“You know who the real victim is in all of this? Milhouse.” – Marge Simpson
Zombie Simpsons excels at telling the audience what is happening rather than showing them, which is the script writing equivalent of being a bricklayer who doesn’t use mortar. Show don’t tell is so fundamental to the job that you have to wonder how anyone could forget it, and the proof is in the piles of rubble that they try to pass off as finished work. Case in point from this week’s dreary “The War of Art” was Milhouse’s reaction to his parents breaking up.
Thanks to Jerkass Homer’s energetic idiocy, Luann finds out that Kirk lied about not shacking up with anyone while they were separated. This leads to Kirk getting kicked out (he ends up on the Simpsons’ couch despite their recent feud because whatever shutup), which means that Milhouse is once again caught in a fight between his parents. The first time that happened was in Season 8′s divorce classic “A Milhouse Divided”, and the way each episode handles his reaction is the difference between building with bricks and mortar and just building with bricks.
Once Kirk and Luann are on the outs, Marge and Homer argue expositionally about the pain Homer’s plan has wrought, including on Milhouse. Bart, casually listening in the doorway as though the show had no conception that he was there, chimes in right on cue to tell us exactly what we’re about to see:
Bart: He’s been playing Dancing Revolution for hours but the TV is off.
He said it, you saw it, comedy genius!
That’s the entire scene. But even as short as it is, it’s indicative of several of Zombie Simpsons recurring weaknesses. For starters, Bart’s explicit pre-narration is worse than useless. The above image would still be sad without it, but it would also be funnier since nothing ruins a joke more than explaining it before you tell it. Beyond that, there’s also the fact that the previous scene was Kirk asleep on the couch. Is he still there? Is Milhouse visiting Bart or his father? Who knows? Kirk has nonsensically vanished from the Simpsons home even faster than he nonsensically appeared. So not only has the hacktacular writing drained the scene of whatever humor it could’ve had, but its physical and story logic are a complete shambles. Zombie Simpsons: dumb stories poorly told, lightly sprinkled with pre-chewed jokes.
Compare that to the same scene in “A Milhouse Divided”. To begin, there’s no exposition. We already know that Milhouse’s parents are split (the episode, you know, showed it to us), so they can cut directly from Kirk getting fired (“I don’t recall saying ‘Good Luck’.”) to this:
Look! Action that hasn’t been announced ahead of time. What a concept.
Before he says a single word we can tell that Milhouse is pissed off. Just look at the above image: his hair is a mess, his teeth are clenched, and he’s destroying as much shit as possible. When he does speak, he doesn’t say “I’m angry at my parents and breaking their stuff”, he says:
And the winner of the Milhouse 500 is . . . Milhouse!
His words don’t tell us what he’s doing, they elaborate and deepen what we’ve already seen. The same goes for the rest of the scene:
Luann: Milhouse, are you sure you want to drive that inside?
Milhouse: Yes!
Luann: Okay, be careful, sweet, sweet treasure.
Milhouse is acting like an angry and spoiled kid because at the moment that’s exactly what he is. His Mom doesn’t care what he does so long as he’s hers, and indulging Milhouse to the point of shattered lamps and smashed furniture is a small price for her to pay to get back at Kirk. It’s classic Simpsons, taking a painful and sad subject, in this case a mother and son both behaving kinda self destructively, and somehow making it fun and funny.
On the commentary track for this episode, Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein talk about how they didn’t want to do a “divorce” episode like the ones they had watched as kids where the d-word gets mentioned, but at the end everyone gets back together. They tease the cliched, teevee ending with a slightly sweet music cue right before Luann has the common sense to say, “Ooh, no” after Kirk asks to get back together, but they don’t go through with it because doing so would neuter the rest of the episode. Kirk’s collapse, Luann’s renaissance, and Milhouse’s sadness and anger, none of them would retain the same kick (comedy or otherwise) if it turned out it was all for nothing.
Zombie Simpsons, of course, not only went with the ending that was already a cliche forty years ago, it crammed everything into the last few seconds after the plot literally wandered off the mainland. It didn’t make the scene with Milhouse any worse, but that’s only because it’s hard to see how it could get worse. The Simpsons knew how to let a scene speak for itself and how to deliver an ending that doesn’t undercut what came before.