18x20 Stop or My Dog Will Shoot!

[5.1/10 on a post-classic Simpsons scale.] I’m not sure I laughed once at this. (Maybe at “signs are also electrified” and “that’s because I soaked him in slime” and the dark gag about the digested rabbit). It’s watchable, and there’s a half-hearted attempt at imbuing some emotion, so I suppose I can’t dip it below a 5/10, but suffice it to say, this is not a good episode.

Instead, it’s an episode where the story ping pongs around, animals act like people, and people act like animals. The reality has already been stretched, but Homer being a jerk, coming off like a nincompoop beyond even his usual expansive idiocy, and acting like an honest to goodness dog is all pretty exagerratedly awful. By the same token, trying to give Santa’s Little Helper a cop arc could theoretically be funny, but it all gets very cartoony very quickly.

Nevermind that we spend an interminable amount of time at a harvest festival in the first act, spend time on pointless Seventies cop show adventures in the second act, and get a new pet snake introduced in the third act. The show can’t sustain one story at this point, and the seams definitely show. Also, the episode leans a lot on the Chief Wiggum-Lou dynamic, which became really weak and strained and full of bad humor at this point in the show.

Even the minor adventurousness from the episode – putting SLH into a first person perspective for a sequence – ends up coming off weird with shoehorned in gags than something that really works. Again, I could forgive a lot of this stuff if the episode was funny, but it just wasn’t, and that makes the rest of its flaws seem all the worse.

The only really redeeming thing is that there’s a mini-arc of Bart feeling estranged from his dog and the two reuniting, but the cartooniness of the whole thing blunts the emotion the episode tries to wring from it. Overall, it’s a dud that doesn’t add anything worthwhile to the Simpsons canon.