The Simpsons, Season 24, Episode 12: Love is a Many Splintered Thing, Review

The blackboard is back! Yaaaay! And it makes note of the Simpsons’ short (The Longest Daycare) that received an Oscar nomination. Congrats, guys!

(By the way, Bart writes, “I was not nominated for best spoken swear word.”) Love it!

Well, it’s the start of Valentine’s week, so of course all the Sunday night cartoons are going to be love themed and this Simpsons is no exception. The story centers around Bart reuniting with one time love Mary Spuckler (from the big redneck family). She’s a talented musician, so Bart figured she had found fame out on her own, but the best she could do was become a hand model. (Hey, those people can make a lot of money too.) Mary might be from a white trash background, but everyone knows that Bart will never find anyone better. Still, in typical guy fashion, he ignores her in favor of playing video games. Even when he goes to Mary’s house and she sings a song she wrote for him, he gets caught juggling piglets out of boredom. My husband does that when I’m trying to tell him something important…so annoying.

Mary enters her song in a hillbilly talent contest. When she loses and turns to Bart for comfort, he blows it again. He knows this when Mary leaves with a Brazilian record agent, telling him, “Everything’s fine.” Guys, when a woman says those two words, know that you are in big trouble. Everything is NOT fine. See Bart’s flash forwards to relationship disasters and you’ll see what I mean.

Bart returns home to find his parents fighting over a lack of communication on Marge’s part. When Bart points out that women don’t say what they mean until it’s too late, Marge shows them how she’s feeling by kicking BOTH of them out of the house. They go to the saddest bachelor apartment complex ever, with crime scene tape, dead bodies in the pool and a sign in each unit that says “No sobbing after 10 p.m.” Even the party they have is sad, with a spoken word album playing as the guys make punch out of Krusty’s powdered mix water, and hand sanitizer.

The show gets a little off track when a large headed caricature of Woody Allen shows up, for no apparent reason. He suggests that Bart and Mary go on a date to see one of his movies, but they fall asleep. Bart also narrates the story at intervals, but he’s wearing glasses and his spiky hair is combed down. These two things were more like interruptions than stuff that held the story together, but all of the Sunday night cartoons are known for a bit of randomness.

In the end, Homer and the boys organize and invite all of their women to a grand romantic gesture to win them back. Everyone is successful, except for Bart and Mary. Even though he sings and gets down on one knee to apologize, Mary runs off with the handsome son of the record producer. 

Final review:  

It seems, at the end, that Bart has learned nothing. He goes back to his video games, until he gets a message from Mary via Facebook, and we see some potential for them rekindling the romance. I also find it very strange that I use that to describe a couple of ten year olds. I’m sure Mary will resurface, just as I’m sure Homer will screw things up again with Marge. So guys, the lesson here is to listen carefully, because what women are saying to you is usually the opposite of what they want you to hear.

 

Everyone got that? Good. Happy Valentine’s Day!