Review: The Simpsons “Paths of Glory”

Spoilers Below

Lisa tries to better the reputation of Springfield’s first female inventor by searching an asylum for her first invention. While in the asylum, she and Bart find a sociopath’s notebook, causing Bart to take the notebook home and pretend to be the sociopath that wrote it. Chief Wiggum actually gets a hold of Bart’s notebook pages and now assumes that Bart is insane and lets Marge in on the bad news.

While Lisa and Milhouse team up to look for the aforementioned invention, Bart finds out that his parents want to test his insanity, so he purposely fails it to teach them a lesson. Unfortunately, it also sends Bart to a crazy house.

Lisa eventually uncovers an invention from Amelia Vanderbuckle that is pretty much one of the first calculators. More importantly, Bart is cleared of being insane after ‘extensive’ testing that involved him blowing up terrorists for the US government.

Lisa gets her discovery featured at the local museum, but no one gives a shit. She brings it home where it gets a bunch more attention from Homer.

Our Take

Tonight’s episode of The Simpsons wasn’t a path to glory, but it was still a path to good laughs and plots that were strongly tied to tropes that are familiar but given enough spice to be just fine. Bart had the better of the two plots by a mile and was truly hilarious. The montage was really well produced and Bart breezing through his test was classic stuff.

On the other hand, Lisa’s bit was kinda of atypical of her and was kind of boring. We’ve seen Lisa make numerous discoveries and solved a bunch of mysteries, and this one kinda just fell by the wayside.

Fortunately, the episode wasn’t a total loss, and Bart’s contribution was so great that it saves the whole deal.