This The Simpsons review contains spoilers.

The Simpsons Season 32 Episode 21

The episode opens with the uneasy soundtrack of intrigue as the titles tell us we are in London in 1970 at the office of the MI5. The British spies are toasting their youngest and brightest star, Terrance, voiced by Stephen Fry, who also voices the Head of the MI5, and will go on to voice his own father and daughter. He is that kind of spy, an Englishman unafraid to dress in drag. His then-most recent operation in Prague only left 11 dead, which for British Intelligence is barely a parking ticket. His new assignment is to catch a Russian double agent, code named Gray Fox, who has infiltrated a nuclear plant in America. The agency doesn’t have much on the target except he was a member of the Flying Hellfish during World War II. They were the only unit to engage the enemy at the European Theater, the Pacific Theater, and Grauman’s Chinese Theater.

All of the Simpsonized short-cut references work to establish the premise and weight of international espionage. They’re all easily accessible cliches. The spies also get in a little dig about how every single nuclear plant in America has bad security, and admit nobody knows what fortnight is. This paints a laughably passable picture of the Gentleman’s Club of British espionage. It is all tied together with references to Carol Reed’s The Third Man. Besides giving an excuse to let Orson Welles (Maurice LaMarche) finish his wine before getting on a boardwalk Ferris wheel, this is an odd choice. The 1949 British film noir film was set in Vienna, which is as far removed from Springfield as Terrance’s mark is from reality.

“Old Man Yells at Cloud,” reads the headline which gives Abe away, 50 years later. The eldest Simpson is less-than-blissfully ignorant about everything that’s been going on in the spy game. To be fair, this is the way he is about everything. He is dealing with a more immediate problem. Louise, who had the best room at the nursing home and hated his and everyone else’s guts, has moved on. She’s not dead, it is sadder, she is moving back in with her children, a nightmare for the elderly caretakers.

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Poor Grampa. Some might see Abe as an allegory for the long-running series itself. He’s been around so long he’s constantly reinventing the past in order to stay relevant. Not only in the present, but in both future episodes and episodes about the future. Do we indulge The Simpsons? Probably as much as we indulge Abe, whose endless ramblings occasionally go somewhere unexpected, but only because they get lost along the way.

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