Overview
Lisa travels back in time to save Springfield in this Disney+ exclusive episode.
Our Take
Imagine a Springfield with a much younger Monty Burns who enjoyed flowers, jazz, and voiced by the brilliant Joseph Gordon-Levitt. I gotta tell ya, I wouldn’t mind it at all. That said,we’ve had a lot of episodes of this show deal with glimpses of the future and the past, in fact we had an episode that just debuted late last year that saw Grampa go back in time and deal with Monty Burns. This Disney+ exclusive ignores the Avengers: Endgame rules of time travel where just because you are in the past it doesn’t mean you can change the future and instead focuses on the tried-and-true Back to the Future formula that anything you do in the past could potentially have ripple effects for the future.
Personally, when it comes to more sci-fi related ideas, Family Guy typically has this show beat in more than one way. I even preferred more of the scenes that were set in the present because it turned Lisa’s incessant rambling off for a second and got us some good laughs from the likes of Homer, Bart, Milhouse, and even Marge. Other than the cute moose and loving Joseph’s depiction of Burns, anytime where we get an episode where there’s TOO much Lisa, I start to get a headache, and that’s exactly what happens here.
I’m not even sure why this episode ended up being a Disney+ exclusive. “O C’mon All Ye Faithful” kinda makes sense because that was a double-episode, though even that I’m wondering why FOX wouldn’t want an hour of 4 million viewers, but if there was a hefty price tag there with the litany of guest stars I get it. “The Past and the Furious” is a quick 25 minutes that maybe had a higher price tag because of the guest spot? If I were FOX I would’ve invested the bigger bucks into this one because they could’ve promoted the heck out of a premium movie star being a part of the cast and probably got themselves a bigger overnight share as a result.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt is really the lone reason why I’m even entertaining a slightly higher score for an episode’s premise that has been done a bunch of times because his depiction of a Young Monty Burns is so good that it should be talked about more, but other than that this one’s nearly a skip.