Season 13 was a time of transition for The Simpsons. The show would burn off the last handful of episodes overseen by superfan punching bag, Mike Scully. Al Jean (who’d supervised seasons 3 and 4 with writing partner Mike Reiss) would return to take the reins after almost a decade away. And the show gradually shifted from its manic decline to its comfortable persistence. The result, as I’ve discussed before, was a season of television that called back to the classic era Jean had been a part of, that still found itself subject to some of the worst habits of the Scully administration, and that previewed the steady anodyne march of years that would possess the show for the next [gulp] two decades.
But as I discussed on The Simpsons Show Podcast, the opening episode of Jean’s second tour of duty, “She of Little Faith”, gave fans a glimmer of hope. Make no mistake, the episode still has some of the telltale signs of the prior regime’s failings. The pacing is a little nuts. There are some overly cartoony gags. And at times, there is still the undercurrent of meanness that hurried along the show’s fall from grace.
Still, this opening salvo of the (old) new regime reminded audiences what the series could be in different hands. Despite a few missteps, the characters feel more like themselves here, with conflicts rooted in their understandably clashing worldviews and familiar foibles. The humor is sharper, with more layered jokes and a dearth of easy gags. Even when the episode is late arriving to the plot or tries to pack in too much too quickly, the comic bits that pave the way are funnier, and the constituent parts are pound-for-pound better.
In short, if only for a brief moment, The Simpsons felt like The Simpsons again.
The episode begins with some of the usual monkeying around, as Homer and Bart enlist the nerds from “Homer Goes to College” to help them build a NASA-level model rocket to outdo the Flanderses. To be sure, much of this act is comic throat-clearing that, but for the last thirty seconds or so, has nothing to do with the rest of the episode. The difference is that it packs in more laughs per minute than the typical disconnected Simpsons introduction.
This is what happens when you let someone who had cereal and milk light on fire help you build your rocket.
Don’t get me wrong, bits like Homer’s giant contact lenses, or his flossing song, or the repeated jokes about Milhouse’s eyebrows feel like leftover Scully-era gags. But the comic timing of Homer’s cobbled together rockets exploding is nigh-flawless. His level of idiocy when declaring his goal to “punch the face of god” or yelling “countdown!” before launching the rocket, is perfectly-tuned. And Marge’s declaration that it’s “sensible” for the hamster pilot’s “wife” to eat three of her kids before the perilous launch feels like the dark, wry Simpsons humor of old.
The rocket, naturally, goes off course and wrecks the church, which ends the act and motivates the actual plot of the episode. “She of Little Faith” then transitions into its main story, a mini-morality tale about the church selling its soul to raise revenue. To generate funds to repair the damage caused by Homer’s mishap, Reverend Lovejoy gives into Mr. Burns’s nigh-literal deal with the devil, spackling the chapel with Lindsey Naegle-approved billboards and working sales pitches into his sermons.
There’s some commentary baked in here about the omnipresence of ads sullying the last vestiges of anything sound or sacred, but it mostly works as an excuse for the show’s trademark comic exaggeration. This brief middle section features some classic Burns chicanery, the right mix of classical and obscure references (with appearances from both money changers and The Noid), and most importantly, it gives Lisa the chance to stand up for her beliefs.
That’s the core of “She of Little Faith”, even if it doesn’t really arrive in full force until late in the episode. Lisa, whose anti-consumerist bent is well documented, revolts after the church’s commerce-focused makeover. It causes a moral crisis, a hard-fought decision on a new spiritual path, and an estrangement with a family member that’s resolved with the help and guidance of a celebrity guest star.
"Git along, li'l parishioners!"
In that, the episode seems to be a religion-focused remake of “Lisa the Vegetarian”. While “She of Little Faith” doesn’t reach the same heights as that all-time great outing for the series, it’s still following a quality blueprint and gains strength from shifting its focus to the connection between Lisa and Marge. That’s long been one of the show’s strongest relationships, and anchoring the episode around it helps the show make up for some of the condensed storytelling it’s eventually reduced to in its haste.
The only problem is that the last third of the episode feels both packed and rushed when it has to cram in Lisa’s choice to become a Buddhist, her gradual estrangement and reunion with Marge, her inspiration and reassurance from Richard Gere, and oh yeah, a whole Christmas spiel all in the span of about nine minutes. The difference is that the material is stronger and funnier, to where the moment-to-moment comedy and character beats shine even within a drive-by bit of storytelling.
The heart and humor of the piece come from the fact that Marge, as the most devout member of the Simpson family, is prone to worrying about her daughter’s soul, but is also too square and too loving as a mom to put up much resistance to Lisa’s blasphemy. Her efforts to sway her daughter come down to a ghostly voice, a withholding of cookies, and an abundance of baths. It’s an adorably, characteristically Marge-like response to a thorny issue like your daughter turning her back on your preferred house of worship.
The ultimate bargaining chip, however, is Christmas, which is Rev. Lovejoy’s grand idea to win Lisa back to the flock. It’s intriguing to see Marge be a little more mercenary with her tidings of good cheer when she thinks her daughter’s soul is on the line. The promise of a pony, some manipulative Maggie-based pressure, and a semi-disturbing encouragement from the good reverend to enjoy the candy cane set the conflict nicely. But ultimately, the plan backfires, causing Lisa to run away instead.
In hindsight, I'm wondering how they made the pony's mouth seem so realistic.
Of course, she finds refuge in a fine-but-forgettable celebrity appearance, as Richard Gere shows up to indulge in some tepid gags and provide the right exposition and reassurances necessary for reconciliation, a la Paul and Linda McCartney. It’s an extraneous part of the episode that feels the most like a Scully-era indulgence, but thankfully, it’s inoffensive at worst.
It also puts Lisa’s struggle into a larger focus. The choice to reestablish your spiritual path when the one handed down to you by your parents doesn’t feel right anymore is a challenging one. The Simpsons softens that idea with its well-timed gags, but takes Lisa’s plight, and her difficulty gaining acceptance from her family, seriously. Channeling it through her Marge, the fellow Simpson who both gets Lisa but also worries about her more than any other member of the family, especially where matters of faith are concerned, gives their cold war a weight and purpose that might otherwise be sapped by the episode’s overstuffed third act.
Still, in the end, Lisa accepts that she can still celebrate Christmas and worship with her family as a Buddhist. Marge is just glad to have her daughter back, whatever she believes. And we end on a note of the show’s trademark wry satire, when everyone involved is mollified so long as Lisa pays the First Church of Springfield a little lip service. With that, and an amusing pony callback, the Simpson family is happy and reunited around the holidays once more.
Not fully earned, but still, d'awwwww.
It’s fitting, then, that the very first episode of the series to air, “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire”, was also one of the show’s yuletide outings. In many ways, “She of Little Faith” is another pilot for The Simpsons, the start of a second phase of the series under Al Jean that continues to this very day. While the show would rarely hit these sort of heights under Jean, it still settled into a groove of consistent competence that marked a sharp contrast with the schizophrenic highs and lows of the era that immediately preceded it.
That’s the most striking thing about Jean’s first effort back. It retains some of the structural problems of Scully years, but by god, it’s smarter, truer to its characters and, most of all, funnier than most of its post-classic brethren. “She of Little Faith” was the beginning of The Simpsons pulling out of its tailspin and starting to fly level again, even if it had trouble gaining altitude afterwards. There were nadirs still to come in the ensuing twenty years, but with Jean back at the controls, the show could at least reassure us that those explosions on the launchpad would once again be the exception, rather than the rule.
Odds and Ends
– The dog in a fishbowl helmet seems in the episode’s 1950s sci-fi spoof seems like an exaggeration, but an early episode of the original Star Trek genuinely tried to pass off a small pup in a Halloween costume as an alien creature.
– It’s a small gag, but I like that Milhouse walks away dejectedly with the others when Homer bans all nerds from the launch area.
– The rocket launch silliness also has some nice visual touches, like the over-glued design of Homer’s rocket, or his colander pot helmet, or his 1960s NASA scientist look later in the act.
– I know I complained about the cartooniness of certain gags, but I just love the fact that the Flanderses’ rocket not only lands perfectly back in its container, but that the box folds neatly on top of it. I’m willing to chalk it up to, uh, wind resistance.
– It’s good to know that Lenny still finds short shorts so fascinating after his excitement at finding a cargo ship full of them in “El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Jomer”.
– Likewise, it’s impressive that Nibbles survived long enough after the events of “Skinner’s Sense of Snow” to make another death-defying escape here. Were it that poor Superdude was nearly so hearty.
– Marge confiding in Lisa that she wants at least one member of this family to make it to Heaven also calls back to the end of “Simpsons Bible Stories”.
– Why are Lenny and Carl Buddhists? It’s never come up before, and it’ll never come up again. Their presence is amusing enough, but they feel shoehorned in to lighten up Lisa’s Buddhist awakening in a way Richard Gere couldn’t or wouldn’t.
– There are some classic Simpsons swerve gags here, like Homer seemingly excoriating Lisa for her religious shift, only to actually be ordering Bart to put butter on his bacon. Likewise the bullies seeming to reference a certain famous long-haired carpenter, only to instead be referring to some guy named Gunner who’s dating Jimbo’s mom is the nice type of layered joke that was otherwise in short supply in this era.
– The one truly execrable moment in this one is Homer forcing Bart to eat bacon-wrapped sausage despite his son’s complaints of chest pains. It’s the sort of casual cruelty that was endemic to the Scully years.
– The great thing about the latter two acts of this one is that Homer gets to be a funny side character rather than having to carry the focus of the episode. His response to Lisa’s protests that “everyone in the store is looking at her” and he and Bart mistaking the search and rescue mission to be one for Santa’s Little Helper and caroling respectively are solid little gags for the local oaf.
– Rev. Lovejoy declaring that “You can save more souls with roller skates and Easy-Bake ovens than with this two thousand-page sleeping pill” was The Simpsons’s most pointed and cutting line of dialogue in years.
– Lisa’s analogy remains apt I tell you! APT!
