Simpsons Did It!: “Lisa The Skeptic”

Man, why is it the Lisa-based episodes are the ones most likely to throw off my suspension of disbelief?  And for a cartoon yet?

I’ve complained in the past about Preachy Lisa, and I doubt she gets any preachier than she does here when she digs up what looks like an angel’s skeleton.  Lisa, and only Lisa, seems to believe there is a scientific explanation for all this and belief in angels is silly at best.  She says some hurtful things to Marge on that subject, and in the end they make up when Lisa too momentarily seems to believe in angels.

Here’s the thing…if it’s a skeleton, then that makes it a dead angel, right?  And what kills angels?  Furthermore, where is it written angels even have skeletons?  Wouldn’t the theological implications of a dead angel be more disturbing than…whatever it is that happened here?

See, I can buy, up to a point, that religiously-minded characters who practice Christianity on this show, like Reverend Lovejoy and especially Ned Flanders, would fall for this…but everyone in town other than Lisa?  That Stephen Jay Gould cameo where he doesn’t do the tests for some reason seems like something just tacked on for some reason unknown.  I also have a hard time believing that a shopping mall would use an angel’s skeleton as a mascot, or that no one in town was working at the mall and thus no one noticed it also opened that night, or that the angel was on a rig when it was sitting out in the middle of a bare hill.  Or why non-Christian members of the community, like Krusty, Apu, and Manjula, were just as quick to believe in a very Christian symbol of…something.

So, what we have is a very heavy-handed allegory of the debate between science and religion where neither really comes out on top, Lisa is obnoxiously preachy but at least she’s taught a lesson from Marge, and I’m sitting there thinking the episode wasn’t very good.

Though, yes, Homer would charge admission to see the angel.  That much I would agree on.