Simpsons Did It!: “Bottle Episode”

Wait, a bottle episode?  You mean an episode with a limited cast confined to either a single location or pre-existing sets?  How does that work with animation?

It doesn’t.  This episode is about a bottle.

I had a lot of Simpsons stuff to cover after my break, didn’t I?  Star Wars material resumes next week if anyone cares.

However, this episode opens with Smithers’s daily routine of doing evil things on behalf of Mr. Burns, including tasting wine for him.  Now, tasting wine isn’t evil, but it is relevant to the rest of the episode as Burns tasks Smithers to find a volunteer, said volunteer being Homer since he won’t abandon a snack in the break room when Smithers comes a’callin’.  And what is Smithers’s task for Homer?  Human cushion for a bottle of rare wine, once owned by Napoleon, Mr. Burns just bought!  But then Smithers is called away because Mr. Burns coughed up his Adam’s apple (and not for the first time), and it is up to Homer to get the bottle to Stately Burns Manor, a job Smithers would prefer to go to literally anybody else, but Homer is the only one there.

Here’s a nice twist:  Homer, after going to great lengths to save the bottle from every possible way to destroy a bottle, gets it home, puts it in his safe, and takes a nap.  That is literally the only thing Homer did wrong, but when Marge’s stew turns out to be really, really good later, it turns out that Homer’s bowling ball was blocking a large hole in the back of the safe, and Marge saw the bottle as something she could use to flavor the wine.

Oops.

So, it’s Marge’s fault?  Well, she did use it up, and Smithers’s arrival later since Homer didn’t go directly to Burns’s mansion means he knows something went wrong with this million dollar bottle of wine.  What can they do?  Smithers trusted Homer to take care of the bottle, so he’s in this too, but Homer has a song on what to do:  cover it up.  Wine, as Lisa observes, is just a chemical reaction, so Professor Frink can make more that tastes the same once Homer sings the song again.  And yes, this time Smithers needs to get this right because Burns is having his rich, wine-tasting friends over later to try the stuff.

And the plan works.  Huh.

Wait, that can’t be all there is.  What else is going to go wrong?  Will Jimmy appear as a live action person on an animated series?  Well, no.  That would be silly.  Instead, Smithers bemoans the fact that he does so much evil for Mr Burns, but it would be nice if he could do some good for poor people?  Well, Marge figures they can make another fake wine and sell it to rich people and use the money to do good for the poor, like Robin Hood!

Cue bit where Simpsons characters are redrawn as characters from Disney’s animated Robin Hood with Smithers and Marge as Robin and Marian, Burns as Prince John, and Homer nowhere to be seen.

Regardless, the auction seems to be going well with celebrity wine enthusiasts like Francis Ford Coppola (not voiced by the famous director), Andrew Lloyd Webber (also not voiced by himself), and Robert Parker, the critic who came up with a one to one hundred scale to rate wine.  He is voiced by himself, but I don’t know much else about the dude.  I do know the Rich Texan is outraged by the existence of Cats and how much he likes it, and a joke where Coppola retracts his million dollar bid could be a reference to how badly Megalopolis did, but it also may not have been.  Anyway, the wine is sold, Smithers and Marge have a lot of money to give to the poor, and then they’re arrested by the wine police and taken to wine prison for forgery.  Apparently, when an executive assistant and a housewife who doesn’t know how to make sangria have a million dollar wine bottle for sale, it makes people suspicious.

Now, all this means Homer blames himself for what happened since he told them to cover things up.  Marge and Smithers are sure to go to wine jail for a very long time.  What can Homer do?

He asks Burns to intervene since Burns is much better than Homer at covering things up.  And Burns does so by bribing the judge, leading to a happy ending where Smithers can use the money he and Marge “earned” at the auction to reverse as much of the evil he did at the start of the episode as possible.

Man, that was a weird episode.  The credits-joke that brought back the season one French winemakers didn’t help there.

Back to Star Wars on Monday.