Aw, c’mon! We just did an anthology episode last time!
Then again, this is our regularly scheduled Halloween episode, so I’ll let it slide.
Our episode opens with Homer and Chthulhu getting into an eating contest in some sort of Lovecraft-style town. The Elder God knows he’s in trouble when Lisa pipes in that Homer skipped breakfast, and when he wins the contest, Homer decides for his prize he wants Chthulhu made into soup. That’s just the cold open, so what else did they do?
Well, some movie parodies. First up is a simple and maybe stupid one parodying Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Which one? I dunno. All of them? Humans are addicted to their smartphones, and a Steve Jobs-ish person is really an alien plant person. Spores go down, infect the people of Springfield, and last survivor Lisa goes down and is shocked to learn…it wasn’t really horrible. The plant aliens were good and were just transporting the humans to their own world where they could lick their smartphone addictions. Then one alien that was a sentient Christmas tree gave some out anyway.
Bonus points for having Lisa ask why aliens can’t use contractions.
The last segment made a mild mockery of Jurassic Park when Mr. Burns finds a way to use dinosaur DNA to make old folks feel younger at a tropical living space, but Homer decides he doesn’t have to read when he’s on vacation and turns up the heat, turning the old folks (except for Burns) into dinosaurs. Lisa manages to save the day by offering to listen to Grampa, now a T-Rex, rather than run away from him because all these people really wanted was respect when they weren’t ripping off people’s heads.
That didn’t make much sense.
The middle segment was actually the best with Lisa (again it’s Lisa) going full-on Split when she somehow kidnaps and holds prisoner Bart, Nelson, and Milhouse. She comes in and out, speaking in weird accents, and finally the boys escape and she starts killing them, first by knocking Milhouse into a newspaper compactor and then stabbing Nelson through with a well-aimed forklift. Bart manages to beg for forgiveness and Lisa returns to normal. What set her off in the first place? Miss Hoover had accidentally dropped a test of hers, Bart found it, made all the answers funny and wrong, showed it to the other two, Miss Hoover clearly didn’t care that the wrong answers were in something she knew was someone else’s handwriting, Lisa got an F on the test, and Lisa just snapped as she says all women do when they are pushed too far, but she’s fine now. Heck, Milhouse is now a sentient bundle of newspaper and seems happier.
Marge, by the way, doesn’t go in for that “every woman snaps” theory. She’s never done it. Then again, Homer is locked in the trunk of her car after he forgot that the day they got married and their wedding anniversary are the same day.
That’s a bit rough.
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