Recently, I rewatched seasons ten through twelve of The Simpsons for the first time in like fifteen years, and you may be shocked to hear me say that it definitely drops off in quality. One thing that particularly bothered me was how it betrays many of the characters; what I like about The Simpsons is that, even through the shifting continuity, the core idea of a character and their motivation remains the same. Season ten onwards marks a shift towards laziness from the show, and with that comes jokes and stories that don’t really suit the characters. It’s easiest to articulate what I mean through this little game, because some characters are so much harder to write than others.
MARGE
The beauty of Marge is that any idiot can write her. She’s the most temperamentally conservative of the characters and has a few behaviours she defaults to; she cooks, she cleans, she nags, she hugs. The big insight the show has into Marge’s character is that she doesn’t need to understand a person to love and support them (hence why she and Lisa make a good pairing in any story, with the latter providing a rational support for the thing she wants to do), and her fear of change or difference means it’s really easy to get a good story out of her where she learns something after twenty minutes.
The big thing that’s lost is also the most subtle – the amusing squarishness of her dialogue. When the show loses its drive to be the best, it also loses lines like “Is this projection accurate?”. The show at its best is precise, with lines chosen for maximum impact, and Marge often represents precision at the expense of style, played for Laffs.
BART
One thing that makes The Simpsons watchable even as it begins to tip over is the killer, committed cast. In some ways, Bart is as easy to write as Marge because he also has a few simple, repeated behaviours – Bart is gonna do pranks, graffito public property, and solve mysteries. The difficult part is trying to live up to his imagination in variations upon those activities, and just about any writer’s room can yes-and themselves into absurd expressions of the things Bart does.
Nancy Cartwright is what elevates a lot of Bart’s weaker dialogue and plots; there are few actors who have immediately and enthusiastically lived and breathed the iconic power of their characters like Cartwright with Bart, and she can not only bring just about anything he says to life, but make it sound exactly like something he’d say, or at least bring conviction to more generic feelings he’s chasing. Much like Marge, one of the upsides of Bart is that he tends to underthink what he’s doing – though in an impulsive way rather than a nervous way – which makes it more plausible that he’d do cruel or stupid things, though of course he’d regret it afterwards.
MAGGIE
She doesn’t actually belong on this list. She’s barely a character. I only put her here because otherwise, someone would ask and that would annoy me.
HOMER
This is where it starts getting a lot more difficult. Homer is simple and impulsive too, but his particular brand of idiocy is much harder to write. The common criticism at the time seasons ten through twelve were airing were what’s known as the ‘Jerkass Homer’ phenomenon, where people thought Homer was just being weirdly mean for a guy who’s otherwise sincere. This, I think, misses how many stories were driven by Homer being nearly monstrous for twenty minutes; “Boy-Scoutz N The Hood” and “Lisa On Ice” are the ones I point to when observing classic Homer has always had the possibility of being an asshole.
Though at the same time, there really is something about how awful and unsympathetic Homer gets in these seasons. The important flipside to Homer’s selfishness is his boundless capacity for love; writer John Swartzwelder compared him to a labrador in how he can effortlessly switch from rage to joy and back again without missing a beat. In these weaker seasons, it’s like he sucks up everything in the room without giving anything back. He’s entirely a destructive force, burning up everything around him in pursuit of simple gratification.
More importantly, the jokes just stop being as funny and complicated. There are dozens of times in these seasons where he simply tells someone to do something stupid, then repeats his demand more angrily while shaking his fist, which is… just kind of dumb. A lot of his gags end up generic expressions of anger or desire, disconnected from the narrative around them. My fellow Magpie Dave Shutton observed that Homer’s monstrousness in “Lisa On Ice” works as a parody of parents overly invested in their kid’s sports; many of the gags in 10-12 lack that kind of context within their scene, let alone the episode.
LISA
Here is the single hardest character to write on The Simpsons. The integral core of Lisa is that she’s motivated by a) personal ideals and b) other people’s feelings. Her journey is one of being caught between being right and making people happy; between abstractions that she knows to be true and the very practical problems of other people’s happiness. “Lisa’s Rival” is a great episode because she’s caught between her self-belief – that she does understand things to a very deep level and her ideals are based on fact – and her belief that Alison should be happy because she’s a perfectly nice person. It turns Lisa into someone a bit unsympathetic but also easy to relate to, because she knows her emotions are driving her to do the wrong thing.
There’s also “Lisa The Vegetarian”, one of the greatest Lisa episodes because it pushes her character to its most extreme. We watch her form an ideal, and we watch her shape her expression of that ideal to its most pragmatic, expressing it while still functioning in her little society. I love that we see her morality from her own subjective perspective; we see the cute lamb with her, and we project that onto her food with her, and we project that onto, uh, other animals with her, until it seems like she has no other choice than vegetarianism. Then we watch her be incredibly difficult to be around, and the push-pull between the two until she eats a hotdog and screams “IS EVERYBODY HAPPY?!”
It’s a nuanced, joyful emotional arc with a lot of great gags (“Why does it talk like a lamb?”), and it makes the Lisa episodes in 10-12 look so much worse. It’s to the point that she feels like a different character to me – almost the opposite of what I like about her, where she forces abstractions on other people and finds herself regretting it instead. To Yeardley Smith’s credit, she manages to slip to this new characterisation surprisingly easily, but it also makes the character harder, less thoughtful, and less sympathetic.
“Girly Edition” is one that bothers me in particular. It’s a perfectly cromulent episode, functioning as a half hour of comedy with a bit of heart, but Lisa seems totally wrong there – almost an adult cosplaying as a child. I could easily see Lisa being enthusiastic about doing real news, but her vision of kids “waking up from naps, cranky and hungry for the news” strikes me as weirdly unpragmatic from her.
(The same episode does Bart much better by comparison)
The reason Lisa is hard to write is because she fully believes in the things she does, and as a result you have to believe in the things she does, and as a result of that you, as her writer, have to believe in something. The thing about the Mike Scully era of the show is that it stopped working so hard, which led to less sincere writing. One of the reasons the show kept so good for so long is because it cycled through showrunners who each had some specific thing they wanted out of the show; David Mirkin wanted to delve into side characters and see what makes them tic (and also brought his desire to tell what he called “million dollar jokes” that could only be done in animation). Sam Simon wanted to tell stories with heart. Mike Scully just seemed to want to keep the lights on, and the characters suffered as a result.
About the writer
Tristan J. Nankervis
Tristan J Nankervis (aka Drunk Napoleon) has been a writer, pop culture critic, dishwasher, standup comedian, waiter, potato cake factory worker, gamer, TV worker, and various other things. You can find him in Hobart, Tasmania.
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Department of
Conversation
This accidentally gets to what could be the thing that maybe finally puts The Simpsons on pause: the cast has played the roles for so long and for so well even when the show is not good that it could be really hard to accept these characters with other actors. Especially when the script writing is lazy. Having someone else be Homer might be as unsatisfying as having Dan Castellaneta as the Genie. The actor might be as good as the original, but the combination of “Not the Guy Who Defined the Role” and weak scripts is going to be a struggle to watch.
At this point even a voice actor doing a perfect season 2-15 voice for the characters would sound off.
The main voice cast just physically won’t be able to keep going at this point.
I am not sure how they’ve go on so long. Mark Hamill retired from the Joker even before Kevin Conroy’s death and Arleen Sorkin left as Harley years before that.
These are great breakdowns, and I get some vicious joy out of how apt and damning the conclusion of the Lisa section is. There’s that old Vonnegut lesson about making sure every character in a scene wants something, even if it’s only a glass of water; it’s interesting to think about applying that to the people crafting the scenes, too. I don’t generally care about a creator’s intentions, but I do ideally like the feeling that they wanted to be working on this story in particular, that they found something about it engaging or challenging.
This why me think Bob’s Burgers holds up for many more seasons than Simpsons does. They actually do have scene where one character only wants glass of water, and it hilarious. They never lost handle on characters, and only briefly (in parts of seasons before and after movie) lost sight of what make show tick.
What did we watch?
The Lego Batman Movie
I (re)watched this at a get-together with a lot of people who really loved it, so I feel like a killjoy for finding it fine and likable but not more than that. Partly, I think it’s just that the busy, maximalist approach doesn’t usually click with me (I admired and enjoyed Everything Everywhere All at Once, for example, but I don’t feel any particular drive to revisit it), so while it’s appropriate for a contemporary Lego movie to feel like an explosion of creative impulses constantly reforming themselves into other recognizable, licensed shapes, I’m not into it. The kid movie part–the explicitness of the lessons–didn’t help. But overall, this is a funny, engaging version of what it is, with great Will Arnett–I do love the “I like to fight around” conversation–and I’m probably just being unfairly hard to please.
Primal, “Spear and Fang” through “Rage of the Ape Men”
Gorgeous hand-drawn animation with especially beautiful landscapes. It fascinates me that these first five episodes all (justifiably) follow the same essential pattern, with some eventual physical confrontation where our Neanderthal and his T-rex partner initially appear woefully outmatched, but they all feel strikingly, thoughtfully different in terms of how and why they play out. Partly, that’s because of the specifics of the incredible fight scenes, which always make use of the environment and the unique physical details of the creatures involved, but partly it’s in the lively and almost political sense of problem-solving. Spear and Fang can play one group of enemies off another (leading giant bats into a raptor ambush); they can form a respectful peace by returning the tusk of a slaughtered mammoth; and when confronted with ritualized viciousness, they can opt for wholesale slaughter. There’s a real feeling here of calculating what forces in the world they can live with, and under what conditions, and also of the realistic assessment of whether or not they can take down particular opponents at all. (Spear makes peace with the mammoths partly out of genuine emotional connection–this is a world where all the characters understand both food and revenge as valid, sympathetic motivations worthy of respect–but also partly because they’re an overwhelming force, and his offering can end a conflict he’d otherwise lose.)
I also love the physicality of the show, especially when it comes to bodies as both vulnerabilities and tools. Spear, unsurprisingly, is particularly good at utilizing and scavenging bodies–living and otherwise–for weapons: there’s something very appropriately primal (that’s the name of the show!) about yanking out a dinosaur’s tooth and then stabbing it with it. Bones, teeth, tusks, spider webbing, snakeskin–everyone here is made up of salvageable weapons and tools.
Hacks, “There Is No Line” through “Tunnel of Love”
Rewatching these with my wife, who’d only seen the pilot. I don’t think we’ll be able to completely catch her up before season four starts, but we’re speeding along nicely.
FUCK YEAH PRIMAL! I like this — “There’s a real feeling here of calculating what forces in the world they can live with, and under what conditions, and also of the realistic assessment of whether or not they can take down particular opponents at all” — especially in the context of those fucking Ape Men, who are the first (but not the last, if this counts as a spoiler) malicious society our heroes encounter — the mammoths are pretty reasonable all things concerned and their demands can be met, the Ape Men are sadistic and can’t be negotiated with. And more interestingly, they cannot be taken down with conventional means, however boss our heroes are at fighting — but their own sadism is used against them in an entirely nonjudgmental way and it owwwwwwwwwwwwwwns.
It’s so satisfying to watch a desperate, vengeful Fang turn the Ape Men’s own ritualized cruelty against them–and he’s not doing a ceremonial drop, he’s chugging the whole bowl, YEAAAAH–and lay waste.
The Lego Batman Movie and The Lego Movie sort of blur together for me. It’s hard to tell how much is just the ongoing (if not necessarily exciting) celebration of cartoons that look like Legos, how much is the desire to create as chaotic a world as possible that is either a six year’s fertile imagination run amok or a fanfic writer losing control, and how much is really commentary about Batman. Though I think to a large degree that commentary is probably something both Matt Reeves and whoever is writing the comics this year needs to hear. Plus at least one movie was able to use a Batgirl of color and not be thrown into the watertower.
Season four starts Thursday, so that would be a tall order indeed.
My wife stubbornly refuses to give Hacks a shot, and I don’t know why. It’s got so much that would appeal to her! (comedy, stories about women, probably a third thing)
Is she just very opposed to glittery caftans?
We did have one conversation that went something like this:
“I just kinda don’t like Jean Smart.”
“What have you even seen her in?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you thinking of someone else?”
“Maybe. But I’m still not watching it.”
Two episodes are better than one!
Kojak:
– “Deadly Innocence” – A police lab chemist is killed in a hit and run, and soon Kojak discovered there is a link between the victim and a cop sent to jail for stealing drugs from an evidence locker. Turns out someone who held the cop responsible for his son’s paralysis arranged with the chemist to frame the cop. The premise behind this is interesting, but the pieces never really connect well enough to make sense. The most interesting thing here? The chemist’s son came home from Vietnam an addict and slowly dying from his wounds. I wonder how many other shows in 1976 were confronting the legacy of the late war yet. James Luisi comes back for the second time in two weeks as an Internal Affairs cop before his stint later in the year on Rockford.
– “Justice Deferred” – A skeleton with a bullet hole in the skull is found in a construction site, and Kojak and his men work to figure out who the corpse is and why he was killed eighteen years earlier. There is a bit of howcatchem here since we know right away who did it, but overall this is a very clever and well assembled mystery. Though the tone is really weird. On the one hand, it turns out that the murder was connected to a plane crash and the deaths of 80 people, really serious stuff, and on the other hand Kojak is having fun playing Sherlock Holmes and everyone is hamming it up a bit. The cast is pretty good, with Michael Ansara as the mastermind, Gail Strickland as the victim’s widow (which is not the best casting since she is far too young for the role), and familiar character actors Ned Glass and Marjorie Bennett. For some reason, Kevin Dobson isn’t in either of these, and Victor Campos makes his last appearances as Det. Gomez. Oh, and we finally learn that Stavros’s first name is Demosthenes.
Frasier:
– “A Word to the Wiseguy” – Maris begs Niles’s help fixing her too many parking tickets, and turns to a “fixer” with mob connections. Whose quid pro quo is making Frasier to tell his long time fiancee to marry him. A fairly simply story that hinges less on Harris Yullin’s performance as the mobster and more on Faith Prince (only on the phone) basically reprising her Guys and Dolls role as Adelaide, and stealing the show. But this one isn’t that strong.
“Look Before You Leap” – However, this one runs with a funny premise: on Feb. 29, 1996, Frasier encourages everyone to take a leap, to do something they would otherwise never do. Naturally, nothing works out, and Frasier ends up backing out of his own leap: singing a Rigoletto aria for a PBS pledge break. Of course, everything still goes wrong. Lots of very funny bits for everyone, especially Niles, asked for another favor by Maris, this one of a connubial nature. (PBS stations no longer rely on pledge breaks as much, as you might guess, but if we could get famous people to come on the air and make fools of themselves, we might still do them.)
M*A*S*H
– “Bulletin Board” – About as scattershot a “things are happening today” episode as we’ve seen. My hunch is that the plan was for the main plot to revolve around Henry being distraught over the death of a patient, but that only takes part of the episode, and the rest is pretty random things like a very short letter home from Trapper to his daughter and a fight between Klinger and Zale (his first lines).
– “The Consultant” – Hawkeye and Trapper, in Tokyo for a conference they don’t actually attend, meet a civilian doctor (albeit in uniform at the army’s insistence) who decides to come to the camp to see what happens there. He introduces the doctors to the new procedure of an arterial transplant to save injured limbs, but then is too scared and drunk to do the operation. Something that really pisses Hawkeye off. My wife thought that the show was critical of the consultant (not new to combat as he was a WWI and WWII vet). I thought this was the first time the show is critical of Hawkeye being just a bit holier than thou. Maybe it’s both? Robert Alda makes his first appearance opposite his son as the consultant, and is solid enough.
Also rewatched MST3K, “Bride of the Monster.” I watched this less than a year ago and not only did I not remember watching it, I didn’t remember any details of the movie or the riffs. Even though some of the sketches are funny. Some movies are just so bad they cease to exist the second you turn them off.
This is strange, because “Bride of the Monster” was maybe the first MST3K I ever saw, and random riffs from it are burned into my brain. “Go get daddy a beer!”
The Shooting
Simon watched this last week, and I thought it sounded interesting. The premise is great for a thriller, but it’s presented as a hangout movie, so I see why he (and others) don’t like it. There’s also a lot of jarring choices that probably come from incompetence, like a cut that makes it look like night instantly fell, but not in a cool artistic way. On the other hand, Jack Nicholson has serious Walton Goggins energy in this.
Chicken Little
Collectively understood as the nadir of Disney films. Indeed, the Disney nerd I watched this with eventually begged me to turn it off because she realised how much she hated it. Almost nothing about this really works; you can really feel that Disney is feeling their lack of identity and the (negative) influence from both Shrek and Pixar. You can feel an absolute lack of the craft that has hit them; Wikipedia reliably informs me that this was rewritten constantly, which is funny because the end result feels less like a story and more like a collection of ideas that weren’t really worked out.
The timing for individual gags feels all wrong, and the overall structure feels wobbly and weird. Individual scenes feel like they go for way too long, the story somehow jumps right into the premise and yet takes forever to get to the point, and the emotional climax comes about twenty minutes too early. The most invested I ever got was in the baseball game Chicken Little wins to win back the town, and it felt like it had nothing to do with the story.
That said, I think the overall idea here works; it finds an interesting riff on the dreams vs responsibility Disney conflict in that Chicken Little wants to be responsible, but nothing he does actually works, and he has to trust his heart and believe that what he’s doing is working. It’s too bad his movie sucks.
(The two good choices in the film: Chicken Little’s design is really sympathetic, and Fish Out Of Water is a great character.)
Elevation
This is what my Disney friend put on instead of Chicken Run, and she liked it a lot better. I found it dry and mechanical in its plotting – not so much plot turns as arguments about procedure – but the lore was kind of cool. The premise is that alien creatures emerged from the ground and started killing everybody below 80k feet, and the protagonist has to pass through to find medicine for his kid. The cool thing is that the lore is never fully explained – the characters discover the creatures are actually robots – but sadly, it’s in a “give us money for a sequel” way and not the “we didn’t have to explain this for the plot” way. Still, Morena Baccarin is really cool in this.
Instead of Chicken Run or instead of Chicken Little? Because Chicken Run is fun and it would be a shame to pass on it because of a previous bad chicken
restaurantexperience.For fuck
That’s the second time in as many days I’ve made that mistake. Chicken Run is indeed a great movie.
Top Secret! — RIP to a king. One of the funniest things about this movie is how its joyful parody winds up reifying the original idea, Kilmer is great from the get-go but hits god mode in the “Tutti Frutti” sequence of a young rocker blowing back the hair of the squares — the orchestra suddenly having electric guitars and rocking out is goofy and it also fits the moment of exuberance. The dummy work in “Straighten The Rug” is similar, the ragdolls being swung around are hilarious and also part of the energy. I think the celebrated Swedish bookshop and underwater saloon gags have a similar vibe, the work to do this makes it real and vital. It all hangs on Kilmer, of course, his shit-eating grin tossing the books “back” in the store is beautiful to see.
Live music — finally caught up with local singer/songwriter Abbie Barrett at a full show, she has a strong voice and even stronger songwriting chops, finding rhythmic fillips and vocal lines that edge past where you’d expect and then stick in your head. She also works a strong dynamic range, from softer near-folk to full on rock, sometimes in the same song. A great, restorative time.
Babylon 5 — the show is settling into a solid groove, although it’s been a while since we’ve seen poor Andrea Thompson. The show’s cosmopolitanism can be weird at points — whenever we visit a new area on the station it prompts questions of just how big this place is — but is also done very well as an argument via setting and character, it tickled me to see an episode’s opening credits refer to guest actors starring as The Muta-Do, Caliban, and Rabbi Koslov. There is also a certain goopy liberalism here in being able to out-rulebook people, this comes through in an episode where unionized dockworkers threaten a strike and evil corporate assholes threaten to break them, our heroic commander finds a loophole to a happy ending that avoids bloodshed and that just feels like wishful thinking to me, especially because it doesn’t require painful conflict and standing up for something. But there continue to be hints of more nefarious doings to come.
The single most frustrating part of the show for me is how often it drops its alien ambassadors despite them clearly being the best part of the show.
Spoilers, but Sinclair’s use of the Rush Act will come back to bite him in the ass later.
Ooooh, interesting! And yeah, I have suspicions based on what I’ve read about other shows in this vein that sometimes characters are absent purely because of the makeup work required to have them around — this most recent episode had a ton of aliens but most of them were non-speaking roles that could be handled via masks, as opposed to the really complicated stuff. So I’m sympathetic to those logistic problems but agree overall — the ambassadors are great! I was initially skeptical in the first episode or so because of how stylized the performances are but man, they struck gold with Furlan, Jurasik and Katsulas.
I think the show is at its most indulgent with G’kar and Londo, but it also quickly becomes apparent that Jurasik and Katsulas are capable of carrying that indulgence and building real characters and emotions out of them. (Furlan is great too, possibly the best on the show, but I feel like the show uses her to her exact potential and that she gets used the most).
Woooooo live music!!
Manhattan — This could maybe be seen (in the context of the Woodman’s larger oeuvre and especially after the IMO success of the experimental Interiors) as going back to the well of Annie Hall. And indeed, that’s kind of how I felt about it the first time I saw it. But in the context of a retrospective that view becomes jejune. Because Annie Hall was about a relationship’s successes and joys even when it doesn’t last — you still have the eggs. This is about a relationship that was doomed from the start. In her first scene Keaton’s Mary is so insufferable you can’t imagine why anyone would give her the time of day. Later, when Woody rescues her from a terrible day you see a better side of her, but still so needy and insecure, with nothing of Annie’s joie de vivre or adventurousness. Mary’s repeated refrain of “I’m from Philadelphia, we don’t talk about things like that” (or similar) is the tell that she is fundamentally overwhelmed by her social circle, who may be onanistic, but at least they’re out there trying to figure things out. But even so, the jokes (which are plentiful; this is less a hybrid comedy/drama than Annie Hall and more a straightforward romantic comedy, but it’s still funny) are almost never at Mary’s expense except in her first scene where she’s being a real dip.
On another note: Mariel Hemingway is just perfect in the role of the wise beyond her years Tracy. Obviously it’s weird that Keaton’s romantic rival is a 17-year-old girl, but the character is so much more poised and sophisticated than Mary despite her age.
The Dirt – Sort of an anti-Streaming Shuffle here, as Lauren is compelled by outside forces to experience this movie and then I am also required to follow. As someone only very casually acquainted with arena hair metal and not anxious to learn more, it doesn’t surprise me that a biopic movie about Motley Crue would be dumb and playfully winking yet still full of misplaced self-importance. Walk Hard, my friends, everyone must Walk Hard, but this film makes the Dewey Cox Story look like a significant achievement of the genre without adjusting for the fact that it’s a parody. The Dirt‘s closer parody analog is Weird: The Weird Al Story which has a similar straight-to-streaming aesthetic and is only marginally more exaggerated in self-mythologizing. In a movie about an incredibly transgressive group of men, the most shocking thing is how conventional it becomes. You guys lapped up your own piss so that someday your lowest moments could be scored with generic treacly piano? Have some self respect.
The movie that I most thought of while tolerating the antics (antics from, to be fair, a very game and winning cast) was The Wolf of Wall Street, another film about men indulging their basest instincts and getting rewarded along the way. That movie strategically walls off outsiders making the response of the public at large almost entirely theoretical until the climactic moment when it drops them in. The Dirt includes Motley Crue’s audience along the way, the crowds of fans of course, but also (as pointed out by Lauren) the innocent bystanders who didn’t ask to watch the boys whip out their junk poolside at the Best Western, and by including them in the transgression but not the absolution, shows how little the main characters really care about anything but what’s right in front of them. Congrats to them on upgrading their objects of focus beyond heroin needles, but if you want me to enjoy the story of the journey I’m going to need something more exciting than warmed-over biopic cliches.
Impossible to overstate the kick I got out of that “anti-Streaming Shuffle” opening. You’re spot-on with the comparisons here, too–re: Walk Hard, I’m pretty sure there’s even a moment where someone comes close to word-for-word earnestly saying, “Goddamn, this is a dark fucking period!”–and with taking down that treacly piano. Plink! Plink! Plink at the devil!
everything everywhere all at once. This is great. Okay, I do have a minor quibble—I need directors and screenwriters to stop going to therapy—but otherwise good. Ke Huy Quan has a natural charisma and almost Jackie Chan-ish comic timing. I love the Daniels sense of humor. This is clearly made by the same people responsible for the daniel radcliffe farting boner corpse movie. Michelle Yeoh and Stephanie Hsu are also great. Jenny Slate steals every scene she’s in. I like when writers understand that the multiverse is a way to look at characters in a new light by recontextualizing their choices and finding a core of who the character is that persists regardless. (The mcu multiverse saga is doing the opposite of this). The search for meaning in a universe of random noise is also an angle I’ll always appreciate in a movie.
White Lotus. Kinda anticlimactic. They went bigger with the culminating murder but it felt smaller. What this season lacked was a basil fawlty character. They need to bring that back. We need a basil fawlty flailing around. Season 1 had a great Basil. Season 2 had a pretty good basil. I’m sorry Fabian, but you are not basil. Gaitok? Definitely not a basil.
Still some good stuff. Mook when Gaitok tells her he’s quitting because he doesn’t want to hurt anyone? Hilarious. (Also very funny that Mook is objectively the biggest star this season but has been ignored in anglophone media.) Duke dad slapping the pina colada out of saxon’s hand? Piper realizing she is who she is? (I went to a duke adjacent small college; I knew a lot of Pipers. A couple Saxons but way, way more Pipers. I have gone dancing with Pipers.) We need more frasier scripts with life and death stakes and less mass shootouts. (imagine Gaitok was Niles.)
Yes yes yes to your line about the Frasier scripts! I enjoyed this season of White Lotus, but it definitely wasn’t as satisfying as either of the first two seasons, and I attribute that in large part to it taking itself too seriously. It works when it remembers that it’s farce (also, you could lift whole scenes and put them into a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode and they would work perfectly). And related to that, farce requires razor-tight plotting, and season 3 lost its grip towards the end (even Shane Vendrell wouldn’t just have gone back to the resort…)
I think it also fell into the trap of upping the stakes to the point that they lose meaning. The mass shootout at the end, happening as it did, didn’t work practically as an ‘ending’ the way that the deaths of the first two seasons did.
Good call on Curb. The show’s dna is frasier/curb/seinfeld but played with a mix of deadpan and drama. The attempted murder-suicide plot worked (though the pacing was off—we did not need that many scenes of jason isaacs on the phone) because it’s a comedy of errors played straight. You get piper and lochy at the last minute condemining and saving themselves. It’s great.
I feel like another pass through the writers room and Rick’s and Jim’s misunderstanding could have had a much funnier resolution. Like maybe Rick doesn’t know what Jim looks like and they first meet at the bar and Jim is talking about this woman he banged fifty years ago right at this very hotel, which he then decided to buy. Rick realizes who he is and attempts to reconcile. He goes in for a hug. Gaitok shoots him and then marries Mook. Twist: Chelsea’s pregnant—time jump to 2065. Rick Jr shoots gaitok with a laser. Ok. Maybe not the last bit. But Jim yelling “you idiot he’s my son” while Rick’s bleeding out would be hilarious and poignant.
Give me a call Mike. I got ideas, starting with hiring Larry David and David Hyde Pierce as co-concierges of White Lotus Geneva.
I was dying at Victoria’s reactions while Piper was having her crushing epiphany, contrasted with Tim’s devastation.
I’d be perfectly happy if this was it for the show (not every series needs to go on forever), but if it must, I will sign your petition to cast David Hyde-Pierce and Larry David. Heck, just do a special cross-over episode where the main cast of Curb goes on holiday at the same resort!
Reminder, everyone, you can check our new Sunday feature for discussing the week in television!
Tuesday when I got home from the hospital I watched Office Space again, one of my regular comforting-familiarity comedy watches for convalesces like this, and the one I’d seen least recently. The third act isn’t as bad as I remembered – the Lumbergh confusion is hideously contrived, but it’s for a pretty brief stretch of the film. And we get over a solid hour of good comedy in a 90-minute film before then. (And that last 30 minutes gives us the “money laundering” scene, among other things.)
Peter probably should have told Joanna they were just drinking because Michael and Samir got laid off, though.
The Lumbergh confusion is extremely contrived but it is justified for me by arguably the worst sex scene in cinema, absolutely nightmarish humor.
Ahah, that’s fair and true. Man, Lumbergh is such an oily snake. Gary Cole just perfectly embodies him.
For the love of god, man, do not make me think about Lumbergh’s oily snake.
You brought it up! You already were.
SUNDAY
Primal
SPOILERS THROUGHOUT
Season 2, Episode 7. “The Colossaeus”. First time.
We see the Viking chief die from his wounds fighting Spear and Fang, and he’s almost taken to Valhalla by valkyries before he’s yanked down to hell, where a massive demon offers him a deal if he’ll kill our heroes. He comes back as a massive fire creature and he begins a slow march for the rest of the series to find him, a brilliant idea as his sporadic appearances make him into a manifestation of looming fate, and the ultimate consequence for everyone else.
Our heroes have their own problems coming. First off, there’s a moment of levity as Spear and Mira trick Fang into letting take her eggs to the ship, where they set up a nest so they can travel back to Mira’s home. I mentioned last week how well this show handles pace and rhythm and it’s not just to provide some breaks in the action but also to allow some funnier and more gentle moments in between the carnage, and this is the last such moment before three very brutal, often downer episodes.
And the downer comes immediately after, as soon enough they come across one massive, city-sized Egyptian ship, and they’re attacked by foot soldiers and one big guy. (Aside: I wasn’t sure if the episode title referred to the ship itself or the big guy, since neither are named in the episode; Wikipedia says it’s the ship, which it endearinlgy writes as COLOSSAEUS in all caps to suggest its massive size). Another fight ensues and tragically one of Fang’s eggs get broken and the baby dies, sending her into a rage until the Egyptian queen comes aboard and takes her remaining eggs, forcing them to surrender. They all get taken as prisoners into the ship, where we learn that the big guy is also a prisoner and is being used by the queen to fight on her behalf. All three of them are then forced to fight the queen’s war against Babylon and its massive armies and war elephants. It’s a definite shift in the story, a violence that’s wielded not for survival but for power, and it will get worse for our heroes from here.
Season 2, Episode 8. “The Colossaeus II”. First time.
The queen has the Babylonian king slaughtered and takes his shit, and we learn that the big guy has a daughter kept captive by the Egyptians, hence why he’s forced for them. All three are forced to fight for the queen as she conquers Rome, China, the Slavs and the Philistines in a harsh, brilliant montage sequence that reveals the extent of their oppression and the carnage they’re forced to execute. Even worse is their intervention in an Indian village, where the villagers peacefully offer their good but the queen orders the big guy to kill all of them anyway. Say what you will about the myriad monsters and creatures from Season 1 but hardly anyone murdered as wantonly and senselessly as she does.
Also, the COLOSSAEUS here is as fearsome as anything else this show has come up with.
After that, Spear manages to break out of his cell and attempts to free Mira and the big guy’s daughter and take the eggs but the queen holds her own in battle and they fight to a stalemate. The eggs also hatch midway through, with Fang’s babies emerging (with a mix of Fang and their father’s colors), and the queen taking them hostage again.
Season 2, Episode 9. “The Colossaeus III”. First time.
Before anything happens, Tartakovsky opens with a couple of minutes of the ship slimpy going about the sea and its row dipping into the water over and over, indifferent to the fight above and what their ship has wrecked on the world. It’s a curious and ominous opening, and it sets up a simple but important question to be answered later: who is rowing this boat?
We resume as the queen prepares to have the heroes executed by the big guy, starting with Fang (who she won’t need since she already has two brand new rexes). We get a flashback to the big guy’s life before and how he and his daughter got kidnapped and their people slaughtered by the queen. It’s a quick glimpse into a life other than endless conquest and it gives him the resolve to free Fang and fight back. A long fight ensues, loaded with great moments of carnage and employing even more new toys for violence, such as cannonballs, longbow and the always reliable stone tied to the end of a long chain. Crucially the big guy goes downstairs to the row room, where we see the rest of his people are being held as slaves and they eventually kill their captors and join the fight. Spear, Fang and Mira jump ship and commandeer a smaller boat to escape, just as the big guy and his people come up and kill the remaining Egyptians and throw the queen overboard to their gruesome death. Both parties acknowledge each other then part ways.
Without putting too fine a point of it and without saying a single word, these three episodes are a great exhibition of what the end of power and violence, and tie in greatly with Season 2’s concerns about family and social systems emerging out of barbarism. Here, the big guy lives and gets to free his people, and is the one person in the industrial violence/slavery system who inspires others rather than oppresses them. And he even gets some forgiveness from Spear and Fang. Still, I think he only walks away for the time being and fate is not done with him, as illustrated by the Viking fire demon casually walking above the sea on his way to enact his revenge.
Season 2, Episode 10. “Echoes of Eternity”. First time.
I hesitate to describe the plot of this one, not only because I already went long on the previous ones but because this marks the end of the show so far and it deals with a lot, succintly and brilliantly tying up the personal and thematic threads from Season 2 and delivering one final blowup and one brilliant final scene. We get a flashback to a kid Spear learning to cave paint and losing his father to sabertooth tigers and becoming the warrior he is today, and another flashback to Mira being kidnapped. Soon enough they find Mira’s people and little by little Spear, Fang and her rexes are welcomed and adopted.
This brings to the fore how Spear’s interiority has slowly developed this season, and after all he’s seen and the possibility of peace and quiet emerges, we see how he’s pondering his place in this world and how he struggles with the desire and the fear of setting up roots again.
But fate is still coming and it catches up to them at last.
The show’s final fight with the Viking fire demon is completely different, scary and brilliantly animated. Without going into detail, it’s clear from the start it’s one Spear and Fang can’t win outright or even survive. Fate does come but they fight it anyway and, in one final go-for-broke moment, Spear manages to outdo it and make sure a part of him will carry on. It’s a beautiful moment and it leads to an awesome conclusion, where violence are power are passed on but also love and community. And so ends a fantastic show. I might rewatch some of the first Season 1 episodes, though I’m tempted to watch Samurai Jack. Still, it firmly establishes Tartakovsky and his crew as some of the best to ever do TV animation.
What did we play?
A short Strahd session to wrap up the side quest into our hellish version of Groundhog Day. Honestly, I am not sure why any of this happened, but we left with a wagon full of food for the starving town we left, and maybe with a potential ally for later. Or maybe not. I really don’t know if this module works that way.
Monikers, with some friends. This is my go-to easy game for get-togethers, because it’s fun, funny, and easy to explain, and you end up having to find a one-word clue for “power bottom” or an (inevitably tasteless) way to mime Princess Diana. This seemed like a hit for everybody, so we even got to play more than one round, which leads to the additional complication of people (i.e., me) accidentally guessing cards from the last deck. If we ever have a Magpies convention–and we should–I’ll bring this, and we can all contribute write-in cards too.
More Assassin’s Creed: Origins over my wife’s shoulder (this is the only game where she doesn’t insist I have the controller). Maybe it’s the change of pace from Renaissance Italy, but the rendering of Cleopatra-era Egypt is quite gorgeous. It also means ridiculous things like the ability to dash across the desert from Memphis to Giza (maybe taking down a hippo or a jackal along the way) but one of the charms of these often monotonous games is how the stuff they’re super serious about (history, architecture) is forced to converse with the extremely silly conventions of the games.
My kids and I rediscovered our Switch and spent the better part of a day playing Crash Bandicoot and Mario Kart. It was a good time.
Mega Man X3 (Mega Man X Legacy Collection) on Nintendo Switch
Still trying to make my way, only made it to one more boss, a flying bee robot. Couldn’t beat it but I got close. If past MMX games are any indication, once I beat two or three bosses the game should crack wide open.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate on Nintendo Switch
Our niece stayed over on Friday and I played a few matches against her. I won all but the last one. She might have won another one but she fell down the stage. Still, she’s made a lot of progress and it’s always a good time playing each other, though I did miss her older brother, who would always join us in playing. Kids growing up, tale as old as time.
Nine Sols is a lot more fun in story mode, where you don’t have to be perfect in every fight or else it’s instant death. Elements of Hollow Knight in the gameplay, elements of Axiom Verge in the story (a more primitive race of people surrounded by vastly advanced technology they’re not even really aware of, let alone understand) plus other sci-fi dystopias like Logan’s Run. Anyway, in Story Mode this is a really fun Metroidvania. In standard mode… if you’re familiar with Sekiro and some kind of elite expert at parrying, you may be able to get through it. Maybe.
Maggie is important! I think she is almost never written for as a lead or even support and like you say, she’s a baby so that’s fine. But she is part of the family and I think you can see a line from episodes acknowledging it via background or quick gag humor (Maggie jumping up to grab the bottle thrown at Homer’s head comes to mind) and ones that don’t bother to write anything for her at all.
And you allude to this, but I think if Marge is the easiest to write she is the hardest to write well. That “amusing squarishness” takes a lot of thought and thinking through her character (and the older I get the more I appreciate Kavner’s delivery), because these aren’t one-liners or foolish exaggerations or other standard sitcom material. Jerk-ass Homer is a matter of tone*, I think even when he’s being written below par he’s still funny, but Marge frequently gets written as a pure sounding board/obstacle the longer the show goes on because that baseline is all the writers care for.
*and while I agree with the general critique of the character slide, it’s not like Homer didn’t already change from grumpy and relatively normal Matthauisms to a more naive and appetite-driven character to the full-on id of the classic years to Captain Wacky
I was thinking similar thoughts about Marge and was thus surprised to find her at the “easiest” side of the spectrum.
For sure, it’s hard to get Marge’s voice perfectly correct, but this is based on the very practical data we have as opposed to the theoretical idea of the character. Marge’s voice is so straightforward that even Mike Scully couldn’t fuck her up. However hard she seems to be to write – and indeed The Simpsons as we know it comes from writers really doing the work – she’s still way easier than everyone else.
I think Scully really is the goat of the history of The Simpsons (N.B not G.O.A.T. — it is frustrating when slang terms evolve into their opposites), because the show really improved a lot once he left, but its decline is fixed in the public imagination.
Anyway, I like Girly Edition because I like any episode that focuses on the relationship between Bart and Lisa as siblings. And maybe (I have watched it within the last few years but not recently) maybe that means we can forgive Lisa’s characterization here because Bart can get under her skin like no one else.
Agreed on Girly Edition, and the conceit is kids cosplaying as adults, right? Blurring those lines is fine with me in that context, and as you note the sibling relationship dominates over all (shades of their science fair conflict from earlier).
Playing off Bart also allows Lisa to be a kid, which is something she is rarely allowed, even in the classic era.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZSoJDUD_bU
Where’s Santa’s Little Helper?
Yes it is season 11 and yes it is incredibly stupid and unrealistic, but in terms of writing for family members the Santa’s Little Helper line “CHEW-Y?” always makes me laugh.
Whenever Santa’s Little Helper is not in an article, all the other commenters — oh, I see C.D. Ploughman has taken care of it.
*Marge groan*
Year of the Month update!
This April, we’ll be looking at 1999, so you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, et al!
TBD: James Williams: 10 Things I Hate About You
TBD: Ruck Cohlchez – Summerteeth/The Soft Bulletin/Utopia Parkway
TBD: Lauren James – Storm of the Century
Apr. 8th: Bridgett Taylor: …One More Time
Apr. 11th: Gillian Rose Nelson: Balloon Farm
Apr. 15th: Ben Hohenstatt: The White Stripes
Apr. 16th: James Rodriguez: The Scooby Doo Project
Apr. 17th: Cameron Ward/Cori Domschot: The Mummy
Apr. 18th: Gillian Rose Nelson: The Hand Behind the Mouse
Apr. 22nd: Sam Scott: Titus
Apr. 24th: Cori Domschot: The Matrix
Apr. 25th: Gillian Rose Nelson: Disney on DVD
Apr. 28th: Tristan J. Nankervis: The Sixth Sense
Apr. 29th: Dave Shutton: American Pie/Class of 1999
And the open call for May starts now! Our year will be 1962, so you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, et al!
May 2nd: Gillian Rose Nelson: Moon Pilot
May 9th: Gillian Rose Nelson: Bon Voyage!
May 15th: John Bruni: L’Eclisse/Il Sorpasso
May 16th: Gillian Rose Nelson: Big Red
May 23rd: Gillian Rose Nelson: Almost Angels
May 30th: Gillian Rose Nelson: In Search of the Castaways