The Springfield Files (aka The Earth Says Hello)

"The Springfield Files" (episode 3G01) is a classic example of how the reputation of The Simpsons' eighth season tends to waver among fans. It's a popular opinion that this season marked the end of the show's golden era, but just how close to the borderline between quality and debasement does it fall? Was it the last of the truly great seasons, or the point at which the series' standards started to noticeably slip? It's certainly fair to say that Season 8 had a high number of storylines that were dependent on some kind of pivotal gimmick, and of these gimmicks, "The Springfield Files" boasted the one that seemed most consciously designed for baiting media headlines. The episode involves Homer having an apparent encounter with an extra-terrestrial lifeform following a Friday night drinking session at Moe's. No one else in Springfield is inclined to take his story particularly seriously, but it does attract the attentions of FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), who come all the way from Washington DC to investigate Homer's claims. When it debuted, on January 12th 1997, the notion of Homer getting to hang out with the two leads of The X-Files, the hit FOX series that pretty much defined the zeitgeist of the mid-1990s, was treated as an explosive deal. I remember "The Springfield Files" being wildly popular in its day. As far as I'm aware it still is - the scene where Homer spectacularly fails a polygraph test, just by purporting to understand the process, is frequently cited as an all-time favourite series moment among viewers. And according to the episode's Wikipedia page, it currently has the 11th highest rating for a Simpsons episode on the International Movie Database, at 9.0 (if IMDb ratings can be taken to mean anything in the age of review bombing). Among hardcore Simpsons nerds, however, "The Springfield Files" might just as readily be singled out as an early indicator of the show's impending decline. Zack Handlen does precisely this on The AV Club, stating that, "I was struck by how not all that different the episode is from what was to come...material which, while not always bad, didn’t build on anything before or after, and, at its worst, wasn’t even connected to the characters and the show itself." "The Springfield Files" is, if nothing else, an incredibly silly episode, perhaps the silliest The Simpsons had done up to this point. No question that belongs in Season 8 - there's a lot about it that will not necessarily be to all tastes, but it's brimming with those offbeat, experimental touches that make this era so fascinating for yours truly.

If we start by looking at the crossover hook itself, was there any precedent for this kind of thing? At least one - Jay Sherman had shown up to host the Springfield Film Festival and to implicitly plug his own animated sitcom, The Critic, a couple of years prior in "A Star Is Burns". That, though, was a clear-cut case of The Simpsons attempting to give a leg up to another series looking to boost its profile - to be popular by leeching off the popularity of others, as Patty and Selma so delicately put it within the episode itself. In this case, Mulder and Scully certainly didn't need a guest spot on The Simpsons to make themselves more visible to the masses. The X-Files was already a mighty cultural juggernaut; if anything, The Simpsons might be seen as riding on its coattails in an effort to prove that they were still relevant. (If you're wondering why Matt Groening was apparently okay with this arrangement, after making a public show of his opposition to "A Star Is Burns", then I suspect that might be your answer. The X-Files was a series to be seen with. The Critic had arrived at Fox in a precarious position, having already tanked on ABC, and Groening possibly figured that The Simpsons would do well to avoid the association.) At this point I should probably make the embarrassing confession that I've never actually watched an episode of The X-Files. Not properly, anyway. My brother was very into the show back in the day, and I would occasionally overhear snippets of dialogue while I was elsewhere in the room, playing Dangerous Creatures on mute on the family PC. I get the gist of the series, and who Mulder and Scully are, but I can't comment on how accurately The Simpsons represents their characters, or on how satisfying their involvement is for the devoted X-phile. For the purposes of this episode, however, I think that Reid Harrison's script does a fine job of giving them a clear and enjoyable dynamic, with as many stand-out gags built around their own philosophical differences as their mutual discordance with Homer (Mulder scoffing at Scully's suggestion that the FBI should be concerned with matters like drugs and illegal weapons when there are unsubstantiated alien sightings in the heartland of America, Scully rolling her eyes and vamoosing when Mulder starts going off on some drawn-out spiel about how The Truth Is Out There).

The most curious thing about Mulder and Scully's participation is that, despite being the big draw on which the entire episode hangs itself, they don't get to do a single thing that actually forwards the plot. To a point, I could buy that that's all part of the joke. That they get absolutely nowhere in uncovering the truth of Homer's alleged alien encounter and decide to bail out before we've even reached the third act (they reappear at the very end, in a perfunctory crowd scene cameo, but play no part in how the conflict is resolved). But then so much of the episode in general is like that - it takes a long time to get into Homer's alien story, the first act being comprised of a largely disconnected series of gags about what a typical Friday evening looks like for different Springfieldians. Then once Homer's seen the alien and it's established that nobody believes him, the entire middle act is just stalling for time until Homer and Bart obtain the video footage and we can finally get moving again. I'd go so far as to call "The Springfield Files" the least story-orientated installment of Season 8; it's definitely more focussed on its gags than on its narrative, which makes perfect sense when you take into account who produced it. Former showrunners Al Jean and Mike Reiss (creators of the aforementioned Jay Sherman) were working for Disney at the time, but they were still intermittently returning as guest producers on The Simpsons, and this one has their fingerprints all over it. To be honest, the shortcomings of "The Springfield Files" (the lack of plot momentum, the heavy reliance on desultory gags and non sequiturs, the glib wrap-up) are much the same as they'd always been whenever Jean and Reiss were at the helm, so I wonder if the accusations that the episode signifies the beginning of the decline are really the result of viewers being more receptive to such flaws at this point in the series' lifetime.

Admittedly, there are at least a couple of throwaway gags that would have likely been considered a bit much for The Simpsons back in Season 4. They might have fit more comfortably into The Critic, with its somewhat looser grip on reality; more than anything, though, they feel like antecedents to the kind of gags we would soon be seeing a whole lot more of in Family Guy - gags that are random, nonsensical and steeped in a deep love of popular culture. The first of these occurs when Mulder and Scully ask Homer to identify the alien he saw from a line-up of extra-terrestrial beings that includes the likes of Chewbacca, Gort and Marvin The Martian. Mulder and Scully being real people within the Simpsons universe is one thing - at least they are only regular humans. But these guys? C'mon, that's maybe just a little too silly. It's a gag that also makes very little sense in the context of Mulder and Scully's arc; if the implication is that they're involved in some government conspiracy to keep the existence of these aliens under wraps...isn't that kind of at odds with what Mulder later says in his "The Truth Is Out There" speech? If he's met Marvin The Martian in the flesh, then doesn't he already have a definitive answer to the question he raises? You're not supposed to give it more than a moment's thought, I know. So we'll move right along to the second of those particularly out there gags, which may well be the episode's most baffling - the one involving the trio of talking frogs from that popular contemporary beer commercial. While Bart and Homer are camping in the woods, the Budweiser frogs show up, only to get eaten by an alligator who apparently works for Coors (that, or the writers are making some point about Coors being higher up in the beer food chain that Budweiser). On its own terms, it's a pretty amusing joke. But it's just so out of place with everything else going on around it. What do talking frogs who shill beer have to do with a story about an ostensible alien encounter? Unless of course the implication is that the Budweiser frogs themselves are aliens...which might actually explain a few things. It's also funny how accurately it foreshadowed the future trajectory of the actual campaign; in 1998, the frogs gained a reptilian nemesis (a chameleon rather than a gator) who was also out to kill them (not because he worked for a rival beer, but because he wanted to shill Budweiser in their place). Were you watching, Goodby, Silverstein and Partners?

And yet it's strange...if you took the frogs out of the picture, then it feels as though the episode would lose an essential part of its character. "The Springfield Files", more so than other episodes of its era, plays like an overview of contemporary zeitgeist as much as it does a Simpsons adventure. As the mid-90s started to fade and we were headed for whatever the late 90s had to offer, this one seemingly aspired to be a veritable time capsule of the various fixations that kept us occupied through the middle of the decade - so, The X-Files, the Budweiser frogs, FOX's blunder in broadcasting Alien Autopsy, the budgetary hubris of Waterworld and the downward trajectory of Kevin Costner's Hollywood career (his wilderness era wouldn't fully kick in until the disaster that was The Postman at the tail-end of 1997, but you can be sure that The Simpsons would be there to comment on that too). More than anything, though, I have to give "The Springfield Files" points for the fact that it's genuinely kind of weird and spooky, in ways that are unusual for a non-Halloween episode. Talking frogs who shill beer might not have anything obvious to do with Homer's alien encounter, but they do feed into the overall aura that there's something very off-kilter about the characters' world in general.

For starters, it has a bizarre opening, one that breaks the fourth wall and straight-up acknowledges the fictionality of what we're about to see. At this point in the series, it was rare to see this kind of framing device used outside of a Treehouse of Horror, or one of those special episodes hosted by Troy McClure. The events of "The Springfield Files" are set up as a story being presented by a third guest star, Leonard Nimoy (previously seen in the Season 4 episode "Marge vs The Monorail"), who prefaces it with this beautifully contradictory statement: "The following story of alien encounters is true. And by true, I mean false. It's all lies. But they're entertaining lies, and in the end, isn't that the real truth? The answer is no." Nimoy's presence is going to immediately put us in mind of In Search of..., the paranormal series he narrated throughout the late 70s/early 80s, and really, "Its all lies, BUT they're entertaining lies" is as wonderfully succinct a summary of that show's appeal as you're going to find (in all seriousness, I have an awful lot of affection for In Search of...). But I believe this was also a nod to something The X-Files did in their first episode, which opened with a title card claiming to have been "inspired by actual documented accounts." This eyebrow-raising caption was already a familiar narrative device to fans of the horror genre, having been used in The Last House on The Left (1972) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) (John Kenneth Muir has a collection of such title cards in this blog post), who thus should know to be wary of their authority. At the time "The Springfield Files" first aired, the Coen brothers' 1996 film Fargo had recently illustrated just how easy it was to preface your story with such a claim when it was actually completely fabricated. In The X-Files' case, the claim of "actual documented accounts" is vague enough that it could mean anything, and the viewer is unlikely to enter in with the expectation of seeing a true story; the title card serves the purpose of more of a wink and a nod, encouraging the viewer to suspend their disbelief and to go along with its professed take on actuality, pondering where, exactly, truth and fiction might potentially be intersecting. Nimoy's disclaimer at the start of "The Springfield Files" is hilarious, in part, because it is so obviously redundant - of course we're not going to come to a Simpsons episode about Homer seeing an alien and meeting Mulder and Scully with the expectation that it has any basis in truth. It is a joke at the expense of the viewer's willingness to play along with such claims and our desire to believe that the events depicted could happen, even if we suspect deep down that what we're seeing is nothing more than some very entertaining lies. It is as Bart's chalkboard gag states during the episode's opening sequence: "The Truth Is Not Out There". Truth is not what we're looking for in entertainment, but escapism. (And just to make Nimoy's credibility even more ridiculous, his opening narration also evokes that of Jeron Criswell King at the beginning of Ed Wood's 1959 film Plan 9 From Outer Space, one of the most notoriously nonsensical pictures of all time.)

The single most unsettling thing to happen in "The Springfield Files" ironically has nothing to do with Homer and his alien, and no bearing on the internal narrative at all, in fact. We cut to a scene outside Moe's, where onscreen text obligingly fills us in on the contextual details. "Moe's Bar. 3:02pm. Temperature 72o." Then the typist apparently snaps and starts typing "All Work And No Play Makes Jack A Dull Boy" over and over in the style of Jack Torrance (as portrayed by Jack Nicholson). We could, just as easily as with those Budweiser frogs, question what this random reference to The Shining is doing in the mix; Kubrick's film deals in all manner of weird and eerie occurrences, but the occasional far-out fan theory notwithstanding, there were no aliens involved (the script's prior Psycho reference, while just as gratuitous, feels slightly less random, Bernard Herrmann's strings having become our universal cultural signifier for when things are about to get seriously twisted). Again, though, the episode wouldn't have half as much personality without it. It's another fourth wall-breaking gag, one that makes us conscious of the individual behind the scenes whose job it is to include this dry factual information and which, unlike the scene with the Budweiser frogs, it comes with its own implicit narrative. Apparently they've just suffered a mental breakdown, possibly induced by the pedantic tedium of having to specify that it was 72o outside Moe's on that day, and if we make the connection to The Shining, and to the character trajectory of Jack Torrance, we can suppose that this typist isn't going to be much fun to be around. This might not mean anything for Homer and co, but it adds to the overall atmosphere of strangeness and uncertainty. It also seems noteworthy that in the scene it parodies, Jack's descent into madness is expressed through his inability to overcome his writer's block. His aspiration to be a novelist is driven by his desire for escapism and self-reinvention (he'd previously had alcohol for the former, but that's gone out the window); his failure to create (to play) instead leads to his entrapment in the endless cycle of violence that characterises the Overlook. This reference to stifled creativity could be interpreted as yet another nod to one of Season 8's favourite recurring themes - the production team's prevalent anxieties that The Simpsons might already have reached its creative peak. But I'm more inclined to connect it to the monotony experienced by the characters throughout the episode, foregrounding the need for escapism. The early, protracted sequence showing the various characters going about their individual business on a Friday sets up a theme of endless looping, be it the literal video loop that Homer wires up to the power plant's security monitor (inspired by a similar scene in The Bus That Couldn't Slow Down), or Milhouse's willingness to keep feeding an arcade machine 40 quarters just for the momentary buzz of getting to advance a sprite shaped like Kevin Costner by a single step. The Waterworld game might be a total rip-off, but what else is he going to be doing on a Friday night? Staying home and watching television isn't a more attractive option - Bart assures Lisa that she only needs to age a couple of years to see ABC's weekly T.G.I.F. Line-Up for the interminable banality that it is. Homer swaps his Duff for Red Tick Beer in an effort to add more variety to his Friday, but it draws him into the same cycle of drinking he always uses to stave off the prospect of having to return to his living room and actually spend some quality time with his family. Lisa argues that it is a common theme that people who claim to have had alien encounters typically have boring jobs, suggesting that tedium is one of the biggest factors in driving a professed connection with the paranormal. The truth may be out there, but it is precisely the truth that we are looking to get away from. The truth is vapid and unfulfilling, and it will completely consume us if, like our unfortunate typist, we gaze too long and hard into its monotonous abyss.

The twist here, however, is that this may not actually be the case. The truth, at least as it stands in Springfield, might be just as off-the-wall as anything our idle minds could concoct, albeit in ways that underscore the simple absurdities of the characters' lives. When the revelation regarding the true nature of Homer's extra-terrestrial encounter finally comes - the peace-loving "alien" is actually Mr Burns, roaming the woods on a painkiller-induced high - it seems both fitting in context, and in its own class of total ridiculousness. It's also tied to that overarching feeling of monotony, being a result of the standard procedure that Burns goes through every Friday. I wonder whether or not it's fair to suggest that the answer is still something of a cheat. On the one hand, the notion of someone in the dead of night mistaking the skeletal form of a delirious, radioactive Burns for an extra-terrestrial being doesn't seem at all far-fetched (not by this show's standards, anyway). On the other hand, it does come more-or-less out of nowhere. With hindsight, it's strange that we see Burns at the beginning of the episode, asking Smithers what he intends to do on a Friday, and the script doesn't take the opportunity to work in even an oblique clue as to his own routine. While it doesn't serve much of a direct narrative function, that drawn-out collection of Friday-themed sketches nevertheless manages to justify itself, in giving us a flavour of the parallel lives that are constantly unfolding in the town (not too unlike "22 Short Films About Springfield"), and the various oddities that accompany what constitutes routine for these folks. Dr Hibbert leaving his practice and accidentally abandoning Hans Moleman in the x-ray machine (possibly for the whole weekend) is something that I could believe happens on most, if not every Friday in Springfield.

"The Springfield Files" is most in its element when it's exploring the thin balance between weirdness and banality that characterises life in this seemingly nondescript burg. In this regard, the episode fits in perfectly with another of Season 8's favourite recurring themes - what an inherently freaky and perturbing place Springfield must be to anyone who approaches the community from somewhere outside of the show's regular dynamics. Mulder and Scully can be viewed as a kind of precursor to the role that Frank Grimes would have a far more gruelling time playing later in the season, as can Sherry Bobbins of "Simpsoncalifragilisticexpiala(Annoyed Grunt)cious". (This does not apply to Cecil Terwilliger, incidentally, who was no outsider. He was right at home in his brother's world.) While they get nowhere in uncovering the alien, the two agents become momentarily transfixed by Homer himself and what a disturbing specimen he is. ("His jiggling is almost hypnotic." "Yes, it's like a lava lamp.") Meanwhile, the visual of Moe having a live killer whale concealed in the backroom of his bar may be the episode's most patently ludicrous. But this too is just business as usual in Springfield - the seasoned Simpsons viewer will recognise this as a callback to a joke made three years prior, in "Cape Feare", where Moe was apparently involved in another underground operation in smuggling exotic wildlife, only to similarly bail out when he thought the law was catching up with him. In both cases, the character who causes Moe to panic (Lisa in "Cape Feare", Mulder here) actually has no knowledge of what he is doing, and his actions remain firmly on the sidelines of the plot. The pandas are immediately forgotten in "Cape Feare", whereas here Moe's whale provides a punchline for an additional gag - Mulder's final insistence that "The Truth Is Out There" is comically undercut by the sight of Moe and his two accomplices staggering into view, carrying the hulking orca, as Moe complains, "Who'd have thought a whale would be so heavy?" It is a wonderful moment, simultaneously bringing Mulder back down to Earth while emphasising the intrinsic absurdness of the world playing out right under his nose. The truth is out there alright, but it might not be as noble as the truth Mulder is seeking.

"The Springfield Files" is best consumed, as the title suggests, as an episode about Springfield as a character unto itself. As a Homer episode, it often feels like he's going through the motions of his own story. Compared to the episode that directly precedes it, "El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Jomer", it's less interested in functioning as a character study, and in exploring his personal alienation and confusion upon experiencing something he cannot explain. Nor is it particularly interested in exploring what it might mean for his family. The way each of them reacts to Homer's claim to have encountered alien life is rarely forced or out of character, but they do only get to contribute the bare minimum, with no particularly substantial arcs or dynamics exploration. The most we get in that department is a genuinely sweet moment where Bart, despite having teased Homer earlier, admits that he actually does believe him; he senses that his father is being entirely sincere in his testimony. His involvement doesn't amount to much more than having the foresight to bring a video camera to the woods, however. Lisa, who subscribes to Junior Skeptic Magazine, insists on there being a more rational explanation but, other than being the one to shine a literal light on the alien at the end, she doesn't get much of an arc out of this. Marge likewise refuses even to humor her husband on the matter - not because she necessarily requires a more rational answer, but because she finds the story so hard to believe coming from Homer. This particular detail feels as if it was at one point intended to be the emotional crux of the episode - Homer feeling especially despondent that Marge, of all people, won't stand by him - but it doesn't come across too strongly in the final product, seeing how Marge is so thoroughly sidelined for most of the narrative. Following on from "El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Jomer", that might even be for the best - we didn't need two stories in a row about Homer being upset because he and Marge weren't seeing eye to eye about some crazy experience he'd had. Which doesn't prevent "The Springfield Files" from falling back on it, rather cheekily, for some illusion of emotional closure. Glib resolutions are par for the course with Jean and Reiss, but if you pay attention to what Marge actually says to Homer at the end - "You said you'd bring them peace and love, and it looks like you did it! I'm proud of you, Homie!" - it really doesn't track with anything the script has been logically building up to. For one, Homer never said that he would bring the Springfieldians peace and love - that was all the claim of the disorientated Burns. Homer also doesn't take much of an active role in the resolution, beyond convincing the townspeople to gather in the woods on Friday night; surely the bulk of the credit, for bringing the actual "peace and love" (heavy quotation marks there), has to go to Dr Nick and his booster?

Still, we get the spectacle of the entire town singing along in unison to "Good Morning Starshine", a classic hippie anthem from the musical Hair (that Burns would even know the lyrics is amusing enough in itself), and that's got to be worth something (I'm going to assume that Jean and Reiss were going through an obsession with that musical at the time, since they also worked the title song into the other episode they produced for this season, "Simpsoncalifragilisticexpiala(Annoyed Grunt)cious"). Is it a hokey way of rounding off our tale? Absolutely, but I could see that insincerity as being all part a of the package. Springfield as a whole is not a place that tends to naturally cultivate peace and love. It comes as no surprise when their knee-jerk reaction, on meeting the seemingly benevolent alien visitor, is to declare war on it and to want to break its legs. So when the "alien" is unmasked as one of their own, it seems fitting that they're left staring their own belligerent natures straight in the face - far from bringing them peace and love, Burns seems intent on invoking the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. If Springfield is going to be gripped by a sensation of peace and love, however momentarily, then the only way it's going to happen is via good old-fashioned mob mentality - one of them starts singing and the others, as easily and as mindlessly placated as Burns with his painkillers, join in, because do any of them have anything better to be doing on a Friday?

As a side-note, my pettiest nitpick for this episode has to do with the scene where Homer claims that it's his birthday (something that has zero relevance outside of a single isolated gag), only to get upstaged by Santa's Little Helper, with whom he apparently has to share the date. Santa's Little Helper was an abandoned racing dog that Homer and Bart picked up directly off the street, so...how do the Simpsons even know the precise date on which he was born? I suppose it's possible that they have a designated day on which to celebrate it, but if so, then it does seem almost implausibly mean of the family to pick the day of Homer's actual birthday. It's a something of a contrived gag, but at least it doesn't contradict anything we already knew on Homer's end. I could be wrong about this, but I think that Homer was the only family member who, up until now, was never shown celebrating a birthday within the series (for the others, we have Marge - "Life on the Fast Lane", Lisa - "Stark Raving Dad", Bart - "Radio Bart", and Maggie - "Lady Bouvier's Lover").