The Review Nebula

“Why are you frosting that old throw pillow?” – Marge Simpson. Just cue the hijinks music, because you know things are going to go south from here.

Airdate: December 10th, 2000

Written By: Carolyn Omine

Plot: A bizarre space-related fish incident causes substantial damage to the Simpson sedan. The estimated cost of repair is $6850. Initial plans to have Bart turn magic tricks on the pier fare poorly for Homer. Abandoned by his father at the pier, he manages to get sympathy money from the townsfolk. Noting the buckets of cash that ensued, Homer and Bart decide to become professional scam artists. As the screencap above implies, this does not end well for them. Or does it?

Review:

The abyss is not a pleasant place to be – little light breaks through the surface. This is especially true if you’re using it to compare it to the quality of a cartoon.

Over the course of my reviews of The Simpsons, I’ve covered many an episode that made me baffled as to how it was allowed to go out the way that it did. Some of what I had to cover was absolutely shocking – botched characterization, abysmal plotting, noticeable mistakes that are exposed by the issues surrounding it, lazier animation, and constantly telling the audience to try and do better. (Worth noting, Rebecca Sugar is a Simpsons fan. Make of that what you will.)

I still maintain that my least favorite episode of The Simpsons is “Alone Again, Natura-Diddily”. As I said in that review, it was the perfect storm of almost everything I disliked about the show’s post-golden era, and altered the universe in a way that was soulless and irrevocable. It was crass, callous, made the main character out to be unbelievably odious, soulless… the episode was just an unpleasant viewing experience I have no desire to inflict upon myself ever again.

I will, however, give the episode one unqualified positive. It’s not nearly enough to get its “0” rating revoked – it’s still the nadir – but credit where credit is due. The episode was at least complete. Yeah, it’s still absolute garbage, but the episode at least had some semblance of a plot, odious and obnoxious as it was. There was at least an end to the episode, even if it was pretty damn vapid and didn’t make up for the travesty of the rest of the episode.

Contrast “The Great Money Caper”. Let me just put it this way… does an episode deserve a critique if it’s practically unfinished?

Ah, what the hell, it was aired by the FOX Network. Fair game, in my opinion. (Besides, way back when, I reviewed that Red Dwarf pilot that never aired on USA television. Make of that what you will…)

The weird part is that the episode starts off… well, it could be far worse. A rather mildly humorous “magic show” skit does have some ties to later on in the plot, as it inspires Bart to get his own magic kit. I mean, it makes sense, given that magic shows are a lot of smoke and mirrors – if done well, the suspension of disbelief holds up and is reinforced in the best way possible. So there is a tie between this and the con-man plot, except replace “good-natured magic” with “grifting for money”. Why grift for money? Well, The Simpsons are in financial trouble again!

More specifically, a sturgeon falls from a dinner being held at the International Space Station, survives re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere without burning up, and lands straight on the family sedan, damaging the hood and requiring a $6850 repair bill. Alright, “Saddlesore Galactica” slowly ramped up the silliness for two acts before plunging into Jockey Elfland, “Kill the Alligator and Run” managed to hold off until the end of the first act, even “The Computer Wore Menace Shoes” kept most of the WTFery until the Second Act Break. Here? Four minutes in, The Simpsons are affected by interstellar insanity. Consider it a harbinger of the end.

Anyway, the duo get to grifting their way out of the financial hole. How? Well, it all kicks off after Bart is unable to get enough money at the pier. An argument erupts between him and Homer… and it’s kind of odd to watch. This is really the first time in a while that Homer’s descent into an utter bastard is taken even remotely seriously – almost an admission that the character has decayed from a “selfish and id-driven, but ultimately well-meaning and loving father” into the toxic and unsympathetic figure he is now. It really casts a dark pale over the rest of the episode, as it demonstrates how low this character is willing to go and how different the writer’s take on the character is from what made him work in the first place.

Well, after being left behind at the pier, the townspeople take pity on Bart and give him enough money to get home and then some. Accordingly, Bart and Homer decide to take up conning around the town. I guess it sort of makes sense that Bart would be willing to take on the art of the grift; he’s always been known for defying societal norms, and even though he considered theft from a church collection plate a step too far back in “Bart’s Girlfriend”, there’s at least a method to his madness here in trying to pay for the fish-attacked car, even if it was influenced somewhat by Homer. Speaking of which, does this fit Homer’s character… eh, not so much on his part, albeit more for being quick to be “buddy-buddy” with Bart. A further sign of how their relationship has been mutated by the writers into something unconscionable.

Accordingly, much of the second act… well, it’s not completely without chuckles, interestingly enough. They’re sparse, but at least most of it was consistent. The grifts range from “surprisingly amusing” to “you already killed Ned’s wife, you don’t need to grift him with something related to the deceased”, but overall, it’s rather “meh”. Most of the comedy can be found in just how awful they are at grifting, and how everybody falls for it. I mean, Homer and Bart don’t bother to do unique disguises or try different towns, so it’s pretty clear that their shtick is transparent. In retrospect, this can be taken as foreshadowing in and of itself… albeit not particularly good foreshadowing, given what happens in the back half of the episode.

Oh, boy.

Grandpa Simpson joins in on the whole grifting act with a plan to nail the retirement home, only for an FBI agent to nail Bart and Homer for their act. Fair enough. Plot twist, the FBI agent proceeds to swipe their sedan and cash, exposing him as a grifter. Coincidental, but nothing too egregious so far. Homer and Bart fear that their whole round of schemes is about to be exposed, so they make up a story about being carjacked and threatened, describing the assailant as being a foreigner with odd hair. The character they make up matches that of Groundskeeper Willie, who is himself nicked and charged with the theft. Things are starting to go off the rails here, but hey, maybe this will be how our two protagonists are brought down to humility. How their grifting and lying prepare to bring an innocent man to jail and absolutely tarnish his life – sort of a sequel to the infinitely more hilarious “Boy Who Knew Too Much”.

Does it catch up with them?

Well… strap yourselves in. Because what I’m about to describe went out to about 16.8 million viewers. Many of them had a choice between this and a game between the New York Jets and the Oakland Raiders on ESPN.

Homer refuses to confess his crime, even as Bart starts to have a guilty conscience. Willie is convicted on the carjacking charge and is sent down for a ten-year bid. On his way out, he steals a gun from Wiggum and fires at Principal Skinner, causing him to drop with blood coming out of his chest – enough to finally break Homer and Bart and force them into a confession.

“Okay, players! That’s a wrap!“

Turns out the whole trial, carjacking, Grandpa’s involvement in the scheme, all of it, it was all a complete hoax – the hoax to end all hoaxes. A setup to end all setups. Revenge on the fraudsters. They all put their lives on hold to lay a lesson on Jerkass Homer and Bart Simpson. (This means the town revolves around Homer’s life yet again, but that’s beside the point.) The only person not involved was Willie thanks to a throwaway joke, which means the townsfolk would’ve had to rely on nailing somebody with the exact same facial features and temperament to go fire a blank into Principal Skinner.

And it would’ve had to go off perfectly in every other way, as well – a man dies, and our hero is responsible for his second death in as many seasons due to his own selfishness. And something this complex, this perfect, involving an entire town from top to bottom, was all but organized in a matter of days since Homer and Bart only took up grifting a short while ago. Even if they were so terrible that the whole scheme was incubated early on, we’re talking about weeks at the absolute most… for Springfield. It’s a small town, but an incompetent town nonetheless. This leaves so many questions as to how far back this whole scheme went. The more you think about it, the more you realize the episode is completely broken. This ending alone literally fries a good chunk of “The Great Money Caper”.

We are dealing with “Threshold” levels of plot-hole madness. For the uninitiated, that had Warp 10 considered an impossibility defying anything known about warp speed before, evolution being treated like a bell curve, and a clear path home all but ignored because, I dunno, pineapple. But you know what? Brannon Braga admitted he effed up and inadvertently crafted the worst Voyager episode ever. At least that episode was a freak accident that the Star Trek franchise has done its best to forget ever happened.

“The Great Money Caper?” From what I gather, this was meant to be a moronic plot twist, to throw the viewers for a loop in the most insane and, given the show’s track record over the past season, most “screw you” way possible. You want to know why I believe this? Well, consider this piece of dialog after the whole scheme is revealed… the last bit of dialog in the entire episode.

Homer: “You’re telling me the police force, the TV news, a courthouse full of people, and a popular entertainer had nothing better to do than to teach me and Bart a lesson?”
Lisa: “I know it seems farfetched, even insulting to your intelligence, but there’s a simple and highly satisfying explanation. You see…”
Otto: (barges in with a surfboard while wearing swimming gear) “Hey, everybody! Surf’s up!“

Cue literally everybody surfing in the ocean, including the Russian Astronauts who dropped the fish from space.

Well…

…what is there to say, really? Because this is how the episode ends.

I almost want to compare the ending of this episode to the last episode of The Prisoner (ironically enough), except that at least made sense relative to the context of the series. And, you know, it was actually a fascinating ending, in my opinion, intended to provoke deep intellectual thought in the viewer. It transcended the series and became a piece of surrealist brilliance – McGoohan actually fled the UK because of the debate the episode caused, but today, many fans regard it as an utterly brilliantly bizarre finale.

This episode? It was written as yet another big fat middle finger to the fans. If it had been a one-off, or the show was still of quality, I wouldn’t complain too much. But this is coming off as incessant arrogance from a room that has lost the plot. This isn’t surrealism, isn’t meant to be provocative. It’s just daring the viewer to go find something better. Believe me, twenty years on, we have. Several times. This ain’t 1995 anymore. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it until I reach the end, but the writers come off as really out of touch the longer the show goes on. At best, this ending registers bemusement, and at worst, utter disgust.

You would expect my anger with this show to diminish with every review. Indeed, I can confirm that this probably would’ve angered me more in Season 10 or 11 – I guess “desensitization” is the word of the day here. Also, this is why I’m not going beyond Season 13 since I feel absolutely nothing with the Jean era. At least, with this episode, I still feel frustrated enough to make it a point that this is one of the most outrageously moronic and insulting endings in the history of The Simpsons. Contrast with “Pygmoelian” – it had a plothole at the end of the episode that the show pointed out in the dying moments, but it didn’t cripple the rest of the episode by how out of left field it was.

The issue isn’t the surrealism – trust me, I love The Prisoner and Gravity Falls, and those shows tended towards surrealism. (Gravity Falls more so when Bill Cipher comes around.) It’s the laziness of it, the bluntness of it, and the fact that we’re dealing with plot-influencing surrealism in The Simpsons. One of those three x-factors would’ve been bad. Two, disastrous. Three? It propels the episode into infamy.

If the episode’s middle was actually good, maybe I’d be willing to be lenient. But since the middle of the episode is merely “mediocre”, the leash is short here. “The Great Money Caper” was a waste of time, with one of the most bafflingly awful endings this show has ever had. And when other endings in the Scully era involve Jockey Elves, fish guts being thrown on paradegoers, ripping off The Prisoner, and the aligator being alive the entire time (the last of which is probably the only ending that’s actually any worse), you know this episode is bound to be in bad company.

This is just a woeful outing – one of the most embarrassing moments in The Simpsons canon. I felt scammed out of 22 minutes.

Tidbits:

• The magician at the show? Voiced by Mike Scully. Feels like a tactic approval of this episode, in my opinion.
• Marge’s relationship to the booze would be the subject of a Season 15 episode, “Co-Dependents Day”. In that episode, Homer and Marge get wasted at an Oktoberfest party. On the way home, Homer crashes his car. Fearing that he’ll have his license revoked, he puts a barely conscious Marge in the driver’s seat before the police show up. All after a first act that mocks the controversial prequel trilogy of Star Wars. And people wonder why Steven Universe has the fanbase that it has.
• Some mildly interesting news, meanwhile, from the Simpsons camp. In an interview with Joe.ie – a news and sports website targeting Irish men – Simpsons composer Danny Elfman suggested that The Simpsons might be coming to an end sooner rather than later. Sort of – it’s a case of “I feel it through the grapevine”, and nothing has been confirmed. This is strictly a case of rumors going around, and sites like Joe.ie like to milk as much of these rumors for clicks as possible. That said, the purchase of The Simpsons by the House of Mouse has likely changed the economics of the show’s airing and production. Changes are afoot, however – the cable-backed SimpsonsWorld has been merged into the subscription-backed Disney+ service, for instance. Interesting times are ahead.

Wrap-Up:

Zaniness Factor: 4. “Hey, everybody! Surf’s up!”

Jerkass Homer Meter: 4. Dump your kid at the pier alone and use him to scam your way out of a $6500 bill – father of the year material.

Favorite Scene: The magic show at the very beginning of the episode, although in this case, “favorite” means “most amusing”.

Least Favorite Scene: The End. What the hell was going through the writers when they decided “hey, let’s end it like this?“

Score: 1.5 This is a case where the ending is so terrible and proud of being wretched, it poisons the rest of the episode by proxy. It gets a half-point because of some amusement in the second half, and it’s lucky to get that.