Miracle on Evergreen Terrace (aka There's No Shame In Being A Pariah)

"Miracle on Evergreen Terrace" (aka 5F07) is yet another example of a Simpsons episode where the title is basically a lie. There is no miracle therein, on Evergreen Terrace or anywhere else. Marge thinks there's been a miracle a couple of times, but she's proven wrong on both occasions. The lack of miracles is precisely the intent - they aren't going to happen in a burg as rotten as Springfield, Christmas be damned. Miracles are so banal anyway, a point made when Marge first insists that one has occurred, and Homer assumes she's talking about a particularly effective brand of silver polish.

"Miracle on Evergreen Terrace" aired on December 21st 1997 as part of the series' ninth season, yet it constituted only its third foray into festive storytelling. For years, The Simpsons had purposely steered clear of going back to the Christmas well - such was the reverence with which "Simpsons Roasting On An Open Fire", the episode that had kick-started an entire cartoon empire, was regarded. When "Marge Be Not Proud" finally dared to breach that barrier in 1995, the floodgates were opened, and seasonal Simpsons outings would become a far more common feature of the series going forward. Of course, the show was already a markedly different beast to what it was in the days of "Marge Be Not Proud", let alone "Simpsons Roasting On An Open Fire"; by the time "Miracle on Evergreen Terrace" showed up, we were in the early stages of Mike Scully's reign as showrunner, and for those viewers who weren't exactly wild about the direction he was about to take things (yours truly included), this episode came as quite the bucket of ice water. "The Principal and The Pauper" had created its share of controversy earlier that season, but since it was technically a holdover from Season 8, you could blame that one on the outgoing showrunners (and on writer Ken Keeler, who stands resolutely by his vision to this day). "Miracle" would, in its own lower-key way, prove just as divisive, and while you could say that about a lot of Season 9, considered by some to be the last truly classic season, and by others the beginning of the end, I find that this episode seems to bring out particularly strong feelings in people. Either it's an ingenious slice of seasonal black comedy or an ill-judged spite-fest and our first uneasy indicator of what was to come under Scully's tenure. Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood of I Can't Believe It's An Unofficial Simpsons Guide seemed mostly bored by it, calling it "a deliberately mawkish Christmas episode that is low on good jokes...and a retread of any number of episodes where Bart does wrong, feels guilty and eventually has to fess up." At the same time, "Miracle" is undoubtedly old enough to be a beneficiary of nostalgia (25 years old, to be precise!); I was still a kid when it debuted, and while I never much cared for it even then (particularly that downer of an ending), it apparently made enough of an impression for the sounds of "Santa's On His Way" by Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys to give present-day me a case of the melancholic fuzzies.

I get, and to an extent can even respect, what "Miracle on Evergreen Terrace" is attempting to do, which is to be the anti-It's a Wonderful Life. Strife on Earth and ill-will to all men is what it swears by - or, to borrow a quote from Phoebe from Friends, "It's a sucky life and just when you think it can't suck any more, it does". "Miracle" contains numerous jabs at the commercialisation of Christmas, for which the family's plastic tree and its flame-broiled fate provide the perfect metaphor. There's a joke about aluminium Christmas trees, and how people once sneered at those for being artificial, while batting not an eyelid at the prospect of a Yuletide smothered in plastic. "Miracle" is deeply distrustful of plastic, which it shows to be cheap, disposable and ultimately not destined to return your emotional investment. But "Miracle" is no redemptive tale of seeing past the materialistic trappings of the holiday and discovering what really matters - if anything, it's doubly suspicious of the notion of seasonal goodwill and of Christmas as a time that brings out the best in humanity, a notion it gleefully eviscerates as being as artificial as any factory-made Christmas tree, plastic or aluminium. Humans, "Miracle" has it, are fundamentally scumbags, at least the ones who reside in Springfield. Which honestly isn't that much of a revelation - it's been a pretty consistent component of the show's DNA since as far back as Season 1's "The Telltale Head" that Springfield is a deeply unpleasant community that jumps upon any excuse to get its pitchforks out and do evil in the name of the mob. "Miracle" pushes it to a particularly pointed degree, however. When Bart first sells his ridiculous lie about the family falling victim to a burglary at the crack of Christmas dawn, Marge's immediate reaction is to wonder how anybody could do something so unconscionable. And the obvious answer, from the viewer's perspective, is that nobody did; narrative tension is, for a short while, driven by the knowledge that there was no such burglar and that the family's crisis of faith in humanity is over nothing more than a really dumb accident. And yet, when Homer later says of Bart's phantom burglar, "You do exist," he's more correct than he possibly realises. The specific burglar described by Bart (with hooks for hands, a striped convict shirt and a bag with a dollar sign) is pure fiction, but that burglar is manifest, on a figurative basis, in the hearts of every friend and neighbour who had only yesterday dug deep into their pockets in order to replenish the family's loss. In the episode's cleverest moment, Homer delivers his statement to the burglar via Kent Brockman's newscast, addressing the camera and by extension the viewer, thus implicating them, pre-emptively, in the mean-spirited twist ending, which sees the entire town unleashing their inner burglar and looting whatever they can from the family's house. To answer Marge's original question, stealing from a family at Christmas is apparently something we ALL would partake in, given the right provocation. For it is within our basic nature to be as petty and vindictive as we are greedy and grasping.

And all credit to "Miracle" for being so thoroughly committed to its cynicism. Unfortunately, I think the episode ultimately suffers because the story just isn't very good; the central conflict is weakly constructed and runs out of narrative momentum well before we've even reached the third act. And its unrelenting cynicism ultimately comes across as rather forced and hollow, a feel-bad ending for the sake of a feel-bad, as opposed to having anything truly honest or meaningful to say about our Yuletide hypocrisies.

The first thing that "Miracle" has riding against it is that it falls back extensively on plot points borrowed from the Christmas shows before it - and, given that there were so very few Christmas shows before it, it can't help but seem a little galling that they were already having to repeat themselves. In that regard it feels like the Simpsons' festive equivalent of one of those Greatest Hits compilations from a band that only ever did two albums. Like "Roasting", it's about the family having to deal with a Christmas stripped bare of material luxury. It's also about Bart doing something very bad, struggling to conceal his very bad action from his family, and then spending much of the episode in a depressive funk while grappling with that ugly little feeling called remorse - sound familiar? I acknowledged when I covered "Marge Be Not Proud" that there are some viewers who find that episode to be overbearing its treatment of Bart's transgression, but at least it had the sting of emotional authenticity - it was based on an incident from Scully's childhood and was, for all intents and purposes, his belated apology to his late mother in recognition of the hurt he realises he could have caused her with his own misadventure in shoplifting (Scully was clearly capable of bringing real sensitivity to the table as a writer, so it's surprising that he favoured such a crass approach as showrunner). It also works as a thoughtfully-constructed character study, focussing on one of the lesser-explored relationships of the Simpsons household. "Miracle" can't really hold claim to any such credentials - it is, on some level, an episode about how the Simpsons are intrinsically a unit and destined to all go down together if just one of them royally screws things up. But in the end its real interests lie less in the usual Simpson solidarity than in the meanness of the townsfolk, and how their ostensibly compassionate hearts will turn cold as stone if the narrative changes and their egos take a bruising. But even then The Simpsons already did a story of this very nature, with heaps more wit and precision and much less of a heavy hand, in Season 3's "Radio Bart" (not a Christmas episode, but in my coverage I made the case that it makes for appropriate festive viewing), which makes more-or-less the same point and follows a lot of very similar narrative beats. Where the two episodes diverge is in their respective outcomes - one is redemptive, the other unapologetically cruel - but then I wouldn't say that they radically contradict one another either. The people of Springfield inevitably bend to the will of the mob, seemingly indifferent to whether it's bent on being helpful or malicious, and the strength of that mob is always a thing to behold.

For all of my issues with "Miracle", the first act is basically fine. The parts that land the best tend to be parts that have little to do with the plot itself and are mostly scene-setters dealing with what a typical Christmas looks like inside the Simpsons house, and most of those occur within the first few minutes. One particularly good gag involves Marge serving the children two different kinds of Christmas cookies - tree-shaped cookies for Lisa and Maggie, and bloody spear-shaped cookies for Bart. Bart thanks Marge with such loving reverence before pretending to brutally skewer himself with his cookie, and the contrast is irresistible. This is preceded by another, neatly understated sight gag in which the children are seen watching a fireplace on television, obscuring the real fireplace right behind them. We don't get a whole lot of focus on Lisa in this episode (that makes three Christmas shows in a row where they've given her next to nothing to do) but her revulsion at the thought of unwrapping yet another yellow sweater always raises a smile. I like Bart's dedication to his absent aunt: "Oh, Aunt Selma. Always good for a fin." Bart's bathroom-fixated dream sequence probably goes on a mite too long, but you've got to admire how amazingly risqué it is, filled with various phallic objects squirting water. I also enjoy the moment with Marge mistaking the sounds of Maggie's expiring moo box for the weird noises Homer makes in his sleep, followed by Homer jabbing Marge for her comparatively inoffensive snoring. And of course, Homer's toddler-like incomprehension upon finding the tree and presents gone: "Lisa, where's Christmas?!" All of which comes together for a fairly solid set-up. It's just too bad that it doesn't go anywhere; past the first act, there's nowhere for this story to go, except through fourteen dragged-out minutes of largely humorless misdirection. You can practically feel the narrative wrong-footing itself when the word "burglar" slips out of Bart's mouth, and the family rallies around him with no further questioning. Like Bart, it's bitten off more than it can conceivably chew.

The second thing "Miracle" has riding against it is that, unlike "Marge Be Not Proud", Bart's very bad action has no basis whatsoever in plausibility. He wakes up early, gets a forbidden head-start in unwrapping presents, and ends up accidentally burning down the tree and the family's entire haul; having hastily concealed the evidence beneath the snow in the family's front yard, he then proceeds to blame the absent festive paraphernalia on a fictitious home intruder. Some suspension of disbelief is obviously required here - first and foremost, the one thing Bart wouldn't have been able to cover with his pure, white snow would be the smell of things following his little calamity; the family really should have been able to tell, just using their nostrils, that there'd been this big plastic bonfire inside their living room. Also, ignoring the convenience of the fire engulfing only the tree and the presents and not spreading to anything else, wouldn't there at least be a massive scorch mark on the carpet directly under the tree? Cartoon logic has to factor in somewhere, I suppose, but it still strikes me as a stretch for the family to accept Bart's story as readily as they do, when presumably he can't point to any actual evidence of there having been a break-in? Compare it to Marge's reluctance to accept that Bart was guilty of shoplifting in "Marge Be Not Proud" - her rushing to the defence of her son when a stranger points an accusatory finger his way is completely understandable, as is her insistence that she knows her son and what he is and isn't capable of. She's so passionate and so sincere in her defence that it is genuinely heartbreaking when she's shown evidence to the contrary. (Kavner's performance is so moving too - in particular, I'm always hit by that unmistakable undercurrent of panic in her voice when she challenges Tierney's security guard to play the tape so that everyone can see that he's wrong; Marge still wants to believe the best in her son, but she's clearly already rattled by how far her opponent is willing to take his case.) Here, there's no such payoff when Bart belatedly but inevitably confesses to his destruction of the tree - the family's toe-curling obtuseness, in swallowing Bart's preposterous lie to begin with, makes it difficult to feel much in the way of sympathy for them. The situation is frankly far too overblown to feel much in the way of sympathy for Bart, either, although we do share his sense of what an insufferable bummer it is. And this is, I feel, where the episode makes its most fatal mistake. It takes Bart's misery awfully seriously for such a labored conflict, and appears to be attempting to recreate something of the drama of "Marge Be Not Proud". Since the rest of the episode is low on emotional sincerity - the peak of its willful insensitivity is reached when those two ghastly Dickensian urchins are trotted out to rub Bart's face in his misdeed (they're identified as Patches and Poor Violet, but Ignorance and Want would be about as on the nose) - what we're left with is an ungainly tonal mishmash.  Not so with "Radio Bart", which had the wisdom to play its own silly scenario as a straight farce right up until the climax.

Where "Miracle" does offer something resembling authenticity is in its exploration of Bart as a child, and not Bart as a criminal mastermind. Again, it suffers from comparisons to "Marge Be Not Proud" in that regard, but it's a nice enough plot detail that Bart's mind is recognisably working in the way that a child's mind would be - geared entirely toward the present, and toward delaying repercussions for as long as possible, rather than clearly thinking through how this might play out in the longer-term. His cover-up is doomed to failure - for one, he doesn't seem to have any kind of contingency plan in place for a sudden thaw, or have given any consideration toward relocating the evidence to a more secure hiding place, period - but when you're a child, knowing that you might be in the clear for now is often relief enough. Maybe he's played like too much of a little kid - in this episode Bart's pretty forthright in his belief in Santa, but I happen to think that what he had to say on the matter in "Roasting" ("There's only one fat guy who brings us presents, and his name ain't Santa!") was a lot more authentic to his character, and to a 10 year old child, period. Still, there is a neat gag suggesting that, despite the religious reverence with which he appears to regard Santa, he is ultimately in Bart's eyes yet another authority figure to be undermined - his triumphant cackle that, contra the song lyrics, Santa obviously doesn't have time to check that list twice.

It's this predilection for circumventing authority that gets us into our pivotal jam. At the beginning of the episode, Bart is totally cavalier, shamelessly disobeying Marge's instructions that nobody will be opening any of their presents before 7:00am, with seemingly no regard for how she's is going to feel when she discovers that she's not getting the full family Christmas experience she so desperately wanted - rather, he seems to take it as a challenge when she goes so far as to confiscate the family's alarm clocks in a bid to prevent them from getting up before her. That fearlessness obviously goes out the window when the tree goes up in smoke; as with "Marge Be Not Proud", his immediate concern is doing whatever he can to avoid the wrath of parental authority, but as the day wears on and he sees the chain reaction that his self-serving lie inspires, he gains a deeper understanding of the nature of consequence and of what it might also entail. All the same, when he finally confesses to the family that he burned the tree, it seems to come less from a place of guilt and a desire to put things right than from a more general emotional exhaustion at how ridiculously far the situation has managed to drag itself out. Bart, like "Miracle" itself, gets fed up with the current plot trajectory and figures that a change of course is in order. Which takes us into the the third thing "Miracle" has riding against it - for all the heavy-handed posturing of the second act, it doesn't actually give a toss about Bart and how he faces up to the problem of remorse, to the extent that it all but loses interest in him in the third act. Here, it ceases to be Bart's story and instead focusses on how the family as a whole are collectively shunned and harassed by the angry townspeople. They're mad because they donated $15,000 to the Simpsons' phony cause (in the first of Marge's alleged miracles) and encouraged them to blow it all on an extravagant impulse purchase - which, in another instance of fate having its own ridiculous vendetta against the family this Christmas, went badly wrong and only served to set them back to square one. When the rest of Springfield gets wind of the fact that there was no burglar (by way of an inopportune appearance from Kent Brockman), they want their money back and insist on making the Simpsons' lives miserable until they're able to make good. Thus, the rest of the episode consists almost entirely of Springfield being unbelievably rotten to the family, with a brief interlude where Marge becomes a contestant on Jeopardy so that we can squeeze in our obligatory guest celebrity appearance (from Alex Trebek).

As with "Radio Bart" you could argue that the basic narrative hasn't really changed - we still have a family who lost everything at Christmas and could have benefited from the support of a generous community, but I guess there's less satisfaction to be had in helping the victims of a really dumb accident as opposed to those who have a nice big sob story to accompany their loss. All the same, the wrath of the townspeople feels so disproportionate and arbitrary, given the total lack of malicious intention on the family's part. Four of the five family members were unaware of the truth of the matter until too late, and the other's just a 10 year old child. There's only so far you can reasonably go with your anger. It's not as though there's any obvious misunderstanding on the town's part either; Bart makes it clear during Kent's second newscast that the deception was all his doing (which "Miracle" seems to consider closure enough for his individual arc), and there's nothing to suggest that anybody disputes this, but it all makes little difference in practice - the town donated their money to the Simpsons as a unit, so as far as they're concerned they're equally culpable. Kent's own outrage on the matter is entirely false, as is made clear when the camera stops filming and he turns to the family to thank them for providing such a juicy local story, and we suspect that the rage of every other Springfieldian is every bit as contrived. Mostly (and very much like their infatuation with the non-existent orphan Timmy O'Toole) they're sore because they didn't get the pre-determined feel-good story they wanted from the deal, something to satisfy their own egos and have them feeling good about their generosity. Instead, the Simpsons caused them to feel like total chumps, and that battering to their pride far outweighs whatever mitigating circumstances might have lurked behind that bogus burglar yarn. Now Marge gets to experience the dark reality of her alleged miracle - far from yielding their deliverance, the family's dependence on the goodwill of others has left them at the mercy of a community with little clemency to spare.

That takes us to the episode's shock ending, where the townspeople resolve to launch a communal burglary on the Simpsons' house in the interests of getting even. One suspects that, like Bart before them, they just grew weary of how tediously drawn-out the matter was getting and decided to supply their own escape clause. I've already indicated that this climax just plain rubs me the wrong way, yet conversely it also contains my personal pick for the episode's stand-out moment - Krusty to Otto: "If you're heading for the medicine cabinet, I've already been there." And, to be fair, there is something amusingly perverse about that final arrangement, which lies less in the townspeople's theft of the Simpsons' property than in them being so cordial to the family as they proceed to rob them blind, about as much so as when they'd attended the home earlier to redeem their Christmas (this is the second of Marge's alleged miracles, as she mistakenly interprets the people's good cheer as indication that they've gotten over their grudge). They act as though they are once again doing the Simpsons a tremendous favour in choosing to settle things this way - they're so civil about being so flagrantly uncivilised. I can, however, point to what has, for me, always been the deal-breaking moment - when Apu walks away clutching Santa's Little Helper and Snowball II. How unfathomably mean do you have to be to steal a couple of family pets? That was a low blow, Apu. In a more tonally consistent episode, such an ending could have worked, but would still have benefited from showing a whisker more restraint. As it happens, the only restraint it does show is in not having any of the Springfieldians attempt to abduct Maggie (although, how much do you want to bet that something like that was included in the original script?).

It's after the townspeople have departed, leaving the Simpsons alone in their ransacked abode, that the episode plays its subtler and perhaps even more cynical card - Marge attempts to bolster the family's spirits with the reminder that "We still have each other", only to be churlishly rebuffed. They would have had each other anyway, Lisa points out. "Plus lots of other stuff", adds Bart. "Miracle" gets across the folly of materialism through the mutually dire fates of the plastic Christmas tree and the swanky new car the family foolishly purchases with their assumed $15,000 bonus, yet it concedes to the fact that, in spite of it all, people do like their creature comforts, and no moralistic lecture about the real meaning of Christmas is is going to change that. And yet, the episode isn't quite so cynical as to leave the Simpsons with no deliverance. Homer finds the one solitary item the Springfieldian mob neglected to take away - a wash cloth, an obvious symbol of cleansing - and the family begin to squabble mindlessly over its ownership. Marge intervenes, purporting to put a stop to their nonsense, only to claim the wash cloth for herself. The rest of the family chase her around the house, and it becomes a fun game for them all, giving us what Martyn and Wood describe as the episode's "only real ray of sunshine...the closing moments when the neighbours get their revenge but the Simpsons find the family spirit after all." "Miracle" is clearly banking on its final images of family togetherness being enough to wash away the bitter aftertaste of the preceding series of unfortunate events, and to convince you that its heart isn't in such a cynical place after all. Still, if I were in Bart and Lisa's shoes I think I'd be too distraught about my dog and cat being stolen to take much interest in a stupid cloth.

Anyway, between this and those two festive editions of D&DWL, I can't help but feel that I served you up rather a sour batch of Christmas cookies this year. Those stealthily-incorporated ads for McDonald's and New Coke in Santa Claus: The Movie wound up being the only fun part of it all. To compensate, I'll close with easily the most appealing image that "Miracle" has to offer - the little rat with reindeer antlers at Moe's bar. This merry murine always does his meagre bit to chase the seasonal blues away.