It Sucks To Be Me #6: Hard Cheese (Survival)

 

We come now to the final edition of Survival, and one of only two contributions by John Norris Wood (here supplying text and photography but not the illustrations, which are credited to Derick Brown). And "Mouse" is, honestly, a pretty good note to bow out on, not quite up there with "Squirrel" and "Otter" but still one of the series' stronger titles. On the whole, I found the level of challenge to be relatively easy, but thoroughly satisfying. Coming off the occasional arbitrariness of Wood's previous effort, "Frog", the death endings in "Mouse" (we're back to a total of six once again) are all perfectly well-incorporated and readily attributable to faulty thinking on your part. There's not a lot about the gameplay of "Mouse" that' especially innovative, but it gets the job done fine.

Above all, I give "Mouse" credit for being possibly the quirkiest installment in the Survival series - there is at least one choice (possibly two) you can make where the outcome appears to be something of a joke. Something I likewise find endearing about "Mouse" (besides the murine-orientated content), is that it is the Survival edition in which your player animal comes the closest to conveying something of a personality. I get the impression that this mouse is a proper little scrapper, and that feisty, determined spirit makes it hard not to warm to it as your murine manifestation. As with "Frog", you're playing as a very small animal, and there is naturally a lot of emphasis on how vulnerable you are, in a world where everything seems dead set upon devouring you, or at the very least beating you up and taking your food stores. And yet I would say there is just as much emphasis, if not more, on how surprisingly tough and capable you are of meeting the challenges that world throws at you. Being a small animal does not make you a pushover, and "Mouse" contains a lot of situations, probably more than any other edition of Survival, in which you're prompted to make bold decisions on whether it's advisable to stand and confront something that could potentially deal you a wad of damage. Do you take on a marauding squirrel? A legless lizard? A hive of bees? A cartoon-friendly mousetrap? Where are you inclined to draw the line? Part of the allure of the Survival series is in the fragile barrier it so elegantly (and harrowingly) depicts as fluttering between life and death, but "Mouse" equally provides a crash course in what a deluge of adversity you're capable of living through.

If I have one nitpick with "Mouse", it's that Wood doesn't make compelling use of the game's points system, in either of his contributions, but then this was something that Tabor before him was really inconsistent with. "Fox" and "Squirrel" were the only two in which it was possible to lose points for non-fatal mistakes - with every other book, so long as you keep advancing through the narrative, you'll gain points, only losing them if you run into a death ending. And the number of minus points allocated for each death, while ideally reflecting the obviousness of your misjudgement, also seem kind of arbitrary in practice. Personally, I was always invested in Survival for primarily the narrative/puzzle element, and found the points aspect really hard to give any attention to. Maybe it's more fun if you're looking to compare your results with a friend's, as the introduction suggests, but I am a lonely Survival-ist.

The points system does have one practical application in "Mouse", however. One of those aforementioned aggressors you can either fight or flee from - Wood actually gives you contradictory information with each potential outcome, suggesting that both choices were perfectly valid responses. One scores you twice as many points as the other, however, making it obvious which you should have gone for.

One last time, then. What horrors and wonders await our intrepid murine explorer as they venture into the big wide open? Click below for all of the answers. But a word to the wise - I personally found "Mouse" the easiest and cheapest edition of Survival to get a hold of, so I'd recommend you look into sourcing your own copy before spoiling.

It Sucks To Be Me #5: A-Courtin' Disaster (Survival)

Ah, we meet again, old nemesis.

I mentioned my coverage of "Deer" that I have "Frog" to thank for introducing to me to the Survival series, this being the only edition that happened to make an appearance anywhere within my childhood. "Frog" became my literary obsession for a brief window of 1995, staying with me and haunting me in the decades that followed, largely on account of my run-in with a lethally inconspicuous snake. The snake allegedly lurking in the river weeds that brought an abrupt and shocking end to my very first playthrough was both a nightmare and an enigma - I gazed at the illustration time and time again, never quite able to figure out where, among that eerie collection of indistinct shapes and shadows, the phantom serpent began and ended. Eventually my allotted time ran out, and I had to admit defeat and return the book to my school library, confounded for the fact that that dratted reptile had gotten the best of me. It's something that would cross my mind intermittently, until late in 2022, when it finally occurred to me that I could track down my own copy and have a second stab at it, leading to the mind-blowing revelation that "Frog" was, in fact, never a stand-alone title, but part of an entire range that had mostly passed me by. As I set about amassing the series, most editions came with the promise of discovering a perilous new world through a fresh set of eyes and figuring out from scratch how to navigate to safety. With "Frog", it was more about retreading the familiar and only semi-remembered, and the possibility of staring a long-standing demon into submission. That snake and I, we had unfinished business.

"Frog" marks a change of direction for the series, in that we bid adieu to Roger Tabor's involvement and get a whole new author in John Norris Wood, who actually seems to have done the heavy lifting in all areas - he's credited as our writer, photographer and illustrator. The change in authorship might account for why "Frog" feels a little less polished than some of the preceding editions, Wood being a newcomer who was having to figure out how to make the most of the concept. "Frog" is a perfectly solid addition to the series, and it naturally held a lot of value for me as a trip down memory lane, but having just played "Otter" and "Squirrel", arguably the two strongest Survival titles, its flaws felt much more apparent. Visually and atmospherically, "Frog" is well done, offering a fine balance between the picturesque beauty of our hero's aquatic habitat and the murky unknowns where hidden dangers are apt to be slinking below the surface. But it put me in mind of "Deer", in that some of the deaths have regressed to feeling similarly arbitrary, lacking sufficient contextual indicators and rendering the outcome as fundamentally a matter of chance, and less the result of any faulty judgement or inattentiveness on the part of the reader.

Like "Deer" and "Fox", "Frog" boasts only five possible death endings, as opposed to the six of "Otter" and "Squirrel", both of which feel better rounded for incorporating that extra fatality. Here it might have added a notch more depth and challenge to the gameplay - especially since there are a couple of opportunities for things to get nasty that Wood curiously passes up, including a predator stand-off that resolves entirely amicably no matter what course of action you choose. Overall "Frog" unfolds at a relatively relaxed pace, which to some might come as a relief following the nail-biting tensions of "Squirrel"; there's nothing really akin to those goshawk and marten encounters that plunged you head-first into the action, forcing you to make do or die decisions under flagrantly high pressure circumstances. It's definitely not because Wood lacked the ambitions of Tabor - in fact, there is one page in particular where I think Wood was maybe trying to be a whisker too clever and ambitious for his own good. I'll admit that a chunk of my initial frustrations with "Frog" were bound up in the impression that there is one scenario that not only lets you off the hook for what would appear to be an extremely careless rookie mistake, but rewards you handsomely for it. Closer attention to detail revealed that that actually wasn't the case, and that Wood really had gone out of his way to establish a scenario in which the outcome is dependent on the interplay between seemingly disparate details; one in which the reader is rewarded for paying attention to what's going on in multiple regions of the page, as opposed to just spotting one potential danger and jumping to conclusions. For that, I give credit to Wood, although I have my doubts as to just how successfully this was going to work out in practice.

"Frog" is also notable for featuring our only non-mammal protagonist; as an amphibian, you'll find that your needs are a little different (since you need to keep your skin moist at all times), but the basic objective to eat and not be eaten remains the same. As a frog, you are a predator and will get your turn at dispensing doom to various invertebrates, but the emphasis is very much on how little and fragile you are in the scheme of things. So little and fragile that you might not be noticed at all, which may be a big source of your troubles so far as your human neighbours are concerned. Although most of the deaths are caused in some way by human activity, "Frog" is notable for being the only edition of Survival in which all of the human-related deaths are basically accidental. No human actually sets out to kill you, they just have a knack for spreading death and destruction wherever they go, and you're so tiny that they often don't notice (or possibly don't care) that you're there at all.

To face down that snake (and various other dangers) along with me, click below. There be spoilers. You've been warned.

Marge on The Lam (aka Welcome To The Jungle)

Before we begin, I'm going to take it as a given that you know how Thelma & Louise closes. It boasts one hell of an iconic final shot, and even if you haven't seen the movie itself, I presume that you're at least familiar with the affectionate parody they did of it in Wayne's World 2. So yes, the gist of it is that those women evade Harvey Keitel and co for a while, and then they go right over a cliff edge. They die at the end. Or do they? It's important that you never see them hit the ground, which makes a heap of difference in terms of how we're to interpret that closing image.

Ridley Scott's picture about two unlikely outlaws on the run made quite a splash when it debuted in 1991. Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon starred as the titular women, a housewife and a waitress who go out for a night of partying, only for things to escalate and push them far across the point of no return, whereupon their only option is to leave everything behind and try to reach Mexico before the law catches up with them. Reaction was wildly split between those who celebrated it as a ground-breaking work of female empowerment, and those who condemned it for its positing of violence as redemptive (because Hollywood, of course, does not make a ton of films that do that every year with male protagonists). The film proved such a vital part of the early 1990s zeitgeist that it was basically inevitable that The Simpsons would get round to putting their own spin on it eventually, particularly since there is unquestionably something of Thelma, the stifled housewife, in our very own Marge. That spin came with "Marge on The Lam", aka episode 1F03, which first aired November 4th 1993 as part of the show's fifth season, a time when the series was lifting quite a few of its premises from famous movie plots (we also had "Cape Feare", "Rosebud" and, though it wound up being held over into Season 6, "Bart of Darkness"). Thelma & Louise is a powerful film that holds up great, but there's still something that feels distinctively more flavour-of-the-month about parodying it than, say, Citizen Kane or Rear Window - chiefly because it was so ingrained into contemporary zeitgeist, and everyone was doing it - which, coupled with emphasis on other timely fixations of the early 90s (clear cola, smart drinks, underground raves), marks "Lam" out as a conspicuous product of its time. Not that that detracts from it in any way; on top of everything else, it has a really strong and substantial Simpsons story, one that finally takes advantage of some of the narrative possibilities set up by the previous season's "New Kid on The Block". I would say that "Marge on The Lam" is one of the most egregiously overlooked episodes from David Mirkin's era as showrunner, but then it is a Marge episode, so that much should probably go without saying. This one, I feel, is predominantly remembered for arguably its most inexplicable gag, which comes up early on - Homer's mind-boggling misbelief that a night at the ballet consists of watching a miniature bear in a fez drive a car endlessly in circles. (On a personal level, the bear in the car stands out for being one of two Simpsons gags that drove BOTH of my parents absolutely crazy, because they couldn't even begin to fathom the logic behind the joke - if you're curious, the other was "He spelled Yale with a 6" from "Burns Baby Burns".) Actually, I think the funniest detail about Homer's bear fantasy has less to do with the sheer absurdity of his misconception (which Lenny apparently shares...must be something in the plant's drinking fountain) or even his drawn-out whistling of "Entry of The Gladiators", than it does the depressingly (upliftingly?) low turn-out he visualises for the bear's performance. I've no doubt that this was a case of the animators looking to cut corners, as opposed to any intentional comedic choices, but it's a brilliant touch nevertheless.

When I covered "New Kid on The Block" earlier this spring, I noted that as an episode it feels like it ought to have had greater consequence than it ultimately did. It goes to the lengths of establishing a brand new set of neighbours for the Simpsons (even jettisoning the Winfields in the process - a sacrifice that was technically never necessary, as they weren't established to be the family's immediate neighbours in prior appearances) and showcasing the various rapports between the respective family members, only for single mother Ruth Powers and her teenage daughter Laura to fizzle pretty much straight out the gate. "Marge on The Lam" is effectively our sequel to "New Kid on The Block", giving pay-off to Ruth (a returning  Pamela Reed) and building on the connection previously suggested between herself and Marge - all of which is accomplished beautifully, but this is also where her arc as a character culminates. Laura is mentioned, albeit not by name, and in some respects is integral to the plot (it's Mr Powers' failure to pay four months' worth of child support that prompts Ruth to make off with his car), but she's already out of the picture as an active presence (apparently, the Simpsons no longer use her babysitting services; it comes up in the plot that the children need a babysitter, and Laura's right next door the whole time, waiting for a naked talk show to come on, but isn't considered as an option). Ruth, for the time being, is holding on, and about to attain the exceptionally challenging feat of getting Marge to embrace the world far beyond her comfort zone. And if you thought Jacques introduced Marge to life on the fast lane, that's nothing compared to the wild ride Ruth's about to take her on. It's a slippery slope all the way over the edge, which begins with Ruth convincing Marge to stay out after 21:30, then showing her how to fire a gun, and finally persuading her to accompany her on an adrenalin-packed flight from the law. Uncommon character team-ups abound all over the episode, Marge's adventure being interwoven with a B-story in which Homer gets to do some unlikely bonding of his own with Police Chief Wiggum. There's also a C-story, in which Bart, Lisa and Maggie are left at home with the dubious oversight of Lionel Hutz (or Miguel Sanchez, as he'd now prefer us to call him), who shows up rather randomly and inserts himself into the dealings for the sake of earning eight dollars, two popsicles and a dented birdcage. The episode doesn't have time to do much with this particular narrative thread outside of a few brief cutaway gags, but Hutz's presence proves indispensable to the resolution. A good deal of care went into structuring this one.

A great part of my appreciation for "Marge on The Lam" stems from that fact that it is fundamentally about Marge embarking on a friendship, something that happens with distressing rarity in the Simpsons universe. Think about it - in the three and a half year gap between "Life on The Fast Lane" and "Marge on The Lam", how many episodes had we had that were centred on Marge going out and experiencing any kind of meaningful social interaction outside of her family? The only other that fits the bill would be "A Streetcar Named Marge" of Season 4, which gave her a welcome opportunity to rub shoulders with various Springfieldians, but didn't really dwell on the possibility of her developing a tighter bond with any of them. The art class she attended in "Brush With Greatness" possibly qualifies, but there I didn't get the sense that she was in it for the social aspect. It begs the question as to what this show has against the idea of Marge having friends? I get that, to an extent, Marge's loneliness and her near-total absorption in her chaotic family is integral to her characterisation; it is, nevertheless, a shame that the series was often content to limit her to that vital but thankless role as her family's emotional adhesive, when she has so much wisdom and compassion to share around. A more cynical perspective, but one I suspect contains more than a nugget of truth, would be that the Simpsons writing team was made up of predominantly male staff, and they weren't within their element writing female friendships. We'd already seen one prior example of the show touching on such a narrative development but failing to fully realise it in "Marge in Chains" of Season 4 where Marge's unlikely bond with Phillips arrives too late for it to go anywhere beyond a handful of brief verbal exchanges. A wasted opportunity, that one. Still, the sparsity of such stories means that, whenever Marge does go out and gets to discover more of the world beyond Evergreen Terrace, and that hidden potential she's always had inside of her, it always feels like such a revelation.

In some respects I'm inclined to see "Marge on The Lam" as less a sequel to "New Kid on The Block" than the last (and most successful) of a spiritual trilogy of episodes that began with "Homer Alone" of Season 3 and continued with "Marge in Chains". What these episodes have in common is that they all entail Marge ending up on the wrong side of the law, whether purposely or not. The notion of Marge, an upstanding citizen for whom keeping her family's various excesses and eccentricities in check is basically a full-time job, even being perceived as a lawbreaker seems inherently startling. And yet these episodes are at their most interesting wherever they suggest that Marge, for all of her natural cautiousness, harbors a latent affinity with the transgressor; that there is something deep within her that's not only passionate and powerful but very wilfully rebellious. Admittedly, this is not an idea that either "Homer Alone" or "Marge in Chains" ran particularly far with. In the former, she started her rebellion by blocking the Springfield Memorial Bridge and ended it by ordering a hot fudge sundae and tequila, an indulgence that is posited as an act of insurrection through its juxtaposition with Marge watching none other than Thelma & Louise. The implication is that Marge identifies with these women, but their assumption of the open road and the liberative possibilities it offers is safely retained within the realm of media fantasy; for Marge, a bubble bath and a wad of junk food is about as far as she can realistically hope to take those urges. "Marge in Chains", for the most part, has no higher narrative ambitions than to fart around the courtroom with Lionel Hutz, but the friendship Marge forges with Phillips - the only bright spot in an episode otherwise dedicated to all of Springfield being phenomenally shitty to Marge and then being forgiven way too easily at the end - is a nice bit of confirmation that she is capable of empathy for those whose own bad relationship choices have led them down darker paths than herself. In Phillips' case, very dark, since she claims to have killed her husband with a screwdriver, although we never learn about the circumstances of her crime (murder or manslaughter?), and Marge is able to suspend her judgements to connect with Phillips as a person. In Season 6, we'd get "The Springfield Connection", an episode where Marge actually becomes a part of the law for a change, and while it is a fine installment on its own terms, there's a part of me that can't help but see it as a betrayal of the fact that, elsewhere, Marge feels like such a natural born outlaw. When Lisa asks about the police being a protective force that maintains the status quo for the wealthy elite...yeah, Marge's response makes for a perfectly funny gag, but after everything she went through in "Alone", "Chains" and "Lam" I would expect her to be fully attuned to what Lisa is saying. The way to look at it is that, wherever she stands, Marge possesses a desire to right the injustices of the world; it's in "Lam" that she most displays the wisdom that law and justice are not necessarily one and the same, and that standing up for the vulnerable and disadvantaged sometimes requires you to go against authority.

Another concern nestled somewhere within the narrative fabric of "Marge on The Lam" is the possibility that Marge might even have been Ruth, under slightly different circumstances. With Phillips, her situation didn't seem quite so interchangeable (it is hard to imagine Marge killing Homer with a screwdriver, no matter how trying their marriage might get), but with Ruth there's a more obvious parallel to be drawn between the two women and their respective dissatisfactions with the cards life has dealt them. Despite inciting much of the narrative action, Mr Powers never appears on screen, but Ruth's testimony implies that we are to see him as a sleazier version of Homer - according to her, all he ever did was eat, sleep and drink beer (admittedly, that's a little different to what we heard in "New Kid on The Block", where Ruth indicated that her marriage broke down because her husband prioritised his working life over their relationship, ie: the one thing that's obviously not the issue with Homer and Marge). Still, it would be a stretch to call "Lam" a marital crisis episode, and I think that even calling it a Homer/Marge relationship episode would be only half-true. Something I find a trifle questionable about Nathan Rabin's review of the episode on the AV Club is the way he manages to frame the entire story as being about the "intense neediness at the core of Homer’s love for Marge" (then again, he opens with the admission that he isn't so enraptured with the Marge and Lisa episodes, which puts us automatically at odds). And while, yes, there is that element of it, I don't think it is the episode's primary concern. C'mon, is there not something a little disheartening in the notion of Marge's journey of self-discovery having to be filtered through the lens of how Homer perceives her (particularly in a story that gives her the rare opportunity to be defined by a relationship outside of her household)? Rather, I think a central irony at the heart of "Lam" is in the way Homer insists on projecting his own guilt and insecurities onto Marge's narrative, when in actuality it's barely connected to him at all. When Marge makes her all-important decision to stick with Ruth and see through her clash with the law to the finish, she does so not because she identifies with Ruth's struggle against her ex-husband, but because she recognises it as her responsibility as a friend. A failed ballet appointment might have gotten Dillinger started down his life of crime (at least according to Wiggum). But Marge? She was merely being a good waffle.

Marge's relationship with Homer definitely forms part of the backdrop to "Lam", and somewhere at the back of her head, she is implied to have been grappling with the question as to whether or not she got a more-or-less decent deal in attaching herself to Homer, particularly in light of what Ruth is going through with Mr Powers. Yet she seems entirely resigned to her domestic situation either way, her annoyance with Homer not appearing to weigh too consciously on the really essential choices she makes throughout. If writer Bill Canterbury intended for that moment toward the end, when Marge tells Ruth, "You're right, I am lucky to have him", to be one of major emotional revelation...he maybe took the wind out of its sails by having Marge profess to be lucky (that exact word) in her home life when rebuffing the attentions of a couple of rednecks a little earlier. If anything, (the flashback with the skunk notwithstanding) "Lam" downplays Homer's aggravations as a partner, making the seemingly deliberate decision to keep his ill-treatment of Marge as mild as possible so as to create more of a contrast between him and the invisible Mr Powers. The first act involves Homer disappointing Marge by failing to accompany her to a local ballet performance (after realising that it has nothing to do with watching little bears drive around in cars), yet I don't get the sense that Marge is too steamy about this, once she's salvaged the evening by going with Ruth instead. And the script makes it clear that Homer had fully intended to keep his appointment, even if he blew it through inevitably ridiculous means (getting his hands "trapped" inside two vending machines). He later objects to Marge spending a second evening with Ruth, something that could come off as potentially really dickish and controlling (particularly given how infrequently Marge gets to go out with friends), although it's played as him being more like a dog with separation anxiety - Marge going out and having fun with her new friend forces him to confront the painful truth that, outside of her, his life is also kind of empty and unfulfilling. Seeking an exhilarating evening of his own, one of his first instincts is to head to his usual social hang-out at Moe's, buoyantly reiterating the lyrics to the theme from Cheers, only to walk in and immediately see it for the depressing hole it really is. Moe won't even allow Homer to play darts, on the grounds that, "People drink less when they're having fun."

As seems befitting for an episode modelled on Thelma & Louise, the subversion of gender expectations provides a comic through line for "Lam" - Patty and Selma show up purely so that the former can dismiss ballet as "girls' stuff", and we later get that hilarious sequence where Homer telephones various male Springfieldians in the hopes of finding someone to join him on his own boys' night out. In contrast to the colourful time that Marge and Ruth are having of it in the wider world, the men are all stuck indoors, their plans for the evening very much bound within the sphere of domesticity. It begins with an odd moment where we see Lenny turn him down on the grounds that he's embarking on that most traditionally masculine of pursuits ("watching the game"), when in actuality he's sheepishly shaving the legs of some mystery woman (presumably intended to be his wife, before they decided he didn't have one), and doing a really terrible job of it too. Although that pales next to the bizarre window we're about to get into the private life of Mr Burns, here seen emulating the lifestyle of a stereotypical teenage girl. Burns initially seems up for a night on the town, until it occurs to him to ask who's calling (shoot, that Homer/Burns buddy subplot sounded like fun). Out of desperation, Homer even considers reaching out to his demure neighbour Ned, only to decide that he isn't quite that desperate and to hang up the instant he hears his voice.

Homer's arc in the middle act works as its own understated bit of beauty because it is such an honest reflection of the way life tends to go once you've hit your mid-30s - most of the friendships you forged in your teens and 20s will have long since run their course, whoever's still around will probably require three weeks' notice before committing to any kind of social outing, and so often you're down to a choice between a solitary stroll in the darkness or an evening in front of the artificial blare of the television. It's something they didn't tell you in The Sunscreen Song. Marge's taking of Ruth to the hilltop where she used to date Homer early into their relationship signifies the promise in the realisation of a brand new bond (something reinforced when Homer thinks of going to the same venue and, apparently failing to recognise Marge, mistakes them for a young lesbian couple), but for Homer it's a retreat into nostalgia, a reminder that he's at a social dead-end and has nowhere to go outside of Marge.

"Lam" takes its time in getting to the Thelma & Louise pursuit, which doesn't actually kick in until the final act. Until then, Marge's evening with Ruth builds at a relatively relaxed pace, giving the two women a couple of quiet moments in which to forge their connection, but is, all the while, tempered by this additional subtext, in that the evening is constantly threatening to take a more dangerous turn than it actually does. There are a number of uneasy allusions regarding what could go wrong for Marge in this precarious new world, but doesn't. One of these occurs when Marge and Ruth go to an ultra-90s underground club, where Marge is approached by none other than Diamond Joe Quimby, decked out in in luminous body paint, who tells her that he's there with his nephews. "Oh, that's nice," says Marge. Little does she know. Nothing untoward happens at the club, and Quimby himself is perfectly amicable. But given that his character was modelled on John F Kennedy, the mention of his nephews is definitely intended to raise a few hairs, by putting viewers in mind of the then-recent case of William Kennedy Smith. In 1991 Smith was charged, tried and ultimately acquitted of an allegation of sexual assault, said to have occurred following a boys' night out he was embarking on with his uncle Senator Ted Kennedy and cousin Patrick J Kennedy at the Au Bar nightclub in Palm Beach, Florida (The Simpsons' interest in the Smith case would resurface, more prominently, at the end of the season in "The Boy Who Knew Too Much", with Freddy Quimby serving as a stand-in for Smith). In another scene, more directly suggested by the events of Thelma & Louise, Marge is approached by a couple of patrons at the Sh_t Kickers bar, who proposition her in distinctly menacing tones, only to back down with a whiplash graciousness when she rejects their advances. The implicit threat of sexual assault, whether directed at Marge or otherwise, is present in both instances, yet it ends up being either glossed over or diverted entirely; the joke is that everyone Marge encounters on her nocturnal voyage is just too improbably polite to follow things through to the insinuated conclusion. It's all followed by a scene where Marge and Ruth go out to a secluded field and Ruth reveals to Marge that she has a gun. This puts Marge in an oddly paranoid mode ("You're not going to hunt me down for sport, are you?"), but apparently all Ruth wants to do is to fire at some tin cans and let off steam about her husband. We'd expect the gun to have some kind of plot significance later down the line (they don't call it Chekhov's Gun for nothing) and it does...but that payoff takes the form of a very silly gag right before the final fade-out, in which the wanton destruction of antique cans ends up being the social violation that wreaks all of the consequences. On the whole, the world beyond Marge's doorstep seems a mite too tame and complaisant for the kind of ugly hostility that spurred Thelma and Louis's transformation to ever enter into it. The nastiest thing going on is the dispute between Ruth and Mr Powers, and that happens largely off of screen.

This culture of incongruous politeness continues into the early stages of the climactic chase (which Homer gets dragged into, since he happens to be bumming a ride off Wiggum at the time). Like everything else in "Lam", it comes down to a series of misunderstandings. Wiggum decides to pull Ruth over for the most ridiculously arbitrary of reasons (the left tail-light on her car is a little smaller than the right) and has no idea that the car is stolen. And when the pursuit gets underway, Wiggum adds his own soundtrack in the form of "Sunshine. Lollipops and Rainbows" by Lesley Gore, a callback to an earlier gag where Ruth used the same track as an accidental tone-setter for her evening with Marge. The callback is an inspired slice of absurdity, but it's also where the omnipresent affability slips over into something a notch more troubling. Amid those upbeat bubblegum vibes is a clear indifference, on Wiggum's part, toward what Ruth is actually up against. For Wiggum, the prospect of an old-fashioned car chase is one to be relished; for Ruth it's where her act of desperation is forced to come to a head.

When Marge and Ruth get as far as fleeing the police and attempting to disappear into the far horizon, the message seems to be that the horizon isn't there; the time of the outlaw came and went long ago, and there's nowhere left to disappear into, even in the sense that Thelma and Louise did. Unlike the movie it's spoofing, "Lam" does not end with the protagonists realising that they cannot go back, that their only option is to "keep going", even if that means going directly over a cliff edge. By the rules of the Simpsons universe, we know that Marge at least has to end up right back where she started; as for Ruth, she might introduce Marge to the thrills of 22:00 coffee and underground raves, but by her own admission, she envies the stability of Marge's home life. Ruth is savvy, streetwise and possesses a knowledge of the wider world that Marge does not, but she's shown to be rather desperate and directionless. The futility of her rebellion is underscored when Marge asks Ruth why she didn't simply report her ex-husband to the authorities, and her response is, "You're the level-headed friend I never had." (Actually, I think the answer to Marge's question is implicit enough in the adjacent display of incompetence from Wiggum happening just up the road; the odds are good that the police would have let Ruth down.)  What was meant to be a liberating evening of discovery for Marge is revealed to have all along been a cry for help from Ruth; presumably, she wasn't planning on the high-speed chase, but she has nevertheless tempted fate by driving the stolen car all over Springfield, and by taking Marge along, roped her unwittingly into becoming her accomplice. Ruth's motive for doing so is that she urgently needs someone to stand beside her in fighting back against her husband. Marge's first instinct is to offer a response that's reassuring but non-committal (by which she means her trademark murmur), but eventually realises that commitment is precisely what's required in a friendship and jumps back into Ruth's corner with both feet.

Still, for all the newfound resolve with which Marge assumes her position as Ruth's partner in crime, there is another irony, in that their devotion to the life of the outlaw is nowhere near as hardcore as their pursuers presuppose. When the chase reaches its climax and the women's only recourse is to literally go over the edge in the form of a nearby chasm, they actually have no idea of what lies ahead of them; this too is a silly misunderstanding, with Homer once again insisting on making this all about him. Not only is he wrong about the women's intentions, he offers a rather passive-aggressive supposition of their motives: "They're gonna drive right into to it just to teach us men a lesson!" That would be a gross misinterpretation of why Thelma and Louise made the decision they did at the end of their film, in which the infamous departure sequence seemed consciously reminiscent of that of Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid (1969) - in both cases, we leave with the understanding that the title characters died within the narrative action, but the technique of closing on a freeze frame allows us to see them as having attained a kind of symbolic immortality, so that they may live forever in their moment of all or nothing defiance. In the case of Thelma & Louise, the car has just begun its downward trajectory as we freeze and fade out, but still appears airborne; it is important that the characters' story ends not with death, but with flight. The spoof in Wayne's World 2, while funny on its own terms, doesn't really reflect that - there, it's played as an ending of overwhelming despair, not triumphant liberation. Homer's reading is even more egregious, since he perceives the apparent action as being performed out of spite, defined intrinsically in terms of how the men are going to react, as opposed to the women making a decision in terms of what they want for themselves. Male hand-wringing about a perceived female uprising forms part of a running gag throughout the third act, with Homer's misconstruing and Brockman's hysterical take on Marge and Ruth's rebellion as carrying apocalyptic implications ("It's in Revelations, people!") indicating that we are to interpret "Lam" as as much a parody of the furore Thelma & Louise generated on release as a pastiche of the film itself.

In the end, the chasm doesn't even offer symbolic liberation, as it did in Scott's picture. Marge and Ruth realise where they're headed and slam on the brakes in the nick of time, only for Wiggum to fail to take the same action and to send himself and Homer flying over instead. Theirs is definitely not a conscious bid for freedom, in which the characters wholeheartedly embrace the mythos of the American outlaw, but an act of random incompetence, as is the Springfieldian way. Likewise, their salvation arises through the mindless desecration of that mythical American horizon - the fade-in reveals that their fall was broken by a vast heap of rubbish dumped into the once-magnificent chasm. There is no flight for Homer and Wiggum, merely a dragging back down to Earth, head-first into the grotesque overspilling of society's messiness, which now permeates every inch of the natural habitat that formerly served the outlaw so well.

With the Thelma & Louise trajectory complete, "Lam" has something of an unsettling epilogue, in the way characteristically favoured by Season 5. It's a parody of the detective series Dragnet, which might be a bit confusing if you're unfamiliar with that series, but provides an efficient and succinct means of wrapping up the episode's various loose ends swiftly, so that even Hutz's random involvement gets a satisfying payoff. We learn that, in spite of her misgivings that the odds were stacked against her, due process actually served Ruth pretty well in the end - the auto theft charges were ultimately dropped and her ex-husband was ordered to pay the full sum he owed her in child support. Lest we be tempted to see this as a vindication of the legal system, the outcome is heavily implied to have hinged upon Mr Powers' poor choice of legal representative (maybe Hutz - Miguel Sanchez? - should stick to babysitting; at least the house didn't completely disintegrate with him in charge). What happens to Marge and Homer is altogether more perturbing. Marge, unlike Ruth, is forced to pay dearly for the embracing of her latent rebel, but it's for the dumbest transgression possible - her destruction of those antique cans (shouldn't Ruth have been charged with that too? She shot more than her fair share of cans), for which she is made to cough up fifty cents for the cost of the cans, and two thousand dollars in punitive damages and mental anguish. Ouch. Still, that's less ridiculous and infuriating than what she went through in "Marge In Chains" (a custodial sentence for stealing a bottle of Kentucky bourbon? Are you kidding me?). As for Homer, we learn that he was "remanded to the custody of the United States Army Neurochemical Research Centre at Fort Meade, Maryland for extensive testing" - a development that doesn't seem quite so baffling once you've connected it to a gag from the first act, when we learn that Homer once volunteered for an army experiment to get out of an evening with Patty and Selma, a move that might have entailed two or three lingering side-effects. As another ludicrous action that reaps disturbing last-minute consequences, it makes sense (enough). But still, what a note to take us out on.

For the episode's cynicism as to what the wider world has left to offer for the outlaw, it proves invaluable as the one place in which Marge and Ruth were able to enjoy an emotional connection. That is the tragedy of "Marge on the Lam". A return to normalcy unfortunately means that their bond cannot endure; the series' regular cast just wasn't willing to accommodate Ruth in the long-term. "Lam" would be her last speaking appearance for some years and, far from going out in a blaze of gravity-defying glory, she wound up slipping away quietly into background cameo limbo. Too bad, because all those wacky shenanigans involving bears in cars, weather station vandalism and Lesley Gore couldn't overshadow the fact that "Lam" is, at its core, a rare Simpsons episode that actively celebrates female friendship. In that sense, the road leading away from Springfield still represents freedom, another alternate universe in which Marge's excursion with Ruth could have been the start of something much bigger for her, and not just a temporary reprieve from the monotony. Alas, there isn't much room for Marge to spread her wings under this sun, except in these stolen outliers.

Collapse (Tomorrow's Harvest)

Boards of Canada (the official moniker of fraternal production duo Michael Sandison and Marcus Eion) were, as they announced upfront on their sophomore album Geogaddi, by way of a repeated sample in the piece titled "Music Is Math", primarily preoccupied with examining the hazy nostalgia of "the past inside the present". All the same, their switch to dystopian futures in 2013's Tomorrow's Harvest (now in double digits and, sadly, still their most recent album to date) did not come completely out of nowhere. Their earliest albums contained elements of looking forward, not merely backwards, expressing explicitly potent concerns about the possible coming times we might be building. Music Has The Right To Children had "One Very Important Thought", which alluded to a hypothetical Orwellian society in which books and TV shows are subject to so-called obscenity trials; its sober warnings ("If you can be told what you can see and read, then it follows that you can be told what to say and think") are counterbalanced by the track's warm tones and by its final call to empowerment. "Energy Warning", off of Geogaddi, is a markedly more sombre piece, based around a sample from a 1979 4-H PSA, in which a child delivers a haunting message to the current adult generation of the world their wastefulness may be procuring for himself and, more implicitly, his own children ("There may not be enough energy to go around by the time I'm a parent"). The vocal seems eerily faded, the relic of some neglected good intention, a call to an action not heeded that has travelled an awfully long way to remind the generation that's since acquired the Earth that their continued plundering of its finite resources is a problem they've also inherited, and remain no closer to solving.

Resources, and our misuse thereof, are a prevalent concern of Tomorrow's Harvest (judging by its title, and those of several of its tracks), an album that I'm inclined to view in its entirety as a thematic sequel to the 35-second "Energy Warning". Its own tone was suggested less by PSAs than by the soundtracks of the dystopian science fiction flicks of yesteryear. To that end, it seems wrapped up in its own deceptive nostalgia - one of the more tongue-in-cheek moments occurs at the very beginning, with the inclusion of a faux ident that appears to place the implied internal narrative within the context of having tuned in for a late night TV low-budgeter. As a safety net it does not endure - "Semena Mertvykh", the album closer, offers no return to this suggested framing device, embracing its dystopian ambience to its fullest and forsaking us with an eerily desolate send-off. The most ominous track, however, is arguably the one that falls square in the middle of Tomorrow's Harvest - track no. 9, "Collapse", which goes out on a point of menacing abruptness. The last twelve seconds or so are focussed on an accelerating whooshing sound, giving the impression of something falling from high up in the sky, although the moment of impact is denied us. The ending of "Collapse" is, in some regards, the set-up to a joke, but the nature of that joke varies depending on what listening format you're using. On CD or digital, "Collapse" leads directly into "Palace Posy" which, while not exactly a benign listen (the title is an anagram of "apocalypse", for eff's sake), provides a discordantly vibrant contrast. On vinyl, "Collapse" is the final track on Side B, meaning that there is no direct follow-up; by the time you've loaded up Side C and have "Palace Posy" playing, that dead, empty silence in which something catastrophic feels like it must have occurred has had plenty of time in which to fester. What exactly is meant to be falling in that track? A nuclear device? Some kind of divine judgement? Or is the fall a symbolic one, to indicate the long overdue upending of a cursed civilisation?

Whatever the specifics, "Collapse" implicates the decisive point where things were pushed a notch too far out of balance, and something had to give. The moment of impact is ostensibly a missing piece of the puzzle, yet one gets the feeling that the build-up and the fall-out contain a succession of equally gut-wrenching impacts all of their own. In a Guardian interview from around the album's release, Sandison elucidated that, "There's a palindromic structure centred around the track Collapse in the middle," confirming that it is to be perceived it as the thematic nexus of the album. Some listeners have interpreted this to mean that the tracklisting is literally out of order (and that "Semena Mertvykh" should follow on from "Gemini", "Come To Dust" from "Reach For The Dead", etc), with "Collapse" serving as the true finale, but I'm not so hot on that theory myself (for one, it's not exactly how a palindrome works, is it?). My view leans more toward the centrality of "Collapse" emphasising its dominance, and its inescapability - whichever way you go, you're always going to end up back where you started, and you have no means of avoiding that unspeakable catastrophe that looms in between. It should be noted that "Collapse" is itself a palindrome - the track's musical content sounds the same when played in reverse. There is a sense of futility, of being unable to reverse the trajectory on which we've found ourselves. By "Collapse", we're aware that we've reached the point of no return, but how far back did was our grim fate truly sealed? The palindromic structure, along with the album title, suggests that each track leading up to "Collapse" should be perceived as its own individual seed, with each corresponding track thereafter representing the crop of that which was previously sown. By the time we've reached "Semena Mertvykh", there is the sinking sensation that our resources might already have depleted. As with "Energy Warning", the underlying narrative is of an earlier generation leaving its successors with a future that is not sustainable; the title of that distressingly sterile final track, translating from Russian to "Seeds of The Dead", would appear to confirm that the legacy of this bygone generation was not worth much in the end, counteracting the regenerative prospects evoked in the track title of "New Seeds". The palindrome format emphasises how what happens in one temporal state has reverberations in the other, be it the anticipation of the "after" or the consequences of the "before". In a particularly delicious trick, this extending across the temporal gap is openly advertised in the title of the second track, "Reach For The Dead", which anticipates the bleak decay setting in by the penultimate track, "Come To Dust", whose own title seems to beckon in response (it's also a double entendre, evoking reproductive sterility and mirroring the "Seeds of The Dead" title directly below it).

Given the album's clear affection for the visions of old-school science-fictions, we might view the overall effect as forming the sonic equivalent to the conclusion of the original Planet of The Apes (1968). Ignoring the existence of the sequels, the story ends with Taylor (Charlton Heston) and Nova (Linda Harrison) escaping the apes and riding off along the shoreline, a man and a woman who, in a more optimistic picture, could well become the next Adam and Eve in heralding the dawn of a new human civilisation. Yet the final image with which the film leaves us is infamously not one of hope, but of ruination. Dr Zaius (Maurice Evans) has already warned us that Taylor will meet "his destiny" out there. What he in fact discovers is the destiny of all humankind, embodied in the wrecked remains of the Statue of Liberty. The sunken statue is literally blocking the route where Taylor and Nova were headed, giving us a closing arrangement in which the mistakes of the past loom heavy and deny a way forward for the future - and when Taylor gives his infamous "Damn you all to Hell!" tirade, he is in effect condemning the film's viewership in the present day, for their (impending) failure to prevent the course of human history from heading down its catastrophic trajectory. The past, present and future are bound up within a common destiny, the inevitability of our collapse being a collective nightmare that haunts us all.

Well, they did warn us. That kid from the 4-H warned us.

Gyroscope (The Devil Is In The Details?)

Something I find a bit sobering about it being 2023 is the realisation that it's now been a full decade since we last had a brand new Boards of Canada album. Are those guys ever coming back?

If Scottish siblings Michael Sandison and Marcus Eion never gift us with another full-fledged package of otherworldly nostalgia and hair-raising subliminals, then we at least can't say that they didn't go out with some semblance of closure, albeit not the kind of closure geared toward lifting weight off our shoulders. I fear this may be a cliched observation, but the current tetrad of Boards of Canada albums appear to correspond perfectly with the different stages of a person's existence. Music Has The Right To Children (1998) explores, in that finest of hauntological traditions, a hazily-remembered childhood, one filtered through the lens of the uncanny but with an unmistakable air of sunniness, echoed in the numerous Sesame Street-sourced samples of giggling children scattered across the album. It plays like the soundtrack to a long lost summer. Geogaddi (2002) has a similarly youthful vigor but comes from a place of heightened disturbance; it is the soundtrack to yet another lost summer, one occurring somewhat later down the line, in which innocence was completely evaporated and the world never seemed quite so idyllic thereafter. The Campfire Headphase (2005), with its heavy emphasis on acoustic strings, represented a new "mature" sound for the duo, after which Tomorrow's Harvest (2013) saw a return to the creeping paranoia of Geogaddi, but with a more meticulously desolate slant. As the title suggests, it is about looking forward, not backward, and the mood of the album implies that the future it anticipates is none too optimistic. It is a meditation on mortality if ever there was one; the final track, "Semena Mertvykh" (Russian for "Seeds of The Dead"), defiantly refuses to offer anything in the way of comfort. Sorry folks, it seems to say, but this is indeed where it all ends. The fragility of existence is evoked, eerily, in the album cover, which shows a ghostly perspective of the San Francisco skyline glimpsed from the defunct Alameda Naval Air Station, an image that conjures up both a haunted past (Alameda was a significant military base during the Cold War) and a haunted future (a world in which civilisation has collapsed, leaving only a wasteland where it once stood). It speaks so much of the way our history could have gone, and where we might well still be headed.

The elimination of barriers of safety (or perceived barriers) is every bit as pivotal to Geogaddi, which occupies an equally thin dividing line between carefree innocence and anxious awareness - its interests lie in teasing out the undercurrent of perpetual unease that pervades all corners of its dazzling soundscapes. The especially spine-chilling short track with the PSA-ready title "Beware The Friendly Stranger" (which would later become synonymous with the web cartoon Salad Fingers) makes it plain that the disruption of childhood innocence is one of the album's preoccupations. Elsewhere, we find references to the occult, the Satanic and to religious cults ("1969" is a continuation of a theme already explored in BoC's 2000 EP A Beautiful Place Out In The Country, which centred around the Branch Davidian religious sect - Eion confirmed in a contemporary interview with URB Magazine that their real fascination with this story was in "the shock of seeing how the US authorities handled it all", suggesting that we're ultimately no safer in the hands of those we are conditioned to see as our protectors). Some of these references could be described as tongue-in-cheek - one of the tracks receives the on-the-nose title "The Devil Is In The Details", while the purpose of the otherwise baffling (even by BoC's standards) closer "Magic Window", one minute and forty-seven seconds of complete silence, is typically ascribed to getting the album to run at exactly sixty-six minutes and six seconds in length. It's here that Boards of Canada seem to be deliberately baiting and lampooning the hysteria about backmasking in music that gained particular traction during the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, making Geogaddi as much a parody of our addiction to perceived danger as it is a deconstruction of perceived safety. Numerous tracks and their titles also reflect an interest in mathematics, science and the intricacies of the natural world ("Dandelion", "Dawn Chorus", "A Is To B As B Is To C"). As with much of Music Has The Right To Children, these are nods to one of the duo's most prominent inspirations, evoking the soundtracks found in vintage educational programming, but in Geogaddi they convey a more salient urge to examine the underlying codes and patterns of the universe, from the twitchy perspective that they might reveal something fundamentally sinister about the nature of our being (meanwhile, the short track "Energy Warning", a precursor to the concerns conveyed more centrally in Tomorrow's Harvest, reminds us that the real balefulness stirring in the natural world is that which we are apt to bring upon ourselves). Geogaddi deals with omnipresent forces operating at all kinds of levels - the individual, the institutional, the cosmic and the microscopic - forces that, if not uniformly malign, seem at best spooky and unknowable. Paranoia is key to Geogaddi, but so is curiosity; compared to the bleakness of Tomorrow's Harvest, Geogaddi seems to relish the prospect of awakening to the danger that lies beyond the boundaries of young guilelessness, and the possibility that such danger is what our childhood games and rituals have always intuitively anticipated and prepared us for.

The emotional gulf between Music Has The Right To Children and Geogaddi is probably no better illustrated than in the respective tracks "Aquarius" and "Gyroscope", both of which involve voices reciting sequences of numbers (a recurring theme throughout BoC's discography...after all, as Geogaddi explicitly reminds us, Music is Math). The first sounds bouncy and optimistic, the second distinctly ominous. "Aquarius" is filled with buoyant young voices laughing and proclaiming "Yeah, that's right!" while a female voice reels off assorted numbers, initially from 1 to 36, but then she goes off in all directions. The synthesised nature of her speech notwithstanding, the results are entirely non-threatening (although if you add up every number from 1 to 36 you get 666, so...there is that), conveying all the rhythmic energy of a particularly infectious counting game. The vocal sample used in "Gyroscope" could also be construed as having associations with childhood play, sounding reminiscent as it does of the build-up to a game of hide-and-seek, but in a manner that emphasises the more sinister implications of the game in question. The distinction between recreation and pursuit of a less innocent nature is blurred; we sense that, in this case, the sequence of numbers presages some unknown impending threat, from which we have only a narrow amount of time to run and conceal ourselves. The title "Gyroscope", one of several scientifically-themed track names throughout the album, alludes to the disorientating spinning sensation created by the track's drum loop, suggesting a frantic loss of control. The game has not yet properly begun, and yet already the odds seemed stacked against us.

In actuality, the voice heard throughout "Gyroscope" is not that of a child, but an adult woman. The audio has been slightly tweaked, but it's a recording of a numbers station (apparently E05, or CynthIA, as it's more affectionately known), shortwave radio stations used to transmit encrypted messages, presumably from intelligence agencies to operatives working in the field. Historically, numbers stations were at their most active during the Cold War era, but are still in use today, and since anybody with a shortwave radio can tune in and listen, you can bet that they've amassed quite the following across the decades (for my part, I once had The Lincolnshire Poacher as my ringtone). If you've ever listened to "The Conet Project", the most famous compilation of numbers stations recordings, then you'll know that these transmissions, incomprehensible to anybody outside of their intended listenership, practically function as their own bizarre little snippets of hypnotic sound art. But they bring with them with the added discomfort of not being able to say what you're really listening to - for all we know, people were killed on the instructions given out in these enigmatic messages. In terms of Geogaddi, it plays into the overarching narrative of omnipresent forces operating off of our everyday radars; the modification of the sample, to sound more child-like, places it within that distinctly child's-eye awareness of the dangers of the world, as a threat that feels both beyond comprehension and instinctively tacit. It is unknowable, and yet its presence is so intrinsic to our functioning that it warrants no rumination. Our schoolyard rituals are filled with acknowledgements of that frightening other...hide-and-seek is, when you strip it back, a game that utilises our basic survival mechanism to evade a predatory figure by not enabling it to see us, just as tag, another enduring playground classic, tests our ability to outrun a predator - and when we are called upon to be "it", or the seeker, these games prepare us for scenarios in which we may find ourselves the predator and not the prey. In a similar vein, we might ponder what is actually being insinuated in that popular children's ditty "The Teddy Bears' Picnic", which shows up (albeit in reverse) in "A Is To B As B Is To C". We are cautioned that, "If you go down in the woods today, you'd better not go alone," a line that sounds downright blood-curdling when taken out of context. It's already questionable enough within context - do teddy bears, another innocent symbol of childhood comfort, turn into rabid grizzlies when they gather en masse out in the forest? Or is the danger more in the symbolic idea of stumbling across a covert society that's probably not going to welcome uninvited observers?

Something that's always struck me as beguilingly incongruous about Geogaddi is that, while it deals overwhelmingly with undercurrents of darkness and danger, there are multiple tracks throughout emphasising the continual presence of light, eg: "Sunshine Recorder", "Dawn Chorus", and "1969", with its refrain of "Nineteen-sixty-nine in the sunshine". The album cover image, which shows a series of identical silhouettes, kaleidoscopically arranged and with their arms outstretched as though advancing on the onlooker (in play, greeting, or something more ominous?), is nevertheless bathed in an intense orange glow. (Meanwhile, the title of the Japanese exclusive track, "From One Sources All Things Depend", while focussed on audio of children talking about God, makes me think of the sun.) As noted, to my mind Geogaddi is quintessentially a summer-themed record - the images it evokes are unfolding just as the daylight hours are at their longest and the sun is at its most oppressive. This plays into the overall sense of a corrupted idyll; there is warmth and brightness all around, and yet the omnipresent terrors appear to thrive in it as much as anything else. The intensity of that light and heat no longer seem quite so benevolent, leaving us stifled, disorientated and exposed out in the open when gut instinct tells us to hide. I don't know exactly what happened in 1969 in the sunshine, but I have a feeling that it was just as foreboding as everything else on Geogaddi.