Episode 15 - The Scorpion's Tale
9 May 2011
Synopsis: On a school field trip Lisa finds some rare flowers which make a pair of scorpions docile. Grandpa is kicked out of the retirement home for being too grouchy and moves in with the family. Homer decides to use the essence of the flowers on Grandpa and he immediately becomes happy and joyful. A scientist named Walter Hottenhoffer offers to synthesise more of the drug but warns the Simpsons not to give the drug to anyone else until it has been thoroughly tested. Bart of course sells it on to the elderly of Springfield and soon Grandpa's eye balls pop out.
The Good: This was definitely a more interesting story than we usually get. Hottenhoffer was a more serious character than you might expect which helped and I liked the idea that Grandpa would welcome an end to his bitterness if he could find one.
The Bad: Otherwise this was a disappointment. As you would expect the story went nowhere. The writers didn't make their minds up about what the story would be about. The danger of untested medication, Bart's lack of morals, Grandpa's state of mind etc. All these potential stories were flirted with and in the end out of nowhere came the moral that Grandpa's generation were only bitter because of how useless their children have been. Even that would have been a better story than just mixing together all of the above.
This episode was also yet another showcase of how the writers have forgotten how their own show works. Once upon a time The Simpsons revelled in telling a certain kind of joke. A character would be set up with an obvious choice to make or a punch line to say, but instead they would do the opposite or the unexpected. Those jokes worked because The Simpsons was the antidote to other TV shows. By the 1990s viewers were so familiar with the clichés of television programmes that the writers of The Simpsons filled episode after episode with hilarious reinterpretations of those clichés.
Unfortunately after twenty two seasons there is apparently nothing left to parody. So the writers have begun to apply the same principle to reality. As in now something unexpected happens, not as fun satire, but just as a surreal and ridiculous act. This episode was full of these jokes. They don't work because when applied to things which make no sense at all there is no joke. Now it has just become nonsense.
So we had rock climbers climbing on the children's tour guide. Then the tour guide climbing up himself to rescue them! Then we had Moe referring to his bar as a dungeon which led to Lenny pointing out that he was literally chained to the bar. Yes Lenny was physically forced into drinking beer at Moe's. We had Homer growing a tail from one of the strains of the flower and the scientists using a crane to pick up a frat house full of students to come work for them. These are all just nonsense. Why not have Homer pretend to be a robot or French or a woman in the middle of the episode? Why have an episode at all? Why not just have a surreal twenty two minutes of characters behaving in ways that bare no relation to who they are?
Speaking of which we have Bart selling Skinner drugs to calm his mother down. When would Principal Skinner ever buy clearly illegal drugs from Bart? That makes no sense for his character at all unless you built a whole episode about his relationship with his mom. As I mentioned the whole generational conflict came out of nowhere at the end of the episode where Homer bizarrely destroyed his car egged on by Lenny and Carl. Why would Lenny and Carl be at Walter's lab in the first place? It was such a ridiculous scene that I found it hard to believe.
I didn't enjoy the jokes about all the old people's eye balls popping out. It wasn't particularly gross but it was the fact that this deeply scary physical symptom was treated as a silly joke.
Best Joke: I didn't think there were any good jokes really. But I should point out a joke that should have been funnier and at least had the essence of real humour in it. When Grandpa's eye balls pop out the whole family is shocked at the side effects of the drug. Bart then reveals that things are about to get worse because he has sold the drug to the whole town. He then goes on to admit that he has already spent the money, ironically on novelty glasses where the eye balls pop out. If delivered differently that could have been really funny.
The Bottom Line: The story could have been fun but wasn't. The jokes were awful.
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