REVIEW: Future Drama

[Sheana_Molloy]

Synopsis:  Prof. Frink uses an astrology/future-prediction machine he invented to show Bart and Lisa their lives (and the general future) in eight years, when both are graduating from high school.

My review?  Well, I...


...


I can't think of anything to say, really.  Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to bang my head against the wall till I lose consciousness.

*WHAM*

*WHAM*

*WHAM*

(etc.)


(PS-  Well, I guess what I could say is this:  the episode was the exact opposite of how most other episodes this season have been.  Instead of pretty good with a lousy last minute or so, it was lousy with a pretty good last minute or so.)

[Binky]

You really didn't like it? I thought it was one of the best episodes of the season. I always love flash-forward episodes, as it gives them a chance to go beyond the constraints of The Simpsons' universe. It's like having a 22 minute long Halloween segment. This one also reminded me of Futurama in a lot of ways, mainly the awesome Bender cameo which caught me totally by surprise. It wasn't mentioned anywhere in FOX's episode description that John DiMaggio would be guest starring.

[Sheana_Molloy]

Major problems I had with this episode:

-All flat-out explaining rather than acting and subtle writing.  "We're seperated!"  "I'm Krusty the Klown and I'm dating your mom!", etc.
-Majorly jerk-ass Homer for about 90% of the time.
-Ridiculously futuristic and over the top for just eight years difference.
-Martin hitting on an obviously male-patterned robot, Smithers taking heterosexual-making shots and shouting "BOOBIES!", etc.
-Edna Krabappel hitting on Bart.  EW.  Just EW.
-Apu's kid calling Bart a "cracker".
-Most of the adults looking waaaay too old and aged for just eight years difference.
-Going to all the trouble of having a surprise guest star appearance by Bender, even making the effort to bring Joe DiMaggio himself in to voice him, and misusing that opportunity so badly.
-Just an overabundance of stupid jokes, stupid future stuff, stupid writing, etc.  Even the rather nice ending before the entertaining credits was tacked on out of nowhere.

Stuff I did like:

-"Stupid flounders!"
-Bart scrolling through the various alternate future possibilities on the computer, and then eventually viewing the Cletus one over the ending credits.
-Bart was actually a pretty nice and somewhat responsible teenager.
-Maggie vacationing (School field trip?  Why the hell was she there anyway?) in 'Alaska'.
-Moe and his clone arguing.

[Tony_Baritone]

-Going to all the trouble of having a surprise guest star appearance by Bender, even making the effort to bring Joe DiMaggio himself in to voice him, and misusing that opportunity so badly.

Wouldn't that require a time machine that goes into the past? 

[Tiffany]

I didn't like the Smithers thing. It bothered me because the whole reason Smithers is funny to me is that he is, as Bart put it, "You know".

[Anonymous]

If you've read this far, you know all the spoilers.

I saw the framegrabs from the commercial for this episode and I didin't like what I saw.  I sat down to watch this episode prepared to hate it.

And you know what?  I didn't.

Oh, sure, there were some cringe-worthy jokes (ie, most of the stuff Sheana mentioned, plus Sherri and Terri both pregnant.  By Nelson.  I don't wanna know how) but I really enjoyed this episode.  As far as the "far out, fututristic gags" go, I disliked the hover-car, but I like the fact that it was the world's first hover-car.  Also, though I thought it was completely pointless to give Bender a cameo I have admit, I enjoyed seeing him.  Maybe I'm just Futurama-deprived.  And having John DiMaggio do the voice kinda made me forgive them for the non-sensical joke.

Overall, B.  Not great, but not terrible.  At least, not as terrible as I was expecting.

[Jake L.]

This one also reminded me of Futurama in a lot of ways,

Which is why I didn't like it.  If I want Futurama, I'll pull out my dvds and watch them.

[capadde]

I didn't like this at all, from start to finish. Everything felt so made-up and out of place. It felt like they wanted to show as many as possible future clips that they forgot to give it a good plot and decent jokes.

I liked Moe. I liked Wiggum. I liked how Bart gave up Yale in the end. I hated the rest.

[Officer 1BDI]

"Lisa's Wedding" is one of my favorite episodes.  "Bart to the Future" is one of those episodes that I can't even sit through without turning off the TV.  So, I didn't get my hopes up too high for "Future Drama."

That is, perhaps, why the episode exceeded my expectations, but only by so much.  Though I enjoyed the main plot, it felt thin to me.  I thought there were too many little "blanks" in the plot that were never explained (for instance, Lisa never explained why she broke up with Milhouse, and I'm still confused over why Maggie was in Alaska in the first place).  At the same time, I thought there were too many sideplots: we had a reluctant Nelson with pregnant twins, yet another "troubled marriage" plot, Bart and Jenda's (sp?) relationship, Bart getting a job and rescuing Mr. Burns, and so forth.  I usually love the more complex episodes, as I find them more interesting, but in this case, it just distracted from the main storyline  (and even now, I'm not sure what the main storyline was) and took away precious time that the writers could have spent focusing on the conflict between Lisa and Bart.

That said, I did enjoy the Bart/Jenda plot (this is the best use of a guest star I've seen in awhile), and I would have been more tolerant of the Lisa/Milhouse relationship, except for that last scene between them ("I guess this is my destiny?"  Huh?  The Lisa I know and respect wouldn't "settle").

Major problems I had with this episode:

-All flat-out explaining rather than acting and subtle writing. "We're seperated!" "I'm Krusty the Klown and I'm dating your mom!", etc.

That bugged me, too.  It just seems like very lazy writing.

There were a handful of highlights.  I did enjoy Lenny and Carl's brief appearance, and I liked the Moe Clone joke, if only because it reminded me of "A Clone of My Own" (didn't Moe say he grew Moe #2 from something off his back?   ;) ).  The Bender cameo was the best part of the episode for me, as I wasn't expecting John to actually guest star (on the other hand, Homer calling him a loser and throwing him out of the car really bothered me.  Maybe it was just "playful teasing" on the writers' part, but it made me feel uneasy, nonetheless).

Overall, it was an... interesting episode, though lacking.  Not something I'd play regularly on a DVD, but I might sit through it if I came across a rerun.

[gkscotty]

On man, that was just downright poor. Pacing is all over the map, bad bad jokes, downright stupid ideas, and a Futurama knock that is just mean spirited.

Save yourself the pain Kif, don't watch it.

[Binky]

You thought it was a knock at Futurama? How? I loved it. It's exactly what you'd expect would happen if Homer and Bender got together.

[Ekko]

I don't quite understand what you guys are complaining about. In my mind, that was one of the best episodes of season 16 I've seen since Mommie Beerist.

The plot was interesting. (I admit, they're running dangerously low on ideas, but they covered it up pretty well) The jokes weren't the best, but they passed. Especially seeing the world change so drastically in only 8 years. (Space ship newspaper delivery and garbage trucks was a riot. I mean. SO UNNESSISARY! )

The episode gave us an idea of future developments for secondary characters to. Like Nelson and Sherri/Terri hooking up. Milhouse somehow deifying nature and become a muscle bound nerve bag. Moe gets a clone? Heh, sure hope they explain that.

The RoboCop SPD was a little too 'off the edge' for my tastes though. Glad to see Snake still doing what he does best. (Although failing)
Mr. Burns is still alive! Wow. I mean, who expected that? (Then again, he was alive in Lisa's Wedding to, so that might not count)

Biggest shock of all! Smithers is straight! (Sorta' )

The joke about Futurama was great. It's all symbolical. Futurama is dead. And to show that, they killed Bender, who, of course is one of the representatives of the series. (Bloody shame, but still funny)

The only part I can safely say I hated was that Marge and Homer were divorced. Just because he blew all his money in an underwater house. (Was he charged for another sexual harassment suit?) Glad they made up at the end though.

All in all, this episode was above average and shouldn't be criticized so harshly. Some of the material was a little corny, but in the end, a 'B' sits just about right...

[missygal21880]

As a lover of the future-spec episodes, I was relieved to note that it wasn't as bad as Bart to the Future

*warning, Spoilers abound, and it may be loaded with overanalyzing and occasional OMG!You're taking this too seriously!  ;D*

This ep was a real mixed bag for me - not as wonderful as Lisa's Wedding (which I saw again last week) but not really awful.  Most of the humor was character-driven, which was refreshing, but it suffers from a problem I'm noticing with a lot of the Jean-era episodes - lots of great set-ups but no solid follow-throughs, "tell-instead-of-show" humor as others have mentioned, and underwritten subplots.  Additionally the mostly-realistic view of the progression of time were undercut by occasional wacky "OMG!TheFUTURE!" asides.  

What really irked me about "Future-Drama" was the Homer/Marge storyline.  I completely buy the idea that Homer would one day drive Marge to the point that they might try a separation, but over an underwater house?  After the RV thing two epsiodes back?  I also think that it might have been a stronger second act if the writers had chosen to have Lisa and Bart working together to get Homer and Marge talking - thus making Jenda jealous that Bart was spending more time with his sister than his girlfriend, and causing Bart to realize once more how brilliant Lisa is and how much she deserved the Yale scholarship.  The abruptness of Marge and Homer getting back together in act four also didn't help the mediocre way the plot was assembled.

I really enjoyed:

-Vince-Principle Kearney (A natural step up from being Nelson's henchman).

-Homer's undersea bachelor pad (Despite it being the source of their separation - it's canon that when he's embattled he wants to run away and live under the sea, and that he did so because he lost Marge actually touched me)

-The continued establishment of Bart and Lisa's familial closeness - the fact that Bart rescued Lisa from a life of mediocrity and living on the border instead of a life of real pain says a lot about how Bart feels about his sister- and the reminder that while Homer and Marge may fight, they love one another enough to overcome most any obstacle.

-How nicely this reality blended with the Lisa's Wedding version of the future.  You could easily picture Bart finding work at Down With Buildings after the events in this episode, and understand why Milhouse settled for work at the nuclear plant.  Plus, now we have an explanation for why Maude Flanders was at Lisa's wedding - it was a clone.  ;D

-Skinner finally expressing his irritation with Bart aloud in the mildest of terms, causing the other students to gasp in horror.

-Moe, Springfield's loneliest man, getting a clone - and finding himself irritating.

-Jenda, who's the best love interest Bart's ever been connected to.  

-V.P.  Cletus!!  Most of the other possible futures were amusing, and I would actually like to hear the ones behind Ned stabbing Homer or Maggie's DUI.

-Snake's phone/gun: "What kind of soups do they have?"  LOVED.  IT.

-The Larry Davis IPod Experience: Any reference to the Larry Davis Experience makes me all misty for "The Way They Was"

- Frink pulling down the "And Maggie" part of his banner: reminding us not to take what was about to happen too seriously.

*continued next post*

[missygal21880]

Was meh on:

-Smither's "straightness" injections.  I found them offensive on one level, but on another it made sense why he might get them character-wise.  If you had to be confronted daily with the object of your obsession for twenty-plus years and know you'd probably never make any inroads, wouldn't you take the first available "cure" just to spare yourself the suffering?

-Edna K's making a pass at Bart: So very wrong on one level, but since TPTB are desperate to regress her back to her pre-Skinner state, I'd say an in-character way for someone who was once made an attempt to be a groupie for Aerosmith's drummer (And the Bee Sharps, if you read the comic book) to behave.

-Nelson and Sherri and Terri: Nelson's reaction to his four children makes real sense - he's got a history of being allergic to maturity and responsibility, and unless he can use his fists he's apt to cut and run - but I don't know why Sherri and Terri would put up with being two-timed AND impregnated by the same man - and they both know about it.  Is Nelson that charismatic?  Are Sherri and Terri that desperate?  We don't know enough about them to know if it would be in-character, which is what's frustrating about that segment of the show.

-Milhouse:  Poor, poor Milhouse.  It fits that he'd still be so miserable, but I wish someone would cut the poor kid some slack in the writer's room. 

- Also, though it's canon that Bart and Milhouse's relationship only works as long as Bart's okay with it, having him tell Milhouse that he was stopping his sister from ruining her life was a little harsh.

-Maggie in "Alaska": While I wish they'd give us a future ep where Maggie gets to have an opinion, I'd like to think that Maggie was off on vacation with Ling and Selma - which could have been established with a still shot of a photograph on a cell phone or such, but nevermind.

-Lenny and Carl:  Though the "let's mock the audience"-version of meta humor sets my teeth on edge, I'm willing to write it off as Lenny and Carl messing with Milhouse.

-The Future, Wow! - In some cases, I think this portrayal of the Future in this ep worked pretty well - the political stuff was amusing, and I'd like to think that the influx of ape voters helped Mayor Quimby get recalled  . 

Let's pretend that Lisa's Wedding and this ep are part of the same continuity - the culture of the flying cars make sense - by the time Lisa's a senior in college *, hover cars are well established and part of Spingfield's culture.  So are androids that look like humans, and virtual trees.  The whole "scientists invented magic!"  part might account for a number of things, too, but let's not get into that!

The "spaceship" newspaper and garbage trucks made sense to me, too - a classic example of Springfieldian overspending and functional excess, like the Staircase to Nowhere and the Monorail.

Things I Dislike/Hated/For the love of Jebus, cut this in syndication:

-The whole WE'RE IN THE FUTURE KOOL musical montage.  I love Bender a lot, but the entire sequence was unnecessary and sucked up time that could have been spent on the Marge/Homer subplot.  Plus it gave us Homer's one major jerkass moment of the night when he dumped Bender out of the car.

-Little to no emotional punch.  "Lisa's Wedding" still gets me, even to this day.  Heck, I even sniffled during "Goo Goo Gai Pan", which had a lot more going for it in the emotional impact department than this ep did.  Though there was some lovely Lisa/Bart bonding, and some lovely Homer/Marge rebonding, it's nothing compared to Homer's emotional speech to Lisa before she goes to marry Hugh.

The new regime of writers are just now beginning to revive the emotional core of the show, after it, for a few exceptions, went dead after the jaded and jading Scully years, so I don't expect emotional pyrotechnics just yet, but I think there could have been more thought put into the emotional resonance.

-No real resolution to Bart and Lisa's earlier conflict: Present Day!Bart and Lisa never make up after seeing the sacrifice Bart will make in the future.  In "Lisa's Wedding," Lisa's embarrassment in regard to Homer is dissolved - she knows how much her father loves her thanks to the Gypsy's fortune, despite his bumbling.  Lisa should have had a similar realization after seeing Bart's sacrifice - her brother is a brat who loves to play pranks on her and argue, but when the chips are down he loves her.

-Frink Committing Suicide: I can't imagine how his fans feel - isn't this the first time ANY future ep has insinuated that someone will die by their own hand?  That got a more violent emotional reaction out of me than

-Patty's tail: Which is another reason the montage should be cut.  Between that and Smither's shots, I'm surprised GLADD hasn't released a statement.

-Chalmer's Drug Addiction: Which comes out of absolutely nowhere.  I think it's fitting that the only word he ends up being able to say is "Skinner", but that joke felt like it was chopped out of an episode of "Family Guy".

-Anoop calling Bart a racist: There's nothing in Majula or Apu's behavior toward the Simpsons, their best customers, that would make me think they would tell their children to treat Bart that way.  True, they HAVE expressed occasional distaste and dissatisfaction with Western culture (Apu's dislike of the American cult of celebrity, Majula's distaste for Marge's westernized Indian dishes), but Apu and Manjua are intelligent people and I cast dubious eyes on them teaching their eight-year-old children what "crackers" are.

-Bart and Lisa's argument: Though I will admit "nobody's gay for Moleman" is funny.

- We never see Marge break up with Krusty, either: And I would have loved to see what made her decide to do so.

-And since when would Lisa's being with ANY boy ruin her entire life? 

-Bart finding a woman who loves him for himself at eighty-three...then dying.  That's too sad of a future for him for me to comprehend.

-The Springfield PD suddenly becoming robocops: my sole WTH moment of the night, though the gag with Bart eating Wiggums' chicken made me laugh.

And Did You Notice:

-Luanne is still with Pyro? (they're seated right behind Krusty and Marge during Lisa and Bart's graduation)

-Better yet, it looks like Kirk found someone, too - unless my eyes were deceiving me, I think he had his arm around a woman (see the reaction shot close-ups from Homer before his fight with Krusty starts).

-The appearance of Teen!Alison Taylor and Wendell at the dance (I know there were more Springfield kids dancing in the background and I need to go back and freeze-frame to see)

- "I never had this problem with Todd Flanders" (You always knew that one of Ned's boys would be a rebel)

-This is the second time we've seen poor Ralph whacked out on drugs through no fault of his own, isn't it?

In conclusion, in my top ten for this season, but it won't stand the test of time as a classic, like "Lisa's Wedding," which is my future episode gold standard.  As with most of the episodes this season all of the parts are there but the dry execution, lack of depth and superficial writing really hurt it - not to mention the amount of dark humor involved, which, thanks to the execution and along the lines of Homer's tumor in "Midnight RX", just isn't funny.  The occasional Scully-like flights-of-wth-ness should be dispensed with, too.  In short, Future Drama could've been worse, but it could've been better. I'm just happy it gave me some things to toss into my ficverse.

Letter Grade: B

* Assuming that Lisa's Wedding and Future-Drama inhabit the same canon, Lisa's nineteen in her senior year at college in the former, and Bart's twenty-two.

[Vulgaris_Prime]

I'm ambivalent about this one.  There were some honestly good moments (VP Cletus, Milhouse's continuing misery, Moe's clone, Snake's phone/gun, "The Larry Davis iPod Experience" - I love the ongoing Larry Davis bit, "the uniclams", Bart sacrificing his best chance at success for Lisa), some okay ones ("I like boobies!" - yes, I consider it an okay moment because I see a strange, complex subtext to it; Robocop Wiggum with a chicken in his cavity), and some real stinkers -

Code: Select all

IF ep-type=future THEN pathos=true ELSE return $false.

I think that as this episode outdid many recent episodes, it also UNDID some past episodes with its screwing with future continuity.  Maybe I'm making too much of this, but it bothers me on some level...

OVERALL: 3 bolts (scale is 0-4)

ADDITIONAL COMMENTS: I'm working on a fanfic series that takes place at about the time period of this episode.  I fear I may have to tailor my story a bit or else... well, there's not much consequence other than a nagging feeling of being wrong, and I always have that!

-Patty's tail: Which is another reason the montage should be cut.  Between that and Smither's shots, I'm surprised GLADD hasn't released a statement.

The shots I get, but the tail?  What gives?  I'm lost!