End of world narratives were to be David Anderson's speciality during his time creating experimental animations for Channel 4. Starting with 1986's Dreamless Sleep, his contribution to David Hopkins' Sweet Disaster series, he showed a flair for conveying the disquietude of a hauntingly fragile reality on the brink of unravelling. In the dwindling stages of the decade he teamed up with American author Russell Hoban, and a brace of five minute pieces was formed under the banner of Deadtime Stories For Big Folk. The first of these was Deadsy from 1989, which went on to inspire the "Mark" entry of the "Drinking & Driving Wrecks Lives" series of PIFs. The second was Door from 1990, a grisly tale of ill-advised choices that is, for me, as perfect an animated short as they come. The
busy, overstuffed and wildly abstract nature of the visuals (created through a
combination of stop motion animation and pixelation) keeps us swamped in a
nightmarish mix of stimuli, yet it never detracts from the elegant and poetic simplicity of the narrative. The agitated atmosphere gets increasingly sinister as it goes, culminating in the kind of ghoulish punchline that could only work in animation, and which has really stuck with me over the years.
Though overtly apocalyptic, Door does not explicitly link its narrativeto the topic of nuclear war, giving it a more mystically parabolic flavour next to its predecessors. Dreamless Sleep had centred on a couple who'd awakened shortly
before the detonating of a nuclear weapon, sensing that something in their environment is profoundly amiss but being unable to pinpoint the source
until the blinding flash of oblivion was upon them; like When The Wind Blows from the same year, it made a harrowing statement by
bringing the all-encompassing matter of nuclear war to the personal level, from the
perspective of innocents who were powerless to change their fate. Deadsy took a more comprehensively allegorical approach, relating a humorously macabre monologue about a gender-bending personification of death and
nuclear proliferation, and their quest to win over the entire world (their grim spectre also haunts the action in Door, where they put in a cameo appearance). In Door
the threat of nuclear annihilation exists on an entirely subtextual level.
The central characters, an unnamed man and woman, discover a key marked
with a tag, "This Is The Wun". After much deliberation on its
meaning, the woman suggests that "This Is The Wun" indicates that this is
the key to the one door that should never be opened, lest it unleashes something with the power to warp their reality beyond all recognition. Sadly, their inability to agree on how to manage this most gargantuan of responsibilities reaps devastating consequences. You don't have to reach in far to locate the nuclear allegory, although it can be interpreted quite a bit more broadly than that, evoking as it does the stories of Pandora’s box and the Garden of Eden (for a welcome change, it is here the male figure who makes the fatal move and dooms everyone), suggesting that there may be something innate in the human psyche that compels it toward its own destruction. Compared to Deadsy, where vanity and the lust for domination were the driving forces for cataclysm, the snake in this particular Eden (which isn’t exactly a paradise to begin with, mind) is simple curiosity. The risk is in going so far, in our quest to keep pushing ourselves beyond our limits, that we end up crossing a line from which there can be no going back. Door explores the possibility of how a single and all-too human error might seal not only our own undoing, but cast the whole world into ruin along with us - very pertinent in an age where destroying the world had apparently become as straightforward as pressing a button.
As with Deadsy, Hoban himself takes up narration duties in Door, voicing a couple of characters who remain offscreen until the closing moments, one of whom is relating the cautionary tale of the “wun” key you had better not mess with to the other. Our first hint that these are specifically the voices of a post-apocalyptic landscape comes with their speaking in the slurred, degraded dialect that previously appeared in Hoban’s 1980 novel Riddley Walker (Hoban reasoned that people would hardly be speaking in BBC English following the collapse of civilisation and another dark age), and which I will state upfront that I will not attempt to accurately transcribe here. Connoisseur Video, the people behind the 1992 VHS release David Anderson: Works On Film, were nice enough to include a full transcript of the Deadsy monologue on the inner sleeve, in Hoban’s degraded survivor tongue, but they didn’t bestow that same honor on Door. The dialogue remains close enough to contemporary English that it is still intelligible, so I will be treating it as though it were more or less the same, but for the two key phrases: “This is the wun”, in relation to that very special key, and “the end of snivvelyzashuns we knowit”, the outcome that the characters most fear. We hear the story of the man and the woman (represented by two-dimensional cut out figures), who inhabit a world ("a great big some kind of place") consisting of innumerable doors and have many adventures navigating the surprises they conceal. Even before they discover the key that has the power to dramatically alter their destiny, there is something terrifying and intensely alien about this world, depicted as a sphere covered in a surreal hodgepodge of doors, none of which seem to offer any clear path or exit, only a deepening of chaotic entrapment. It resembles a puzzle box, of the sort that is liable to confound anybody curious or masochistic enough to try engaging with it. At one point a door swings open to reveal a figure positioned within a corridor who is seemingly incapable of doing anything but banging their head interminably against a brick wall, a sign that they've encountered a few dead ends too many. Some of the doors conceal pleasant surprises, which the man and the woman enjoy, while others are direct portals into nightmares ("You opened them, you would just keep falling for a long time").
On the making of documentary that appears on the Connoisseur Video release, Anderson shares that he came to the project wanting to explore human relationships and what causes us to self-destruct at an interpersonal level, with Hoban being the one who chose to take that interest in destruction to more cosmic heights. Door actually feels like a perfect amalgamation of their respective fascinations, with the script placing a great deal of emphasis on the interplay between the man and the woman (it's never stated, but we presume that they are a married couple) and their constant bickering, as interminable as anything the maze of doors has to offer. The clue that they are a husband and wife arises from the distinctly humorous nature of their arguing, indicating that they have spent just little too long in one another's company ("Sometimes they would say, why did we ever come here anyhow? Then one of them would say it wasn't my idea, and the other one would say, well it wasn't mine neither, maybe we could go some other place. Only they didn't know any other place."). Their adventures within the world of doors becomes a metaphor for navigating through life within a partnership, with all the highs, lows, surprises and tedium it may bring. As we join them, it isn't exactly trouble in paradise; their relationship doesn't yet feel that it's corrupted, but it has reached a point of stagnation that is wearying, but ultimately survivable. It is the discovery of the wun key that drives an irreparable distance between them, with the woman's cautiousness conflicting with the man's impatience. She suggests that they at least sleep on it before making any decisions, but he is unwilling to do even that and sneaks away with the key, intending to seek out the wun door and uncover the answer by himself. This amounts to an act of infidelity (it isn't a stretch to see the act of inserting a key into a keyhole as a penetrative one), and effectively severs their partnership; his search for the door takes him far away from the woman and they are not reunited. On an allegorical level, their relationship is a reminder that we are all in this wun world together and need to figure out how to make it work; the division over the key indicates the failure of conflicting parties to handle a mutual responsibility that should perhaps never have fallen into the hands of mere mortals to begin with, one that stands between life as we know it and total devastation. Eventually, the man finds a strange rotating door and attempts to get close enough to locate the keyhole - in doing so, the narrator tells us, he ended up getting sucked in by its spinning motion and was dragged into the ground to his demise. A fortunate turn of events, for the woman was right about this being the wun key you had better not mess with, and if the man had gotten any further it would have meant nothing less than "the end of snivvelyzashuns we knowit!"
At this point the narrator's companion speaks up, challenging him on whether he's certain that the man didn't get as far as inserting the key into the keyhole. The narrator responds that he doesn't think that he did. His companion then makes the short's most haunting observation - if the man did commit the reckless deed and bring about the end of snivvelyzashuns, they would not be in a position to even know the difference. The final sequence pulls back to show the sphere of doors, now busted and disintegrating, as the narrator and his companion are revealed to be a couple of disembodied, heavily decayed heads drifting through the debris of the ruined world. The narrator reiterates that he doesn't think the man opened the door. "Wow, what a lucky us," says his companion, and the film fades to black.
On the VHS documentary, Anderson clarifies that he saw the epilogue as happening several centuries after the events involving the mysterious key, with the talking skulls representing the subsequent generations who've lived with the consequences ever since. Within context, they can hardly be described as survivors, given their advanced state of decay; rather, they are fragments of the damaged landscape that have been floating in infinity for so long that they've lost sight of what that landscape once was. The bitter irony is that the "snivvelyzashuns" in question already ended long ago, and what they now know is barely civilisation at all. Their continued existence speaks not to the resilience of humankind (if these skulls could even be defined as human), but to the elongation of its decline, their inability to distinguish between the so-called snivvelyzashuns of then and now indicating yet another layer of that protracted decay. The legend of the man and the woman with the wun key might be exactly that - a mere legend, now that the world is far-removed enough from whatever events first set it on its course of irreversible deterioration, but its purpose has been subverted, not to preserve the truth but to reassure listeners that the world was actually saved. It becomes a denial of a reality that should perhaps be all too stark, but which is ultimately too bleak to accept. Door closes, then, by presenting us with a paradox, in the contrast between the man's fatal need to know what lurked behind that wun door and the skulls' desperate need to not know the truth of their hopeless situation. Curiosity might be the factor that propels us to our ruination, but having opened those doors that would have been better off remaining closed, to what extent would we sooner remain ignorant of the consequences? Which proclivity is stronger - our need to know, to understand and keep pushing ourselves into unmapped worlds, or the ability to close our eyes when we're on the cusp of uncovering something truly unpalatable? It is also possible to project a degree of conscious irony onto the second skull's closing statement, as though he wishes that the current state of snivvelyzashuns would be brought to an end.
I honestly don't remember when I first saw Door. I first knowinglycame across it in 2012, back when I had started my mission to locate each of the Sweet Disaster series,
which led me to check out some of Anderson’s other, less elusive
projects, and I found that it had this instant and uncanny sense of
familiarity, like the thing had already been haunting me for the better part of my
existence. It is possible that I had seen it, or at least an excerpt from
it, somewhere before and not quite taken it in (I don’t know if you-know-who would have covered it in his Cartoon Club), but I'd like to
think that its freaky ambience just struck a chord with me because it
felt so reminiscent of some half-remembered nightmare I'd once had (there
is a third option, which is that I’d seen the McEwans lager ad that
Anderson later animated using many of the same sets as Door). I
do recall becoming utterly obsessed with it then and there in 2012.
Not because I was fearing any imminent apocalypse, but because I was, at
that point in my life, having a hard time coping with uncertainty in a more generalised sense (in a way that leaves you wide open to intrusive thinking), and I found
the ending chilling but also strangely cathartic. I didn’t know if I
saw something defiantly reassuring in the concept of being damned and unable to tell the difference, or if that inability represented an
entrapment in itself, if you couldn't see beyond it and had no lingering appreciation for what was lost - I just liked that the characters acknowledged that they would have no way of knowing either way. It seemed exonerating, a reminder of how we're all just crumbs of debris floating around in space with only a narrow inkling of the bigger picture (both on a cosmic and on a personal level), and in those circumstances there's not a whole lot we can do other than to learn to trust whatever our own judgement is telling us. What a lucky us indeed.
I can only imagine what it would be like to stumble blindly upon Vincent Ward's 1988 film The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey, without knowing the big narrative trick that occurs a third of the way through. I'm not convinced that would be an easy endeavor - it's not as though it was treated as a secret from a marketing standpoint, with the trailers, promotional posters and taglines making it abundantly obvious where this particular medieval odyssey was headed. If you happened to catch the film while channel-surfing then you might have had more success...but only if you tuned in after the opening titles, which in television broadcasts reportedly came with onscreen warning not to adjust your set or be startled by the precursory sequences in black and white. Colour, viewers were assured, was eventually coming...and so was modernity. The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey is a time travel story, a point that was always used to draw in audiences, not to catch them off guard after first enticing them with the medieval setting promised in the subtitle (which for some releases even was swapped out for "A Time-Travel Adventure", making it as explicit as could be). From a commercial perspective, this makes perfect sense - the runaway success of Back To The Future just three years prior indicated that there was a great market for time-hopping adventures, while the sombre period drama that opens Ward's picture would likely have struggled to suffice as a hook in itself. But from a narrative view, it seems a shame. Ward's film is so artfully structured, and feels consciously designed to have blown its audience's minds with its sudden foray into the Twilight Zone (the episode "A Hundred Yards Over The Rim" was a possible influence on Ward). Fortunately, The Navigator is one of those films that really cannot be spoiled simply by divulging a few key plot details in advance. The mere knowledge that it takes a sharp turn from murky medieval drama into science-fiction romp does not prepare you for what an absolute thrill ride it is on an aesthetic and atmospheric level. The best way to describe it is that it subjects the viewer to the ambience of a dream within a dream, immersing us first in one terrifying nightmare scenario (cold, claustrophobic and marked by a sense of impending dread) before pushing us out into quite another (expansive, head-spinning and filled with strange and immediate dangers).
Our story opens in England, in the year 1348. Europe has been ravaged by the Black Death, but for now this is still all a distant rumble to our protagonists, the denizens of an isolated mining community in Cumbria. They've heard word of a symptom that signals imminent death, the development of a pus-filled boil in the armpit. They're also disturbed that one of their party, the wanderlusting Connor (Bruce Lyons) has journeyed out of the village and been absent for longer than expected. Meanwhile, Connor's younger brother Griffin (Hamish McFarlane), a child with second sight, is experiencing strange visions involving an underground pit and a church spire. Eventually Connor returns, although he brings little good news, having witnessed first-hand how the plague has devastated communities all over the land, and knowing that its advancement upon their village is all but inevitable. There is preliminary talk about embarking on pilgrimage to a big church in a distant city, with the aspiration of gaining divine protection with an offering, but when refugees from an eastern community pass by with signs of infection, the villagers fear that it is already too late, and that they will have started to succumb by sunrise. Their last remaining hope lies with Griffin, who believes that his visions indicate a geographical shortcut; there is a tunnel in the earth that will lead them to a great church in the furthermost regions of the world, and if they are able to erect a Cumbrian cross upon its spire before the night is through, they might convince God to spare them. Griffin sets out with Connor and four other men - the eternally po-faced Searle (Marshall Napier), the genial Martin (Paul Livingston), the thieving Arno (Chris Haywood) and the timid, guileless Ulf (Noel Appleby), the last of whom has brought along offering of his own, a wooden craving of the Virgin Mary that he intends to place in the church as a tribute to his deceased mother. Our six plucky pilgrims burrow into the earth, and eventually emerge on the other side, to be greeted by a dazzling city of light. Unbeknownst to them, they are now in Auckland[1], New Zealand, and the year is 1988. The past may be in black and white, but the future (the present) exists in glorious (albeit nocturnal) colour.
The most obvious comparison here would be The Wizard of Oz (1939), which used a similar visual trick in presenting the Kansas-based bookends in sepia and the adventures in Oz in Technicolor. The Kansas sequences are coded as the "real world" because they are more grounded (at least until the tornado strikes), but have a colourless drudgery that suggests a world not fully awake and in tune with its potential. The result is a kind of dual unreality - we might say that Kansas itself plays like a dream, but a flatter, hazier dream that can only come into being while the vibrant, larger than life Oz is lying dormant. In Ward's film, the black and white opening imposes a similar disconnect - the middle ages are a distant, unfamiliar world submerged in a bleakness so unspeakable as to seem incomprehensible to modern viewers. There is, nevertheless, a great humanity that emerges from this desolation. The characters - Griffin, Connor, Ulf, Arno and their company - have distinct personalities and a clear affinity. They are affable and entirely relatable. We might not feel so at ease being immersed in this world, but we have little difficulty in empathising with its inhabitants. We become so aligned with these characters that when we finally arrive in 20th-century Auckland, we experience it through their eyes, as a sprawling, dazzling onslaught of light and colour. As with The Wizard of Oz we end up with a dual unreality, although in this case it is the world that is ostensibly familiar and mundane that becomes the larger than life fantasy, every bit as grand and impressive as the fairy tale world of Oz. The pilgrims are overwhelmed by its beauty, declaring it to be God's own city, but are also filled with questions about the practical ramifications of such a place -wondering, for example, how much tallow would be required to keep so many lights ablaze. The city is beyond their comprehension, and yet these pilgrims are not fools, approaching the foreign metropolis with a keenness and a desire to assess and make sense of what they see.
It isn't long before this gleaming light show is exposed as a region of unforeseen peril. Ulf, lured by the splendor of the vehicle headlights, wanders into a highway and narrowly avoids being knocked down by incoming traffic. He is left so shaken by the experience that he is subsequently unable to cross with the others, forcing them to leave him behind as they venture into the city. It is in Ulf's traumatic encounter that we find the most palpable echoes of the real-life experience that reportedly inspired Ward to make the film, when he attempted to cross a German autobahn and got stuck in the middle. He came to the realisation that there was plenty of terror lurking in the banalities of modern living, and envisioned an adventure in which these were the dragons to be overcome by explorers from another time. Auckland entails no shortage of nightmarish run-ins, but they are nightmarish in ways that recall the morbid mundaneness of the public information film, as experienced through the eyes of the ingenuous (and interwoven with a few surreal touches lifted directly from cartoons, such as when Connor takes a mouth-contorting ride on the city's train system). The pilgrims discover the potentially deadly hazards that come with crossing roads, trespassing on construction sites and lingering around railway lines, evoking the memory of what it was like to have fears of these things instilled in you as a child, and the sensation that these are not modern miracles to be marvelled at, but omnipresent hazards that give catastrophe endless openings from which to strike. It is not surprising that Ulf, a more innocent and childlike figure than the actual child of the group, forever clutching his wooden Virgin as both a comforting toy and a mother substitute, decides that this world is more than he can bear at the very first hurdle.
20th-century Auckland feels notably less human than 14th-century Cumbria, with technology having displaced nature, dominating a landscape in which people seem largely absent or indistinct. The vehicles race by like stampeding beasts, their occupants seemingly indifferent to the pilgrims. When Connor, who insists on separating himself from the rest of the group and locating the church on his own, wanders across a patch of rubble, he finds a crane descending on him that looks uncannily like a monstrous spider. A nuclear submarine surfacing in the harbour is perceived as an attacking leviathan (the reality, as we'll see below, is considerably more ominous). The city is not entirely without its human side, however. The pilgrims find all-important allies in the employees of a modern foundry, led by the benevolent Smithy, played by Desmond Kelly (the only Aucklander outside the foundry to have any degree of significant dialogue is
the man from whom the pilgrims "borrow" a horse to use as a winch). Neither party ever quite figures out that their new friends are from another time, with Smithy and his crew being at first bemused by the appearance of the pilgrims, but arriving at the conclusion that they are out-of-towners who have "spent too much time in the bush". In truth, they have little difficulty connecting with these eccentric travellers because they are their modern counterparts, awaiting destruction of a different kind in the form of the "wreckers" set to call on the foundry in the morning to put them out of business. We might connect these unseen "wreckers" to the menacing construction devices encountered by Connor, indicating that these men are as out of their depth as the pilgrims in a world of impersonal and relentless urbanisation. The most pronounced difference between the two bands is the modern crew's lack of religious sentiment. Smithy explains that a local church had previously commissioned a cross of their own, but their preparations had come to naught because the church was unable to produce the necessary funds. Martin is shocked by the implications - "The church is poor?" - and is just as perplexed by the crew's response that it's "like any other business...when they don't want what you're selling." Smithy is given pause when it turns out that the cross the Cumbrians want casting perfectly fits the mould they had prepared earlier, but decides that they must have come on behalf of that same church. Should we chalk this up to fate? Strange coincidence? Or might there be a more troubling explanation for why the past and the present seem so perfectly in sync?
It is only when Griffin, having become lost and separated from the others, wanders into a television shop and sees the various horrors on display on its great wall of screens, that Ward's intention in mixing the two time periods becomes starkly apparent. The first image we see is footage from a nature documentary, in which a hawk is pursuing a rabbit across desert terrain - a symbol of impending destruction that foreshadows the grim broadcast to follow on the subject of nuclear proliferation. Smithy and his companions might presently await the destruction of their personal territory with the coming of the wreckers, but there is a far greater threat hanging over them, articulated in the studio voice that declares: "This is the real world, 1988. You can isolate one little pocket of the world and say, nuclear-free. Oh, you can try. But then, there is no refuge. No pocket, no escape from the real world." The Navigator is not so much a film about the Black Death as it is about the apocalypse rearing its head within the present. It's in this statement that the significance of having the medieval travellers emerge in New Zealand (the director's nationality notwithstanding), as opposed to, say, modern-day Carlisle, becomes most pronounced. The plight of the small Cumbrian village is an allegory for the plight of New Zealand in choosing to remain nuclear-free in a world dominated by overwhelming nuclear tension. This 20th-century apocalypse isn't restricted to the terrors of the A-bomb, with plagues and vulnerability to disease remaining as much a reality as they did in the 14th century. The spectre of Death materialises in the form of the Grim Reaper, hurling bowling balls at defenceless humans substituting for pins, immersing us once again in the macabre aura of the public information film. The footage in question is from an Australian AIDS-awareness film, the bowling scenario being a grisly metaphor for how AIDS is a danger facing humanity as a collective, not the select groups once assumed. The film's most horrific image, in which a mother and baby, having survived the first bowl, are physically torn apart when the Reaper makes that spare, is fully discernible over Griffin's shoulder. Everyone - men, women and children of all stripes - are the terrified playthings of a force as unspeakable as it is unsparing.
Martin's prior assessment that, "if the evil was on our side, then surely God's goodness is on this one", turns out, perhaps not to our surprise, to be bogus. We are left wondering if the time barrier breach had been possible because there is so precious little to separate these two worlds. The Navigator takes an eternalist view, in which the apocalypse that loomed in the past is suggested to be effectively no different to the apocalypse that looms now. The precise nature of the threat might have shifted, but the battle against oblivion remains unchanged, as one of fundamentally fragile humans up against destructive forces inconceivably greater than themselves. This is a struggle that Searle has, on a personal level, understood all too well even before the coming of the plague, as he recounts how he has watched each of his family die off through various instances of misfortune. Significantly, Griffin's encounter with the television shop comes after a disturbing additional vision indicating that the endeavor to erect the cross upon the church spire will come at a cost, with one of the pilgrims falling to their death (he fears it will be Connor, on the basis that the doomed individual is wearing a gauntlet that only his brother possesses). The closing component of his vision shows a cloaked figure standing before a coffin that has been set adrift on a body of water, an image that eerily parallels the broadcast vision of the Reaper bowling for victims.
The question Ward's film poses is what, then, are the little people
expected to do when living in the face of such all-encompassing horror?
Smithy and co make it clear that the modern world has largely moved
on from the kinds of action that the pilgrims would consider wholly practical
solutions. Would any prospective efforts on our part to change our fate
be as quixotic, in practice, as the pilgrims' attempts to keep sickness out
of their village by attaching a cross to a spire on the other side of
the world? Or does it take an act this quixotic, that steadfast willingness to
face what feel like insurmountable odds, to inspire the action that might very well
alter the course of history? At the climax of the film, once the
pilgrims have reached St Patrick's Cathedral, the great church of
Griffin's dreams, and begun the process of attempting to scale it to and
to fix their spike to the top, we see their efforts bring out a sense
of unity, in a way that totally transcends the barriers of time. Smithy and his
crew show up to lend a hand, and the broader human element of the city is finally teased
out of hiding, as other Aucklanders gather on the ground below to watch. They have no context
for what is happening, yet are compelled to cheer the pilgrims on regardless,
recognising their efforts as an act of valiant defiance. Intercut with the modern day spectators are black and white shots
of the villagers left behind in the 14th-century village, awaiting the sounds of church bells to
indicate the success of their adventurers. The people of both eras are now intermingled,
as if their respective fates are tied up in the outcome of the pilgrims'
endeavor. The coming of the brilliant sunrise signals not just their looming deadline, but the passage of time turning as it has always done, indifferent to the march of human history within its midst.
(Spoilers now follow)
The pilgrims succeed in attaching the cross to the spire before sunrise, but it turns out to be Griffin himself who takes that fateful plunge, bringing an abrupt halt to Auckland's manifestation. The fall apparently takes him back down to reality, for we find ourselves in the pits below medieval Cumbria once again, the world restored to black and white, as Griffin recounts his vision to his reunited companions. Ulf is disappointed that he missed out on the adventure, but Griffin obligingly works in an addendum, assuring Ulf that he conquered the road by digging underneath it, and was able to show the wooden Virgin the great city on the other side. He does, however, stop short of honoring Ulf's request that the Virgin make it all the way to the cathedral, as if sensing, forebodingly, some limitations in how drastically one might rewrite fate. The trip to Auckland is contextualised as "just a dream", in a manner not dissimilar to Dorothy's trip to Oz, with a final comic punchline in which the city once hailed as God's own is dismissed by Searle as "a vision of Hell." The group then hears the voices of their fellow villagers calling out to them, proclaiming that the new day has come, and nobody among them is displaying any sign of illness. But as the adventurers make their triumphant return, Griffin makes a disturbing discovery - he has developed a pus-filled boil under his arm. He confronts Connor, and finds a similar boil concealed on his throat. Connor was carrying the infection all along, having picked it up on his travels and returned with it to the village. Connor states that he was not aware he'd been infected until he was in the pit, at which point he made the effort to keep himself separate from the others. Frightened and with no other recourse, he came to believe that Griffin's vision would be his salvation. He assures Griffin that the story he shared has indeed cured with, the boil he bears being now nothing more than a scar. The other pilgrims ask if everything has been in vain, and if they will all die after all, but Griffin insists that they will not, for only one person perished in his vision. He announces that he will not return to the village, and tasks Connor with retelling his story to the villagers, for this now is the only weapon they have in their fight against oblivion: "You'll bring them round, make them believe my story! They must!" The film ends with Griffin, having been laid to rest in a wooden coffin, being set out to drift upon the waters as his companions bid him a mournful farewell. The closing shot shows the silhouette of the cloaked Connor within the foreground, observing the departure of his deceased brother in an arrangement identical to that of Griffin's prophecy.
It is a hauntingly ambiguous ending, filled with imagery that could potentially point us to either conclusion. All of the adult travellers are standing together in a final show of unity, but do they look like a collective strength ready to take on the odds, no matter how seemingly insurmountable, or more like bowling pins waiting to be struck down by forces perpetually beyond their control? Also present for Griffin's departure is Connor's wife Linnet (Sarah Peirse), who is holding a crying baby - the seed of a possible future for the village, or a baleful echo of the mother and baby doomed to be ripped apart by the Reaper's thrust? Is out final impression of Connor that he is a protective figure who will make good on his brother's wishes, or does his shrouded form still recall the Grim Reaper, being the one who has brought the infection to his community and potentially sealed everyone's fates? Has Connor really been cured by his brother's story, and will the act of believing it also be enough to save the villagers? Is this story nothing more than a diversion, to keep its recipients from having to look their harsh reality square in the eye, or is it a stirring reminder of how they need to keep believing in themselves in order to implement change? Or are there some changes that are simply beyond their power to implement? The fate of our heroes remains uncertain, and all in a way that functions as a call to arms to Ward's viewership within the present. I mentioned at the start that the entire picture plays like a dream within a dream, although whosedream it might be would be anyone's guess. It feels, appropriately, as if the modern world has fallen asleep and had a vision of its own possible future, filtered through the ordeals of a past it thought long behind it. Does it foretell of our salvation, or of our inevitable destruction? That part of the dream is still murky.
[1] The city is never explicitly identified as Auckland, but while Ulf is digging there is a sign indicating that we are in the vicinity of Onehunga.
"The Crepes of Wrath" was the 13th Simpsons episode to enter production (as indicated by its code name 7G13), meaning that at one time it was presumably pegged as the prospective finale for Season 1. The teething troubles that plagued "Some Enchanted Evening" dictated otherwise (for some reason it also slipped ahead of "Krusty Gets Busted" in the airing order), but it's not hard to fathom how it might have served as an appropriate end point to the show's first chapter. The closing scene is one of family unity, with all five Simpsons gathered together in the same room and on more or less the same page; they're happy to see one another after an episode spent largely divided. The season bows out with a final, heartening affirmation that the ties that bind our titular clan are essentially unshakeable.
There's an argument to be had that "The Crepes of Wrath" was also The Simpsons' biggest and most adventurous episode to date. Up until now, the series had rarely allowed its characters to venture outside of Springfield, the only notable exception being "The Call of The Simpsons", in which the family spends a few days lost in the wilderness after a camping trip goes awry. "The Crepes of Wrath" represented a much deeper broadening of the show's canvas, by looking further afield and opening the door to exploring the characters' relationship with the wider world. Here, the wider world in question happens to be rural France, where Bart is exiled after Homer and Principal Skinner have each had their respective fill of his mischief. Homer trips and injures his back when Bart fails to pick up his Krusty doll, while Skinner's mother Agnes (making her debut appearance and seeming deceptively sweet-tempered) becomes a casualty of Bart's latest prank of detonating a cherry bomb in the toilets at Springfield Elementary. Skinner proposes that they take advantage of the school's foreign exchange program to send Bart to a vineyard in France for three months, purely so they can enjoy a period of respite ("Normally, a student is selected on the basis of academic excellence or intelligence, but in Bart's case I'm prepared to make a big exception!"). Bart is enthused by the idea, only to discover on arrival that the whole thing is basically a dupe; the "fabulous château" he was promised has clearly seen better days, and its unscrupulous owners have signed up to the foreign exchange program as a source of child labour.
"The Crepes of Wrath" is sometimes credited with being the first in a long and particularly notorious line of Simpsons episodes- the Simpsons travelogue, in which the family jets overseas and dedicates 18-odd minutes to providing a rundown on the people, landmarks and culture of their selected destination through the eyes of crass American tourists, in a world where every crass American tourist's wildest, most prejudicial assumption is accurately realised. Let's just say that such episodes tend to be divisive at best. I would argue that "Crepes" is, at most, a distant cousin, and that the archetypal Simpsons travel episode didn't come into being until fairly late in the game - "Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo", which landed about midway through Mike Scully's reign, feels like the one that properly cemented the formula (with its bitty, meandering narrative and first use of the deliberately vexing catchphrase "The Simpsons are going to__!") and made them a fixture of the series going forward. Prior to that, it's curious just how little interest the series had in exploring how the Simpsons would cope with the world beyond America. Episodes where the family travelled to other countries were rare, and rarer still were the episodes where travelling to another country represented the plot in itself, as opposed to a dash of frivolity on the side, eg: Homer going to India on a deliberately inconsequential tangent in "Homer and Apu", Lisa going to Britain for a small chunk of "Lisa's Wedding". Notably, facing foreign cultures was not something the family typically did as a unit; it was not so much a case of the Simpsons vs the world as individual members temporarily splitting from the clan to pursue personal business. By my count, the "classic" era offered only two instances of the entire family taking an international trip together...and since one of those was in a Halloween episode (the family's vacation in Morocco in "Treehouse of Horror II"), there's effectively only one. "Bart vs Australia" feels a lot closer in spirit to the archetypal "travel episode" than "The Crepes of Wrath"; its treatment of the Australians is significantly meaner-spirited than the depiction of the French in "Crepes" (for all the horrors Bart has to face at the Château Maison, there is no equivalent, on the metre of viciously bad taste, to his remark about hearing a dingo eating a baby - to quote Tropic Thunder, you about to cross some fucking lines). But what "Crepes" does nail straight off the bat, and which set the tone for every travel episode to come, is this basic idea that foreigners are to be regarded with suspicion. On that score, it offers two cautionary examples for the price of one. Bart's nightmarish reception in France's wine country is interwoven with a parallel narrative in which the remaining Simpsons accommodate an Albanian exchange student (Homer: "You mean all white with pink eyes?") by the name of Adil Hoxha, who seems innocuous but is actually a Soviet spy.
Occasionally with Season 1 you can spot telltale signs of their being penned while the 1980s was on its deathbed, little snippets of the spirit of the decade right as that spirit was gasping for relevancy. The Happy Little Elves, a pastiche of your typically cute and toyetic 1980s cartoon, were one such example. The early concept of Mr Burns being modelled on Ronald Reagan was another. On account of the Adil subplot, "The Crepes of Wrath" might be the most 1989-into-1990 of all Simpsons episodes, a tongue-in-cheek snapshot of Cold War paranoia from the very last days in which Cold War paranoia had genuine currency. By the time it made it to air, on April 15th 1990, the Iron Curtain had fallen and the non-threatening nineties were in the process of beginning (Albania itself would abandon communism before the year was through). With that in mind, it's not surprising that Adil never made any significant reappearances (though he was seen in the "Do The Bartman" video, dancing by the remains of the Berlin Wall, which seems a nice enough postlude for his character). Bart's story is a lot more evergreen, offering a darker take on the familiar tourist experience wherein the reality of travel does not align with what was shown in the holiday brochure. But "Crepes" ultimately succeeds because it is at its heart about the family and how they are fundamentally stronger as a unit, even when there's an Atlantic ocean between them. It offers yet another variation on a theme that was becoming increasingly familiar in the back end of Season 1 - an exploration of how that unit is at risk of disintegrating whenever one of its members is pushed or drawn out of the equation. We saw it with Marge in "Life on The Fast Lane" and Homer in "Homer's Night Out", and now it's Bart's turn to be the wayward Simpson. The threat to the family here is somewhat lower-key, but no less troubling, and lurks in Homer's outspoken preference for Adil over Bart. Homer's view is that he's effectively swapped out his son for a superior model, one who's polite, helps with the housework and above all takes a keen interest in what he does at the nuclear power plant. His belief that equilibrium has finally been attained through Bart's exclusion is something he's not shy about expressing in the presence of Marge and Lisa, and it disturbs them so. The arrangement is obviously askew, but it goes deeper than they could possibly imagine.
The allusions to Berri's cinema were a gratifying confirmation that The Simpsons did not underestimate its audience. But they also functioned as sly rebuttals to those critics of the show who felt that the popularity of the series represented a lowering of standards, by playfully demonstrating that its production crew were learned and had an appreciation for more highbrow fare. This much is also flaunted in an early sequence - one of the showiest and most visually inspired of Season 1, next to Marge's dream sequence in "Life on The Fast Lane" - when Ugolin goes to collect Bart at the Parisian airport, and their journey away from the city and deep into provincial France is represented as a ride through the scenes of various paintings by (mostly) French artists. Let's see, we have Claude Monet's water lilies, Henri Rousseau's dream and Édouard Manet's luncheon. Vincent van Gogh's wheatfield gets in, presumably on the basis that it was painted in France, even if van Gogh himself was Dutch.
For me, the most harrowing aspect of Bart's predicament is the revelation that it's gone on for two whole months, which frankly feels like an eternity in Simpsons time. Did nobody seriously catch wind of what was happening over those 60-odd days? (Likewise, did no one in the Simpson household have any inkling of what Adil was doing?) Watching the episode recently, I had a bleak thought that had honestly never occurred to me before - does Skinner know what kind of place the Château Maison is when he sends Bart there? It seems a bit of a stretch that he would do it on purpose, no matter how incensed he was about the mishap with his mother (Skinner dispenses discipline because he's a stickler for order, not because he's in any way vindictive), but there's nothing in the episode that explicitly rules it out (and "Crepes" does showcase a particularly dickish side to Skinner, as evidenced in his speech "welcoming" Adil to the school). In the end, maybe it isn't important - Skinner is complicit in Bart's ordeal simply through not caring enough to look into where he's actually sending his students. You could lay the same charge against Homer and Marge, who also don't seem to demand too much oversight of their son's experience. Marge cares enough to write Bart a letter (in which she sells him a half-truth about Homer going to sleep talking about how much he loves him), but that's all the communication from home he apparently gets. Granted, contact means were more limited in the days before email and social media, and we don't know for certain that the maison has a telephone, but you'd think they might have made a bit more effort. To a point, there's a sense that this lack of oversight stems from Homer's feelings of having moved on, now that he has Adil, and being happy to leave Bart to his lot. This ties in with another favourite theme of the series, present pretty much from the start - that of adult indifference to childhood anxiety, and the various strategies those shrugged off children must fall on to survive, be it Lisa's need for artistic expression or Bart's itch for rebellion.
PS: Here's another nice postlude - in the aforementioned scene in the "Do The Bartman" video, the American spy is seen dancing alongside Adil, and I'd take that to mean that they're openly the best of friends now.
PPS: For some reason the scene with Adil and his American friend does not appear in the version of "Do The Bartman" that's included in the Season 2 DVD box set. I was so bummed when I found out. Why would you deny Adil his coda?
My favourite gag in "Homer's Odyssey" (7G03) is the one that wouldn't even have qualified as a joke on its initial airing. This episode, only the third in the series' run, involves Homer losing his job at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant and finding a new calling in spearheading a safety campaign against his erstwhile employers. It climaxes with Homer being invited to the office of the plant's bigwig, one C. Montgomery Burns, who's come up with an underhanded means of silencing Homer. "Ah, Homer Simpson," a glad-handing Burns declares, on coming face-to-face with his adversary. "At last we meet!" Truly the beginning of a beautiful friendship. What's so incredibly gratifying about this moment is the realisation that it would have meant nothing to those viewers who'd first tuned in to catch it on January 21st 1990. And yet for anybody who's gone back and watched it since, the line can't help but stick out like a sore thumb, seeing as it was the only occasion on which Burns could make that particular declaration and it be absolutely true. Ignore, for just a moment, any subsequent flashback episodes, like "I Married Marge" of Season 3 and "And Maggie Makes Three" of Season 6, which posited that Homer and Burns had met at earlier junctions in their lives. It wasn't necessarily the first time that Homer and Burns had crossed paths within the series' internal chronology, but it was the first time, so far as the viewer was concerned, that they were meeting. It's an ostensibly nondescript line, the significance of which could only be acquired retroactively, once the series had found the time to implement one of its strangest, most enduring running gags - Burns' baffling assumption, whenever he encounters Homer, that this is the first occasion on which he's dealt with this particular menace. They wasted practically zero time in getting it into motion; when Burns and Homer next met, in the following episode, "There's No Disgrace Like Home", Burns had already forgotten who he was. His selective memory blanking would only get all the more absurd as time went on, with he and Homer meeting every other week and the slate always being inexplicably wiped clean by the next. It's a gag that works on two levels - Burns' refusal to commit anything regarding Homer to his long-term memory is, on the one hand, a cruel denial of Homer's personhood, and of the notion that someone so lowly could have such a significant impact on someone as high in stature as Burns. But it's also a tongue-in-cheek denial from series of its own continuity; an acknowledgement that the characters cannot be allowed too much growth or self-knowledge, lest it threatens the very dynamics on which its perpetuation depends. Truth is, this denial is actually highly beneficial to Homer - if Burns had any awareness of what a persistent thorn in his side this one individual has been, he would have dealt him a harsh retribution a long time ago.
It doesn't stop there, however. There is yet another layer of juiciness to this particular snippet of dialogue, albeit one that's more accidental and much easier to miss without specific background knowledge on the series. For Homer would never meet this particular incarnation of Burns again, certainly not in such a head-to-head capacity. The Burns we see (or, more accurately, the Burns we hear) in "Homer's Odyssey", is a Burns from an alternate timeline, standing on the brink of a potentially very different trajectory for the series. I allude, of course, to the trivia that Burns wasn't always voiced by Harry Shearer; when production of the series was first underway, the showrunners had another man signed on for the role, by the name of Christopher Collins. Collins was already a highly experienced voice actor, having played such iconic 1980s cartoon villains as Cobra Commander in G.I. Joe and Starscream in Transformers. I'd imagine he would have been considered quite a catch for a fledgling series like The Simpsons. Unfortunately, it didn't work out, and Collins was dropped after recording lines for only a handful of episodes, reportedly because he rubbed people the wrong way. With Collins gone, Shearer replaced him as Burns, while a new voice actor, Hank Azaria, was hired and took charge of another role that had previously been allocated to Collins, Moe the bartender. "Homer's Odyssey" is one of only two Simpsons episodes in which Collins receives acting credits, and one of the few venues to preserve his performance as Burns. Or so it's widely accepted.
(Note that Christopher Collins was also known as Chris Latta, which is the name Transformers fans predominantly know him by. I believe that Latta was his birth name and Collins his stepfamily name, and he used both identities professionally. For the purposes of this review, I'll be calling him Collins, because that is the credit he used during his time on The Simpsons.)
I'll admit this is an issue I'm not 100% clear on. Over the years, I've seen a lot of conflicting opinion over whose voice it really is coming out of Mr Burns in "Homer's Odyssey". Some swear blind it's Harry Shearer, that Collins did originally record vocals for the character, but these were all dubbed over before the episode went ever to air, and if Burns' voice sounds in any way too scratchy or weird, we should chalk it up to the fact that Shearer, like everyone else, was still growing into his characters. I've seen at least one person claim that when "Homer's Odyssey" (and other early Burns appearances) first aired, they had Collins' vocals, but were subsequently re-dubbed with Shearer's for the sake of consistency and these are the only versions that exist now. Collins' name is, of course, retained in the credits, although in typical Simpsons fashion, it isn't stated what role(s) he's being credited for. The episode's DVD commentary is of little help on the matter, since Collins isn't mentioned at all (if there was that much friction between himself and the producers, then that's understandable; a DVD commentary isn't the place to be airing your dirty laundry about people you've clashed with). The commonly-accepted line, however, is that that is indeed Collins' Burns we're hearing in "Homer's Odyssey". IMDb credits him with the role; it also claims that he voiced Burns in "Simpsons Roasting on An Open
Fire" and "The Tell Tale Head", although he isn't credited for either
episode (Burns appeared in two other Season 1 episodes, "There's No Disgrace Like Home" and "Homer's Night Out", but I guess those performances were both Shearer's). If Shearer and Collins' respective takes on Burns really were that indistinguishable, then I'll admit that disappoints me; when I first heard that Burns was originally meant to be voiced by the man who did Cobra Commander, I'd imagined him sounding a lot closer to that character. There is, meanwhile, at least one other Collins performance that survives in the final mix, in "Some Enchanted Evening", as the presenter of America's Most Armed and Dangerous.
It should be noted that no such confusion exists over Moe. In his case it's accepted that all of his appearances (including "Homer's Odyssey") were re-dubbed by Hank Azaria before making it to air, and we can only speculate how Collins' take on the character would have sounded (I personally like to envision his Moe as sounding something like the Dalmatian he voiced in the movie Rover Dangerfield). Azaria weighed in on being hired as a replacement for Collins in a video interview given to GQ in 2018, although he didn't mention Collins by name:
"I didn't know til many years later, kids, that there was an original Moe the bartender voice that I replaced. I didn't know that! And I was like...that guy, you didn't like what he did? And Matt Groening was like, oh no, he was great. I'm like, so why did you recast him? (Groening said) like, he was just a dick. His voice was great, but he was just kind of jerky to everybody. Think about how awful like, that that guy could have been on The Simpsons his whole life. Lesson to you kids - always be nice!"
There's something about Azaria's statement, well-intentioned though is is, that just seems profoundly off. I agree with the general sentiment on always being nice, but it's the part about how Collins "could have been on The Simpsons his whole life" that bothers me. I'm going to hazard a guess that Azaria wasn't aware of this when he gave the interview, but Collins' "whole life" really wasn't that long. He died on June 12th 1994 from encephalitis. He didn't live to see The Simpsons' amazing longevity, nor to contemplate how he'd missed out on what could've potentially been a lifelong gig. He was only 44 years old. That is the kind of detail that gets me thinking, "How awful".
Christopher Collins, the orig on Evening at The Improv
All evidence points to Collins being ousted due to some degree of friction, but I'm inclined to take Azaria's testimony with a pinch of salt. Partly because he is only repeating what someone else had said to him (those probably weren't Groening's exact words, either), but partly because I've seen other claims (admittedly all stemming from internet hearsay) that it was specifically Sam Simon with whom Collins clashed, not absolutely everyone involved. Collins' fellow Transformers alumni have certainly indicated that he could be a something of a loose cannon (in the fondest possible way, mind you), but I've heard some pretty wild anecdotes about Simon too, so who knows what really went on between them? It's not like Collins is around to give his side of the story, or Simon for that matter.
The possibility that, had chemistry been more amenable, Collins would have stayed as Burns and Moe raises more "What if"s for the series than you might first imagine. We wouldn't simply have had the exact same show with a few different voices here and there. For one, Azaria might never have been hired had Collins' departure not left a vacant spot in the cast - in which case, various iconic characters that grew out of Azaria's unique talents, such as Dr Nick and Professor Frink, might never have existed. Instead, we could have seen some completely different supporting characters that were tailored to Collins' own strengths as a voice actor. Likewise, characters voiced by Dan Castellaneta or Harry Shearer might otherwise have gone to Collins, and received completely different vocal interpretations. The uneasiest question, though, has to do with how the series would have handled Collins' premature death. Given its nature, it's hard to see how his being retained as a Simpsons cast member would have made any difference. After a few years of voicing the characters, as opposed to a few scant episodes, Collins would presumably have found the time to develop each of his roles and make them his own, so swapping him out for another actor would have been a much more daunting process. Would Burns and Moe have been retired, along with any other characters he happened to voice, out of respect for the deceased Collins, as would happen with Doris Grau (for a time, anyway) and Phil Hartman? Or would Burns and Moe have been deemed too integral to the series to just be dropped? Obviously Grau and Hartman were sad losses, but their characters were basically peripheral enough that they could be phased out without creating too much disruption to the pivotal dynamics. The loss of a core cast member would have been more challenging to weather, to the point where you have to wonder if it might have cast doubts on how much life was reasonably left in the series. It's hard to speculate, because over the years The Simpsons has been so inconsistent in its handling of deceased cast members. With Grau and Hartman, I'm pretty sure that few people in the mid to late 90s envisioned the series going on for that much longer anyway, so quietly retiring their characters seemed the most sensible and tactful option. The loss of Marcia Wallace in 2013 led to her character being formally laid to rest within the show's continuity (in a manner clearly intended to conflate with Wallace's real-life passing). By contrast, Russi Taylor's characters were promptly recast following her passing in 2019. Grau's character, Lunchlady Doris, was eventually un-retired, with Tress MacNeille as her new voice, but was renamed Lunchlady Dora, in concession to the sad reality that the "Doris" part of her had long departed. It's a terribly morbid topic, I know, but one I've seen come up with increased frequency in recent years, with the awareness that a lot of the cast aren't getting any younger and the series having seeming ambitions of remaining an unstoppable force for decades to come. For now it will likely remain a matter of crossing that unfortunate bridge when they come it. Sobering to think that, had Collins stayed, they might have crossed it thirty years ago.
Irrespective of who voiced him, it's clear that "Homer's Odyssey" was intended to be our introduction to Burns as a character, and that's a purpose it effectively still serves. He'd previously made a brief appearance in "Simpsons Roasting on An Open Fire", the first episode aired (if not produced), and it was his heartless denial of a seasonal bonus to the plant's blue collar workers that kicked that particular story's conflict into motion. This, though, feels like the first time we'd gotten properly acquainted with the magnitude of his malevolence, and the chilly shadow he casts over not only his workforce, but Springfield as a whole. Burns has only limited screen time in "Homer's Odyssey"; he doesn't appear until the third act, nor does the build-up ever mention him by name. When the children of Springfield Elementary take a field trip to the plant at the beginning of the episode, Burns doesn't greet them in person, but sends his PA Smithers (who's looking distinctly off-colour in his first onscreen appearance) to deal with them on his behalf. When Homer is fired, it's not by Burns himself or even by Smithers, but by some random nobody slightly higher up the ladder (well, not quite so random in that he's established to be the father of Bart's classmates Sherri and Terri, but I don't think we ever saw him again). And yet when Burns does finally appear, it feels as if he's always had a very active role in these events, an omnipresent threat lurking persistently out of sight, surveilling the masses below for any indication of weakness or insubordination. His introductory sequence shows him doing exactly that, panning upwards to reveal him glowering over the tiny figures in Homer's rally and looking eerily inhuman, even for early Season 1 when backgrounds and crowd scenes were all swarming with the most outrageously freakishly-designed of extras. Often, Burns' hunched posture and hooked nose give him an avian appearance, like a buzzard preparing to swoop down on prospective prey, but here I'd go a step further and say that the exaggerated emphasis on his cranium has him looking positively alien (foreshadowing the ending to "The Springfield Files" seven years before the fact). I'm put in mind of those Martians from The War of The Worlds who spent a long time watching humanity and drawing plans against them.
"Homer's Odyssey" was definitely the most ambitious Simpsons episode to air at this point, having its sights less on surveying the Simpsons themselves than on the world around them and the family's place within. It feels like the first real attempt to explore Springfield as a character in its own right, a sure sign that the show was already feeling confident enough to start branching out from the more limited storytelling possibilities of the Ullman shorts, in establishing a fully functioning community beyond the Simpsons' doorstep. It's for this reason that the first act plays, deceptively, like a protracted bit of plot misdirection. You'd be forgiven for initially assuming that this was going to be a Bart-centric episode - the school field trip takes up the first seven minutes, and only as the first act ends does it become apparent that this is actually going to be Homer's conflict. But those early moments with Bart and co are hardly filler, since they do a lot to establish exactly what it is that Homer will be fighting for much of the episode. The bus journey alone between the school and the plant, which encompasses the town's toxic waste dump, tyre yard and prison, reveals everything that's sordid and depressing about the Springfieldian soul (in the one the script's biggest WTF moments, we hear that the school's previous field trip was to that last venue). The kids wave gleefully to each of these establishments, seemingly desensitised to the grim implication that they represent the various possible futures awaiting them after leaving school - although the nightmare scenario of never escaping the school system in the first place (the driving conflict of the forthcoming "Bart Gets an F") is also evoked when Otto's odd idea of a shortcut takes them back past the school. Along the way, we get to know a few more of Bart's classmates, and further banes of his academic existence. In the spotlight this time are the devious twins Sherri and Terri, supplements to Bart's ever-increasing stockpile of antagonists (a role that, other than a scene in the aforementioned "Bart Gets an F", where they deliberately feed Bart the wrong test answers, they never went particularly far with) and Wendall, a quiet and unassuming kid for whom Bart expressly has no ill will, but whose perpetual queasiness makes him a nightmare to be seated next to on turbulent bus rides. Hard relate there.
The real behemoth of the episode, though, is the plant itself. It represents the grimmest of all possible futures, and everything toxic and inescapable about Springfield in the present. "Homer's Odyssey" establishes the plant as a dominating force not only in the Simpsons' own lives, as Homer's place of employment, but for the town as a whole. It looms over Springfield, an ugly, ominous, polluting beast run on incompetent labor and unethical business practices. While a Level 7 disaster waits in the wings, the plant is already poisoning the town, slowly and insidiously, as signified by the appearance of Blinky the three-eyed-fish, who'd play a more central role later down the line in the Season 2 episode "Two Cars In Every Garage And Three Eyes On Every Fish". There is, all the same, an extent to which that terrible plant is nothing more than a warped reflection of what's already corrupt and polluted in the town's collective psyche. Springfield in general is run on incompetence, and there's not a lot that its various authorities can do right - we get a taster of this during the town meeting, when Chief Wiggum, in his debut appearance, gives an update on the situation with the mysterious graffiti artist "El Barto" and has drastically failed to comprehend the nature of what he's up against ("El Barto" is yet another early detail that I don't think went anywhere in the series proper, although it was the basis of a few comic book stories). Homer makes an even bleaker discovery, that the town at large has a problem with simply not caring about its fellow residents' welfare. The characters who best encapsulate this pervasive negligence are the Winfields, the elderly couple who lived alongside the Simpsons and were keen on passing judgement on them, until they were formally written out of the show in the Season 4 episode "New Kid on The Block". In their first appearance, we find them seated out on their porch late at night as Homer staggers by, having tethered himself to a boulder with the intention of throwing himself from the Springfield bridge. The possibility that Homer might be looking to kill himself explicitly occurs to them, but they can't decide if he isn't just taking the boulder for a walk. Either way, they don't seem particularly concerned. Much as his neighbours are gleefully aloof, his ostensible allies are casually cruel; a cash-strapped Homer was earlier refused a drink on credit by Moe, who informs him that he has zero confidence in his prospects of finding another job and ever paying him back. "Don't worry, we're still friends", Moe adds, as if that means anything at all.
Homer's desperation for a Duff beer, with its promise of temporary refuge from his unemployment woes (expressed through the Siren song of the chattering cyclops [1]), is what prompts him to take drastic measures and raid Bart's piggy bank in the hope of scraping together enough change. When this fails, Homer concludes that his family would be better off without him; hence, he straps a rock to his body and heads dejectedly for that fateful bridge. It's this particular plot point - Homer's suicide ideation - that I suspect tends to throw some viewers off about "Homer's Odyssey", which in my experience seldom seems to be anybody's favourite of Season 1, an already undervalued batch of episodes in general. Having Homer desire to kill himself is a manifestly extreme direction in which to take his unemployment arc - as a narrative choice it was certainly bold, although tonally it gets a little ambiguous, with it not always being obvious where the levity is intended to lie and where the genuine pathos. Take the suicide note Homer scrawls out to his family (on a sticky note with the header "Dumb Things I Gotta Do Today"), which includes the statement, "I can only leave you with the words my father gave me: stand tall, have courage and never give up". Are we meant to find it sad or hilarious that Homer himself clearly doesn't see anything worth heeding in those words? (Mostly, I just find it hard to envision Abe saying anything so encouraging to Homer.) Homer's chosen method of death is also cartoonishly impractical, a measure conspicuously designed to keep the attempt from feeling too real. It's a tough tightrope the episode has to walk. We're not supposed to take Homer's ideation overly seriously, but not so lightly that we're immune to the Winfields' callousness.
The one aspect of the episode that definitely feels dated now concerns the minor plot point of Marge stepping up to support the family while Homer looks for work, by returning to her old waitressing job. It doesn't go any further than a single sight gag (the revelation that Marge is a roller carhop), but there seems to be a regressive assumption that Marge becoming the family breadwinner is a further indication of Homer's failings as a patriarch (Homer basically cites as much as a reason for accepting Burns' job offer at the end). The expectation that Marge would give up her job immediately after marrying makes more sense later on, with the revelation that she was heavily pregnant with Bart at the time, but here it feels like an old-fashioned supposition even for 1990. Despite taking such an active role in family proceedings, her narrative function is essentially passive - three episodes in and Marge's characterisation remained quite wishy-washy, her ill-suppressed agitation at Otto's rudeness being the only foreshadowing of her latent fire. The dynamics of the Simpson clan are not, in general, at the narrative
forefront, but Homer's relationship with his family provides the
emotional grounding throughout, in that all he wants is to do right
by them and live up to the responsibilities he sees as unquestionably his. At this stage, the relationship between Bart and Homer was still the most prominent and developed of all the family connections, and there is a through line of Homer feeling particular shame wherever he's screwed up in the eyes of Bart. What makes Homer's firing at the end of act one particularly hard to bear is that it happens in front of Bart. In act two, it's not Homer's failure to find employment per se that brings on his suicidal despair so much as the realisation that his alcohol cravings have caused him to actively wrong his son. And when his family follow him to the bridge to intervene with his attempt, and Homer instead saves them from being hit by a van on the hazard-filled street (all while still being tethered to his boulder), it's the fresh understanding that he needs to secure them a safer environment that convinces Homer his life is worth living. He campaigns to have a stop sign installed on the road, and on discovering how unopposing people are of the motion, vows to keep fighting for additional safety signage the town over. Eventually, he gets emboldened enough to take on the big dogs in the form of that monstrous nuclear power plant, having realised that his gestures for a safer Springfield are all futile whilst they're living in its tyrannical shadow. Homer knows, better than anyone, how dangerous that place is, because he's been on the inside. As he puts it: "Our lives are in the hands of men no smarter than you or I, many of them incompetent boobs. I know this because I've worked alongside them, gone bowling with them and watched them pass me over for promotions time and time again. And I say this stinks!"
The title of the episode, in addition to getting a particularly obvious cultural reference out of the way (if you've a character named Homer, then it's basically law that you'll have to acknowledge The Odyssey at some point, much as you'll have to get in a pun on the Mona Lisa if you've a character named Lisa), alludes to Homer's journey to reclaim his self-respect after being pushed to his very lowest ebb. He goes from being deemed unemployable, derided by his neighbours and refused a favour by a self-proclaimed friend to being cheered by the entire town (other than on the measure of implementing a 15mph speed limit on Main Street; there are a number of audible boos when it's cited by an extra who could be a proto Ned Flanders). Having taken heed of the town's fatal lack of regard, Homer aspires to seize control of it and remold it in his more conscientious image. This ultimately means going head-to-head with Burns, who may as well be the human (though just barely) manifestation of the callousness that's characterised the town up until now - in that respect, he and the plant are practically the same entity. When Homer is summoned to Burns' office for that decisive collision of wills, Burns lays down the ultimate Faustian bargain - he will hire Homer as the plant's new safety inspector, on the condition that Homer immediately steps outside and assures his legions of supporters that the plant poses no threat to them. Burns recognises that being cut loose from the plant workforce is what gave Homer leeway for his rebellion, and that a sure-fire method of neutralising the man is to bring him back under his thumb. And Homer recognises that his becoming safety inspector is the very sort of critical absurdity he's just been explicitly lobbying against - with his prior track record, he's the last person qualified for that position. Faced between the principles on which he's built his newfound self-respect, and the temptations of job security, Homer chooses the latter, although he does a little arm-twisting of his own, wheedling Burns into allowing him to conclude his campaign on his own terms. Instead of assuring the town that the plant is safe, Homer urges them to protect themselves independently. He states that he's going to have to live without their respect and awe, an admission that he might have forfeited his right to such things, but the rally happily receives the news that he's been appointed safety inspector as nothing less than the fitting conclusion to the narrative in which they've been eagerly invested - even as Homer slips in the obviously self-serving detail about the job coming with a boosted salary.
That's another thing that potentially throws people off about this episode - the ambiguous ending. Is it a happy ending or isn't it? Outwardly, it has all the trappings of a triumphant deliverance, with Bart proudly acknowledging Homer as his father, and the episode coming full circle from the mortal embarrassments of that first act. It's an equally nice touch that the Winfields, who previously wouldn't lift a finger to help Homer, are now among the people cheering for him. Still, there's little dancing around the fact that is is Burns who comes out on top. His one concession is in failing to secure Homer's leverage for selling the public a positive image of the plant, but he is able to make the opposition go away, which seems victory enough. The townspeople are certainly no safer than they were before, and are potentially worse off with Homer overseeing the plant's safety procedures, yet they clearly think they've won. There's a level on which writers Jay Kogan and Wallace Wolodarsky appear to be skewering the mindlessness of the town's mob mentality (a topic that would come up a whole lot more frequently with Springfield), and our own desire for a happy ending, however facile. On another level, we are being invited to identify with Homer's struggle, and the sincerity of his desire to better both himself and the world around him. He heads to his new position with a thread of that sincerity still intact, however dubious it seems that he'll be capable of putting it into practice. Homer himself implores, "You have to learn that there's a little Homer Simpson in all of us," ie: basically fallible, but navigated by the best of intentions. The ending of "Homer's Odyssey" accepts that as a cause for celebration in itself.
We wrap up now, with Saturday Morning Rewind's tribute to Christopher Collins.
[1] Has anyone tried to make the events of this episode correspond with the actual Odyssey? You know, just for fun?
