New Kid on The Block (aka Hertz, Don'ut?)

 "New Kid on The Block" (aka 9F06) is a real oddball episode of The Simpsons, but it's oddball in deceptively low-key ways. Debuting on November 12th 1992, around the middle of the show's fourth season, it tells an uncharacteristically modest story for its era, one that's small in scope but, when you pick it apart, actually quite high in ambition. There's a lot going on, yet it's a relatively quiet episode, relaxed in its pace. It is, in many respects, about the inevitability of change, something that seems to permeate the episode all over (the title is a nod to the 1980s boy band New Kids on The Block, although it might also be a little meta, in that this was the first script from Conan O'Brien, who came in just as some of the older writing staff were moving on). And yet few of the changes it implements were of particular consequence in the long run. It offers (on Bart's end of the story, anyway) an honest and relatable exploration of a pre-adolescent rite of passage - the faint awakening of sexual curiosity, and the withering realisation that being a child means that nobody takes you particularly seriously. Like the season's other great outlier, Selma's Choice, it's a story that wouldn't have felt at all out of place in one the show's earlier seasons, but feels all the more convincing for having come along slightly later down the line in Bart's development, when we'd seen him play the irrepressible hellion for long enough to know what a bombshell it is to see these strange new feelings in him. This is, after all, the same Bart who, just last season, had struggled to comprehend those very feelings emerging in his best friend Milhouse, and who'd insisted, of the opposite sex, "They all look alike to me". And now here he is, falling head over heels in love - check that, falling in love with his babysitter, an authority figure it would ordinarily be within his nature to mercilessly obliterate. The whole premise is off the charts in its adorableness, and one of the absolute best things "New Kid on The Block" has to recommend it is Nancy Cartwright's suitably endearing performance as the artless puppy lover - I particularly love the way she chokes out "I please to aim" when Bart goes to meet Laura inside the treehouse. Like a lot of the Bart classics, it gets its mileage from showcasing his hidden vulnerabilities, Bart being at once self-conscious about how out of his depth he is around Laura, but steadfast in his eagerness to impress her. We know from the outset that Bart is setting himself up to have his callow heart broken, so there is tremendous pathos in his efforts.

On paper, "New Kid on The Block" feels like a monumental episode, for various reasons. It opens with a coming and a going. We see the back of the Winfields, the Simpsons' other neighbours for the first three seasons (actually, I don't think they were established to be the Simpsons' immediate neighbours in preceding episodes - rather, they appeared to live a little further along on the same street, but since this is their last hurrah I'll let it slide). This in itself wasn't such a massive shake-up, since the series never found a whole lot of use for those characters, other than to dish out the occasional murmur of judgement - they were a lot less tolerant of the Simpsons' eccentricities than the Flanders, and rarely said anything that wasn't openly hostile to them. It's a niche that feels better suited to the earlier seasons, when the premise lent slightly more toward the Simpsons being this singularly ignominious unit whom respectable people looked down upon, and less toward Springfield being this intrinsically rotten burg that no respectable person would inhabit, period (a notion advanced in "New Kid on The Block", with the revelation that TIME magazine has formally declared Springfield to be "America's Worst City"). The Winfields had their moments (such as their cameo in "Simpson and Delilah"), but I can't claim to have felt their absence terribly. 

The Simpsons getting a whole new set of neighbours, on the other hand, feels like the kind of development that should have opened up a wealth of additional avenues. In the Winfields' place we gain the Powers - Ruth (Pamela Reed), a divorced mother, and Laura (Sara Gilbert) her teenaged daughter - both of whom strike up an immediate rapport with the family that feels natural, fresh and genuine. Of course, the producers might have shot the characters in the feet straight out the gate by enlisting guest stars to play them, as opposed to members of the series' regular voice cast - Reed and Gilbert are both great in the roles, but presumably this limited how much we were ever likely to see of them. As it turned out, Ruth had only one other major appearance on the horizon, in "Marge on The Lam" of Season 5 (in which Laura was referenced, but never appeared), after which both Powers just kind of fizzled. Laura was good as forgotten, while Ruth continued to make regular appearances as a background character, but nothing more substantial than that. She eventually garnered a third speaking role, in "The Strong Arms of The Ma" of Season 14, where it was established that she was no longer the Simpsons' neighbour (paving the way for Sideshow Bob to acquire her house, but that's a story for another occasion). On the DVD commentary, they make some ironic wisecrack about how "Ruth Powers went onto become everybody's favourite character", but if you ask me she was a wonderful addition to the neighbourhood and the series' failure to go particularly far with her is certainly not any reflection of her limited potential as a character. For one thing, she gave Marge something that had been sorely lacking in her life up until now, and that's a female friend with whom she could open up about her problems and actually have something resembling a social life away from her family. This would be utilised in greater depth in "Marge on The Lam", although you see the roots of that affinity forming here, during a scene where Marge goes to present Ruth with a welcome basket and they briefly touch upon on their respective husband troubles (and since Marge has such an appalling time of it elsewhere in the episode, it's nice to see her at least getting one sweet thing from the arrangement). Other possible angles suggest themselves - Ruth explicitly asks Homer to hook her up with one of his friends, in a scene that seems to be purposely laying the ground for future story material, but it ends up going nowhere (of course, I figure Ruth would change her mind the instant she caught a whiff of Homer's social circle).

The real reason why Ruth was doomed to obscurity might simply have been that the writers were never overly invested in developing her character. The DVD commentary is awfully revealing in that regard, as it gives the distinct impression that nobody on the production staff was all that enthusiastic about making this episode, other than James L. Brooks, who had pushed to have a single mother to move in near the Simpsons. It didn't surprise me to learn that this should be his idea - he was the producer who, in the show's early years, had championed for it having a strong undercurrent of heart and drama to equilibrate the comedy, and the opportunity to explore contemporary social issues like divorce and single parenthood would have fed right into that. As a bonus, it allowed the series to make concessions to the fact that the modern family didn't always conform to the 2.5 kids model reinforced by the Simpsons themselves. His intentions were good, but in the era where Al Jean and Mike Reiss ruled the roost, these kinds of slower, more down-to-earth character dramas were fast becoming an endangered species; writing this Brooks-mandated story was deemed an unenviable task among the top brass and dumped into the lap of newcomer O'Brien, who had a noble stab at it. The result was a sweet (if mildly uneven) case for why the Powers' introduction was a worthwhile endeavor. Alas, in the long run, The Simpsons was determined to remain Ruth-less.

Laura, though? If not for the fact that she slipped into oblivion faster than her mother, a part of me would seriously wonder if she represented an attempt to further broaden the show's appeal by adding a character more openly geared toward courting the hip Gen-X crowd. To that end, she in no way reeks of the same cynical corporate programming as Poochie, but I can see how she might potentially have been conceived to fill an obvious gap in the Springfieldian line-up - The Simpsons didn't have many characters within the teen to young adult bracket and certainly no positive depictions (it's been established that the show was, at one point, under pressure to add a teenage relative to the family, which provided inspiration for the one-off character of Roy, so presumably this was a concern of somebody backstage). The teenage years have traditionally been treated quite unsympathetically within The Simpsons, but then again, what hasn't? Younger teens, like Jimbo and his crew, are there to be an endless source of antagonism to the weaker children they relentlessly pummel, while older teens, such as the Squeaky-Voiced Teen (though he was not fully established as a character at this stage in the series) are there to look awkward and pathetic in dealing with the demands of the adult sphere. Laura is cut from a very different cloth, in that she occupies a beautiful middle ground between childhood and that other direction that's slowly but incontrovertibly calling. I'm not clear on Laura's exact age, but I'm guessing she'd be about 14, maybe 14 going on 15 - young enough to still be a kid at heart and up for some mischief with her smaller charges, but old enough to have that all-important air of adolescent mystique that both makes her so alluring to Bart and sets her firmly out of his league. She has the kind of worldly wisdom Bart admires, in being a few rungs ahead of him on the pranking ladder. (I'll admit that I still find the part with Laura's palm reading trick difficult to watch - not so much because it's gross (although that too), but because as a kid I once fell victim to that exact same prank...thankfully, the perpetrator in question was nowhere near as good at expectorating as Laura and their saliva mostly missed my hand. Mostly.) She's also warm and nurturing in how she connects with the younger Simpsons - there are some lovely moments during her initial babysitting session with her introducing them to the delights of waltzes and labna. (I'll also admit that I don't get quite what the joke is meant to be with that Two Guys From Kabul restaurant - was there some negative buzz around Afghan cuisine in 1992 that's been lost to time? - but the dynamic between the two guys themselves is hilarious.)

Bart's first instinct, on falling for Laura, is to make himself more dapper, by donning a lounge jacket and blowing on a bubble pipe in an effort to emulate Hugh Hefner (which, handily, doubles practice for when he'd get to meet Hefner for real at the end of the season). He then consults various adults for advice, but quickly discovers that they have nothing valuable to offer - if there's one lesson this series has taught us repeatedly, it's that most adults don't have a clue what they're doing, either. Apu approaches Bart, having picked up on the fact that Bart likes Laura, but doesn't impart anything other than the mere observation. Bart then goes to see Abe, who tells him about the time he failed to impress the oldest woman alive by wearing a 15-pound beard of bees - a fascinating anecdote, sure, but it does sod-all for Bart's predicament. Finally, Bart gets desperate enough to talk to Homer, who got his preliminary sexual education from watching animals on heat (to be fair, I think most of us did), and accumulated little to no wisdom beyond that - he does, however, figure out how to segue a frank discussion with Bart about the facts of life into an excuse to down several cans of Duff. There seems to be a vague running gag all throughout the episode with Homer getting his lines perpetually crossed when it comes to sexual metaphors and similes and the veneration of food and beverages. But then, as one other character making his debut appearance so delicately puts it, he is more stomach than man.

The episode's most impactful move, in the long term, was the introduction of old salt Captain McCallister, one of the show's more outlandish supporting characters, who plays an instrumental role in the B-story and whom the writers swiftly adopted as their bit-player of the month - which is to say, the character they'd insist on shoehorning into the most random of places for a sizeable stretch of the episodes thereafter (in just the right doses, he is hilarious, but you can have too much of a good thing - I thought they were overdoing it a bit by the time of his entirely disconnected appearance in "So It's Come To This: A Simpsons Clip Show"). He was a character who joined the cast through pure serendipity - the original pitch had Homer getting into a feud with comedian Don Rickles, only Rickles wasn't game (as per the DVD commentary, he didn't appreciate how mean the script made him out to be outside of his comedy routine), which necessitated a total revamp to instead have Homer grappling to salvage his wounded pride - and unsatiated hunger - when a restaurant owner has him ejected from the premises before he's eaten his fill. The Homer story definitely feels like it's there to counterbalance the more grounded elements of the Bart A-story, in that, tonally speaking, it seems to be taking place in another galaxy entirely. It's less off the wall than his sugar-peddling adventures in "Lisa's Rival", but with hindsight does play like the evolutionary ancestor to that very model of storytelling, with Homer's cartoonish appetite and bullish indignation feeling like they were lifted more from a Looney Tunes short than the trials of the everyman. I give the subplot points for how logically it intermeshes with the main story, in providing not just one, but two instances of the family requiring Laura to babysit, and McCallister is on fine form for his first appearance ("Would ye sooner eat a bilge rat than another burger?"), as is Lionel Hutz in his small role (I kind of want to hear more about his case against The Never-Ending Story). What does bother me, and in some respects makes that sugar subplot preferable, is the subtly unpleasant way that Marge is made to endure this entire debacle. I tell you, "New Kid on The Block" is a phenomenally punishing episode for Marge; I get that she's dragged along to act as Homer's foil (ie: the voice of reason who's perpetually ignored and shouted across), but the episode seems strangely at ease with just how colossally insensitive he is toward her for the duration. First, he takes her to a restaurant where she can't eat anything on the menu due to her seafood allergies and expects her to sit there for hours while he stuffs his face. He then insists on pursuing a lawsuit against McCallister when Marge pleads with him to let it go, with the result that Marge is made to testify in court in his interest, which she finds painful and humiliating. When we hear how, after being ejected from The Frying Dutchman, Homer had them driving around until 3:00am looking for another all-you-can-eat fish restaurant and, failing that, had them go fishing, my thoughts are entirely with Marge and how she hadn't eaten anything that whole evening except for some Tic Tacs she had in her purse. Surely she must have been dizzy with hunger by the time they got around to the fishing? (I'm just saying, Jacques would never have treated her that way...even if he is now, regrettably, a slice of cantaloupe short of a brunch.*) Even the resolution, which sees Homer and McCallister reaching an out of court settlement where McCallister allows Homer to eat endless food in exchange for using him as a sideshow attraction, entails the continued humiliation of Marge for some reason. There's actually no reason why Homer even needed to bring Marge along in the first place - if he was so eager to dine at the Frying Dutchman, then couldn't he have gone by himself? I know the answer there is that if Marge had stayed at home it would have ruled out the need for a babysitter and then we've got no A-story, but I'm still compelled to pout on her behalf.

Where the two stories intersect thematically is in showing just how unapologetically petty father and son both are in pursuing their respective ends. The only character I consider more short-changed than Marge by the episode's out is its eventual antagonist, Jimbo Jones. For a while, the A-story looks to be spinning its wheels, when it consists of Bart wandering from adult to adult in his fruitless quest for wisdom, but it figures out where it's going by the third act, when Laura announces to Bart that she and Jimbo are officially an item. He's scratching her itch for life on the edge in a way that the cute, Hef-emulating Bart most definitely is not, having impressed Laura with his willingness to poke corpses with sticks (what is the subtext behind that particular tidbit of information, anyway? Are we to assume that Mayor Quimby or one of his aides killed that man?). To Bart, this is a betrayal on multiple levels - it's bad enough that Laura would fall for another boy, and all the more unbearable that it should happen to be a natural adversary like Jimbo. But it also signifies Laura's increasing desire to move away from the sphere of childhood revelry of which she and Bart are still mutual occupants, and into more adult pursuits like dating and kissing. Hence, Bart is in danger of losing the connection they already have. The warning signs are there, in how Laura's attachment to Jimbo transforms her approach to babysitting - she goes from being an attentive babysitter who bonds sincerely with her charges to an indifferent one who packs the kids off to bed so that she can make out with her boyfriend on the couch (and did Laura even ask for Homer and Marge's permission before inviting Jimbo over? I'm guessing not.). Still, to be totally fair to Jimbo, his status as episode antagonist is rooted squarely in the fact that he has something Bart also desires - there's a flashback reminding us why Bart and Jimbo aren't exactly the best of friends under ordinary circumstances, but in the present Jimbo doesn't really do anything that's so egregious, outside of calling Bart a dork. It's not as though there's evidence of him mistreating Laura or anything. Bart's reasons for wanting to wreck Jimbo's relationship with Laura are entirely self-serving and blatantly malicious - but then, as Laura is at pains to remind us, he is just a kid. And, if I'm honest, I much prefer this approach to either Bart or the episode harbouring any delusions that he's somehow "protecting" Laura by interfering with her love life.

It's a conflict that resolves itself quite iffily, albeit in a way that's somewhat salvaged by the clever use it makes of the series' established lore - Bart rings up Moe's tavern and convinces the gullible bartender that Jimbo is the mysterious prank caller he's spent the last few years threatening to horrifically mutilate. Moe impulsively runs off to Evergreen Terrace to butcher Jimbo with a rusty knife (question - does Moe not recognise this as his friend Homer's abode? I'm certain he'd been there before in at least one other episode), only to have a change of heart when Jimbo breaks down in tears and begs for his life. And then Laura goes and dumps him, for not being manly enough to show no vulnerability when cornered by a raging sociopath who was threatening to stick a whopping great knife into him. Seriously now, that's a situation that would have most grown adults pissing themselves in terror; I think a teenager like Jimbo can certainly be excused for his reaction. At the end of the day, he's just a kid too. If anything, it makes Laura look a trifle callous, for casting Jimbo aside at a time when he's visibly still reeling from the trauma of what's just happened. But then I suppose that she's also just a kid. Kids really are a rotten bunch. (They flag up on the commentary how objectively unfair the resolution is, so it's nice to to hear that they are at least self-aware about it, even if it doesn't come across in the episode itself.)

All of this threatens to end the story on absolute bummer, but the magic ingredient that keeps it afloat is the input from the raging sociopath himself. It's here that we should address the other truly significant thing that happens in "New Kid on The Block", being that it provides what can effectively be considered closure to one of the series' earliest and most iconic running gags: those prank calls that Bart used to make to Moe every few episodes. By the writers' admission, these were getting increasingly hard to write, so it probably was time to put them formally to bed. They had already been thin on the ground for a while - I actually couldn't remember, offhand, when was the last prior occasion that Bart had got on the line to Moe, so I did something very out of character and consulted the Simpsons Wiki for the answer. Apparently it was "Burns Verkaufen der Kraftwerk", all the way back in the middle of Season 3. And, honestly, THAT episode looked as though it might have been toying with the idea of bringing the gag to a culminating punchline of sorts, in having Moe and Bart finally meet in person, and Moe still being none the wiser. So it might be more accurate to say that they revived an already-retired gag for the sake of plot convenience here. Still, it's a worthwhile revisit, yielding not only Amanda Huggenkiss, one of the funniest of all the pun names, but also the opportunity for Moe to act upon (or at least gear himself up to act upon) the blood-lusting urges he's been threatening all these years. As a bonus, it allows the episode to homage the old slasher convention of having a homicidal maniac drop in on an abode where an unseasoned babysitter is all they have to contend with, or anywhere else where lusty teens, far removed from adult oversight, are on the verge of letting their hormones hang loose. Given that, at the time, Jimbo seemed to be testing just how far he could take things in his make-out session with Laura, it turns Moe into the unwitting moral guardian, by ensuring that those kids keep their pants on.

The climax's most inspired joke (and a fitting punchline to the prank calls as a whole), is in how instantaneously Moe loses interest when confronted with the sobbing Jimbo ("I wasn't really going to kill you, I was just going to cut you...aww, forget it"), as if it's suddenly dawned on him how reprehensible he's being in aspiring to carve up a youngster. Holding the punk accountable is something Moe has fantasised about for the longest, yet Jimbo proves so plaintive an opponent that he sees no satisfaction to be had in the ravaging, using the "Ouch, I'd better go check on Barney" observation as an excuse to remove himself from the awkwardness of the situation. As a survival tactic on Jimbo's part, you can't say that all that crying and pleading wasn't effective.

Sucker that I am, I find the closing gag with Ivana Tinkle to be almost poignant, knowing that it is the last bow for a particular vestige of the early era, one that the show is here conceding it needs to jettison for its own longevity. You'd find the occasional throwback to Moe and Bart's routine in the later seasons (in "Homer The Smithers" and "Bart on The Road" of Season 7, for example), but they ceased to be a regular occurrence after the search for Ms Tinkle. As is befitting for an episode that's all about change, and embracing life's various comings and goings. Yet the final message of "New Kid on The Block" leans more in favour of the value of taking time to savour a good thing before it's gone - change is indeed inevitable, and it's for precisely that reason that you shouldn't be in such a rush to let it all go. The matter of Bart's crush is resolved on a note of compromise - obviously, Bart can't get the girl, but Laura admits that if Bart was of an appropriate age, she would happily date him, thus enabling Bart to remain in his pre-adolescent stasis and still have Laura acknowledge him as an equal. Bart's ultimate victory, however, is in convincing Laura, before she comes of age, to momentarily rejoin him in that middle ground, indulging her inner child by giving us one last encore for the prank calls. Order is restored in the universe, as is reinforced by the image of Homer and McCallister enjoying a keg together, with children of all ages coming together for a final snicker at the expense of Moe. Eventually, the episode teaches, you'll have to move on - but don't be in a hurry to do so, particularly when it's a matter of ditching the recreation of childhood for the formalities of adulthood. The adult world sucks, anyway. All it has to offer is booze and litigation.

Finally, "New Kid on The Block" gave us this immortal line: "As usual, a knife-wielding maniac has shown us the way." Strange, Bart, we never see you applying that philosophy whenever Sideshow Bob's in town. I suppose at this point in the series we'd yet to actually see him wield a knife.

* Sit tight. My thoughts on "Pin Gal" are coming.