Opening the unlucky 13th season, Monty Burns decides it’s time to put up the Halloween decoration with grisly consequences for Smithers and The Simpsons, this time dressed as their cartoon forebears The Flintstones.

Hex And The City

“Ah, the cursed one. How’s that curse I cursed you with, cursedy?”

Awash with casual racism, the Simpsons visit ‘Ethnictown’ and Homer insults a gipsy fortune teller. As various mishaps befall everyone around him, Homer decides he needs to fight magic with magic and sets out to find a leprechaun’s assistance. It’s got some amusing moments but overall it just feels a bit tasteless and glib, especially given how high the body count is. At least the wedding provides the most narrow of windows for Kang and Kodos to make their customary cameo.

House Of Whacks

“Trusting every aspect of our lives to a giant computer was the smartest thing we ever did.”

Much like the first vignette of this Treehouse Of Horror, this future-set tale skews a little more adult in its humour so it’s not long before the Pierce Brosnan-voiced cybertronic ultrabot is perving on Marge in the bath and plotting to kill Homer. Brosnan brings the same level of excellence to voicing an animated character as he did singing in “Mamma Mia!”, never quite getting the scripted gags to land. It’s funnier in its Patty and Selma-set finale than it manages to be in its murderous rampage.

Wiz Kids

“Sloppy work as usual. Lisa’s casting spells at an eighth-grade level, you’ve sinned against nature.”

A lazy, uninspired and toothless parody of “Harry Potter” which relies on a parade of increasingly desperate and disappointing puns that fails to add up to very much at all. Expecto Disappointum.

It’s a measure of how wide of the mark this episode ended up being that the coda during the end credits manages to be funnier than most of what preceded it.