It’s been a while now since even we die-hard Simpsons fans got tired. We’ve seen the same episodes a thousand times and we still keep finding new gags, but the series has run aground, in its modern episodes, in a sea of mediocrity from which only the odd episode like Pixelated and Afraid or A Serious Flanders escapes (if you haven’t seen them, you’ve got homework now). The series has discovered that it’s better when it references itself or when it rummages through the past to surprise the only viewers left: the longtime ones. And along these lines, the latest Disney+ exclusive special has delivered a little story that’s going to delight all of us fans who’ve spent decades following its adventures.
That’s not who we were
In the middle of season 2 of The Simpsons, with 1991 only just begun, Homer and Marge told the story of how they met in high school in 1974. The episode was called The Way We Was, it was a big hit and it laid the foundations of the love story of the family’s parents, which many people didn’t understand. 35 years have passed since it aired, and The Simpsons isn’t just still standing, it’s gone back to its classic style of animation to tell an alternate universe in which Marge didn’t exist, Homer never got married and became a millionaire in spite of himself.
The episode in question is called Yellow Mirror, and it uses the Black Mirror premise to tell two “strange” stories about the family, in the style of the Halloween specials. The second is a tablet rebellion against the town led by a Maggie Simpson who definitely hasn’t understood that kids shouldn’t have screens and that, frankly, suffers from far too many of the problems of the modern series. But the first one, oh the first one, is an absolute delight. In it we get an alternate universe in which Homer, sick of hearing yet again the story of how they met, stares intently at a lamp until he discovers, right in the middle of the flashback, that he hit the wall (a gag that is, indeed, in the original episode)… and when he wakes up, he had imagined his entire life.
All the Simpsons plots, including the one where Bart has an elephant, had happened in his imagination, and, like a deranged Matt Groening, he creates a series with that family he lived with, in his mind, for years: the Sadsons. It is, at the same time, a celebration of The Simpsons’ legacy, a sad story, a reflection on fame and an episode packed with gags like we hadn’t seen in a long time. In the end, Homer becomes a kind of all-powerful creator, mad, deranged, willing to do whatever it takes to get back to his normal life, the one he only ever dreamed. Or maybe not?
It’s not the first time the series has toyed with its own mythology (there’s the famous “final episode,” or that time Anonymous “hacked” the feed), but it’s true that, in the sea of mediocrity it has got us used to season after season, it’s nice to see that The Simpsons can do more than churn out repetitive episodes with mediocre jokes. Back in the day they were kings, and this episode shows that it could still be that good. They just need to put in a little effort and remember that the heart of the series was never the jokes about physical violence, but a family that, despite everything, loves each other. There’s no need to bang your head and rewrite the past to know it, but hopefully it helps them give it some thought.
