This The Simpsons review contains spoilers.
The Simpsons Season 33 Episode 20
The Simpsons celebrates Mother’s Day by giving America’s most representational mom a break in character. “Marge the Meanie” counts as a gift. The family dynamic is slightly ajar, but the episode has the timing of the best of the series’ offerings.
The opening segment ends with just the right amount of suspense. Who could imagine Marge, the most accommodating and enabling character on the cartoon landscape, destroying someone’s life? As always, the second act is the strongest. We see a young Superintendent Chalmers find his first rhyme for “Skin-ner!!,” and get a taste of the educational system’s real views on anti-bullying rules. The animators go out of their way to make every possible connection between the bad girl Marge of old, and the Bart who earned his reputation as cartoon’s most influential bad boy. The parallels build the bond before the characters act on it.
The pranks provide a natural build to the suspense underlying the comedy, but each one detonates solidly. Comic Book Guy’s comeuppance is loaded with snide rejoinders and unintentional pathos. It is indeed sad to learn he was one credit short of finishing medical school, but this also subliminally informs the line about Ralph having too big a head to be so dim. The Superman/Uber Hombre copyright bit lands brilliantly unexpectedly, and the elusive Spider-Man issue alluded to is wish fulfillment at its most childlike.
The most fulfilling of the pranks also works as social commentary, but it is a spin on the “Shopping for Others” segment in John Waters’ Pecker. The specific items being run up contain imaginative buffoonery, including such gems as Stink Foot Insoles, Barely Helpful Herpes Ointment, and Garbage Mouth Bad Breath Neutralizing Suppositories.
You might guess the ending just before it happens, but Chief Wiggum’s concerns about zombies and the Wilson family, and how many former Blue Man Group members die hilarious deaths, raise more questionable laughs than answers. The sweetness of the conclusion raises more peanut brittle than snakes, but the episode, as a whole, cuts out the majority of the treacle instantaneously. The credit sequence is brilliant. It’s basically the opening played backwards at high speed, rendering everything into a passing memory of things to come. It is almost frustrating.
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“Marge the Meanie” is something to bring home to mother and still feel guilty about, with a wealth of one-liners to spare. Marge’s final apologies pull the entire fiasco together perfectly. It makes the subtle mockery of false apologies ring very true.
