Simpsons Did It!: “The Last Traction Hero”

Should Marge have a gay male friend?

Well, she’s getting one.

How did that happen?  Well, Mr.  Burns was out of town for a hunting expedition where he and other very rich people shot heavily tranquilized quails.  Homer, needing a parking space, used Burns’.  Then he decided that meant he could use all of Burns’ stuff, which mostly amounted to trying on the old man’s much tighter clothes.  Finally Homer forgets himself and Burns catches the lout in the old man’s office.  Naturally, that means hitting the button for the trap door.

And that was a problem because the trap door is being renovated.  Homer falls down pretty far, hitting all kinds of things along the way, and ends up in a body cast.

See, that’s where the gay friend comes in.  Burns’ trap door wasn’t up to code, and that was ignored thanks to it being grandfathered in during the Reagan years, but renovate the thing and now it has to meet safety requirements, up to and including being wide enough to be wheelchair accessible.  That means Homer can sue, and that means sending Smithers to get Homer’s signature.

At home, Homer’s having a pretty good time.  Marge set up a mobile for him of his favorite things, like beer and a photo of Moe, and he even has some sound-dampening headphones to drown out Grampa.  Heck, the idea of suing never even entered Homer’s mind until Smithers showed up with the waiver.

That is a bit on how these things roll.

As it is, Smithers is too demoralized to get Homer to sign anything, so he and Marge get to talking and it becomes rather emotionally fulfilling for both.  Homer doesn’t mind either because that means Smithers meets Marge’s emotional needs and Homer gets the sex.  It’s every man’s dream according to Homer.

Meanwhile, according to Lisa, the school bus needs a seating chart to cut down on chaos.  She volunteers and the first day goes smoothly by sitting bullies away from nerds and Milhouse by himself.  Then everything goes to hell on day two, ruining Lisa’s dreams of reorganizing everything at the school and making everyone’s lives her idea of better.  Heck, it wasn’t even Bart’s fault.  It just happened that everything went down the crapper as the bus went through a tunnel.  But as Milhouse explained, the bus is the only refuge for much needed chaos between most people’s twin hellholes of school and home.  Lisa learns no one likes a know-it-all and promptly forgets that by episode’s end.

But as for Homer, Burns is threatening to send Smithers to Chernobyl (because of course Burns owns that place too) unless Homer signs.  By then, Homer has a lawyer he saw on TV (I miss Lionel Hutz), and he only changes his mind when he sees how devastated the loss of Smithers would be for Marge.  But then he offers to take a fall off the courthouse steps for his disappointed lawyer, but that just ends up accidentally pulling Marge with him and then both are hit by a truck and put into traction.  That actually allows Homer to learn how to talk to his wife.  That’s sweet.

Not so sweet is having Grampa serve them very hot soup until the casts come off.  Yikes!