Season 16 kicks off with ‘Keeping It Kodos, featuring Kang’, an alien sitcom which takes the place of the couch gag. It’s the first of many future Treehouse of Horror intros which feel like they were potential segments which couldn’t be stretched out to the required run time but didn’t go to waste.
The Ned Zone
“So…what do I die of? Too much happiness? Naked girl avalanche?”
Riffing on Stephen King’s novel, Ned Flanders gains the power to foresee how people will die and is disturbed to see a vision of him shooting Homer to death. Despite Ned’s best endeavours, and Homer’s constant provocations, Ned manages to thwart his destiny, or so it seems. Homer and Flanders are the perfect pairing for this story and it clips along at a nice pace with plenty of good gags and appearances from Springfield’s great and good – including God and the Simpsons’ garage.
Four Beheadings And A Funeral
“Please spare me – I’m not a murder, I’m not. And I’ve never known the pleasures of a woman, or a proper eating apple.”
Victorian London gets the Treehouse Of Horror treatment in a Simpsons take on the Johnny Depp movie “From Hell”. It’s all a very jolly bag of stereotypes and cliches but – the regular casts’ questionable English accents aside – it manages to be pretty funny despite the gruesome and dark subject matter at hand. Opium addiction has never been so hilarious. It’s just a pity the ending falls apart so weirdly.
In The Belly Of The Boss
“Now I insist you take off your shoes when you get inside and, while you’re in there, grab as much cancer as you can.”
When Maggie is accidentally shrunk to microscopic size and swallowed by Mr Burns in a vitamin capsule, the rest of the family must shrink down in Professor Frink’s special submarine as The Simpsons take on Richard Fleischer’s sci-fi classic “The Fantastic Voyage”. For the most part, it’s a great parody, with plenty of gags from both the Simpsons and the source material but it’s also one where the writers clearly didn’t know quite how to end it, so they ended it with a tenuous song and dance number.
