful occasion, Eddy blows his coin on a fruit machine and, realising that he has no means with which to feed himself, starts scavenging the arcade desperately for dropped change. He is approached by a stranger who has taken notice of his plight, but it quickly becomes apparent that their concern veils a far more sinister agenda. Sadly, although Eddy has been expressly advised not to "talk to funny men", he sees nothing at all threatening about this scenario (what he really could have done with is a talking cat to keep him grounded), and accepts the stranger's offer to take him out for a slap up meal. The poem ends with Eddy's mother returning home from work to discover that Eddy hasn't made it back. Orme punctuates the narrative with italicised verses in which we are informed repeatedly that: "Eddy's mum's at work all day/Eddy's dad has gone away/Hot or cold, wet or fine/Eddy Scott's sent out to play" - the repetition reinforces the drudgery of Eddy's routine, but also enables Orme to conclude on a particularly ominous note, in offering a final variation of "Eddy was sent out to play". Although Eddy's fate remains unknown by the end of the poem, the shift to past tense isn't exactly a reassuring sign.

The corresponding illustrations are supplied by Barry Rowe, who's chosen to represent the predator as a shadowy figure in a trench coat and fedora who looks as though he strolled right out of a Humphrey Bogart noir. The fact that you can't discern the features on his face, compared to Eddy and his mother, marks him out as a dubious presence, a character doing their utmost not to draw attention to themselves (except to Eddy) and to disappear into the night once they've fulfilled their dubious deed. Pretty effective in its way, but I can't help but wonder how much starker the poem would read with no visual aids, and only Orme's words, where the stranger is identified merely as "someone" and no clear description of them is given (in fact, if we go by the text alone then we can't even take it for granted that Eddy's abductor is male). There, we have no reason to believe that they appear as anything other than perfectly amiable, as they presumably do to Eddy, and they keep a chilling anonymity about them, so that we, as much as Eddy's mother, have no idea with whom exactly Eddy has absconded.

"Eddy Scott Goes Out To Play" disturbed me as a child and it disturbs me now, although inevitably my perspective on the situation has shifted somewhat as I've gotten older. As a child, I think you get the satisfaction of feeling superior to Eddy, as you can spot well ahead of him what kind of danger he's in. We were, after all, taught from an early age that a stranger who offers you sweets and tries to get you to go with them inside their car is the reddest of red flags. I think I was also somewhat inclined to see it as a moral fable in which Eddy suffers the consequences, not simply for being gullible enough to get into a stranger's vehicle, but for feeding his lunch money to that dumb fruit machine in the first place. Revisiting the poem as an adult, however, I don't get the impression that Orme intended it as a condemnation of Eddy, who is, lest we forget, the victim of this scenario. The message is clearly that Eddy gets into his horrific situation because nobody is watching his back, except for the wrong sort of person. Arguably, the poem betrays a slight prejudice toward single parent families, with Eddy's mother posited as unable to manage the situation on her own (there is also deliberate ambiguity as to what is meant by his father having "gone away" - has he abandoned the family, is he in prison or is he dead? Seems a bit optimistic to suppose that he might be off on a business trip); nevertheless, there is a powerful contrast to be drawn between the absence/indifference of Eddy's parents and the observant attentions of the predatory stranger. We suppose that Eddy gravitates toward the latter not simply for the promise of a free meal, but because he's grateful to finally encounter somebody with so much interest in him. What's also striking about the poem is Eddy's total lack of a voice throughout - all of the dialogue heard comes from either his mother or the stranger, bringing a bitter irony to the ending observation that, when Eddy's mother returns home and calls for her son, "There'll be no answer: just her voice/Echoing along the wall". As for that dumb fruit machine, I note that Orme describes it as "hypnotising", making me feel that the stranger isn't the only aspect of this scenario that's ruthlessly preying on Eddy. The opening verse recalls the struggle described by the protagonist of "The Purse", who was willed to the titular object by a compulsion professedly beyond his control. Here, Eddy is lured to the fruit machine because the streets outside are dark and rainy, whereas the arcade appears bright and inviting; in that regard, the fruit machine acts as a precursor to the stranger themselves - attractive offers and a bright, friendly exterior that we expect to disappear not far down the line. The significance of the fruit machine is also echoed in that baleful final line, "Eddy was sent out to play", the suggestion being that Eddy has been prompted to gamble, both recreationally at the arcade, and in a broader, much more urgent sense, in going out every day and having to make life-or-death judgements in a world he's painfully ill-equipped to comprehend.

Finally, we have the anthology's titular poem, "High Time You Grew Up" by Kitchen once again, which I'm convinced was purposely positioned so as to round things off with a little comic levity following the nightmare scenario described in "Eddy Scott". Here, we have another situation in which our protagonist is faring badly with being left alone, except that this time they are safe within their own home. Their parents are right across the hallway, and whatever peril they might sense they are up against presumably exists exclusively within their head. Sleepless and alone in a darkened bedroom, they have a great nocturnal void to fill with whatever ludicrous horrors their imagination is able to concoct, intermittently earning the censure of their parents whenever the impulse to summon them becomes too strong. Like "The Purse", the poem is told in the first-person, giving us a direct line into the protagonist's erratic thought processes, which vacillate between reason and sudden irrational terror - they deduce that the brushing outside their window can't be a burglar, "'cause we've got nothing worth burgling", before going off on some inexplicable spiel about "the man with black eyes and black fingernails" who crawls into your bedroom at night in order to peel back your skin. There is a twist to this particular tale, and we'll get to that soon enough, but the really delicious irony of the poem, for me, lies in how Kitchen has chosen to represent the parents - not as reassuring guardians against the unknowns lurking in the dark, but as behemoths in their own right, periodically roused from their sleep to bring their wrath down upon the protagonist. All of their dialogue is presented in capitals, which helps distinguish their voices from that of the protagonist, but it also gives them a thunderous, intimidating quality that is deliberately devoid of emotional warmth. They are the voice of reason to the core, plain-spoken intrusions on the protagonist's propensity for invention and for wild flights of fancy. This interchange is teased out further by Nicky Marsh's illustrations, which are agreeably colourful but give a certain playful grotesqueness to the characters, familiar but not quite the same beasts in the dead of night as we might expect to see in the day (certainly, the sight of the scowling mother, with her hair in curlers and her burly shadow, did little to help my own sleep as a child). Meanwhile, the parents' movements to and from the bedroom are tracked with a precise, rhythmic onomatopoeia ("A thump/A heavy thud, thud/A light on, four more steps"), the protagonist's attunement to which suggesting that they are well-accustomed to this routine from similar disputes on previous nights.

The character dynamics, and the title, take on a new perspective once we get to the punchline of the poem, when the father permits the protagonist to keep their bedroom light on, and asks them, with evident sarcasm, how old they are, to which they respond, "Thirty four, next birthday, Dad." Oh god, how funny it is now to contemplate that there was once a time in my life when 34 seemed ridiculously old, when reading that line and attempting to calculate how much life's experience that amounted to was utterly beyond my comprehension. Reading this book as an adult, I can't help but wonder if Sedgwick's decision to make this the title poem, and to effectively make that line the punchline to the entire anthology, was intended as his joke at the expense of any adult who might be reading, either back in 1989 or years down the line. Shouldn't you, he teases playfully, be doing something more grown-up than reading an anthology of children's poetry? This implicit jibe is complemented by the winking acknowledgement that there is, of course, tremendous value to be had in immersion into a little nostalgic childhood pleasure - the very nature of the anthology, in emphasising the relentless march of time and the inevitability of change, bears out just how satisfying it can be to puncture through all that and by remaining in touch with who you were back then. Obviously, you can't go home again. You can revisit the same old haunts, but never quite from the same angle. Can you work with what you see now?