Simpsons Did It!: “Kiss, Kiss, Bang Bangalore”

Why is it episodes co-written by Dan Castellaneta and his wife never really work for me?

Oh yeah, they wrote this one.

It’s time for a movie at the Nuclear Plant.  Everyone likes movies!  But wait, this movie seems to have a hidden meaning.  It shows a bunch of factory workers who are tired and then are very happy their jobs got outsourced to a third world country.  Could it be that Mr. Burns is…yeah, he is.

How does a public utility get outsourced to another country anyway?

Well, the law says Burns has to let one union member stay on the job, so whoever gets the bouquet can keep his job.  It’s Homer, because this is The Simpsons and not The Lenny Show, though Lenny’s job is also safe.  It was taken away from him and given to some guy from India.

While all this is going on, Patty and Selma are holding a MacGyver convention and are amazed when Richard Dean Anderson (as himself) stops by looking for the much bigger Stargate SG-1 convention.  The man disses MacGyver in front of the entire convention (basically Patty, Selma, Bart, and Lisa, and the last two don’t know what MacGyver is).  There’s a subplot in there where the twins kidnap Anderson and he himself becomes obsessed by doing MacGyver-like escapes, but this was the first time we’ve heard a peep about Patty and Selma’s love of MacGyver in ages.  This subplot would have probably worked much better when MacGyver was still on the air after all.  Hey, look, there’s Baby Ling!

So, anyway, Homer goes to India and moves in with Apu’s cousin, then after Mr. Burns and Smithers leave him in charge, the power goes to his head and he thinks he’s a god.  Burns brings the rest of the Simpsons to India to fix Homer, only to find that while the Indian employees are bowing down before him, they aren’t worshipping him.  No, instead, Homer taught them all about stuff like overtime, coffee breaks, flex time, and, when Burns fires the lot of them and opts to move the plant back to Springfield where the employees are more ignorant and desperate, he discovers Homer also taught them about severance pay and golden parachutes.

Homer got that in a signed contract and everything.

And in the middle of all that, he had a monkey fighting an elephant.  It looked a little one-sided at one point.

That would be when the small monkey was twirling the elephant around by its trunk.

Let’s move on to a better episode tomorrow…