Episode 2 - Bart Gets A Z
12 October 2009
Review
Synopsis: Bart spikes Mrs Krabappel’s coffee with alcohol and she gets fired. He feels guilty and so uses a self help book called “The Answer” to help her open a muffin store. The substitute teacher Zach is popular with the kids but ends up drinking too allowing Edna to return to the school.
The Good: This is a bad episode and symptomatic of everything that is wrong with the modern incarnation of The Simpsons. Part of why this is so bad is that it starts with such promise. We open on Edna’s life in all its spinsterish misery. She struggles to get through the day in true sympathy inspiring fashion and you sense a character episode which might actually warm the heart.
Homer pops up in typically amusing fashion to provide Bart with the alcoholic inspiration for his plan. The montage of the children gathering alcohol was a fun scene and Mrs K duly imbibes too much spiked coffee and is fired. As in so many previous episodes Bart’s morality kicks in and he goes to try and get her life back on track.
The Bad: What was the point of this episode? Young Zach arrives and is happy to use modern technology to communicate with the students. But apparently the hopelessness of elementary education drove him to drink. Then we have Edna who puts a lot of effort into a doomed muffin shop but then takes her old job back without mention of the debt she is in or more severe punishment for Bart. Finally there is “The Answer” a parody of self help book “The Secret” which provides Bart with the tools needed to push Edna forward.
The reality is the episode is about none of those things. The simplest story would have been to recreate the plot of Sweet Seymour Skinner's Baadasssss Song (519) where Bart’s guilt led him to help Skinner get his job back. It would have been a rip off but it could have been a simple and pleasant tale to see Edna and Bart grow a little closer. Or the writers could have chosen to parody “The Secret” with all their satirical powers as they have done before (507, Bart’s Inner Child). Or finally they could have actually portrayed elementary school as being criminally ignored by society leading to Zach’s breakdown (like Frank Grimes who fell foul of Homer in 823).
But instead they write all three plots together, none with conviction or real humour. Instead we don’t see Edna’s struggle at all, we just cut to her store opening and a bunch of bad muffin jokes. We don’t get to know Zach at all, it’s just an excuse for the writers to make jokes about modern technology. And “The Secret” gets the most generic possible of mockings. I don’t mention all the previous episodes which were written better than this one to show off my memory. I mention them because the same writers who are presenting these muddled episodes should know better. I don’t castigate the jokes they write because they happen not to be funny. I castigate them because they don’t connect to the story or the emotions of the characters. And that is when real laughter comes, when viewers are so absorbed by a story that the jokes flow effortlessly from the conflicts presented.
Best Joke: Flanders pops into “Edna’s Edibles” and asks for a “Cran bran for the Flan man!” Bart enthusiastically hands him a bag and he leaves.
E: “What did he want?”
B: “Beats me. I just gave him a banana.”
The Bottom Line: The writers should know better. They should feel ashamed for pushing out this half baked mess of an episode. They have over ten seasons of decent storytelling to draw from before they even look outside of their own creation for inspiration.
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