Who Shot Mr Burns? Part Two (aka Suspicion Could Tear Us Apart)

So, to answer a question to which I alluded in my previous commentary, why did the culprit in the "Who Shot Mr Burns?" mystery have to be Maggie, as opposed to the other obvious candidate who would have enabled the Springfield denizens to carry on as if nothing happened, guest celebrity Tito Puente? Simple. Because it had to be a Simpson. That much was always inevitable. I presume that this is the reason why Puente ended up with such miniscule odds at The Mirage (600/1) while Homer topped the list with odds of 2/1. Puente was as peripheral a candidate as can be, whereas the entire Simpson universe revolves around Homer and his clan. All of the important events in this world tend to intersect with the family in some way or another; why would the shooting of Mr Burns be any different? (Although to those of you who were swayed by Homer's high odds, I sincerely hope you were also banking on this all coming down to a really ridiculous accident, as opposed to wanting him to be exposed as an attempted murderer.) As a bonus, it also enabled to the writers to make implicit commentary on contemporary events involving a notorious namesake. I've no doubt that buried beneath all that emphasis on Simpson DNA is an underlying preoccupation with the O.J. Simpson trial, although ironically the most explicit this episode is prepared to get on the matter is with regards to Puente. "I can't see him doing something illegal," pleads Lisa, having inadvertently directed suspicion toward Tito. "He's in show business. He's a celebrity!"

Although "Who Shot Mr Burns? Part Two" (2F20) ends up dramatically upholding the law of Simpson-centrism, it starts out with deceptively little interest in the Simpsons themselves. The first act is all Smithers' story, more-or-less, and the family have surprisingly meagre input. There's a scene where Lisa obligingly reels off a few lines of exposition as to their own individual motives for inflicting harm on Burns, for the benefit of anyone who didn't see Part One or just has a really short memory, and a Vitamin D deficient Homer later joins in with a vigilante effort to dismantle Burns' sun-blocker. At first, the family are quite happy with the (as it turns out, erroneous) assumption that Smithers was the shooter, because it alleviates whatever suspicion could potentially fall on them; hence, it's up to Sideshow Mel (getting more exposure than he'd ever received at this point in the series) to right the serious injustice. With Smithers cleared and the case re-opened, Lisa takes an interest in conducting her own amateur investigation, becoming the audience surrogate in the process, yet the second act is more heavily centred on Wiggum's formal investigation. It's only when Simpson DNA is uncovered from Burns' clothing that everything clicks into place and the family find themselves at the centre of attention - narrative and forensic - when, just this once, it would have been in their best interests to have maintained a low profile.

I feel this a minority opinion, but I prefer Part Two to its predecessor. Part One tends to be the more fondly-remembered of the two, and I've no doubt that the reasons for that are at least partially rooted in the fact that Part One opened up such an exciting barrage of possibilities that Part Two seemed always destined to disappoint, by providing an answer that was unlikely to satisfy everyone. Anticlimax is the inevitable bugbear of any whodunnit that captures the imagination of zeitgeist  - I've no idea how it worked out for Dallas and the "Who Shot J.R.?" mystery, but most Twin Peaks fans are agreed that the series was so much more fun before the question of  "Who killed Laura Palmer?" was prematurely answered. Irrespective of where all of this is eventually headed, I'd rate Part Two as the more purely enjoyable installment. Part One had to juggle so much plot, exposition and dramatic tension that it overall becomes something of a cumbersome experience for anybody less interested in exploring the particulars of the mystery than in hanging out for 20-odd minutes with their favourite characters. Despite having a heap of fall-out to unpick from Part One, Part Two is content to let the pieces fall where they may; it unfolds at a more leisurely pace than Part One, and has more fun building scenes around the various Springfieldians and exploring their reactions to finding themselves caught up in the middle of such a heinous whodunnit. It clearly isn't bound by the same obligation as its predecessor to keep everything as tightly plot-focussed as possible - the big musical centrepiece of the episode, Tito Puente's slanderous mambo, "Senor Burns", takes up a whole minute and has fairly little to add in terms of narrative substance. But it would be an awful shame if we went to all the trouble of bringing Puente into a two-part episode and didn't get to hear his Latin Jazz Ensemble in action (as a bonus, we also get an overdue reappearance from Gulliver Dark, the lounge singer from "Homer's Night Out"). The sporadic screen-time afforded the family in the episode's front-end means that several members of the supporting cast get to do a generous amount of narrative heavy-lifting - including one who'd had few real opportunities in which to shine up until now. Sideshow Mel, here giving his full name as Melvin Van Horn, finally gets to demonstrate that he can be good for something other than suffering abuse in the name of slapstick and inviting negative comparisons to Bob, becoming the surprise hero of the first act by speaking up for Smithers' innocence. Jasper also makes a couple of small but indispensable appearances, exercising a bizarre one-man vigilantism with an eye toward upholding sidewalk and drive-through etiquette. And of course it's great seeing the emotional drama of Smithers' arc continue on from Part One, as he grapples with the uneasy feeling that he might have done something terribly out of character while intoxicated (and gets a particularly surreal false awakening into the bargain).

All that being said, Part One was so over-burdened with build-up that it's somewhat inevitable that a number of story threads end up being fudged or completely forgotten. The whole matter of Burns' sun-blocking device is gotten out of the way early on - and, for as much terror as the thing inspired in Part One, the townspeople seem to have little difficulty in bringing it down. Meanwhile, Marge's closing suggestion that "we can all get back to normal" seems particularly glib when you consider just how many loose threads from Part One there are still left hanging by the end of Part Two. Are Burns and Smithers reconciled? Was Moe's bar re-opened? Have the school's financial troubles been resolved, enabling Willie and Largo to be rehired? The answer to all of those questions is obviously, "Yes", but only because Marge's reassertion of normalcy paves the way for all of that to be conveniently reset by the beginning of the next episode. Whereas Part One bowed out on a rare note of Simpsons solemnity, with the suggestion that what had just gone down might have serious ramifications for the show going forward, Part Two flies in the face of that, in gleefully shirking just about anything resembling consequence. The episode's biggest trick is in how it reveals itself as the punchline, rather than the extension of, the momentousness built up around Part One, brushing it all aside with a wink and a "Naaah, we're not going to be doing that!"

But for one tiny exception. As it turns out, something of lingering consequence does happen in Part Two, but it's squirrelled away so delicately within the fabric of the story that odds are that you didn't even notice it the first time you saw it. "Who Shot Mr Burns? Part Two" opens with a series of fake-outs that are purposely designed to exploit our uncertainty regarding the other lingering question that went hand in hand with the titular one, but was less amenable for building an official contest around - did Burns survive the shooting? The episode opens with a hungover Smithers finding Burns alive and well in his shower, a la Bobby Ewing in Dallas - discarding the whole "Who Shot Mr Burns?" arc then and there, as Dallas did for the entirety of its Season 9, would have been one heck of an audacious move for the series...but most viewers would be savvy enough to know right away that something is up. That Smithers is confronted by such a buoyantly naked Burns in his shower already seems to mark this out as wish fulfilment on his part, and as soon as we get into that whole Speedway Squad business, we know that we're in false awakening territory here (as much as I would pay good money to watch a spin-off series where Burns and Smithers are undercover detectives on the hot rod circuit). I wonder, though, how many viewers were genuinely caught off-guard by the subsequent bit of trolling from Kent Brockman's lips, as he brings us up to speed on the aftermath of the shooting: "Burns was rushed to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead. He was then transferred to a better hospital, where doctors upgraded his condition to alive." With that went the first prospect of this having any kind of significant impact on the series, and a good thing too - there can't have been many viewers who actually wanted The Simpsons to do away with Burns. Still, we remain so fixated on Burns' fate, and the identity of his would-be killer, that we might miss the subtler reference to an established character's demise that goes on in the backdrop. Along with everything else, "Who Short Mr Burns? Part Two" is the episode that officially laid Dr Marvin Monroe to rest. The character wasn't deemed worthy of a big tearful send-off, a la Bleeding Gums Murphy - instead, news of his passing occurs only implicitly, when Lou gets a call on his police radio telling him to report immediately to the Marvin Monroe Memorial Hospital where the fugitive Homer has been sighted. The death of Monroe was not explicitly announced until the clip show, "The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular", at which point I, like so many viewers, felt tremendously confused, wondering if I had somehow missed an episode. Going back and catching the reference to the Memorial Hospital in this episode was a big "a-ha!" moment for me. And what can I say, I kind of feel bad for Monroe. Not only did they kill him, they unceremoniously buried him, as a footnote in someone else's story, a bitter irony only underscored by the fact that Burns and Monroe are both voiced by Harry Shearer. Monroe hadn't been used in the series for some time, owing to the fact that Shearer hated doing his voice, but he had a fairly major presence in the first two or three seasons, and was regarded a great enough menace to be cast as a boss in the 1991 video game Bart vs. The Space Mutants (although he seemed a bit out of place alongside actual antagonists like Bob, Nelson and Ms Botz), while Burns was apparently not seen as important enough to even be included in the family's first video game outing. How massively had their fortunes reversed in the interim.

(And yes, I'm aware that Monroe's own condition was later inexplicably upgraded to alive for a Season 15 episode, "Diatribe of a Mad Housewife", retroactively making his status here somewhat confusing. I am focusing on what was clearly intended by the writers at the time, however.)

The million dollar question at heart of Part Two, and the overarching mystery as a whole, concerns whether or not the revelation that Maggie was the shooter is actually a good one. The answer to that, in my books, would be a resounding YES! But also NO! A common defence, when dissecting effectiveness of "Who Shot Mr Burns?" on the mystery front, is to insist that, no matter how seemingly out of nowhere the outcome, "the clues are all there".  Wood and Martyn do it in their reference book, I Can't Believe It's An Unofficial Simpsons Guide. David Sims does it in his review of the episode on The AV Club. And yes, it certainly is the case that the clues are all there BUT you've also got to keep in mind that, since everybody nowadays knows it was Maggie, we all have the luxury of getting to play the game backwards, ie: to use our knowledge of the culprit to identify whatever clues appear to specifically implicate them. Put yourself in the position of the fans in 1995 who were required to work things in the opposite direction - to identify which details were the all-important clues and whom they appeared to implicate - and I'm not convinced that the process translates half as well as a properly forward-played game. For as beautifully and intricately constructed as the mystery is, it does require the viewer to make a leap of narrative logic that I'm not convinced it was entirely reasonable to expect of them. The whole business with the sundial was well-observed, and cleverly implemented. The freeze frame shot revealing Burns' missing gun was also slickly done. I've still not tested this myself, but apparently if you follow the route Burns takes after leaving the town meeting and compare it to the miniature model of Springfield he'd showed to Smithers earlier, you'll see that he ends up in the parking lot where Marge had left Maggie and Santa's Little Helper. If so, then that's also great. Where the solution gets creaky, in my view, is in necessitating the assumption that, because Burns had previously made the casual suggestion that he and Smithers steal a peppermint stick from a baby in the plant daycare, he automatically has reason for taking an interest in Maggie, and that she in turn was capable of firing back at him. The circumstances surrounding the shooting are so flimsy and incidental compared to everything else going on in Part One - and that, I suspect, is why so few participants in 1995 were able to crack the mystery. It hinges on the viewer making the audacious supposition that Burns' prior remark about stealing candy from a baby translated into personal avidity on his part; that, in spite of how easily he allowed himself to be dissuaded, Burns was secretly annoyed that Smithers had prevented him carrying out this dastardly deed and would try it again given the next opportunity. And I'm sorry, but how is the viewer supposed to know that Burns' "I feel like celebrating" equates to "I want to indulge my sweet tooth"? What a load of crapulence.

The best way to interpret the whole taking candy from a baby thing - and Maggie's significance as the shooter, period - is on a symbolic level, it being indicative of Burns' contempt for Springfield as a whole, and his assumption that he could cheat, rob and finally deprive them of their basic right to sunlight, while they just lay there on their backs, clawing helplessly at thin air. Burns doesn't anticipate anybody having the power or the resolve to fight back against him, so perhaps there is some tremendous poetic justice in it taking a literal baby to bring him down, on behalf of everyone else in town. It's the classic David and Goliath story. But more importantly still, the revelation that the shooter was Maggie transforms the entire scenario into a middle finger directed squarely at the audience, and I do mean that in the most affectionate way possible. Leave it to The Simpsons to turn a cartoon shooting into a full-blown soap opera and get the whole world talking about it, only to have the solution come down to as mind-blowingly stupid a freak occurrence as Burns getting blasted by a baby while trying to steal their lollipop. And would you really want it any other way? It's exactly the kind of brilliantly subversive move I would expect from The Simpsons - to build an elaborate whodunnit with an endless array of possible leads and with so much seemingly at stake, only for the solution, when it comes, to show the entire thing up as a hilarious waste of time. It's an absurdity that's so much more in keeping with the spirit of the show than a more conventional denouement where we find out that Colonel Mustard did it with the breadstick and for the insurance money.

I just think it was a terribly flawed idea to use it as the basis of an official contest, that's all. In the end, that aspect of the mystery didn't boil down to very much more than a cynical publicity stunt, but so long as everyone had fun with it, I guess that's all that matters, right?

For eighteen minutes or so, the attempt on Burns' life is serious business, one of the more unexpected side-effects being that it brings out an unusually professional side to Wiggum, who isn't taking his duty to identify the culprit lightly. Oh sure, his investigation begins with his struggling to pronounce the word "motive" and ends with him getting tangled up in a gruesome-looking drive-through accident because he couldn't be bothered to leave his police wagon to collect his food order, but even he gets to display a few flashes of semi-competence along the way. When Smithers recalls that it wasn't Burns that he shot, but sidewalk vigilante Jasper, it's Wiggum who asks the logical question - if a second person was shot on the night in question, why did it go unreported? - facilitating the discovery that Smithers had conveniently shot Jasper in his wooden leg, and that the senile Jasper has no memory of the incident. It's also Wiggum who at the end shuts down Burns' ludicrous demand for retribution, with the reminder that no jurisdiction would hold a baby criminally accountable (maybe Texas). For all of that, though, it's ultimately Lisa, the plucky amateur attempting to solve the mystery from her armchair, with whom the viewer is most likely to identify. She's sincere about wanting to get to the truth, but compared to Wiggum has an obvious emotional investment in where the evidence seems increasingly to be pointed. While we have every reason to believe that Lisa is a lot shrewder and more together than the adults fronting the official investigation, her own judgement is inevitably clouded by her personal attachment to some of the potential candidates, and not just Puente - right out of the gate, she wrong-foots her investigation with the understandable but erroneous assumption that nobody in her family could be capable of murder, instead encouraging the police to investigate the suspects who might have been avenging financial wrong-doings. When a DNA test on a vital piece of forensic evidence - an eyelash uncovered from Burns' suit - points to involvement from someone inside the Simpson clan, and the cries of an awakened Burns appear to implicate Homer, Lisa continues to advocate her father's innocence, although this does put her in the awkward position of hypothesising that there could be a traitor in the Simpson ranks.

The tactic of making Lisa the audience surrogate is an effective one - her first-hand understanding of what went on around the shooting is fairly narrow, so we get to uncover the truth precisely as she does - but occasionally presents some limitations. At one point the episode flat-out cheats, in having Lisa appear to recall from memory the all-important detail that Burns' own gun was missing as he staggered toward the sundial, in spite of the fact that she wasn't at the scene in question. The scene where Lisa attempts to rationalise how Homer's fingerprints could have ended up on the gun used to shoot Burns is likewise confusing - we see a flashback revealing that Homer unwittingly touched the gun whilst rummaging around the car floor for his dropped ice cream; Lisa was present, but the flashback isn't shown from her perspective, making it unclear if this is intended to be her conjecture or some objective third-person perspective sandwiched in for the viewer's convenience. But then Part Two in general is riddled with awkwardly-implemented memories and flashbacks; unusually for a non-clip show, it's a partial Frankenstein creation, with several extracts from its predecessor that, to the binge viewer, probably seem repetitive and unnecessary but are presumably there to make Part Two more comprehensible as a stand alone episode (again, for the benefit of anyone who didn't see Part One or just has a really short memory). For example, when Smithers is interrogated by police, he cites Burns' prior readiness to take candy from a baby as an example of how consumed by greed the man had become. I've already questioned the effectiveness of said scene in establishing a clear motive for Burns to later tangle with Maggie, although its repetition in Part Two is a big enough hint that we're to regard it as significant. More questionable is the inclusion of the sequence where Homer angrily confronts Burns in the latter's office - we'd already re-established at the beginning of the episode that Homer's "damn good reason" for wanting retribution was due to Burns' selective memory, so what's the purpose of this flashback? I'd hazard the guess that it's to provide some kind of context for why Burns, on emerging from his coma, can initially only say the name "Homer Simpson" over and over, since he'd been bombarded with this name shortly before the shooting, even if he didn't consciously take it in. This leads to the unfortunate misunderstanding that Burns is identifying his assailant, when a subsequent scene with Dr Nick makes it clear that he isn't doing this voluntarily. For the long-term fan, I'm not sure if this particular plot contrivance needs any context - I would have thought the joke was that being in a coma has temporarily rewired something in Burns' neural pathways, forcing him to communicate solely through the information he's been inexplicably suppressing all these years.

Another, likely unintentional consequence of Homer's flashback is that it potentially casts a smidgeon of doubt on the validity of the Simpsons DNA evidence, since it's never established to which family member that rogue eyelash even belonged. Clearly, we're meant to assume that it came from Maggie when she and Burns tussled over the lollipop, but isn't it just as plausible that Burns got it from Homer when he grabbed and shook him in the office? In the end, maybe that's not so important - the most damning evidence turns out to be not the DNA per se, but the gun uncovered from the Simpsons' car, with bullets matching the one removed from Burns (something the dummy ending from "138th Episode Spectacular" does not take into account). Perhaps the whole Simpson DNA thread was itself more indicative of a leap of faith that the viewer was already expected to make, in figuring that the titular family had to be involved somewhere (if so, it seems less of a stretch than whatever motive we were expected to ascribe to Burns' going after Maggie's lollipop). Just before Burns' denouement, Lisa manages to solve the mystery by herself (with a little assistance from a disease-ridden pigeon), and while she does so by picking up on the two most important clues from the end of Part One, by this stage both she and the viewer also have to accommodate the subsequent information suggesting that the shooter is someone very close to home. Lisa had already ruled out Marge on the basis that she's biologically a Bouvier, leaving only one other individual to whom MS could possibly refer. Let's look at how it might work from the viewer's perspective - if we were always operating on the assumption that it had to be one of the titular clan, on the grounds that it's their show, then suddenly it turns the mystery into a good old-fashioned game of Cluedo (or Clue, if you will), giving us six candidates to work with, three male, three female, and the opportunity to fish out the red herrings based on the clues available. It couldn't be Homer or Lisa because there's no way to connect them to what's on the sundial. The detail of Burns' missing gun is an obvious hint that he was felled by his own weapon, implying that he wasn't shot by either Abe or Bart using the former's Smith & Wesson. We already know that Marge didn't do it because we saw where she was when the shooting took place. That leaves us with only Maggie, which is consistent with what Burns appears to indicate on the sundial. Perhaps that's all the detective work that was ever needed.

That's assuming you could have brought yourself to swallow the unlikelihood that Maggie could have gotten hold of Burns' gun and fired it. But stranger things had already happened. They'd sent Homer into space, for crying out loud.

As the shooter, there is one final invaluable quality that Maggie brings to the table that Tito Puente could not, nor any other suspect for that matter (except maybe Simpson Mutt), and that is ambiguity. Since we'll never know exactly what was rattling away in that infant head of hers when she pulled the trigger, she enables a little piece of the mystery to linger on. It was this very ambiguity on which Mirkin was able to sell his suggestion that the culprit be Maggie, feeling strongly that it should be a Simpson. James L. Brooks loved the idea, but Oakley and Weinstein apparently took some persuading; they feared that an accidental shooting by Maggie would be seen as a cop-out, but were willing to compromise when Mirkin pointed out that it didn't necessarily have to be an accident. Hence the unsettling ending where Maggie's eyes dart surreptitiously about and the sounds of her pacifier sucking are replaced by those of a gun firing, so that we depart not with the sweet kiss of clarity, but the eerie smirk of uncertainty. To suppose that Maggie knew what she was doing when she fired the gun seems a bit of a stretch, but then as they point out on the episode commentary, we've known from as far back as "Bart The Genius", when she uses her alphabet blocks to spell out E = mc², that Maggie's a pretty exceptionable baby. If so, then nice going, Maggie - you might have gotten back at Burns on behalf of the town, but you very nearly got the misdeed pinned on your own father. Unless of course she was banking on things going that way all along. Was Lisa right to suppose that one of her family might be a traitor? We can debate this all day.

Anyway, enough Burns. Do you remember the glorious summer when the UK was tasked with figuring out who murdered game show legend Bob Holness? Now if this campaign is ever uploaded to YouTube in its entirety, I'll cover it.