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...
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