My favourite gag in "Homer's Odyssey" (7G03) is the one that wouldn't even have qualified as a joke on its initial airing. This episode, only the third in the series' run, involves Homer losing his job at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant and finding a new calling in spearheading a safety campaign against his erstwhile employers. It climaxes with Homer being invited to the office of the plant's bigwig, one C. Montgomery Burns, who's come up with an underhanded means of silencing Homer. "Ah, Homer Simpson," a glad-handing Burns declares, on coming face-to-face with his adversary. "At last we meet!" Truly the beginning of a beautiful friendship. What's so incredibly gratifying about this moment is the realisation that it would have meant nothing to those viewers who'd first tuned in to catch it on January 21st 1990. And yet for anybody who's gone back and watched it since, the line can't help but stick out like a sore thumb, seeing as it was the only occasion on which Burns could make that particular declaration and it be absolutely true. Ignore, for just a moment, any subsequent flashback episodes, like "I Married Marge" of Season 3 and "And Maggie Makes Three" of Season 6, which posited that Homer and Burns had met at earlier junctions in their lives. It wasn't necessarily the first time that Homer and Burns had crossed paths within the series' internal chronology, but it was the first time, so far as the viewer was concerned, that they were meeting. It's an ostensibly nondescript line, the significance of which could only be acquired retroactively, once the series had found the time to implement one of its strangest, most enduring running gags - Burns' baffling assumption, whenever he encounters Homer, that this is the first occasion on which he's dealt with this particular menace. They wasted practically zero time in getting it into motion; when Burns and Homer next met, in the following episode, "There's No Disgrace Like Home", Burns had already forgotten who he was. His selective memory blanking would only get all the more absurd as time went on, with he and Homer meeting every other week and the slate always being inexplicably wiped clean by the next. It's a gag that works on two levels - Burns' refusal to commit anything regarding Homer to his long-term memory is, on the one hand, a cruel denial of Homer's personhood, and of the notion that someone so lowly could have such a significant impact on someone as high in stature as Burns. But it's also a tongue-in-cheek denial from series of its own continuity; an acknowledgement that the characters cannot be allowed too much growth or self-knowledge, lest it threatens the very dynamics on which its perpetuation depends. Truth is, this denial is actually highly beneficial to Homer - if Burns had any awareness of what a persistent thorn in his side this one individual has been, he would have dealt him a harsh retribution a long time ago.
It doesn't stop there, however. There is yet another layer of juiciness to this particular snippet of dialogue, albeit one that's more accidental and much easier to miss without specific background knowledge on the series. For Homer would never meet this particular incarnation of Burns again, certainly not in such a head-to-head capacity. The Burns we see (or, more accurately, the Burns we hear) in "Homer's Odyssey", is a Burns from an alternate timeline, standing on the brink of a potentially very different trajectory for the series. I allude, of course, to the trivia that Burns wasn't always voiced by Harry Shearer; when production of the series was first underway, the showrunners had another man signed on for the role, by the name of Christopher Collins. Collins was already a highly experienced voice actor, having played such iconic 1980s cartoon villains as Cobra Commander in G.I. Joe and Starscream in Transformers. I'd imagine he would have been considered quite a catch for a fledgling series like The Simpsons. Unfortunately, it didn't work out, and Collins was dropped after recording lines for only a handful of episodes, reportedly because he rubbed people the wrong way. With Collins gone, Shearer replaced him as Burns, while a new voice actor, Hank Azaria, was hired and took charge of another role that had previously been allocated to Collins, Moe the bartender. "Homer's Odyssey" is one of only two Simpsons episodes in which Collins receives acting credits, and one of the few venues to preserve his performance as Burns. Or so it's widely accepted.
(Note that Christopher Collins was also known as Chris Latta, which is the name Transformers fans predominantly know him by. I believe that Latta was his birth name and Collins his stepfamily name, and he used both identities professionally. For the purposes of this review, I'll be calling him Collins, because that is the credit he used during his time on The Simpsons.)
I'll admit this is an issue I'm not 100% clear on. Over the years, I've seen a lot of conflicting opinion over whose voice it really is coming out of Mr Burns in "Homer's Odyssey". Some swear blind it's Harry Shearer, that Collins did originally record vocals for the character, but these were all dubbed over before the episode went ever to air, and if Burns' voice sounds in any way too scratchy or weird, we should chalk it up to the fact that Shearer, like everyone else, was still growing into his characters. I've seen at least one person claim that when "Homer's Odyssey" (and other early Burns appearances) first aired, they had Collins' vocals, but were subsequently re-dubbed with Shearer's for the sake of consistency and these are the only versions that exist now. Collins' name is, of course, retained in the credits, although in typical Simpsons fashion, it isn't stated what role(s) he's being credited for. The episode's DVD commentary is of little help on the matter, since Collins isn't mentioned at all (if there was that much friction between himself and the producers, then that's understandable; a DVD commentary isn't the place to be airing your dirty laundry about people you've clashed with). The commonly-accepted line, however, is that that is indeed Collins' Burns we're hearing in "Homer's Odyssey". IMDb credits him with the role; it also claims that he voiced Burns in "Simpsons Roasting on An Open
Fire" and "The Tell Tale Head", although he isn't credited for either
episode (Burns appeared in two other Season 1 episodes, "There's No Disgrace Like Home" and "Homer's Night Out", but I guess those performances were both Shearer's). If Shearer and Collins' respective takes on Burns really were that indistinguishable, then I'll admit that disappoints me; when I first heard that Burns was originally meant to be voiced by the man who did Cobra Commander, I'd imagined him sounding a lot closer to that character. There is, meanwhile, at least one other Collins performance that survives in the final mix, in "Some Enchanted Evening", as the presenter of America's Most Armed and Dangerous.
It should be noted that no such confusion exists over Moe. In his case it's accepted that all of his appearances (including "Homer's Odyssey") were re-dubbed by Hank Azaria before making it to air, and we can only speculate how Collins' take on the character would have sounded (I personally like to envision his Moe as sounding something like the Dalmatian he voiced in the movie Rover Dangerfield). Azaria weighed in on being hired as a replacement for Collins in a video interview given to GQ in 2018, although he didn't mention Collins by name:
"I didn't know til many years later, kids, that there was an original Moe the bartender voice that I replaced. I didn't know that! And I was like...that guy, you didn't like what he did? And Matt Groening was like, oh no, he was great. I'm like, so why did you recast him? (Groening said) like, he was just a dick. His voice was great, but he was just kind of jerky to everybody. Think about how awful like, that that guy could have been on The Simpsons his whole life. Lesson to you kids - always be nice!"
There's something about Azaria's statement, well-intentioned though is is, that just seems profoundly off. I agree with the general sentiment on always being nice, but it's the part about how Collins "could have been on The Simpsons his whole life" that bothers me. I'm going to hazard a guess that Azaria wasn't aware of this when he gave the interview, but Collins' "whole life" really wasn't that long. He died on June 12th 1994 from encephalitis. He didn't live to see The Simpsons' amazing longevity, nor to contemplate how he'd missed out on what could've potentially been a lifelong gig. He was only 44 years old. THAT is the kind of detail that gets me thinking, "How awful".
All evidence points to Collins being ousted due to some degree of friction, but I'm inclined to take Azaria's testimony with a pinch of salt. Partly because he is only repeating what someone else had said to him (those probably weren't Groening's exact words, either), but partly because I've seen other claims (admittedly all stemming from internet hearsay) that it was specifically Sam Simon with whom Collins clashed, not absolutely everyone involved. Collins' fellow Transformers alumni have certainly indicated that he could be a something of a loose cannon (in the fondest possible way, mind you), but I've heard some pretty wild anecdotes about Simon too, so who knows what really went on between them? It's not like Collins is around to give his side of the story, or Simon for that matter.
The possibility that, had chemistry been more amenable, Collins would have stayed as Burns and Moe raises more "What if"s for the series than you might first imagine. We wouldn't simply have had the exact same show with a few different voices here and there. For one, Azaria might never have been hired had Collins' departure not left a vacant spot in the cast - in which case, various iconic characters that grew out of Azaria's unique talents, such as Dr Nick and Professor Frink, might never have existed. Instead, we could have seen some completely different supporting characters that were tailored to Collins' own strengths as a voice actor. Likewise, characters voiced by Dan Castellaneta or Harry Shearer might otherwise have gone to Collins, and received completely different vocal interpretations. The uneasiest question, though, has to do with how the series would have handled Collins' premature death. Given its nature, it's hard to see how his being retained as a Simpsons cast member would have made any difference. After a few years of voicing the characters, as opposed to a few scant episodes, Collins would presumably have found the time to develop each of his roles and make them his own, so swapping him out for another actor would have been a much more daunting process. Would Burns and Moe have been retired, along with any other characters he happened to voice, out of respect for the deceased Collins, as would happen with Doris Grau (for a time, anyway) and Phil Hartman? Or would Burns and Moe have been deemed too integral to the series to just be dropped? Obviously Grau and Hartman were sad losses, but their characters were basically peripheral enough that they could be phased out without creating too much disruption to the pivotal dynamics. The loss of a core cast member would have been more challenging to weather, to the point where you have to wonder if it might have cast doubts on how much life was reasonably left in the series. It's hard to speculate, because over the years The Simpsons has been so inconsistent in its handling of deceased cast members. With Grau and Hartman, I'm pretty sure that few people in the mid to late 90s envisioned the series going on for that much longer anyway, so quietly retiring their characters seemed the most sensible and tactful option. The loss of Marcia Wallace in 2013 led to her character being formally laid to rest within the show's continuity (in a manner clearly intended to be conflated with Wallace's real-life passing). By contrast, Russi Taylor's characters were promptly recast following her passing in 2019. Grau's character, Lunchlady Doris, was eventually un-retired, with Tress MacNeille as her new voice, but was renamed Lunchlady Dora, in concession to the sad reality that the "Doris" part of her had long departed. It's a terribly morbid topic, I know, but one I've seen come up with increased frequency in recent years, with the awareness that a lot of the cast aren't getting any younger and the series having seeming ambitions of remaining an unstoppable force for decades to come. For now it will likely remain a matter of crossing that unfortunate bridge when they come it. Sobering to think that, had Collins stayed, they might have crossed it thirty years ago.
Irrespective of who voiced him, it's clear that "Homer's Odyssey" was intended to be our introduction to Burns as a character, and that's a purpose it effectively still serves. He'd previously made a brief appearance in "Simpsons Roasting on An Open Fire", the first episode aired (if not produced), and it was his heartless denial of a seasonal bonus to the plant's blue collar workers that kicked that particular story's conflict into motion. This, though, feels like the first time we'd gotten properly acquainted with the magnitude of his malevolence, and the chilly shadow he casts over not only his workforce, but Springfield as a whole. Burns has only limited screen time in "Homer's Odyssey"; he doesn't appear until the third act, nor does the build-up ever mention him by name. When the children of Springfield Elementary take a field trip to the plant at the beginning of the episode, Burns doesn't greet them in person, but sends his PA Smithers (who's looking distinctly off-colour in his first onscreen appearance) to deal with them on his behalf. When Homer is fired, it's not by Burns himself or even by Smithers, but by some random nobody slightly higher up the ladder (well, not quite so random in that he's established to be the father of Bart's classmates Sherri and Terri, but I don't think we ever saw him again). And yet when Burns does finally appear, it feels as if he's always had a very active role in these events, an omnipresent threat lurking persistently out of sight, surveilling the masses below for any indication of weakness or insubordination. His introductory sequence shows him doing exactly that, panning upwards to reveal him glowering over the tiny figures in Homer's rally and looking eerily inhuman, even for early Season 1 when backgrounds and crowd scenes were all swarming with the most outrageously freakishly-designed of extras. Often, Burns' hunched posture and hooked nose give him an avian appearance, like a buzzard preparing to swoop down on prospective prey, but here I'd go a step further and say that the exaggerated emphasis on his cranium has him looking positively alien (foreshadowing the ending to "The Springfield Files" seven years before the fact). I'm put in mind of those Martians from The War of The Worlds who spent a long time watching humanity and drawing plans against them.
"Homer's Odyssey" was definitely the most ambitious Simpsons episode to air at this point, having its sights less on surveying the Simpsons themselves than on the world around them and the family's place within. It feels like the first real attempt to explore Springfield as a character in its own right, a sure sign that the show was already feeling confident enough to start branching out from the more limited storytelling possibilities of the Ullman shorts, in establishing a fully functioning community beyond the Simpsons' doorstep. It's for this reason that the first act plays, deceptively, like a protracted bit of plot misdirection. You'd be forgiven for initially assuming that this was going to be a Bart-centric episode - the school field trip takes up the first seven minutes, and only as the first act ends does it become apparent that this is actually going to be Homer's conflict. But those early moments with Bart and co are hardly filler, since they do a lot to establish exactly what it is that Homer will be fighting for much of the episode. The bus journey alone between the school and the plant, which encompasses the town's toxic waste dump, tyre yard and prison, reveals everything that's sordid and depressing about the Springfieldian soul (in the one the script's biggest WTF moments, we hear that the school's previous field trip was to that last venue). The kids wave gleefully to each of these establishments, seemingly desensitised to the grim implication that they represent the various possible futures awaiting them after leaving school - although the nightmare scenario of never escaping the school system in the first place (the driving conflict of the forthcoming "Bart Gets an F") is also evoked when Otto's odd idea of a shortcut takes them back past the school. Along the way, we get to know a few more of Bart's classmates, and further banes of his academic existence. In the spotlight this time are the devious twins Sherri and Terri, supplements to Bart's ever-increasing stockpile of antagonists (a role that, other than a scene in the aforementioned "Bart Gets an F", where they deliberately feed Bart the wrong test answers, they never went particularly far with) and Wendall, a quiet and unassuming kid for whom Bart expressly has no ill will, but whose perpetual queasiness makes him a nightmare to be seated next to on turbulent bus rides. Hard relate there.
The real behemoth of the episode, though, is the plant itself. It represents the grimmest of all possible futures, and everything toxic and inescapable about Springfield in the present. "Homer's Odyssey" establishes the plant as a dominating force not only in the Simpsons' own lives, as Homer's place of employment, but for the town as a whole. It looms over Springfield, an ugly, ominous, polluting beast run on incompetent labor and unethical business practices. While a Level 7 disaster waits in the wings, the plant is already poisoning the town, slowly and insidiously, as signified by the appearance of Blinky the three-eyed-fish, who'd play a more central role later down the line in the Season 2 episode "Two Cars In Every Garage And Three Eyes On Every Fish". There is, all the same, an extent to which that terrible plant is nothing more than a warped reflection of what's already corrupt and polluted in the town's collective psyche. Springfield in general is run on incompetence, and there's not a lot that its various authorities can do right - we get a taster of this during the town meeting, when Chief Wiggum, in his debut appearance, gives an update on the situation with the mysterious graffiti artist "El Barto" and has drastically failed to comprehend the nature of what he's up against ("El Barto" is yet another early detail that I don't think went anywhere in the series proper, although it was the basis of a few comic book stories). Homer makes an even bleaker discovery, that the town at large has a problem with simply not caring about its fellow residents' welfare. The characters who best encapsulate this pervasive negligence are the Winfields, the elderly couple who lived alongside the Simpsons and were keen on passing judgement on them, until they were formally written out of the show in the Season 4 episode "New Kid on The Block". In their first appearance, we find them seated out on their porch late at night as Homer staggers by, having tethered himself to a boulder with the intention of throwing himself from the Springfield bridge. The possibility that Homer might be looking to kill himself explicitly occurs to them, but they can't decide if he isn't just taking the boulder for a walk. Either way, they don't seem particularly concerned. Much as his neighbours are gleefully aloof, his ostensible allies are casually cruel; a cash-strapped Homer was earlier refused a drink on credit by Moe, who informs him that he has zero confidence in his prospects of finding another job and ever paying him back. "Don't worry, we're still friends", Moe adds, as if that means anything at all.
Homer's desperation for a Duff beer, with its promise of temporary refuge from his unemployment woes (expressed through the Siren song of the chattering cyclops [1]), is what prompts him to take drastic measures and raid Bart's piggy bank in the hope of scraping together enough change. When this fails, Homer concludes that his family would be better off without him; hence, he straps a rock to his body and heads dejectedly for that fateful bridge. It's this particular plot point - Homer's suicide ideation - that I suspect tends to throw some viewers off about "Homer's Odyssey", which in my experience seldom seems to be anybody's favourite of Season 1, an already undervalued batch of episodes in general. Having Homer desire to kill himself is a manifestly extreme direction in which to take his unemployment arc - as a narrative choice it was certainly bold, although tonally it gets a little ambiguous, with it not always being obvious where the levity is intended to lie and where the genuine pathos. Take the suicide note Homer scrawls out to his family (on a sticky note with the header "Dumb Things I Gotta Do Today"), which includes the statement, "I can only leave you with the words my father gave me: stand tall, have courage and never give up". Are we meant to find it sad or hilarious that Homer himself clearly doesn't see anything worth heeding in those words? (Mostly, I just find it hard to envision Abe saying anything so encouraging to Homer.) Homer's chosen method of death is also cartoonishly impractical, a measure conspicuously designed to keep the attempt from feeling too real. It's a tough tightrope the episode has to walk. We're not supposed to take Homer's ideation overly seriously, but not so lightly that we're immune to the Winfields' callousness.
The one aspect of the episode that definitely feels dated now concerns the minor plot point of Marge stepping up to support the family while Homer looks for work, by returning to her old waitressing job. It doesn't go any further than a single sight gag (the revelation that Marge is a roller carhop), but there seems to be a regressive assumption that Marge becoming the family breadwinner is a further indication of Homer's failings as a patriarch (Homer basically cites as much as a reason for accepting Burns' job offer at the end). The expectation that Marge would give up her job immediately after marrying makes more sense later on, with the revelation that she was heavily pregnant with Bart at the time, but here it feels like an old-fashioned supposition even for 1990. Despite taking such an active role in family proceedings, her narrative function is essentially passive - three episodes in and Marge's characterisation remained quite wishy-washy, her ill-suppressed agitation at Otto's rudeness being the only foreshadowing of her latent fire. The dynamics of the Simpson clan are not, in general, at the narrative
forefront, but Homer's relationship with his family provides the
emotional grounding throughout, in that all he wants is to do right
by them and live up to the responsibilities he sees as unquestionably his. At this stage, the relationship between Bart and Homer was still the most prominent and developed of all the family connections, and there is a through line of Homer feeling particular shame wherever he's screwed up in the eyes of Bart. What makes Homer's firing at the end of act one particularly hard to bear is that it happens in front of Bart. In act two, it's not Homer's failure to find employment per se that brings on his suicidal despair so much as the realisation that his alcohol cravings have caused him to actively wrong his son. And when his family follow him to the bridge to intervene with his attempt, and Homer instead saves them from being hit by a van on the hazard-filled street (all while still being tethered to his boulder), it's the fresh understanding that he needs to secure them a safer environment that convinces Homer his life is worth living. He campaigns to have a stop sign installed on the road, and on discovering how unopposing people are of the motion, vows to keep fighting for additional safety signage the town over. Eventually, he gets emboldened enough to take on the big dogs in the form of that monstrous nuclear power plant, having realised that his gestures for a safer Springfield are all futile whilst they're living in its tyrannical shadow. Homer knows, better than anyone, how dangerous that place is, because he's been on the inside. As he puts it: "Our lives are in the hands of men no smarter than you or I, many of them incompetent boobs. I know this because I've worked alongside them, gone bowling with them and watched them pass me over for promotions time and time again. And I say this stinks!"
The title of the episode, in addition to getting a particularly obvious cultural reference out of the way (if you've a character named Homer, then it's basically law that you'll have to acknowledge The Odyssey at some point, much as you'll have to get in a pun on the Mona Lisa if you've a character named Lisa), alludes to Homer's journey to reclaim his self-respect after being pushed to his very lowest ebb. He goes from being deemed unemployable, derided by his neighbours and refused a favour by a self-proclaimed friend to being cheered by the entire town (other than on the measure of implementing a 15mph speed limit on Main Street; there are a number of audible boos when it's cited by an extra who could be a proto Ned Flanders). Having taken heed of the town's fatal lack of regard, Homer aspires to seize control of it and remold it in his more conscientious image. This ultimately means going head-to-head with Burns, who may as well be the human (though just barely) manifestation of the callousness that's characterised the town up until now - in that respect, he and the plant are practically the same entity. When Homer is summoned to Burns' office for that decisive collision of wills, Burns lays down the ultimate Faustian bargain - he will hire Homer as the plant's new safety inspector, on the condition that Homer immediately steps outside and assures his legions of supporters that the plant poses no threat to them. Burns recognises that being cut loose from the plant workforce is what gave Homer leeway for his rebellion, and that a sure-fire method of neutralising the man is to bring him back under his thumb. And Homer recognises that his becoming safety inspector is the very sort of critical absurdity he's just been explicitly lobbying against - with his prior track record, he's the last person qualified for that position. Faced between the principles on which he's built his newfound self-respect, and the temptations of job security, Homer chooses the latter, although he does a little arm-twisting of his own, wheedling Burns into allowing him to conclude his campaign on his own terms. Instead of assuring the town that the plant is safe, Homer urges them to protect themselves independently. He states that he's going to have to live without their respect and awe, an admission that he might have forfeited his right to such things, but the rally happily receives the news that he's been appointed safety inspector as nothing less than the fitting conclusion to the narrative in which they've been eagerly invested - even as Homer slips in the obviously self-serving detail about the job coming with a boosted salary.
That's another thing that potentially throws people off about this episode - the ambiguous ending. Is it a happy ending or isn't it? Outwardly, it has all the trappings of a triumphant deliverance, with Bart proudly acknowledging Homer as his father, and the episode coming full circle from the mortal embarrassments of that first act. It's an equally nice touch that the Winfields, who previously wouldn't lift a finger to help Homer, are now among the people cheering for him. Still, there's little dancing around the fact that is is Burns who comes out on top. His one concession is in failing to secure Homer's leverage for selling the public a positive image of the plant, but he is able to make the opposition go away, which seems victory enough. The townspeople are certainly no safer than they were before, and are potentially worse off with Homer overseeing the plant's safety procedures, yet they clearly think they've won. There's a level on which writers Jay Kogan and Wallace Wolodarsky appear to be skewering the mindlessness of the town's mob mentality (a topic that would come up a whole lot more frequently with Springfield), and our own desire for a happy ending, however facile. On another level, we are being invited to identify with Homer's struggle, and the sincerity of his desire to better both himself and the world around him. He heads to his new position with a thread of that sincerity still intact, however dubious it seems that he'll be capable of putting it into practice. Homer himself implores, "You have to learn that there's a little Homer Simpson in all of us," ie: basically fallible, but navigated by the best of intentions. The ending of "Homer's Odyssey" accepts that as a cause for celebration in itself.
We wrap up now, with Saturday Morning Rewind's tribute to Christopher Collins.
[1] Has anyone tried to make the events of this episode correspond with the actual Odyssey? You know, just for fun?
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