Hello and welcome to Laughing Place’s regular recap of The Simpsons on the FOX Network. This week’s installment, entitled “Uncut Femmes” (a reference to the 2019 Adam Sandler crime drama Uncut Gems) is the 17th episode of the long-running animated sitcom’s 32nd season.
Chalkboard gag: None.
Couch gag: None.
The episode begins with Carl (voiced by Alex Désert) discovering a workplace atrocity at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant and getting paid off by Mr. Smithers (Harry Shearer) with two tickets to see Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band. He decides to share the reward with Homer (Dan Castellaneta) who rushes home in excitement. “Marge, you know how nothing ever happens to me? Well the curse has been lifted!” But Marge (Julie Kavner) reminds Homer that he’s supposed to take Bart (Nancy Cartwright) and Lisa (Yeardley Smith) on an overnight field trip that day. Homer guilts Marge into taking over his chaperone duties, and they attend a tour of a battleship where the kids are put to work deoxidizing the ship’s hull.
On the battleship, Marge is partnered up with Sarah Wiggum (guest star Megan Mullally), who is painfully dull in her responses to Marge’s attempts at socializing with her. At the concert, Homer and Carl bond with Chief Wiggum (Hank Azaria), who also persuaded his wife to attend the field trip. Marge continues to try to make friends with Mrs. Wiggum: “What are your top ten ways of trying to start a conversation?” Marge is surprisingly impressed with Sarah’s parenting skills and is taken aback when Wiggum lets loose after drinking some alcohol. They talk about their husbands as they wind down after the children have gone to bed, relating to each other over how similar their lives really are. Marge asks Sarah to hang out more often, but Sarah says she has a reason she keeps to herself. Suddenly two mysterious figures appear out of the darkness and put pillowcases over the two women’s heads.
Held hostage in the back of a discount fabric shop, Marge is shocked to find that her captors are Sarah Wiggum’s ex-partners in crime. At the concert, Homer and Clancy Wiggum meet Bob Seger (playing himself), who shames them both for abandoning their wives in favor of the event. “We’ve got to go make it up to Bob Seger… and our wives!” Sarah Wiggum tells Marge about her past as a “sexy girl thief”: “They never saw us coming, but they loved to watch us walk away.” We see a flashback montage to a diamond heist that involved a young Clancy Wiggum as a security guard. At this point in the past he’s working a night job while putting himself through the police academy. Sarah explains that it was never part of the plan, but she genuinely fell in love with Wiggum on that night. She was supposed to be the getaway driver, but was late exiting the scene due to her tryst with Clancy. But in the present, the other two thieves explain that it wasn’t Sarah’s fault– they had actually been set up by the fourth member of the gang: Lindsay Naegle (Tress MacNeille). The thieves threaten to tell Clancy about Sarah’s criminal past unless she helps them find their bretrayor.
At the battleship, the captain (Mullally’s husband Nick Offerman) tells Homer and Wiggum that their wives have disappeared. Clancy thinks he’s put together the clues thanks to his son Ralph (also Cartwright) and wrongfully accuses Fat Tony (Joe Mantegna) of the kidnapping, who professes his ignorance. Fat Tony suggests that the two wives were not kidnapped but perhaps left because of the men’s poor attitudes. Marge watches as Sarah and her ex-partners plan another heist, and she can’t help but pipe in with her own suggestions. She uses her famously tall hair to point to the map and helps them come up with a better plan. The thieves enlist Marge to execute the robbery and get back at Lindsay Naegle, though Marge initially resists, and Sarah quickly talks her into it.
At the Museum of Generational Wealth, Kent Brockman (Shearer again) is reporting from the Gen Gala while Patty and Selma (both Kavner) watch the red carpet with their gay friends in the Simpsons’ living room. Marge and her new thief friends are dressed to the nines as they arrive at the event, and Marge is dazzled as she spots all the celebrities and famous spots at the museum. Sarah Wiggum seduces Sarcastic Man– another security guard– while Homer and Clancy report back to Fat Tony that they still can’t track down their wives (Fat Tony has been babysitting Ralph while the husbands were busy). They spot Marge and Sarah on TV at the gala, and we cut back to the party, where the two women grift Lindsay Naegle, whose date is Rainier Wolfcastle (Shearer). They manage to make off with her necklace but as they’re exiting Homer and Clancy show up and draw attention to them by shouting through a megaphone. “When it comes to love, it’s always the time for shouting!”
Lindsay Naegle confronts the thieves outside the museum, but Marge trips her using a fellow partygoer’s elaborate coattails and she falls down the extensive staircase. The rest of the thieves’ plan plays out and Naegle is framed for stealing many other valuable pieces of jewelry. Patty, Selma and their friends are aghast to see Marge leaving the red carpet at the gala, and proceed to make fun of her outfit. In the mid-credits coda, Clancy and Sarah Wiggum make out in the museum, as Clancy has been turned on by the revelationtion that his wife is a criminal. Meanwhile, Fat Tony babysits Ralph Wiggum again, having taken him to get ice cream and intimidated the Squeaky Voiced Teen (Castellaneta) working there. “I love you, scary daddy,” says Ralph as the two leave together.
In two weeks: “Burger Kings”