Review: The Simpsons “The Very Hungry Caterpillars”

Overview

When a plague of insects shuts down Springfield, the Simpsons face their greatest challenge yet — spending time in lock down with each other.

Our Take

Last year there was a story going around that The Simpsons inspired the murder hornet craze that went down that ended up being nothing, but clearly writer Brian Kelley took that ball and ran with it. Add in all of the obligatory stops one makes when poking fun at lockdowns, everything from the extreme conservative take to Lisa going nuts to Zoom calls with a mission, and you’ve got yourself covered.

For my money, this was one of the most innovative episodes of The Simpsons in recent memory. The infestation almost gave us a Rick and Morty-inspired sci-fi effort complete with the Inter-Dimensional Cable riff of a bunch of storylines going on at once. I’m actually super happy that The Simpsons did this and not Family Guy, because if this were Family Guy, it would have been three mini-episodes about authors or something lame like that. Instead, the longest running animated series in primetime knew how to catch this ball and score it in the end zone.

That’s not to say that there couldn’t be some improvements. I think Bart’s bit was lackluster in its execution, and instead of Marge and Homer breaking into Ned’s house to get ranch dressing, I would’ve like to have seen Maggie do it, but then we would not have gotten the entertaining climax of the bit where Ned goes crazy. Speaking of crazy, Lisa’s imagination running wild was so creepy it felt like a Treehouse of Horror episode. We also got a Rob Lowe cameo this week which, I gotta tell ya, was only decent. We’re talking about a truly funny actor who has seen stops at Parks and Recs, Tommy Boy, Austin Powers, and more, and as such I feel like he was a tad underutilized.

Even with these complaints, I have to give ups where ups are due. The caterpillars crawling all over Springfield was a great start, I think I would’ve liked to have seen how a few other members of the community reacted to what went down, knowing that this premise probably could’ve lent itself to a double premiere but overall I enjoyed the weirdness of the plot.