Scullyfied Simpsons: “It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Marge” (Season 11, Episode 21)

Well, at least she’s not yielding an entire motorcycle this time…

“I can only see a horrible rainbow!” – Ice Cream Parlor employee. Hey, it was one of the few memorable quotes from this episode.

Airdate: May 14th, 2000.

Written By: Larry Doyle

Plot: The Simpsons host a wedding in their background. This time, it’s meant for Otto and his partner, Becky. However, the marriage collapses due to Otto’s obsession with metal music. With nowhere else to go, Becky moves in with the Simpsons. She manages to endear herself to most of the Simpsons. The odd member out is Marge, who starts to feel jealous… and starts to suspect that Becky is trying to kill her.

Review:

Once again, I am bereft of words.

I mean, I’ve watched this show go down the tubes so fast, you swear it brought a pass to Splish Splash and hit up the Cliff Diver several times. To be blunt, you know that old cliche “hope for the best, prepare for the worst?” Well, in the case of The Simpsons, the latter sentiment holds stronger than the former, to put it mildly. So I wasn’t expecting much from “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Marge” – particularly with my memories of this episode involving a broken ice cream cone being weaponized.

But it still might surprise you to know that what we have here is in the “infamously bad” category.

No, seriously – Season 11 has had some stinkers, and some of those stinkers have been utterly astonishing in how they got put to air in the state they were in. But honestly, this episode is a genuine candidate for the second worst of the season. In fact, that’s where it might wind up when all is said and done.

To put it simply, this might be the single least Simpson-y Simpsons episode I’ve seen so far. And when you manage to outpace the jockey elves in that regard? At least that was surreal. This is, too, but unintentionally this time around.

Starting off, you’d be led to suspect that this episode was constructed as something of a sequel to “The Otto Show”. After all, the first act revolves around Otto’s personal life – specifically, his engagement and wedding to Becky, a one-episode wonder (surprise surprise). Even before the end of the first act, it becomes clear that there is a gulf in how the two episodes treat Otto and his life, character, and well, everything about him.

Otto was something of a bum-out Gen-X rocker in the early seasons – he drove a bus for a living, lived in a rundown apartment (and had little, if any, furniture), and merely took pleasure in his admiration of harder rock music. However, the writers knew how to keep him grounded and relatable – his lifestyle actually got him suspended and evicted at one point, his personality traits were mixed up while coming off as complimentary, and he genuinely felt like a bus driver that you would meet. The beauty of The Simpsons’ golden years was playing around with somewhat stereotypical characters and exposing the personalities behind, from their pasts to their characterization, to how they interacted with individual characters, all while still making it funny overall.

Now contrast with what we have here. Otto now pretty much lives in his school bus, and his whole life is obsessed with rock and roll. Yeah, I can buy him diverting the school bus to his girlfriend’s workplace, but here, he takes the bus everywhere he goes. He proposes to the tune of “Every Rose Has It’s Thorn” while looking like Slash, got set on fire at Woodstock 99 (which was the Fyre festival on meth), and gets a Poison tribute band to play at his wedding. There’s nothing to this behind him being a bus-driving metalhead – the only thing we learn is that he was dating a woman named Becky.

A woman he met at a Woodstock 99.

And who hates heavy metal music.

Okay… while the Woodstock 99 lineup went beyond metal (a lot of alternative bands played there), it still makes little sense for somebody who dislikes metal as staunchly as she did to attend a concert festival that was geared towards harder rock. But you know what, people can tolerate things they dislike to get to things they do like, so that plot hole at least is somewhat understandable. In fact, most of the issues with the first act are relegated to a relative lack of effective comedy… well, that and the simplification of Otto. Oh, and the wedding being held in the backyard, because, you know, we need the Simpsons to be the focus of every episode, period, no matter what.

Also, it occurred to me that Becky and Otto’s relationship really does come off as something of a mirror to what Marge and Homer’s marriage would deteriorate into – the former is a meek individual who can barely stand her childish, reckless partner who is unwilling to change. Okay, maybe Homer and Marge’s relationship had elements of that in the classic era, but there was a genuine balance before the show collapsed – honestly, there are way too many times post-Scully where it goes from “flawed, but relatable and still loving” to “disturbingly toxic”.

Anyway, the wedding falls apart right at the altar, as Otto chooses his obsession with metal over Becky – Marge laid down the gauntlet. In retrospect, this was probably the best possible option – the marriage was never held, and it was a clean break. But the issue lies in the fact that Becky has apparently been dumped out into the cold. Bart, having volunteered the house for the wedding, has now volunteered the house so Becky can crash there until she gets back on her feet. And Marge reluctantly acquiesces.

Here’s where we get the issues with the episode. I hinted at this in the paragraph above, but Marge’s character collapse revolved around her mettle. In the golden era, there was an element of tragedy to her character – that she could’ve been a prime intellectual, but with Springfield being a hellhole and the standards expected of women who came of age in the 70s, all combined with an unsupportive family (before she became a Simpson by marriage), she wound up in a life of domesticity. Not necessarily trapped, but certainly resigned in some ways. She did have some form of mettle, though, and while certainly not without moral weaknesses (she proved to be a gambling addict), was willing to stand up to those in her family when they messed up (eg, calling Homer out on using Lisa for gambling purposes – ironic, innit – in “Lisa the Greek”.)

What we instead get in this episode is a character that winds up split in two. And neither side really reflects well on the writers with regards to Marge’s character path.

The first half is the doormat. This has been building over the past two seasons, as Homer’s behavior has gone from “stupid” to “callous” to “put this man in a psychological ward at Rikers, but in the first half of this episode, she has virtually no spine. She lets the wedding get held at her house and is all but shamed into letting Becky – a character who she literally just met – stay at their house. Hell, she doesn’t really contribute much to causing the wedding to collapse – if you removed her from the first act, what would change? Becky would still likely have cut Cyanide’s power and told Otto that it was her or his music. The impact would not have changed, because Marge didn’t kill the wedding – Otto did.

There’s a difference between a character getting karmic retribution and a character getting spit on, and this episode falls squarely into the latter territory.

And then she goes off the rails.

Oh, yes, with Becky being this apparently super-cool lady, Marge begins to feel like her territory is being infringed upon. One meeting with Patty and Selma later, she begins to suspect that she is the target of possible murder – utter usurpation, in fact, of her role in the family. Yes, thanks to a solo discussion with her sisters, Marge suspects that Becky is out to kill her and become Homer’s wife. I think they were trying to go for a sequel to “Bart’s Inner Child”, where Patty and Selma helped convince Marge to go to Brad Goodman’s seminar to embrace the id, but here, the conversion from “wet blanket” to “murderous paranoia” is downright rapid.

Yes, you heard that right. Murderous paranoia. The second act ends with Marge believing that Becky cut her brakes (when it was Homer’s oil change that did it, resulting in some of the weakest dramatic irony that I’ve seen in quite a while), tracking them down at an ice cream parlor where Becky is giving Homer CPR, grabbing an ice cream cone decoration, breaking it, and swinging it wildly at her. This is Marge Simpson, as Larry Doyle imagines her – at the slightest provocation, entering a murderous rage.

“Screaming Yellow Honkers”, at least, had the justification of using a powerful SUV. Having one of the more levelheaded characters in the show buy into some tabloid trash peddled by her sisters, and quickly going to kill the apparent suspect? Two episodes ago, I was calling for Homer to be put in a psychiatric ward. Here, we actually get Marge hauled in front of a committee of psychiatrists… and declared criminally insane.

Even if you declare it a self-fulfilling prophecy, the writing does not hold up between the poor pacing, the fact that it’s out of character in general, and the fact that amongst the psychiatrists who are tasked with judging Marge is Dr. Zweig, the star of one of the best Marge episodes of all time… who is quick to let her go under the bus and get ruled insane, which of course, leaves Marge to leap out of the courtroom. (Just a quick question – if somebody’s thought to be insane after committing an act of attempted murder, wouldn’t they have kept them in some form of restraint during the trial? I’m serious – I don’t know the answer to that.)

Nobody cares. Within hours of the hearing (which apparently was held promptly after the breakdown, hello, how long has Becky stayed at 742 Evergreen, a few months, because it feels like a few days), Mare is a complete joke, an urban legend being mocked on Krusty the Clown, which is apparently a low-rent SNL now. Not a single member of the Simpson clan works to clear her name. They put more effort into Ned when he had a mental breakdown – oh, right, that was Season 8, silly me!

Really, the jokes in the third act feel nothing like The Simpsons this show used to be. And it all culminates in an ending that barely is. Marge slips into a library and finds some newsreels praising Becky (meant to clash with her paranoia, not that it helps build her rather dull character, and she returns home to find her living room transformed into a gothic dungeon – in three hours, no less. All while Marge is missing and on the run from people who think she’s criminally insane. But don’t worry, it’s just something for a music video that Bart is doing for his class project. (Some marginal credit – at least they did wrap up the plot at the beginning of the episode. And it at least converged the two plots, which meant that it’s very very marginally better than “Saddlesore Galactica” in that regard. Ah, who am I kidding, all four plots across the two episodes are garbage.)

But wait! When Marge finally admits that Becky wasn’t a usurper, guess what? She confesses but claims that she couldn’t find a shovel cheap enough to bury Marge. I guess that was meant to be sarcastic, but if so… there’s still the matter of a certified board writing this character off as completely loopy, and the worst part is that her behavior in the second act really does nothing to mitigate that. It’s the self-fulfilling prophecy done in the worst possible way.

The episode ends with little harm, no foul… no, seriously, that’s practically how the episode ends. It just stops. At least “Saddlesore” had a hefty bag to put the episode’s completely insane plot device to an end. This just ends with Marge getting a tranquilizer put in her neck… but I’ll get to that closer to the end of my review. All I’ll say right now is that this episode’s ending feels as far removed from the brilliance of the classic era as soon as possible

This might seem shorter than other reviews where I absolutely gutted a Simpsons episode, but that’s more because it suffers from the same problem that the Jockey Elves encountered – for all the sound and fury of its insanity, there is nothing of any impact other than frustration. Marge is a wet blanket, encounters a mental breakdown, and is finally proven sane, except that she really isn’t. All the tension is played seriously despite being defused rather early on, and I stopped giving a damn by the last two minutes of the third act.

Like I said, I am bereft of words. It’s weird because for how insanely awful this episode is, I can’t even muster the same amount of rage-based overanalysis that I did for “Saddlesore”, “Alone Again”, or “Kill the Alligator”. Maybe I’m numb to the complete incompetence of it all, or maybe I just want to get this show over and done with so I can never watch anything past Season 8 ever again.

The simple fact of the matter is that this episode is twenty-two minutes of cringe. “Saddlesore Galactica” was at least fascinatingly bad, “Alone Again, Natura-Diddily” was infuriating, “Bart to the Future” was boring, and “Kill the Alligator and Run” bordered on being the Simpsons equivalent of The Room. This is cringeworthy in the worst possible way – not in a meaningful way like the first act of “Lisa’s Pony” or “Saturdays of Thunder”, but in a rather nihilistic way that the show didn’t do before.

In a way, it’s similar to the problem that faced “The New Lars” – although probably worse, as again, The Simpsons did dabble in occasional cringe, they just royally screwed up this time. I’ll take “The New Lars” and its attempt to at least try something different over this episode that manages to be simultaneously monotonous and insane at the same time. It feels like Family Guy. Post-cancellation Family Guy, mind you.

And because some of you expecting this pun, I’ll just lay it on the line. “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Marge” is a bad, bad, bad, bad episode. There, now that I’ve got that stupid sentence out of the way, there is some good news… we are down to our last episode of Season 11.

The bad news is that we still have Season 12 to go. But hey, small victories.

Tidbits:

• Look, I’m no vegetarian myself, but Marge revealing that she slips meat juice into Lisa’s meals is quite unnerving. Makes her enduring ordeal less sympathetic. Remember when Marge and Homer were fundamentally decent, albeit flawed, parents?
• I got nothing else for this one. So I’ll just tell a story of what happened in a recent (shudder) episode of the flaming wreckage of The Simpsons. Apparently, during the show’s travels, they sang a song ripping on the decrepit state of Upstate New York. Our state’s Grand Poobah, Andrew Cuomo, did not take kindly – part of his re-election platform was arguing that his initiatives had given Upstate New York a shot in the arm. Well, first off, Cuomo indicated that he had never watched a single episode of The Simpsons – thank god he‘s not running for the Democratic Party nomination, then. But the staff at The Simpsons decided to try and gain his favor by sending him a DVD set. By which, I mean Season 4. Maybe it was a random selection, but if not, it speaks wonders.

Wrap-Up:

Zaniness Factor: Yeah, this gets a solid 3, more for the unnecessary tension and the rather horrid pacing.

Favorite Scene: There was one moment in the otherwise awful third act that amused me. Marge, trying to escape from the police, manages to blend into a parade band that are all dressed in a way reminiscent of her. Unfortunately, they are the insanity hospital’s band. Cue her quickly rushing out of the hospital once the gates close. I dunno – I guess it was just a somewhat clever joke and it reminded me of “The Springfield Connection”.

Least Favorite Scene: Again, we are spoiled for choice here, so I’m going to describe the ending. As representatives from the medical hospital arrive to take Marge away, she clears her name. Once she jokes that it’s time for Homer to participate in some “scrubbing and mopping” (that’s not a euphemism, apparently), she gets a tranquilizer to the neck. It was shot by Homer.

What a way to close off the episode – by reminding us that, though the episode started with the collapse of Otto and Becky’s relationship, Homer and Marge’s marriage has degenerated into a toxic, actually rather abusive one, and the show is quick to write it off as “oh, that wacky Homer!” Again, he wasn’t a model husband before Scully, but he’s become absolutely intolerable now. Regardless of what you feel about Slate Magazine, their comparison to “Duffless”, where he gave up beer to ride off into the sunset with Marge, to this episode is astonishing. What a decline for the character, for the show. From multifaceted and heartwarming to a cynical cartoon with no depth.

Oh, and by the way. That scene, combined with his inaction during Marge being on the lam (not related to the far better episode), combined with his decision to stab his hand with a knife repeatedly as part of a game, combined with… you know what, the Jerkass Homer Meter sits at 3 here, and it’s prevented from being worse because of his relatively limited role in this episode.

Score: 1.

I have nothing left to say here. Let’s move forward and close this season out. Actually, before that, let’s return to a show that doesn’t spit in the face of fans.