Earlier this week I shared my mostly spoiler free review of this week’s new episode of The Simpsons, entitled “Treehouse of Horror Presents: Simpsons Wicked This Way Comes.” And now that the episode has aired on FOX, let’s go through a more in-depth recap of this anthology installment.
As “Treehouse of Horror Presents: Simpsons Wicked This Way Comes” Begins, Our Favorite Family is visiting R. Bradbury’s Traveling Night Circus, and Lisa (voiced, as always, by Yeardley Smith) comments on how odd it is that a strange circus “just appeared out of nowhere.” But Homer (Dan Castellaneta) and Bart (Nancy Cartwright) are not bothered by this, content to go off and gawk at the freaks on display, like the Dog-Faced Man and the Man-Faced Dog. Marge (Julie Kavner) is also intrigued by Pint-Sized Hercules, so Lisa peeks into the tent occupied by the Illustrated Man (guest star Andy Serkis from The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars: Andor), who is in the process of being fired by the ringmaster because he isn’t the draw he used to be. The Illustrated Man explains that his many tattoos are “mystical portals to alternate realities,” but the ringmaster isn’t impressed: “If kids want mystical portals, they’ll look at their phones.” Once the Illustrated Man is left alone, Lisa approaches him with sympathy, and he allows her to peer into one of the stories that inspired his tattoos, though the process takes a little longer than Lisa would like.
Then from the wraparound story, the episode dissolves into the first full segment of the anthology– a parody of Bradbury’s 1948 radio play-turned-short-story “The Screaming Woman”– in which Bart is wearing a coonskin cap and is off shooting at cans in the woods with a BB gun. Suddenly he hears the haunting scream of a woman coming from underneath a freshly dug patch of dirt nearby. Unable to dig up the dirt himself, Bart runs back home, where in this reality Homer and Marge are apparently rather wealthy, to get help. Bart’s parents are indifferent about the woman’s plight, instead choosing to gossip about other women in Springfield. Marge and Homer think Bart must be crying wolf, so he calls Milhouse (the soon-to-be-retired Pamela Hayden) on his tin-can-phone. Milhouse can’t help because he’s at his grandma’s– and he also thinks Bart is playing a “Screaming Woman” game– so Bart decides to check every house in the neighborhood until he finds “the one that’s missing a lady.” Eventually he comes upon Luann Van Hoten (Maggie Roswell), who Marge was gossiping about earlier.
Luann is suspiciously interested in Bart’s story, so she invites him inside for a glass or two of milk with heavy cream, which makes him very sleepy. Bart nearly falls asleep on Milhouse’s bed, but a quick pixie-stick injection makes him snap to, and he rushes back out into the woods, where the “lady” is thankfully still alive, and actually singing the jingle for the burger joint where Homer evidently used to work with Kirk Van Houten. Bart runs home and sings the jingle to his parents, who now hurriedly help him dig up the victim in the woods, who indeed turns out to be Kirk (Hank Azaria) himself. It seems Luann buried him alive because he let Miss Hoover see him buying her hair dye. “The shame.” Chief WIggum (also Azaria) has arrested Luann, but says in the 1950s “murder is much more socially acceptable than divorce.” Luann is set free and Kirk wanders off after her, asking if she’s mad at him. Marge tells Bart that they’ll never doubt him again, to which Bart blurts out, “Lisa’s a communist!” So Lisa is hauled away in Wiggum’s police car, and the rest of the family clink martini glasses together.
In the second full segment– a parody of the 1949 short story “Marionettes, Inc.”– Lisa gazes into gears tattooed on the Illustrated man’s bicep, revealing Superintendent Chalmers (Azaria again) meeting with Principal Skinner (Harry Shearer) as they prepare for Springfield Elementary School’s Flag Day celebration, which Chalmers notes “is seven months away.” Their high-waisted pants and short ties hint that something is amiss, and when Chalmers walks outside we see that it is indeed the future. He passes storefronts called “Atomic Toasters” and “Ray’s Rayguns” on the street, eventually making his way to Moe’s Tavern, where he chats with Carl (Alex Désert) about how he hates being forced to spend all of his time with Skinner. Carl informs Chalmers about a scientific innovation that may be of assistance, and he shows him how he’s had a robot replica of himself made to hang out with his friend Lenny and do jigsaw puzzles. So Chalmers does the same, and he initially gets along quite well with his robot copy. He drops off the robot at the school and goes out for ice cream, where he shockingly runs into Skinner. After a very brief chase sequence, Chalmers learns that Skinner has also had a robot copy made of himself so he wouldn’t have to be around the superintendent: “You don’t robot-Skinner me, I robot-Chalmers you!”
Suddenly Carl shows up out of nowhere and tells the two men about an alarming turn of events– apparently robot Carl had become sentient and emotional, so the real Carl had to eliminate him. “Once the robots start feeling emotions, there’s no telling what could happen. Chalmers and Skinner rush to the elementary school, where their robot duplicates are holding an assembly and informing the children that they have become friends, and encourage the students to start calling teachers by their first names. The real versions of the two men say this will cause the breakdown of societal hierarchy, so they attack the robots and a fight breaks out between the four of them. Skinner blasts his robot to pieces with a raygun, but when he turns the weapon on the two Chalmerses, there’s a question as to which one is actually real. “Shoot ‘em both; it’s the only way to be sure!” yells Jimbo Jones (Hayden) from the crowd. When one of the Chalmerses admits he could be a little nicer, Skinner shoots him, but that turns out to be the real Chalmers, and he bleeds human blood on the assembly-hall stage. It’s a tragic ending, but the twist is that Skinner is all too happy to hang out with the robot version of Chalmers instead, as he seems much more interested in looking at bunting samples for Flag Day.
In the third and final segment– a parody of Ray Bradbury’s iconic 1953 dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451– the Illustrated Man invites Lisa to gaze at a tattoo just above his hernia scar into a “chillingly plausible future,” in which a group of black-masked firemen burst into Helen Lovejoy’s (Roswell) house and find her husband Timothy (Shearer) watching illicit VHS tapes behind a false bookcase. “Step away from the low-brow entertainment,” orders one of the firemen, and they set fire to copies of Love Island, NCIS: Hawaii, Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, and others with their flamethrowers. They take Reverend Lovejoy away for “re-education,” and one of the firemen lifts his mask to reveal Homer’s face. He returns home to a blandly futuristic house to find Marge and the kids watching a prestige TV drama called Robber Barons, which Homer cannot make any sense of whatsoever. “It’s our civic duty to watch the most densely plotted television we can,” explains Marge expositorily. “That’s why low-brow entertainment was outlawed.” Later at the firehouse, Moe (Azaria) congratulates his team on their last raid. Homer asks his coworkers if they’ve ever actually watched the programming they’re tasked to destroy, but they’re called to another raid at the abandoned Springfield Elementary School, where Homer kicks open Groundskeeper Willie’s shed out back and stumbles upon a TV playing America’s Funniest Home Videos.
Homer laughs himself silly at a farmer being bit in the junk by a goat, and Willie (also Castellaneta) appears from behind a door and puts one of the tapes discreetly into Homer’s jumpsuit. The rest get burned, but at a dinner party Homer expresses interest in “dumb and fun” TV, which offends his guests to the point that they just leave. Alone in the attic, Homer plays the tape Willie gave him and he laughs so loud that Bart overhears him. Homer confides in his son, but Bart is confused by the lack of “innovative narrative” in America’s Funniest Home Videos. Still, Homer trusts Bart not to turn him in to the firemen, and of course right away we cut to Moe and company busting in the front door of the Simpson home in response to “reports of low-brow contraband.” We see that Bart turned in his father in exchange for Robber Barons merch, and Homer is dragged in front of Burnmaster General Siegfried Blaze (also Serkis). “We learned long ago that entertainment must fully occupy the consciousness of the population,” Blaze reveals. “These challenging shows are the perfect distraction from how dystopian our dystopia is.” So Homer is ordered to be taken to the “viewing chamber” to be forcibly shown four seasons of Mozart In the Jungle, but he escapes yelling, “I choose crap!”
He runs into his friend Barney Gumble (Castellaneta again) and switches clothes with him, leading to Barney being immediately vaporized by a helicopter. And Homer manages to find others like him hiding out in the Android’s Dungeon, where a secret lever in the shape of Stewie from Family Guy leads to a hidden basement and a vast library full of low-brow entertainment run by Krusty the Clown (you guessed it– Castellaneta). “This is all that remains of the old civilization… all yours to enjoy.” But then the firemen rappel down through the ceiling and set the library ablaze, with Blaze thanking Homer for leading them there. Homer distracts Blaze by suggesting that Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan is standing behind him, and the lovers of garbage escape into the forest, where they pass stories of The Big Bang Theory and The Vanderpump Rules down through the generations. In a mid-credits sequence, Lisa thanks the Illustrated Man for his tales, but when she gets up to leave she discovers that she is in a “strange, featureless void” and in fact has become one of the man’s tattoos herself. And her “reward” for listening to the three stories is hearing a Sublime sun tattoo sing the song “Santeria” for all eternity.
New episodes of The Simpsons air Sunday evenings on FOX.