Tonight saw the debut of the 14th episode in The Simpsons’ 35th season, entitled “Night of the Living Wage” (a play on the title of George Romero’s horror classic Night of the Living Dead), and below are my brief recap and thoughts on this installment of the long-running animated sitcom.
“Night of the Living Wage” begins with Lisa Simpson (voiced, as always, by Yeardley Smith) taking her cat Snowball II– or is it III or IV at this point? I honestly can’t remember– our for a walk in a baby carriage, which she insists is a perfectly sane thing to do. Cue the Crazy Cat Lady (Tress MacNeille) insisting, via her own garbled dialect, that this is how she got started. Anyway, Lisa finds her way to a heretofore-undiscovered-by-her Emotional Support Animal park, and this is where Snowball claws her way out of her collar and mauls a beloved pet chicken. One trip to the Springfield Veterinary Hospital later, and the Simpsons owe $60,000 in vet’s bills– covering pun-tastic procedures like “cucklear” implants– which Homer (Dan Castellaneta) of course cannot possibly afford from his job at the nuclear power plant. So Marge vows to get her first-ever job, at which Bart (Nancy Cartwright) reminds her that she’s had a number of different jobs over the years, an in-joke nitpick which I’m sure immediately popped into every long-term Simpsons fan’s mind as soon as she said the line.
But Marge insists that this situation is different because she took those other jobs for reasons of self-improvement rather than simply to pay the bills. She finds a gig online preparing food for one of those multiple-restaurants-in-one-kitchens-type-deals called “Gimme Chow,” which is owned by a tech billionaire named Finn Bonnie Day (guest star Jason Mantzoukas from the immensely popular “How Did This Get Made?” podcast), who after introducing his concept via pre-recorded video message turns things over to supervising manager Gil Gunderson (also Castellaneta). From there we get into a clever montage parodying FX’s The Bear with some really jaw-dropping animation as Marge and her fellow Gimme Chow workers scramble to whip up all the various meal orders coming in rapid-fire. And the B-story of this episode centers around Homer vowing to make dinner each night at home with the kids’ help, although secretly they are also ordering their meals from Gimme Chow.
Things take a turn from The Bear toward Norma Rae when Marge and company begin talk of starting a union after she discovers that Gil and Finn have been depriving the workers of their overtime pay. There’s a great riff on CNBC’s Mad Money with Jim Cramer– called, naturally, Demented Dollars with Fiscal Cliff– that, again, features a lot of really dynamic, eye-grabbing animation and showcases the disparity between the lifestyles of billionaires and the workers who make them all their money in the first place. I thought the first two acts of “Night of the Living Wage” were super strong, but things started to fall apart for me a little bit near the end when Homer goes against Marge in the union battle, resulting in Finn firing all of his employees and replacing them with drones.
As dumb as Homer can be and often is, it just felt a little out of character for him to side with someone else over his wife, even temporarily. There’s a predictably saccharine ending here after the patriarch of Our Favorite Family realizes what he’s done and zaps all the drones with an EMP from Springfield Nuclear, but it also feels rushed, with a bizarre wrap-up voice-over monologue by Sarcastic Man (Hank Azaria) tying up all the loose ends (like “Whatever happened with the chicken’s medical bills?”) reminding me a bit of the “Oh, let’s say Moe” conclusion to the classic ninth-season episode “Das Bus.” Regardless, this was about two-thirds of a great episode, but the animation was so impressive all-around– seriously, this aspect of the show has been improving more and more lately– that I would have to wholeheartedly recommend it based on that alone.
New episodes of The Simpsons air Sunday evenings on FOX.