There is something faintly paradoxical about the way in which "Homer vs. Patty and Selma" (2F14) handles the overdue grudge match promised upfront by its title. On the one hand, this is the first Simpsons episode in which the mutual dislike between Homer and his twin sister-in-laws is permitted to take centre stage. Their antipathy has been a fixture of the show since its very first episode, where having to accommodate Patty and Selma was one of the many grievances weathered by Homer during a particularly grim holiday in "Simpsons Roasting on An Open Fire", but had seldom escalated into anything more dramatic than regular rounds of passive aggressive murmurs. The characters make little secret of what anathema their respective existences are to one another, but it's always been something that, for the most part, everyone just has to tiptoe around. So long as they've ample opportunity to take snide potshots at the enemy party (often from behind their back), then Homer and Patty and Selma are about able to coexist, united on the understanding that they're required to put up with one another for the sake of Marge. It's far from ideal, but it's a kind of equilibrium. "Homer vs. Patty and Selma" attempts to explore in-depth what putting up for Patty and Selma for Marge's sake really looks like for Homer, by thrusting him into a situation where that equilibrium is flipped hopelessly out of whack, with Patty and Selma gaining the critical advantage. Showrunner David Mirkin suggests on the DVD commentary that when this first aired, on February 26th 1995, it represented the show's most exhaustive dive to date into this uneasy dynamic, and I'd agree insofar as it does more with it from a narrative standpoint than any episode before it was wont to do. But I'm not sure if that necessarily makes it the most developed look at the relationship between Homer and his sister-in-laws, as it has to be said that this is something of a regressive entry on Patty and Selma's end. It makes the move of casting them as straight up villains, for which there is honestly very little precedent. Patty and Selma have never been the most affable of souls, but they have typically always been treated with more nuance than is evident here. Whereas a lesser series might have settled for painting them as the loathsome boogeywomen Homer assumes them to be, with no greater drive than to make his life miserable, The Simpsons has always been careful to give them distinct shades of humanity, with doubts and vulnerabilities all of their own. "Homer vs. Patty and Selma" is a rare episode in which their characterisation is determined exclusively by Homer's perspective, and therein lies the paradox - their disdain for Homer gets a ton of focus, but they themselves are at their most one-dimensional, to the point that you would have to go as far back as "Simpsons Roasting on An Open Fire" to find an episode where the matter was ever quite this one-sided.
That's not to say that Homer is without fault, since he gets into his situation through an act of flagrant misjudgement, the kind that could only validate Patty and Selma's perspective that he is an unworthy husband for Marge. The episode opens with him having invested all of the family's savings in pumpkins, observing that demand for the gourd has been souring all throughout October but failing to grasp the obvious reason for this (ie: Halloween is right around the corner). The season passes, leaving him with only a worthless investment, a looming mortgage payment and too much shame to be capable of explaining the situation to Marge. Having exhausted every other possible avenue of support, he turns to his last ditch option of Patty and Selma, who've recently received a big promotion at the DMV and are in a sound position financially. They agree to lend Homer the money, keeping the wolf from the Simpsons' door but leaving it wide open to a disagreeable intrusion of another nature. Not surprisingly, Patty and Selma had an ulterior motive for their generosity, having spied an opportunity to gain leverage over Homer - as Selma so elegantly puts it, "We know something you don't want Marge to know. Now we own you, like Siegfried owns Roy." The twins insist on calling at the Simpsons' house more frequently, forcing Homer to perform a variety of degrading tasks at their beck and call in exchange for their continued silence around Marge. But of course that cat's only staying in that bag for so long.
As Mirkin observes, this an unusually straightforward and grounded story for its era, the kind of conflict we might expect to have come up not just in the show's earlier seasons but in any number of its live action counterparts. It has, though, unmistakably the flavour of a Season 6 installment. It's a wholly relatable situation - at some point in our lives, we've all had to ask a favour of someone with whom we did not ordinarily get along, and perhaps they weren't exactly gracious about it - but it paints itself in distinctly big and broad strokes. Take the comically exaggerated sequence where Patty and Selma are first inducted into the conflict, as Homer arrives home to find smoke gushing out from under his front door and is initially elated, thinking the house is on fire and that insurance money will cover his pumpkin losses. He rushes in, to find the source of the smoke to be none other than his sister-in-laws with their usual cigarette-biting antics. They're established, none too subtly, as toxic invaders, filling the household with their noxious fumes like a couple of rapacious fire-breathing dragons. But the sequence feels just as telling for the troubling window it offers into Homer's muddled, overly-impulsive psyche; he spends the entire first act struggling to save his family's home from repossession, yet he was momentarily happy at the thought of it going up in flames if it meant an imminent cash payout. It foreshadows how the story will eventually develop, as Patty and Selma do indeed turn out to be Homer's salvation, at least in the short-term. In the long-term they prove to be just as destructive as his hypothetical fire, making his home life unliveable and dragging his already battered self-esteem to blistering new lows.
The resulting episode is one of assorted contradictions. It's a small story that, in narrative terms, is content to stay small. Neither Patty and Selma nor writer Brent Forrester seem interested in taking their unholy arrangement to overly dramatic heights, the tasks Homer is required to do being unpleasant but basically nondescript. The nastiest it gets is when they force him to grovel at their freshly-massaged feet and to talk in the voice of a stereotypical Hanna Barbera dog. Yet the larger-than-lifeness that dominated your average Simpsons outing by the mid-1990s stays firmly in the driver seat. It isn't entirely disconnected from the realism of the earlier seasons; for one, it's nice to have another story in which the family struggles with
money in a meaningful way, something that used to happen a lot in the
early years but now rarely seemed to be an issue any more (we were just a
season away from that infamous moment where Homer hands Bart $750 like
it was pocket change). But the undeniable despair of the predicament is buffered by copious amounts of silliness, and this is before we get into the comparatively lighter subplot. There's the ridiculous means through which Homer loses the family's money in the first place (which, admittedly, seems quite sedate compared to his recent get-rich-quick shenanigans involving a sugar pile and a trampoline), the cartoonish physicality of the sequences where he ejects Patty and Selma (and Marge, in one instance) from the house, and the way he protests Marge's evaluation of the matter by smashing a plate against his head. There are a few downright baffling gags, including a total non-sequitur involving a possibly paranormal television and a nod to The X-Files. And then the third act development where Homer resolves to bring in more money by moonlighting as a chauffeur takes a distinctly improbable detour, which Homer puts neatly into quotation marks: "I can't believe my very first passenger is comedy legend Mel Brooks!" With hindsight, Brooks' cameo seems kind of ominous, it being an early example of a celebrity appearance that's been conspicuously crowbarred in for the sake of a celebrity appearance (Brooks' wife Anne Bancroft had recently voiced a character in the episode "Fear of Flying", and the producers wanted to stick Brooks into an adjacent story while they were at it). Brooks is given no substantial link to this particular narrative; he's there because he just happened to be passing through. They could have dropped any celebrity into the backseat of Homer's limo and it would have made every bit as much sense. And yet I can't really begrudge the Brooks sequence because it contains what might be my second favourite joke of the episode, one so subtle that it took a few watches for it to completely register - Homer telling Brooks that he loved his movie Young Frankenstein because it scared the hell out of him. (I can relate to that; I'll never forget my confusion on being shown the movie Airplane! at age 7 and, being too callow to comprehend the idea of a spoof movie, trying to follow it as a serious adventure story. It certainly made me leery about airline catering.) Besides, the script is able to scrape some decent humor out of Brooks' sidelined status, when Homer is found by Wiggum to be driving without the correct licence, and ordered to apply to Patty and Selma at the DMV. Homer starts screaming uncontrollably, and Brooks, not comprehending the situation on which he's vaguely impinging, concludes simply that Homer is dangerous and opts to bum a ride with Wiggum instead.
This is also the episode where Homer envisions Bart as a giant rat. Bart, sadly, perceives that as an insult, but I know I would much rather be compared to a rat than to a royal.
"Homer vs. Patty and Selma" is less interested in how Homer relates to Patty and Selma (something touched on in more nuanced, if not pivotal ways in episodes such as "Principal Charming" and "Selma's Choice") than the depths of his devotion to Marge, and this is where the emotional crux of the story lies. Which is not to say that it's even half as interested in Marge herself, who doesn't have much to do other than stand on the sidelines and look sad. Her reaction on coming up to speed with Homer's financial ills is curiously downplayed, given how much he'd feared her finding out. Other than voicing her confusion as to why he didn't tell her, she doesn't express much of an opinion on her husband blowing the family's savings on Jack-o-Lanterns, leaving it unclear what she's really feeling in the aftermath. Disappointment? Concern? Resignation? Homer's self-loathing, and his assumptions about what his investment fiasco says about him ends up overshadowing anything that Marges actually says or does, which is doubtlessly the point, but it keeps her in a position of total passivity throughout. Conversely, this is one of the few episodes in which Marge gets to openly highlight something that should be obvious but nearly always gets ignored whenever her husband and sisters are spitting venom at one another - just how shitty it must be for her to be caught in the middle of it all. In one scene she tells Homer, "It's very hard on me to have you fighting all the time." With that in mind, there is a layer of hidden poignancy in Marge's de-emphasised view of events, since for a chunk of it she's under the impression that Homer and her sisters are finally getting along, when things are actually worse then ever while her back is turned. Which takes us into my absolute favourite joke of the episode, following Patty and Selma's "perfect" dinner with the Simpsons where nothing at all went wrong. Even more revealing than the strained, plastic grin on Homer's face is Marge's joyous aspiration to celebrate the ostensible truce by serving the most international coffee in the house - Montreal Morn! That one line says pretty much everything about Marge, about her outlook on life, her expectations and her lived reality. It's capped off by another fantastic gag when she returns a few moments later, announcing shamefacedly that her Montreal Morn supplies have been depleted and all she has to offer in its place is some cheap and nasty Nescafe (yuck, I would be ashamed too). Marge's life is an onslaught of perpetual disappointments, her hopes of impressing by serving flashy coffee about as realistic as all prospects of her husband and her sisters ever putting aside their bad blood.
Since Homer's story is a (relatively) grounded one with (somewhat) genuine stakes, a B-story is woven in to pad it out with extra levity. This involves Bart being forced to take ballet lessons and discovering a latent talent for the dance. When tasked with performing before the rest of the school, however, he balks, fearing that the bullies will target him for enjoying a traditionally feminine pursuit. As B-stories go, it's a fairly arbitrary one, offering not even the vaguest of intersections with the A-story (the aforementioned "Rat Boy" moment is the only point where Bart and Homer even interact). The most they have is a loose thematic parallel about the Simpsons boys harbouring secrets for shame of what others might think of them. But as a premise it certainly has boundless appeal. There's something about Bart being a natural ballet dancer that just makes perfect sense to me, to the point that it feels as though this might have been expanded into an actual A-story with further refinement. As it happens, the writers are content to treat it as a bit of fluff on the side. Maybe they didn't think there was anything more to be done with the idea than the standard expose and takedown of gender norms - which, judging how this arc ends, they were clearly not interested in doing sincerely. Giving it considerable momentum is the wonderful performance from guest star Susan Sarandon as Bart's ballet instructor, doing a very similar voice to the one she would subsequently use as a talking spider in James and The Giant Peach (1996). Whenever she's on screen, the story positively sparkles. Once she fades from the picture and we enter into Bart's recital, it struggles with where to take itself, ultimately settling on rather an iffy conclusion. I'm not really talking about how Jimbo, Nelson and co turn on him when he summons the courage to reveal his passion for ballet to the school - we all saw that one coming (to the point where you could question if it's even that much of a subversion) - but what happens at the very end, when Bart fails to jeté himself across a ditch to escape the bullies, and winds up potentially breaking a few bones down at the bottom. Lisa suddenly appears, embracing the injured Bart and telling him how proud she is that he showed his sensitive side. This is supposed to be our heartfelt moment to take the sting off, by having someone commend Bart for following his dreams in spite of what it cost him. In practice, it plays like an unconvincing attempt to suggest that Bart's relationship with Lisa was what the subplot was really about, which totally doesn't work because Lisa had barely even featured in it up until now. Honestly, it felt as though she had more of a meaningful presence in Homer's story, where he filled her in on his intentions to find a second job. It's also not helped by its inconclusive ending, with Lisa apparently wandering off while Bart groans, "Why'd you just leave me when I clearly need medical attention?" Yeah, why Lisa? I mean that does seem very out of character for you. Again, I think a more substantially developed version of this story might have fixed things so that Lisa's moment feels less like a tacked on afterthought; the version we have is fun, but effectively fizzles. Besides Sarandon, I think my favourite thing about it is the rare witticism we receive from Richard and Lewis. ("If they don't get here soon, it'll be T.S. for them!")
The A-story likewise bows out on rather an abrupt final note, as though it absolutely cannot wait to reset the status quo and move on, and I think it's the hurried nature of the respective wrap-ups for each narrative, coupled with their total disconnect from one another, that makes it all-too easy to dismiss the episode as one of the season's fillers. Erik Adams of The AV Club calls the two stories "undercooked" and "partially formed", characteristics he attributes to pressures Fox had placed upon the writers at the time. (Now that you mention it, while Season 6 both starts and ends strongly, there is a fairly noticeable lag around the middle.) We may come away feeling underwhelmed, as though nothing that happened therein was of any real consequence. Which seems unfair, because the developments that occur toward the end of Homer's arc are genuinely potent. It takes the earnest route, at least in the short-term, with an unusual display of maturity on Homer's part. He manages to salvage his pride, not by meeting Patty and Selma at their level and continuing the cycle of antipathy, but by rising above it and acting on the opportunity to be kind to them. As with "Black Widower", the twins' cigarette addiction ends up being the factor that nearly spells disaster, in a way that taps deftly into the niceties of life in the nineties. Having failed Homer on his driving test, Patty and Selma are so exhilarated that they momentarily let their guard down about smoking on the job and are caught by their boss with the offending cancer sticks. She's so outraged that they'd be smoking in a government building that she threatens to rescind their promotions. Homer is all ready to savour the schadenfreude, until he notices how anxious Marge appears about the situation and puts aside his desire for petty vengeance. Instead, he helps Patty and Selma by pretending the cigarettes were his, redirecting their boss's wrath his way ("You, sir, are worse than Hitler!") and sparing their jobs. He admits afterwards that his Good Samaritanism was motivated not by sympathy for Patty and Selma, but by empathy for Marge and the recognition that if her sisters were to suffer, so would she. If Patty and Selma bring out the worst in him, then she's a constant reminder of why he should keep striving to be the best he can be. By taking the higher ground, he leaves Patty and Selma totally disarmed; they are humbled by his actions, and Marge is able to make her own case for why, in spite of all his failings, she'd still be with him. Perhaps there is a better side to Homer that, up until now, Patty and Selma have simply never witnessed.
These observations feel more heartfelt and rightfully earned than those used to round off Bart's arc. But the script insists on undercutting them in a typical Simpsons fashion. The conclusion comes abruptly by design, in a way that seems to mercilessly dash all possibility of any durable understanding between the warring parties. Patty and Selma behave graciously, apologising to Homer for their recent mistreatment of him and suggesting that they might be able to do him a favour in return. The implicit offer they're actually making is to pass him on his driving test, but he has set his sights set on a much bigger prize. He demands that Patty and Selma forgive his debt altogether, which they are clearly reluctant to do. Homer, though, isn't settling for anything less - he's located a convenient out to this story's entire predicament, and with only seconds left on the clock you can bet he's taking it. A cancelled debt means that he no longer needs the chauffeur gig and can walk away scot-free. And so he does, declaring the debt void and bolting off with Marge in tow before Patty and Selma have leeway to negotiate. They're left standing there, powerless and obviously put out. The debt may have been nullified, but we sense that so too has a wad of their newfound goodwill toward their brother-in-law. It paves the way for the cycle of resentment to only continue, so I guess nobody really won.
Oh, and I
noted in my recent coverage "Team Homer" that, originating with that
episode, there seemed to be a conscious push on the writers' part to have Moe promoted to the status of Homer's best friend. You might not have guessed that that was so imminent from how Moe is depicted here, with his very darkest of inclinations on display. He agrees to lend
Homer the money, not as a friend, but as a loan shark, and on the
condition that he gets to break Homer's legs in advance since he has no
collateral. Homer backs out when he can't convince Moe to deal him a
bloody head injury instead. Sure, with friends like that, who even needs enemies?
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