32x20 Mother and Child Reunion

[5.9/10 on post-classic Simpsons scale] I am a sucker for episodes that explore Lisa and MArge’s relationship, so this should have been right up my alley. There’s even a good emotional core to this one. Lisa starts to feel like her life up to the age of seventeen has been one big effort to follow other people’s expectations, and wants to wait on college, or not go at all, to find her real self. Marge has been scrimping and nurturing and struggling to lift her daughter up so that Lisa can achieve the things Marge never had the opportunity to. Their friction after Lisa decides not to go to college is a natural extension of those things, and they feel true to life.

But there’s a few problems from there. The biggest of them is that the show doesn’t really explore the conflict once it sets it up. We understand why Marge and Lisa have issues with one another, but Lisa founding an after school education training academy and Marge...grumbling I guess??...does nothing to advance their conflict or make it realer. They’re just estranged and that’s it.

They come back together just as arbitrarily. There’s something decent about Bart smoking Lisa up and reminding her of all the things Marge did for her. But rather than actually resolving the situation in any sort of emotionally satisfying way, Lia just brings out a “mom translator” who spouts a bunch of clichés and the mother and daughter’s relationship is magically fixed. It’s a really weak progression and ending to such a strong idea.

The pacing for this one is also all over the pace. We go from a good amount of time spent with Lisa at 17 and starting this cold war with Marge, to racing through her life from educator to governor to President, with no time for anything to breathe or for any of it to matter.

The laughs here are mild. I’ll cop to enjoying some of Werner Herzog’s shtick (what is it with him and appealing all over the comedy map in the past few years?). But the jokes about the future are all tepid and reheated, and the cameos from George Stephenopolis and Nate Silver were yawners.

I’m also going to trot out the nerd complaint here -- this doesn’t line up with the show’s continuity at all. The future episodes have always been inconsistent, so I don’t want to raise too much of a stink over it, especially when it relies on fortune tellers and magic astrology devices. But the writer of “Mother and Child Reunion”, J. Stuart Burns, wrote some of the future episodes this contradicts! We’ve already seen depictions of 1. Lisa and Bart graduating high school, 2. Lisa in college, and 3. Lisa becoming President that contradict this episode in pretty marked ways. I know it’s a fool’s errand to expect the show to maintain any sort of narrative consistency at this point, but it’s still irksome.

Overall, I could forgive the continuity snarls, but I can’t forgive the botching of a promising Lisa/Marge relationship episode.