This evening saw the debut of the tenth episode in The Simpsons’ 36th season, entitled “The Man Who Flew Too Much” (a riff on the title of two separate Alfred Hitchcock films called The Man Who Knew Too Much) and below are my brief recap and thoughts on this installment of the long-running animated sitcom.
Longtime fans of The Simpsons will recall one of the best episodes from the in-its-heyday seventh season– entitled “Team Homer”– which established Homer Simpson’s bowling team the Pin Pals. Well apparently the Pin Pals are still around, though its only two original members are Homer himself (voiced, as always, by Dan Castellaneta) himself and bartender Moe Szyslak (Hank Azaria). Joining them now are Homer’s hyper-religious neighbor Ned Flanders (Harry Shearer), coworker Carl Carlson (Alex Désert), and a Portuguese man named Fausto (also Désert) previously seen in the season 18 episode “The Wife Aquatic” and last year’s “The Tipping Point.” We see at the beginning of this installment that Mr. Burns is proud of having been on the team “before it was cool,” but there’s no mention of the other two former members Otto Mann, Dan Gillick, and Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, the latter of which has been retired from the show for reasons it’s best not to get into here.
Anyway it seems as though the Pin Pals have been on something of a “roll” lately (pun intended) and they’re set to travel by helicopter to Capital City for their first-ever state bowling championship… still no official word on what state that actually is. A large crowd of Springfieldians gather to bid the team adieu, as it’s the first time in a century that a local sports team has ever made something of itself, and the five members crowd into a chopper piloted by a quite sober Barney Gumble (also Castellaneta) for the trip. Unfortunately several of the passengers brought extra weight along in the form of duplicate extra-heavy bowling balls, and Barney struggles to clear the mountains separating Springfield from the bigger city. Here’s where the episode becomes a clear homage to/parody of the 1993 Frank Marshal film Alive and the real-life incident that inspired it, involving a Uruguayan ruby team stranded on the top of a mountain after a plane crash and forced to resort to cannibalism to survive.
Fear not: there’s no eating of any of the Pin Pals team members in this episode, although the topic is broached more than a couple times by Moe. Instead, the friends have to work together to figure out a way back down to Springfield while Chief Wiggum (Azaria) tries to help Homer’s wife Marge (Julie Kavner) and her kids back home. But the town’s police department is characteristically incompetent, so there’s not much they’re able to do, and even when Bart Simpson (Nancy Cartwright) manages to call Moe on his cell phone, the tavern owner thinks it’s another prank phone call and throws his phone into the distance. Meanwhile Marge isn’t handling things too well and is pushed over the edge when her sisters Patty and Selma (both also voiced by Kavner), who have always despised Homer, attempt to “comfort” her by encouraging her to wear short-shorts and join a singles pickleball league. Marge starts panic-cooking Homer’s favorite meals for when he returns home and panic-decorating the Simpson home for Christmas a bit too early– evidently this episode takes place in October despite having aired the weekend before the big holiday.
After Faustos seemingly dies on the mountaintop, the bowlers begin to lose their will to go on, all eventually collapsing and being covered in snow until Homer smells Marge’s cooking– from an impressive distance, mind you– hears the voice of his dead mother (returning guest star Glenn Close) warning him about death and where she supposedly ended up in the afterlife, and rallies enough to tie everyone else to himself and march down to the First Church of Springfield, where their collective funeral is being held. These are all funny ideas, but most of the jokes just didn’t land for me this week and I would call the writing of this episode weak overall. There’s a mid-credits sequence that revives Fausto and has Reverend Lovejoy (Shearer) telling him not to “make a meal” out of still being alive, and I was left with not much more than a couple smirks on my face throughout this half hour. It’s unfortunate because “Team Homer” is one of my absolute favorite entries in The Simpsons’ oeuvre, so it would have been nice if another follow-up could have been closer to the quality of some of the other episodes this season. Oh well.
New episodes of The Simpsons air Sunday evenings on FOX.