Still from THE SIMPSONS: Eternal Moonshine of the Simpson Mind (2007).
© FOX
Mania Grade: C+
Episode: Eternal Moonshine of the Simpson Mind
Starring: Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, Nancy Cartwright, Yeardley Smith, Hank Azaria
Created By: Matt Groening
Episode: Eternal Moonshine of the Simpson Mind
Starring: Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, Nancy Cartwright, Yeardley Smith, Hank Azaria
Created By: Matt Groening
THE SIMPSONS: Eternal Moonshine of the Simpson Mind
By: Stephen LackeyReview Date: Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Sunday night I was desperately looking for something to watch so I decided to check out this lone new episode of The Simpsons. The Simpsons hasn’t been edgy for a long time but I did find the movie to be pretty entertaining so I had some hope that I wouldn’t doze off watching this. While I wasn’t having stomach pains from laughing, I did find this episode to have some clever moments.
Homer wakes up outside covered in snow after drinking all night and sneaks into his house only to find his family gone and his dog mad at him. Strangely, he has no memory of the previous night’s activities so he sets out to retrace his steps and figure out what has happened. Soon he learns that he was desperate the previous night to forget something so Moe mixed him up the ultimate drink that would erase his memory. The episode features its typical mix of movie spoofs and references and in this episode we get the obvious (based on the title of the episode) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind spoofs but there’s a bit of Total Recall and The Game also in the episode.
The episode is one of the more surreal episodes I’ve seen in a long time. Add to the surreal nature of the episode, a darkness that I don’t know if I’ve seen in the series before. Yes, we’ve seen Homer choke out Bart many times but it all feels light hearted and slapstick, but when we first see Marge with a black eye and Chief in the house due to a domestic dispute call, it feels a bit darker to me. Obviously the insinuation that Marge was cheating on Homer wasn’t true and neither was the thought that Homer gave Marge a black eye on purpose, but even the possibility of this happening on The Simpsons is a bit darker than the series usually is.
My favorite gag in the whole episode is the flashback of Homer’s life that ends with the You Tube button. It’s the most timely the show has been in a while and that joke is even starting to get old. There are a couple of other gags that are fairly current but there isn’t much commentary tied to the gags so they feel like light jabs at pop culture rather than stinging jibes like what we still get from South Park. The only reason I bring this up is because The Simpsons was really one of the innovators in doing an adult oriented animated series that’s slapstick funny but still current event relevant. While I do miss that edginess I don’t miss “eat my shorts” and all of the bad Bart-centric episodes of those early days. Eternal Moonshine of the Simpson Mind was a smirk inducing episode and probably one of the more unique episodes of the season but it’s nowhere near the quality of the episodes that made this series great.
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