The Simpsons - "Sex, Pies, and Idiot Scrapes" - Talkback [9/28]

If Fox wants to warrant the $400,000 per episode pricetag for the VAs, they sure as hell better come up with better plots. I found this episode boring, and even the Batman spoof was bad. Even the one that James Rolfe aka. the Angry Video Game Nerd had in the second part of his Batman game review was funnier. Sideshow Bob will be seen again. You saw him escape from prison, so it'll happen.
 
You know they've run out of plots when this episode can be summed up as "Marge becomes an erotic chef while Homer and Ned become bounty hunters."

I admit, I found the chase scene to be amusing, and a few one-liners here and there got some laughs, but as a whole? Eh. Run-of-the-mill; no better or worse than most episodes.
 
To be fair, you can summarize the good episodes that way too. Like, Homer's Enemy can be summed up as "Homer makes the only sane man in Springfield go crazy and kill himself." Or, Mother Simpson can be summed up as "Homer meets his hippie mom."
 
I liked how they showed the prison and Sideshow Bob escaping from it.

For a really fat guy, Homer can be really nimble when he wants to be, it was actually kind of funny like how he did the escape moves in the elevator. The B story with Marge though felt really out of place for a Simpsons episode, I wasn't really fond of that. Other than that it was nice opening to the season.
 
If they had removed the Marge plot they could have extended the Homer and Flanders stuff and could have actually given it a little more emotional meat. We're supposed to buy that the two of them bonded during their time as bounty hunters. But nothing seemed sincere about any of it because it moved too damn fast. When they finally confronted each other on the construction girder I was actually surprised they expected me to care bout how Ned was feeling. I didn't, because so much of what came before it was just "Simpsons shtick".
 
This was just plain sad. A computer could be writing these episodes and no one would know the difference. Homer gets new job, Marge gets new hobby to put her skills to use, do a montage, do a "Homer uses new gadget to do stupid things" gag, do some sort of "twist" gag, do '60s Batman parody with word balloons (this joke got old about ten years ago), things go wrong somehow, figure out a way to end it before things get too unpredictable. In short, these guys have no right to hate on the Family Guy crew so much because they are doing the exact same crap these days. This would've been better as a Family Guy episode. In fact, the most inspired scene in the episode, the over-the-top action-movie-style chase scene, is the kind of thing Family Guy excels at.

You won't be seeing me in here again if the rest of the season is like this. I guess there will be a few bright spots, inevitably. But it really seems like they're making no progress at all.
 
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