2x08 Bart the Daredevil

[7.5/10] It’s funny to see these early episodes fall into the same traps many later episodes do. At first, I wanted to gripe about the fact that the opening part of “Bart the Daredevil” has nothing to do with the end of it. Homer and Bart watching professional wrestling in parallel takes a very circuitous route toward Bart attempting to jump the Springfield Gorge on his skateboard.

And yet, when I stepped back and thought about it, I realized they were connected at a deeper level than plot. The opening bit is part of the wry humor of this episode, basically arguing that the pack of workaday drunks in Moe’s bar are little more evolved and mature than a group of ten-year-old boys. That goes double for Homer and Bart, who offer the same assessments of the match, pull the same seat-theft on their chums, and share the same level of excitement over Truckasaurus. The import is clear -- for better or worse, this father and son pair are on the same page.

So when Homer goes to stop his son from jumping the gorge, it’s not just as a parent trying to prevent his son from doing something stupid, it’s about a kindred spirit understanding and trying to step in to save a likeminded idiot from harm. The truth is that both Homer and Bart enjoy stupid things. (I say as someone who enjoys many of those same things.) There’s a strange synchronicity in arguably Homer’s finest moment as a parent coming when he basically tries to throw himself on the grenade that is doing one more.

Oh yeah, and then he falls into a massive canyon. There may be no Simpsons moment more iconic than Homer plummeting down the rocky cliffside, being airlifted out of it, and then rolling back down into it all over again. There’s a reason for it! It’s an absurd, amusing, ridiculous sequence, translating Chuck Jones-style flair into The Simpsons’ world.

It’s funny, I tend to think of these early episodes as much more down to earth than what would come later. That mostly bears out here. There’s a much more sly sense of humor at play, between the extended sequences of Homer and Bart’s squared circle spectatorship, to Homer’s watch-checking sit through Lisa’s recital before a monster truck rally, to other bits of the low-key observational humor that dominated the show in the early going. I still like that side of The Simpsons, one that retained more of Matt Groening’s Life in Hell style takes on modern family life (Bart continuing to do stunts despite claiming to have learned a lesson from Dr. Hibbert) and smaller moments of sweetness. (See: Lisa’s “I reached him” when Homer hums a little Schubert on the drive to the arena.)

But this is also an episode where the family sedan gets chewed up by a giant mechanical dinosaur/truck, and Homer plummets down into a craggy pit over and over but survives with little more than a glum muttering to close out the episode. For all the greater realism that these initial episodes supposedly have, there’s plenty of lunacy to go ‘round.

Still, I keep coming back to this as a great Bart and Homer episode, one that recognizes how the parent and child are both still a little immature and prone to stupid actions, but also how Homer cares for his boy, however inept his parenting may be. Sometimes Homer’s stupid risks come in service of looking after his kids, especially the one who relates the most to him and vice versa. It makes for one of the series’s most iconic moments, and one of its sweetest tales for the father and son.