Living In The Bottle: The Beast In The Cage (One Foot In The Grave)

Something I've come to appreciate about One Foot In The Grave is how beautifully ominous the episode titles tend to be. In keeping with the series' quintessentially morbid tone, and with the unrelenting pessimism and freakish misfortune of its pivotal character, titles are typically nothing less than borderline apocalyptic threats, waggishly hinting at what form of disaster will inevitably strike the Meldrews on this particular outing. The suggestion of genuine horror is usually tempered by an evident sense of playfulness (though not always - "We Have Put Her Living in The Tomb" does exactly what it says on the tin, and is truly a nightmare to behold), with winking nods to popular culture (eg: "In Luton Airport No One Can Hear You Scream") or titles transplanted wholesale from more infamously macabre works (Edgar Allan Poe was a notable recurring influence, as seen from "The Pit and The Pendulum", "Descent Into The Maelstrom" and "Tales of Terror"), their significance cunningly repurposed to suit the circumstances of Victor's predicament. "The Beast In The Cage", a possible allusion to the short story The Beast in the Cave by HP Lovecraft, conjures images of something snarling, savage and inhuman becoming increasingly riled at its captive existence - and sure enough, Victor spends the entirety of the installment confined to his car, his plans for a bank holiday excursion having been brought to a standstill by a torturously slow-moving traffic jam. The implicit joke seems self-explanatory (Victor is, naturally, the beast and the Honda, which should have been his means of mobility, has become his prison), and yet so much more might have been made of it still. Absent from the final edit was an entire section of dialogue in which the meaning behind the title was expounded on more openly, with the suggestion that its analogical intentions were broader and a notch more complicated than simply relating another cosmic gag at Victor's expense.

In its early stages, the arrangement could be said to come more at the expense of the audience than Victor, even as we join him to discover that he's spent the preceding four and a half hours staring at the back end of a horse. When "The Beast In The Cage" first aired, on 23rd February 1992 as part of the sitcom's tertiary series, it was only the second of Victor's bottle adventures, following the formula laid out by "Timeless Time" of Series 2. By the time we got to "The Trial" of Series 4, viewers had been prepped to expect that these bottle episodes might become a customary occurrence, but for those venturing into "The Beast In The Cage" for the first time, the set-up probably seemed quite innocuous. There was nothing to suggest that this traffic jam business would be occupying the entire episode - that this wouldn't be the first scene of a larger story, and that before long we'd being fading out and moving along with the Meldrews to some fresher development. The "penny drop moment", when it occurs to the viewer that they've been inside the car for a little too long for comfort, and that the traffic jam might well be all that there is to this particular journey, ends up becoming its own bit of glorious meta humor. On the DVD commentary, show creator and writer David Renwick shares an anecdote about how Jonathan Powell, then controller of BBC1, had been watching the episode with his wife, who'd remarked to him about four minutes in, "I've got a feeling they're never going to get out of that car..." The notion that the Meldrews and the viewers are mutual prisoners, doomed to the resignation that they won't be going anywhere, is reinforced in Susan Belbin's direction. "The Beast In The Cage" is the most intensely claustrophobic of the One Foot In The Grave bottle episodes; compared to "Timeless Time" and "The Trial", were Victor at least had the comfort of being cooped up inside his own home, here he and Margaret have little freedom of movement, and the viewer is made to experience that along with them. Our view of the predicament is restricted mostly to what they can see of it. Other than the two aerial shots that open and close the episode, all of the action is shown from inside the vehicle. Even during a brief moment where Victor and Margaret get out of the car to exchange seats, the camera doesn't leave the vehicle's interior.

"The Beast In The Cage" also implements a twist, about twelve minutes in, that alters the rules of the dynamic - just as we've gotten used to the rhythm of the piece, and think we know exactly what this is going to be (ie: another two hander between Victor and Margaret), family friend Mrs Warboys (Doreen Mantle) suddenly climbs into the back seat, and it's revealed that she too is along for the (non) ride, having left the car in search of the nearest toilet. Her surprise appearance comes directly after Victor's declaration that his situation has already gone beyond all human endurance, indicating that it signifies a deepening of his torture. Sure enough, one of the first things she does on her return is to reveal how she bungled Victor's straightforward request for a packet of smoky bacon flavour crisps, confidently broadcasting that the pub she'd stumbled upon had three huge boxes full of the desired pick-me-up, but that she failed to bring any back with her. She subsequently offers him a cool refreshing ginger beer, only to admit that she didn't acquire any of that either. Part of what makes Mrs Warboys such an indelible character is that I think we all know someone in our own lives who is infuriatingly like her.

The presence of Warboys represents a deviation from the conventions of the One Foot In The Grave bottle episode, which tended to focus on the isolation of the Meldrews. Victor and Margaret were the only characters to appear in "Timeless Time" and Victor was completely alone in "The Trial". In both cases, all interactions with the outside world came via telephone - in "Timeless Time", a neighbour called to argue with Victor about his picture-straightening technique, while in "The Trial" there were various clashes with people who had irritated Victor, and an unwelcome call from Warboys herself. "Rearranging The Dust" took place in a solicitor's waiting room where Victor and Margaret were intermittently joined by other clients, but interactions were fairly minimal, and while a third person did eventually appear during the blackout in "Threatening Weather", they were predominantly on their own there too. The upshot of these Victor-Margaret two-handers is that something new and illuminating about their relationship or personal history was ultimately revealed, once they were alone and vulnerable enough to let the mask drop. "Timeless Time", for example, contains the only reference to their deceased son Stuart. This doesn't happen in "The Beast In The Cage". The episode closes with Victor making a poignant observation about how their squandered day trip is a distressingly good metaphor for his life's trajectory, but this doesn't tell us anything we don't already know. This shouldn't surprise us - having someone like Warboys listening in from the backseat doesn't facilitate the level of emotional nakedness that had the Meldrews opening up about Stuart, the origins of their relationship or what became of Margaret's father. But even before the third wheel enters the picture, we know that the Meldrews are far from alone; in keeping with this being the most claustrophobic of the bottle episodes, they're forced to share this entrapment with not only Warboys, but legions of other souls subject to the same stagnation, and to the same sense of scuppered ambition. This is the episode's bigger twist still - while Victor has been dealt a typically bum hand, in being stuck behind the rear of a horse for the duration, in the scheme of things he hasn't missed out more than anyone else. The loss of Stuart was a deeply personal one, and the Meldrews' sleepless isolation in "Timeless Time" symbolised how they were essentially alone in their constant, if rarely vocalised, mourning for their son. It was a pain that could only truly be known and understood by them. "The Beast In The Cage", on the other hand, proposes that there is something far more universal about their traffic-bound predicament; that everyone is travelling down the same congested highway, doomed to come to an eventual standstill and to contend with the disappointment of never being able to get to wherever they'd once thought they were headed.

The question of where the Meldrews thought they were headed isn't brought up within the episode's dialogue, to the point where it could be dismissed as deliberately irrelevant - as Margaret points out, it wouldn't be worth completing the journey now anyway - but this is where things get especially curious. Thanks to axillary One Foot In The Grave media, we know that they'd intended to go to a zoo...or at least, that was how Victor remembered it. Included in the script but excised from the final edit was a sequence of dialogue where he and Margaret come to the mutual realisation that their day has been so dominated by the congestion that they've lost all sight of their planned destination, only to arrive at completely different conclusions. Victor reckons they were going to Whipsnade Zoo while Margaret insists that they had agreed on Windsor Castle. For as adamant as Margaret is on the matter, I note with some amusement that the official synopsis given in the BBC's listings favours Victor's perception: "An outing to Whipsnade Zoo turns into a nightmare." I'm taking that as official confirmation that Victor was right...or at least I would if said disagreement had made it into the televised episode. As it stands, that synopsis is the closest it gets to retaining any formal connection to Whipsnade Zoo. Three years on, however, and we did get to experience that lost material first-hand, by way of Victor's foray into the wireless. The One Foot In The Grave radio series broadcast on BBC Radio 2 in early 1995 consisted of audio remakes of four classic episodes: "Alive and Buried", "Timeless Time", "In Luton Airport No One Can Hear You Scream" and "The Beast In The Cage" (interestingly, no episodes featuring Patrick and Pippa, which might have been a coincidence, or maybe Angus Deayton and Janine Duvitski were unavailable for recording). In this version of "The Beast In The Cage", the Whipsnade Zoo-Windsor Castle debate was retained, as was a further reflection on the matter from Warboys, and it's apparent that the decision to have their party headed for a venue filled with captive animals was not arbitrary. 

Listening to the radio installments is a strange experience, like stumbling into a parallel universe where the basic outcome was always the same for Victor but where things played out a little differently. The essence and direction of each narrative was kept intact, but the scripts were dotted with various minor alterations. Moments that depended prominently on visual humor or storytelling were obviously removed or rewritten, dialogue was frequently tweaked, and entirely new gags and sequences were added in, including material that might have been planned for the original television versions but hadn't made the cut (and in some cases were eventually accommodated in a different TV installment altogether - Victor's polystyrene rant in the radio version of "Luton Airport" was used five years later in the Series 6 episode "The Dawn of Man"). I should confess that for myself it's always worked the other way around - in the mid 1990s I had all four radio episodes on cassette and would listen to them constantly, long before I owned any media of their television counterparts, so in my head I'm hard-wired to accept them as the "authentic" versions, and whenever I watch the television originals I'm always conscious of the various ways in which they don't line up. It was an infinitely sounder and more flavoursome approach than the alternative, which was to extract the audio directly from the television originals and simply cut out whatever didn't work in radio form - as we saw when three other episodes, "The Man In The Long Black Coat", "The Broken Reflection" and "The Trial", were later released in audio form and did exactly that (I'm not sure if these received radio broadcasts, but they were made commercially available on cassette). In their case there were often abrupt fade-outs and set-ups with no payoff. "The Broken Reflection" was a particularly awkward choice, since an entire subplot about Victor minding Patrick and Pippa's houseplants had to be excised, presumably because it was too reliant on visual narration, causing the audio edit to feel both conspicuously short and to end on a bizarrely glum and humorless note. Anyone who listened and didn't immediately follow this up with the hilarity of "The Trial" was certainly going to have their day ruined.

In the radio remake's take on events, Warboys, who had inexplicably believed they were going to Cheddar Gorge, is troubled by Victor's mention of the zoo, as she's ethically opposed to keeping wild animals in captivity. Her line, "Animals in cages like that, it's not natural", feels key, since it's obviously supposed to echo what's going on around them, with all those human animals leading awkward and uncomfortable existences in their tiny steel cages. On the DVD commentary, Renwick explains that the zoo discussion was cut from the televised version because of time constraints, and while he acknowledges how it would have tied in with the ideas conveyed in the title, he ultimately didn't think that you needed to have them spelled out in order to grasp their significance. I only partially agree. While the humor of the title is discernible enough, omitting all reference to the zoo means missing out on a rich vein of symbolism - the implicit suggestion that, irrespective of whether or not the Meldrews had intended to get to Whipsnade Zoo, they have ended up at a zoo of sorts, that being the human zoo. It isn't simply in the insinuation that the humans are being confined, but that they are being exhibited as well - that their lives are not only meaningless, but amusingly so for anyone who happens to be surveying them from the outside. There is a moment, not translatable for the radio version, where Victor remarks on the traffic jam as being a "complete waste of human life" while observing the driver behind them in his rear view mirror. There is nothing about this driver in particular that ought to invite comment, but there's nevertheless something voyeuristic about the juxtaposition, as though Victor is musing on the absurdity of human life in general. It's also as close as the episode comes to breaking the fourth wall; although we spend the episode feeling the Honda's claustrophobic confines along with the Meldrews, our primary perspective, from where the windscreen should be, more reflects the position of someone looking in from the exterior than that of a fellow occupant. It is as though Victor, Margaret and Warboys have become our own personal exhibit, entertaining us with their daft antics from inside their wildly unnatural habitat. The ways in which humans respond to their constrained, inelegant existences cannot help but become the stuff of spectacle. We sense that if we were to uproot from the Meldrews and to wander around the surrounding exhibits, we would find plenty more to gawk at. At one point Victor sticks his head out the window and reports seeing a man sunbathing on the roof of a Pickfords removal truck (somewhat questionably, given the visible lack of sunshine).

This doesn't just apply to those poor sods with the misfortune of being stuck inside the traffic jam either. Anybody with a salacious or unlikely yarn to be spun around them is destined to become the object of idle diversion for the perpetually bored, as demonstrated in a sequence where Margaret and Warboys indulge in a round of lurid gossip about various characters in their community. For what sums up both the absurdity and the banality of modern living more succinctly than the remark, "Of course, she wears nothing in bed except Sainsbury's cocoa butter"? This is followed by what sounds like the basis of a particularly grisly urban legend, when Warboys suggests that said individual risks sautéing herself to death whenever she uses her electric blanket, and then a similarly dubious tale about a man who had a cast removed to find that his arm had mysteriously disappeared. Victor ponders aloud why people would be compelled to circulate stories of such squeamish mortification (before Warboys lets it slip that a few comparably lurid stories have been shared about him), but how else are they going to fill the vapidness and stagnation of their own captive lives? 

The Whipsnade Zoo analogy doesn't end there, however. Once Warboys has made her stance on zoos explicit in the radio version, she suddenly goes off on a strange train of thought about the larger predatory animals (specifically tigers and vultures), and whether it might actually be good sense to keep those creatures confined, to prevent them from roaming around and mauling everybody to death. It's a suggestion that clearly touches a nerve in Victor (alas, we have no way of discerning what Margaret makes of it). In a way, I can understand why this aspect of the discussion was cut, since it is a bit rambling and nonsensical, even by Warboys' standards, and the dialogue they prioritised for the television version is honestly a whole lot funnier and sharper. But from a thematic standpoint it suggests a complicating of the analogy, with Warboys proposing that the alternative to this vapidness might be even more unbearable. If we stop to consider these implications, we might arrive at the conclusion that the titular "beast" is not Victor specifically, but humankind in general, and the "cage" is the thin veneer of civility that keeps us from tearing one another's heads off (and possibly exacerbates our urge to do so). Early in the episode, Victor had professed an understanding for why some people are driven to violate that societal taboo and become psychopaths. But those ferine tendencies run deep, and will find ways of manifesting beyond physical brutality. Later developments would appear to confirm that we are all just snarling zoo animals, imprisoned side by side, maddened by our mutual entrapment and angrily swiping at one another through the bars of our exhibits. We get multiple instances of Victor coming to blows with other frustrated individuals who, in lieu of outright savagery, are forced to resort to more creative means of expressing their latent beastliness. The first of these involves the driver of the vehicle to the Meldrews' left, and it's perhaps not a total coincidence that he bears an animal name - one Mr Salmon (Trevor Byfield). True, a salmon might not be the first creature that comes to mind when we picture a raging beast, but there is something decidedly fishy about him (a joke made within the episode itself).

The Salmon encounter is a good demonstration of why Victor's reputation for being a relentlessly bitter individual unreasonably kicking off about everything under the sun is frankly unearned, for Salmon is being astoundingly rude to the Meldrews, loudly blazoning through their personal space with his sketchy advances on Lisa (Louise Duprey) and Carol (Tish Allen), the two twenty-something girls in the vehicle to the Meldrews' right. As Renwick so aptly puts it on the commentary, it amounts to a complete dismissal of Victor's existence. I think most people in his position would have a hard time containing themselves. Margaret implores him to choose the civilised alternative, by winding up the car window and disengaging; retreating into the symbolic cage is their best defence against getting sucked into the ferocity of the world outside. Victor refuses, countering that this would mean further stifling themselves for someone else's benefit: "We're not suffocating to death inside here...just so he can get off with two sex-hungry trollops!" (to which Carol produces the terribly vicious but supremely witty response, "I notice it worked for you..."). It also has to be said that this entire sequence is a whole lot funnier in the television version than the radio, where we miss out on some wonderful visual gags - not least, the outrageous decal seen on Salmon's car window when he finally winds it up in his own churlish act of retreat. Also sacrificed was a great moment where Salmon receives a call on his characteristically chunky 90s mobile (back then, a sign that he was flash), which transpires to be for Victor, and to be coming from somebody further down in the queue looking to take their annoyance for the slow movement out on him.

Another confrontation happens more indirectly. Throughout the episode, we had heard various grumblings from Victor about the mechanics at his local garage and how ineffectual they were in fixing his seemingly cursed Honda. Toward the end, Victor decides to put a cassette on, only to discover that the mechanics, tired of his complaining, have used it to record him an insulting message - and what's more they've done it in song form, to the tune of "Cwm Rhondda" (I like to think this is a deliberate callback to the ending of "Timeless Time", where Victor had threatened to get even with the intrusive sparrow by sneaking up to its nest with a Welsh male voice choir). On the commentary, Renwick states that one of his favourite running gags throughout the series was the idea that people who had scores to settle with Victor would go to ridiculous lengths to do so, orchestrating elaborate revenge schemes that would require far more planning and effort than they should logically be worth. He cites another example from the episode "Warm Champagne", where a professional artist neighbour had painted an unflattering faux pub sign in Victor's likeness, pointing out that it would have cost him a night's sleep or two just to get it done. But maybe these boxed-in beasts really do have nothing better with which to occupy their minds.

As with "Timeless Time", a preoccupation with time and its finiteness pervades "The Beast In The Cage". An inconvenience Victor contends with at the start of the episode concerns a clock that is two minutes fast and which cannot be turned backwards, meaning that he has to run it through the entire cycle just to have it show the correct time. We circle back to the symbolism in Victor's final reflection, as he mournfully muses that, "You can't turn the clock back." There's the resignation that it is now too late in the day for the Meldrews to do anything with their bank holiday, and that as soon as the traffic clears they'll have to turn around and head for home. (In the radio version, Warboys offers the flimsy silver lining that "at least it's been a day out...a change from just sitting at home all day", a gag pre-empted in the television version with the acknowledgement that the Meldrews wouldn't have accomplished anything more productive by staying put, other than Victor cutting his toenails.) It is, incidently never stated on which bank holiday "The Beast In The Cage" is intended to take place, but we can narrow it down a little. On the commentary, Richard Wilson confirms that the episode was filmed in the winter, which accounts for the gloomy conditions outside, but that it was meant to be set during the summer. (The incongruous weather needn't have been an issue, given the temperamental nature of the British climate, only the script makes it clear that this is supposed to be a blisteringly hot day on top of everything else - we have Victor complaining about the Honda being like a bread oven and his feet like a pair of boiled lobsters, that man sunbathing atop the removal lorry and Victor's insistence that Warboys put ice in his pineapple cordial, which to his horror contains a dead wasp.) It could very feasibly be the Spring bank holiday that falls on the last Monday of May, but from our thematic standpoint it makes far more sense for it to be the bank holiday that occurs on the last Monday of August, and is traditionally viewed as the final opportunity for a day of summer's recreation before the autumn kicks in. This opportunity being denied the Meldrews aligns with that underlying sense of time having run out, and with Victor's concession that his life ultimately didn't end up going anywhere, despite the sense of vigour and purpose he recalls feeling in his younger years. Margaret offers the consolation that it is the same for everyone - that we are all the same boat/traffic jam/metaphorical zoo, and all we can do is to try to make the best of it, as Warboys suggests.

"The Beast In The Cage" has a neatly cyclical narrative, opening with Victor rejecting Margaret's offer of a sucky sweet, insisting that he is more likely to be sucking on the car's exhaust pipe before long, and closing with him belatedly accepting her offer. This is preceded by one final threat of bestial behaviour, as Victor (presumably none too seriously) announces that he's become so hungry he might have to resort to eating Mrs Warboys. Instead, he chooses the civilised alternative and asks Margaret to pass him the sweets, a signal that he's resigned himself to fate. The camera pulls out into another aerial shot as the credits roll, showing the Meldrews still imprisoned in the congestion, and we leave them on an even more indeterminate note than than we did at the end of "Timeless Time". In that episode there was a certain predictability to the monotony, for we knew that the morning would come soon enough, and they'd be opening up yet another can of worms (even if that represented an unknowable nightmare in itself). Here, we don't know much longer they might be forced to endure their inertia, and there's no indication that they'll be moving on any time soon. For now, the final shot emphasises both the extent of their entrapment, and how far afield their predicament extends. There are a million stories in life's great traffic jam. This has been one of them. 

Living In The Bottle: The Trial (One Foot In The Grave)

Of the pentad of bottle episodes that emerged during the run of BBC sitcom One Foot In The Grave, "The Trial" stands out as the obvious outlier. The other four more-or-less adhered to a certain set of narrative rules, laid out by the first of these efforts, "Timeless Time". Victor and Margaret would be mired in some uncomfortable situation where time had been brought to a complete standstill, Victor would openly muse on whichever of life's assorted annoyances was bugging him most in that particular moment, intermittently pushing Margaret to breaking point along the way, until finally their testiness dissolved into mutual melancholia, as they reflected on past heartbreaks and scuppered ambitions ("The Beast In The Cage" being the only one to do so without delving into any specific, hitherto-unspoken-of instances from the characters' backstories). The seemingly mundane framing scenarios - a sleepless night, a bank holiday spent seated in a traffic jam, a stretch in a waiting room where every other client seems to be called before them, an evening in a prolonged blackout - become clever metaphors for life's broader trials and aggravations, and close deliberately without resolution, other than Victor and Margaret quietly acknowledging that their only recourse is to grin and bear whatever lies ahead. Each episode did its own thing to differentiate proceedings ("The Beast In The Cage" added supporting player Mrs Warboys to the dynamic, while "Threatening Weather" has apocalyptic undertones that seemed to knowingly anticipate the impending end of the series), but the basic structure was not immensely different. "The Trial", which aired on 28th February 1993 as part of the fourth series, makes the most radical deviation from the formula, by removing one key element - on this occasion, Margaret does not have to share in Victor's entrapment. This one deals with Victor being stuck indoors whilst on call for jury service, having been sent home to await further instructions on when he'll be needed. Margaret, meanwhile, is out of the picture, presumably working in her day job as a florist, although it's never explicitly stated where she is. Most bottle episodes were basically two-handers, focusing on the dynamic between Victor and Margaret and emphasising that they were fundamentally in all of these hardships together (however reluctantly on Margaret's part) by virtue of their union. But this time the hardship was Victor's to bear, and Victor's alone.

The result is the only episode of One Foot In The Grave in which Margaret never appears. Even the Comic Relief sketch from the same year, "The Bath", which consisted of Victor musing on more of life's inconveniences from within the tub, managed to incorporate Margaret somewhere, by way of an answering machine recording. But what's more surprising is how little indirect presence Margaret has; Victor mentions her in precisely one scene, when he realises that he can't find his flannel because Margaret has tidied it away, purportedly so they'll always know where it is, which in practice only makes it harder for him to find. It's a rare moment in which we get to see Victor grumble about Margaret's annoying tendencies behind her back (the reverse happens a lot more frequently throughout the series). Otherwise, "The Trial" plays almost as a glimpse into a parallel reality in which Victor lives alone, and doesn't have Margaret to act as the neutralising straight woman to his continual carping. And make no mistake, that is the real entrapment. Victor is stranded not merely inside his own house, but inside his own head, having nobody to play off of except himself. Tempting though it will be to file this one in the Index of Conflict as a Man vs. God narrative, it's really a case of Man vs. Self. Well perhaps. Man vs. God is certainly the narrative Victor perceives throughout - he sees himself as perpetually at the mercy of some divine judgement, cruel and arbitrary in its retribution, and with a particular interest in sabotaging his day. It's an opinion he expresses early on, in his churlish observation that the storm clouds currently cluttering up the sky only appeared as he was starting to unwind the flex on his lawnmower. And in its opening shots, the episode certainly invites the viewer to share in his paranoia that there may be darker forces conspiring around him; in lieu of the opening sequence with the tortoise stock footage (which would disappear from the bottle episodes from this point onward) we're faced immediately with those ominous, rumbling clouds, followed by the curious foregrounding of a crow perched in a tree branching overlooking the Meldrews' house, that cliched symbol of foreboding.

That crow is, incidentally, the only living being glimpsed onscreen for the full 28 and a half minutes other than Victor himself. "The Trial" is really a full-on monologue, in which Richard Wilson is presented with the challenge of having to carry the action entirely by himself, something he accomplishes with utter aplomb. That's not to say that Victor doesn't get ample opportunities to butt heads with anyone else for the duration, but always from a distance - he gets into multiple heated exchanges via telephone, in which we're only privy to what's being said at Victor's end. And a familiar character still manages to worm their way into the happenings. Margaret may be uncharacteristically absent, but Mrs Warboys puts in a surprise (though not to Victor) contribution, ambushing him with a telephone call to fill him in on the boring particulars of her recent visit to Cork (in her case, her muffled but unmistakable voice can be momentarily heard coming down the line). Intrusions from the outside world are sparing, and there's a sense to which they might even offer Victor some relief from the monotony, a chance to direct his loathing outward rather than inward. One such interlude yields the episode's most enduring visual gag, when Victor opens the door to his downstairs toilet to reveal that a yucca plant he'd had delivered earlier has been inserted directly into the pan, in an all-too literal reading of Victor's instructions on where to leave it. Victor likens the unseen young delivery man to Frank Spencer, the notoriously accident-prone hero played by Michael Crawford in 1970s BBC sitcom Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em, an observation that's not without irony given that Frank and Victor don't strike me as altogether dissimilar creations. Both are sitcom leads renowned for their characteristic attire, their perfectly quotable catchphrases, their inability to keep any new source of employment for long and, most crucially, their tendency to be on the receiving end of a deluge of outrageously improbable mishaps. Both are accustomed to grappling with chaos wherever they go, and they invariably do so badly. Victor's obviously a whole lot smarter and Frank's a whole lot sweeter, but both men are united in each being their own worst enemy. ^[1]

Unlike Frank Spencer, whose flaws were ultimately mitigated by his unrelenting innocence, Victor has a reputation for being rather a nasty character, and that's always seemed unfair to me. Victor could unquestionably make things a lot easier for himself if he learned to rein in his temper a little, but then who wouldn't be tempted to completely blow their top if they went to use their toilet only to find a yucca plant protruding out from it? There's an extent to which Victor is merely the product of a universe that is every bit as chaotic and inconsiderate as he perceives it to be, the classic figure of the sane man who to an insane universe must appear insane (as he himself points out, just look at the outcome of the 1992 general election). "The Trial", being the OFITG installment that forces Victor to look the most relentlessly inward, is our most extensive study into where one interpretation begins and the other ends. He holds himself to account for a couple of instances where he recognises that his rage was disproportionate, and ponders if he might just be the villain of his own story. The episode builds up Victor as a ridiculously paranoid individual, only to tease us with the parting implication that, actually, they might just be out to get him after all. The viewer finally becomes the juror, and is left to make their own verdict.

The title of the episode has multiple meanings. Most obviously it alludes to an event that should be happening within the narrative, but isn't. Victor murmurs that this is his fifth day of being on call for jury service, and he hasn't even set foot inside a courtroom (side-note: I was summoned for jury service myself once, and my experience was the same as Victor's - I would show up only to be sent home every day, and never even saw that jury box). The implicit suggestion is that the process of waiting and having nothing to occupy one's mind other than the most menial of distractions should itself be a trial. For a while, that looks to be the central joke, but the title suddenly acquires renewed significance come the third act, when Victor perceives himself as being put on trial by a higher power for his most recent misdeed. It's also a reference to Franz Kafka's 1925 novel The Trial, the dystopian tale of a bank clerk apprehended on a charge that is never specified and forced to navigate a labyrinth of head-spinning bureaucracy (in Victor's case, that labyrinth is largely his own self-inflicted concoction). David Renwick's script immediately makes us mindful of this allusion, by having Victor evoke another of Kafka's works, The Metamorphosis, in the very first sequence. It's likely not a coincidence that, whilst on the phone to a switchboard operator, he sardonically introduces himself as "Victor Meldrew the talking cockroach", a nod to the nightmarish premise of Kafka's novel, in which the protagonist awakens to find he has been inexplicably transformed into a giant insect and is placed under house arrest by his mortified family. (The more pedantic viewer might point out that, in Kafka's novel, the form Gregor acquired was never explicitly identified as a cockroach; it is, nevertheless, the interpretation most favoured by popular culture.)

Victor's in-universe reason for likening himself to a cockroach is that he feels that the switchboard operators have been treating him like an insect; aside from adding shades of the Kafkaesque to his ostensibly mundane predicament, it functions as a cunning bit of foreshadowing, the third-act crisis being directly informed by Victor's erratic reactions to the creepy crawlies infiltrating his abode. Early on, he spies a daddy long legs on the lampshade (note: the term "daddy long legs" can refer to multiple species, depending on which part of the world you're in, but in the UK it's a crane fly) and while he's keen to evict the intruder, he does so with an evident level of care and compassion, making an effort (albeit an unsuccessful one) not to break any of the insect's legs while handling it and, having cast it outside, following it long enough to observe it finding alternative shelter by limping into a discarded Lucozade can. Later, he notices a woodlouse crawling across his kitchen floor and gloatingly squishes it. There's no discernible reason why one house pest should have warranted such a humane response and the other found itself on the receiving end of Victor's meanest impulses, other than that they happened to encounter Victor at slightly different points in his immurement. This is something that Victor himself openly reflects on, and he's disturbed by the arbitrariness of his own judgement. This paves way for the climactic conflict, when Victor projects that arbitrariness onto the wider universe. If he would choose to punish a woodlouse with death for the crime of crawling across his kitchen floor, then why wouldn't some higher power, to whom he must appear as small and insignificant as a woodlouse, choose to punish him with death for the crime of disproportionately punishing a woodlouse? Victor openly notes that he is not a religious man, but he is too fundamentally suspicious an individual to not suppose that there must be some kind of malicious conspiracy going on around him, its basis in the cosmic. The murder of the woodlouse is the misdeed for which he specifically believes he's being tried, although one senses that this is the culmination of a whole lifetime's worth of rash responses to minor annoyances that he realises, with hindsight, could have been handled better. (Such uneasy introspection is anticipated by a sight gag where Victor manages to spread ink from a leaky biro all over his face before noticing, two minutes later, how ridiculous he looks in the mirror.) Also prodding him into his repentant despair is a passive-aggressive missive pushed through his door by a couple of Jehovah's Witnesses to whom he was recently rude. "May the Lord have mercy on your soul", they tauntingly close, which conjures up notions of a death sentence.

The twist, then, is that Victor ends up becoming the defendant in a trial of his own making. But it doesn't stop there. He also becomes the jury, judge and executioner (he is, after all, the only person around to play any of the parts), and it's that final role he seizes with by far the most relish. Why does Victor become so convinced that he's been sentenced to death? He notices a mole on his stomach that he swears wasn't there the last time he looked and panics about what that might mean. The viewer, of course, is unlikely to share in Victor's paranoia, which is blatantly over the top. Earlier sequences have already established Victor as a hypochondriac, prone to browsing through his medical dictionary and construing the most minor of ailments as an indication of something much nastier ("Colon tumor! Often no symptoms in the early stages...exactly what I've got!"). Victor appears to settle upon a rational line of action, and rejects it - he notes he's seeing a skin specialist next week and can discuss it then, only to conclude that he'll probably be dead by next week. He's now so committed to the narrative that he's getting what he deserves for his incorrigibility that his first inclination is to lie down and take it. "I've had a good life," he muses, before taking a moment to register what he's just said, and throwing the universe's verdict bitterly back at it. "I'VE HAD A BLOODY AWFUL LIFE!"

It strikes me as significant that the incident with the woodlouse, followed by the missive from the Jehovah's Witnesses, comes after Victor's aborted attempt at writing a letter to his brother Alfred. Alfred was previously introduced in the Series 3 episode "The Broken Reflection", where he was played by Richard Pearson. While it's not a requirement to have seen Alfred's prior appearance in order to understand "The Trial" (which does a perfectly succinct job, on its own terms, of illustrating that communication between the brothers is strained), it probably does help to know the full background. As per "The Broken Reflection", Alfred lives in New Zealand and he and Victor seldom have any face-to-face contact. In that episode, Alfred came to visit Victor, and while Victor was initially hostile to the intrusion, he came to realise that a lot of his disdain for Alfred was rooted in the reality that they were actually very alike. This prompted Victor to treat Alfred with a newfound tolerance, which unfortunately came too late; Alfred happened upon a dictaphone recording in which Victor had unwittingly expressed his prior dislike and, figuring he wasn't wanted, returned to New Zealand. "The Trial" perhaps lessens the sting of that ending, in confirming that Victor and Alfred have since reconciled and maintained a relationship by postal communication, even if Victor still struggles in relating to Alfred. While Alfred has no physical presence in "The Trial", the structure of the episode seems to place their relationship curiously at the centre, suggesting that Victor's failings toward his brother are indicative of his broader failures as a human. It's in his indifference toward Alfred that Victor goes down his dark path, turning away from the task at hand and noticing the woodlouse. It's also Victor's second attempt at writing to Alfred, on the premise that he doesn't have much time left, that yields his salvation - in his last letter, Alfred had sent an old photograph of the six-month-old Victor and, on studying it more closely, Victor realises that the mole in question was actually on his body the entire time. Perhaps it has less to do with Alfred in particular than the notion that, in reaching out to another, Victor is momentarily escaping entrapment in himself and whatever distorted perspective of reality it's concocting, prompting him to take a more objective view. As with Edgar Allan Poe's The Purloined Letter, the solution turns out to have been under Victor's nose (or, more accurately, under his navel) all along. Come to think of it, that corvid seen at the start of the episode might even have been an allusion to Poe, in sly anticipation for how this pickle would ultimately resolve.

Victor rejoices his deliverance, albeit with the backhanded observation that he was "sentenced to death and I managed to get off with life". It gives him, momentarily, a renewed perspective on life. "I'll never be rude to another Jehovah's Witness for as long as I live", he declares, before pausing and upping the ante: "I'll never be rude to anyone again." We know that this much is beyond Victor's reach. Like his earlier resolution to add healthier variety into his junk food diet of chocolate, crisps and chips cooked in fat with OK fruity sauce, it's well-intentioned but doomed from the outset to failure. The two failed resolutions are cleverly linked, in the episode's final, revolting discovery. Prior to discovering the mole, Victor had been musing about a baker in the local supermarket who had recently lost his toupee. Having at last settled on a nourishing lunch option he would actually enjoy (beans on toast), Victoria slices into a loaf of bread, only to find that terrible missing toupee concealed inside! Whereupon he gets on the phone to the supermarket manager and starts blowing his top once again; just to make it plain that he's relapsed into the same old cycle, the language used mirrors that of his earlier call to the garden centre. The question is, can you blame Victor for his reaction? After all, finding a misplaced wig in your intended lunch would be an even more disconcerting experience than finding a yucca plant lodged in your toilet. No matter how sincerely you had vowed to mend your ways, you would totally go to pieces. Is it therefore fair to suppose that Victor is actually the villain of his own story? The episode closes with deliberately mixed signals on that front. Victor, for whatever reason, cannot resist trying on the wig himself, if only to confirm, on glancing in the mirror, how ridiculous it looks. He reaffirms himself as a fool and seemingly embraces that identity for the sake of getting his momentary catharsis against the supermarket. And yet the final shots of the episode have us panning back out of the Meldrews' house and back into the torrential downpour outside, suggesting that Victor might well have been the victim of a cosmic prank and that an Old Testament deity is raining its unabating, gleefully disproportionate wrath down upon him. Or is the wrath all Victor's, an utterly proportionate response to a chaotic universe that gets the Victor Meldrew it certainly deserves? (Which probably shouldn't apply to that harmless woodlouse, mind). As with all of the series' bottle episodes, it ends without clear resolution. Victor is still under house arrest, and the jury still hasn't returned.

PS: I don't get Victor's jab at Robert Mitchum, since he was in some riveting thrillers (really, Victor, you were bored by The Night of The Hunter?). There is something intuitively sound, however, in his bracketing of the Dudley Moore Trio with the six-legged menaces with which he won't share a bathroom.

[1] Fun fact: Richard Wilson was in an episode of Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em ("Wendy House").

Inside No. 9 '22: Wise Owl (aka Bird of Prey)

Content warning: child abuse 

Earlier this month we bid farewell to the BBC series Inside No. 9, a show that could be aptly described as the modern-day successor to Tales of The Unexpected, but with plenty of personality and devilish ingenuity all of its own. Like ToTU, it was comprised of half-hour stand-alone comic dramas exploring the meaner side of human nature, typically with some kind of ghoulish twist at the end. Creators Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, who'd previously collaborated on the gleefully grotesque cult comedies The League of Gentlemen and Psychoville, tended to star in each story, although always as different characters; occasionally they took a backseat, and at least one episode, "3 by 3", did not feature them at all. The one major constancy was that every episode took place in a venue that in some way pertained to the number 9. Usually this denoted the house or apartment number, but Shearsmith and Pemberton also liked to think outside of the box in terms of how to work in that titular number (for example, in one episode, "Diddle Diddle Dumpling", it referred to the size of a shoe that formed a pivotal plot detail). The genre of the series was also perpetually shifting - some episodes were flat-out horrors, others were surprisingly tender tales of human vulnerability. One of the thrills of the series was entering into each weekly 9 and never knowing exactly what you would find. Besides the 9, there were really only two guarantees - a) every episode contained a "hidden hare" (literally an ornamental leporine slipped somewhere into the mise en scene) and b) the toilet and its related bodily functions always featured to some capacity, usually as a revolting observation on the side. Actually, I can't claim to have gone through the entire series with a fine enough comb to say for certain that the latter applied to absolutely every episode, but I feel confident in saying that episodes devoid of shit, piss or fart jokes were a whole lot rarer than episodes where nobody dies, and those constituted a slim minority. Shearsmith and Pemberton may be creative geniuses, but their trains of thought never seemed to venture far from out of the toilet bowl. And that's grand - the toilet has long served as a beautiful shorthand for everything ugly and forbidden about the human psyche, the matters we'd sooner flush into oblivion and not give a second's thought. We might recall the specific ground that Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho broke in 1960, with its unusually prominent focus on a flushing toilet.

Psycho, most appropriately, was given the tip of the hat quite a few times throughout Inside No. 9. One episode, "Private View", opens with a "Psycho moment", where a popular guest star is introduced and abruptly killed off. In "Merrily, Merrily", a character who mentions having studied psychology is met with the plebeian response, "Yes, I've seen that. Where she gets stabbed in the shower..." And of course, it's hard to not have the Bates in mind through much of "Death Be Not Proud", watching David's morbid relationship play out with his own gruesome mother (itself transplanted from Psychoville); they are gleeful caricatures of the very archetypes the Bates helped cement in popular consciousness. The most substantial of all these Psycho homages, though, occurs in the series 7 episode, "Wise Owl", which was directed by Louise Hooper and first broadcast on 1st June 2022. Its protagonist, Ronnie Oliver (Shearsmith), is an obvious counterpart to Norman Bates, albeit one who lurks in a suburban home in Rochdale (numbered 9, of course), rather than an isolated pocket of the Californian highway. He is yet another socially maladjusted figure who practices taxidermy, has a thing about birds and mentally has never escaped the shadow of the parental figure who dominated him throughout childhood. The particulars of the plot, however, are less evocative of Hitchcock's film than of the Richard Franklin-directed sequel, Psycho II (1983); Ronnie, like the middle-aged Norman, has returned to face his childhood demons following a lengthy period of hospitalisation. There are also echoes of Stephen King's Pet Sematary, with Pemberton playing Derek Blenkin, a client who tasks Ronnie with resurrecting the deceased pet of his five-year-old daughter, an albino rabbit named Ferrari. Like King's protagonist, Blenkin is hoping to delay a conversation about death with his daughter, confident he can pass the stuffed rabbit off as living by telling her it's always tired. His concern for his daughter's feelings is comically undercut by his desire to secure to the cheapest possible option, suggesting to Ronnie that he might leave off the rabbit's legs if it will spare expenses.

Now that the series has formally concluded and I've seen every installment, I have few qualms in declaring "Wise Owl" my personal pick of the bunch. It is, in my eyes, an unmitigated triumph. Given my fondness for all things Psycho, the Bates allusions alone might have been enough to get it into my good graces. But what really elevates this one to such immaculate heights is that it doubles as Shearsmith and Pemberton's affectionate tribute to yet another subject near and dear to my heart - the public information film. Shearsmith and Pemberton were clearly hotly attuned to the impact that such films had on the legions of tender young minds raised on their sombre teachings, tensions that lingered well into adulthood. They wove a beautiful, smartly-observed little horror yarn from that idea, one powered by a rich plethora of creeping disturbances but also an undercurrent of genuine pathos. "Wise Owl" is centred around a fictitious series of public information films that existed in a parallel version of the 1970s, an era that boasts particular infamy for the array of shocking and psychologically scarring educational films that found their way onto UK television screens, a lot of which played like miniature horrors and were specifically intended to be seen by younger viewers. The decade has, in recent times, acquired quite another infamy, as an era in which certain celebrated public figures were able to commit sexual offences with impunity. In a few cases, those infamies have intersected, with some of the most memorable PIFs of their day featuring since-disgraced figures who were then deemed credible as the voice of reason. There was a time when "Teach Them To Swim" was considered such a gentle and wholesome PIF, up against the barbaric likes of "Lonely Water", but now it's every bit as cursed, if not more so. Such apprehensions haunt "Wise Owl" to the core.

"Wise Owl" opens with an animated segment, a faux PIF presented with all the grain and crackle of a 1970s artifact. A brother and a sister (the voices of Dylan Hall and Isabelle Lee Pratt, respectively) are out playing with a kite. The boy, the older of the two, states that he's been asked by his mother to keep guard of the situation, something he immediately blows by demanding a go with the kite, causing it to fly away and get caught against a pylon. The boy thinks it's a perfectly a sensible idea to climb the pylon and retrieve the kite, but is stopped by Wise Owl (voice of Ron Cook), a friendly talking strigine, who advises him of the dangers and why he should not mess with electricity. The sequence beautifully nails down the qualities that made these vintage PIFs so indelible to the children who had to accommodate them amid their regular teatime viewing - in particular, that haunting sense of childhood innocence on the cusp of some awful, irreversible disturbance. The danger the children are in is made all the more stark with the knowledge that it is the little girl's sixth birthday, and the kite that lures them to that dreaded pylon an item of particular excitement for being her present. As a pastiche of a 1970s public information film, it plays itself almost entirely straight, to the point where I could have bought it as a genuine specimen of the era. The only part that doesn't quite ring true is when Wise Owl retrieves the kite himself by blowing in its direction, providing a facile solution to the problem of the girl's lost present, so that the character goes from being authoritative to super-heroic. For now, a pivotal dynamic is established. Wise Owl is the voice of reason; vigilant, trustworthy and benevolent, a parental surrogate who can be counted on in the absence of adult supervision. The boy is foolish and courts disaster. The girl is innocent and helpless.

The look and the tone of the "Wise Owl" animations was blatantly inspired by the "Charley Says" series, in which a young boy named Tony was prevented from making stupid decisions by a cat named Charley (who, unlike the Owl, couldn't speak English, only a discordant garble of purrs and yowls, which Tony inexplicably understood). Two of the Charley shorts are recalled directly at later junctions in the episode - the one where Charley stopped Tony from playing with a box of matches, and the one where he stopped him from going off with a sinister figure who'd approached him in the playground with the (undoubtedly false) promise of taking him to see some cute puppies. There was, however, never a Charley short devoted to the dangers of scaling pylons - the inspiration for the opening sequence (and the use of an owl in general) looks to have been drawn from the 1978 film Play Safe, where a cartoon robin was lectured by an owl on the dangers of electricity, citing grim examples of children who met horrible fates by playing too close to live wires and substations (including one particularly infamous interlude with Jimmy and his Frisbee).

As Ronnie goes about his business inside the house (which includes a harrowing moment, the story's analogue to the Psycho shower scene, where he contemplates suicide by climbing into a filled bathtub with a mains-powered radio), his routine is interspersed with further animations starring Wise Owl and the children. But unlike the opening sequence, both contain obvious disturbances to the formula, suggesting a breakdown of the security Wise Owl supposedly upholds. In the second PIF, the boy and his sister are enjoying a day at the beach. The sister goes off with their mother to paddle in the waves, while the boy, left alone to dig sandcastles, is approached by a strange man who offers to show him a starfish. He nearly accepts the invitation, but is once again saved by the interventions of Wise Owl, who advises him that the man's intentions might not be as friendly as his appearance (which is really not at all friendly, since he's literally a looming shadow in a trench coat and fedora; he actually looks a lot like the stranger in that illustrated edition of "Eddy Scott Goes Out To Play" I covered a couple of years ago). As a pastiche, it doesn't play itself quite as straight as its predecessor, with the added bit of blackly adult humor in the stranger's upfront observation that the boy looks "nice and shiny". It's also a little more on the nose with its nightmarish imagery - unlike its "Charley" equivalent, in which the playground prowler gave up the instant he was called out, we here get the extra sordid detail of the stranger's dark, gangly hand reaching out to seize the boy, prompting a violent response from Wise Owl, who swoops in and bites the hand. With the boy spared, Wise Owl turns and delivers the relevant lesson to the camera: "Don't be a Twit You! Always stay safe with your mummy and daddy! Wise Owl knows best!" The sequence doesn't end there, however. It rounds off with an unsettling epilogue, where Wise Owl flies away, leaving the boy alone once more, shaken and crying out for his mother.

An even more disturbing subversion occurs in the third film, which takes place, once again, on the girl's sixth birthday. Impatient for their mother to arrive home and to light the candles on her cake, the children retrieve the matches themselves from the mantelpiece. But on this occasion, no Wise Owl appears. No cat named Charley either. No voice of authority at all, in fact. The children are simply left to their own devices. The boy, ever the instigator of disaster, strikes one of the matches and holds it close to his face, smiling at the camera while the little flame dances ominously atop the head. We then cut back to Ronnie, who is studying his reflection in the bathroom mirror, stroking back the greasy curtain of hair around his ear to reveal the cluster of burn marks obscured underneath. It now becomes apparent that Ronnie and the animated boy are one and the same. The sequences we've seen are conflations; Ronnie has remained so subjugated by the Wise Owl and his teachings into adulthood that he's obliged to filter his own childhood memories through the form and imagery of the character's PIFs. Although Ronnie is now in his 50s, he is still identifiably a child, and lives his life according to the rules laid out by the Wise Owl. Safety consciousness is baked into his psyche, to an obsessive degree; he responds to a buzzing fridge by unplugging most of the house's electrical appliances, removing all the light bulbs and retiring in the darkness. He also makes a point of never talking to strangers. When Blenkin shows up at his door, he accepts the rabbit but avoids engaging with him on any conversational level. The girl who appears alongside him in the animated sequences is identified as his sister, Joanne, and before long we've discovered the terrible reason why it seems to be perpetually her sixth birthday in his memories. It's a date that will forever haunt Ronnie, the day when the kind of catastrophic, worst-case-scenario nightmares outlined in public information films spilled over into his reality. It seems that Ronnie really did attempt to light the candles on Joanne's cake without adult supervision, and it all went horribly wrong. Ronnie was burned and Joanne did not survive. Ronnie has lived with the guilt ever since.

A common theme throughout the animated segments is the absence of the children's mother, and Ronnie's apparent inclination to make bad decisions when left to manage his own welfare and/or his sister's. In the present, Ronnie receives a video call from his mother (Georgie Glenn), who still worries about the possibility of Ronnie doing something stupid on his own. She reminisces about a childhood pet of Ronnie and Joanne's, a cat named Mimsy that was eventually evicted on account of Ronnie's allergies. She then asks Ronnie if he'll be coming to see her on Monday for an important family anniversary. Ronnie responds by referencing that other parental figure whose whereabouts have, up until now, remained unaccounted for. "Will Dad be there?", he asks. Her answer suggests that he is elusive and doesn't involve himself in family matters. "You know what he's like." Ronnie may be without parental oversight, but watchful authority is omnipresent through the eyes of the various stuffed cats, lambs and badgers that adorn the shelves above and are ever peering down on him (in that regard, they fulfil a similar purpose to Norman Bates' stuffed birds). Explicit note is made of the fact that there are no owls in the macabre menagerie, although Ronnie gets a nightmarish visitation from something even more grotesque (and darkly comic), in the form of a monstrous man-owl hybrid that steps into the living room during the night, head rotating and genitalia on full display.

The following morning, Ronnie begins work on stuffing Ferrari the rabbit, and we get a fourth "Wise Owl" PIF, only by now the pastiche has given way into full-blown parody. In this sequence, Ronnie and Joanne are mourning the death of their pet cat, when Wise Owl appears and instructs them on how to preserve their beloved friend forever, guiding them through the taxidermy process in lurid detail. I mentioned that some level of bathroom humor was a requisite for every episode of Inside No. 9, although "Wise Owl" is actually one of the mildest examples on that front. All we really have (besides the toilet's inevitable showing in the backdrop of the bathtub scene) is Ronnie's mother's recollection that Mimsy "had a way of looking at you...like you were muck on its shoe". We do, however, get plenty of uncomfortable gross-out bodily humor in watching this cartoon cat be skinned, its eyes gouged out, its body incinerated and its tanned hide stretched across an artificial skeleton (in Ronnie's words, "Like putting a sausage into its skin"). The cat is, troublingly, identified as Mimsy, although I don't take to mean that the cat was actually killed and stuffed in real life. Rather, an allusion is being drawn between the childhood pet and childhood innocence; once dead, it cannot be restored to what it was. We know that, despite Ronnie's declaration at the end of the PIF that Mimsy is "good as new", that a stuffed animal is in no way the same as a living pet. Blenkin's plan to pass the stuffed Ferrari off as a live but perpetually tired rabbit is obviously doomed to failure, a facile attempt to mask over a painful reality. How doomed, however, comes as a bit of a shock. As the PIF ends, we see the end-results of Ronnie's real-life taxidermy session, revealing a pronounced difference between himself and his Hitchcockian counterpart. Norman Bates was, among other things, a skilled taxidermist. Ronnie is anything but. The body of poor Ferrari the rabbit gets absolutely desecrated in his hands. In death, the creature is afforded no dignity.

Unfortunate, because it's right at this point that Blenkin reappears at the door, wanting to get Ferrari back in the same condition in which he left him. He seems much more agitated than on their previous encounter, having learned from speaking to a neighbour that resident taxidermist Mr Oliver is a man in his 70s, and he might have entrusted his daughter's pet rabbit to an imposter. Naturally, he's horrified on seeing what's become of Ferrari. While he's absolutely right in asserting that any child presented with Ronnie's "Franken-Rabbit" would have nightmares, it's hard to imagine how his tactic of giving his daughter a preserved rabbit hide would have worked out any better in the long run. Ronnie, then, is only an amateur taxidermist, and he is not the regular occupant of this particular no. 9. That is one of the story's twists. It is not made explicitly clear why he accepted Blenkin's job and attempted to stuff the rabbit himself, although it seems that he does, at heart, only ever want to do the right thing and please people. His disinclination against interacting with strangers was potentially overridden by the knowledge that the innocence of a small girl, not much younger than Joanne, was hanging in the balance. But he isn't able to protect her from the bleakness of the world, any more than he was Joanne.

Later that evening, the regular seventysomething Mr Oliver returns home, having been away on business for the weekend. He is of course Ronnie's father, Wilf, and he's played by Ron Cook, who is also the voice of Wise Owl. That is yet another of the story's twists. Just as Ronnie and the animated boy are one and the same, so too are his father and Wise Owl the exact same entity. Wilf really was the voice of Wise Owl in the series of public information films that existed in-universe, and Ronnie has never been able to separate them in this mind. Wilf was not expecting to see Ronnie. "You'll have to give me money for that window", he states, indicating that Ronnie has forced his way into the property. He speaks with a distinct lack of affection for his son, dropping the first casual reference to Ronnie's having been institutionalised for much of his adulthood ("Did they have a telly in...where you were, or were you not allowed?") and unrepentantly acknowledging that he maintained no contact with him within that time. He never visited Ronnie; when asked if he received any of Ronnie's letters, he takes the opportunity to berate him: "I couldn't read half of them. Your handwriting's shocking!"

Even before Wilf shows up in the flesh, his animated counterpart has undergone a significant degeneration, transmuting from the benevolent voice of reason to an increasingly sinister being with each new appearance. Take that moment in the second PIF where he bites the stranger's outstretched hand. Within context, it's ostensibly framed as a heroic action, but it calls attention to the owl's potentially vicious nature, underscoring that central irony that Ronnie is receiving advice about avoiding predators from an animal that is itself a predator. True, you could lay the exact same charge against Charley the cat (in his own "Strangers" PIF, he reduces a fish to a skeleton in the blink of an eye), but a cat's domesticated, and not a critter it seems particularly unusual to depict hanging around with small children. An owl's a creature of the wilderness, which is suggestive of a whole myriad of unknown and hidden dangers. His instruction on not talking to strangers seems like sound advice to give to a child, but has a darker echo in a later sequence, when Ronnie recalls being asked by his distraught mother why he lit those matches, and is again visited by Wise Owl, who simply tells him, "You mustn't say anything." The message Ronnie is being fed is that silence is his only recourse. Even Wise Owl's catchphrase, "Don't be a Twit You!", while sounding amusingly plausible as the kind of trademark saying a character from a public information film would have, takes on harsher tones, in mirroring Wilf's evident tendency toward bullying and rebuking Ronnie. Cook's dual performance is terrific - as the owl, he's hauntingly convincing as an authoritative voice from yesteryear. As Wilf he's spookily mean, but not to a point that precludes the character's discernible wretchedness. When they merge together, the results are both unhappy and uncanny.

Since the "Wise Owl" series ended, Wilf (whose name is, incidentally, only a letter away from that of another predatory wild animal) has gotten intermittent gigs playing to the nostalgia crowd (most recently an event at a toy museum, which had him in the stellar company of "Ray Brooks, Nigel from Pipkins [and] one of the Bungles - not the scary one") but taxidermy is now his bread and butter. He tells Ronnie, "You'd be surprised how many people want to preserve something of the past, keep a memory alive. Freeze-frame of a happy moment." The taxidermy motif serves a string of purposes throughout the narrative. It is, most obviously, an allusion to Psycho, that classic tale of an abusive parent and their damaged offspring, but on that score it is also something of a misdirect. On our first viewing, knowing the series' predilection for gruesome and disturbing endings, we might suspect that this is building towards the shocking revelation that one of our two taxidermists, be it the professional or the amateur, has applied that same process to a human subject (as Norman infamously did with his mother), most likely the body of the long-deceased Joanne. But that revelation does not come. Instead, the taxidermy is used fundamentally as a metaphor for what Wilf has done to Ronnie, in keeping him perfectly preserved, forever a child under the Wise Owl's rule, only a shell of what he might once have been. With hindsight, the macabre instructional film on stuffing Mimsy the cat becomes a grisly allegory for the violations Ronnie has endured at his father's hands; in the aftermath, it would be a flagrant pretence for either Mimsy or Ronnie to be described as "good as new", with Ronnie's botched job on Ferrari the rabbit signifying a more honest representation of the ugly realities. And intensely ugly they are too. Ronnie reminds Wilf that Monday will be the 44th anniversary of Joanne's death; if she'd lived, she would have been turning 50. He's come to Wilf because he has questions regarding what really happened on that fateful day. There follows a replay of the earlier "Matches" PIF, only this time the live action Ronnie is intermixed with the animated Joanne, suggesting a puncturing through of the illusion. Ronnie recalls that she'd received a doll, a tea set and a kite (there's another predatory bird). "Wise Owl" is revealed to have been present after all, only now he is depicted as the abusive and negligent figure that Wilf was in real life. Joanne wants to light the candles herself. Ronnie tells her that she shouldn't, but is shouted down by Wise Owl, who mocks Ronnie for needing to ask permission for everything and tells him to grow some balls. Joanne is left without supervision while Ronnie is ominously ordered to follow the predatory bird upstairs into the bedroom, with the reminder that "Wise Owl knows best". Ronnie was conditioned to always follow his father's instructions, much as he was conditioned to always follow the teachings of the Wise Owl. Wilf abused both of those authorities at once, creating a climate in which the innocence of both of his children was prematurely snuffed out.

With that in mind, we can see how the scenario in the earlier "Strangers" PIF was really being turned completely on its head. The danger lay with the supposedly safe authority figure all along. The message never to talk to strangers becomes an admonishment against ever reaching out to the outside world for help, against Ronnie being able to vocalise what he was going through. This is a chilling inversion of the alleged purpose of a public information film, in which the authority's words are clearly designed to protect its own interests and not the subject's.

The story climaxes with a reversal of this dynamic, as Ronnie holds his father at knife point and forces him to accompany him upstairs. As he goes, he has one more flashback to Joanne, now a flesh and blood child (the girl who plays her is not credited), cheerfully lighting the candles on her cake, the last time he ever saw her alive. He takes Wilf to his childhood bedroom, and confronts him on why he allowed him to take the blame for the fire. Wilf responds that he had his career to think about, morbidly observing that for a renowned PIF voice-over's daughter to die in a fire of his causing was "not very on brand". Ronnie insinuates that Wilf betrayed his trust in him, and the Wise Owl, to which Wilf responds, "That was only a game. You enjoyed it." He then attempts to subdue Ronnie by evoking the lexicon of the Wise Owl: "Don't be a Twit You. Give your old man a hug." Ronnie looks as though he might comply, but instead raises the knife and slashes through an adjacent pillow, causing feathers to violently spill. Wilf hits back with the threatening reminder that such behaviour could potentially get Ronnie reinstitutionalised, assuring him that if he stops now then he won't say anything. Ronnie responds, "But I will", and goes his own way, clear in his mind over what he needs to do next. He's going to go to his mother and tell her everything. Wilf makes a further effort to dissuade him, by slipping back into the persona of Wise Owl ("Wise Owl won't let you...and we must always do what the Wise Owl says, mustn't we?"); in a deliberately on the nose detail that straddles the border between the unsettling and the just plain absurd, he does so with several feathers still hanging off of his body. The spell is broken, however. Ronnie no longer answers to the Wise Owl, having seen him for the wretched fool that he is.

It's tempting to conclude that "Wise Owl" was conceived as a measured response to criticisms of how the series had previously depicted trauma victims and characters with mental illness, which is to say, as ready to kill their abusers and liable to hurt others; for examples, see "Tom and Gerri" (which is a really good, really tense little character piece, although the ending might not please everyone) and "Thinking Out Loud" (for myself, the low point of the series, for a myriad of reasons). In that regard, Shearsmith and Pemberton aren't necessarily offering up anything more egregious than any number of horror-based media, which has an ingrained tendency towards treating the psychologically troubled as outcasts and objects of fear and suspicion (for all of its merits, Psycho is absolutely included; the film's title alone is a dead giveaway) ^[1] - although, correct, by the 2020s we really should be doing a whole lot more to challenge those preconceptions, and "Wise Owl" feels like a refreshing step in the right direction. To an extent, it is another exercise in rug-pulling from a series smart enough to use its own perceived formula to its advantage. In establishing Ronnie as an obviously mentally ill protagonist and coding him according to such a familiar archetype, it engenders a deliberate set of expectations, only to subvert them - in addition to the aforementioned misdirect with the taxidermy, there's also a fake-out moment where it looks as though Ronnie intends to stab his father, when in the actuality he's going for the pillow. But more than merely surprising, it reaches a genuinely affecting and cathartic resolution, one that eschews brutality and shocks in favour of conveying a sincere sense of Ronnie finding a way forward from his traumas. The cycle of horror and despair does not ultimately claim him. As he walks away at the end, we have every reason to believe that a more hopeful future lies ahead.

"Wise Owl" concludes with one final animated sequence, in which Ronnie the boy leaves the house and, freed from his father's toxic influence, takes his first real steps toward adulthood; in doing so, he visibly transforms from a boy into a man. The traumas that have dogged him for most of his life have not entirely receded; Wise Owl continues to follow him, and to berate him with the usual cry of, "Twit You! Twit You!" But he's merely an irritating speck at the back of Ronnie's head, not the dominating figure of the past, and Ronnie is fully capable of dismissing him. "Get stuffed!" Ronnie retorts, and keeps on walking.

 [1] For an example of how persistently accepted such ideas still are in the modern horror landscape, you might look to film critic Mark Kermode's rather tone-deaf response to a listener's charge that the 2022 film Smile perpetuated those very stigmas. I'm only bringing this up because I was somewhat taken back at how he brought Psycho into the conversation, to make the case that Smile shouldn't be singled out, without acknowledging that Psycho was made a whopping 62 years before Smile. You might very reasonably have expected attitudes to have moved on since then.

Homer The Smithers (aka One Crane Flying Solo)

On the DVD commentary for "Homer The Smithers" (aka episode 3F14) showrunner Bill Oakley introduces the episode by explaining that it represented an ambitious attempt, as The Simpsons coasted through its seventh season, to bring the series "back to the family". It's as baffling a statement as I think you can make about "Homer The Smithers", of all episodes, because it really has bupkis to do with the family. Four of the unit it finds all but zero use for, and the other, despite getting title billing and a generous amount of screen time, is effectively a pawn in a story built around testing the bond between two typically inseparable supporting characters. If anything, it takes the focus further away from the family than any other episode that season, with the possible exception of "A Fish Called Selma". Oakley clarifies that what he means by "back to the family" is for The Simpsons to be brought back down to Earth, after multiple seasons with its head stuck in the clouds. Mirkin's era had already seen Homer get blasted into space by NASA, and at this point the series was still grappling with the question as to whether it might have already crossed its event horizon in terms of breaking the plausibility barrier. When they took over as showrunners, Oakley and Josh Weinstein were initially eager for the show to get back to the kinds of smaller, more grounded stories you would have found in the first two or three series. Stories that were, in Oakley's words, about "realistic things that happen within the family." "Or within the workplace situation", he adds, as if it's dawned on him that the "back to the family" analogy perhaps doesn't work for this episode. It was a noble ambition, but one that Oakley and Weinstein clearly ultimately decided was doomed to failure, given that they closed their tenure with Frank Grimes' notorious Blue Screen of Death and the deliberately dire (but not exactly inaccurate) final predictions of "The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase".

As part of this drive for stories that wouldn't have felt at all out of place in the show's first two or three seasons, Mike Scully pitched the idea of Smithers taking a vacation and Homer filling in as Burns' personal assistant; Oakley and Weinstein thought this such an obvious story idea that they were amazed it hadn't been done in the first three seasons. The outline was assigned to John Swartzwelder, the most prolific member of the show's writing team, who turned out a surprisingly unassuming script, albeit one still peppered with the kinds subversive, unpredictable gags for which Swartzwelder has been long renowned. The result is another of the more pleasingly experimental installments of Oakley and Weinstein's run, though it's experimental in lower-key ways than, say, "22 Short Films About Springfield" or "The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase". It isn't a "gimmick" episode (or "format-bending", in Oakley's words), but it is unique in how refreshingly minimalist it is. It doesn't so much recreate the feeling of the earlier episodes as go as determinedly bare-bones as possible, creating a full and satisfying episode from impressively few elements. I'm not sure if you could really call this a bottle episode, but it definitely falls back on many of the same techniques. There are long stretches of the episode that involve only three characters - Burns, Smithers and Homer - and with Smithers absent for much of the middle act there's a good chunk of it that ends up being a two-hander between Homer and Burns. When you keep in mind that two of those three (Burns and Smithers) are voiced by the same actor, it becomes apparent just how much heavy-lifting Harry Shearer is doing throughout the episode; factor in the additional cameos from Lenny, Dr Hibbert and, in a deleted scene, Ned Flanders (see below) and the episode feels like it could have been purposely conceived as a showcase for Shearer's voicing chops. And with most of the action taking place within a single locale - Burns' office - this is probably the closest The Simpsons have come to replicating the enclosed atmosphere of a staged play.

Where "Homer The Smithers" does feel more reminiscent of the earlier seasons is in its predominantly straightforward treatment of its scenario. There's less of the knowing, self-depreciating humor that characterised Oakley and Weinstein's reign, and which could only really come with longevity and déjà vu. The sole point where we catch the episode winking unambiguously at the audience is in the specific plot point regarding how Homer comes to be involved in what is, from the beginning, two other characters' conflict. No viewer, even those who haven't seen the title of the episode in advance, is going to anticipate anything other than for Homer to be appointed as Smithers' substitute, yet the episode initially feigns interest in going through the motions of providing all the proper narrative connective tissue for getting us from Point A to B. Determined to steer clear of any candidate who could potentially do a better job than he, Smithers searches the plant's database for an employee flagged as being "incompetent", and the database returns 714 possible options. Smithers attempts to narrow down his search by adding "lazy", "clumsy", "dim-witted" and "monstrously ugly" to his specifications, which seems to set the stage perfectly for Homer to come in. Yet the script subverts our expectations, with the database again insisting that Smithers could be referring to any one of 714 names. Smithers, who by now has lived through enough Simpson-centric shit to know where this is ultimately headed, resigns himself to fate - "Nuts to this, I'll just get Homer Simpson" - an inevitability reinforced during the obligatory sequence where the selectively amnesic Burns has to be reminded of Homer's existence, and Smithers notes that, "All the recent events of your life have revolved around him in some way." (Of course, if Smithers' own memory was all that hot then he might recall that there have been at least two circumstances under which Homer has previously outshone him - namely, in "Simpson and Delilah" and "Homer Defined" - and perhaps think better of it.)

Homer, meanwhile, is naive enough to think that he's been chosen because of his merits as an employee, specifically his motivational skills ("Everyone always says they have to work a lot harder when I'm around!"), and he throws himself into the role with such an earnest tenacity you feel kinda bad that he's basically been set up to fail. Still, while the episode takes care to establish what the stakes are for Homer - Lisa and Marge independently remind him of what a golden opportunity this is to further his career - its interest in Homer and how far he could potentially go with his new responsibilities are also feigned. "Homer The Smithers" isn't really about Homer, but it pretends that it is by focussing on Homer's perspective and his struggle to make good on Burns' every unreasonable demand. The turning point comes about midway through the episode, when Homer gets so overworked and overstressed by his bullying boss that he does the one thing Smithers would never do - he physically retaliates, socking Burns in the face in the heat of the moment and rendering him unconscious. The punch itself, and its immediate fallout, is genuinely startling; Homer panics that he might have just committed manslaughter, which seems highly unlikely (we'd already been through this "Is Burns dead? Could Homer really get worked up enough to kill him?" thing less than a season ago), but given Burns' age and fragile physical condition, there is a little queasy uncertainty as to where this all might be headed, and the episode lets that fester, by first having Homer run home to consult his next move with Marge and Lisa. He returns to the office to find Burns more-or-less fine, but so shocked by the experience, and so terrified of what else Homer might do to him, that he won't allow him to get close again, prompting Burns to attempt to handle his daily menial tasks by himself. At this point, the perspective switches from Homer to Burns, and his struggle to educate himself in the basic survival skills he's had the luxury of forgoing for so many years. This is where the real tension of the episode lies - in Burns' talent for giving orders versus his latent desire for self-sufficiency, and where Smithers fits in with all of that. That time we'd spent with Homer? All build-up to justify why he would ever reach the point of doing something so tremendously out of character as to punch Mr Burns. But it is an exceptionally good build-up, making sharp and economical use of the fact that it's largely just Homer and Burns in an office together, with each slowly chipping away at the other's patience. It manages to incorporate a few brilliantly absurd sight gags - not least Burns summoning Homer with a giant megaphone and a tiny bell, which Homer can apparently hear all the way over in Evergreen Terrace (how this doesn't keep the whole of Springfield awake is anyone's guess), and the inconveniently timed fire at the first act break. Not to mention that Burns proves so painfully out of touch with the real world that Homer even gets the rare opportunity to be the smart one in the room - he's shrewd enough to know why Burns' request for a dodo egg is definitely off the menu, for example.

Symbiosis?

 

"Homer The Smithers" is first and foremost a character study about Burns and Smithers, what makes their relationship tick and why they choose to remain together, despite the fact that it might not be the healthiest option for either of them. If I were to compare it to one of the early Simpsons installments, it would be "Principal Charming" of Season 2, in that both episodes deal extensively with characters who exist primarily on the sidelines of the lives of the main family (Patty and Selma, in "Principal Charming"), the emphasis being on the isolation that characterises their day to day lives. In both cases, the characters are a duo - one is so rarely seen without the other - and we're given reason to believe that their seeming inseparability is both an insulation against that isolation and something of an immurement in itself. One of the duo gets the opportunity to break away in another direction, leaving the other stranded at a personal dead-end (in both scenarios, an allegiance with Barney Gumble, be it romantic or professional in nature, is treated as tantamount to hitting rock bottom), but ultimately decides that things are better as they were, reaffirming their place within that duo. What separates the two episodes is that one is obviously much more pathos-driven than the other - while "Principal Charming" ends with an achingly bittersweet moment where Selma openly acknowledges the sacrifice Patty has made on her account, and thanks her for it, we get no such gentle gratification at the end of "Homer The Smithers", which closes on a more cynically ambivalent note. For one thing, the sisterly bond between Patty and Selma has the virtue of being grounded in mutual respect, which cannot be said for Burns and Smithers. Their relationship is built on symbiosis, but symbiosis of a more precarious and unequal nature. It's possibly best understood as a variation on an old Aesopian allegory, regarding a wolf who has a bone stuck in his throat and is at dire risk of starvation. He seeks out the help of a crane, imploring him to lower his head into his mouth and to remove the bone with his elongated beak, promising him a great reward for his trouble. When the crane has extracted the bone, the wolf produces nothing, telling the crane that the was permitted to place his head between the jaws of a wolf and to pull it out intact, and if he were at all sensible he would consider that reward enough. The intended message of the story is that one should always consider the fundamental character of a person before becoming entangled with them - if you lend your services to someone who lacks integrity (the wolf, in Aesop's fables, was typically used as a shorthand for the predatory and exploitative), then you should not be surprised if they do not return your good will (although it is, to my mind, an example of a fable in which the wittiness of the punchline almost supersedes the need for a moral - see also the one about the drunken dog who can't remember how he left the party). Now imagine a scenario in which that crane not only considered the honor of getting to stick his head into the wolf's jaws unharmed to be a tremendous reward in its own right, but was positively addicted to the privilege, and we have something resembling the Burns-Smithers dynamic. The crane thrives on his closeness and indispensability to the universally feared wolf, who, lucky him, needs assisting with his chewing and swallowing and always has a bone in his throat that requires dislodging. Yet the crane plays a dangerous game, for the wolf does not regard his right-hand bird as anything other than a means to his own functioning, and should the crane's usefulness suddenly expire, he will find himself as subject to the wolf's mercilessness as anybody else. And the specific manner in which the crane serves the wolf requires him to make himself especially vulnerable (in Smithers' case, by investing so much emotion into his relationship with Burns). It's an arrangement that works for Burns and Smithers - so long as the equilibrium is not disturbed, both characters can survive and be perfectly satisfied within its confines. It goes without saying, though, that it won't be everybody's cup of tea.

One thing that "Homer The Smithers" surely demonstrates is that Smithers is irreplaceable in his role, because there's nobody else in the world who could possibly show Burns the same level of unflinching devotion. To go above and beyond in the way that Smithers does with his assistance to Burns, you would really have to love the decrepit old tyrant (that, or there would have to be a pretty substantial paycheck in it for you at the end of the day, although it's clear at this point that Smithers' motivations aren't mercenary, and a safe bet that whatever Burns is paying him, it isn't nearly enough). Too bad, then, that the sentiment is entirely one-sided. At the beginning of the episode, it does appear as though Burns has something resembling legitimate concern for Smithers' welfare - he can see that Smithers is at risk of burning out, and in desperate need of a vacation. But that's all undercut by what happens on Smithers' return, when Burns has decided that he can function on his own and no longer needs a personal assistant, whereupon he shows the soft-throated Smithers just how sharp his wolf teeth are, callously casting him aside as if he were nothing. In the end, Smithers' years of extraordinary loyalty and back-breaking labor mean zilch to Burns. Which, really, should have us questioning if we actually want to see Smithers restored to his old position by the episode's conclusion. The harsh truth nestling at the bottom of "Homer The Smithers" is that Burns frankly never deserved an assistant as good as Smithers in the first place.

That said, it would be inaccurate to suppose that Smithers is a total innocent in this equation. His motive for choosing Homer as his substitute, rather than somebody upon whom he could count on to do semi-competent job, comes explicitly from a place of self-preservation. The likelihood of Homer's incompetence causing serious problems for Burns does not appear to weigh too heavily on Smithers' mind before he leaves for his vacation - although perhaps he compensates by repeatedly calling to check up on Burns during his leave of absence? We also have to take into account that Burns seems so genuinely happy and liberated during his short-lived period of self-sufficiency, suggesting that Smithers, whether knowingly or not, has kept him in a state of dependency. Burns has benefited immeasurably from Smithers' years of extraordinary servitude, but he has, in a way, also suffered.

What "Homer The Smithers" is really interested in exploring is how desperately isolated both Burns and Smithers are from the rest of the world, and the extent to which they are each complicit in that isolation, choosing to retreat comfortably into the safety net of the other when they could be getting so much more from their respective lives. Burns' problems are apparent - his inability to connect with his fellow man is what triggers this whole mess, when a drunken Lenny approaches him outside a drag racing event, wanting to do nothing more malicious than to shake the old man's hand. The viewer knows straight off the bat that Lenny's intentions are harmless, but the encounter is played with a comical faux tension (later echoed when Burns develops a fear of Homer), leaving us no ambiguity as to how terrifying it is for Burns to find himself this up close and personal to the common man, with his murderous eyes and his beer and pretzeled bread-scented breath. Elsewhere, Burns tries reaching out to the outside world, but with his inadequate telephone literacy gets through to Moe (in the seventh season there seemed to be a revival of interest in the long-abandoned running gag of Bart prank-calling Moe, given that we would shortly have another call-back in "Bart on The Road"), who misconstrues the situation and aggressively spurns Burns. It's here that all those earlier, quieter shots of Burns alone in his capacious office really pay off, in underscoring just how grandiose but intrinsically empty his life is. Burns is totally out of his depth in dealing with the world beyond his office because Smithers acts as such a good buffer between him and the rest of humanity, which makes it gratifying to see Burns coming out of his shell in having to learn to get by on his own. Whether he could actually learn to embrace his fellow man, as he does Homer, remains up in the air, but we do see a definite change in his demeanor when he deals pleasantly (if archaically) with a caller who has dialled the wrong number.

The cost to Smithers is a bit more subtextual. We'd witnessed previously in the "Who Shot Mr Burns?" saga that without Burns, he basically can't function; by comparison, his firing in this episode doesn't send him spiralling into a diet of depression, alcohol and comedy sketch shows, but he isn't able to find a niche for himself anywhere else. Smithers has invested so much of his personal identity into his role as Burns' assistant that he's automatically out of place in any other working environment. More fatally, he denies himself the freedom to be who he really is - who he really is being hinted in how he makes the most of his vacation time. On the DVD commentary it's observed that "Homer The Smithers" contains what might have been the most explicit reference to Smithers' sexuality in the series thus far - Smithers calling Burns from a gay nightclub, with Frankie Goes To Hollywood's "Relax" playing suggestively in the background. Whereas earlier showrunner Al Jean had taken the stance that Smithers was purely "Burnsexual" (I sometimes wonder if this was Jean's inelegant attempt at safeguarding against potential accusations that Smithers' sexual orientation was being played for a skin-crawl effect, or against the responsibilities of legitimate LGBT representation, period), Oakley and Weinstein make it clear that they had a different interpretation, feeling that there was this discrepancy between who Smithers was in the office and in his personal life. What's apparent is that Smithers doesn't want Burns to know about this discrepancy - when Burns states that he wants to see lots of photos from Smithers' vacation, Smithers insists that picture-taking is not allowed at his chosen resort. On the commentary, episode director Steven Moore notes that when "Homer The Smithers" first aired, on February 25th 1996, it was "a transition period", with homosexuality slowly becoming more accepted by the mainstream, but still a different time, and Smithers wanting to conceal evidence of his sexuality from his boss might not have seemed so unusual back then. We get only fleeting glimpses of Smithers' time away from Burns, but it clearly brings out a different side to him, and we suspect that if he were to pursue this to the full then he could easily have a proper relationship, with a partner with whom he could be on equal footing, and an actual social life. Instead, his dedication to Burns takes precedence above all else, to the point that his vacation is repeatedly interrupted by his compulsion to call back home. Smithers chooses to remain with Burns because he genuinely likes him, and while there is no accounting for taste, Burn's lack of reciprocation, and Smithers' need to conceal the extent of his feelings from Burns leave him personally stunted. Attaching himself to Burns essentially means dooming himself to a life in the closet.

As a side-note, "Homer The Smithers" contains one of my all-time favourite deleted scenes, where Smithers tries working at the Leftorium under Ned Flanders, only for both characters to rub Just Stamp The Ticket Man the wrong way with their mutually oversolicitous approach to customer service. From a purely economical perspective, I can understand why it was cut - we didn't need to see Smithers fail at four different jobs to get the message - but I still lament its excision. Among other things, it would have been the first time we'd seen Springfield's two mildest-mannered residents properly interact (I'm not counting their surprisingly brutal medieval duel in the opening to "Lisa's Wedding"), and while they only get one exchange, they really do have terrific chemistry. I could seriously take a whole spin-off with Ned and Waylon.

Instead, Smithers ends up back with Burns, as is inevitable, although getting there takes a few additional twists and turns, resulting in Homer accidentally knocking Burns from his office window, causing him to break a number of bones, and leaving him once again completely dependent on Smithers for meeting his every need. And, insist as he might that he's developed a taste for self-sufficiency, it doesn't take Burns long to re-embrace the life of being waited on hand and foot. Despite how happy both parties are with this final arrangement, it isn't exactly a tender reunion, a la Patty and Selma at the end of "Principal Charming". The giveaway is in the affected manner in which Burns' jaw gapes open as Smithers feeds him peanuts, unsettlingly reminiscent of Malcolm McDowell at the end of A Clockwork Orange - which, coupled with Smithers' disturbing mantra for coaxing Burns into eating ("Here comes the endangered condor into the power lines!") - is clearly geared toward having us see something more than a little grotesque about this whole set-up. As Burns and Smithers rediscover the reassurance of having the other close at hand, we will likely feel relief that their allotted place within the Simpsons universe has been upheld (as fundamentally flawed as their relationship might be, Burns and Smithers, as a duo, are a vital part of the Springfieldian dynamic). But we understand that it is also a mutual entrapment, even if it's an entrapment into which both characters are re-entering with their eyes wide open. "Homer The Smithers", then, is ultimately about two characters failing to reinvent their lives for the better, because stepping away from the comfort and familiarity of the personal niches in which they've existed for so long proves too hard. Such failure is hardly unique to Burns and Smithers - just a couple of episodes prior, the series had attempted to make a similar, albeit less successful point with Krusty in "Bart The Fink", which ends with the pseudocidal clown making a decision that is flagrantly bad for him but also the only one that the status quo will allow. Whereas "Bart The Fink" weakens its point by having Krusty be actively harangued into his decision by Bart and Lisa, at a time when those kids really should have minded their own goddamned business, Burns and Smithers are permitted to reach this conclusion by themselves, with Homer doing little more than the basic setting of events into motion. As noted, it is an arrangement that works for the both of them, and in the end perhaps their relationship (not unlike Homer and Marge's) is the kind that defies all judgement and can only really be understood by its active participants. We leave the crane, with maybe a scratch or two, once again devotedly plucking lodged bones from the throat of the wolf.

As order is restored with Burns and Smithers, so too do things revert to their default state with Homer, who gets the final word of the episode. As thanks for Homer's role in helping him to reconcile with Burns, Smithers has sent the Simpsons a lavish fruit basket. Lisa asks if Burns survived the fall, a call-back to Homer's earlier freak-out that he might have killed his boss, but Homer's nonchalant response - "What am I, a doctor?" - indicates that he has satisfied whatever personal investment he might once have had in this scenario. Instead, he feasts impassively on grapes, waiting for the next opportunity for Burns' life - or that of any Springfieldian - to circulate back to him.