Team Homer (aka Birds of A Feather)

It's finally time for us to talk about "Team Homer" of Season 7 (episode 3F10), and we might as well start by leaping straight to the main attraction - yes, this is the episode with that amazingly inspired sight gag where Jacques, Lurleen, Mindy and Kashmir are seen competing in the Springfield bowling leagues under the team name "The Home-Wreckers". That alone makes this one of the most important installments in the history of The Simpsons. No hyperbole, if you feel any kind of affinity or attachment for the characters in question then it can't be underestimated just how mind-blowing powerful this deceptively small moment is. Not only do we have "Team Homer" to thank for applying the term "Home-Wreckers" to handily denote these characters as a collective, it's really down to this episode that we're able to think of them as a collective at all. It's not as though they ever encountered each other in their respective adventures in coming between Marge and Homer. Perhaps it was always inevitable that Lurleen and Mindy would get together for the sake of a sly background gag, but "Team Homer" really went the extra mile in assembling all four of these characters and depicting them as a literal team battling what are always insurmountable odds. Everything about how the gag plays out is absolutely perfect. Their presence isn't lingered on and their significance as a unit isn't made any more explicit than in their team name - the episode trusts that you'll recognise each of these characters and connect all of the necessary dots yourself. Not so surprisingly, none of the Home-Wreckers get any dialogue, but their expressions as they exit the Bowlarama, having been knocked out of the league by the Pin Pals (coupled with Kashmir's impulse to take the loss out physically on Jacques) mark them out as rather sore losers. Maybe no more so than the Channel 6 Wastelanders, but it adds just an extra dash of personal acidity to their participation. If you look at the scenario from the Home-Wreckers' perspective, then the stakes for three of their four members would have been gut-churningly high. Lurleen and Mindy were both rejected by Homer, who just so happens to be the Pin Pals' honcho, while Jacques was rejected for Homer (and if we must retroactively factor in the happenings of "Pin Gal", then he presumably knows who Homer is). Once again, these characters have been pushed out to the sidelines to fester in their bruising defeat. Ironic then that Kashmir, who shouldn't logically have the same degree of personal investment in the match-up, seems to take the loss the hardest. Kashmir has always been the somewhat square-shaped peg among the Home-Wreckers, in that she wasn't interested in a relationship with her associated Simpson, and I have a sneaking suspicion that if this gag were done much later in the series' run, then she might have been looked in favour of one of Marge's jilted admirers, Artie Ziff (the reason why Artie didn't qualify at the time is, I suspect, because he had yet to create any serious trouble for Homer and Marge after they were married). But it's a gag works so much more aptly with Kashmir on board - her voluptuous form meshes better with the seductive aura of the team. As a bonus, it gives the Home-Wreckers the additional distinction of being the only team we see competing with a majority of female members (even if the lone male is quite blatantly the team captain...after all, he is the pro).

The real genius of the Home-Wreckers gag is in how it simultaneously speaks to both the richness of Springfield's wider community - to the idea that all of these little character connections are being constantly interwoven off of screen and that the show's world is so much bigger than the Simpsons' eye-view of it - and to just how fundamentally small and narrow in scope the Simpsons universe really is. I love the idea of Homer-Wreckers all being friends and would gleefully take an entire spin-off about their singledom exploits. But coupled with the revelation that the Home-Wreckers all know each other is the eyebrow-raising implication that they also all know what they have in common. That they call themselves "The Home-Wreckers" would suggest that they are entirely aware that they've each created apocalyptic mayhem for a family unit at some point over the past seven years (in Kashmir's case, not even purposely). Whether they're aware that it's the same family unit in all cases is more ambiguous (if so, can you imagine the sheer awkwardness of the conversations that must have gone on between them?), but it is nevertheless telling that the basis for their solidarity and self-definition should be the relatively minor point in their respective lives in which they tangled with a Simpson. It's not like we, the viewer, ever got a chance to know them for doing much else. It's a sly acknowledgement that the world does indeed revolve around that one cursed clan, and that all of its denizens exist in some form of service to them - even if, in the Home-Wreckers' case, that service was antagonism, to test the marital bonds between Homer and Marge. The Home-Wreckers understand exactly where they stand in the scheme of things, and they recognise how much it bites.

The Simpsons had already come a long way by the time "Team Homer" dropped, but the Home-Wreckers' cameo is a heartening reminder that the show hadn't forgotten its roots (Mindy being the only member who'd had her star turn in the latter half of the series' contemporary run). This was the second episode in which the topic of bowling took centre stage (technically, it was the third episode in which the Bowlarama was a major setting, but in "And Maggie Makes Three" the bowling itself largely took a backseat to Homer's short-lived stint as a non-divine pinspotter), and while Jacques' appearance is as close as it comes to explicitly referencing its predecessor, there are other subtle ways in which the episode is indebted to "Life on The Fast Lane". There's a nice continuity nod when Homer is telling Marge about the Pin Pal's initial victory over the Channel 6 Wastelanders, and Marge demonstrates herself to be very knowledgeable about bowling. Elsewhere, exterior shots of the Bowlarama are still being recycled from "Life on The Fast Lane".

The Home-Wreckers' appearance constitutes only a fleeting portion of the overall story, and yet it is very much the heart of the episode. Oh true, I do have a ton of bias on that point, but I don't think it would be overly controversial to suggest that the narrative tensions surrounding the Pin Pals' league prospects aren't half as delectable as observing how the various different team alignments fall among the Springfieldians - how they "quad off", in the words of showrunner David Mirkin, and what it says about each character's broader sense of personal identity. Some of these team formations seem perfectly natural and logical within universe - Patty and Selma, for example, are part of the DMV Regulation Kings, alongside a couple of unnamed male colleagues who seem every bit as grouchy and terminally bored with life as them. Others offer a more ostentatiously novel mix of characters, like the Channel 6 Wastelanders, a team comprised of Springfield's most prominent television personalities: Krusty the Clown, Kent Brockman, Arnie Pie (in The Sky) and Bumblebee Man (is Scott Christian sore that he didn't make the cut?), who happen to be the most obnoxious and self-aggrandising of the competitors, outside of the Pin Pals themselves. Other teams are linked by humorous gimmicks that suggest a surprisingly candid self-awareness on the part of their members (those aforementioned Home-Wreckers, but also the Stereotypes). In most cases, it is really fun to speculate how these teams might have come together and what kind of internal dynamics they would have (we get to see so few of them in action). The quad-off requiring the greatest suspension of disbelief are reigning league champs and ostensible episode antagonists, The Holy Rollers, a team made up of Reverend Lovejoy, Helen Lovejoy, Ned Flanders and Maude Flanders (none of them characters whom I would have pegged as having even a casual interest in bowling, much less being this proficient at it). What they obviously have in common is that they're representatives of Springfield's religious faction...which doesn't automatically make them birds of a feather. All signs point toward Maude and Helen getting along just fine, but it was well enough established by now that Timothy isn't so keen on Ned; the notion that he'd choose to hang out with Ned socially and work this well with him as a team is a glaring contrivance we'll just have to overlook. For the purposes of the story, the Holy Rollers make for effective final opponents because they radiate a moral purity that puts Homer and his scruffy lot in well the shade - the self-satisfaction of never having been caught driving without pants, as Moe so eloquently phrases it. Plus, it's implied that they might literally have God on their side - Ned explicitly calls on God for special favours during one bowl - making the Pin Pals the definitive underdogs.

"Team Homer" boasts an exceedingly simple premise, but it is nothing if not a busy episode, and we certainly do have a lot to unpack with it. There are multiple ways in which this unassuming adventure represents a significant turning point for the series, both in-universe and out. When it debuted, on January 7th 1996, it came attached with a note of immense sadness. The Simpsons was in its seventh season and had spectacularly exceeded early projections for its life expectancy; "Team Homer" arguably marked the point at which the march of time was felt so much more painfully than ever before, for reasons outside of the show's control. It was the first episode to air after the death of script supervisor/voice actress Doris Grau, on December 30th 1995, and was dedicated to her memory. The first Simpsons cast member to pass on was technically Christopher Collins, the original voice of Mr Burns and Moe, who parted ways with the show after only a few episodes - reportedly because he didn't get along with the rest of the crew - and died in 1994 due to encephalitis (side-note: Collins' place within Simpsons lore and his premature death are something that I think about a lot, and might be worth a whole blog post in itself some day). Grau, though, marked the first loss among the long-term players (although Phil Hartman's untimely death wasn't far on the horizon), and while her signature character, Lunchlady Doris, never had as much chance to shine as her character in The Critic (also named Doris), it was sad knowing that a particular avenue in the show's ever-burgeoning community was already closed off. It makes it all the more poignant, then, that "Team Homer" should be a rare episode to give Doris a spot of actual development, hinting at her own sense of broader identity outside of her designated position at the school cafeteria (not only is she competing in the league, but she's apparently the mother of Squeaky-Voiced Teen). Alas, this was as far as it could ever go, at least with this particular incarnation of the character. The luncheon lady was eventually reinstated to the show, with Tress MacNeille as her vocals, but under the revised moniker of Lunchlady Dora, a tacit admission that the character could obviously not be the same now that Grau was gone.

Within the episode itself, we can also see the subtle but impactful ways in which the sands of time were shifting and rearranging the balances between the show's supporting players. "Team Homer" marks the first significant step in what I like to term the "Life After Barney" phase - the fact that Moe, and not Barney, gets to be the character who accompanies Homer to the alley is a far bigger deal than it might seem at first glance. If you've listened to enough Simpsons DVD commentaries, you'll have picked up that Barney was a contentious character behind the scenes, and it's around this point that a conscious decision looks to have been made to pack him off into a soft retirement. The show never went as far as jettisoning Barney altogether (despite the efforts of incoming showrunners Josh Weinstein and Bill Oakley to get him stitched up for the attempted murder of Burns), but he was effectively relieved of his duties as Homer's best friend, with Moe being eyed up as a viable replacement. I tend to think of this as something that only got properly underway once Weinstein and Oakley had taken hold of the reins, but I have to remind myself that "Team Homer" was actually a holdover from Season 6, back when Mirkin called the shots, so perhaps there was more overlap in their intentions than I've given credit for. For Homer to have any kind of one-to-one socialisation with Moe outside of the bar was unusual at the time and, coupled with his recent B-story in "Bart Sells His Soul", indicated that Moe was going to become a much more prominent player from now on. As for Barney, he isn't completely forgotten - his absence is explicitly accounted for, when Homer notes that he stopped coming to the bar after acquiring a girlfriend. What's interesting is that Lenny and Carl's participation is ruled out within the same statement, and for the same reason. Although they would eventually become two of Homer's closest and oft-seen companions (replacing Apu and Otto as the other half of the Pin Pals), at this point the writers still seemed to want to maintain a clearer division between Homer's work life and his social life.

On that note, "Team Homer" functions as a neat little study into Homer's friendship values and where he's inclined to look for solidarity. He's first inspired to form the Pin Pals, along with Moe and Apu, on the recognition that they've been excluded from the league because they don't have teams of their own. The premise that initially binds them is that they are all outcasts. Their ragtag origins and downtrodden status are inadvertently advertised in the cheap uniforms for which they have to settle, inviting the derisive attentions of the Channel 6 Wastelanders. (At first glance, I thought it odd that Sideshow Mel wasn't among them, but then they are the bullying team and I couldn't see Mel getting in on that or being this outrageously nasty about the Pin Pals' uniforms. It's not within his nature. I'm disappointed that it is apparently in Arnie's). On their own, they would be losers, but through coming together and openly celebrating that connection they're able to turn the tables on teams who might easily have bested them. It's worth noting at this point that "Team Homer" was another Mike Scully script, if you squint you can discern his version of Homer coming into play, just put to a more constructive and benevolent purpose than usual. The watershed moment for the Pin Pals comes when Homer suggests that they carve out a niche as the team that supports each other. There's actually nothing to suggest that the other teams don't, they just don't make a loud and obnoxious a display of it with an arsenal of team chants, as Homer is able to rally his fellow Pin Pals into doing, and apparently that's where most of them are going wrong. For a while, this morale-boosting technique is enough to overcome what might be the Pin Pals' obvious deficiency - not the teams' shoddy, homemade uniforms, but rather its distinctly arbitrary formation. Otto Mann (I was never sure if his name was intended as a pun on "automan", or a reference to the Ottoman Empire) remains the odd man out of the group. He gets roped in because he happened to be in the right place at the right time, and had seemed to be more interested in the contents of the Bowlarama's claw machine than in the game itself. He isn't someone whom Homer, Moe or Apu would ordinarily interact with, and it's really not surprising that he's the one who later gets booted from the team to make way for Mr Burns, a development that engenders a lesser sense of betrayal than perhaps it should. One suspects that just about any character other than the loathed and decrepit Burns could have filled his vacant position to begin with.

What is obviously important is that all of the team members are in perfect sync with one another, and this is presumably why Homer's chants prove so formidable. They give the Pin Pals a persistent point of synchronisation, the sensation that they are working actively together at all times on exactly the same page. Any cracks in that unity are going to risk exposing serious weaknesses. The team that suffers the most embarrassing loss - the Springfield Police Framers - makes the grievous mistake of attempting to force one thing that is not like the others into the mix and doesn't even have the honor of getting to bowl a full game (a shackled Snake, for some reason, is having to fill in for one of the police officers, and takes the opportunity to escape custody, forcing Wiggum to forfeit). But just as a breakdown in unity may be fatal to the team, it might also prove damning to the individual. To lose your team is to lose a chunk of your identity which, as is exemplified by all of the teams competing, is fortified by the company you keep. For the outlier Otto, being exiled from the Pin Pals means being banished back to his place beside the claw machine to hunt for lobster-shaped harmonicas, but for the other members the stakes are higher. For Moe, a place on a successful bowling team is his means of demonstrating that he's better than dirt (maybe not that fancy nutrient-loaded dirt you can apparently buy in the stores). The most revealing moment for Apu, meanwhile, has less to do with Burns' intrusion than it does an off-screen drama to which we are mostly not privy. As it turns out, he was invited to join another team, the Stereotypes (a name even more flamboyantly on the nose than the Home-Wreckers, denoting the heavily caricatured likes of Captain McCallister, Groundskeeper Willie, Luigi the Italian chef and Cletus the slack-jawed yokel), but turned them down, apparently feeling that he could do better than to identify with such a shameless parade of human cliches. He later rethinks that position, once Burns enters the scene and the Pin Pals start to lag behind the Stereotypes.

The plight Apu faced with the Stereotypes - the prospective flattening of his identity through the degrading integration into a unit than champions conformity over individuality - is echoed by the episode's B-story, in which Bart's "Down With Homework" t-shirt, courtesy of a MAD Magazine iron-on, causes such a violent uprising at Springfield Elementary that Skinner insists on having his students wear uniforms. This in turn causes the children to lose all sense of singularity, to the point where, as observed by the outgoing Lunchlady Doris, they even start blinking in unison. I don't have quite so much to say about this subplot on its own, aside from that I find its overblown take on the subject inherently nonplussing, because a) I'm from the UK, where schools requiring students to wear uniform are the overwhelming norm and not the exception, and b) trust me when I say that the uniform worn by the kids at Springfield Elementary is considerably LESS dorky than the uniform I had to wear. The school I attended had this thing about ugly and uncomfortable blazers. I would have killed for Mr Boy of Main Street! The most interesting thing about this story, to me, is in how it parallels the themes present in the A-story. Both are concerned with how the individual's identity and self-perception is molded by the wider group and, as Erik Adams points out in his review on The AV Club, uniforms prove equally integral to how that group is defined. They reach for opposite conclusions, however. For the students of Springfield Elementary, putting on a uniform means becoming part of a faceless mass and being denied any form of personal expression. For the league contenders, a uniform signifies acceptance and the possibility of finding one's place in the world (or even acceptance of one's place in the world, as with the Stereotypes). The result is an episode where the values of the young are implicitly contrasted against those of the fully grown. There's an unspoken tension between the children's youthful urge to rebel against every which way authority should attempt to pigeonhole them, and the sad neediness of the adults in finding their purpose and affinity in whatever group might be prepared to have them.

Nowhere is that sad neediness more evident than in the figure who threatens to bring the Pin Pals' empire crashing down, all because he aspires to be a part of it. You don't tend to see a lot of sincere analysis for how Burns is characterised in "Team Homer", possibly because Scully's script insists on putting quotation marks around it. When Burns approaches the team and requests that they accept him as one of them, he is entirely upfront about the fact that his desire springs from an "unpredictable change of heart". This is Scully both admitting to the narrative contrivance and foreshadowing how the scenario is likely to end - it's all very slick, but I can't help but feel that it sells Burns a little short. Is it so inconceivable that Burns might notice the camaraderie among the Pin Pals and become curious about what he's missing out on? "Team Homer" did not, after all, air terribly far ahead of "Homer The Smithers", an episode that on the one hand illustrates just how painfully out of touch Burns is with the common man (as seen in his encounter with Lenny) but also implies that he isn't entirely satisfied with life in his ivory tower, and there's a side of him that yearns to step just a little out of his shell. For the most part, Burns lacks the capacity to forge real connections with others, something that could, under certain circumstances, have him come off as vulnerable. Here, he's is so inept at traversing the ins and outs of human interaction that he doesn't seem to pick up on the fact that the rest of the Pin Pals don't want him around. He goes through the motions of what he assumes to be jovial interplay and accepts the feigned camaraderie he gets in return. Maybe I'm in the minority, but every time I watch this episode I always feel just a smidgeon of sympathy for Burns. There's a sliver of pathos in his trajectory that isn't played up too heavily due to the emphasis being on how he inconveniences the team, but it does have a moment of genuine emotional pay-off...even if the way things will ultimately end is always a foregone conclusion.

Burns gets involved in the first place because Homer goes to him on the off-chance that his boss might be persuaded to sponsor the Pin Pals' costly registration. To his surprise, Burns seems entirely willing, but only because he's on an ether-induced high that causes him to perceive anyone he interacts with as delightful advertising mascots - in Homer's case, the Pillsbury Doughboy (addressed here by his less common moniker Poppin' Fresh), whom Burns is compelled to poke in the belly and make giggle (as is the characters' trademark) and in Hans Moleman's case, Lucky the Leprechaun, whom Burns is, far more bafflingly, compelled to trepan with a drill (did those horrible cereal-stealing children ever do anything comparable to Lucky?). Burns later notices the unexplained expenditure and traces it to Homer. He goes to the Bowlarama to confront the Pin Pals, only to shock everyone by revealing that he wants to join the team - a proposition that Homer, being in Burns' employ, isn't in much of a position to decline. Of course, swapping out Otto for Burns disrupts the team equilibrium in a way that no amount of chanting is going to compensate for (not that we see the Pin Pals getting up to much chanting after the exchange; their enthusiasm as a unit is clearly gone), turning the teams' prospects of besting the Holy Rollers into a pathetic pip dream - much to the chagrin of Homer, who laments that he'll never have anything on his trophy case to stand alongside that Academy Award in his dubious ownership. That ill-gotten award, incidentally, provided the basis for the episode's most unfortunate gag - in fact, it's a very strong contender for the Simpsons gag to have aged the most poorly within the briefest space of time (more so even that John Travolta's appearance in "Itchy & Scratchy Land"). For all the modern day hubbub about the Simpsons' alleged ability to predict the future, it's quite astonishing how unlucky they were with this one. When the episode originally aired, the name on the award was Haing S. Ngor, who won Best Supporting Actor for his role in the 1984 film The Killing Fields. Then on February 25th 1996, less than two months after the episode aired, Ngor was murdered at his home in what was thought to be a robbery gone wrong. When the episode next aired, the name on the award had been changed to Don Ameche, who won for the 1985 film Cocoon, lest anybody think that the intended joke was that Homer was Ngor's killer, and had stolen the award while raiding the actor's house. That would be a tremendously dark conclusion to draw about our main character, but I can understand why caution was exercised.

That Burns should suck at bowling isn't much of a revelation. He's a feeble old man who can accomplish very few physical tasks without the aid of his personal assistant, and here he is trying his hand at a game that requires the skilful manipulation of a 15lb ball. The thing that really makes him intolerable as a teammate, though, is that he doesn't appear to see a problem with his not being able to bowl. Until the end of the episode, Burns doesn't actually give two shits about winning. Despite his initial assertion that he was moved to join the Pin Pals because watching them revel in the Home-Wreckers' vanquishing struck a chord with his tyrannical nature, Burns doesn't seem too perturbed by the team's inability to experience that same kind of victory once he's joined. When the Pin Pals take a thorough thrashing from the Stereotypes, he laughs it off and attempts to reassure Homer that the championship is unimportant since "the only ship worth a damn is friendship." I have to wonder what's actually going on with Burns at this point. Is he really as naive as all that? Is his buoyancy a protective measure, to compensate for his uneasy awareness that he can't bowl for toffee? Or is this a testament to just how eager he is to experience the thrill of belonging to a team - that he doesn't see winning as the end goal so much as having a fun time with his companions (even if it's very clear that no one else is having much fun)? That's not to say that he lacks any sense of spirited competition - prior to the deciding match with the Holy Rollers, he tries to rally his team with the glorious battle cry of "Who's ready to kick some Christian keister?" Of course, by this stage the rest of the team's enthusiasm is dead on the floor, and Homer seems prepared to bite the bullet and be rid of the old man once and for all. That is until Burns reaches into a box and reveals that he's bought them all a special gift for the game - uniforms that are not merely presentable enough to be seen in, but as Apu puts it, fine enough to be married in.

The moment where Burns pulls out those custom-designed shirts is a surprisingly affecting one. For one, it indicates that Burns is bearing his soul more nakedly than ever, and just how desperately he yearns for acceptance in these ranks. Somehow, it doesn't register as a pathetic gesture, but an empowering one that elevates all of the Pin Pals above one of their lingering insecurities - the fact that they've come this far and are still saddled with the crummiest uniforms in all the league. Burns' gift serves to unify them as a team, if only fleetingly, by providing the grounds for a common celebration. And when Burns says his bit about how, "I've always been wealthy, but this is the first time I've felt...rich", well, I could almost buy that he genuinely means it, within that specific moment. It just doesn't stick. Against all odds, the Pin Pals go on to beat the Holy Rollers, but it has less to do with Burns than the unwitting assistance they receive from their discarded teammate Otto, whose ongoing efforts to get hold of that infernal lobster harmonica end up sending some good vibrations their way. (Did the Holy Rollers seriously not notice what had gone on with the claw machine? Because surely they would have had grounds to contest the Pin Pals' win? Then again, I don't think Ned's prior tactic of calling on divine intervention to get him a strike was all that sporting either, so call it karma.) The Pin Pals are about to receive their trophy when Burns suddenly claims it for himself, announcing that he's had yet another of his unpredictable changes of heart. Not quite so unpredictable, really. Obviously, Burns has to go back to where the status quo wills him, but he's able to rationalise this transition as an entirely logical one on the pathway to personal growth - teamwork was always essentially a means to end, and vital to the greater game is recognising when to stab your teammates in the back for the promotion of individual glory. The urge to forsake his fellow Pin Pal so that he might he might position himself as the overall victor is, in his words, akin to a boxer shedding "roll after roll of disgusting, useless, sweaty flab before he can win the title".

Wounded, the Pin Pals take solace in the obvious conclusion - that the trophy itself was but a silly trinket, and The Real Treasure Was The Friends We Made Along The Way. The team is reconciled with Otto in the glibbest of fashions; the implication, one supposes, is that Otto's unorthodox support in beating the Holy Rollers shows that the universe was always gravitating toward a natural order, and the final unity of the team in its "true" form represents a moral triumph over Burns' corruption. But all of that is undone (deliberately so) in the story's epilogue, in which the Pin Pals decide that it would be awfully nice to have that silly trinket after all and have Homer break into Burns' mansion to steal it while the others cheer him on. That might be subversion enough, but the script goes the extra mean-spirited mile in having the theft go horribly awry - Homer is unable to clear the mansion grounds before Burns' security dogs catch up with him, at which point the rest of the team up and abandons him, leaving Homer to be savagely mauled. The Pin Pals are exposed as a sham and the episode ends up vindicating Burns, by suggesting that what he did in the Bowlarama is really a variation of what most people would do under the right circumstances - to work as a team for as long as it is convenient, only to put themselves first when it comes to the crunch. As Burns observed, teamwork will only take you so far.

Sky 1 edit alert!: Sky 1 broadcasts in the 90s always used to take out that early exchange where Homer attempts to prostitute himself to Marge in the hopes of raising the $500 registration money. Instead, we cut straight to the part where Marge gives Homer practical advice about asking Burns for a sponsorship. If I'm honest, I find this gag kind of weird and kind of skin-crawling (it's got Scully's trademark crass all over it), and I don't think the episode loses much without it. It was, however, considered an important enough moment to be transcribed in The Simpsons: A Complete Guide To Our Favorite Family, which is how I first learned of its existence. While we're at it, the same entry also contained the publication's most bizarre mistranscription, of the scene where Smithers is discussing Burns' monthly "boweling". I always heard that line as "Remember that month you didn't do it?", and I think that is the correct dialogue, but whoever transcribed that entry heard something else entirely, and it raises a few icky questions.

Wrangler '00: Ride (aka I'm Going Back To My Plough)

Ideally, you shouldn't be far along into "Ride", Jonathon Glazer's 2000 ad for Wrangler Jeans, before figuring out that it's a promotion for the denim trousers its protagonist is fond of wearing. I'll admit, though, that when I first had the pleasure of catching it, there was a fleeting moment, just toward the end, when I thought it had taken me to a darker place altogether. That I was looking at a stealth PIF, the kind that wants to catch me off-guard by pretending that everything is sweet and upbeat before hitting me with a heavy dosage of psychological scarring. I've seen this trick used before, I know how it is. Forty-six seconds into the minute-long ad, we're drawn down an ominous black road obscured by smoke, happening on the image of a particularly brutal looking car wreck. I took that as a sign that our heroic backpacker had met a terrible end and was fully expecting a slogan along the lines of "KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE ROAD" to flash across the screen. But no. The protagonist is revealed to be alive and well, lapping it up in the warm red glow of roadside hospitality as a herd of buffalo, an obvious symbol for the untamed spirit of the American terrain, charges on unabated. It'll take a lot more than a few horrific images to perturb this drifter's wanderlust, thank you very much.

Truthfully, the feeling that this could, at any instance, turn into a PIF about some kind of unseen peril is integral to the appeal of "Ride", an ad that runs the whole gamut of emotions when it comes to solitary travel. The exhilaration and romanticism are tempered by scenes of loneliness (our protagonist huddled by a deserted bus station in the dead of night) and of drudgery (him attempting to bum rides from flooded streets in the drizzling rain). Whatever the mood, the momentum of the ad absolutely never lets up, the fast cutting from shot to shot meaning that we always feel that we are going somewhere, with further sights ever on the horizon. Yet we never know exactly where we are going (it could be that the protagonist does not either). It is a ride that, joyous though it may be, is constantly threatening to veer out of control. Flirtation with danger, and the omnipresence of risk, is part and parcel of the drifter lifestyle, the appearance of that dreadful smoking wreckage an acknowledgement of what could potentially happen if we allow ourselves to be lured down the wrong path. It is not the only potential bad end that presents itself throughout the ad. In one shot, we see a rattlesnake lunging at the camera. In another, we glide through an ostensibly immaculate suburban neighbourhood, only to pass a house going up a deadly blaze - a warning that danger could be lurking around literally any corner and that we're perhaps no safer in the comfort of our homes than out in those snake-filled grasses. Elsewhere, the protagonist hops aboard a moving train carriage only to find it occupied by a strange figure lurking in the shadows, who could potentially be a threat or a pleasant travelling companion. He transpires to be neither (he's also wearing jeans, so for the purposes of this ad we are presumably to see him as another aspirational figure, but this is clearly no basis for he and the protagonist to make friends).

Glazer's piece is a curiously mind-bending one, given that most of the images are of a fairly mundane variety - motels, road stops, highways - with only intermittent glimpses of genuine weirdness. The choice of accompanying song, "We're Off To See The Wizard" by Victor Young & His Orchestra (taken, of course, from the evergreen Hollywood musical The Wizard of Oz) injects a sense of playful fantasy, that the America the protagonist is traversing might be every bit as bizarre and wonderful as the land of Oz, and at times potentially as fictitious. Of particular note, and key to the ad's philosophy, is the line "Follow the fellow who follows a dream". Our protagonist clearly lives outside of the bounds of society, as signified in a scene where we catch him bathing in a river. He is able to wander in and out of towns and taverns and integrate himself with others here and there. In one scene, we catch him stirring following an episode of physical intimacy, a same sex one night stand in a motel room (queer heroes were an unusual sight in mainstream advertising in 2000, adding to the general subversiveness of both ad and protagonist), but as soon as he slips those pants back on the outside world beckons (his partner, who remains naked, feels no such urge to follow, a point he expresses by turning his head in the opposite direction). His instinct to eventually leave it all behind and trek onward is celebrated as having set him apart. He is a Y2K throwback to that most quintessential of American figures, the pioneering cowboy, setting out across a turf that is still deeply suffused with the spirit of the old West. Glimpses of that old West sporadically make their way to the surface - a car is seen rearing up and down like a bucking horse, suggesting that the march of progress and technology hasn't quelled the fundamental sense of uninhibitedness that a land so vast and filled with possibilities can inspire. Meanwhile, the mysterious figure our protagonist has the pleasure of stowing away aboard a train has the aura of a Hollywood movie star from another era - that the mystery man and the protagonist are never seen in the same frame raises questions as to whether the former is even there, or whether he's a figment of our young drifter's imagination, a lingering image from a bygone slice of Americana. "Ride" suggests an intersection of the assorted mavericks of the American mythos, each very much alive and very universal attuned to the same urge to keep moving in the manner of those noble stampeding buffalo. The distance maintained, in the end, feels less like unfamiliarity than it does a mark of respect, two like-minded, denim-clad souls each acknowledging their right to share a physically and ideological plain in which they may be equally and blissfully untethered to anything, including one another.

Who Is The Sexy Beast? (aka Gangster's Paradise)

There was nothing in this year's Academy Award nominations that delighted me more than seeing The Zone of Interest up for so many big prizes. Jonathon Glazer has long been a firm favourite of mine, ever since he was spooking me with his freakish television ads for booze and banking, but he's a director who, up until now, has never garnered anything close to the recognition he's due. His work has long been defined by a boldness of vision, an eye for the uncanny, and above all an eclecticism - he has never made a feature that feels overly derivative of anything else in his filmography. But then, he hasn't made that many features, period. The Zone of Interest is only his fourth, and comes after a decade-long gap between his third film, Under The Skin. I am optimistic that the amount of praise and attention The Zone of Interest is receiving means that we won't have to wait nearly so long for his fifth. In celebration of its break-out success, I've decided to make 2024 the Year of Glazer. I have, in the history of this blog, covered a very limited selection of his adverts as part of my ongoing Horrifying Advertising Animals series, but it has long been my intention to delve more broadly into his work - his feature films, some of his non-horrifying animal advertising, maybe even one or two his music videos. We'll start with a loving overview his debut feature, Sexy Beast (2000), which might still honestly be my personal favourite of the four. Not because it's necessarily the most ambitious or technically impressive of his filmography, but because it remains the most enjoyable and easy to rewatch. It's the closest Glazer has come to making a "hangout film" (ie: one where getting to spend time with enticing and well-defined characters is the biggest draw), albeit one too deeply steeped in an aura of indeterminate horror for the characters to ever seem overly familiar, or like anything resembling good friends.

Sexy Beast is a picture of several enigmas. Not least among them, what the title is meant to be getting at. Neither the word "sexy" or "beast" is uttered anywhere within the dialogue, nor is it overtly obvious to which character, if any, it is alluding. It does not, presumably, denote our protagonist, Gal Dove (Ray Winstone), a retired London gangster living the dream life in a chic Spanish villa. His physique certainly dominates the screen as the title flashes across it, but the specific image with which it's juxtaposed, with emphasis on Gal's crotch bulging beneath his speedo, immediately sets him up as more of a figure of absurdity than a particularly persuasive or menacing one (coupled with the choice of opening song, "Peaches" by The Stranglers). Already he has the air of a man who has bitten off more than he can chew and doesn't yet know it. A more probable candidate might be the film's antagonist, Don Logan (Ben Kingsley, in an Academy Award nominated performance), who is certainly the most bestial participant - a man who throws his weight around by urinating on bathroom rugs and by barking obscenities repeatedly with the tenacity of a rabid dog. His is a transfixing presence, but not an especially charismatic or romantic one. It's hard to buy him as a "sexy beast". Some critics, such as Mark Dujsik, have suggested that the title refers less to any specific character than it does the enticement of the gangster lifestyle. Writes Dujsik: "The word "sexy" means primal just as much as it does attractive in this situation. This is a dangerous but alluring profession, and if you aren’t careful, it will get to you—even if you are the baddest of the bad." (Which, of course, Gal isn't.) If that was the intention, then the irony would be that Sexy Beast shows the profession from the perspective of a man who has long fallen out of love with it. Crime has presumably paid for Gal, by paying for luxury retirement, but it's a demon that he yearns to excise from himself, only to discover, throughout the course of the film that there is no escaping.

Heck, maybe the title refers to the film's outright strangest element - the shadowy, jeans-wearing anthropomorphic rabbit that pervades the darkest regions of Gal's psyche, intermittently showing up to point a gun in his face and be a general bad omen. The rabbit (sadly, I can't find an acting credit for the character) plays curiously like a direct precursor to Frank, the uncanny leporine who would haunt the titular character's visions in Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko (2001) - but for the fact that this beast is such a mangy monstrosity that it makes Frank look like a cuddly theme park mascot by comparison. It's in the rabbit that I most see the shades of the characteristic freakiness that Glazer was always accustomed to bringing to his advertisements - the WTF-ness of the Dream Club squirrels combined with the unspeakable eeriness underpinning Samuel L Jackson's monologues. It's such a weird and compelling enigma. But is it sexy? Does it embody the notion on which the entire picture pivots?

There are two different angles from which I'm inclined to explain the presence of that rabbit. The first is that it's a twisted kind of tribute to Bugs Bunny. Which might seem a ludicrous thing to insert into a gangster picture, but then the surreal touches in general seem to have been plucked straight out of a Looney Tunes short. Take the opening sequence, where we join a heavily-tanned Gal reclining by his swimming pool. A giant boulder suddenly detaches itself from the adjacent hillside and starts rolling in his direction, while Gal stands in total obliviousness. By a stroke of luck, the boulder just misses Gal and lands with a tranquillity-shattering splash within the pool. The incident is framed with the eye-popping intensity of a cartoon - one could imagine the very same thing happening to Daffy Duck or Wile E. Coyote. Then in the following sequence, when Gal is extolling the virtues of his Spanish abode while gazing adoringly at his wife DeeDee (Amanda Redman), he blows smoke in her direction, which facetiously takes the shape of a heart. Such cartoonish elements add a distinctively playful edge to the film, establishing Sexy Beast as a gangster pic that's going to be as much fun as it is dark and gritty. But they are also clues as to the illusory nature of Gal's present existence. It seems a little detached from reality, and at the same time prone to strange and chaotic intrusions, reminiscent of a wonderful dream on the cusp of being corrupted into a nightmare. Sexy Beast opens with Gal assuming that he's already attained his happy ending, his life in Spain a blissful epilogue to a story he does not want to tell and is all-too eager to banish into oblivion. Here, he has it all - a swanky house in the Mediterranean, a wife he cherishes, the companionship of fellow ex-patriot Aitch (Cavan Kendall, in his final performance) and his wife Jackie (Julianne White), and even a budding son surrogate in Enrique (Alvaro Monje), a local teenager hired to do odd jobs around the villa. That is until Don, an unwelcome figure from that nebulous past, shows up at his door, his sights set on beleaguering Gal into rekindling his connections with the London underground and lending his expertise to the emptying of a bank vault.

Sexy Beast arrived a couple of years after Guy Ritchie revitalised interest in the London gangster picture with his own debut feature, Lock, Stock and two Smoking Barrels, itself a British answer to the Tarantino model that had popular culture so spellbound at the time. From the outset, it would be easy enough to dismiss Sexy Beast as a jump upon a bandwagon, yet as a crime film it defies expectations. The heist is far from the most compelling aspect of the narrative, and takes up little of the runtime. The really juicy elements arise from the psychological chills of the first two thirds, when Gal is having to entertain the house guest from Hell, a character who is intent on dragging Gal from his Costa del Sol paradise and back into the grimy, rain-soaked Hellscape of London. The script, written by Louis Mellis and David Scinto, is structured on unspoken tension after unspoken tension; the sequences centred on Don's intrusion into Gal's sun-soaked world have the claustrophobia and intimacy of a stage play. His presence is enough to completely subvert the entire nature of the ostensible paradise. Don muses that Gal's villa is remote, indicating that he knows that Gal has travelled a long way in order to conceal himself from his prior connections. The very remoteness with which Gal has protected himself now becomes a stifling entrapment, when he is alone in the company of Don. Don's arrival visibly terrifies Gal's circle, and while we get only limited insight into what the man is fully capable of, we don't blame them for a second. Kinglsey's performance as Don is remarkably imposing. He isn't that big - physically, Gal and Aitch should be more than a match for Don, but the sheer ferocity with which Kingsley imbues the character makes it clear just how incredibly nasty things might get if those around him don't tread carefully. Yet for most of his visit, that nastiness manifests in Don's ability to confront them with the very demons they'd assumed they'd left behind on the English shore. He is a reminder that the sins of old must be accounted for, that the sinners will not be let off the hook through a mere change of address. It is not just Gal who has a lot of deeply uncomfortable baggage that surrounds him. Don announces his coming through a telephone call to Jackie, a move that confuses the others, until Don reveals to Gal that he and Jackie once had a sexual relationship, something that could potentially put a strain on her marriage to Aitch if he were ever to find out. DeeDee too has a salacious past that, according to Don, still lingers in the present - she is a former porn star, and we are told that her fan club still meets weekly for their ritual Wednesday Wank. Notably, Don's preferred tactic is to undermine the marital ties between the two central couples, something foreshadowed in the opening sequence, when the falling boulder fractures the motif in the swimming pool tiling of two hearts overlapping. The rabbit likewise makes its first appearance as Gal is anticipating Don's arrival, an occurrence that would appear to align Don with its grotesque enigmas. There is something about Don that seems almost supernaturally menacing. He could be the Devil himself...but for the fact that he also possesses an absurdity that marks him out as just as human and overwhelmed as everybody else. In this regard, we find a telling observation hidden away in the accompanying booklet to the DVD release The work of Jonathan Glazer, upon a scan of what I take to be authentic production notes, juxtaposed with concept sketches for the rabbit. As per these notes: "Gal embraces the universe. The sun. Animals. Sea. Don can't. Don feels diminished by its scale and order. Don has to feel paranoia. He has to hear the audience laughing at him." This idea is never more salient than during a sequence where Gal and Don are driving back from a bar in the nocturnal hours and encounter a goat on the road, which Don believes to be staring at him. Gal dismisses the animal as a "fucking nuisance", while Don seems to detect a greater purpose in the goat's gaze, a feeling that the universe is actively conspiring against him. In a subtle gag, the goat is not revealed to the viewer, and Don instead appears to look directly into the camera, breaking the first wall by commenting on the audience's voyeurism. It is as if he understands, on an intuitive level, that he is a spectacle to be gawked at, the butt of some cosmic joke. A goat merely looking in his direction presents a challenge, in being potentially in on something that he isn't, and this makes Don twitchy. As well it should. The goat is looking at Don because it knows he's going to die.

What makes Sexy Beast an uncanny experience, outside of Kinglsey's hair-raising performance, is the sense that there may be some greater force toying with Gal and company, always manifest in the natural world overlooking the villa. The sun is the very first image we see. As the production notes state, Gal embraces it, but the sun is perhaps not as benevolent as he assumes - through a slick visual trick, it appears to be what sets the falling boulder in motion, giving birth to the chain of events that indicate that his paradise is in jeopardy. Is it a matter of the characters being caught up in the perpetual chaos of the universe, or is something more sinister going on? I think it's as simple as the natural world signifying fate, the notion that the characters fundamentally have no control over where they are headed, and of course the inevitability of death. Which is the second meaning I'd ascribe to that rabbit. It echoes an early sequence where Gal, Aitch and Enrique attempt to assert their mastery over the world and fail spectacularly. The two grown men laugh at Enrique's thwarted efforts to shoot a hare in motion. Aitch then spots a runt of a rabbit nestled in the grasses and can't resist what he assumes will be an easy kill, telling the rabbit to prepare to meet its maker just before his gun disintegrates. The rabbit never budges an inch, as if it knows all along that Aitch is not to be seen as a threat. When the demonic rabbit surfaces in Gal's dream, it is a classic example of the hunter and the hunted reversed, although it seems noteworthy that Gal was the only one of the trio who is not seen attempting to fire his gun in the prior sequence. In fact, he objects to Aitch's eagerness to shoot the rabbit on the grounds that it's "only a little tiddler." What Gal empathises with, we suspect, is the rabbit's smallness in the scheme of things; his confrontations with the rabbit's nightmarish counterpart would indicate that the exact same is true for him. If the sun, the boulder and the goat all point to the inevitability of death, then the rabbit is a direct reflection of Gal's own mortality.

Which is a function also fulfilled by Don. He dies at Gal's villa, an outcome that paradoxically seals Gal's own fate. Paradoxically, because it is actually DeeDee, the personification of Gal's haven and the closest the film has to a moral centre, who pulls the trigger on Don (twice), as things boil over into a particularly ugly confrontation. Enrique appears, making a valiant stab at defending Gal, but also the ill-judged move of bringing a shotgun into the equation, which Don manages to pry away from him. DeeDee, who had the foresight to pick up a gun of her own, shoots Don pre-emptively in the stomach, before an incensed Gal is impelled to pulverise his mortally wounded form even further. Don's dying words are, ironically, words of affection - he looks in Jackie's direction and professes his love for her. An enraged Jackie walks over and joins Gal in the beating, while Aitch stands on the sidelines, silently piecing two and two together. Finally, DeeDee points the gun at Don and finishes him off. This might be considered a mercy killing, albeit one that's perhaps more geared toward sparing the characters the horrors of their own latent beasts than to ending Don's suffering. Don and DeeDee are diametrically opposed, each vying to keep Gal grounded in their respective domains, so it seems entirely fitting that she, and not Gal himself, should be the one to deliver the decisive blow. But it creates a new problem. After all, Don was only the messenger - he was there to recruit Gal's services on behalf of crime boss Teddy Bass (Ian McShane), whom Gal clearly fears as much, if not more so, than Don himself. Gal now has no option but to return to London and do the job, in the hope that Teddy will not suspect that Don's disappearance had anything to do with him. The mutual devotion between Gal and DeeDee may be the purest thing in the entire story, but it gives birth to the fresh new sin that Gal spends the remainder of the picture attempting to purge. His time in London is marked by different cleaning rituals - showering in a hotel room and of course the heist itself, which is carried out by drilling into the vault through a bath on the other side of the wall. Throughout the film, Gal is drawn to water, that classic symbol of cleansing. Much of his time in Spain is spent beside his swimming pool; clearly, there is a lot of unknown evil in Gal's past that he desires to wash away. His love for DeeDee gives him reassurance, some sense that he is not irredeemable. During a hellish dining reception in the London underworld, he sneaks away long enough to give her a telephone call, and to profess his devotion to her in a rambling and incoherent manner ("I love you like a rose loves rainwater, like a leopard loves his partner in the jungle..."). During this sequence DeeDee is shown entirely in silhouette and is mostly silent - the paradise she embodies is barely accessible to Gal, although a small token of affirmation, the utterance of his name, gives him a thread of hope that it is not irrecoverable.

I'm always intrigued by the fact that we never see anything of Gal's passage from Spain to the UK. We simply cut away abruptly from the scene outside his villa to find him underneath the grey London skies. His return to Spain at the end of the film is conveyed through an equally abrupt cut - one moment, Gal is standing beside an otherwise deserted bus stop in the dead of night, having been discarded by Teddy with a piddling £10 for his vault-cracking efforts, the next he's back in the warm embrace of the Mediterranean with the genial company of DeeDee, Aitch and Jackie. This is in contrast to Don's own travels, in which we actually see Don leaving the airport in Spain, and that squeamish episode from his aborted return flight to England (where Don causes a scene, gets arrested, and then claims to have been sexually assaulted in order to get out of trouble). I am reminded of Barton Fink, and how its lack of a clear transitional sequence showing the protagonist setting off for Hollywood has some questioning if he even leaves New York at all. The theory goes that Barton's Californian adventures represent some kind of fantasy vision playing out within Barton's head (I certainly suspect this to be the case for the scenes inside the Hotel Earle). In the same way, Gal's return to London seems to represent the jarring awakening from a dream, the dreariness of the city registering as a particularly harsh rebuke from reality next to the vibrancy of the Costa del Sol. Then at the end, when Gal finds himself cast out of Teddy's underworld, at least for now, he is permitted to retreat back into that dream. I am not proposing that the episodes in Spain are literal fantasies of Gal's, but that there is a deliberate sense of unreality to them that implicates the precariousness of Gal's escape; he could be plucked from his blissful haven at any moment.

On the surface, the conclusion of Sexy Beast would appear to uphold the notion that love conquers all. Not only does Gal make it back to DeeDee at the end of the film, he is even able to cheat Teddy's crew by secretly pocketing a pair of precious earrings during the heist and presenting them as a gift to DeeDee. We also see in the final scene that the hearts at the bottom of the swimming pool have been repaired. And yet it is precisely due to a lack of love that Gal even survives his return trip to London. For Teddy is not fooled by Gal. He makes it clear that the only reason he is allowing Gal to live, in spite of Don's damning disappearance, is that he ultimately did not value Don's life enough to consider him worth avenging. Don was right to be so paranoid about his place in the universe. The grim implication is that the exact same applies to Gal. Teddy makes his contempt for Gal known by paying him such a paltry sum for his efforts (not only does he pay him only £10, he gives Gal a £20 note and demands change) and abandoning him at the bus stop to make his own way to the airport. Gal is released on the basis that he also matters little in the scheme of things - if the outcome were reversed and Don had killed Gal, we suspect that he too would go unavenged. Teddy also makes the troubling remark that he might visit Spain himself in the future, with its implicit suggestion that he will potentially be calling on Gal's services again down the line. So we might question if Gal is even entirely off the hook. As he returns to his Paradise Regained there is a vague threat already hanging over it. As for those repaired hearts at the bottom of the pool, they now conceal a dark secret, for it is revealed at the end that Don's body lies buried underneath. The pool now seems to be less about cleansing Gal's sins than pretending they're not there, something that the characters are all cheerfully participating in. On the surface, Don's intrusion does not appear to have left too much of a stain on their lives. Aitch is telling Jackie about an experimental hair formula, with no hint of any lingering tension as a result of Don spewing his dirty laundry. Is this a testament to the strength of the relationship between Aitch and Jackie, something Don might have underestimated, or to their mutual willingness to bury the uncomfortable truths Don presents along with his murdered body?

Don, though, is not compliant in maintaining his silence. Even from his water-covered grave, he continues to undermine Gal, who acknowledges that Don technically did succeed in convincing him to do the job, but asserts, "You're dead. So shut up". The camera then dives under the pool and travel down a literal rabbit hole, where the demonic leporine is shown busting into a tomb and revealing Don to be very much alive within. This is the film's ultimate punchline - Don, the man who, up until now, might have passed for the Devil, suddenly becomes a twisted Christ figure, miraculously raised from the dead. All the same, the last laugh is conspicuously on Don, as he puffs passively on his cigarette, seemingly indifferent to the rabbit's intentions to rouse him. He does not look like a raging beast, ready to roar back to life and lay waste to everyone on the surface, but a dumbfounded individual who can barely take in anything around him. Gal's closing words are an attempt to reassert mastery over his situation, by insisting that Don is defeated and gone, but that final sequence, with Don and the rabbit both below him, and stirring, would imply that he will never truly be free of his demons. The blissfulness of the final arrangement around the poolside, while it pleases our desire for a triumphant outcome, seems improbable. After all the characters have been through, there is something deceptive in how they sit around discussing monkeys with Beatles haircuts and snickering as though nothing happened, as though they weren't confronted the unspeakable barbarism buried deep within their own psyches. The rabbit, as confoundingly surreal an image as it might be, is the very embodiment of reality, countering Gal's assertion by demonstrating that, no, Don is very much alive, even if the film cannot help but end on an image that revels in the absurdity of the character, as Don becomes once again the butt of a great cosmic joke. Somewhat facetiously, his resurrection underlines the inevitability of death; the rabbit reawakens him as a reminder to Gal that the issue of his own mortality is not one that he can sit on forever. One way or another, and whether or not his criminal credentials should come clawing back to the surface, he and the moth-eaten coney are destined to do business again.

In the meantime, we're left none the wiser as to the identity of that elusive sexy beast. Instead, the title comes to signify the abstract danger that hangs over the characters all throughout, undefined and omnipresent. Whatever form this beguiling beastie might take, it is seemingly as endemic in Gal's Costa del Sol paradise as it is in the grimy streets as London; Gal's narrative journey is in discovering just how little separation exists between the two. Not only do his historic demons encounter no difficulty tracking him down to his remote villa and infiltrating its grounds, the violent murder of Don, and Gal's part in it, prove that he was not successful in purging himself of their contaminants. Don's murder allows the cycle of brutality that Gal aspired to transcend to continue, and when he makes it back to his villa and life is apparently permitted to carry on as normal, Don's continued presence, albeit out of sight, presents a permanent blotch in his idyll. In the end, this may amount to nothing more dramatic than Gal having to accommodate his reignited awareness that he too must eventually die, and the precariousness of his place in the world. The prospect of procuring a happy ending that is not at the mercy of a fundamentally callous and chaotic universe is appealing, but leaves itself open to a dreadfully rude awakening.

The World's Most Horrifing Advertising Animals #48: YoGorilla and Friends

The Wella Gorilla might have gotten up to some fairly crazy shenanigans, but even his nightly schedule of abducting unresponsive humans from their apartment windows and taking them on hair-raising joyrides looks mighty sedate compared to the monkey business that went on in the YoGo universe. Meet YoGorilla, the star of a popular advertising campaign that graced Australian screens in the 1990s and 2000s. Its chief purpose was to incite cravings for the brand of chocolate-flavoured yoghurt/custard product that served as the underlying source of narrative tension in all of YoGorilla's adventures. But the creative minds at the helm were evidentially just as preoccupied with skewering the bombast of contemporary Hollywood blockbusters, which they accomplished with even more precision than those clips Jay Sherman would have the pleasure of roasting every week within The Critic. Speed, Cliffhanger, the Planet Hollywood restaurant franchise - absolutely no prisoners were taken in the ongoing struggle for dessert dominance.

YoGorilla was voiced by Paul Johnstone and, much like the product he was hawking, was an outlandish hybrid concoction, being part Bruce Willis, part Arnold Schwarzenegger and part Sylvester Stallone. He was basically your typical 1990s action hero - brawny, intrepid and with a penchant for causing as much destruction as he set out to rein in. Accompanying YoGorilla on his escapades was his sidekick Snake, a yellow serpent of extremely few words (there is at least one ad where Snake talks - the one where YoGorilla tries his hand at stand-up comedy - which isn't treated with as much in-universe shock as you might imagine). He also had a recurring love interest, whose name I was never able to catch, but I think she's a lion (she has a mane, so make of that what you will) and a recurring nemesis, canine terrorist Hans Doberman (a presumable nod to Hans Gruber, the character played by Alan Rickman in the original Die Hard). There were various other faces that kept popping up within the community, the most prominent being Gordon Gecko, a green lizard modelled after Michael Douglas's character in the movie Wall Street.  His shtick involved barking at his unseen associate Barry through his chunky 90s cellphone and watching aghast as his mode of transport was invariably made collateral in YoGorilla's unrelenting efforts to keep the local YoGo supplies from falling into Hans' nefarious paws (Hans' clear palate for the chocolate-based pudding is bothersome, given that he's a dog and such foods are therefore poison to him). There were also a trio of identical looking critters with fluffy white tops who appear in various bit parts throughout the series, and I draw a complete blank on what species they're supposed to be (Albino lions? Poodles? Polar bears?). The YoGo universe was nothing if not alive, and densely populated with figures all fated to collide with one another in a chaotic hodgepodge of dizzying action.

Really, I'm not sure if mere words can do justice to just how head-spinningly frenetic the results were, or just how ambitiously jam-packed each individual ad was with wall-to-wall gags. To experience a YoGorilla ad is to become immersed in a world with absurdity ricocheting from all directions. There's definitely something in there of the madcap, anything-goes humor of the Airplane! movies (making it appropriate that Otto the inflatable pilot even cameos in one of the ads). The gags are so off the wall, and come at you so thick and fast that you'll barely have time to process what's going before you're hit by another. Some of the ads were able to build up quite extensive narratives, and I believe it was common practice to break the longer ones up into two or three chunks, with overblown cliffhanger sign-offs imploring you to stay tuned for the next installment.

Of all the YoGorilla adventures, the entry that sticks out the most as a bona fide classic would be the Speed homage. This is in spite of the fact that Hans Doberman is conspicuously absent. It's never explained if he's responsible for putting that bomb on the bus; nevertheless, there is a bomb on the bus, and YoGorilla takes it upon himself to assert control of the situation, by forcibly boarding and yelling the bad news directly into in the bus driver's ear. The bus driver is yet another character whose exact species is indiscernible to me (facially he looks somewhat like a Chihuahua, but I'm not sure). His immediate reaction is to bail out by throwing himself out of the bus window; he's followed by a couple of sheep, in a gag that I'm not convinced has any deeper significance than to play into the idea of sheep as followers, but is a perfect example of just how delightfully, weirdly random the gags in this series could get. And it gets zanier still. Snake, who's sporting a wig in this ad, is tasked with filling in for Sandra Bullock, while the passengers manage to keep their cool by bonding over their shared love of YoGo products (YoGo GorillaMix, according to the labels). We get an appearance from Crocodile Dundee, with the twist that he's played by an actual crocodile, getting emotionally intimate with a beatnik hippo (a hip hippo?). There's also something going on between a parrot with a vanilla tub and a giraffe, but I've no idea what - for the life of me, I've never been able to pick out what the giraffe actually says after "Is that vanilla?" Honestly, he sounds drunk. Gordon Gecko makes his obligatory cameo, and the albino trio show up, attempting to earn two bob in exchange for wiping the speeding bus's windscreen. The whole thing is a non-stop parade of fast edits displaying the action from all angles, and intense close-ups of these grotesque claymation critters with their perpetually-popping eyeballs; it not only replicates the dynamism of an action blockbuster, but it frequently threatens to push the ad into borderline nightmare territory. The experience culminates in an explosive (quite literally) ending where they eventually stop the bus, quite forgetting about their bomb dilemma. The entailing visual is extreme, but the damage to the passengers and their YoGo seemingly quite minimal.

The second most notable ad in the YoGorilla campaign involves the yoghurt-hungry ape finding himself up against an extra terrestrial who looks something like the aliens from Mars Attacks! and has devious plans for Earth's YoGo supply. This one gets special mention for incorporating a scene where YoGorilla receives a call from then-President Bill Clinton (in the form of a rhinoceros), in which there is a surprisingly risqué reference to the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Of course. What food product doesn't want to have itself stand out by equating itself with presidential semen?

Lisa's Date With Density (aka She Don't Use Jelly)

Milhouse's presence might have been suspiciously downplayed in "A Milhouse Divided" (for an episode bearing his name in his title), but maybe the extra attention he'd receive in the subsequent Simpsons outing would go a little way in making up for that. "Lisa's Date With Density" (4F01) arrived hot on the heels of "A Milhouse Divided", airing on December 15th 1996 and blessing us with another well-observed story about relationship troubles, this time among the younger Springfieldians. It is in some respects the perfect accompaniment, but the placement is also a little jarring. It's important to keep in mind that the writers don't necessarily coordinate the precise order in which the episodes will air whilst brainstorming and writing them; certainly, there's nothing in "Lisa's Date With Density" to suggest that it was consciously written to come after the Van Houtens' divorce. There are no references, explicit or implicit, to the idea that Milhouse is having to deal with his parents' break-up in the backdrop of everything else he's going through here. "Density" gives Milhouse arguably his most substantial supporting role since Season 3's "Bart's Friend Falls In Love" (shining a much bigger light than before upon who he is outside of his dynamic with Bart), but it's also a particularly punishing installment for the young Van Houten. Having it come directly after "A Milhouse Divided" gives it that extra bite of cosmic cruelty, one of the pivotal jokes being that nobody seems to care much about how Milhouse feels. But it also lends a little added catharsis to the final scene, which allows Milhouse to have the last word (at least as far as the A-story is concerned), proving that he is, however abjectly, a survivor.

As with "A Milhouse Divided", the title of this episode warrants its own special mention. The wordplay is so subtle that if you only glance at it too quickly, it's easy to miss out on it altogether (ditto for "Realty Bites" of Season 9, which I still see people muddle with the title of the Winona Ryder movie). I'll confess that I initially misread it as "Lisa's Date with Destiny", and in my head I still think of that as the correct title. So apologies in advance if I accidentally refer to it as "Destiny" here. And yet, the confusion seems entirely appropriate, in that destiny is something that weights heavily on its central scenario. The outcome is a foregone conclusion, and that is essentially the point.

"Lisa's Date With Density" was, surprisingly, the first episode to centre on the premise of Lisa developing romantic feelings for one of her peers, an avenue already explored with Bart, in "Bart's Girlfriend" of Season 6. We'd seen her on the receiving end of Ralph Wiggum's awkward infatuations in "I Love Lisa", sure, but episodes that involved her putting her own heart on the line had tended to focus on her feelings for adult characters, be it her schoolgirl crush on her teacher Mr Bergstrom in "Lisa's Substitute" or her foretold engagement, in "Lisa's Wedding", to fellow college student Hugh in the far-off futuristic world of 2010. Nelson definitely feels like the perfect candidate Lisa's nascent stirrings, a kid so thoroughly unlike her in every shape and form that it holds that she would find him fascinating - a fascination that, as with so many prepubescent crushes, manifests first as intense irritation. Lisa sees Nelson making an exhibition of himself multiple times throughout the school day and is amazed at his gall and at his reckless compulsion to create a disruption at every opportunity. And then before she knows it, she can't take her eyes off him. As she attempts to rationalise it, "He's like a riddle wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in a vest." (He's also fond of ending communications with the flippant "Smell you later", and was there ever a more obnoxiously 1990s phrase? Will Smith said it in the opening to every episode of Fresh Prince of Bell Air, and Blue/Gary Oak said it incessantly in one of the earlier installments of Pokémon.) But Nelson is also the kind of character with the potential to rip Lisa right out of her comfort zone; any prospective association with him constitutes a risk for Lisa. As per the DVD commentary, it was a pairing that, much like Skinner and Krabappel, the writers had been kicking around for some time but had never figured out how to approach until the eighth season.

"Density" also takes advantage of the fact that, despite being one of the more prominent students at Springfield Elementary, Nelson was still a relative unknown. His status as a serious threat to the Simpsons kids had peaked all the way back in his introductory episode, "Bart The General" of Season 1, after which he was reinvigorated with his catchphrase, "Ha! Ha!", popping up all over as a force of almost cosmic derision. But there hadn't been any episodes since "General" that had focussed on him so extensively as a character, and certainly none that tried to get to grips with what, if anything, was lurking beneath his thuggish exterior. The possibility that Nelson might actually be a sensitive soul acting out as a bully was intermittently raised, but always played solely for humor (the revelation that he has a talent for home economics in "Lisa on Ice", his love of Andy Williams in "Bart on The Road", etc). "Density" was a fresh attempt to explore this question from a position of pathos (but not too much pathos). Nancy Cartwright gets to give a particularly nuanced Nelson performance, which surely compensated for the fact that "Density" is an unusually Bartless affair (he gets a small moment at the start when Skinner accuses him of vandalising Chalmers' Honda, but his only role within the actual narrative is a single scene where he cautions Lisa against an entanglement with Nelson).

Adding an extra dollop of pathos to the mix is that this story is actually about a love triangle, with Milhouse being the unhappy third party who's emphatically left out in the cold. I could be wrong about this, but I think "Density" was also the first episode to explore Milhouse's unrequited crush on Lisa, at least in the present. It built on an idea introduced in "Lisa's Wedding", which prophesied that an ill-fated teenage fling was in their future, going so far as to insinuate that Lisa would lose her virginity to Milhouse before unceremoniously dumping him. The adult Milhouse explicitly cites Lisa as his "one true love", but the entire premise of Hugh being Lisa's first love (ie: her first serious relationship) would indicate that she had no such delusions about where their puppy romance was headed (her implied willingness to get physically intimate, however, raises questions as to what actually went on between them). For now, all Milhouse wants is for Lisa to notice and respect him, but alas, her only interest is in using him as a middleman to pass love notes onto Nelson, ultimately resulting in a painful misunderstanding that has Milhouse hospitalised for most of the second half. The kid is our underdog, sweetly endearing in his unfounded hopefulness that Lisa will eventually latch onto his winning qualities, yet wretchedly upfront and utterly inept in his futile attempts at self-assertion. "But I'm ALL Milhouse!", he indignantly insists in response to Lisa's condescending assurance that she wants to bring out the Milhouse in Nelson. "Plus, my mom says I'm the handsomest guy in school." Kirk spent the entirety of the preceding episode demonstrating that he's out of touch with anything resembling dignity, and here we see how his son fares no better. Mr Largo puts it most succinctly when he firmly declares that "Nobody likes Milhouse!" - although it is suggested that Janey might secretly like him, and possibly also Uter. So much of how this episode plays out puts me in mind of a slightly meaner version of Peanuts, with its parade of tragic young lovers all grappling with feelings they can barely understand, helplessly infatuated with people who wouldn't give them the time of day, naively clinging to whatever shreds of hope they can get that they might actually be loved in return.

Milhouse does get a moment of explicit endorsement, albeit one that he isn't around to witness. Bart, during his only substantial scene, makes it clear that he sees Milhouse as a worthier choice of boyfriend for Lisa than Nelson. Lisa has a compelling counterargument: "Milhouse likes Vaseline on toast!" For a while there, a number of us naively assumed that this was included as a reference to The Flaming Lips' song "She Don't Use Jelly", but no. Showrunner Josh Weinstein confirms on the DVD commentary that it was inspired by a kid who would regularly board his school bus with a slice of Vaseline on toast at the ready...which was honestly more than I'd wanted to know. It's here that I'm going to plug the DVD commentary for "Lisa's Date With Density" as quite possibly the second most hilarious of all the Simpsons commentaries (the most hilarious being that of "Marge Be Not Proud", with its string of horror stories about working with Lawrence Tierney), if only for everyone else's aghast reactions when Weinstein shares this particular anecdote. (Weinstein: Apparently, you can do that...don't hold me responsible, but it's very healthy... Mike Scully: It's NOT very healthy!) Come to think of it, wasn't there a scene where Homer ingested an entire jar of petroleum jelly in the Season 4 episode "Lisa The Beauty Queen"? And this was before Weinstein even joined the show staff? Have the Simpsons writers known multiple people with this eccentric culinary inclination?

"Lisa's Date With Density" is yet another Season 8 installment that's often overlooked, with many fans shrugging it off for being overly straightforward. I will agree that the narrative trajectory with Lisa and Nelson has few genuine surprises, going pretty much exactly where you'd expect from the outset. Lisa falls for Nelson, believing that there's a nicer, more upstanding citizen to be wheedled out of him. For a fleeting moment it looks as though she might have succeeded, but in the end his badness (and the status quo) prevails. Lisa terminates their relationship and goes home, thank you and goodnight. A predictable plot needn't be a death knell, however. What makes this one great is just how beautifully it delves into the characters along away, and the small, revealing moments it brings to the surface. The suggestion that Nelson has feelings should not, in itself, come as much of a revelation. We'd recently seen ample evidence of that in "A Milhouse Divided", where he'd opened up about how his parents' marriage fell apart after his mother developed a weakness for throat lozenges. There, his moment of soul-bearing was double-edged; his tearful admission that, "By the end, her breath was so fresh, she wasn't really my mother any more", an absurd one, but with darker undertones when you take into account that his mother's partialities are being used as a family-friendly, Muntz-adverse allusion to drug addiction and how it warps a person. "Lisa's Date With Density" further explores the idea of Nelson coming from a troubled background, but with a more subtle hand. There's a scene where Lisa accompanies Nelson back to his house after school, and his parents are conspicuously absent, the only mention of them in the entire episode being Nelson's off-hand comment that they haven't had any visitors since his dad "went nuts". The dilapidated state of the property, and small details such as the stolen Kwik-E-Mart doormat, are allowed to speak for themselves and tell us as much as we need to know about what Nelson has had to live with off of screen. "Density" was undoubtedly the most sympathetic an episode had ever been toward Nelson at this stage, but it's a point that Scully's script smartly avoids overselling. It doesn't turn Nelson's life into a walking sob story. He receives no big moment of emotional breakdown, as he did in "A Milhouse Divided". The most we get are a couple of little hints that he regrets that things can't work out differently, but by the end it's clear that Nelson is fully resigned to being who he is - not because he's necessarily happier that way, but because being a reckless, belligerent outlaw is the only way he knows how to survive in the world that he's been raised in. And Lisa comes to understand that it maybe isn't on her to be interfering with that. She doesn't condemn Nelson for his failure to reform. She gets angry with him for lying to her, but the bulk of her annoyance is directed at her own idealistic thinking ("I was a fool to think I'd actually changed you. Maybe I was seeing things in you that weren't really there.")

Just as "Lisa's Date With Density" is often dismissed for being an aggressively straightforward story, so too is it often perceived as a more cynical episode than it really is, offering no possibility of redemption for Nelson at the end and having Lisa walk away sadly, realising she's been played a fool. To the contrary, I think this is hands down one of the season's most thoughtful, quiet and affecting character studies, eclipsed only by "Grade School Confidential" (both episodes were directed by Susie Dietter, who does a masterful job of bringing out the moodiness of their respective scenarios). The major difference being that, unlike "Grade School Confidential", the conclusions of this particular study don't point us to a happy ending. It's honest, but not excessively bitter in its conclusions, a point I would make by comparing it to another Lisa episode from Season 8. Just as I see "A Milhouse Divided" and "Grade School Confidential" as inverted reflections of one another, I would argue that "Density" has its own "twin" episode at the latter end of the season, that being "The Old Man and The Lisa". Both episodes involve Lisa entering into friendlier terms with typically antagonistic characters, believing there to be something redeemable about them, only to learn an unhappy lesson about leopards not changing their spots (it would happen with Sideshow Bob too, but that's quite a way off). Lisa takes Mr Burns' inevitable betrayal a lot harder than she does Nelson's, and why shouldn't she? What Burns did was so much more monstrously depraved, what he exposed Lisa to much more unspeakably traumatic. And it followed on from Lisa genuinely believing that the old man had changed and standing up for him against her family's mockery. Pure though her intentions might have been, there's a sense that she has debased herself by associating with Burns, and the only way for her cleanse her soul at the end is by rejecting his offer than she benefit financially from his misdeeds. "Old Man" is a thoroughly cynical slice of Simpsons life, the only brightness being in Lisa's ability to remain true to her morals. The way "Density" resolves is a lot more modest, but also more complex. There's no question that Nelson has done a bad and unpleasant thing with his malicious targetting of Skinner, but he isn't upheld as the clear-cut villain of the scenario (it helps that, unlike Burns' horrific mass porpoise slaughter, the coleslaw-heavy offensive on Skinner's property is played largely for humor). Nor does Lisa appear to have believed so sincerely in his capacity for change. She's prepared to give Nelson the benefit of the doubt when he shows up at her house in the early hours of the morning, insisting that he's been falsely accused, but does not sound overly shocked when the truth later outs. As with "Old Man", Lisa finds herself having to review her role in the equation, but all that's required here is for her to graciously go her own way, recognising that (unlike Burns), Nelson was never asking for her support in the first place. I don't see that as a cynical conclusion, but a sensitive one in which the characters come to some understanding about human weakness and their personal limitations. The point of "Density" is not that Nelson is an inherently bad apple, unworthy of anyone's affections. It implies that there's a reason for why he's the way he is, just as there's a reason why he's not looking to change that, one that goes a little further than the usual snag of "the character can't grow and improve because the status quo wouldn't allow it". And where Nelson rejects the possibility of change, Lisa takes the opportunity to do a little growing herself.

I also don't see "Density" as a sardonic refutation of the old cliche that love conquers all, a reading that dramatically overestimates what Lisa and Nelson have between them. Because let's be real here - they're kids, and there isn't a whole lot of substance to their attraction beyond curiosity and a passing fancy. They do form something of an emotional attachment, enough for Nelson to seem genuinely startled when Lisa initiates their break-up, but there isn't a sense that they were ever massively devoted to one another. I think it's far more accurate to say that while Lisa and Nelson both liked each other, in the end they just don't like each other enough. Nelson is certainly intrigued by Lisa, and by the freshness that her rose-coloured outlook brings to his table, but not so much that he would treat that as incentive to mend his ways. Likewise, Lisa might be captivated by Nelson's bad boy persona, but she cannot overlook the aspects of his behaviour that she finds troubling. And compared to "Lisa's Substitute", where Lisa was always leaving herself wide open to eventual heartbreak, here she seems to have always entered into the situation a little too warily to be overly hurt by the outcome. No tears are shed, and she and Nelson are able to part ways on basically amicable terms. Her final scene has her emotionally grazed, but already acknowledging the light at the end of the tunnel - for now, she's not interested in thinking about her next crush, but doesn't doubt that she will learn to open her heart up again.

Before then, we get plenty of awkward character moments where Lisa and Nelson each get to sit in one other's worlds and struggle to know what to make of them. Lisa is more vocal in her own philosophical discordance with what passes as normal in Nelson's realm - his ownership of a "Nuke The Whales" poster and his predilection for singing songs about teachers being brutally decapitated - but Nelson seems every bit as baffled by the various manifestations he encounters of Lisa's personality (while visiting her house, there's a background gag where he picks up her plush bear, as if he can't grasp what it's even for, and churlishly casts it aside). I'm in two minds on how to interpret that scene with Lisa trying to impress Nelson by coaxing Snowball II into acting like a baby, and failing. Lisa insists that the cat is usually very compliant with her role-playing, implying that Snowball II is possibly being thrown off by the negative energy in the room coming from Nelson (and the way Bart's eyeline follows the fleeing cat as he enters the scene is a really nice detail, as if he's already picking up on the disturbance). Or maybe there's a metaphor in there for what she's trying to do with Nelson - ie: forcing a bad-tempered animal into a part they are not inclined to play, and getting her face swatted for her efforts. Lisa's assumption that she can bring out the better qualities in Nelson is, notably, at odds with what she'd previously told Bart in "Bart's Girlfriend" about how it's naive to think you can change a person - although even there, her yearning for a surly young library assistant implied than she wasn't necessarily going to heed her own words. And to be fair to Lisa, she seems ready to take the obvious lesson midway through the episode, but gets pushed into persistence by Marge, who gives her daughter some flagrantly bad advice on the level of the teachings she initially tried to impress on her in "Moaning Lisa" (if Marge were being halfway sensible about this, she would tell Lisa that she's only 8 years old and shouldn't be too worried about finding a partner at her time in life). As with "Moaning Lisa", the advice very transparently stems from Marge's own insecurities about her life's choices. Agreeing with Lisa that it's impossible to change Nelson's fundamental character would be tantamount to admitting that she failed in her own aspirations of transforming the "loud, crude and piggish" Homer into "a whole new person". For evidence of how that's working out, we need look no further than the B-story, which has Homer acquiring an autodialler and using it to bug the town with an incessant message promising non-stop happiness in exchange for a dollar.

It's the "Happy Dude" subplot that slightly lowers the tone of "Density", making it feel like a less assured piece overall than "Grade School Confidential". It's reminiscent of Homer's sugar pile subplot in "Lisa's Rival", also written by Scully, in that it's conspicuously a silly B-story for the sake of a silly B-story, to bring levity to a more grounded Lisa adventure. There's an intermittent friction between the great, perceptive character observations for which Scully had such a knack as a writer and the excessively crass energy that would dominate the series during his impending turn as showrunner. "Lisa's Rival" arrived at a time when Homer was coming to feel less like an everyman than an out-and-out Looney Tune, but "Density" signalled the next logical step in his debasement, in having him be really kind of odious. You can certainly see the Homer of the Scully era creeping his way into the picture, with his wholly unrepentant efforts to scam his neighbours out of money (and later try to pass it off as Marge's doing). You could argue that he isn't doing anything too egregiously terrible, on the grounds that a) he's only asking for every dialled individual to send him a single dollar, not their life savings and b) nobody except the ridiculously gullible is going to fall for it anyway (we get no evidence of anyone actually responding besides Abe and Jasper). Yet he still manages to victimise the entire town by beleaguering them with his inane recording. "Density" also went some way in cementing Marge's role in this equation, by having her murmur disapprovingly and point out just how stupid and inconsiderate Homer is being, but otherwise stand back and let it happen. What was preventing her from unplugging the autodialler and dumping it in the trash while Homer's back was turned?

Still, Homer's seedy antics do allow for a few great character moments. Often quoted is Burns' avaricious musing: "One dollar for eternal happiness? I'd be happier with the dollar." Even better, for my money, is Apu's broadside, "A jolly rancher is not a sprinkle, sir! Perhaps in Shangri-la they are, but not here!" Best of all, though, is a sequence entailing a rare glimpse of marital discord within the Flanders' walls, with Maude getting progressively exasperated with Ned for his reluctance to unplug the phone and stop Happy Dude's nocturnal intrusions. A seldom cited but wonderful thing about Season 8 is that it gave Maggie Roswell, one of the show's more undervalued cast members, numerous chances to shine. Helen Lovejoy finally got to fulfil her antagonistic potential in "The Twisted World of Marge Simpson", while Luann Van Houten delivered a string of cutting one-liners about life with Kirk in "A Milhouse Divided".  Here, we have Maude's revelatory delivery of "If you don't unplug that phone right now, you're sleeping on the lawn!", demonstrating that even she finds Ned's deference awfully hard to bear at times. I'll also give the B-story points for the fact that, unlike the sugar pile in "Lisa's Rival", Happy Dude does have some bearing on how the A-story is resolved.There's a clever bit of narrative intersection in the third act, when Wiggum, Lou and Eddie raid the Simpsons' house, supposedly in pursuit of the coleslaw punks, leading to a dramatic fake-out where it looks like Wiggum might have killed Nelson, when in actuality he's shot the autodialler. Having busted Homer and thwarted Happy Dude, Wiggum considers that closure enough for the night and effectively decides to let Nelson and co go scot-free. Of course, Nelson still has to answer for what he did to Lisa.

Lisa can see that what Marge is saying about Homer is straight-up denial, yet that doesn't deter her from having a go at it with Nelson, convincing him to swap out his wardrobe for more presentable attire and waxing lyrical to him beneath the moonlight. Lisa's gestures might seem hopelessly ungainly, but they get results, at least in the short-term. Nelson kisses her, if only to buy a few moments of silence from Lisa's poetic musings, and discovers that he likes it. It's a development that immediately brings them into direct conflict with Jimbo, Dolph and Kearney (and produces the immortal two-liner: "You kissed a girl?" "That is so gay!"). Lisa assumes that the trio are a toxic influence on Nelson and, given that they are all visibly older than him (in Kearney's case, god only knows how much older), she's probably correct. But it's not hard to understand why Nelson might view things differently. In the absence of an attentive family, their camaraderie likely provides him with a sense of  belonging. He's unwilling to give that up, and appears to have zero qualms about participating in their hooliganism when Lisa isn't around. Which doesn't automatically mean that his feelings were Lisa were feigned. It's not that he chooses their fellowship over Lisa so much as he naively assumes that he can have them both. He wants the freedom to express himself the only way he knows how, though his antisocial actions, but he also seems to like the neutralising presence that Lisa brings to his life, and having the option of retreating back to it. Lisa's prior observation about him being an enigma wrapped in a vest stands by the end, since what Nelson wants isn't entirely clear-cut. His insistence that Lisa was always misguided in thinking that she could ever make an upstanding citizen out of him is compounded by his response when she asks him why he ever wanted to be with her. He admits that she was the first person who believed that there was latent good in him. He wasn't able to make that transition, and agrees that Lisa should not have expected it, but he nevertheless appreciated that she was willing to look at him and see more than just the same obnoxious hoodlum as everyone else. The possibility that he could at least be perceived differently is something that Nelson has clearly responded to, suggesting that there is a part of him that wishes that he could be a better person. He doesn't know how to get there, but his interactions with Lisa enabled him to at least rub shoulders with the suggestion. He rounds off his poignant admission with a bitter sting, by putting the onus on Lisa for her inevitable disappointment. "I guess you really blew that one, huh?" he states, insinuating that it really wasn't his fault if Lisa was projecting her mistaken assumptions onto him. Nelson isn't entirely blameless on that front - he did lie to Lisa and take advantage of her desire to see the best in him - but Lisa seems prepared to accept responsibility. She does not disagree with Nelson's observation, and walks away with no further hard feelings. From the looks of it, Nelson is sorry to see her go.

The final sequence, as Lisa makes her way back to Evergreen Terrace, visibly sadder but presumably a good deal wiser from her experience, is truly a thing of beauty, so haunting in its colours and so arousing in its direction and score. The evocative atmosphere, and the quiet sense of overall solitude, remind me a little of the sequence in "Moaning Lisa" when she sets out to find Bleeding Gums Murphy (and, as with "Moaning Lisa", we have the questionable sight of an 8-year-old girl wandering through town unaccompanied at a potentially dangerous hour). Along the way she's greeted by Milhouse, who emerges from his house to give his Shih Tzu an early morning toileting (I was going to label it another one-off pet, like Smithers' Yorkie, Lovejoy's sheepdog and Ralph's cat named Mittens, but according to the Simpsons Wiki, the Van Houtens' Shih Tzu has appeared in a few other places). He becomes the first to learn that she and Nelson are no longer an item, and asks her if she has anyone in mind for her next crush; she responds that it could be just anyone. It's a perfunctory answer that barely conceals Lisa's disinterest in the matter, but Milhouse takes it as confirmation that he has, against all odds, come out as the victor of the scenario. The final shot is a freeze frame of him leaping into the air (unwittingly throttling his dog in the process) in celebration of that rekindled hope for the possibility, however remote, that his place in the newly rising sun might be coming. It's a meagre prize, but Milhouse seizes it for all that it's worth, and we both pity and admire him all the better for it.