Review: The Simpsons ‘Labor Pains’

Spoilers Below

I want to start by saying I had a mini-freakout prior to last night’s episode of The Simpsons. You see, because I like to pretend I’m the God of the TV, I always DVR the shows I like so I can start watching them halfway through and fast-forward through the commercials. However, when I looked at my cable box at 8:15pm, the record light wasn’t on. Oh no. What the F? Now how will I do my review? I’m going to be fired!

“How could this happen?” I thought. Recently I was having an issue with the DVR, where it would record FOX’s Sunday night lineup on both the HD and SD channels, but my girlfriend, BubbleBlabber photographer Bela Z. Green, said she fixed it so it would only record one. Did she mess it up so neither was set to record? Could this be the culprit? As I switched the channel to FOX to catch whatever I could, I picked up my phone to send my lady an angry text, because I’m a jerk like that.

Then I looked up at the screen. It was that dumb new Almost Human show with the ads that air way too often. Apparently The Simpsons wasn’t scheduled to go on until 9pm tonight. (Ed’s Note: We actually reported this special time here, here, here, and here)

Change of pants.

In this week’s episode, Homer delivered a baby in an elevator while leaving a poker game at Carl’s apartment, with Lenny and Moe (when he told Marge he was working). He later found out that the woman named her baby Homer, and that her boyfriend/baby daddy wasn’t around. Homer (the adult) began spending time with Homer (the baby) whilst sneaking around behind Marge’s back. She eventually found out, but allowed the two Homers to still spend time with each other – until it became a distraction from Bart, Lisa, and Maggie. In the end, it turned out the woman’s boyfriend was really a soldier deployed overseas, and not, in fact, out of the picture.

In the alternate story line, Lisa helped some NFL cheerleaders obtain fair pay from their employer.

I must admit: his was a hilarious episode, as far as writing goes. All the poker scenes were hilarious; from the first one (Moe saying: “Too rich for my blood… I should NOT have anted with my blood.”) and Homer’s internal monologue (“Homer Simpson: Do you really want to keep cheating your friends… lying to your wife, and avoiding your kids?”) to the gang catching on to Homer’s ruse (“I never dreamed a night where you discovered I was cheating and beat the crap out of me could end on such an up note!”) to Moe taking Carl’s door towards the episode’s end.

Homer really had a ton of good lines in this installment. I enjoyed his brain-talk throughout, including in the supermarket (“This simulation has been brought to you by your brain, a subsidiary of your penis.”) and his lousy explanation of how he knows the woman whose baby he delivered (“We did it in an elevator!”)

I didn’t particularly care for Lisa’s storyline once Milhouse left it, but her and Bart had a good line at the end: “Bart: “Therapy please.” Lisa: “Me too.”

One criticism: they killed two jokes. I feel (and thus egotistically think everyone else should as well) that repeat jokes only work if the second (third, etc.) references are as funny as, or funnier than, the first. There were two instances in this episode where the first joke was hilarious, and the second not-so-much. I loved when Milhouse told Lisa that their seats at the football game were so close you could hear the players swear, and one – for some hilariously unknown reason – yelled, “I’ll kick your ass, Milhouse!” But at the end of that scene they gave the football player another line (“Burned again, Milhouse” or something) and it just wasn’t as funny. They also killed another joke, involving the “other guy” in the elevator, who was later revealed to be a doctor. Funny the first time; flat the second.

Other than that, this was an amusing little half hour, and I enjoyed the main plot that strung the jokes together. Lisa’s storyline could have been funnier, and the show seems to have had an abundance of touchy-feely episodes lately, but neither of these complaints took away too much from the episode. It’s not like Family Guy, where the content can often involve overly-heavy stuff; either something that has way too much emotion for a cartoon comedy, or something so dark that it kills the viewers’ buzzes. This, like other great Simpsons episodes, had a lot of laughs throughout and simply ended with a moral and a short & sweet moment.