Review: The Simpsons ‘The Princess Guide’

 

Spoilers Below:

Kind of odd that we get two Moe-focused stories in back-to-back episodes, right? This was different from the last though, as it centered on possible love interest for old Mr. Szyslak, instead of a change in his bar. Still, it felt quite familiar, for all the same reasons.

During “Take Your Child to Work Day” at the power plant, Homer (being a surprisingly good father to Lisa) was tasked with babysitting the 25-year-old princess of Nigeria, Kemi, while her father worked on a business deal with Mr. Burns. During a visit to Moe’s, the princess ditched Homer and began chatting with the bartender (who suspected her of having a brother that duped him in an internet email scam).

Moe took her on a tour of the city, with Homer in pursuit, until Mr. Burns and the Nigerian King realized what was going on via paparazzi photos of the couple together. However, when confronted, the princess admitted that her feelings for Moe were platonic, and everything went back to normal.

In Case You Missed It:

1) Couch gag: an image of the Simpson family appeared on a fax print-out. A paper jam occurred, and Homer remarked: “Mmm…paper jam.”

2) The Bring Your Child to Work Day slogan was: “Children will be expected to work for free.”

3) Elon Musk was mentioned AGAIN in an episode. This Simpsons continuity is blowing my mind!

4) Homer referred to Lisa’s eyes as “those baby blacks.”

5) “And she trashed my bar. Oh no, wait, she actually cleaned up a bit. Good for her.”

6) “As long as he can run, he can beat us.” / “D’oh!”

7) “But I didn’t show you the place Dave Grohl got mugged!”

8) The Jezebel headline of Kemi giving Moe a peck read: “Woman kisses man, yuck!”

9) Eager newspaper reporter: “Oh, this is vague stuff. Vague stuff!”

10) Burns & Branson: “Can you go five minutes without saying the word Virgin?” / “That’s another Virgin challenge, that I won’t be Virgin taking. Virgin.”

11) The episode ended with a slide reading “In loving memory of Leonard Nimoy,” and a screengrab of him from season three’s “Marge vs. the Monorail.”

This might be the hardest episode to score of the whole season thus far. No matter what the issue is, I feel a pull to both sides of the spectrum.

Take the story, for instance. First, last week I lamented on the fact that two possibly strong storylines ended up so weakly, with Marge’s Uber plot barely staying afloat. Moe’s was decent, but he didn’t need to specifically chat with Marge in the end, so her part could have been cut and the episode probably could have survived and succeeded just as well or better. This week we had a singular narrative that probably needed a B-story to complement it. Yes, there were the cutaways to Mr. Burns’ negotiations, but that wasn’t so much a separate story as a related sidebar. Because of this, I felt that some of the Moe moments seemed a bit drawn out.

Speaking of Moe moments, I appreciated the sweetness of yet another Moe love story (like “Dumbbell Indemnity” and “Eeny Teeny Maya Moe”) but did we really think Kemi would fall for Moe? Renee had pity and saw Moe’s sweeter side, and that made her fall for him. Maya had her own issues with people judging her appearance, which allowed her to also meet the man inside Moe. With Kemi, I didn’t feel like she was particularly interested in Moe in the first place, despite her calling him interesting. It was clear to everyone but him that she was only focused on exploring America, and she only traded Homer for Moe due to the former’s unlawful arrest for rambling to Chief Wiggum about an African Princess.

Nevertheless, it was nice to see a story with such a natural flow. It didn’t start with something totally unrelated and then make a 180-degree turn to the show’s main focus, but instead started at the nuclear plant almost immediately, and stayed there all episode long – but with the meat of the story breaking away to follow Homer, Moe, and Kemi. Instead of a bunch of jokes stitched together with some flimsy premise, there was a nice story with a decent helping of humor sprinkled it.

Oh, and there was that Richard Branson thing, which was appreciated, but totally unnecessary. I would have rather seen it as part of a bigger story.

There were too many flaws with this episode, but that only kept it from tipping the scales too close to the top.