TV Recap / Review: Springfield Gets Its Own Spherical Concert Venue In "The Simpsons" - "The Day of the Jack-Up"

Tonight saw the debut of the eighth episode of the 37th season of The Simpsons, entitled "The Day of the Jack-Up" (a riff on the title of the 1971 political thriller novel The Day of the Jackal and its acclaimed 1973 film adaptation), and below are my recap and thoughts on this installment of the long-running animated sitcom.

"The Day of the Jack-Up" begins with Waylon Smithers (voiced, as always, by Harry Shearer) informing his boss Charles Montgomery Burns (also Shearer) that the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant, of which Burns is the owner, is undergoing a power surplus due to a variety of factors, including the local prison generating its own power for executions with a spin class. Burns and Smithers's first plan to sell off the excess power is to unload it onto a blockchain-mining cryptocurrency company (after all, Burns knows all abouts mines, chains, and crypts) but when Monty's negotiating tactics fail-- including never being the one to speak first in a meeting and having Homer stand too close to the potential buyers with his shirt off-- Smithers suggests building a concert venue that Burns names the "Circulus," an obvious parody of the Sphere entertainment venue, which opened in Las Vegas in 2023.

So the Circulus is rolled into place next to the power plant and turned on, bathing Springfield in an eerie glow. Soon residents including the Simpson family are forced to sleep in welding masks to block out the light, but before that newscaster Kent Brockman (Shearer again) announces that the first concert to be held at the Circulus will be K-pop group Kneesock Dolls, who Lisa (Yeardley Smith) says is her favorite musical group from her "favorite Korea." Naturally Lisa begins to beg her father Homer (Dan Castellaneta) to go to the concert, and though he initially resists, he eventually breaks down and agrees to buy her tickets. The only problem is that when they sit down to make the purchase, tickets to the show sell out in less than a second.

But it's not only the Kneesock Dolls concert that's affected-- every show booked for the Circulus is already sold out, and the angry townspeople soon discover that it's all due to a third-party reseller named the SeatMiser. Chief Wiggum (Hank Azaria) is helpless, but an FBI profiler (guest star Paget Brewster from Criminal Minds) determines that the SeatMiser launched his account using the internet at the Springfield library. Meanwhile, Homer is so angry about not being able to get Lisa tickets to the concert that he goes down to the Circulus and begins kicking it, and that's where he's called over by the school bus driver Otto (Shearer yet again) who agrees to sell him four tickets in exchange for $450 and semi-clean urine.

So Homer, Lisa, Marge (Julie Kavner), and Bart (Nancy Cartwright) all go to the Kneesock Dolls concert together, but Bart only lasts about a minute before he decides to get up and go wandering around the venue. At the merchandise stand, he's informed by the Squeaky Voiced Teen (also Castellaneta)-- whose name is given in this episode as Andrew Freedman-- that the whole concert is actually a trap set up to catch the SeatMiser. And here's where it dawns on us, the viewers, that "The Day of the Jack-Up" is a parody of writer/director M. Night Shyamalan's 2024 thriller Trap. We also learn in this scene that (SPOILER ALERT) Bart himself is in actuality the SeatMiser.

So the remainder of the episode roughly follows the dramatic beats of Trap, with Bart even managing to steal Wiggum's walkie-talkie and use it to evade the FBI profiler, who has determined that a student at Springfield Elementary must be the perpetrator due to their only using the money to publicly mock Principal Seymour Skinner. But after Bart decides to flush his phone in order to escape without his location being triangulated, the authorities line up all the kids at the exit and use their faces, one at a time, to attempt to unlock the recovered phone. When it comes down to Bart being the lone remaining potential suspect, the profiler thinks she's got her man, but Bart's face doesn't unlock the phone either, and he walks away scott-free.

In the final scene, as they're walking away from the Circulus, Bart confesses to Lisa that he didn't actually use his face to set up his phone's security... and that during his escapade he was able to gain access to the room that controls the images on the venue's exterior. Here's where we and Lisa figure out that instead of his face, Bart used his own posterior to unlock his phone. Case closed. Over the end credits, we see that The Simpsons production staff utilized motion capture technology to create the choreographed dance numbers for the Kneesock Dolls. And I have to say, I thought "The Day of the Jack-Up" was a pretty strong entry, during which I found myself chuckling a good number of times. I admired the structure and resolution of the episode quite a bit and, having seen Trap, I definitely appreciated the skewering of that particular film. Heck, we even got a bonus Shyamalan reference in the form of a crop circle formation, a la Signs (see image above). Really solid outing!

New episodes of The Simpsons air Sunday evenings on FOX.