Tonight saw the debut of the 13th episode of The Simpsons’ 35th season on FOX, entitled “Clan of the Cave Mom” (a reference to the 1980 novel Clan of the Cave Bear and the 1986 film adaptation of the same title) and below is my brief recap and review of this installment of the long-running animated sitcom.
“Clan of the Cave Mom” begins with a Springfield Elementary School field trip to the local anthropology museum, which features a 4D theater that blows cold wind in the audience’s faces, among other effects. During the educational film about prehistory, chaperone Marge Simpson (voiced, as always, by Julie Kavner) is distracted by her motherly duties on her cell phone, and is shushed by Principal Skinner (Harry Shearer) who tells her that the children are trying to learn. Later during their lunch break, Milhouse Van Houten (Pamela Hayden) tells his best friend Bart Simpson (Nancy Cartwright) that his father Kirk (Hank Azaria) was injured in his new job at an arena, pinned between the ice rink and the basketball court as it was being installed on top of it. His settlement included tickets to see an upcoming concert by a hispanic rap group, and Milhouse invites Bart to the show.
Later at home, Marge wants to know exactly what kind of music this band will be performing before she grants Bart permission to attend. Bart plays her the radio edit of a song, which she finds inoffensive, but then his sister Lisa (Yeardley Smith) chimes in with the explicit version, which gets Bart banned from the concert. Bart attempts to call Milhouse’s mom Luann (Maggie Roswell) in order to get her to persuade Marge to let him go, but this backfires when Luanne says Bart is a bad influence on Milhouse. This sets off a feud between Marge and Luann, during which the former insists that her husband Homer (Dan Castellaneta) buy four VIP tickets to the concert for Bart just to show up the latter. Now is the point where I should mention that this entire story is intercut with a metaphorical parallel narrative showing us the Simpson family as it might have existed during the stone age, as inspired by the museum from the beginning of the episode.
These sequences are animated quite differently than the usual style for the series, but the events that we see play out in these interstitials mirror the story of the present-day happenings. For example, Luann Van Houten (and really the entire Van Houten family, as the story’s chief antagonists) is represented by a wolf that Marge and the rest of her primitive Simpson clan members must combat and escape. Similarly, Homer’s pursuit of the concert tickets is depicted as prehistoric Homer hunting a deer– you get the idea. Anyway, in the “present” day, Bart lures Nelson Muntz (also Cartwright), Martin Prince (Grey DeLisle), and Lewis Clark to abandon Milhouse and join him in the VIP section at the show. But when they show up at the venue, Marge learns from the Sarcastic Man (Azaria again) at the entrance that they don’t accept paper tickets, only the app– which Homer deleted along with the app that stores his passwords.
The climax of this episode centers around Marge leading her son and his friends through a mission to sneak into the concert venue and claim their VIP seats, though by the end– though she accomplishes her goal– she realizes she has given into her more primitive self. This leads Marge to make nice with Luann and invite Milhouse to join Bart in the VIP section of the concert. It’s an innovative, unique way to structure an episode, and I definitely appreciated it for taking chances in the ways that it did. Though I will say I found some of the metaphors in the prehistoric narrative to be a little muddled, and ultimately I would have liked the episode to be funnier overall (I think the hardest I laughed was when Santa’s Little Helper jumped up and grabbed the dog toy that Bart had welded to Lisa’s Malibu Stacy doll). At the same time, I’m always hopeful that The Simpsons writers and animators will think more outside the box when coming up with ideas for this show that has been running for three and a half decades, and this certainly counts as that.
New episodes of The Simpsons air Sunday evenings on FOX.