25x02 Treehouse of Horror XXIV

7.0/10 on a post-classic Simpsons scale. It's rarely a good sign for The Simpsons or any show really when the high point of your episode is the opening credits. But the "couch gag" done by Guillermo Del Toro was fun combination of his horror sensibilities and the show's comedic sensibilities, with enough homages to keep you googling for hours.

The three stories themselves were okay at best. The opening Dr. Seuss story struggled to inject horror-y elements into the conceit, but having the nuclear family take part in a Cat in the Hat parody, while throwing in basically every Seuss reference imaginable was good enough for a larf, as Mr. Burns might say. There wasn't much of a point or throughline to it, and some of the doggerel was strained, but it was enjoyable enough, even if most of the jokes amounted to "that was kind of cute rather than laugh out loud funny."

The middle story, about Bart's head being severed and then grafted onto Lisa's body was the absolute pits. Just a rushed, limp, go-nowhere storyline that made little sense even in the confines of Treehouse of Horror. This is the type of segment where the show's dwindling comedic chops show up, and you realize that past Treehouse segments have been just as underdeveloped, but you could go with the flow because the laughs were there.

The last story, a parody of the 1932 film Freaks was a mixed bag. I watched Freaks right before this episode, so I appreciated some of the direct homages a little better than I did when I watched this originally. Making Moe the featured "freak" and going with a story of Marge as the decent acrobat while Homer was the jerk strongman was a nice way of slotting the cast of Springfield into the story. The jokes were hit or miss, but it did have two of the funniest bits of the night ("the circus folk singing "Superfreak" in solemn tones and Moe's line that "a wedding is no time to worry about threats from your wife's former lover"). And the How I Met Your Mother inspired tag was a shallow but solid laugh for me as a someone who just finished rewatching that show too.

Overall, it's one of those "not great, but pretty decent" episodes that would have made it the embarrassment of an earlier season, but something that just scrapes by to "good" when grading on a curve in the show's later years.