Last Wednesday I shared a mostly spoiler-free review of this year’s The Simpsons Halloween special, entitled “Treehouse of Horror XXXV.” And now that the episode has aired on FOX, below you will find a more detailed recap of what took place across the three segments of this installment.
Couch Gag: This year’s opening title sequence was created by guest animator Jorge R. Gutiérrez, who directed 2014’s acclaimed feature The Book of Life. It features a rapid-fire series of heavily stylized scenes depicting various Simpsons characters combating each other as though they are in a fighting video game. It ends with a pull-out to reveal Kang and Kodos as though they have been playing an arcade game entitled Los Simpsons Fighter on their spaceship.
Segment 1 – “The Information Rage”: This first full segment begins with Mayor Quimby (voiced, as always, by Dan Castellaneta) presenting the assembled Springfieldians at the Town Hall with Lisa Simpson’s (Yeardley Smith) plan to replace all the lightbulbs in town with LED bulbs for free. Naturally this project is met with extreme examples of both support and rejection, to the point where by the end of the meeting, by the end it has descended into utter chaos. Later as Lisa walks through town with her mother, Marge (Julie Kavner) observes the hostility growing in Springfield as she notices signs going up in everyone’s yards either applauding or decrying the lightbulb plan. But Lisa’s concern is a bigger one: all the rage building up in the town has led to a fissure opening underneath the adjoining ocean and from that hole emerge two enormous Kaiju– one red and one blue- each representing a side in the debate. The red monster destroys windmills and crushes a building containing mail-in ballots, while the blue one attacks a ship containing plastic straws and sends a text to local Democrats about the Senate race in Nevada. Meanwhile, Lisa discovers that her brother Bart (Nancy Cartwright) is simply opposed to whatever she believes in.
The two Kaiju begin to battle each other (Liberal Arts Ray vs. Book Banning Blast), destroying large swaths of Springfield in the process. Professor Frink comes up with a plan to fight the creatures using a giant robot– a la Guillermo del Toro’s 2013 sci-fi/action movie Pacific Rim– but it’s powered by the love of two siblings working together. When a pair of much better candidates are crushed by one of the monsters throwing the “S” in the Springfield sign, Frink settles for Bart and Lisa. So the Simpson siblings suit up and take the controls of the robot, even though Bart still thinks everything Lisa stands for is lame. After accidentally stepping on Otto the bus driver, the robot approaches the scene and Lisa says she’s surprised there are only two monsters because of how “divisiveness has made the world go mad.” Cue four additional Kaiju emerging from the water: Four Chan Saurus, Facebookzilla, Mecha-Reddit, and Ro-Gan. On the street below, Homer (also Castellaneta) gets trapped in the oversized Lard Lad donut and is kicked down the street by one of the monsters, and the kids can’t help but laugh at his misfortune. “If we can both laugh at a fat guy stuck in a donut, we can work together,” concludes Bart.
The remainder of this installment sees Lisa and Bart combatting the monsters using the robot’s Noogie Power, Purple Nurples, and skateboarding/bolo tricks utilizing a school bus and a wrecking ball. Seeing their allies defeated, the other four monsters give up and retreat back into the ocean, to the cheers of everyone in Springfield. Over a loudspeaker in the robot, Bart and Lisa give a speech about how the only way to keep the monsters away is to “remember what we all have in common and reject the echo chambers of cable news and social media.” Of course then the show cuts to “three news cycles later,” when Springfield is just a pile of rubble, with the red and blue monsters having returned to fight each other once again. “Well, I guess civilization had a good run,” says Lisa, as she and Bart watch the carnage from the cockpit of the now-destroyed robot.
Segment 2 – “The Fall of the House of Monty”: The second segment begins in an old-timey looking Springfield, where C. Montgomery Burns runs a corn syrup factory instead of a Nuclear Power Plant. Bart as the Raven from the very first “Treehouse of Horror” episode flies by and makes the plant’s trademark “caw” noise. Inside, Waylon Smithers (Harry Shearer) pulls the whistle to end the day’s shift in the factory, and then seconds later pulls another louder whistle to begin work on construction of Mr. Burns’s mansion for the night. We see that the mansion is ever-expanding and built in a cobbled-together Gothic style like the Winchester Mystery House in Northern California. Outside, Lenny (also Shearer) says several generations of his family have passed away while working on building the mansion. The workers are welcomed into the estate for Thanksgiving dinner, but when Burns (Shearer yet again) loses a wishbone pull to Groundskeeper Willie (another Castellaneta character), he reneges on his offer of a feast and instead dumps the meal down a trap door with Moe (Hank Azaria) along with it.
Burns’s wife Agnes Skinner (Tress MacNeille) warns Monty that he is now cursed by breaking his wishbone promise, and will be tormented by the souls of all he has wronged, “‘til the end of your days.” “Now I remember why I married you,” remarks Burns, and the two geriatrics begin furiously making out. (Note: this is coincidentally the second Simpsons episode in a row in which Mr. Burns and Agnes Skinner are or were in a relationship). The next day at the factory, Homer tries to eat some of the boiling-hot corn syrup and instead causes an accident that kills himself and all the other workers. As predicted by Agnes, the ghosts of these employees begin to haunt Burns immediately, many of whom keep yelling “Jump scare!” at him as he runs around the mansion attempting to evade his fate. Much like in the Winchester house, some doors lead to dead ends, and others down long, twisting corridors, but Burns cannot shake the ghosts, who even scare themselves. Monty decides he can end the curse by providing the undead workers with the dinner he had promised them, but after riding down an elevator inspired by Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion and preparing a meal in the kitchen, the ghosts pass right through the food, turning it rotten and maggot-ridden.
“The only dish that will fill our bellies is your soul,” says ghost Homer, but Burns takes matters into his own hands by using his own corn oil to set himself on fire– there’s a really funny sight gag here where he moves the fireplace in front of the door to block it first. “Oh, I forgot about Hell,” he groans as he’s dragged into the flames, and the next day we see Smithers and Sideshow Mel (you guessed it– Castellaneta) investigating the burned-down ruins of the mansion. They find Burns’s remains in the fireplace, and Mel christens the day after Thanksgiving as “Black Friday, a day that will serve as a warning to never mistreat workers again, no matter how good the deal is.” The segment ends with Waylon and Mel using Monty’s ribcage as a wishbone.
Segment 3 – “Denim”: The third and final segment begins with an evidently single (though adult-aged) Homer shopping for jeans with his pal Barney Gumble (the beyond-talented Dan Castellaneta) so he might have a shot at impressing Marge, the “cute waitress” who works across the street. Homer can’t find a pair that fits him right, but outside a zipper opens in the space-time continuum and out steps a stop-motion animated pair of jeans that sounds an awful lot like Venom from the Marvel antihero movie of the same name, though here “Denim” is voiced by guest voice actor Kevin Michael Richardson from Disney’s Lilo & Stitch. Denim folds himself up and places himself in the changing room, where Homer tries the jeans-creature on and discovers it’s a perfect fit: “Amazing. You can see where my butt ends and my legs begin.” This new look gives Homer the confidence to approach Marge in the diner, but as he goes in and gets another sudden bout of self-doubt, he discovers that the jeans can talk. Just then, the jailbird Snake (Azaria) barges in and attempts to rob the restaurant, but Denim kicks into gear and uses Homer’s body to knock the criminal unconscious.
Marge is impressed, but for some reason (even though he was the hero in the situation) Denim decides he and Homer must run from the arriving cops, and there’s a fun chase sequence that ends with Homer hanging upside-down in an alleyway, Spider-Man-style. “What the hell is going on?” wonders Homer aloud, and this is where Denim explains his origin story as a bio-adapted symbiote from the planet Wranglor in the 501 galaxy, which is in the throes of a “climate catastrophe.” Apparently acid rain is causing all of Denim’s kind to go out of style, but to survive on Earth they need human hosts… and Denim actually eats Homer’s “nourishing methane exhaust…” yuck. Denim orders a chili dog with extra beans from Sarcastic Man, who is working a hot dog cart on the corner, and Homer asks what’s in this relationship for him. We cut to a nightclub where Denim uses Homer’s body to dance in a variety of moves, further impressing Marge. They go back to Homer’s place to make out, but Denim won’t allow himself to be removed from Homer’s legs: “I cannot be disengaged from my host for long, or I’ll perish.”
So Homer and Marge enter into a relationship without him ever taking off his new jeans, practicing “outercourse” instead of the usual love-making rituals. But in private Marge complains to her sisters Patty and Selma (also Kavner), who demand that he “drop jeans and fulfill your dreams.” When the couple moves in together, Homer attempts to tell Marge the truth, but Denim won’t allow it, making Homer walk out of the room instead. At Moe’s Tavern, Denim tells Homer that Marge is “attempting to break up a great team,” but Homer attempts to end his relationship with the symbiote. “No one will ever flatter your ass like I do,” begs Denim, but Homer quiets the creature by getting them both drunk and passing out. The next day he wakes up to Marge having surreptitiously replaced the jeans with a pair of khakis and having put Denim in the washing machine.
The symbiote emerges and yells, “Never wash quality denim!” And the rest of this segment is an extended action scene in which Denim at first attempts to murder Marge using Homer’s body, and then switches to several other hosts after Homer squirts the creature with the acid from a lemon. Comic Book Guy is too fat and Patty’s legs are too hairy, but Disco Stu’s roller skates help Denim catch up to Marge and attach himself to her. Homer shows up at the last second and declares, “I’m never gonna let anything come between us again,” and though Marge is thrilled by this, Homer says he wasn’t talking to her. “Thank you Jeans-us!” yells Denim, and returns to his first host. So Homer and Denim live together playing video games, and when the latter reveals that an invasion of Earth by his species is imminent, we cut to a wide shot of Earth, where a zipper unzips in space and hundreds more pairs of jeans emerge. Then over the end credits we see a number of scenes from the episode depicted in the style of this year’s opening titles by Jorge R. Gutiérrez.
New episodes of The Simpsons air Sunday evenings on FOX.