This evening saw the debut of the fourth episode in The Simpsons’ 36th season, entitled “Shoddy Heat” (a play on the title of Lawrence Kasdan’s 1981 neo-noir thriller Body Heat) and below are my brief recap and thoughts on this installment.
I’ve never been quite sure how I feel about The Simpsons’ ever-shifting timeline, but this episode might be the instance in which it’s bothered me the most. “Shoddy Heat” begins in the present, with a heat wave hitting Springfield that’s so bad the firemen are dancing around opened hydrants and Our Favorite Family is forced to visit Grampa Simpson (voiced, as always, by Dan Castellaneta) at the Retirement Castle. They’re interrupted jockeying for position in front of Abe’s air conditioner by Police Chief Wiggum (Hank Azaria) and Officer Lou (Alex Désert), who need to question Grampa about a very strange case they’ve accidentally uncovered. It seems a cemetery being dug up– to be replaced by the “Cholera Pit Fashion Plaza”– has revealed two corpses buried in the same casket. And the first clue the cops found on one of the corpses is a business card leading to Simpson and O’Donnell Private Investigators, which apparently was in operation sometime around the early 1980s.
Now, having been a kid in the 80s myself (I was, in fact, Bart Simpson’s exact age when the show started in December of 1989) it’s super bizarre and unnerving to me to see Abe Simpson still relatively young in the Reagan era. But forcing myself to get past that, I was able to meet his detective-agency partner Billy O’Donnell (guest star Topher Grace from That 70’s Show) as we see a case unfolding via flashback involving an also-much-younger Agnes Skinner (Tress MacNeille), acting in the role of Kathleen Turner’s seductive character in this extended Body Heat riff. Agnes hires the private eyes to follow her boyfriend C. Montgomery Burns (Harry Shearer) who she believes is cheating on her. But after she finds out that Abe is saddled with a young son named Homer (Dan Castellaneta), O’Donnell is forced to take the lead on the case instead. Unfortunately he turns up missing almost immediately, and in the present the Simpson family is shocked to discover that their elderly patriarch wouldn’t even have bothered looking into the disappearance of his partner.
So young Lisa Simpson (Yeardley Smith) takes the case into her hands, testing the business card for residue and finding a blood sample. From there she and her brother Bart (Nancy Cartwright) visit their aunts Patty and Selma (both voiced by Julie Kavner) at their DMV workplace, where they dig through the records– after enduring the usual painful slideshow– to determine that the sample matches Billy’s blood type. Lisa brings this new information to Grampa, who tells her that he did actually look for O’Donnell, but nothing ever turned up. Instead we see him carousing with Agnes, who relates to him the story of the evening Billy disappeared. In the present, Abe tells Lisa that he knows a secret that could destroy Homer, and he asks the two kids to help him sneak over to visit Agnes without the cops seeing him. Grandpa and Agnes rekindle their romance while Bart and Principal Skinner (also Shearer) do children’s mazes on the back of a Chex Box– sadly not an Xbox as Bart had misheard. And based on what Agnes told him, Abe decides he has to correct the mistakes of his past by racing over to confront Mr. Burns in his mansion.
Here we ultimately learn that Burns made a deal with Abe Simpson that his intellectually challenged son could come work for him at the soon-to-be-built Springfield Nuclear Power Plant in exchange for Abe keeping the secret that Burns knows what happens to Billy. So the big reveal is that Grampa is the reason why Homer has never been fired from the power plant despite his extreme incompetence (except we have seen him fired by Burns on numerous occasions), and then the second twist is that O’Donnell isn’t dead at all, but simply retired to an island paradise with money that Burns used to pay him off. In a mid-credits sequence, Lisa barges into the Springfield Police Station demanding to know who the second corpse in the casket was, and Wiggum tells her it was simply the town’s business-card-maker. That’s a funny and very Simpsons-esque rug-pulling joke in an episode that mostly didn’t work very well for me otherwise. I mean the mystery wasn’t terribly satisfying and I didn’t laugh a whole lot, except at the visual gag of Burns’s face being blown haphazardly by an oscillating fan. I dunno, I think monkeying with the timeline of The Simpsons really throws me off (Homer was now a child around the time when Bart would originally have been a couple years old as well), and it would take a lot for that kind of episode to really click for me. For those reasons “Shoddy Heat” largely felt like a misfire, with a few assorted highlights being the exceptions.
New episodes of The Simpsons air Sunday evenings on FOX.