What to make of the images below?  Were these clever throwbacks designed to be shoutouts to long time fans?  Or was it simply a copy and paste job done out of laziness?

The rest of the episode, a hodgepodge of chases and exposition, sucked too.  Given last week’s dismal viewership I’m going to be hopeful and set the over/under at a flat 6.00 million viewers.  C’mon under.  

Update: TV by the Numbers says, “I just received notice that the Sunday Night fast affiliate ratings that we use for our posts have been delayed due to Nielsen processing issues. No ETA on when they may be available, but I will post as soon as I can. ”  There also weren’t any overnight numbers yesterday, so I’m taking the no ETA thing seriously.  Still hoping for under six million though.

Wednesday Update: The numbers are finally in and the wait wasn’t worth it.  The over has it at 6.55 million viewers, oh well.  While I’m here, since Monday I’ve figured out something that was bothering me about the above set of images.  The older two images are from episodes which are, for lack of a better word, “imaginary”; the one on the left is from a possible future in “Lisa’s Wedding” and the one on the right is from a Treehouse of Horror.  Conceptually that makes them a lot different than an ordinary family living in a town called Springfield, which is what The Simpsons used to be about.  Zombie Simpsons, on the other hand, operates in a reality where wild craziness is just assumed to be part of the normal world.