Good intentioned but ultimately, the skippable episode of this season. At least it didn't go into this ridiculous bromance stuff like last season.
Same problem as The Simpsons. It looks the same and sounds the same as in the good old days except it’s just not funny or good anymore.
In the NBA there is something called a +/- radius, it shows how many points are scored verses given up when a player is in the game. If this applied to acting and Morgan had this, who by the way was my favorite character period around season 7 of TWD, then he'd easily be the worst rating imaginable. This character who was formally so amazing just bombs every scene he's in now with his bullshit passivness. He once pulled someone's guts out of him with his BARE HANDS, now he doesn't even have any. This episode was at least twice to three times as good as the opener, which doesn't say much, but does say this show is better the less it focuses on Morgan, which absolutely breaks my heart but couldn't be more obvious.
Seriously, what the heck did I just watch?
I'm not sure who thought any of this was a good idea but it will probably go down as the worst episode of the entire series? Just, wow.
I don't normally rank individual episodes nor review them, but dear god was this episode awful. It's so terrible it inspired me to actually go to the effort.
I was thinking this season has a lot of the taste of modern Simpsons to it, but dear god this episode has plumbed new depths in bad that not even The Simpsons can reach. How did it ever get released?
When i see episodes with lot of negative comments i usually think that people are overreacting and they are really not that bad.
Its usually the case but... but holy shit, it was really that bad.
What’s happened to Mr Burns? He sounds like someone who can’t do a Mr Burns impression
I lost count of how many times groups of people with guns happened upon other groups of people with guns in this episode. The episode did feature the return of Daniel, which is a plus, except that a major plot point last season was that he was suffering from dementia, and now in this episode, he's just back as the leader of a group of parents, fresh as a daisy? The writers seemingly tried to explain away his miraculous recover from dementia by having him drink yerba mate for "focus." Seriously?? Call every neurologist in the the country! Fear the Walking Dead has come up with a simple cure for Alzheimer's! :facepalm: The big reveal about PADRE was super lame and underwhelming. Otherwise, the writing in this episode is dreadful and often nonsensical, and the acting is uninspired. At one point, Crane is really worried when his father leaves some binoculars behind. I mean, he's way more worried than anyone on planet earth should ever be about binoculars. So he runs off to find his father and give him the binoculars. His sister asks why he has to take the binoculars to his father, and he says, "Because how will he see what's coming without them?" Dreadful.
It's almost as if everyone involved knows this shit sucks, and they're just trying to get to the finish line at this point.
I thought this episode sucked. Boring as hell.
I am a simple man. I see Sam Adesanya, I watch.
[9.5/10 on a Selman Era scale] Remember when the Simpsons felt like human beings? It seems like such a long time ago now. The show’s still had its emotional high points over the years (largely while Matt Selman was serving as substitute showrunner for Al Jean), but in large part, Homer, Marge, Bart, and Lisa stopped feeling like real people and started feeling like joke machines who existed to be bumped from zany scene to zany scene.
Despite its fantastical dreamworld setting, “A Mid-Childhood’s Night Dream” is achingly real. It is founded on real emotions: of parent worried about losing the sweet children she knows to the inexorable march of years and growing up, of kids maturing and wanting to be seen for what they are and not what they were, of the way that relationships evolve over time but in a way that doesn’t have to diminish them, of the fact that fifth grade boys definitely need to learn about deodorant.
It is beautiful. I’m a firm believer in the idea that oftentimes the abstract and the impressionsitic can do a better job of getting at truth than the literal. So I love using the dream imagery of bubbles, representing both a touching memory of domestic bliss and the sense of something precious about to pop. I love the visceral panic of Marge losing Bart’s hand in a department store, frantically trying to find him, and encountering a dismissive teenager instead. I love the use of size here, with Ms. Peyton growing immensely when warning about the end of Bart’s childhood and Marge feeling tiny as she imagines walking through her home as an empty nester.
All of these big choices communicate the feeling of what Marge is confronting in the way that's accentuated by the exaggerated and surreal imagery. It’s disorienting and in some cases distressing to see, which puts is in Marge’s shoes.
Frankly, it felt like one of the dream episodes of The Sopranos, which is high compliment! (Maybe it’s just the mutual premise of food poisoning prompting emotional epiphany and psychological hardship with your kids growing up.)
Not for nothing, it’s still funny! There is a lot of heavy stuff here, with Marge reckoning with the fact that Bart may not be her “special little guy” anymore. But there’s also a lot of cute, clever, and downright hilarious choices here. For whatever reason, my favorite jokes in the whole thing were the freeze frame gags in Marge’s file folder of yesterday’s thoughts. Absurd bits like “I have manly thumbs” and “Do I have to watch The Wire?” really tickled my funny bone for whatever reason.
But honestly, every comic element of this one clicked. Ms. Peyton’s grave seriousness about preteen B.O. hit home in an amusing way; the inner Lisa half-translating our favorite eight-year-old’s insights in Marge’s “Lucy dream” was a clever device; Homer’s various transformations were creative and fun; and all they kept finding new layers to the gags about food making Marge nauseous in a way that surprised me. The advent of a “summer sushi” stand, and the radio ad involving “warm mayonnaise” got especially absurd laughs out of me.
With all the humor, the episode never loses the heart or the truth behind what it’s doing. I love the little insights here that feel very human. The fact that Marge remembers a time when Bart was the sweet one and Lisa was a handful is a particularly nice touch, dovetailing with the theme of how kids are constantly evolving, and that's okay.
There’s some clever writing in how “bounce-a-thon” becomes the inflection point for Marge’s anxiety about those changes. Her realization that Lisa is still a mommy’s girl and so she’s desperate to be there to capture a photo of Lisa for her scrapbook smartly dramatizes the immense pressure Marge is feeling to hold onto her kids’ childhoods by any means necessary. The fact that Bart won’t do the thumbs up photo to add to her scrapbook is an equally canny choice to turn their conflict into something tangible.
It too feels real. Again, the lived in touches help drive this one home. Bart being able to express himself so maturely about why he doesn’t want to do the pose leaves Marge taken aback. Her removing a splinter from his palm makes her realize how much his hand has grown. These small signs that your son is not a little kid anymore pile up, in a way that would make any parent wistful.
And yet, what I admire most about the episode is it doesn’t resolve all of this anxiety in a place of hopelessness, or cheap gags, or even a saccharine “their childhoods will always be there” message. Instead, Marge embraces Bart doing comic picture poses over sweet ones. She laughs at the cleverness of his faux-mooning tableau. She may still mourn the little boy he isn’t, but she comes to love the young man he’s become, and there is great beauty in that, to love the evolution and change you see as someone grows into the person they’re going to be. Bart may not be her sweet and “special little guy” in the same way, but now he’s her “funny little guy”. Being validated like that means as much to Bart as it does to Marge.
In a strange way, it gives Marge what she wanted. The episode returns to hand-holding again and again as a motif. Marge remembers her little boy grasping her fingers as a sign of maternal bond. She remembers the bittersweetness of convincing him to let go to go to kindergarten. She senses his disinterest when she removes a splinter from his hand now.
It’s a potent image.You don’t have to dig too deep to understand the meaning and impact of letting go, of feeling a loss of connection, that's represented by your child not reaching for you anymore.
That's why there’s such catharsis in the final moments, when Marge earnestly likes Bart’s little gag, and he’s plainly touched by being affirmed in that way. So he does what he always did. He takes his mother’s hand and invites her into his world, into the life he has now and the person he’s becoming. I get misty-eyed just thinking about it.
That's not typical for The Simpsons in its post-classic years. And yet, under the new regime, the door has opened wider and wider to this kind of earned emotion and earnest character exploration once again. (See also: last season’s superlative “Pixelated and Afraid”.) The show had leveled out after the insanity of the Scully years, but largely stagnated, in ways that sanded down the characters. Now, they’re allowed to consistently be people again. And like Marge with her son, it is once again exciting, and heartening, to see what the show might grow into next.
I really liked the style and making of the episode. There are 2-5 episodes per season that stand out and I remember them still; that became a theme for me in the last 10-15 years. And imho this one is a really entertaining one.
Great Simpsons episodes have two options to succeed for me: either they leave the standard formula (as in the great gatsby or the coen brothers episode) or have a really great topic/story and through this stand out. And this one got me…don’t know why but I liked it.
man, this show is all over the place! They should bring Nick back just to confuse it more... very poor end to a show! I can't wait to see how they completely ruin this in the next four episodes
[7.5/10 on a Selman era Simpsons scale] Another good year! Some wild swings with all three of the stories this year, and some measured successes as well.
The first segment, riffing on NFTs, is probably the weakest, which is a good sign for the episode because even it was fun. I wouldn’t say there’s a ton of trenchant observations about the NFT market, just the usual “crypto bros stink”, “these dumb things used to be valuable” type shtick. But I actually love the conceit of Marge going into the virtual world to rescue Bart after he’s become an NFT. There’s a real Tron/Matrix/Snowpiecer vibe to the whole thing, which is a neat mash-up for a Treehouse of Horror segment.
Plus, the animation here was surprisingly good. The NFTs Marge runs into aren’t the cleverest takes on the genre, but there’s some extra expressiveness and fidelity when she fights them. Little details like Mihouse and Ralph getting mixed together when Kirk and Clancy try to push their kids into the digitizer at the same time makes it feel appropriately horror-esque. And I like the sort of Twilight Zone twist of Homer selling himself as an NFT to Mr. Burns for a hundred million dollars. The closest thing to an incisive observation here is the whole idea that the train runs on FOMO, but as a pure romp, this one is quite entertaining.
My favorite segment was probably the middle one. As someone who enjoys Fincher-esque flicks, a combination of Seven, Silence of the Lambs, and another film for an omnibus gritty killer movie parody is a winning idea. Putting Lisa at the center of it in an alternate timeline follow-up to “Cape Feare” only ups the ante, especially when she has to partner with Sideshow Bob in the future.
MMy only gripe is that this one isn’t especially funny. (Though I got a kick out of the fact that Homer choked on a tennis ball.) But I’ll take interesting, scary, and even clever in a Treehouse of Horror segment, even if the laughs don’t flow freely. Lisa as a grown-up profiler, tracking down a series of murders of grown-up Springfield Elementary students, and enlisting Bob for help, is a premise that sets up a nice riff on the investigatory thriller genre.
I appreciate how the twist has its cake and eats it too. On the one hand, it’s implausible that Lisa would have a second personality doing all the killing and eluding her notice and the whole scheme is pretty baroque. But it’s also a spoof of those kinds of neat but implausible twists, and so can be credited for lightly spoofing that sort of crazy twist. And god help me, something about her getting revenge on Bob with the help of a grown-up Maggie. Plus, the tableau the killer leaves make this one impressively (and artistically) gory.
The final segment is the most high concept, but it wins on that concept alone. The whole notion of the entire town turning into Homer-esque versions of themselves becomes more of a gimmick than a story, but I don’t really mind. It’s fun to see the designers and animators going off and Homerifying everyone in Springfield. The twist of Homer being enchanted, rather than repulsed, by the Homer-y version of Marge is amusing. And there’s even a touch of social commentary on how doomed the world would be with a population that’s anti-expert and against intellectualism of any sort. Honestly, it feels like more of a commentary on the pandemic than last season’s lockdown episode.
Overall, a good batch of spooky stories this year, with each one having a creative idea at its core, and each having plenty of fun and inventiveness with the execution.
a banger! and how is that even legal? lol
Man. Season premier and he's already going all out more than ever before.
That'll be a close one.
Diane's backstory of how she got on board with the plan is interesting but I don't geht how she could be that stupid. Working with bad guys is never a good idea - how could she ever trust them - and how could she love Michelle so much as to risk everything?!? :o
"Fuck." - That was quite a phone call :D
That quick and efficient discussion between Peter, Rose, Chelsea, and Maddie was nice.
I'm a bit confused though that Peter and Rose didn't take one of the two cars... I would've definitely used them to quickly escape from the crime scene and then ditched the car.
"Fuck no. I think one call was enough."
And when Rose pulled the gun xD
They make a fun duo.
Their proof doesn't seem undeniable to me at all. How would the metadata of pictures proof anything if you could arbitrarily alter it?!? IMO they have more than enough other proof though to convince someone (just the conviction might be a problem).
"I would never hurt Michelle Travers."
That's quite surprising...
[8.0/10 on a post-classic Simpsons scale] As a devotee of so-called prestige television, this was right up my alley. I loved the homages here, from Fargo, to Breaking Bad, all the way to Dexter’s famous grapefruit (I agree, it’s not subtle). And while I admire both the tributes and the guest stars (Brian Cox!Timothy Olyphant! Cristin Miloti!), I actually love the way The Simpsons apes these shows in this one.
It’s not just a Simpsons episodes with a few call-outs to prestige T.V. The episode actually goes pretty big in terms of its formal audaciousness, using flashy HBO/AMC/FX trademarks like split screens, match cuts, and unique framings for various scenes. It’s more of a prestige drama starring Simpsons characters than an episode of The Simpsons that happens to be about those sorts of dramas. I appreciate Matt Selman and company being willing to really go for it in terms of the look and feel of the episode.
And it’s a good melding of the two sensibilities as well. I like the raw story here. Ned Flanders finding a bag of money that accidentally gets him wrapped up in the world of crime is right out of Fargo (which makes me chuckle a little since for years, fans joked about how Fargo film star William H. Macy would make a good live action Flanders). There’s some real meat to his story, from wanting to honor his grandfather, ginning up some jealousy from Homer, and wondering if he’s being karmically punished for taking some pride in his good deed when he donates the purloined cash to a local orphanage.
It pushes Ned out of his comfort zone, not only having to deal with gangsters, but also feeling like he has to lie to Marge (albeit to protect Homer and reckon with his motivations for putting his name on the donation (even if it’s technically his grandfather’s name). It’s a character study for Ned, in a way not unlike legitimate award-winning dramas, and I dig that.
At the same time, Brian Cox’s debt collector character is the perfect spoof of a premium crime drama heavy. (My prediction: He’s actually the young hippie to whom Flanders’ grandfather loaned money for bread, hence his start with “debts”.) Cox’s delivery is fantastic, and his goons roughing up folks in unique ways, especially Comic Book Guy, is a lot of fun,
Of course, it’s pretty clear that this is a What If? or Treehouse of Horror-style non-canon story once Disco Stu and Mr. Burns bit the dust. But even there, the show does well at mimicking Sopranos-style violence, with a humorous twist. (I loved how aghast Snake was when he finds the scene at the donut shop.)
The romance angle with Barbara, the manager of the orphanage, is a little odd in the finish, but still amusing. She seems perfect for Ned, and the pair having a lovely, quaint time, only for Ned to find out she’s Sideshow Mel’s wife who has an “arrangement” with her husband. Their scenes together are amusing in the squareness, and I guess the reveal works in a “this would freak Ned out and make him wonder if he’s being punished” sort of way, but it’s a little out there.
Still, I appreciate the continuity of it, since Mel has mentioned his wife Barbara before! In the same vein, I love that the mix-up with the goons kidnapping Homer instead of Ned comes from Homer’s well-established trait of “borrowing” all of the Flanderses’ stuff. These are some nice touches, pulled from past episodes and used for good purposes in the new one.
On the whole, this is a big swing for The Simpsons, which I always admire, but this one connects much better and much cleaner than the average post-classic episode. You love to see it.
I finally managed to return to these great characters after a couple of years, I watched the first two seasons when it was still on Netflix and after that I had no access to the new seasons as Amazon was not available in Poland back then. In the meantime, I read all but the last Expanse novels and loved them, both the "old" characters as well as the new introduced in the saga, so I wonder how it would play out in the show and whether they introduced profund changes from the books. Though I must say I really enjoyed this episode, it is visually stunning with the spaceship and all, and I missed all the main characters though I couldn't recall some of the background ones.
The situation at Roci is really tense after Naomi sent the protomolecule to Fred Johnson (though I am not sure whether Naomi really does it in the novels?) and it is a bit of a sad start to the season, but on the other hand the message Alex records for his family is quite moving, from what I recall from the novels, Alex does return to his wife and child in the later novels but as he confesses here in this scene, he cannot really live without piloting ships and isn't happy staying too long in one place, this is something he cannot change in himself. The scenes with Avasarala and Bobbie are also very emotional, and both of them are among my favourite characters both in th novels and the show.
I guess it is much easier to write a critical review but rather difficult if you really enjoyed everything about the episode, I can't wait to watch more :)
It was nice of them to have Jackie for dinner. No, wait. I meant to say that something has obviously been eating at Jackie. No, wait. That's not it, either. I meant to say that it's obvious that they're all getting fed up with Jackie. No, that doesn't work, either. Oh, never mind. I can't quite figure out what I'm wanting to say here, so I'll just chew on it for a while.
Found my attention waning during this one. It's looks like the show might have second season syndrome
It was a hell of a setup to build on after all.
I am that guy. So. Satisfying.
I really want Drummer to become a series regular next season.
"Okay, I'm going to need that gun back." Classic.
- How'd she look? (...) No, I mean, like, what was she wearing?
Holden, do not put your dick in it. It's fucked enough already.
Chrisjen really is the star of the show isn't she? :sweat_smile:
High brow story points aside it was great to see Bobbie kick some ass.
"Fuck these people, if they don't see how glorious you are they don't deserve you."
