Hello and welcome to a new feature on Laughing Place wherein we recap new episodes of The Simpsons on FOX. This week’s installment, entitled “The Incredible Lightness of Being a Baby,” follows up on the theatrical short “Playdate with Destiny” (now viewable exclusively on Disney+) by reintroducing Maggie’s infant boyfriend Hudson.
Chalkboard gag: “SCHOOL ONLINE” with Bart notably absent from the room.
Couch gag: Our favorite family is revealed to be wearing virtual reality headsets after we see them perform a series of death-defying stunts in highly stylized animation.
The episode proper begins with Marge Simpson (voiced by Julie Kavner) strolling baby Maggie through the Springfield park, which is characteristically run-down. “Maybe we should find a new playground,” she says to her daughter. At an upper-class park, they find Hudson, with whom Maggie had previously bonded. Marge meets Hudson’s mother Courtney, who seems perhaps overly concerned about Maggie’s vaccination status and whether or not she had spent any time around peanuts lately. Regardless, they make a playdate for the following day. The next morning at the Simpsons’ house, Homer (Dan Castellaneta) declares he is trying to lose weight so he forgoes having pancakes for breakfast and instead simply grabs a grapefruit to go, to his family’s utter shock.
But Homer has yesterday’s pizza stashed away in his trunk, and eats it on the way to work, making the wheel greasy and causing him to crash into a tree. “Why didn’t I put on my pizza-eating gloves?” he laments. Near the roadside he encounters Cletus Spuckler (Hank Azaria), who has evidently opened a balloon-selling stall. Homer is late to a meeting at the power plant, but he still inquires about how Cletus got started selling balloons, which inspires the slack-jawed yokel to sing a parody of “The Beverly Hillbillies” theme to explain how he struck helium near his shack. Back at the plant, Mr. Burns (Harry Shearer) explains to his employees that he had recently gone undercover as the fake coworker “Chip Incognito”– basically just Burns wearing a moustache.
Homer enters and offers Burns a balloon as an apology for being late. Smithers (also Shearer) laughs this off, but Burns is elated after popping the balloon and inhaling the now-rare helium. After being inquired about where he came by the gas-filled toy, Homer tells Burns about Cletus’s new business, and is rewarded with the Employee of the Months Award– the first human after a long line of released hounds. Back at home, Maggie is in love and Marge doesn’t think it could get any cuter until a butterfly takes the place of the bow on the baby’s head. Then Santa’s Little Helper eats the butterfly and Home thinks that’s pretty cute too.
Burns and Smithers visit Cletus who explains his delay by saying, “I can’t very well open the door with an unloaded shotgun.” Burns offers Cletus a tin cup full of dimes in exchange for his helium supply (and the land it sits on), but Cletus demands the billionaire drink with him instead. Upon imbibing the moonshine, Mr. Burns enters into a very amusing old-fashioned cartoon-dance dream sequence and wakes up later in his office, dazed. “Perhaps it takes an idiot to catch an idiot,” he says as Homer enters the room. But Homer doesn’t want to cheat Cletus out of his house, so the hired goons start beating him up until he relents.
Marge brings Maggie to the playdate at Courtney’s huge, futuristic home with tile personally installed by I.M. Pei, Aibo-driven toddler sleds, and the Mario Bros. as “inefficient” plumbers. Courtney makes Marge fill out a sexual history questionnaire, but it isn’t until she baby-proofs Maggie’s hair that Marge gets fed up, takes her daughter, and leaves. In Springfield’s more rural area, Homer finds Cletus tapping a corked rock for helium and relates to him via their shared stupidity. Mr. Burns is talking to Homer via a wireless radio and an earbud, making him repeat everything he says, which goes predictably wrong. Still, Homer and Cletus become fast friends, introducing each other and shaking hands. Surely they’ve met many times before over the past thirty years, but apparently they’ve both forgotten.
Cletus takes Homer catfishing (literally), invites him to a Spuckler Family Fish Fry, and gives him a Hillbilly Handshake (just more dance-inducing moonshine). “I consider you family now, which is not really that select a circle,” he says. When Homer returns to his car, Mr. Burns is hiding behind his car’s antenna and says, “No one screws anybody half over,” insisting that Homer follow through on conning the Spucklers out of their land. Later, Marge and Homer compare their days over pillow talk, with Marge admitting she didn’t tell Maggie about Hudson’s birthday party because she doesn’t like the baby’s mother. Maggie overhears this and storms away, furious.
At the “Balloons What Float” stand, Mr. Burns demands Homer get his contract signed, so Homer claims to Cletus it is a “friendship certificate,” which he does not hesitate to believe is on the up-and-up. “What’s up-and-up is the helium business,” Cletus says, following that with, “I signs with an ‘X’ ‘cause that’s the kind of iPhone I got.” But Homer stops Cletus before he can sign and tells him it was all a trick. Fortunately Cletus is incredibly forgiving about the matter: “Gettin’ mad at city folk is like gettin’ mad at your six-year-old for not cleanin’ her gun.” There’s a standoff between Burns’s goons and Cletus’s shotgun-toting children, though it ends quickly with Burns inhaling more helium, floating away, and getting caught in some nearby power lines.
Marge decides to bring Maggie back to Hudson, saying she’s not going to be the villain in this romantic comedy. Meeting back up with Courtney at the fancy park, Marge says, “The one thing we have in common is that we’re willing to pretend we like each other for our children.” Maggie and Huson get baby-married and move into the playground’s plastic house. Then in the coda, Homer and Cletus sing a parody of Queen’s “You’re My Best Friend” through a hanging-out montage while Smithers returns to the balloon stand to buy a still-floating Mr. Burns back and carry him away.
Next week: “Warrin’ Priests”