Simpsons Did It!: “Treehouse Of Horror Presents: Simpsons Wicked This Way Comes”

What’s this?  Another Treehouse of Horror episode?  Is this like that IT parody two years ago?  Wait, this is another anthology?  Crap, I never know what to do with these…

Well, this one is a wee bit different in that all the works here parody the writings of Ray Bradbury, a sci-fi writer who hated advanced technology.  Seriously, the dude hated TV and worked on a manual typewriter.  But regardless, he is a well-respected writer for a reason, and…I only really know Fahrenheit 451.  I read some short stories once upon a time, but I don’t really remember much about them.  And they might have been horror instead of sci-fi.  Plus, I do know where the title for this episode comes from and did see that movie once with Jonathan Pryce and Jason Robards.

Basically, I won’t get many of these references.

Anyway, the family is visiting a circus, much to Lisa’s consternation because she’s gotten something like six of them closed all by herself.  But this is more of a freakshow, so while Homer and Bart go off to see the dog-faced man and the man-faced dog and Marge heads over to see the world’s strongest boy, Lisa sees the tattooed man (guest star Andy Serkis) is getting fired, but he tells her she can see other worlds if she stares at his tattoos intently enough even if most chefs have more ink these days than he does.

So yes, we have a framing device!

Anyway, the first story is set in what looks like a fictional 1950s or so where Bart hears a woman’s scream coming from underground.  But, no one believes him.  Homer points out Bart had tried to get everyone to look into a boy crying about a wolf, but all they found was a fat wolf.  Bart will do anything to get someone to pay attention, so he checks every door in town to see if the lady of the house is missing, but most of them women seem to be smoking while pregnant.  He eventually gets to the VanHouten house where Luann drugs him with warm milk.  Fortunately, Bart wakes up enough to go back and try to dig the woman out himself, and that’s when the whole town shows up to believe him.  Only the person in the coffin is actually Kirk VanHouten, a man with a very womanly scream.  He was down there because Miss Hoover saw Kirk buying blue hairdye for Luann, and then Miss Hoover started a rumor.  Plus, it turns out divorce is worse than murder in this time period, so no one gets punished.

The second story has Superintendent Chalmers getting advice from Carl to get away from boring old Seymour Skinner.  That involves buying a robot double to deal with Skinner.  Small problem:  Skinner also got a robot double to get with Chalmers who is too mean.  But the robots go bad if they develops feelings, so it’s off for the two school administrators to go to stop the robots, only to find they made friends and are making school less formal through the power of friendship.  That ends with a blown-up Skinner bot and a dead Chalmers because Seymour sure couldn’t tell who was who.  But at least Chalmers Bot will now be Skinner’s friend.

And finally, hey, it’s based on Fahrenheit 451!  Homer is a fireman who burns trash TV, but he finds it interesting while the rest of the family is engrossed in intelligent, deeply plotted stuff.  He falls for the bad stuff, Bart rats him out, and his boss (Serkis again) comes to arrest him.  Homer does find a resistance group, big surprise that it includes Krusty and is under the comic book store, but that was all a trick to find their stash, and now Homer and the other rebels live outside of Springfield, relating the plots of episodes of The Big Bang Theory.  Huh,  I think I will stay away from that.

So, another anthology down, and Lisa is cursed to be another one of the tattooed man’s tattoos.  That stinks.

I suspect she’ll be fine when she returns.