Mike Teavee, The Sideshow Bob Effect and This Awfully Modern Malaise

Of the wealth of colourful and unforgettable characters created by Roald Dahl, I don't think there's one he ever did dirtier than Mike Teavee.

You'll recall how, in Dahl's 1964 novel Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, Mike was the fourth child to uncover one of Willy Wonka's elusive Golden Tickets, and also the fourth to be eliminated in Wonka's gruesome game of moral knockout. His particular vice was that he worshipped the chattering cyclops and the salaciously violent imagery it dangled before him; his undoing sprung from his being so enraptured with the television signal that he wanted to become one with it. He jumped at the opportunity to be the very first human to be sent via television, using the sinister experimental technology in Wonka's lab, and was seemingly unbothered when it caused him to come out a whole lot tinier at the other end. The television dominated him so that he allowed it to consume him and to literally diminish him. As was by then an established pattern in Dahl's story, his mishap was succeeded by an interlude from the Oompa Loompas, showing up to be our Greek chorus and to reflect, with minimal sensitivity, on the moral ramifications of what we'd just read. They did so through a humorous polemic about the war between television image and literature for a child's soul, a war that Dahl evidently still deemed relevant 24 years later, when he wrote Matilda (I've long suspected that Matilda's brother, Michael, was so-named as a nod to Dahl's more notorious television junkie). In the words of the Oompa Loompas, this is what television does to the mind of a callow spectator:

 

"His brain becomes as soft as cheese!

His powers of thinking rust and freeze!

He cannot think - he only sees!"

 

It's here that I detect a certain disingenuousness in Dahl's rhetoric. In his eagerness to condemn the presumed effects of television-binging on the young and the impressionable, he does a terrible disservice to the character of Mike. The Oompa Loompas' insistence that television impairs the viewer's ability to think is not exactly borne out by Mike himself, who is actually quite a bright and perceptive young man. If you pay attention to Mike, you'll notice he has a tendency to challenge Wonka whenever the baffling old confectioner is telling the group something fishy or that blatantly doesn't add up. In particular, he is the one character who picks up on the disturbing contradiction in Wonka's ethos, and has the guts to call him out on it - when Wonka condemns Violet's gum chewing habit as disgusting, Mike asks him, not at all unreasonably, why he contributes to the problem by manufacturing gum in the first place. Wonka ducks out of answering by pretending not to have understood Mike, claiming that he is mumbling. I realise that the disservice Dahl does to Mike is not altogether dissimilar to the way Wonka regards him - he gets around the character's pesky inquisitiveness, and his willingness to challenge adult authority, by simply ignoring it altogether. Mike's problem, so far as Wonka was concerned, wasn't that he was unable to think, but that he was too much of an independent thinker. That's why he knew the little fucker was going down.

But therein lies a problem. Mike is a smart child, and as such he really should have known better than to transport himself via Wonka's broadcasting device. He'd already observed the effect it had on a bar of chocolate, and should have anticipated that it might do something similar to his own body. Yet somehow he couldn't help himself. The desire to forge a more intimate link with his precious television was too overwhelming. Mike might have been bright and perceptive, but the one thing he couldn't wrap his head around, I suppose, was consequence. At first, Mike doesn't care about his severely diminished size because, as he points out, it needn't interfere with his day-to-day aspirations of watching endless television. It's only when Mr Teavee, appalled at what the technology has done to his son, threatens to get rid of the family's set that Mike comes up against a consequence he actually understands. He reacts as any child his age would, by throwing a tantrum (of course, he doesn't have a lot of weight to throw around any more). Fundamentally, he is a child, and he's at his most comfortable living in a fantasy world - but it is, as Dahl is keen to stress, the wrong sort of fantasy that Mike occupies. His is a corrupted state of childhood make-believe, not the pure unleashing of imaginative wonder cultivated by Wonka and his creations. Dahl's distaste for the character of Mike is at its most salient in the implication that prolonged exposure to television has left him desensitised to violence. Mike not only watches a lot of television, he likes to emulate the violent spectacle he sees therein with his vast collection of toy guns, which he takes strapped around his body to the factory with him. All that savagery passed off as entertainment has led him to believe that such violence is fun and aspirational. Says Mike, shortly after finding his Golden Ticket:

"They’re terrific, those gangsters! Especially when they start pumping each other full of lead, or flashing the old stilettos, or giving each other the one-two-three with their knuckledusters! Gosh, what wouldn’t I give to be doing that myself! It’s the life, I tell you! It’s terrific!”’

 

What Mike says here is all bluster, of course. He's a 9-year-old child, he has no first-hand experience with such things and he couldn't possibly understand what he's talking about. If we're going to condemn any of the characters for their callous disregard for life, then I would be at pains to point out that no one in the story is more savage and brutal than Mr Wonka himself. Wonka is a psychopath of the highest order. Depending on what version of the story you're experiencing, he might be a psychopath with a wad of charisma, or a psychopath with a fantastical, child-like ability to make the impossible possible, but a psychopath nevertheless. He gets off on abusing children, and on scarring them both physically and mentally. They were really rotten kids, you say? Meh. What it basically comes down is he's obese, she's orally fixated, she's a daddy's girl and he has ADHD. Last time I checked those were not war crimes, Wonka.

I realise of course that such thinking would be terribly out of the spirit of Dahl's novel. It is a children's morality tale, committed and uncompromising in its ghoulishness, and it appeals to an especially visceral child's-eye comprehension of morality, one in which the various excesses represented by the bad nuts seem reasonably inviting of cosmic judgement. To consume it according to any level of adult scrutiny is to have missed the point. Wonka is a higher power who operates above the law, and all laws of the universe; he assesses children according to their childhood purity, and the degree to which they remain uncorrupted by the pursuit of worldly gratification and by the shaky examples of the adults around them. Only those who retain that purity can access the full, world-changing splendour the factory has to offer. Yes, I understand that. But I'm allowed to feel for those bad kids all the same. For me it was always the bad nuts, and not Charlie or Wonka, who were the real beating heart of the tale. Charlie was merely a cipher with an elongated sob story; it was in the cautionary examples of Augustus Gloop, Violet Beauregarde, Veruca Salt and Mike Teavee that you could see bits and pieces of yourself, enjoy a giggle at your own expense, and maybe feel the sting of Dahl poking you a little too pointedly in the ribs. Let's face it - the overwhelming majority of us would not have survived Wonka's factory tour. I can only wonder for what vice Wonka would have judged and horrifically punished the younger me? Nail-biting, I'm guessing.

Which of the two big budget Hollywood takes on Dahl's book you prefer might well depend on which you grew up with, but in my experience, most prefer the 1971 Mel Stuart film starring Gene Wilder (Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory) to the 2005 Tim Burton film starring Johnny Depp (Charlie and The Chocolate Factory), which is a divisive beast all over. I see little reason to quarrel with that - in most regards I too prefer the 1971 film. And yet I will admit that, with all due respect to Paris Themmen, the 2005 Mike portrayed by Jordan Fry will forever strike me as the definitive take on the character. I always loved how John August's script and Fry's performance honed in on that very under-championed aspect of Mike - his shrewdness and his willingness to challenge Wonka - and brought it to the forefront of his characterisation. This Mike is a genius, and I am totally here for it. He is by far the smartest of the five winners, as reflected in the unconventional means through which he secures his Golden Ticket. But more than simply call Wonka out whenever he dispenses questionable information, Mike '05 presents a challenge to Wonka's very ethos, in that he vocally dislikes chocolate and dismisses the factory's various experiments and flights of fancy as the height of insignificance. I believe this was motivated by the fact that he survives the tour longer than any other child besides Charlie, thus the idea was to give him an arc in which he serves as a more direct antagonist to Wonka (and by extension Charlie, although the two have little interaction). From the start, Depp's Wonka appears to recognise a natural adversary in Mike; he despises all four of the bad nuts (compared to the book, where Wonka greeted all of the ticket winners with boundless enthusiasm, here he's not disguising the fact that he doesn't want any of these brats inside his factory), but there's a particularly sinister deliberation in how he turns and acknowledges Mike as "the little devil who cracked the system". Later in the film, it becomes apparent that Wonka's exceptional dislike for Mike is exacerbated by how reminiscent his candy aversion is of the stance his father attempted to impress on him growing up. In this version, when Mike meets his fate in the Television Room, he's basically getting Wonka's daddy issues taken out on him, poor kid.

Mike's nationality was not specified in the book, but adaptations have consistently portrayed him as American. Just as Veruca Salt works as a perfectly grotesque caricature of British privilege ^[1], so too does Mike serve as an appealing shorthand for an anger and destructive fascination baked deep into the bones of the American psyche. The 1971 film substitutes his fixation on gangster movies with one on cowboys and westerns, recalling America's violent origins, while the 2005 film has him hail from Denver, Colorado, a move obviously designed to evoke uncomfortable associations with the then-recent Columbine massacre. The 2013 West End musical relocates the Teavee household to a more nondescript American "suburbia", one evocative of mid-century sitcoms, in which Mrs Teavee's efforts to present her family as conventional and functional are persistently undermined by Mike's aggressively hyperactive outbursts, and her own ill-disguised admissions of the chaos she struggles to rein in on a daily basis. Here, the Teavees inhabit a world that, Mike's modern technological prowess notwithstanding, seems stranded in a vacuous nostalgia for a mythical America of the 1950s (in the song, "Strike That, Reverse It", Wonka even mocks Mrs Teavee for being "dressed for 1958"), clearly a facade designed to gloss over the violent disorder and general indifference that characterises their everyday reality. The Broadway version goes a step further, reworking the Teavees' introduction with a revised song, "What Could Possibly Go Wrong?", to make the character directly analogous to Donald Trump (poor Mike; he absolutely did not deserve that comparison). While I've no doubt that Dahl intended for his readers to see TV as the corruptive presence in Mike's life, with other depictions there tends to be more of a chicken and egg situation - did TV (and, in the more contemporary adaptations, video games/social media) make him so angry or is he simply using them to channel a rage that was already there, and possibly reflective of the broader cultural malaise in which he's been raised? A bit of both, maybe?

I have a particular sympathy for the Mike from the 2005 film. In my view, he's not such a bad kid. Rather, he's a highly precocious child, starved for stimulation and frustrated with a world that perpetually misunderstands him. Whereas Mike '71 was very much on the wavelength of the people who'd raised him - his father had promised him a real gun as soon as he turned 12 and his mother seemed inexplicably proud of the fact that he'd only ever eaten off TV trays, never at the table - with Mike '05 there's a visible disconnect between himself and his parents. The very first thing we hear from his father's lips is, "Most of the time I don't know what he's talking about." We get no insight into what Mike's life at school is like, but it's obvious that at home he isn't getting a lot of affirmation and his parents don't know how to relate to him or to support him in using his talents constructively. Mike's intelligence has left him isolated and unable to connect with other people, and while I'm not saying I think the level of anger he exhibits is healthy, I feel that I can comprehend where it comes from. It's why the running gag of Wonka pretending not to understand Mike, though lifted from the book and present in most adaptations, strikes such a raw nerve with me in this version; I get the impression it's a variant on the type of response Mike's already come up against a lot in his short time, only much more knowingly taunting. Alas, due to the nature of the story, the film is on Wonka's side - Mike's intelligence is regarded as a liability, the thing that disqualifies him from getting to participate in Wonka's candy-coated utopia, and I find that just a little disheartening.

This, friends, is what I will henceforth refer to as The Sideshow Bob Effect. When a character is blatantly the smartest one in the room, yet their intelligence is not valued, even regarded as a problem in itself, and everyone else insists on treating them like bloody shit...you can bet your bottom dollar that I am going to sympathise with that character. Call it a personal weakness. Bob and Mike might have opposing views on the worthiness of the chattering cylcops, but they are very much kindred spirits at heart. They each fought the status quo, and the status quo won. They are truly my people.

On the whole, my feelings toward Burton's version of the story can be described as ludicrously ambivalent. The parts I like about the movie (ie: Mike and the other bad nuts), I really, really like. The parts I don't like I find downright repugnant. For example, I do not like Depp's take on Wonka in the slightest. It is a singularly unpleasant performance, and yet, one that I can't claim clashes terribly with my own interpretation of the character. For Wonka is a singularly unpleasant person, and that is something Burton and Depp understood all too well. Their goal was clearly to bring out the nastier elements embedded in Dahl's novel, in contrast to the more whimsical approach of the 1971 film. And so they do. Tonally, it all goes a bit lopsided - sure, Wonka is creepy and evil, but you still need to balance that out with his enigmatic, visionary side. Otherwise, is there really any gratification to be had in watching Charlie embrace him and agree to follow in his footsteps? I don't want Charlie to emulate this Wonka. I don't think this Wonka should be allowed within 15 feet of any children, period (actually, no Wonka should, but this one's a particularly dire example).

What is lacking in the Burton film is fun. The 1971 film leans into the high camp of the scenario, and it works a treat - there, when Veruca goes down the garbage chute, having been judged as a "bad egg" (geese and not squirrels are Wonka's animal assistants in this version), and her dad wilfully throws himself down after her (inadvertently outing himself as another "bad egg" in the process), it's as hilarious as it is horrifying. Wilder's Wonka is easily the rottenest egg of them all, for his buoyant lack of concern about the possibility that the father and daughter might end up in the incinerator - and yet, you giggle, and you're gleefully aware of your own complicit nastiness in giggling. The 2005 film, by comparison, is high on cruelty and bitterness, light on any genuine twisted joy - there, when Veruca is deemed a "bad nut" and hauled off by a scurry of malevolent squirrels to a chute leading to the factory incinerator, I can't help but ponder what a profoundly horrible situation this is and wonder why Wonka does nothing to stop it. Is he really so unmoved at the thought of having this child's death on his conscience? Am I giving him too much credit in presuming he has a conscience at all? The Burton film is simply cold. Not helping matters is that I don't particularly like this take on Charlie either, even if it is closer to Dahl's text than the 1971 film. In fact, I would go so far as to say that I positively resent this Charlie. I do not intend that as a knock on Freddie Highmore, who does only what the script requires of him, but the requirements it makes are truly fatal. In giving flesh and form to Charlie's exaggerated goodness, and choosing to exaggerate it further, it teases out an element that may well have always been latent in Dahl's text, but becomes here impossible to ignore - that Charlie is a wildly condescending depiction of a child living in poverty, assumed to be angelic, uncomplaining and doggedly altruistic, as opposed to as imperfect and human as the rest of us. The Stuart film moved to make Charlie (played by Peter Ostrum) a little less innocent and a little more of a brat (but still recognisably a good nut, compared to the other contest winners), a move that reportedly angered Dahl, but that I personally consider quite prudent. Ostrum's Charlie feels real and relatable, a kid with just the slightest whiff of potential for wrongdoing, but who overcomes it and earns his happy ending. Highmore's Charlie feels cloying, manipulative and inauthentic, and I get no satisfaction from seeing him triumph. Team Teavee to the finish, I'm sorry.

Oh, but I loved the bad kids. The bad kids, and the talented young actors who portrayed them, were what really redeemed this picture for me. They deserved better. All of them. But especially Mike.

Isn't it weird how EVERY one of the winners happened to be an only child? I mean, what were the odds?

Augustus, admittedly, hasn't changed much - he's still Fat-Shaming Incarnate, with no attempt to add any new depth or dimension to his character (but then he doesn't last long anyhow). Veruca likewise isn't wildly different, in terms of what she does and what she represents, but I enjoy Julia Winter's more subdued, calculating take on the character (and I say that as a great admirer of Veruca '71, as portrayed by Julie Dawn Cole) - this Veruca has the face of a cherub, only showing her heated entitlement very intermittently. The way Burton's film was able to expand on Violet and Mike, bringing them more into line with kids of the 21st century, was a welcome move - here, Violet's gum-chewing is no longer treated as the problem in of itself, but rather symptomatic of a greater toxicity, and the extent to which her mother has molded her into a reflection of her own glory-seeking ego (something carried over into the 2013 musical, where Violet was a pawn in her father's aspirations for fame). As for Mike, he's now extremely tech-savvy, in ways that baffle his elders and put them to shame.

Mike explains to the press how he found his Golden Ticket: 

"All you had to do was check the manufacturing dates, offset by weather, and the derivative of the Nikkei Index. A retard could figure it out."

Okay, I'll admit that Mike '05 did do one thing that was very wrong. He should not have used the "R" word, and if he were my child I would have had some harsh words for him there. That much does not reflect well on him, fine. But in all other regards this kid should be celebrated, not beaten down.

In defence of Mike '05, I will point out that he's seldom seen to take his violent energies out on anything that's actually going to feel pain. He gets incredibly worked up during his gaming session, but that's all against computer graphics, not real living things. He also destroys a candy pumpkin in Wonka's chocolate room; when challenged by his father, he indicates that this is how he's inclined to enjoy candy in lieu of eating it. But it's not like Mike is ever violent toward other children, or to animals (more than you can say for Wonka, who apparently has cows strung up and whipped as part of his production process ^[2]). Heck, he's not even verbally antagonistic to other children - he just doesn't connect with them, period. Whenever one of his fellow bad nuts goes down, he always looks concerned about it; he gets no sadistic pleasure out of watching people suffer. The worst we ever see him do is aggressively shove a couple of Oompa Loompas aside when he's running through the Television Room. And despite being the film's main antagonist, for all intents and purposes, Mike poses no meaningful threat to Wonka - he's not trying to get the factory shut down or anything, he just has strong reservations about the value of Wonka's product and isn't impressed with what he sees. Mike '71 was, in theory, more of an active threat to Wonka, since he and his mother were conspiring to smuggle secrets out of the factory and sell them to Slugworth (unaware that this was itself part of Wonka's morality test). In the end I can't help but feel that Mike '05 is punished for his vicious non-conformity more than anything - he's a kid who doesn't like candy, and boy howdy, what could be more abhorrent and unnatural than that?

 ಠ_ಠ

A common charge I've seen made against Mike '05 is that, for all his criticisms of Wonka, he isn't exactly accomplishing anything constructive with his own brainpower. He calls candy a waste of time, but mostly likes to fill his own playing gory video games. He revels in destruction and understands nothing of the joy of creation, or of making others happy. And that's true enough. But I would counter that Mike is only 9 years old ^[3], and this isn't the be-all and end-all of what he'll be doing with his life; he has plenty of time in which to figure out how to usefully apply his knowledge. No, I think the movie's real problem with Mike is that he's lost touch with what it means to be a child; his pragmatism and his tech-savviness have distanced him from the kind of innocent wonder that gives meaning to Charlie's being. This much is spelled out by Mr Teavee, who, far from expressing pride at having sired such a brilliant child, laments that, "Kids these days, what with all the technology...it doesn't seem like they stay kids very long." Compared to other depictions of Mike, who at least occupied their own deranged, media-fuelled fantasy spaces, Mike '05 insists on seeing the world through a dogged rationality that's presented as cynical and at odds with Wonka's particular brand of virtuosity. The escapism he seeks, in first-person shooter games, is all geared toward venting his negative emotions, not elevating his imagination to exhilarating new heights. Mike would like to be able to change the world for the better, as is indicated during the Television Room sequence, but his rationality, and his assertion that frivolity should never enter into it is what leads (not entirely convincingly) to his downfall. His total disconnect from the childhood sphere is epitomised in his having no palate for chocolate, prompting George Bucket to decry the very notion of this self-confessed chocolate-hater gaining access to Wonka's candy Xanadu in the first place. To some, Mike comes across as a dog in a manger, since he has no use for the factory's product yet insists on taking up a place in the tour anyway. One could argue that Mike doesn't have to like eating the stuff to have a legitimate interest in the technicalities of how chocolate is made, but I suspect that what's actually driving Mike is (not unlike Violet) the need to prove himself. Wonka's contest gave him the opportunity to demonstrate his prowess and to stand out, and he took it. Well, good for him. Something tells me he wasn't getting the challenge he craved from his prosaic home life.

It would be disingenuous of me to not acknowledge that a love of candy is obviously not enough to get you far in Wonka's Xanadu, as we observed in his treatment of Augustus. Augustus certainly did not believe that candy was a waste of time, and was eager to let Wonka know how much his product mattered to him, but Wonka felt only contempt for him. For Augustus it was all about the indulgence of carnal desire, not the opening of the mind to fresh possibilities, so as far as Wonka was concerned he misused the tremendous gifts he'd given to the world. The kid to whom Mike stands diametrically opposed is obviously Charlie, who embodies all of the essential childhood virtues that Mike himself has turned his back on - not only does he love candy, he regards it with a religious reverence. It takes a while, but this does eventually give way to Mike and Charlie's only two-way exchange of the picture (even then, they don't actually make eye contact). During the glass elevator tour, Mike hits Wonka with his ultimate challenge, and asks why everything within his factory is completely pointless; Charlie responds with what is, presumably, intended as the film's big moral takeaway (aside from that stuff about family it tacked on rather awkwardly through its extended epilogue):

 

"Candy doesn't have to have a point. That's why it's candy."

 

Oh shut up, Charlie.

Burton's film would like for us to believe that Mike's lack of a sweet tooth is a sign of moral failing on his part. But...it's not. It really isn't. I suppose my sympathies for Mike are cemented by this one prevalent thread of cynicism I have - is the candy manufactured by Wonka really as sacred and as worthy of veneration as both Charlie and the narrative assume? I do not believe that Burton's telling makes out the case that it is. There is, very clearly, an ugly, less idyllic side to Wonka's production. By that, I allude not just to the fact that four children and one adult met with incredibly horrible accidents in his factory's walls, and that it runs on arguable slave labour and unethical experimentation (I'm not centring on the Oompa Loompas in this entry, but they are their own particular hornets' nest). Wonka's high-minded claims about his everlasting gobstoppers notwithstanding, he doesn't bestow his creations upon the world because he's a generous guy who's all about giving - at the end of the day, his is a business like any other, there's profit to be had, and his business is going to callously hurt the little people in pursuit of said profit. In the Burton film, the chocolate factory is explicitly linked to the same exploitative capitalistic system that's already caused the Buckets so much harm - Mr Bucket initially works in a toothpaste factory, but loses his job when the surge in sales of Wonka-brand candies leads to an increase in tooth decay, from which the toothpaste factory profits handsomely and then decides to replace a part of its workforce with upgraded technology. Wonka might have a deeper ulterior motive, in using the contest to locate an heir, but let's face it, the whole thing is also an ingenious means of increasing his own financial gain. Mike doesn't play by the rules of Wonka's game, and Wonka's early disdain for him is based on the fact that he "cracked the system", ie: he figured out how to get a ticket while contributing only the bare minimum in terms of lining Wonka's already deep-filled pockets. Wonka's candy, and the consumption thereof, represents the status quo; Charlie's devoted consumerism, and his unwavering trust in the Wonka brand, are equated with goodness and purity, while Mike is the one character who questions what it fundamentally achieves. I do not think he is wrong to do so. Unfortunately but unavoidably, he ends up paying the price.

It's here that Burton's film runs into an inevitable problem with Mike, in that it doubles down on the character's intelligence but the story ultimately still requires him to do the stupid in the Television Room and to transport himself via Wonka's device, despite his just having seen a demonstration of how it makes everything it teleports smaller. Book Mike and Mike from the 1971 film might not have cared terribly about this highly conspicuous consequence, but Fry's Mike is so smart and so serious-minded that it's harder to justify in his case. I remember watching this film for the first time back in 2005, and as we edged closer to that dreaded television sequence I was very consciously pondering how they were going pull this off. As it turns out, they attempted to make it into a matter of hubris - Mike '05 isn't motivated by giddy recklessness, but by his frustration with Wonka and his desire to demonstrate that his mind should be on more important issues than the proliferation of candy. Nice try, but I don't think it quite succeeds. It still requires Mike to disregard the fact that it makes things smaller, and we don't get sufficient insight into his thought processes, in this particular moment, to account for why he would do that. Mike '05 is, notably, the only version of the character who seems to immediately regret his decision to go through the transporter - most other Mikes at least enjoy the actual experience of appearing on Wonka's television, but for Fry's Mike it turns into an all-out nightmare from the get-go, as he is attacked and terrorised by the Oompa Loompas. Like all of the bad nut disposals in the Burton film, the sequence is ugly and mean-spirited without being much fun (ordinarily I would relish a Psycho homage, but not here - leave Norman out of this, please).

What do the Oompa Loompas have to say about Mike this time, as they jam up his skull with gratuitous trauma?

"His brain becomes as soft as cheese!

His thinking powers rust and freeze!

He cannot think - he only sees!"

 

Goddamnit, seriously?

The book's disregard for Mike's intelligence I can view as a curious foible, partially mitigated by the wittiness of Dahl's rhyme. Burton's film, I feel, has absolutely no excuse. It made Teavee's intelligence his most prominent trait; wherever his faults might lie (and to be sure, he does have them), it's blatantly more complicated than the same "TV makes you stupid!" hyperbole it ultimately still expects us to swallow. The lyrics that could be considered applicable to Mike '05 are the particular accusation that, "He can no longer understand a fairy tale, a fairyland," in reference to Mike's pragmatism and his unwillingness to indulge the fanciful stirrings championed by Wonka and Charlie. The rest of it refuses, almost wilfully, to take into account the specific ideas embodied and articulated by Mike, and as the character's pay-off, it merely aggravates. Like Wonka himself, it pretends it hasn't heard Mike and abruptly dismisses him.

So yes. Having expanded on Mike's character so intriguingly, and having awarded him with all that juicy extra nuance, Burton's film went on to do him even dirtier than Dahl. Fundamentally, it remained bound by the framework of Dahl's story, and struggled when it came to fudging his expansion into that pre-determined trajectory. It doesn't stop there, however. What happens to Mike next is also largely in adherence with Dahl's text - Wonka sends him to the taffy-puller to be gruesomely tortured and disfigured. And yet Burton's film still insists on making Mike the butt of the final joke involving the bad nuts, in a way not present in the source material. In Dahl's book, Wonka at least had the decency to assure us that the freakishly spindly Mike would be alright, since he would be sought after by every basketball team in the world. Such reassurance is denied to Fry's Mike. During the sequence where each of the bad nuts leaves the factory with their accompanying parent, I always found it so harrowing that Mike is the only child who doesn't exchange any words with his father. It felt like rubbing salt into the wound, a reminder that, on top of everything else, their communication issues remain unsolved and would likely fester going forward. In the meantime, what must be simmering in the mind of Mr Teavee? Well, we can speculate.

I'll profess to deriving greater satisfaction, in terms of how Mike ends up, from neither Dahl's book OR either of the movie adaptations, but from the West End musical. The Mike of the West End could be considered an amalgamation of the character's various manifestations over the years, with definite shades of the 2005 Mike in there - this version of the character also vocally dislikes chocolate, and Wonka, likes screaming "Die!" at the screen while playing video games, and obtained his ticket through unorthodox means that enabled him to circumvent the rules of brand consumerism (in his case, overtly criminal means; he twice admits to having found the ticket by hacking into Wonka's computers, although his mother insists these are "just allegations"). At the same time, he possesses the hyperactive recklessness of his literary counterpart (cranked up to 11), his favourite video game hero, Captain Knuckleduster of the futuristic rodeo, nods simultaneously to the respective obsessions of book Mike and 1971 Mike, and his love of toy guns has returned. This Mike is also clearly a lot more emotionally disturbed than all of his previous incarnations; as per his family's introductory song, "It's Teavee Time!", he has been placed under house arrest for a string of violent offences around his community, which include setting a cat on fire, chloroforming a nurse and stealing a German tank (okay, the cat thing's horrible, but those other two incidents really demand their own half-hour specials). Overall, I prefer Fry's aloof, brooding Mike to the overstimulated enfant terrible he is in the musical, but I still love this interpretation, particularly the dynamic he has with his mother - it always gets a laugh whenever she tells him to be nice and he flat-out ignores her. (In this version, Mrs Teavee accompanies Mike to the factory, since this Mr Teavee will scarcely acknowledge the existence of either of them. Which is probably the preferable arrangement - otherwise, as we saw in Burton's version, the last leg of the tour becomes a total sausage party.^[4]) The musical also does significantly better than Burton's film in bringing the Oompa Loompas' judgement of Mike in line with his character's modernisations; his comeuppance song, "Vidiots", while still reinforcing some of the same old hyperbole about how electronic media rots the senses, cleverly updates its rhetoric, and Mike's predicament, to comment more on the dangers of compromising one's personal information in the social media age ("His secrets now are yours and mine, cos everything he's got's online"), which is a much more relevant concern for the current young generation.

Most importantly, Mike's fate in the musical differs from the book and either of the films; he still gets shrunken down via TV signal, but here Wonka never offers to reverse the process, insisting that "nobody ever goes back to normal once they've been on television". Instead, his mother accepts this outcome as a practical solution to her domestic troubles, having realised that Mike is back to being as small and helpless as he was as a baby, and she can now relive those glory days when he was entirely dependent on her to take care of him. It's a little creepy, but there is also a sweet side to it. Mrs Teavee isn't motivated by spite - she simply wants to recapture that more innocent dynamic they once had, before the world and its tech drove a wedge between them. Now Mike can look forward to a lifetime of being cosseted by his mother; as for Mr Teavee, he probably won't even notice the difference. It is, in its way, a warped answer to the problem posed by the Mr Teavee of the 2005 film, there left unsolved, about modern children not staying kids for long (also expressed in the lyrics of "Vidiots", which warn that, "The age of innocence is gone, when certain sites are clicked upon"). Wonka, in this version, may even feel some sympathy for Mrs Teavee, and helps her out by allowing her to keep her son in a state of permanent infantilisation - his trip through the Wonka broadcasting system could therefore be regarded as a rebirthing of sorts. On paper, that's no less fucked up than what happens to Mike in the default version, and yet strangely enough I am more at ease with this than I am the outcome in the book or the 2005 film. He avoids the horrors of the taffy-puller and instead gets confirmation that his mother has his back, and I'm just a sucker for that. (You know, all those bad nuts - for as harshly as Wonka judged them, they were each the fruit of someone's loins. Somebody loved them, and felt inclined to nurture them.) Besides, if we view Mrs Teavee as someone who's been screwed over by the patriarchy, ignored by her husband, beleaguered by her son and dismissed by the authorities, then there is something tremendously satisfying in seeing her triumph through the reassertion of her maternal mettle.

What can I say? If only there was some way to combine Ostrum's Charlie and Wilder's Wonka, Fry's Teavee and the ending with his mother from the musical (and also the mecha Oompa Loompas from the musical's recent UK tour, which sidestep the usual racist implications and are the coolest version anyhow). The perfect Charlie and The Chocolate Factory experience! But whatever the version, wherever Mike Teavee has the pluck to challenge Wonka, I'll be in perpetual admiration of the little techno junkie, and Fry's Teavee absolutely gets the gold star (it helps that the Wonka he's up against is in such desperate need of challenging). Seriously, why does the man make gum in his factory, if he has so much contempt for those who chew it? But then I think I already know the answer to that, and I suspect that Mike '05 did too. Four out of five consumers get nothing but disdain from Wonka - but as long as there's moolah to be had from your disgusting habit, you can bet he's going to exploit it.

^[1] Dahl might have used Veruca to send up class privilege, yet a profound irony that does not escape me is that, of all the bad nuts, he privileges her - I'm sure going down that garbage chute was a properly traumatic experience for the girl, but she's the only one who doesn't end up with any kind of physical disfigurement for her sins. There's also no indication, in the book, that her parents are going to stop spoiling her. Then again, Mike does better than the other kids in the stage musical, in that he gets closure and to go home at the end, while the fates of Augustus, Violet and Veruca/Mr Salt are just left hanging. The musical might actually be the most brutal version of the story.

^[2] Charlie thinks this is delightful, apparently. Really, and Teavee's the one who has the problem???

^[3] Mike's biography in the tie-in trading card set created by Artbox gives his age in the 2005 film as 13, but I'm going to dispute that. Fry was younger than that when he played him, and I'd assume he's meant to be more-or-less the same age as he is in Dahl's novel; if Mike '05 is meant to be 13 years old, then he's on the puny side for a young teen.

^[4] In the book, all four of the bad nuts were actually accompanied by BOTH of their parents, but I can understand why the adaptations have all insisted on that one adult per child rule. Otherwise you end up with too cluttered a cast.

It Sucks To Be Me #4: Oh Nuts (Survival)

Hurrah, we're at the "Squirrel" edition - the last Survival book to be penned by Roger Tabor and, if you ask me, the point at which the series reached perfection. If I were to pick just one edition of Survival for the purposes of enticing somebody with no prior familiarity with the series, I would unquestionably give them "Squirrel". "Deer" and "Fox" feel like they were still getting the hang of the format, "Otter" is a mite too bleak and upsetting, but "Squirrel" really nails that balance between creeping paranoia punctuated by regular bursts of nail-biting tension and good clean role-playing fun. I'll confess that of the six animals you get to play as in Survival, the squirrel happens to be my personal favourite, but lest you're thinking that bias might have coloured my judgement, that was, honestly, just as likely to have worked against it - I wasn't exactly relishing the prospect of encountering those Grey Screens of Death and the little lifeless squirrel bodies that accompany them. The puzzles in "Squirrel" are simply very well-constructed, evoking even greater suspense than those of any other Survival volume; in most cases, I had a strong inkling as to what the answer would be, but there was often a nagging sense of doubt that kept me from wanting to fully commit. "Squirrel" might also be the most punishing edition of Survival - whereas in "Fox" you could potentially wander around for pages without running into danger, here all three opening scenarios lead you directly into hazards that can kill you straight out the gate if you fail to assess the situation wisely (although one of them is somewhat nicer than the others, in giving you a chance to course correct if you get it wrong).

"Squirrel" offers a very different perspective to the previous three editions of Survival, in which you played relatively big animals, and there wasn't a whole lot that was going to kill you besides humans and the knock-on effects of human activity. From this point onward we begin our descent rapidly down the food chain - our player animals are only going to get smaller, and we'll find ourselves on the menu for an increasing variety of critters, giving us all the more incentive to watch our backs wherever we go. In "Squirrel", we get an even split between deaths at the hands (as it were) of natural predators and man-made peril. Note that, unlike "Otter", where most of the deaths were gruesome accidents, in "Squirrel" all of the human-engineered demises were quite deliberate - with at least one, there's ambiguity as to whether you were the intended target, but all of these humans set out to kill.

The hero of "Squirrel" is specifically a red squirrel - a species that, much like the Eurasian otter, saw significant declines in England and Wales throughout the 20th century. This is largely on account of competition from the eastern grey squirrel, a native of North America introduced to Britain in the Victorian era that went on to widely displace it. I would presume that "Squirrel" is intended to take place in Scotland, where red squirrel population still retains a few footholds (and this is supported by one of the predators you encounter likewise being largely absent from the rest of the UK). Curiously, the impact of the grey never comes up in "Squirrel", perhaps due to the geographical specificity of the problem; unlike the otter, which was dying out all over Europe, on a worldwide scale the red squirrel is classed as a Least Concern species, so extensive focus on this particular threat might have impeded the book's ability to transfer to overseas markets. I should note that I am working with the US publication of "Squirrel", so I don't know if Tabor's notes in the UK edition included any reference to the greys; they are, however, completely absent from this jaunt around the forest.

Despite the species' precarious position in the British Isles, "Squirrel" doesn't carry so pronounced an environmentalist undercurrent as "Otter" - we obviously do learn something about the impact of human activity on squirrels, but the undercurrent I detect seems geared more toward starting a conversation with young readers about the perils of accepting treats from strangers. In "Squirrel" there is a small running theme in which the apparent generosity of man is revealed to have sinister consequences.

 

To dig up what hidden horrors lie buried in the ostensibly tranquil forest ambience of "Squirrel", click below. If you wish to remain unspoiled, keep moving.
 

It Sucks To Be Me #3: Lutrify Yourself (Survival)

Otters seem to have had a rough ride of it when it comes to prominent depictions in literature. The two most famous books written on the subject of otters are unquestionably Tarka The Otter by Henry Williamson and Ring of Bright Water by Gavin Maxwell, and if you've read either (or watched their movie adaptations), you'll know that the lives of Tarka (fictional) and Mijbil (real) ended on distinctively tragic notes. Lesser remembered but no less harrowing was Colin Dann's prequel to his Animals of Farthing Wood series, Farthing Wood: The Adventure Begins, or as it should have been titled, Farthing Wood: The Lutrine Genocide, which was all about Fox's ancestors declaring war on the wood's otter population and violently offing them one by one. The surviving otters were forced into exile and continued to die in various gruesome accidents. That was pretty much the plot in full. It's no mystery as to why that specific title was not covered as part of the mid-90s animated adaptation - even by the series' standards, it was a bleak, bleak read. I remember pawing through it as a child, wondering when the otters were going to catch a break and being repeatedly appalled at the fates that awaited. When I'd finished, I realised that the misfortunes suffered by the Farthing animals had, all along, been karmic retribution for their own wanton brutality. (Seriously, Dann, what the hell compelled you write that book? Did an otter eat your sister or something?) If you're an otter then the literary gods have decreed that you don't get a happy ending - although there may be some scant exceptions that slip the net (presumably not of the fyke variety). I've never read Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas by Russell Hoban, but I would hope that at least doesn't end in a massacre (although it's Hoban, so I can't just take it for granted).

Following in that grisly tradition of literary lutrine suffering we have our next volume of the Survival series. You might be wondering if the "Otter" volume is really going to be any more upsetting than "Deer" or "Fox". And yes - yes, it is. Trust me when I say that this is by far the cruellest and most distressing entry in all of Survival. It is not for the faint of heart. I don't know what it is about otters that makes them such magnets for all of life's tragedies. Or maybe, in this case, I understand it all too well.

Reading through the publication details, I noted that the book gives thanks to The Otter Trust, making it the only edition of Survival to explicitly credit a charity with input. As such, it isn't surprising that "Otter" should have a somewhat more pronounced environmentalist subtext than others in the series. All of the Survival books were made for educational purposes, and all contain some detail on what human encroachment has done to make the titular objective that much harder for the species in question. But in the case of "Otter" it really does seem as though you can't turn around without bumping into some life-threatening hazard that never needed to be there in the first place. "Otter" was clearly written with an eye toward illustrating how the various knock-on effects of human intervention have made it near-impossible for the otter to function in the habitat in which it ought to be thriving. It was a noble aim indeed, for at the time "Otter" was published, in the late 1980s, the future of the Eurasian otter in the United Kingdom (and significant parts of Europe) very much hung in the balance. The 20th century was a thoroughly unkind time to the species - Tarka might have had it tough living in the 1920s with Deadlock and co constantly on his tail, but at least they got to practice their enmity in uncontaminated waters; between the 50s and 70s, pollution caused by modern pesticides led to critical declines in otter populations, and England and Wales came dangerously close to losing the otter altogether (as Switzerland did, by the end of the 80s). The 21st century has thus far been sunnier, with populations showing signs of recovery in many English and Welsh regions, but there is still a way to go. 

Unfortunately for your player animal in "Otter", you're mired in Britain of the 1980s, what an absolute hellscape you have to contend with there. The gameplay is engaging and the challenge level more satisfying than either of its predecessors, but the entire experience is swamped in this grimly depressing aura (I'm sure that was 1980s Britain in a nutshell, for lutrines and non-lutrines alike). Even if you make it safely to page 23, it's hard to shake the feeling that there isn't much of a world out there for you any more, your victory mitigated by the sense that you're fighting what's effectively a losing battle. Most of the deaths in "Otter" can be described as unhappy accidents brought about by a general human disregard for the tribulations of nature - the protagonist dies simply for having the misfortune to get caught up in the middle of our various acts of earthly pillaging, and there's such a miserable wastefulness to it all. Adding to the dismay is that Roger Tabor's textual commentary has a more pointedly acerbic flavour than either "Deer" or "Fox", tending to accentuate the utter senselessness of each demise.

What else is there to be said about "Otter"? As seems befitting for the ill-fortuned mustelid, it contains what can only be described as the single most DIABOLICAL death in all the Survival series, one that I didn't see coming and which genuinely shocked me on my first playthrough. I was somewhat derisive of "Fox" for the relatively low challenge presented by its hidden enemies, but "Otter" definitely ups its game by several notches. All I can say is, if you spotted this particular hazard and deduced exactly what was in store, then congratulations, you made a better otter than me. 

On a more cheerful note, there is a rat in this book, the first of two rat appearances in Survival. No harm comes to the rat in either case, and for that much I am very relieved.

With that, we're at the point of no return. For a deep dive into the psychologically-scarring abyss of these not-so-bright waters, click below. To remain unspoiled, get running!
 

Pin Gal Happened...Shall We Talk About It? (aka I Think I Know Why The Dog Howls At The Moon)

Earlier this year, midway through March, a friend of mine sent me a text message. It simply read "Jacques is back". No further context was needed; it was now official. Oh my god, this was not a drill! The Simpsons was about to do the most earth-shattering thing they possibly could do, the one thing guaranteed to set my giddy heart awhirl and put it flat on the line in one fell swoop. It's not often that I talk about new Simpsons episodes just weeks after they air (or new Simpsons episodes, period), but episode OABF10 of Season 34 met certain requisites that made it impossible for me to ignore.

Jacques' triumphant return to the Home-Wrecking arena wasn't formally announced until about a week or so before the episode aired, but there were already distant rumblings on the horizon to indicate that the Brunch-meister was on his way. It had been brought to my attention that someone who'd attended the D23 Expo Simpsons panel in September had tweeted information that Albert Brooks (or A. Brooks, as he is traditionally credited on The Simpsons) would be reprising one of his Season 1 roles - words that immediately had something jumping in my shirt, since I figured that Jacques was a far more likely candidate than that RV-peddling cowboy from "Call of The Simpsons". Initially, I was inclined to take it all with a pinch of salt, but when I looked at the upcoming list of titles for Season 34, there was indeed an episode called "Pin Gal", making it a no-brainer which one it would be. What really clinched it for me, though, was noting that "Pin Gal" was set to air on March 19th, one day after the 33rd anniversary of "Life on The Fast Lane", and I couldn't fathom that being a total coincidence. So I'd had ample time to get myself psyched for the big day; by the point news outlets started reporting it, and I had people approaching me to specifically ask if I was aware that this was happening, it had become downright surreal. We were about to get properly intimate with Jacques again, a good 33 years after he first swept Marge off her feet and turned a disappointing birthday present into a prospective new awakening. He took his sweet time, but he was finally going to have a second shot at winning Marge over to his indelible charms. Attaboy, I knew you still had it in you.

Allow me to put that into perspective for you. In "Life on The Fast Lane", Marge was seen celebrating her 34th birthday. In the real world, just one year short of Marge's entire lifetime has elapsed between the respective air dates of "Life on The Fast Lane" and "Pin Gal". Now that is a scary and uncomfortable thought. Marge, Homer and Jacques, sprightly thirtysomethings in 1990, would all be pushing 70 if they'd aged in real time. And if you've been following this blog for more than a few years, then you should already know that I have a horse in this particular race, "Life on The Fast Lane" being my favourite Simpsons episode that doesn't involve Sideshow Bob, and Marge and Jacques being a pairing I ship with wild abandon. We take Brunch VERY seriously around these parts, and the arrival of a brand new episode where Marge and Jacques cross paths had the potential to shake things up quite explosively. Hells yes, my eyes were on it.

My relationship with modern day Simpsons can be described as, in general, fairly indifferent. I ceased to be a regular viewer some years ago, although I might catch the odd new episode here and there. I've long stopped advocating for the show's cancellation, because at this stage it seems downright futile to complain about such things. I'm aware that since Matt Selman has taken on showrunner duties (alongside veteran Al Jean, who's had the gig since Season 13), some viewers have reported a slight uptick in quality, and if people are enjoying those episodes with Selman's stamp on, then I'm honestly happy for them. It has, however, gotten to the point where I don't think I could catch up with the series even if I wanted to. There just aren't enough hours in the day. But I do still pay close attention to what's coming up for the series, chiefly because I'm always waiting for the next Sideshow Bob episode. Bring Bob back into the spotlight and it's guarantee I'll at least watch that. I need to keep an eye on my man Bob and how he's getting by in this cruel, crazy, beautiful world. My man Jacques, though? Did I entertain there being much of a prospect that he would ever come back? If you'd asked me that question 15 years ago, my answer would have been "Probably not". More recently, I'd found myself increasingly in two minds on the matter. On the one hand, if the show went on for long enough, then I figured there was a chance that they might want to revisit the character and his connection with Marge eventually. I'm not sure that any viable stone will be left unturned in the series' need to perpetuate itself, and besides, there was always something of a loose end in the way "Life on The Fast Lane" concluded - so much so that it seems odd that the series apparently never thought to capitalise upon it until now. But I suppose that takes me into the case against, which is that there was no precedent for Brooks reprising one of his prior roles in any substantial capacity (technically, he did return to voice Jacques in a previous episode, "The Heartbroke Kid" of Season 16, but there Jacques only said two words, to Bart - "Be careful!" - and wasn't involved in the plot, so I don't think it counts). I couldn't tell you if there was ever a reason for that, be it Brooks' personal preference to only voice original characters or if it had just been that way for so long that it came (whether rightly or wrongly) to be regarded as tradition (you've probably heard that Hank Scorpio was at one point in the running to be the antagonist of The Simpsons Movie, but I forget what the source was on that). And I gotta tell you, there is a part of me that's seriously chuffed that Jacques got to be the first of Brooks' characters to have that honor - particularly as I've always seen him (and "Life on The Fast Lane") as being kind of undervalued next to the extreme popularity of Scorpio. I'd often wondered how the series would handle a return from Jacques, and now I was about to find out. This is what I'd always wanted, right? Right?!

It admittedly didn't take long for my excitement to start giving way to trepidation. After all, I had been down this road before. Bringing back a beloved character isn't going to fix my issues with the show if it's just not vibing with me any more - I learned that the hard way in Season 12 when Bob returned from his four year hiatus with the godawful "Day of The Jackanapes", and left me a sadder, bitterer person as a result. Similarly, I got all excited when "Funeral For a Fiend" was announced, with the revelation that they would be bringing back Cecil Terwilliger from "Brother From Another Series", and then "Funeral For a Fiend" aired and was also pretty hopeless (although Cecil's contribution was by and far the best thing about it). And, in this case, the territory at risk of being trampled was so much more precious and delicate. I hold "Life on The Fast Lane" in such high, loving regard, and it has stood on its own for so many years, that revisiting it was frankly always going to be a dicey proposition. More to the point, "Life on The Fast Lane" is representative of The Simpsons at a very different juncture in its lifetime - it's a more down-to-earth, melancholic and understated version of The Simpsons that simply isn't there any more. It hasn't been there since "A Streetcar Named Marge" of Season 4, which was absolutely the last of its kind. The show has changed numerous times over in the interim, so it was a given that this episode would be very different in tone to "Life on The Fast Lane". I mean, Jacques had been divorced from that trajectory for so long, how would they even characterise him in a modern day episode? 

The more I thought about that specific question, the less I liked where my mind was leading me. The other Home-Wreckers' track records weren't exactly encouraging; when we caught up with Lurleen in "Papa Don't Leech", her fixation with Homer had only been taken to more outlandish heights. Moreover, there was already a worrying precedent involving another old admirer of Marge, who was similarly introduced in the show's early years before returning later on down the line, and whose ceaseless distress at missing his chance with Marge became pretty much his sole defining character trait. I refer, of course, to her high school sweetheart Artie Ziff. In Artie's case, there was a sliver of poeticism to it all - he'd gone on to become a highly successful businessman (for a time anyway), but felt unfulfilled because he didn't get the one thing he really wanted out of life - but it was handled in a crudely reductive way, with Artie being presented as ridiculously hung up on Marge to the point that it essentially broke his brain. That is how the show tends to characterise these old flames; whereas Homer and Marge get to move past whatever marital problems have been dogging them and be refreshed by the next episode, they just end up stuck on the same page, hoping to pick things up right where they left them when they next show up out of the blue, however much time might have elapsed within the real world and within the show's internal reality. Homer and Marge's union is so front and centre to the Simpsons universe that those characters who'd aspire to come between them seem to suffer what can only be described as cosmic retribution for their sins, damned to wallow in their reject status for all eternity. They're damaged goods, and by Jove do they wear it on their sleeves. There is a degree of poignancy to be had from that - Homer and Marge's marriage might endure, but not without leaving a few casualties along the way - but poignancy rarely seems to factor into it. By the time Artie came back into the fray with his half-decent proposal, it was more that nuance was no longer a currency The Simpsons dealt in - it sure as heck wasn't during the Mike Scully years, and when Al Jean replaced him as showrunner, he didn't do a lot to reverse that. Fact is, nuance had never really been one of his strong points, either. Fundamentally, he's always been more of a gag man, with rapid-fire references and exaggerated character flaws taking priority over subtlety and meaningful storytelling; in other words, the very antithesis of what made "Life on The Fast Lane" so great (I identified "A Streetcar Named Marge" was the last episode of its kind; it got in there right at the start of Season 4, just before Jean and Mike Reiss honed the signature style they would carry over into The Critic). If Jean was calling the shots on this episode, then I figured that, yeah, there was every chance that Jacques was going to come back with his mind pathologically warped as a result of his striking out with Marge; it's the kind of typically on-the-nose way of conveying that he still has unfinished business that would appeal to Jean's sensibilities. A good starting point, I supposed, might be to look up who was listed as the showrunner for this episode, Selman or Jean. Shit, it was Jean. Sorry Jacques, but I think you might be headed straight for the rocks with this one.

Let me be clear about this one thing - while I'm pretty upfront and unapologetic about my Marge/Jacques partialities, I harbor zero delusions of it ever happening. No matter how "Pin Gal" played out, Marge was obviously going to stick with her oaf husband, because the status quo and all. By re-involving himself in their lives, Jacques was blatantly setting himself up for another emotional bruising, and by standing in his corner, so was I. And that's okay - the thrill of shipping is, at the end of the day, in allowing your imagination to provide alternatives. The best I could reasonably do was to hope that the episode wouldn't be too hard on him. Did I think there was anything to be gained by bringing him back at all? While it does seem jarring for the characters to suddenly be picking at these particular scabs now, 33 years after the fact (seriously, why now? Why not 30 years ago, when it might have made sense?), there was always one aspect of "Life on The Fast Lane" that left me feeling a little dissatisfied, and which I have considered ripe for further exploration - namely, the total lack of closure given to Jacques at the end. I say that as someone who, on the whole, cannot say enough good things about "Life on The Fast Lane". It takes a difficult, adult-orientated subject and handles it in a sensitive and thoughtful manner. It passes no overt moral judgement on Marge for her attachment to Jacques (the one character who does lean toward doing that, Helen Lovejoy, is depicted as an insufferable busybody who likes to dig up dirt on her neighbours). Rather, its interests lie in planting the family in this potentially traumatic situation and observing how it affects them. It has a trust in understatement, and in subtle character interactions that goes beyond what you'd expect from most live action sitcoms of the time, let alone a silly cartoon about weird neon demons. The most explicit it ever gets on what's at stake is in Lisa's observation that, "Mom is racked with guilt because her marriage is failing." And yet there is a certain disingenuousness in how the episode concludes. The Officer and A Gentleman homage is a memorable, stirring and effective way of rounding off the episode, but it's also glib as hell, and it ignores the fact that poor Jacques is just left hanging at the end. It seems odd that he and Marge never have a formal goodbye. This was a matter of such concern to me that when, in 2020, veteran writer Jay Kogen did a Twitter Q&A session where he invited us to ask any questions we wanted about the first two seasons, I bit the bullet and asked if there was ever a version of "Life on The Fast Lane" in which Marge's relationship with Jacques had received closure. Evidently I didn't phrase my question very well, because Kogen initially thought I was asking if Marge and Jacques actually did the deed in earlier drafts, and I already knew what the answer to that would be ("I don't think we ever wrote a version where Marge slept with Jacques. She loves Homer. God knows why, but she does."). When it was clarified, his response was, "Oh. We might have written a goodbye scene at one point, but I honestly don't remember." Thanks anyway. The lack of closure made it a total mystery how Jacques would have taken being jilted by Marge, and this is something that "Pin Gal" had potential to pick up and finally bring clarity to. It was a prospect that, frankly, had my stomach in knots. Because an alternate perspective is that "Life on The Fast Lane" is actually extraordinarily kind to Jacques, in not showing anything of his hurt or humiliation (although obviously it's implied). "Pin Gal" probably wasn't going to let him off the hook that easily. All I could do was wring my fingers and wait for March 19th to roll around.

The plot of "Pin Gal" has it that the Bowlarama has fallen on hard times, and Terrence the hipster, a semi-recurring character voiced by Fred Armisen, wants to buy it and renovate it to get rid of the bowling (it's a funny coincidence that I happened to precede this write-up with a review of Robot & Frank, because this guy is basically Jake from that movie - it's Susan Sarandon's library all over again). Homer is devastated to be losing one of his favourite hang-outs, but a thread of hope emerges when Marge is revealed to be mysteriously proficient at bowling (hmm, I wonder why?), becoming something of a local sensation. Terrence is wowed enough by Marge's skill to agree to keep the bowling lanes intact if she can beat an opponent of his choosing (hmm, I wonder who?). Homer notices that Marge's mind seems to be on...other things, and decides to help her out by pairing her up with the most renowned bowling instructor in Springfield (hmm, I wonder who?). Things just escalate from there. Hearts are hurt. Jacques' heart is VERY hurt.

The GOOD news is that I didn't have anything approaching the same kind of visceral reaction to "Pin Gal" as I did either of those aforementioned Bob episodes. "Pin Gal" didn't completely and utterly piss me off, as "Day of The Jackanapes" did, nor did it strike me as as eye-rollingly witless as "Funeral For a Fiend". Al Jean did piss me off a little with some stuff he tweeted soon after the episode aired (we'll get to that), but he couldn't be expected to break the habit of a lifetime. "Pin Gal" was, for better or for worse, pretty much in line with how I expected Jacques' return to play out. The thing I had most anticipated might happen, and put right at the top of my bingo card - Jacques becoming Artie 2.0 - turned out to be 100% on the mark. More than anything, I was really just annoyed at how easily I was able to call that one. But there was nothing that happened in "Pin Gal" that I couldn't basically live with, nor were those events consequential enough to feel like they were actively defiling my memories of "Life on The Fast Lane". Is it a worthy follow-up to "Life on The Fast Lane"? Fuck no, but it never stood a chance.

First, let's acknowledge the way in which "Pin Gal" is highly favourable to me, and to my pro-Jacques sympathies - there isn't a lot in there that could be construed as such, but the episode did throw me one rather juicy bone, and I am going to latch onto that for all it's worth. As you know, in "Life on The Fast Lane" I had always wanted to give Jacques the benefit of the doubt, and to believe that he genuinely liked Marge; that her naivety, when it came to bowling, brunch and life in general, was greatly endearing to him, and he was enjoying the process of bringing this unhappy and repressed woman out of her shell ("Let it out Marge, laugh loud. Laugh out loud, you'll lose weight."). And wouldn't you know it, "Pin Gal" does uphold that perspective. Heck, if anything, it implies that Jacques had more emotional investment in their fling than did Marge, if not getting her really effed him up this badly. In the future, if anyone tries to convince me that Jacques was going to love Marge and leave her...nah, I can point to his sad, obsessive stalker shrine in this episode as confirmation that he did indeed form an attachment to her. He recognised Marge for the rare and special creature she truly is. It would, admittedly, be something of a self-own, in that it's still a sad, obsessive stalker shrine, and that Jacques coped with rejection in as flagrantly unhealthy a manner as he could have done. Look, it's backhanded, but it's validation all the same, and I'm grateful to "Pin Gal" for giving me this much, really I am. I just wish they'd done it in a way that had Jacques come off as a little less...mentally ill. Because that's basically how they opted to characterise him in the present day - as a man of dubious mental stability. Being stood up by Marge all those years ago clearly tore a screw from him, and you can practically hear that loose screw rattling around inside his brain in everything he says and does in "Pin Gal". He isn't the Jacques we knew back then. Remember how fierce he was in "Life on The Fast Lane"? All that swagger he positively oozed? All gone. He still has a lot to say for himself, but you can tell it's mostly bluster and that there's no actual confidence there. It's really very sad. At least he still has his job as a bowling instructor - but goddamnit, Marge, did you otherwise completely destroy this guy.

Don't get me wrong, though. Having Jacques back - even this damaged, more desperate version of Jacques - was, in itself, an absolute delight. As a presence, he's still so unique and charismatic, and it makes you contemplate what a massive oversight it was that they didn't try to bring him back years ago. A. Brooks has still got it. A master of ad lib, he never disappoints when he's on The Simpsons, and while he doesn't get anything quite as immediately immortal as his definition of brunch in "Life on The Fast Lane" (this time, Homer offers his own definition, and it's considerably less elegant), it's evident that he's still having a lot of fun with the character. There are some lovely moments in here involving Jacques. I hate to say it, though, but I don't think the episode is using Brooks' improvisations quite so proficiently as before - rather, it has a tendency to go overboard with it much of the time. Thinking back to some of those out-takes that were included as a bonus feature on the Season 1 DVD, I realised that Jacques did always have this potential, based on the nature of Brooks' improv, to come across as slightly unhinged, although "Life on The Fast Lane" wisely chose not to lean into it. They made Jacques as eccentric as he needed to be to convey his lively personality, but no more than that. A few years ago, when I transcribed the full out-take for Jacques' bathroom mirror pep talk, I actually titled it "Jacques' Demented Mirror Monologue", words that now feel like they've come back to haunt me. What's going on with Jacques' characterisation in this episode is, I think, actually two-fold, although it boils down to much the same thing, which is to say, the overall lack of nuance. Going overboard with Jacques' ramblings is a surefire way of making him seem creepier and crazier than he did in "Life on The Fast Lane". But it also points to the episode not getting a handle on the fact that less is more and milking a scene to the extent that it overstays its welcome. For example, there is a good line in "Pin Gal" where Jacques says: "If there's anything a Frenchman wants, more than a beautiful woman, it's to beat Americans at the game they love." This feels like it should be the joke in itself, except he goes off on some tangent about wine and snails (Jacques' Frenchness, which passed without explicit comment in "Life on The Fast Lane" - possibly because he was originally written as Scandinavian - is here the subject of quite a number of gags) and it just gets dragged out.

Anything else I really dug about "Pin Gal"? I'll give a tip of the hat to Kearney, who is apparently a man (boy?) after my own heart. Suddenly I have a fresh new respect for you, Kearney.

Now, there are a couple of elephants in the room with regard to this episode, and I'm going to address the first of those quickly and then move immediately on - yes, "Pin Gal" follows 33 years after "Life on The Fast Lane" and yes, the cast do all sound noticeably older. Jacques and Marge might not have aged, but Brooks and Kavner are both now in their 70s, and it's inevitable that their characters don't exude quite the same youthful energy as they did in 1990. They're still great, though! It seems that, in recent years, Kavner in particular has taken a lot of stick on social media for her vocals, and it's a discussion that frankly makes me uncomfortable. Voices change as you get older, there's not a lot that can be done about it, and I for one am prepared to make allowances. As Abe said, it'll happen to you. NEXT!

The second elephant is where it gets a whole lot more sticky and personal for me, and has to do with a continuity issue that, right after the episode aired, led to its own controversy on social media, one that I am far more sympathetic toward. Part of the conflict in "Pin Gal" hinges on the idea that Homer doesn't know about Marge's near-affair with Jacques, and assumes that she's just a bowling whizz by nature. Early on, Marge flat-out admits that "there's something I never told you about my past", words that sound oddly familiar, because it's awfully similar to what she'd previously said to Homer and the kids in "Another Simpsons Clip Show", right before telling them all about Jacques and the fact that she was only one ironic street away from fucking this guy. Yes, it was a little strange that she would talk so brazenly about this in front of them, and explicitly describe her fling with Jacques as her go-to example of ideal romance, but I certainly wasn't complaining (besides, that episode opened with Marge reading The Bridges of Madison County and commenting that she could really identify with its corn-fed heroine; if you know that story, then it makes perfect sense that she would be thinking of Jacques at the time). For the plot of "Pin Gal" to work, you have to disregard that Marge has already aired her full basket of dirty laundry with Jacques before the family. Personally, I wouldn't have gotten terribly worked up about this, because The Simpsons has never been that fastidious when it comes to following its own internal continuity, nor would it necessarily be the most gaping example of the show eviscerating said continuity (the problems caused by the series' floating timeline are, frankly, far more of a headache). But there was a faction of the fanbase that insisted on making a stink about it on Twitter, in response to which Al Jean tweeted something along the lines of "Yeah, it goes without saying that clip shows aren't canon."

Sir! I say, Sir!

I'll admit that Jean's words stung me a little, more so than anything in "Pin Gal" itself, because I'm a sick weirdo and I'm actually rather attached to "Another Simpsons Clip Show". In the past, I have put a lot of effort into examining the series' clip shows, and into defending that one in particular. I'm not sure I've convinced a single soul that the clip shows were a worthwhile endeavor, and I perfectly understand why so many fans have a knee-jerk aversion to their existence. Nevertheless, my reviews of "So It's Come To This: A Simpsons Clip Show" and "Another Simpsons Clip Show" are probably the two that I've felt the most satisfaction for having written, because I'd tried to come at them from a different angle to the usual and to consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, there was a little more going on than other Simpsons blogs and fansites were giving them credit for. I might not have succeeded, but I felt that I was at least bringing something original to the table, and I had fun with that. I was well-prepared for "Pin Gal" to skin my heart and skin my knees as a Jacques devotee. As a clip show apologist? Hmm, I didn't see that one coming and it caught me off-guard. Fortunately, I'm not inclined to take Jean's word on the matter as definitive. It is, after all, an entirely self-serving assertion on his part, and I see no reason why "Another Simpsons Clip Show" shouldn't be regarded as canon. There is little that happens in the first two clip shows that couldn't conceivably happen within the series' regular reality (they handle the recollections in a deliberately contrived way, but they're not happening in an altogether different plane of existence, as the Halloween shows are). Honestly, I think Jean's assessment is rooted more in the fact that the clip shows have such a low reputation among fans and production staff that he doesn't see an issue with bulldozing over them for the sake of plot convenience elsewhere. Let me put it this way - as showrunner, does Jean have the right to make that call in terms of how he dictates the rules the series can follow going forward? Yes, absolutely he does. As a viewer, do I have the right to make my own judgements, and to interpret the show's internal continuity as it most makes sense to me? I would say so. Besides, it wouldn't be the first time I've disregarded a statement made by Jean specifically - he was the one who banged on that borderline offensive "No, Smithers is just BURNSsexual!" gong for years. There are a few areas in which Jean and I haven't seen eye-to-eye, so this is really just business as usual in the woods for me.

It's a moot point anyway, and I'll tell you why. Homer knew that Marge was on the brink of having an affair in "Life on The Fast Lane" itself. There, he never met the other man or learned anything specific about him, but it was a significant plot point that Homer was aware that there was another man, and that he was in serious danger of losing Marge. And he wasn't the only one. Lisa also knew, hence the anguish in her voice when she asks her mother, "Are you going bowling again tonight?" Bart possibly hadn't thought about the circumstances so deeply, but he recognised that something was badly off within the household dynamics. John Swartzwelder's script was built around what the characters wanted to say, but were never quite able to bring to the surface - in the end, it might even have been a whisker too smart and subtle for its own good, if it was really that easy to overlook that particular dimension. In that regard, Jeff Westbrook's script comes off as a little weaselly, since Homer's exact words are "I can't believe you've never taken a single lesson". Homer might not have known that Marge was specifically receiving lessons from a professional instructor, but he knew that she'd developed an interest in bowling, and that she was going to the Bowlarama night after night while he was stuck at home with the kids grew to be a matter of increasing concern to him. He later had tangible proof that it wasn't all in his imagination, when he found the bowling glove that Jacques had given Marge - the inscription "For Marge" made it painfully obvious that it was a gift from somebody else. A good chunk of the dramatic tension in "Life on The Fast Lane" comes from Homer knowing, but struggling to vocalise his knowing to Marge - after Jacques has driven her home and she's just agreed to go to brunch with him, Marge goes upstairs to find Homer already in bed, and there's a moment where Homer wants to say something, but immediately loses his nerve. Later, after he's found the glove and Marge has accepted Jacques' invitation to go have sex with him at his apartment, we have the moment where Homer tries, again, to speak to her, but can only express his feelings by complimenting her on her sandwich-making technique. Marge's startled pause and total silence during this sequence would indicate that she's picked up that Homer knows, and then to top it off we have the pointed way in which Homer says, "I don't believe in keeping feelings bottled up...goodbye, my wife", as he sets out the door. He then goes to the plant, sad because he thinks he's lost Marge, and laments to Lenny and Charlie that "She made [the sandwich]. It's all I have left." Noteworthy is that Homer doesn't get angry with Marge for her potential infidelity, because he realises that he's the one who's been pushing her away; when she later shows up at the plant, there's a sense of forgiveness on both sides. In my coverage of "Another Simpsons Clip Show", I actually called that episode out for its own continuity snag, in making it sound as if this was all news to Homer, when his eyes were clearly open to what was happening at the time. And the exact same applies here. Homer shouldn't be wallowing in such blissful ignorance as to Marge's shady history with the Bowlarama. Because he knew. In order for "Pin Gal" to work you have to disregard not only the events of "Another Simpsons Clip Show", but also a huge chunk of the original Jacques episode. Ain't gonna happen. Checkmate, Jean!

That aside, there is something distinctly undercooked about the conflict in "Pin Gal". Westbrook's script isn't as well-developed or cleverly structured as Swartzwelder's before it. Marge's internal conflict seems to be based on something of a Catch-22, in that she's bowling to help out Homer, but since it's Jacques who taught her how to bowl, embracing her prowess on the lane feels tantamount to embracing him, and by extension betraying Homer. I can see why that might make her uncomfortable, but the idea that this in itself represents a danger to their marriage (as Marge herself phrases it) is something of a stretch. Here, I didn't get the sense that Homer and Marge's marriage was ever in that much trouble. We are definitely not in DEFCON 1 in this episode. We're not in DEFCON 2 either. I doubt this would even qualify as DEFCON 3. When Jacques finally shows up, it's clear that Marge is entirely capable of resisting him (she can probably tell there's something wrong with him). Marge's concerns about having to train with Jacques certainly don't appear to be rooted in the fear that there's any prospect of her being swayed back to him (to my deepest chagrin) - more than anything, she just seems to be struggling with the squeamishness of it all, in being confronted by this guy who both actively reminds her of her near-infidelity and is disturbingly hung up on her, despite his insistences to the contrary. One of the richest things about "Life on The Fast Lane", the chemistry between Marge and Jacques, isn't quite so delectable here, chiefly because the two of them are coming at it from very different angles. Before, he was a suave allurer with a lot to teach, she was a shy homebody with a wad of untapped mettle. It was beautiful. Now, he's a mentally ill stalker, and she's a real cold fish. The circumstances aren't so hot, you know? The best thing to come out of their tête-à-tête is when Jacques gets to shed light on what happened that fateful day when she failed to show up for their scheduled liaison. Le moment de vérité, as he would say:

 

"Do you ever think of the night you almost came to me? I had showered four times! I shaved my face twice! I shaved my back once! I was ready for you, Marge. Later on in the evening, when doorbell rang, I closed my eyes, I opened the door and I kissed...unfortunately, I forgot I had ordered take-out. It was some 20-year-old kid holding a roast beef sandwich. Apparently he came out the next day."

 

Since Marge isn't so captivated by Jacques as he is in the present, the perceived crisis for her marriage seems to stem more from her guilt and her fear of how Homer might react if he finds out that she was once sorely tempted by this other man (despite him already knowing in "Life on The Fast Lane" itself, and Marge knowing that he knew). But for her to just now be pawing at that old cicatrix, 33 years after the damage was dealt, definitely plays out as more than a tad contrived. True, within the characters' internal universe, the timeline is a lot more nebulous than that (as signified by their general immunity to ageing), and in my coverage of "Another Simpsons Clip Show", I even noted that the events of "Life on The Fast Lane" (and all of the other Home-Wrecker episodes) wouldn't be something you'd expect to just walk away from scot-free with no lingering emotional fall-out. Nevertheless, the series has sat on this matter for 33 years and not once indicated that it's an issue that's been eating a terrible hole in Marge, so "Pin Gal" doesn't exactly sell me on this being the be-all end-all of her crisis. There are times when the script feels like it's deliberately playing on the viewer's perception of this all being ancient history, such as when Jacques asks Marge if Homer is still buying her bowling balls as presents. Marge seems irked that Jacques would even bring that up, responding "He apologised for that!" and I think the viewer is intended to share her stance that it is kind of petty and futile for Jacques to be taking potshots at Homer for something that happened decades ago. Jacques may be stuck on the same page, but everyone else has moved on, and Homer has done way, way worse things in the interim (wait till Jacques hears about the events of "Secrets of A Successful Marriage", which itself is only the tip of the iceberg). But I frankly feel the same way about Marge's internal conflict here. She's gotten on with her life and her marriage to Homer has endured a mind-boggling succession of additional challenges, so what is the point of her getting all upset out of the blue about this now? Other than to set the stage for Jacques' return?

The more interesting development has less to do with anything between Jacques and Marge than the fact that Homer and Jacques get to meet this time and to square off against each other (previously, Lurleen was the only Home-Wrecker who'd had the honor of getting to trade blows with her rival). In "Life on The Fast Lane", Jacques and Homer were each aware of the other's existence, but they practised their rivalry from a well-maintained distance. Seeing how they regarded one another in the flesh was something that intrigued me, particularly since it's the one area in "Pin Gal" in which Jacques does come across as a little sinister - he might have been doing a feeble job of disguising his feelings for Marge, but what he was able to keep in check, when he first showed up at the Simpsons' door*, was his disdain for Homer. He was very polite and friendly toward him to begin with, but it didn't take long for the veneer to start to peel. In "Life on The Fast Lane", Jacques only commented on Homer indirectly, by way of the bowling ball that had his name inscribed on it - he didn't say anything openly disparaging about Homer per se, since he'd never even met the man. Here, he's a lot more hectoring of him ("Clearly he must have changed his ways, huh? Improved? Lost a pound? Or twenty?"), which lacks the sly subtlety of Swartzwelder's approach, but I can buy the disparity since Jacques is presumably rattled by the fact that he lost Marge to Homer, who on the surface should have been an easy opponent. Adding an extra layer of peril to Jacques' twisted obsession with Marge is that it's visibly intertwined with this seething resentment toward Homer, exercised in those images he's obtained showing Marge and Homer together, where Homer has been aggressively crossed out with red ink. The way he's played on Homer's obliviousness carries a smidge more tension than his dealings with Marge - so much so that I wonder if this episode might have worked better if Jacques had tried a very different tactic and his interplay with Homer had been the main focus. When you think about it, there was really no need for "Pin Gal" to disregard the established continuity of "Life on The Fast Lane" or "Another Simpsons Clip Show" - what's important with those episodes is that, as far as Homer is concerned, Marge didn't actually sleep with this man, so there was no irrecoverable harm done to their union. But what if Jacques was able to plant the seed of doubt into Homer's mind that Marge wasn't being entirely honest with him? Darn it, Jacques, you were working this thing from the wrong end - you should have made Homer your target from the beginning, instead of trying to impress Marge with your filthy pronunciation of the term "garbage disposal". The most Jacques does on this front is to tell Homer he's as good as lost Marge - which is blatantly Jacques' delusions talking (we saw how his latest bowling lesson with Marge went down) and not something Homer should seriously feel threatened by.

The way the thread between Homer and Jacques builds is itself quite flimsy. Abe, of all characters, detects that there's something suspicious about Jacques' behaviour toward Marge (actually, he doesn't trust Jacques on principle because he wears a turtle-neck), and convinces Homer that the situation is none too kosher. They scour Jacques' social media profile and find evidence of his flirtatious nature. All that proves, however, is that there's a risk of Jacques flirting with Marge in the present - it isn't until Homer goes to Jacques' apartment (he still lives at the Fiesta Terrace) and uncovers the extent of Jacques' fixation on Marge specifically that he gets any inkling of the history between the two. It's a development that might have progressed a whole lot more convincingly if Homer had recalled the events of "Life on The Fast Lane" and connected the mental dots himself, instead of stumbling into it by basically happenstance. Homer opts to settle the matter as civilised men do, by challenging Jacques to a duel (no, he doesn't slap him with a bowling glove and demand satisfaction, but if you ask me they missed a trick in not doing so). Jacques accepts his challenge, and they fight using bowling balls instead of swords. Their altercation is daft, and about as far removed from the spirit of "Life on The Fast Lane" as you can get, but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't the highlight of the episode for me - the image of Jacques attempting to trepan Homer with a bowling ball drill is one that I'm happy to have. Eventually, Homer overpowers Jacques and demands to know how far he got with Marge (Jacques: "We had brunch...no hot food"). Marge then shows up and prevents Homer from bludgeoning Jacques with a bowling ball, assuring him that nothing happened between them. She asks if Homer remembers a time when he had disappointed her, and a joke is made of the fact that she could be referring to any one of a whole multitude of occasions (cue flashbacks to his saucy dance with Kashmir in "Homer's Night Out" and his ogling of Maude in "The War of The Simpsons", among others). Homer decides that if Marge is still with him after all of the emotional horror he's put her through over the years, then she must really love him, and he has nothing to fear from Jacques. But it's a crisis that was never really there; Homer's epiphany arrived too late for the episode to do much with it. "Pin Gal" also isn't interested in exploring why Marge would choose to be with Homer after all of this, and maybe that much is to its merit - "Secrets of A Successful Marriage", which attempted to supply a specific answer, was full of fail, after all. It's as Kogen told me: God knows why, but she does.

It's this "why" that's proved so distressing to Jacques, and the key factor in instigating his breakdown. Unlike Artie, who knows exactly what he did and had 20 years to think about it, Jacques presumably wouldn't understand where he went wrong with Marge. The fact is, he didn't do anything specific to alienate her - it was Homer's sandwich talk that first threw Marge off, before that ironic street caused her to lose her nerve. Jacques can't make sense of why Marge would reject him for Homer, and it's eaten more holes in him than the Swiss cheese he so disparages. There is one particular line in here that I think underlines the plight facing all of the Home-Wreckers (sans Kashmir) and Artie - when Jacques grudgingly tells Homer and Marge to, "Go ahead. Enjoy your endless bourgeois celebrations, and your birthdays, and your anniversaries, until you crumble into enviable bliss." He doesn't understand what they have, or how it holds them together, but he does envy it. As is intrinsic to the Home-Wreckers' mutual damnation - no matter how much they each have going for them, or what they could offer Homer or Marge that would logically make them the more ideal partner, Homer and Marge's union has a remarkable ability to rise above all logic, and it's a euphoria they know they'll never attain. Honestly, it's a pathetic existence that Jacques leads now, and I feel bad for him. His Facebook activity (ie: the image he chooses to publicly present of himself) would imply that he still likes to flirt with women, and maybe he even takes those lucky ladies out to brunch, hot food or no. But I'm going to hazard a guess that he doesn't actually invite them over to his apartment at the Fiesta Terrace. If he does, then he's sure as heck not going to score with them - any sensible woman would run a mile at the first sight of his scary-ass shrine to Marge.

Jacques isn't bowing out of this conflict that easily, though. We've still got the matter of that all-decisive bowling match to come, and does it really surprise you that Terrence's opponent of choice should end up being Jacques? All the same, I can't help but feel that this represents something of a conflict of interest for Jacques. Not because of his feelings for Marge - I can understand how beating her would bring him catharsis and some sense of retained mastery over her - but because if he wins, the Bowlarama gets rid of its lanes, and Jacques, what is it that you do for a living again? That's a point the episode never even raises - if the Bowlarama is struggling with its footfall then wouldn't Jacques' business also be suffering? Maybe there are other bowling alleys in Springfield where he's able to teach (like the two Frank Grimes supposedly lived between). In which case, why is saving the Bowlarama such a big deal? Couldn't Homer and friends just migrate there? Whatever. Marge and Jacques bowl a very close game, but Marge manages to beat Jacques narrowly, leaving Homer reassured that she is over him (again, it seems a spurious final wager, but maybe it's just my chagrin talking). Jacques laments that he wound up losing everything in this episode, right before he is arrested by Wiggum and threatened with deportation back to Paris - it transpires that Jacques was living in the US on an expired visa. Oh whoops. Ordinarily I would consider this to be a typically abrupt and mean-spirited Al Jean ending (and it is both of those things), but under the circumstances, I actually think this is the best possible outcome for Jacques. Being exiled to Paris isn't such a bad consolation prize, for all the reasons Jacques himself lists off, though understandably I'm sure he'd rather remain in Springfield where he can be close to Marge and continue to watch her through a camera. But given the state he's in, he would do well to put some distance between the two of them. Jacques, dude, you blatantly need therapy, and I'd wager that the mental health services in France are a lot better than anything you're going to find in Springfield. Besides, he'll be back (probably). I await the inevitable episode where Jacques and Artie team up to get rid of Homer, and then turn on each other, unless they're cool with a polyamorous relationship.

No, the really cruel part of the resolution comes in the epilogue, played over the credits, when Terrence agrees to preserve one of the bowling lanes and implement a three-week waiting list. In other words, he's barely keeping the bowling at all, making this trauma all for naught. You know, I don't think I like Terrence that much (it's hipsters like him who give the rest of us a bad name), and I sincerely hope that Molloy the cat burglar shows up at his abode one day with a robot sidekick and robs him of several priceless pieces of jewellery. As for "Pin Gal" itself, I don't begrudge that it exists; it answered one or two long-standing curiosities I had left over from its predecessor, and just to have that little extra time with Brooks reprising the role of Jacques made it all worthwhile. But it is an inferior sequel and I think I'll stick with "Life on The Fast Lane" (and "Another Simpsons Clip Show") for most of my Brunch feels. I can't see anybody writing to some high profile agony aunt about the events of this episode, or it winning any Emmys for that matter, although in both cases that remains to be seen.

But I still love Jacques with all of my heart and I like to believe that there is a parallel universe in which he and Marge did indeed end up happily together. I had already made peace with the fact that I'll Do Anything is the closest I'll get to seeing it.

*My most petty and thoroughly unreasonable nitpick of "Pin Gal" - I noticed that Jacques had on regular shoes when he called at the Simpsons' house. Isn't it a thing of his that he always wears bowling shoes, no matter what the terrain? Also, Sideshow Bob's picture was in the Bowlarama's gallery, which was cool and all...but why on earth was he holding Gerald and not Gino?